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#11
10-12-2005, 01:22 PM
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Re: Question for evolutionists
Most of these arguments boil down to semantics- what is "self aware" or "self realized" anyway? There are animals that show signs of self awareness- ie recognizing themselves in an mirror, elephants "mourning" thier dead, as well as problem solving capabilities of other primates. Hell, watch a squirrel go after a bird feeder, no matter how you design it the little fucker will almoast always get to the food.
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#14
10-12-2005, 04:04 PM
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Re: Question for evolutionists
[ QUOTE ]
Thank you. How people have divined randomness from natural selection is beyond me. A selective process is not random. [/ QUOTE ] I guess it's because they know the theory is based on random mutations of the genes etc and that whether a particular mutation is better adapted to the the environment the phenotype finds itself in is down to chance.
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#17
10-12-2005, 04:32 PM
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Re: Question for evolutionists
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] Thank you. How people have divined randomness from natural selection is beyond me. A selective process is not random. [/ QUOTE ] I guess it's because they know the theory is based on random mutations of the genes etc and that whether a particular mutation is better adapted to the the environment the phenotype finds itself in is down to chance. [/ QUOTE ] But the selection of the phenotype isn't chance. that's the big difference.
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#18
10-12-2005, 04:42 PM
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Re: Question for evolutionists
[ QUOTE ]
If we are a product of chance (irrationality), how do we make the jump from irrationality to rationality? [/ QUOTE ] I would say, no jump is needed; we aren't a "product of irrationality", we are the end result of a natural process. There is a large family of natural phenomena that are grouped together under the term "self-organizing behavior." If a very slightly inhomogeneous collection of gas and dust is left under the influence of gravity, the dense patches become denser because of their greater attraction, and the thin patches thinner -- making the formation of stars / galaxies / galactic clusters rather than random blobs of hydrogren inevitable, not miraculous. A very similar argument shows that racially mixed neighborhoods would tend to develop into clumps of blacks and clumps of whites even in the absense of racist hatred, because of a tendency for people to desire to live near their own relatives and childhood friends. Returning to evolution of humans/animals .... such a self-organization argument is used to explain the origin of protein chains and of cells - chemical reactions progressing in such a way as to concentrate certain products in small blobs of the 'primordial soup' rather than freely mixing as one might naively expect them to do. We can't STOP the world from changing around us, and we can't stop ourselves from continuing to change with it. We concentrate ourselves into cities and states with spaces between them just like the mindless atoms of hydrogren did after the big bang. And our DNA will do what it needs to to sustain its self-replicating behavior. Individual atoms bounce around 'randomly' in Brownian motion. Their collective behaviour forms patterns so reliably we call the results laws of nature. Individual chains of DNA get their sequences changed 'randomly', but the effect considered over a species as a whole won't look random at all, it will look like a downright purposeful march toward a new species that is better suited in some way to its environment than its predecessor. Individual people, with their 'free will', can 'bounce around the world randomly', but they too can't avoid the fact that the resulting society is going to have a pretty complicated and organized structure to it. So, to your original question: what jump? "Chance" is just a name for the fact that things look fuzzy when viewed at too high a magnification... when you zoom out and look at the long run, your win rate at poker converges to its true value, and our genes keep on evolving, converging to their ultimate form..... and we'll just have to wait and see what that is, won't we?
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#20
10-12-2005, 05:13 PM
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Re: Question for evolutionists
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ] Thank you. How people have divined randomness from natural selection is beyond me. A selective process is not random. [/ QUOTE ] I guess it's because they know the theory is based on random mutations of the genes etc and that whether a particular mutation is better adapted to the the environment the phenotype finds itself in is down to chance. [/ QUOTE ] But the selection of the phenotype isn't chance. that's the big difference. [/ QUOTE ] Yep! That's the bit they don't get, apparantly.
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