Animal Minds (Animals)

by dhw, Monday, June 27, 2011, 17:50 (4897 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Evolution itself was not NECESSARY for life in its original forms to go on, and so the real cornerstone of evolution has to be innovation. The explanations for this unsolved mystery can be divided into three scenarios:-1) A UI created the mechanism of evolution and programmed its outcome. (Where did the UI come from? Why so many dead ends if it had planned everything from the start?)-2) A UI created the mechanism of evolution and left it to do its own thing, perhaps occasionally intervening. (Where did the UI come from?)
3) Sheer chance created the mechanism of evolution, which then did its own thing. (Requires quasi-religious faith in the creative genius of chance as opposed to religious faith in a UI.)-All three fit in with the process of evolution as we know it, and all three require faith in the unknowable and unprovable.-DAVID: Excellent summary on your part in our discussion. At this point I think we have to analyze what we observe as the known history of life. Prop 1 doesn't fit. Evolution is innovative in all sorts of ways; the spiders that live underwater as one crazy example; fungus living on ants; humming birds that store an exact milligram of fat to make a 600-mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico from my backyard to Mexico to escape the winter. These are all survival techniques, undoubtedly set up through epigenetic mechanisms. So evolution was set up to go off in many directions, ending up in the massive bush we see. At the same time we do not yet know, research has not gone that far, whether there is a built-in directionality toward primates. Certainly evolution creates organisms that are complexer and complexer. So my guess at this point is Prop. 2 is the correct guess. Prop 3 is reasonably beyond all belief.-I think we have to distinguish between two types of innovation. You have pinpointed survival techniques set up through epigenetic mechanisms, but these are adaptations. So far as we know, they do not result in new species. The other type is far more radical, going back to the all-important question of how the earlier, "primitive" (but nonetheless complex) forms of life could have developed and changed into the millions of species extant and extinct that have populated the history of life. Neo-Darwinism attributes innovation to random combinations and mutations, with the assumption that given enough time, chance plus natural selection will produce the variety we now have. Since earlier, "primitive" forms of life have survived, however, clearly the millions of changes were not NECESSARY for survival. We are left, then, with a scenario in which innovation takes place for its own sake. Living cells experiment. Some experiments work and survive, others don't (just like human inventions). Our scientists would be deliriously happy if they could find a few microbes on Mars ... but proof of such life elsewhere won't answer the question of how and why evolution happened. Life and replication in themselves do not automatically mean evolution. I remain convinced that evolution did happen, and that there must be a direct line leading from the early forms to ourselves, but I agree with you: it beggars belief that such inventiveness could spring from a chance combination of materials.-On the other hand ... sorry, but agnostics always have another hand ... it also beggars belief than an intelligence almost infinitely superior to our own could have simply existed for ever or could have spontaneously generated itself. If you can believe that, you can believe that the original mechanism for life and evolution spontaneously generated itself. I see no way out of this intellectual trap.