CUDA wrote:Sirian you TOTALLY missed my point.
I responded to the point that you made, not the one that you may have intended. You forwarded an analogy that did not make your point effectively. How does that hurt your position? You end up distracting from what you intended to say.
Analogies sometimes fail. You may still have a valid point, but you have to back up and express it some other way.
CUDA wrote:what are the chances of all those atoms coming together BY CHANCE to form what is now know as a homosapien
We know of one universe. In that universe, homo sapiens exist. Using -only- empirical data, the odds would appear to be 100% chance that homo sapiens will appear.
Homo sapiens HAVE appeared. Therefore, something has occurred to bring them into existance. Either this has occurred as a conscious act of a creator, or it has not. Either this has occurred unconsciously, by random chance, or it has not. For either side to declare that the other side's vision "could not be true" due to Reason X is pure vanity.
There exists no evidence either way to DISPROVE either assertion. Where does that leave us? It leaves us with nothing more than our powers of reason to consider the possibilities. There are some possibilities that we can exclude. That's about as far as the "proof" can go. The rest depends on what you choose as your base assumptions, your postulates.
CUDA wrote:you cannot have evolution up to a point. then another evolution after that.
Why not? You offer no reasoning.
To me, that is precisely the kind of evolution that makes the most sense. Evolution is responsive.
How do you explain dolphins and whales? These are mammals who live in the sea.
Evolution offers an explanation. Fish moved on to the land for part of their life cycle, becoming amphibians, developing legs instead of fins. Amphibians moved all the way on to the land, becoming reptiles. Reptiles take to the air and become birds. Reptiles and/or birds evolve into mammals. Some mammals move back into the sea and develop fins to replace their legs, but they retain their lungs, develop blow holes on their backs for breathing at the surface, and develop blubber to insulate their body heat in the water rather than going back to scales and cold blooded life. Why stay warm blooded? Maybe that is better for a more powerful brain.
Clearly cetaceans are NOT fish. If there is any logical explanation, it would lead to the type of evolutionary journey I laid out.
So here's the big question, and to my mind, the one that science has failed to imagine. HOW can the chicken come before the egg? That is what evolution argues, that the chicken precedes the egg. Why would a fish develop a mutation (lungs) that can breathe air? If a fish developed lungs ALONGSIDE its gills, wouldn't we see vestigial gills in amphibians, reptiles, and so forth? We do see vestigial tails in human beings. Where are the "no longer useful" gills hiding? If gills mutated directly into lungs, instead of lungs growing alongside the gills, then amphibians would had to leave the sea and move on to the land. Yet what are the odds of them finding land before they starved? What are the odds of even being near enough to land to make it onto the land? And what are the odds of enough of these mutations making it to the land at the same time, so that they could procreate and spawn a new phylum?
I agree that there are holes in evolution, but the holes do not lie with the "what", but with the "why".
Why would any mutation prove useful? If instincts develop in reaction to successful behavior, such that some animals "figure out" a behavior that works for them and that behavior is repeated enough times to burn itself into the very genetic code, then instinct is not a function of imagination, but of memory. How does an animal mutation survive long enough to allow for that? Life cycles are too short. Evolutionary leaps must of necessity occur in very small windows of time. A mutation must occur, then must reproduce itself to survive. That's less than the life span of a single organism to bridge the gap between arrival of mutation and survival of mutation via procreation.
If mutation is a gradual process, one genome at a time, then there would have had to have been missing links galore. Otherwise, we're talking about radical mutations, which seem less and less probable, the more I look at them -- assuming that cause precedes effect.
But what if we don't assume that? Why does the cause have to precede the effect? Why does evolution have to start with a mutation? Why must evolution be a shot in the dark? Why must the success rate of mutations be extremely low, a scattershot approach where only the lucky and the few survived?
What if the effect precedes the cause? What if an organism has imagination? What if the organism has a known range of behaviors, of possibilities, but comes upon a new possibility and IMAGINES a way to make use of it?
