Extinctions: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? A nod to D. Raup (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 09, 2011, 12:59 (5036 days ago) @ David Turell

David believes that God planned humans from the very beginning.-dhw: The whole history of life appears to depend on one environmental stroke of luck after another ... good for some, bad for others - but why should a UI rely on luck to accomplish something it has planned from the beginning? Doesn't the luck element suggest randomness rather than planning?-DAVID: You have a good point, but evolution started 3.7 billion years ago with the following background: the universe is extremely dangerous, and the Earth is quite unstable in its evolution. The 'random events' were expected to occur and to influence evolution. Mammals lay in wait, but not eradicated until the dinosaurs had their extinction, and mammals could then advance. Each expected extinction advanced evolution toward its future. Timing is the only true randomness. I am positing God's thoughts at 3.7 million years ago. He assumed He had all the time necessary. The process would get to humans when it got there.-The process would also get to the dinosaurs, the dodo and the duck-billed platypus when it got there. Do you think he planned them from the beginning too (a question also for Tony ... balance_maintained ... who I hope is still with us)? If he did, wouldn't that mean that the evolution of species was not random? If he didn't, why would he leave the evolution of every species except humans to luck? Since we are playing the game of positing God's thoughts and assuming his assumptions, is it not more consistent with all this randomness that, as we discussed earlier, he set up the mechanism and hadn't got a clue how it would turn out? Or that he liked the look of certain random developments, and did a bit of deliberate experimenting as things went along? I know this is old ground, but I am still not satisfied with the logic underlying the anthropocentric interpretation of evolution, with its planned dependence on unplanned strokes of luck.