The explanatory power of evolution.

[Kulindahr]

^Purpose is always apparent to the observer when the fruit tree feeds those who benefit from its fruit.

The observer can be quite wrong. A rat may think that a maze exists for the purpose of providing him food . . . .

 

[TX-Beau]

I get annoyed when people start applying value judgments to evolution. It is a random process, it doesn't need guidance, some people seem to operate thinking that one mutation happens, then it gets "tested," but really mutations are happening all the time at the same time most aren't beneficial or detrimental and don't propagate, or do and remain entirely neutral in regards to survival. The human genome is populated by the obsolete, the dangerous, the benign, the propitious, all there in our genetic history.

If there was a designer, he was a pretty sorry craftsman.

 

[mightbe]

If there was a designer, he was a pretty sorry craftsman.

To quote Oscar Wilde "...God somewhat overestimated his ability."

 

[Kulindahr]

I get annoyed when people start applying value judgments to evolution. It is a random process, it doesn't need guidance, some people seem to operate thinking that one mutation happens, then it gets "tested," but really mutations are happening all the time at the same time most aren't beneficial or detrimental and don't propagate, or do and remain entirely neutral in regards to survival. The human genome is populated by the obsolete, the dangerous, the benign, the propitious, all there in our genetic history.

If there was a designer, he was a pretty sorry craftsman.

Well, if you view it as what I call the "toy animal"model of Creationism, that's certainly true -- unless you want to maintain that the Creator is a prankster with a mean streak.

 

[bankside]

By the way, on Pauli, if I follow his meaning, he thinks that evolution by random chance alone cannot plausibly occur within realistic timeframes.

While I'm sure he could follow the science of radiometric dating, knowledge of the age of the earth throughout his career would have ranged from speculative to "tentatively demonstrated." It is possible he lacked an appreciation of the timescales actually available for random divergence to occur and accumulate. It is also possible he knew very little of genetics and heritability and mutation rates and so forth. The discovery of DNA had been made before his death, but as it was then a new science, his quote from (as near as I can guess) the early 1950's is irrelevant.

The timescales of evolutionary development are extraordinarily long, and there is no need to posit purposive meddling to account for the breadth or specialization we see around us or indeed as we experience. Chance will do.

 

[kallipolis]

You have yet to establish a purpose for the fruit tree, other than another's noting that the only observable purpose of life is reproduction.

If purpose is to be dependent on the observer, then it's really not an inherent quality. A fruit tree has many functions, but it's only 'purpose' (defined loosely as 'goal') is replication.

That you, say so, it must be so....whereas, I, as a beneficiary of the fruit tree's, fruit can can appreciate that the fruit tree's life has purpose, when feeding me with its harvest.

- - - Updated - - -

If there was a designer, he was a pretty sorry craftsman.

You speak for your self?

 

[kallipolis]

It doesn't even have a purpose to procreate or ensure the survival of its DNA. Purpose is no part of it. If you have a set of things with a mixed and variable capacity for self-replication, and if that capacity is roughly constant when passed on at the time of any individual replication, the average offspring will tend to become better self-replicators in each successive generation. (Unless that results in the emergence of some other constraint, in which case more modest self-replicators might become more numerous as the hyper-replicator population collapses in view of the constraint.)



It's quite possible to be more pragmatic about the whole thing and not quite so dramatic about "blinding oneself" by simply noting that it can be adaptive to eat fruit.

I leave drama to those with an established track record, here............

Self replication, and purpose are mutually viable when verifying the outcome of the fruit tree's purpose, by eating its fruit....proof, that the fruit tree's purpose is always visible to those who benefit from the fruit tree's purpose.....

 

[kallipolis]

The observer can be quite wrong. A rat may think that a maze exists for the purpose of providing him food . . . .

When I bite into an apple (as I did at breakfast, this morning) - after eating a bowl of porridge, garnished with a banana - I knew instinctively that the apple's appetising, and nutricious content serves my need to maintain my good health whereas, a rat will eat simply to fill its stomach...quite a difference in understanding between a rat, and a human being....in this respect the apple tree's purpose is by design...

