On Science, Improbability and Design

Originally posted by Taoman
Thanks for raising the Mandelbrot Set, tw. And sorry, but I do see the Mandelbrot set as another indication of an underlying holistic awareness and holistic formation of order out of sheer chaos.

Well then why not argue from that position as the mathematics behind it are much clearer and better understood than abiogenesis.
So what arguments do you have for why 'holistic awareness' should have anything to do with the mandelbro set. What is 'holistic awareness'?
Is 'holistic awareness' a prerequisite for 'holistic awareness'? (this is the age old 'so who made God' question).
The mandelBro set, evolution and other highly complex patterns are all an almost inevitable outcome of the basic laws of physics, math and logic. In fact, the physics and math are more or less a result of logic. Evolution would be no less amazing even if it never happened but the concepts had been 'discovered' by some alien race that just came into being by magic.
It is not so much the results that should amaze you, but the fact that seemingly simple rules (such as Z=Z^2 +c, or 'survival of the fittest'😉 can lead to remarkably complex patterns. But why should such amazing logic be attributed to 'holistic awareness'? What rules does the 'holistic awareness' operate on? Surely this 'holistic awareness is itself an amazing result of a set of relatively simple rules / processes.


There are at least 40 mathematical/scientific constants that have emerged that are remarkable in the manner they apparently fit together and absolutely necessarily so for life to emerge and any diversion from those constants would prohibit the mergence of life, and in many of those constants there is no reason they couldn't have been different.
This is the natural outcome of the Anthropic principle. What you have to realize is the laws necessary for us to be here, must exist. If they didn't we wouldn't be here. That doesn't mean that other forms of life wouldn't exist if the laws were different.

So what are those 40 mathematical / scientific constants? I bet the number is seriously over exaggerated.

One scientist stated it was so unlikely that it appeared "to be a put up job"!
You can always find 'one scientist' who said something weird but without context and a bit more background information it is meaningless and equivalent to saying "some villager in some distant corner of Ethiopia said 'inteligence .... ' ".

Originally posted by rvsakhadeo
Is evolution a process dealing with filtering of biological properties only such as organ structure,organ materials, development of senses and other abilities / skills connected with the use of organs in the living being etc. or is it also concerned with brain processes such as thinking,emotional development etc.
If it is also concerned with thinking a ...[text shortened]... e humans the highest thinking powers and the highest range of emotions among all living beings ?

Evolution will develop our abilities for us to reproduce, therefore, like other species, will develop the responses to stimuli to increase our chances of this (i.e. being attracted to a mate). Also, at the same time, we needed to avoid predators, so evolved the processing ability to be able to outwit them, and intelligence to develop tools/weaponry to be able to do this along with hunting/gathering.

The by product of this processing ability is our intelligence to achieve other things. We had the edge over other species in that we could travel further, increasing our diversity (coping with different climates and exposure to more threats), which improved our abilities further, which, in turn gave us more of an edge. We have still been streamlined to cope with many environmental factors. There was never any need to develop abilities beyond what we are capable of doing at the moment.

Other species also have remarkable abilities which are well suited to the environments that they live in. There was never any need to develop abilities beyond what they are capable of doing.

Originally posted by rvsakhadeo
Is evolution a process dealing with filtering of biological properties only such as organ structure,organ materials, development of senses and other abilities / skills connected with the use of organs in the living being etc. or is it also concerned with brain processes such as thinking,emotional development etc.
If it is also concerned with thinking a ...[text shortened]... e humans the highest thinking powers and the highest range of emotions among all living beings ?

Not that this applies to you, but these improbability discussions seem to gravitate toward humans as the highest example. This seems to imply that our combination of thinking power and emotional range is the important thing to consider. It just happens to be more important to animals that don't have other capabilities to get them through the day. As they say, life will find a way, and it is obvious that there are many ways. Which one is best?

While nothing escapes the long arm of the second law of thermodynamics, all life forms share one property -- the ability to locally and temporarily decrease its entropy. (Not uniquely, though.) A measure of superiority that is without bias toward the measurer, might be the extent to which a candidate's population decreases local entropy during its existence. We are latecomers to this contest.

http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Sept2001/pdf/Sept2001p61-66.pdf

Originally posted by rvsakhadeo
Is evolution a process dealing with filtering of biological properties only such as organ structure,organ materials, development of senses and other abilities / skills connected with the use of organs in the living being etc. or is it also concerned with brain processes such as thinking,emotional development etc.
If it is also concerned with thinking a ...[text shortened]... e humans the highest thinking powers and the highest range of emotions among all living beings ?

