The Dodo Problem (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 01, 2010, 17:59 (5104 days ago) @ dhw


> I find your argument against "dumb luck" totally convincing, here as in your book, and as I keep trying to emphasize, it is one reason why I cannot accept the atheist argument that attributes life, consciousness etc. to chance. In my last post I have tried to make that clear, and have also tried to make it clear that I can't believe in a UI that either came about by chance or has always been around. That is why I'm an agnostic. I can only repeat that my objection to your scenario is that you focus the UI's original mechanism precisely on the deliberate and automatic production of humans, while at the same time it produces by chance a vast array of species that have nothing to do with the production of humans. This does not seem to me a logical piece of planning.-No one has said that the UI is logical at our level of thought. 
> 
> In your automatic scenario, why would the original mechanism have changed from chimpobo to hominid, since the chimpobos were doing OK (and are still around to prove it, although the bonobo is in trouble now)?-Because the automatic scheme branched off a line, australopithicus, to grow big brains. It was pr-planned to happen
> 
> My two scenarios allow for all the other branches and extinctions and irrelevancies between first molecule and first homo sapiens, and do not rely on random changes to the environment. Please tell me how they contradict the evolutionary facts as we know them.-You have the UI dabbling and dithering too much IMHO. There should be (I don't know this) some degree of preciseness if one can easily create a universe as starters
> 
> In your response to BBella, you ask: "What can 'outside interference' do to living primates to make their brains grow?" If there is such a thing as a UI that created the original physical mechanism, it could also interfere (experiment) with it as above, just as our puny human scientists interfere (experiment) even now with existing mechanisms. -The UI doesn't have to. The mechanisms are built in and there are self-correcting safeguards against tampering, the complex feed back loops of epigenetics.