Did random evolution of thumbs lead us to develop tools to use? Or did imagination of using tools lead to the evolution of our thumbs? The latter seems to make more sense to me. It may even bridge the gap between the two theories.
In fact, if the effect precedes the cause, then we are looking at BOTH. Both in one package. Creation and evolution. Imagination, vision, thought, an idea, a concept, a birth of something new, leading to the will, the desire, the urge to realize this new possibility, leading to a response from the body to reshape itself to meet the "request", to fill the imagined need. This process might take generations to fulfill, where the genes of one organism begin the process, but the vision is not completed in one leap. What if there is a form of consciousness to the species as a whole, which may have limited capacity to capture a signal, an idea, imagined by one of its members? Perhaps the call for mutation is not even coming from a single organism, but from a higher level of consciousness not contained within a single animal's brain?
What if cells have consciousness? Not "upper level" consciousness as humans show, nor even subconscious thinking that animals show, but an even lower level of consciousness that is sensitive to the will of the brain, of the higher consciousness.
This might mean that fish imagined walking on the sea, and so the urge to walk led some to turn their fins into feet: not instantly, but through trial and error, the body attempting to adapt what it already had to perform a new function, and sticking with it until it got the job done. Then the walking fish walked to the shore but could not exit the water, so imagined the ability to breathe air instead, so that they could explore on to the land.
This would be a cellular level process not unlike the human organism -- I speak not of people, but of humanity as a whole. If human beings are to humanity what single cells are to a human being... If humanity is to human beings what a single human being is to its cells...
What if there are layers of consciousness that operate on different scales, different time frames, different kinds of senses and perceptions? What if some basic forms of communications are possible between the layers?
Why couldn't the cells of a body capture some form or essence of an idea or concept and code this into the genes? We see an example in instincts. Instincts are specific responses and behaviors in specific situations, hard wired into the brain, hard wired into the DNA that offers the blueprint for growing a brain that will hold true to the instincts. Are these behaviors merely the survivors from among countless "shots in the dark"? Or are they survivors BECAUSE the organisms in question had some kind of vision of what they wanted to make possible, and the evolution continues until the breakthrough is made?
If imagination precedes evolution, then evolution is itself an act of creation -- but not creation brought down from on high, instead creation generated by the self, as life grows tired of its current limitations and seeks to expand its range, its possibilities. In reaching for something previously impossible, to make possible the impossible, a vision bridges the gap. A form of consciousness first creates an image, an idea of what else might be possible, and then the body responds, to reshape itself to match the vision.
This process might be slow or it might be quick. It might be both slow or quick, and yes, it may involve dead ends, if what was imagined turns out not to work as envisioned. Some niches may dead end, with no new possibilities for growth from those paths. Others may open more and more new possibilities, where several layers or instances of evolutionary leaps build upon previous gains, just as reptiles may have built upon the gains of amphibians, with the leap from fish straight to reptile simply too large a gap to cross in a single leap.
There is one catch to what I have offered here, however. If imagination is the essential ingredient, then the original creation must also have been an act of imagination. This would require that imagination, and thus consciousness, precedes evolution, and not the other way around. My concept only works if there was a Creator there in the first place. For if consciousness was formed up out of nothingness or by random chance, then whatever created the first consciousness must have repeated itself to create more, and therefore the consciousness itself must be superfluous to the process, and imagination would therefore also be superfluous.
It's one or the other. Cause precedes effect, or the effect is imagined and desired, leading to the genesis of a cause, which creates the physical effect.
Why would a creator use evolution as a process for its creations? To answer, let's compare to how we operate. Why do we debate? Why do we attend school? Why do we experiment? The Creator may be the ultimate believer in scientific method. Conceive a hypothesis, test it by evolving a form that will live out that imagining, see how well that works, revise the hypothesis, rinse and repeat until all the possibilities have been explored.
Sounds like a pretty cool game to me.
- Sirian
). I will listen to any reasonable argument. I mostly like the fish-with-feet thing for the humor aspect.