The idea we are the king of thinking emotional beings on this planet has yet to be proven. Don't forget Dolphins have brain/body mass ratios higher than humans and since we have yet to decipher their language, we don't know anything about their emotional attainments.

Originally posted by sonhouse
The idea we are the king of thinking emotional beings on this planet has yet to be proven. Don't forget Dolphins have brain/body mass ratios higher than humans and since we have yet to decipher their language, we don't know anything about their emotional attainments.

perhaps you should text one and ask them to text back.

Originally posted by sonhouse
The idea we are the king of thinking emotional beings on this planet has yet to be proven. Don't forget Dolphins have brain/body mass ratios higher than humans and since we have yet to decipher their language, we don't know anything about their emotional attainments.

Yes, while agree with err, rvsakadeo's theories of man and his role on land, 70%+ of the Earth is covered by oceans and the sheer immensitiy and complexitiy of the seas is a little down the track for humans to make any definitive assertions about.

Indeed dolphins are extremely intelligent and seem to have a perfect balance between the individual and the whole group-something that humans haven't gotten right yet.
And they are prolly advanced beyond mobiles, robbie, but we just dont know.

Originally posted by rvsakhadeo
I will take your replies in reverse order,if you please.
iii) Why is learning about complex metaphysical questions necessary for the human being at this stage from the Evolution point of view ?

It isn't.

Humans have evolved enough,I thought.
Enough for what?

Has Evolutionary Process a discernible aim or is it " just the way it has taken place"?
It is 'just the way it has taken place'.

If survival of the fittest was an "aim " has it not been achieved by humans ?
It is not an aim, but it has been achieved by every living thing on earth. Every living thing today is a survivor.

Then why learn evermore ? or it is" just the way it evolves" ?
I am not sure what you are asking here.

ii)Your answer to the 10% question is a circular argument.
How so?

Moreover 10 % seems to be not so efficient in an otherwise impeccably well designed product crafted by Evolution. I thought Evolution was an efficient process.
You thought wrong. Evolution, like car design, does not always result in high efficiency. Our digestion for instance is extremely wasteful. Snakes do far better.
Besides, your 10% figure is just something someone pulled out of a hat. Just because we are not using all our brains all the time does not mean that we are not using them efficiently or that we can do without 90% of our brains. Do you know anyone who has lost 90% of their brain and still functions normally?

i)The Evolutionary Process has led to more and more complex beings with better and better intelligence. So I thought that the process is driven towards ensuring a form of life which will not only survive but be better enabled to tackle if not understand the vast and mostly hostile universe around it. But you think it is just the way it has evolved,no questions permitted.
You may ask all the questions you like. However, the vast majority of life forms have practically zero intelligence. The process of evolution most certainly does not ensure the development of intelligence - though it is an almost certain outcome for animals that move to find food once they get over a certain size as movement and food gathering require a certain amount of coordination.

Originally posted by twhitehead
Would you care to explain why it becomes more difficult? You already accept that it is perfectly possible for highly complex things like eyes to arise from far less complex things (like bacteria) through the process of evolution. So an argument of 'I cant understand how a natural process could possibly have lead to such complexity' cannot hold water for y ...[text shortened]... re. There may be some and it would be quite difficult to prove that there aren't.

Your answers impress as a fine instance of the resistant scientific attitude.
They have a pattern too.

1. There is little grappling with the central core of the matter, amounting to avoidance, in this instance the extreme unlikelihood of the emergence of living conscious highly complex organised living cells and tissues from original gases and later inert rocks.

2. A plethora of remarks and opinions, which imply because you hold a different opinion as a scientist (which I am presuming you are of some kind, or strongly aligned), they are more true per se. and therefore do not warrant further investigation.

3. The seemingly valid request constantly of details, stats and evidence before anything is even considered, let alone researched. This aspect somewhat annoyingly has a derailing effect on the central discussion and leads into dead ends that stymie any furtherance or investigation. This happens so frequently I wonder if it is intentionally done to obfuscate valid points of your opponent. It even has a flavour of the approach taken by some fundamentalist creationists.

4. Some requests are evidence that you do not see a reason why someone may not want to inundate with related easily accessible matter, if the reader wanted too. Surely, you are not unaware of this process, like simply put in "consciousness studies" in the Google search box and be confronted on the first link with highly relevant matter >>>

"Consciousness Studies is a featured book on Wikibooks because it contains substantial content, it is well-formatted, and the Wikibooks community has decided to feature it on the main page or in other places."