...whilst also appreciating that there are human beings who can be as big a rat, as the common rodent...

 

[kallipolis]

By the way, on Pauli, if I follow his meaning, he thinks that evolution by random chance alone cannot plausibly occur within realistic timeframes.

While I'm sure he could follow the science of radiometric dating, knowledge of the age of the earth throughout his career would have ranged from speculative to "tentatively demonstrated." It is possible he lacked an appreciation of the timescales actually available for random divergence to occur and accumulate. It is also possible he knew very little of genetics and heritability and mutation rates and so forth. The discovery of DNA had been made before his death, but as it was then a new science, his quote from (as near as I can guess) the early 1950's is irrelevant.

The timescales of evolutionary development are extraordinarily long, and there is no need to posit purposive meddling to account for the breadth or specialization we see around us or indeed as we experience.

Chance will do.

I'll let Professor Einstein answer for me:

"As I have said so many times, God doesn't play dice with the world."

 

[mightbe]

I leave drama to those with an established track record, here............

Self replication, and purpose are mutually viable when verifying the outcome of the fruit tree's purpose, by eating its fruit....proof, that the fruit tree's purpose is always visible to those who benefit from the fruit tree's purpose.....

Saying that you have "proof" out of the blue doesn't make it so. You took an observation and suddenly declared it as proof. That's tending on non-sequitur. Furthermore, it's by no means empirical. You've taken a perspective, which essentially nullifies what you've sought to establish. The fruit tree has no perspective. It's simply propagating. The fruit tree has no higher cognitive functions. You're always taking it from the anthropomorphic perspective. That's ludicrous. Why should the universe bend itself backwards to cater towards an inconsequential and powerless species that won't exist for millions of years. Everything a species is will come from adaptation and luck. There's no purpose to it. It's an ersatz arrangement that's worked out in the long run.

Thus is a species: a collection of mutually-reproductive organisms that hasn't died out yet due to luck and genetic perseverance (which is partially left to chance).

One simple organism with no cognition nor intelligence nor reason for being doesn't think (obviously). Therefore, it cannot have purpose or goal as we would recognize it, let alone work towards goals of OTHER species. It's sole "job" is to fulfill biological imperative No. 1: reproduce.

In short: No.

When I bite into an apple (as I did at breakfast, this morning) - after eating a bowl of porridge, garnished with a banana - I knew instinctively that the apple's appetising, and nutricious content serves my need to maintain my good health whereas, a rat will eat simply to fill its stomach...quite a difference in understanding between a rat, and a human being....in this respect the apple tree's purpose is by design...

...whilst also appreciating that there are human beings who can be as big a rat, as the common rodent...

You weren't born knowing any of that. It's all a posteriori; experience; etc. You've underthought this somewhat. You aren't really built to eat porridge and domesticated apples or bananas. You're built to survive on the savanna. That you can eat such almost miraculously advanced foods is a result of millions of years of learning and domestication, and the relatively sudden pan-communal increase in wealth over the last 10,000 years.

Ancestral apples came from central Asia--Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan etc. Not Africa. We were introduced to apples long after basic digestive development. That we found them and can eat them was adaptive. Bananas are from the neighborhood of Indonesia--a relatively recent addition to the human diet. It's frankly stupid to assume that just because we can do it today that it was always meant to be, from the outset.

I'll let Professor Einstein answer for me:

You misunderstand the context. Einstein is saying that the universe is non-random. That doesn't make it deterministic. Either way, Einstein has been dead for nearly 60 years. His science is not cutting-edge, and certainly not his expressed opinions. Much of his work has been tailored slightly.

Quoting an incredibly intelligent, though long-dead man on matters of science serves no purpose. His principles are important. What he said about them, not at all. The principles stand; his personal beliefs do not. He was likely a deist, but that's irrelevant to his main work, as it's his OPINION; he never said that it was an empirically based one (and it certainly couldn't have been).

