Jed wrote: Harry Veeder wrote:
HV: Personally I do not feel life BEGINS by chance, although the subsequent evolution is plausibly Darwinian. Perhaps an E.T. (not necessarily God) has been 'guiding' the evolution of life on this planet. <snip> JR: Regarding the Darwin quote: Yes he said that, but it has not been demonstrated that any organ exists which could not have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications. Indeed, every organ I know of still has numerous existing successive slight modifications remaining in primitive species, including eyes, an example Darwin cited. Primitive eyes that can only sense the direction of light are way better than no eyes at all. MC: The evolution of the eye is a classic battleground in this argument, and Gould did an effective job of showing evolutionalry steps, including one marine creature whose eyes use refelctive optics!! Truly amazing. The argument needs survival value for each incremental chnage for it to be preserved in the random mutations which naturally occur. Another striking case is the rotary flagellum in certain one-celled animals. The flagellum is corkscrew-like and truly rotates, driven by a molecular rachet motor which has been thoroughly analyzed. Some 15 very specific proteins are involved. Remove one of the 15 and it does not work. It has not been shown that any of the individual proteins have survival value indpendantly, so there should be no 'reason' for them to be made and genetically preserved. The 'probability' of random assembly is vanishingly small. There are other examples in biology. When you dig into the details of blood clotting and many other things you find extremely complex interacting bits of biological machinery. MC: Against this you cna argue the vast oceans and vast time and innumerable molecules to try all possible things, which eventually becomes as vaporous an argument as religious pontifications. Personally, I see this conflict arising out of mutual ignorance on both sides, with institutions and purses to defend. Wisdom grows from conflict. MC: As Jed points out, natural selection marches on in the evolution of bacterial immunity to antibiotics. It is also used in combinatorial chemistry, which mimics the natural selection process in guided random searching foir new chemical compounds. Computer simulations of this process have shown that it can move with astounding efficiency to solve problems. Mike Carrell
