Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

[Laird]

Why is the code missing? Surely the quote tags within it are not interpreted.

As I've said already, my working assumption is that quote tags are stripped out wherever they occur, including within code tags. I haven't looked at the MyBB code to confirm this. If it interests you, you could do that yourself, as the code is freely available.

Something I care about would be more like this. How can the same intelligent agent that produced say, the flagella, the eye, all the systems of the body that work in tandem, let some of the diseases that exist continue to be? Especially inherited ones, like Huntington's disease. Certainly, we (as humans) understand what the disease is now too. Why can't it just be set back to 'normal'? Is the intelligence just selective?

Maybe the intelligence comes and goes like a gardener and his/her crops.

Interesting question...

Perhaps intelligence is interested in experiencing the struggle to survive. Perhaps the intelligences that designed all of these things wanted to explore what these experiences would be like, and other intelligences then joined in to have a challenging game of physically-incarnated life.

I can see the allure, because existence is rather boring when you can just make unpleasant things go away. Much more fun to overcome adversity... and also fun to lose every now and then. No fun just winning all the time.

When you can do anything in existence, you want to be able to handicap yourself every now and then, just to have something to do.

 

Something I care about would be more like this. How can the same intelligent agent that produced say, the flagella, the eye, all the systems of the body that work in tandem, let some of the diseases that exist continue to be? Especially inherited ones, like Huntington's disease. Certainly, we (as humans) understand what the disease is now too. Why can't it just be set back to 'normal'? Is the intelligence just selective?

Maybe the intelligence comes and goes like a gardener and his/her crops.

Consider this as much as you give thought to the questions above that there is no intelligent agent involved. Is that too abhorrent?

Consider this as much as you give thought to the questions above that there is no intelligent agent involved. Is that too abhorrent?

The answer to that is really it depends. Christian god, one life? Yeah, that would be pretty messed up. If we are essentially in a 'virtual reality', and are essentially characters in Grand Theft Auto, then not so much.

Regarding my prior question (about the seemingly capricious/ elusive intelligent factors in the universe), I queued it up into my subconscious and got this semi-answer during my commute home while stuck in traffic.

You may have heard that in whatever realm the spirits are in, there is not much room for growth. 

Let's take a look at the Mandebrot set.




What could be considered absolute consciousness may be the areas that converge, the absence of consciousness may be the areas that do not diverge to infinity in any variable manner (essentially looks like a slight gradient). The most interesting areas are the ones that are bordering the areas of convergence.

As such, (this gets back to the point by Valmar) the border at the edge of absolute consciousness may result in sometimes suboptimal results. But they are interesting, and add value to the whole. And as in the Mandelbrot set, you can see what looks like representations of the whole reflected at smaller levels.

And reflecting on what I said about the spirit world, note that the areas in black are ones that will not diverge. Hence they can't really expand. Perhaps the edge of consciousness is best at expanding and growing in little consciousnesses.

You may have heard that in whatever realm the spirits are in, there is not much room for growth. 

Or perhaps, not the right kind of growth? You need different kinds of experiences to receive different kinds of growth. In this physical realm, the construct of the filter-limiter-reducing-valve of consciousness that is ego allows us to experience certain kinds of growth that we could not otherwise. What these kinds of growth are, I am not certain of. We may only truly know once we die, and shed the ego-construct, returning to our uninhibited nature of Self.

What could be considered absolute consciousness may be the areas that converge, the absence of consciousness may be the areas that do not diverge to infinity in any variable manner (essentially looks like a slight gradient). The most interesting areas are the ones that are bordering the areas of convergence.

As such, (this gets back to the point by Valmar) the border at the edge of absolute consciousness may result in sometimes suboptimal results. But they are interesting, and add value to the whole. And as in the Mandelbrot set, you can see what looks like representations of the whole reflected at smaller levels.

And reflecting on what I said about the spirit world, note that the areas in black are ones that will not diverge. Hence they can't really expand. Perhaps the edge of consciousness is best at expanding and growing in little consciousnesses.

Another perspective is that Absolute Consciousness also includes the areas outside of the Maldelbrot, because that is the meaning of Absolute. The Maldelbrot, as infinite as it is in depth, is still finite to some vague degree, but inscrutably and profoundly large enough to allow for a unknown amount of finite minds and the experiences that they have.