Make no mistake, Einstein was a genius, but not infallible.

 

[TX-Beau]

Well, if you view it as what I call the "toy animal"model of Creationism, that's certainly true -- unless you want to maintain that the Creator is a prankster with a mean streak.

The only kind of creator (lacking further evidence) that I could logically parse, would be Bankside's hands free creator who kicked things off and has been absent or observing since, and therefore absent from the equation.

Though if God was a vindictive Shriner, that could explain a lot.

 

[TX-Beau]

You speak for your self?

See, you say you aren't Drama Queen, and here you are being nasty just because.

I speak for you me and everyone else. The Human (and I suspect every other) genome is riddled with things like predisposition for cancer, and Alzheimer's, it's also the blueprint for your immune system and sensory apparatus (which it can also fuck over.) There are things it tells your body to do, such as grow hair on your knuckles that seem to have no positive or negative at all.,

It, like you and me and everyone else, is a hodge-podge of things, leftovers and randomness that our species has collected over the last few millennia. IF someone was designing this, one would hope he'd do a better job.

Personally I'm pretty damn sure it's just a process with no premeditation, I'm sorry you have to have invisible friends to give meaning to your life, some of us think the process is wondrous enough without need for recourse to magic and the anthropomorphism of apple trees.

 

[Kulindahr]

That you, say so, it must be so....whereas, I, as a beneficiary of the fruit tree's, fruit can can appreciate that the fruit tree's life has purpose, when feeding me with its harvest.

Nothing about a fruit tree establishes that it has purpose -- purpose is a meaning you are imposing on it.

 

[Kulindahr]

When I bite into an apple (as I did at breakfast, this morning) - after eating a bowl of porridge, garnished with a banana - I knew instinctively that the apple's appetising, and nutricious content serves my need to maintain my good health whereas, a rat will eat simply to fill its stomach...quite a difference in understanding between a rat, and a human being....in this respect the apple tree's purpose is by design...

...whilst also appreciating that there are human beings who can be as big a rat, as the common rodent...

Wow. I think you'd better bow out of this, and any other discussion involving science, because it's evident you can't abandon your mysticism -- indeed, yourself-centered mysticism, which is of the very sort that led churchmen in the past to conclude that the sun had to go around the earth: an argument based on "purpose".

 

[palbert]

While pondering the apple tree I recalled it makes the very best firewood.

 

[Kulindahr]

I'll let Professor Einstein answer for me:

Einstein was wrong. As Bohr told him, stop telling God how He does His job.

 

[Kulindahr]

The only kind of creator (lacking further evidence) that I could logically parse, would be Bankside's hands free creator who kicked things off and has been absent or observing since, and therefore absent from the equation.

True elegance from a Creator would be to set up the initial conditions so that the desired result would arrive with only minimal tinkering along the way.

I heard a nice argument from a Greek Orthodox priest with a doctorate in theology to the effect that the fact we have only two sexes demonstrates that God doesn't tinker: if God made humans in His image, and if God is triune, then a nice way to express that Nature in our nature would be to make us "triune" in order to reproduce.

Though if God was a vindictive Shriner, that could explain a lot.

 

[Kulindahr]

While pondering the apple tree I recalled it makes the very best firewood.

That's a waste of apple wood!

Apple wood should be turned into chips to be tossed on the coals when grilling stuff -- it imparts a smoky apple flavor to the food.

Or you can freeze bags of chips and in cold, dry weather toss them in a pan of simmering water to add moisture to the house-- with an apple aroma.

 

[kallipolis]

Nothing about a fruit tree establishes that it has purpose -- purpose is a meaning you are imposing on it.

A fruit tree provides fruit, that I eat....evidencing purpose....to feed me.

 

[kallipolis]

Einstein was wrong. As Bohr told him, stop telling God how He does His job.

That you say, so....

Einstein was not telling God how to do his work....merely, observing that God does not play dice....