Rapid evolution or epigenetics? (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 30, 2011, 22:14 (4935 days ago) @ dhw

Secondly, it's your preordained "framework of driving evolution to create humans" that I find unconvincing in the light of the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush of species which come and go. Adaptation to change does not indicate that bacteria are preordained to evolve into humans! On the contrary, their being "programmed" to remain as bacteria suggests to me that they are an end in themselves.-BUT, view it a different way: bacteria are very successful, as shown that they have survived for 3.6 billion years or so. But somehow or other they became multicellular also, and that set of organisms became more and more complex. They invented sex which made the dispersal of various types of organisms even more complex and more varied as a wider range of DNA became more and more mixed together. From this process humans arrived. Some branches of organisms ran out of steam and stopped but stayed around in stasis. Others, less successful, diappeared completely. But humans did arrive, and that suggests directionality built into evolution. See Michael Denton's book : Nature's Destiny, 1998. No one has said that directionality has only one road to follow. As Yogi Berra once said, "if you come to a fork in the road, take it!"