E. Coli vs. Linux (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 25, 2010, 12:01 (5295 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Gould referred to humans as a glorious accident based on an enormous series of chance contingencies. Running the tape of life again and we would certainly not appear. I can't believe any of that.-You have misquoted me at the beginning of your post ... "...to develop without design (the history)" doesn't make sense in the quote ... but the next part of your post states explicitly that you think humans were planned for, so the salient point that you were responding to is obviously my belief that life and evolution proceed without a goal. This need not in itself be a contradiction. In my post, the bit you tacked on came from my statement: "This leaves us with something deliberately designed (the mechanism) to develop without design (the history)." If there is a designer, it might be that every so often he intervenes to conduct experiments ... he's fed up with dinosaurs, so he tries something different. Or, as you believe, he may have been planning right from the start to create the level of consciousness humans now have ... after all, other animals that we are descended from are conscious too. But even allowing for such experiments, the history of life itself as I see it has always been a series of random events. I can't believe (subjective incredulity) that the designer has/had plans for every beast, let alone every human that ever lived. The world goes its own way, dealing out good and bad luck at random. So in the context of my hypothetical entertainment scenario, one can reconcile your argument that the advance to complexity has a teleology ... to improve the quality of the entertainment through increased intelligence ... with the claim that life itself remains undirected and without a goal, since even God has no idea how it will all pan out. Pure speculation, of course, but that is the nature of our subject.