Read it - it is highly organised and informative.

This is just one of many interesting leads. Please do not feign ignorance in some implied criticism of lack of referential validity. Or else, read up a bit more, because you are not up to mark on recent advancements in the area.

I have about twenty or so "points" of yours you raise accumulating from each answer. I am not going to. Some are valid, others are simply your opinion opposed to mine. I'll let any readers decide.

If you disagree that's fine. I expect it. It is the prevailing reductionist closed attitude to even accomodate the possibility of important aspects of life and its origins that could involve something that cannot be measured or put in a test tube. One doesn't even have to be overtly religious for this consideration either.

To Twhitehead:

Bacteria and archaea along with algae and fungi are also
plants. There are some that wanted to move them out
of the plant classification and made up a classification
in order to do that. The Holy Bible does not break them
done in to a bunch of categories the way you wont to
do. Since God is the creator, he knows what order he
created them. Scientist are only speculating on things
they never witnessed. They were not there when they
were created, God was there when he created them.

RJHinds

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
perhaps you should text one and ask them to text back.

I'm sure they could do just that given Dolphin based keypads. I think you are so sure of human ascendancy you can't see other life forms as valid. We don't need access to UFO's to find advanced life, it's already here in the oceans.

Originally posted by sonhouse
I'm sure they could do just that given Dolphin based keypads. I think you are so sure of human ascendancy you can't see other life forms as valid. We don't need access to UFO's to find advanced life, it's already here in the oceans.

The Dophins are connected to E.T's from some advanced part of the cosmos.

At one stage there was, or still is , a human-dolphin hybrid. The head of a dolphin with the body of a human.
Whether they were on this planet or not, i dont know.

Originally posted by Taoman
Your answers impress as a fine instance of the resistant scientific attitude.

And your answers impress as a fine instance of fundamentalist religious attitude.

They have a pattern too:
1. You wont discuss any points that go against your beliefs.
2. I point out serious errors in your arguments and instead of trying to deal with them you ignore them and repeat the strawmen / errors over and over.
3. Instead of providing any actual support for your claims you repeatedly accuse the scientific community of ignoring your ideas and expect them to study the concepts on your behalf.
4. When the discussion doesn't seem to be going your way, you depart in annoyance accusing everyone else of being 'closed minded'.

If you disagree that's fine. I expect it. It is the prevailing reductionist closed attitude to even accomodate the possibility of important aspects of life and its origins that could involve something that cannot be measured or put in a test tube. One doesn't even have to be overtly religious for this consideration either.
And one doesn't have to be overly scientific to know that if something cannot be measured or put in a test tube then it has no place in science, cannot be studied, and will forever remain mere fanciful speculation.
I think that for anyone to assume that some sort of 'holistic awareness' cannot be measured is an unwarranted supposition and an immediate indication that it is a religious belief that the person wants to protect from any possible challenge - but does not realize that in doing so, they create the age old 'supernatural' contradiction ie the simultaneous claims that something has an effect on us but cannot be observed - and that something follows a discernible pattern but does not follow any laws.

Originally posted by RJHinds
Since God is the creator, he knows what order he
created them. Scientist are only speculating on things
they never witnessed. They were not there when they
were created, God was there when he created them.

I did not dispute that. I never said the scientists got it right.
It is you that claimed that science and the Bible agreed, and you are now essentially admitting that they do not agree (despite your initial attempts at trying to redefine words to make the Bible fit science).

Originally posted by sonhouse
I'm sure they could do just that given Dolphin based keypads. I think you are so sure of human ascendancy you can't see other life forms as valid. We don't need access to UFO's to find advanced life, it's already here in the oceans.

What a pile of horse, i see other life forms as invalid???? my goodness that's taking real liberties! simply because i refuse to ascribe to your speculations and unsubstantiated claims founded upon what we dont know rather than what we do! Give up the materialism, its driving you to harbour unfounded and quite serious prejudices!

Originally posted by karoly aczel
The Dophins are connected to E.T's from some advanced part of the cosmos.

At one stage there was, or still is , a human-dolphin hybrid. The head of a dolphin with the body of a human.
Whether they were on this planet or not, i dont know.

yeah only yesterday i saw a mermaid, 'come to Atlantis', she beckoned, i have a kingdom beyond the oceans edge, as i took the first tentative steps towards the ocean, enchanted by her song accompanied on a whalebone harp, the sea rose up and tiny sea horses were formed from the crests of waves carrying my upon their backs to my destiny beyond the ocean edge.