Randomness or Design?
20 Feb 2009, 7:03 pm
Belief is so passe. We don't ask that you have believe anything, merely that you accept the evidence before you.
You are asking him to believe what his senses are telling him.
ruveyn
20 Feb 2009, 7:13 pm
Mostly randomness, any design is only the product of the randomness, intelligence of a more earthly kind.
Your probability idea does not work. If you are dealt some cards, it is easy to say you can not possibly have got those cards. But the fact is you did. You cannot "deal" the cards in reverse.
20 Feb 2009, 7:48 pm
If humans were designed then the Designer is a howling incompetent. Look at the lumbar region of the human spine. Proof positive that we were unintelligently designed if we were designed at all. Our back is more fit for an animal that walks on all fours.
ruveyn
Human knees are pretty damn ridiculous, too. Also human appendices. Also the wiring in the human eye. Not to mention all of the evolved intra-specific competition mechanisms that are beneficial to individuals but detrimental to the species as a whole, or for that matter all of the evolved mechanisms that are downright abhorrent by any sane human's standard of morality.
20 Feb 2009, 8:11 pm
If humans were designed then the Designer is a howling incompetent. Look at the lumbar region of the human spine. Proof positive that we were unintelligently designed if we were designed at all. Our back is more fit for an animal that walks on all fours.
ruveyn
Human knees are pretty damn ridiculous, too. Also human appendices. Also the wiring in the human eye. Not to mention all of the evolved intra-specific competition mechanisms that are beneficial to individuals but detrimental to the species as a whole, or for that matter all of the evolved mechanisms that are downright abhorrent by any sane human's standard of morality.
Although the appendix has a quite different use in humans than it does in, say, rabbits, it as recently been discovered that is serves as a buffer backup when the intestinal flora is destroyed by an anti-biotic. It can restore the essential cooperative bacteria needed to keep the digestive functions in good working order.
21 Feb 2009, 9:52 am
Natural selection, selects on reproductive success. The organisms with the wherewithall to successfully reproduce or more likely to pass on the characteristics which bring success to the next generation. Intelligence is much overrated. Ants and roaches are more successful at reproducing than we are. The ants have been around for a quarter of a billion years. Our kind has been around for less than a half million years. Long after we are extinct the ants and roaches will be around.
ruveyn
And will you lead them?
21 Feb 2009, 12:06 pm
People who subscribe to creation never seem to get the message that the universe is not random. It is full of dynamic processes directed by basic forces and chains of these processes are no less creative than the creative brain - probably more so since these active processes explore every possibility whereas human creativity is much more severely limited.
21 Feb 2009, 12:13 pm
That's because human thinking is limited. We're all obsessed with Plato.
21 Feb 2009, 12:42 pm
That's because human thinking is limited. We're all obsessed with Plato.
No doubt human thinking is limited but some humans, I gather from your comments, are more limited than others. Plato said some really dumb things so he never fascinated me so don't judge others by yourself.
21 Feb 2009, 12:48 pm
Comparing a human brain to a computer is kinda misleading, but looking at the differences between computers and brains can give us some insight into the evolutionary process...
We are fortunate to live in a time during which the device we know as a 'computer' has gone from a simple circuit that can do a novel thing, to the vast computer network that we are communicating on as we speak...
The first computers were extremely simple circuits, that took up huge amounts of space. Although they did very little work by today's standards, they could do one thing faster and more efficiently than the humans who built them, performing complex mathematical computations correctly.
The first computers took up entire office buildings and needed constant maintainance. Today I can wear on my wrist a computer more powerful and more complex than that which sent astronauts to the moon and returned them safely. We have witnessed the development of this device that once could do a trick or two and now can do a whole lot more.
Yet no computer posesses that thing we call instinct, or the urge to survive and procreate. The computer driven robot will walk willingly into certain destruction without a care for its own survival, something no creature with a brain is able to do under ordinary circumstances. There are some who believe that instinct and survival urge can be programmed into a computer, that it is only a matter of development. There are others who say that no matter what you program into a computer, the computer will never 'feel' anything, nor 'think', it will only do what you tell it to.... it will run from fire if you program it to do so, but it will also run from that fire straight into a vat of acid, if that is what it is instructed. The computer will never decide for itself what to do, it will only run its process and return its result.
Brains are very different from computers. The most notable difference is in the inability of a brain to operate in a different organism than the one it was born to. You can swap out a processor anytime, and your computer will do what it is supposed to do. Regardless of whether you use an 80286 processor or the newest quad-core model, the only difference will be that of speed. You can't do that with a brain. You can't swap my brain out for yours and experience what it is like to be me. If you swap my processor for yours, your computer will still be your computer, all of your data will still be there, only it will be running on my processor. Swap my brain for yours, and we both die.
Brains can not link themselves together in the way that computers can. I can' t build a super fast quad core brain by taking the brains of three of my friends and wiring them up to my system. I'm certain it would not work, and my friends would be pissed if i tried.
The whole 'intelligent design' debate is predicated on the assumptions that 1- No object as complex as a brain could possibly come about randomly, so therefore must have been designed, and 2- That no human designer possesses the skill necessary to develop such an object, therefore the object must be designed by someone with super-human abilities, e.g. a god.
However, if you look at a computer chip, you see a similar level of complexity... No human being could possibly conceive of, design, and implement such a system, and no human eye can see finely enough and no human hand can be steady enough to lay out the circuits. Therefore, using the above logic, computers must have been designed by god.
Except we know that this was not the case. Computers were not made by god, they evolved, and we watched them do it, from the simplest vaccuum tube circuits to today's quad-core behemoths. No single person did the work, the work was done by thousands upon thousands of people, each doing a small part, to achieve something superhuman.
21 Feb 2009, 8:05 pm
Fascinating. Do you have any peer-reviewed articles to solidify that statement?
Given that antibiotics were only invented within the last century, that isn't an evolved function; I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio is for presence or absence of an appendix, given this new environment. On the one hand, you have an uncommon but potentially fatal cost to having an appendix; on the other hand, you have a relatively common but non-life-saving benefit. Some people are actually born without appendixes, though it is very rare (< 1 in 10K, IIrc); it would be interesting to do a study on relative survival rates, if you could find enough people who naturally lacked their appendix.
21 Feb 2009, 10:14 pm
Fascinating. Do you have any peer-reviewed articles to solidify that statement?
Given that antibiotics were only invented within the last century, that isn't an evolved function; I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio is for presence or absence of an appendix, given this new environment. On the one hand, you have an uncommon but potentially fatal cost to having an appendix; on the other hand, you have a relatively common but non-life-saving benefit. Some people are actually born without appendixes, though it is very rare (< 1 in 10K, IIrc); it would be interesting to do a study on relative survival rates, if you could find enough people who naturally lacked their appendix.
I know... let's ask Wikipedia!
Here's a well- annotated wikipedia post on that very subject...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Appendix_function_diagram.svg
22 Feb 2009, 12:32 am
Fascinating. Do you have any peer-reviewed articles to solidify that statement?
Given that antibiotics were only invented within the last century, that isn't an evolved function; I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio is for presence or absence of an appendix, given this new environment. On the one hand, you have an uncommon but potentially fatal cost to having an appendix; on the other hand, you have a relatively common but non-life-saving benefit. Some people are actually born without appendixes, though it is very rare (< 1 in 10K, IIrc); it would be interesting to do a study on relative survival rates, if you could find enough people who naturally lacked their appendix.
See http://seoblackhat.com/2008/01/18/the-h ... ash-drive/
