Evolution without accidents and also no intelligence?

Thanks for opening up a bit, because it is hard to respond well to short quips.


I suppose the real value of ID is to shake up the thinking process. Generations of kids have been brought up on Darwin, DNA, and natural selection. If this explanation is wrong, it is time people knew about it!

Whether the true explanation is as you suggest, or that some entities designed life on earth, is almost a secondary consideration, and the two concepts might even merge into one, since immaterial designers still need to impress their ideas into physical matter at some point.

OK first just a quick review of what we are talking about. A modest protein consisting of a chain of 100 amino acid residues can have

20^100, or
12676506002282294014967032053760000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

possibilities. For comparison, the number of protons in the universe has been estimated as

10^80, or

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Protein space is absolutely VAST. Talking about genetic variants floating about in individual microbes doesn't really cut it, unless effective proteins are actually fairly common.

For RM+NS to find one of these things is basically absurd unless useful proteins are really quite common, even if we allow that some activity might exist when we get within one or two steps of the end product.

On top of that, nobody seems to discuss the fact that many important enzymes - such as the proteases - would be deadly to a cell unless additional control machinery was available. This means that natural selection would operate against the adoption of such a protein just when it had finally evolved!

Emergence always seems useful as a vague concept to throw around to confuse discussions, rather than a serious proposal.

My best guess - only a guess, not something I am wedded to - is that a timeless realm does indeed exist in the realm accessed by NDE's and some other practices. I am also fairly impressed by the evidence for reincarnation. I seriously wonder if we began as a group of spirits who set out to make a tough physical life that can operate something like a gym. For that make any sense it would be necessary that people get multiple chances of life on earth, so reincarnation is necessary.

David

Maybe apropos: interestingly, well-known psychic channeler Ron Scolastico's "Guides" taught that in early human days the spirits went through several stages of attachment to fully occupying the bodies of the early humans; initially the spirits had sort of hovered over their early human avatars. Your guess as to the overall reincarnational cosmic scheme is close to the system expressed by Ron's "Guides".