New Miscellany 2: mysteries, closed minds, ecosystems (General)

by dhw, Monday, May 19, 2025, 10:59 (1 day, 8 hours, 53 min. ago) @ dhw

Human evolution: HARs

dhw: […] I agree that our brain is special.

DAVID: Wow. This moment should be enshrined.

dhw: I have never ever questioned the specialness of our brain. Do you agree with me that the article lays emphasis on the fact that our brain is a development of former brains, and that it’s not clear why ANY live organ or organism should exist?

DAVID: Yes.

dhw: An important agreement. The evolution of our special brain is no more and no less of a mystery than the existence of life itself.

DAVID: A designer mind explains it.

Agreed. But at the risk of one big yawn, let me repeat that a designer mind creates another insoluble mystery, as described in the final section of this post.

Chirality

DAVID: chirality seems to be the key to everything. That specificity seems designed. Since both handedness types are naturally available why does biochemistry make such choices?

dhw: […] if your answer is unequivocally that chirality proves the existence of your God, perhaps you can also explain to me why so many scientists remain atheists.

DAVID: Open or closed minded to the evidence is the reason.

dhw: Do you regard your own mind as open or closed?

DAVID: Open to science studies with design implications, most of them.

dhw: This is tantamount to saying that your mind is only open to scientific views that agree with your own. I’m afraid that means your mind is closed. I don’t know what “most of them” refers to. I’m sure you don’t mean that most scientific articles support the design theory.

DAVID: I think most biochemical studies show a designer at work.

Figures show that at least half the scientists who write these articles would disagree with you. But your mind is only open to the one interpretation.

New oxygen research

DAVID: Why should oxygen be generated at all? The study is best understood in the teleology of a designed process planning for future use by newly evolved organisms.

dhw: Your questions and answers are mere pinpoints in the grand scheme of things. What is the teleology behind the billions of heavenly bodies without oxygen? Even if there is unevolved bacterial life elsewhere in the universe, what purpose would it serve? All questions ultimately go back to the unsolvable problem of “first cause”: a sourceless form of almighty consciousness, or a sourceless form of matter and energy forever producing different combinations, just one of which happened to produce Earth and life on Earth.

DAVID: Your faith in combinatorial progress by chance is irrational. It is now for you to drag in millions upon millions of years of mindless directionless combinations.

When will you stop pretending that I am an atheist? I have no faith in chance, and I have no faith in a sourceless form of omnipotent, omniscient consciousness. One of these theories must be closer to the truth than the other, but each of them demands a degree of faith which I do not have. That is why I am an agnostic.

Early life

DAVID:: Amazing work to how early life invented mechanisms to live on very simple substrates. As an aside to dhw note: "In ecosystems today, life is so deeply entwined with itself that very few creatures live directly off Earth's raw materials. That has been the case for a very, very long time." When I have told you the ecosystems are exquisitely entwined this statement proves the point.

The fact that ecosystems today are deeply entwined is not an issue between us. The issue which you continuously try to avoid is your claim that all ecosystems past and present were specifically designed for the sole purpose of producing and supporting us humans and our food, even though the vast majority of extinct ecosystems had no connection at all with us and our food. See also your acknowledgement in Part 1 that we have no idea what species the future may produce; therefore it is absurd to claim that the process has ended with us and so we must have been your God’s only purpose for creating life.