Who knows what would be outside of the Maldelbrot... only Absolute Consciousness would know.

It makes sense to me that Consciousness itself is analogous to an infinite fractal, in curious ways.

Consider this as much as you give thought to the questions above that there is no intelligent agent involved. Is that too abhorrent?

You presume, without question, that no intelligent agent must be involved? The question I have for you is ~ why?

Because it is obvious, for me and others here, that there must be ~ you are an intelligent agent, are you not?

Sorry... I'm just deeply amused at the irony of the situation, right now.

You presume, without question, that no intelligent agent must be involved? The question I have for you is ~ why?

Because it is obvious, for me and others here, that there must be ~ you are an intelligent agent, are you not?

Sorry... I'm just deeply amused at the irony of the situation, right now.

I see no evidence for it and I have no deep seated need to invoke a agent to explain why and how this universe works the way it does. I also know seeing things that are not there is a highly developed skill in us humans. For example this :-) is not a face. It is a colon followed by a dash followed by a right parenthesis, all of us may choose to see a smiley face but you along with other paranomalists only choose to see the face.

you along with other paranomalists only choose to see the face.

How much of belief is choice really?  Maybe the evidence gives us no room for choice.  I've often said - and I mean it - if I was to choose a religion it would not be Christianity.  However, here I am believing in Jesus Christ because that is where the evidence has led me.  Along the way,many faces have turned out to be colons and brackets and that is usually disappointing but I have accepted it because I have no choice.  I cannot believe what I don't believe.

There is a new paradigm-breaking paper in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology: "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?" (at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...0718300798). There are 33 authors, biologists and other scientists at universities around the world. These scientists are not in any way ID advocates, or members of the Discovery Institute. But they still conclude that the origin of life, and in particular the Cambrian Explosion of new animal body plans, can't be explained by neo-Darwinism, and in desperation conclude that panspermia must be the answer. They believe that new genetic material must have been delivered from space via virus-like organisms. 

They carefully avoid the question of where and how this biological information originally came about. They don’t even touch that one. They are really just pushing the question back in time and space. 

This paper demonstrates how support for neo-Darwinism is eroding among many professional scientists, especially biologists and those in related fields. An admission that Darwinian Cambrian and other origin theories have failed. 

In the process of describing and unfolding their hypothesis they make a number of key observations of the inability of new-synthesis Darwinism to explain these major episodes in the history of life. As summarized at https://evolutionnews.org/2018/05/with-n...the-stars/, they argue that the information needed to build complex life must have arrived on Earth from space before complex life arose.

From the paper:

"The transformation of an ensemble of appropriately chosen biological monomers (e.g. amino acids, nucleotides) into a primitive living cell capable of further evolution appears to require overcoming an information hurdle of superastronomical proportions (Appendix A), an event that could not have happened within the time frame of the Earth except, we believe, as a miracle (Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, 1981, 1982, 2000). All laboratory experiments attempting to simulate such an event have so far led to dismal failure (Deamer, 2011; Walker and Wickramasinghe, 2015). It would thus seem reasonable to go to the biggest available “venue” in relation to space and time."

Further, they state:

"We should then plausibly view viruses as among the most information-rich natural systems in the known Universe (Fig. 4). Their size dictates they are very small targets minimizing the probability of destruction by flash heating or ionizing radiation, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (1979) e.g. Chapter 1. Their nanometer dimensions plausibly allow easy transport and dispersal by micrometer sized dust grains and other protective physical matrices of similar size. They are then nanoparticle-sized genetic vectors which contain all the essential information to take over and drive the physiology of any given target cell within which they mesh. Their replicative growth means they are produced, and exist, in huge numbers on cosmic scales; so that they (and to a lesser quantitative extent their cellular reservoirs) can suffer huge losses by inactivation while still leaving a residue of millions of surviving particles potentially still infective. A virus then is a type of compressed module in touch with the whole of the cell’s very ability to grow and divide to produce progeny cells and thus to evolve."
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"In other words, we can now make the plausible scientific argument that a key feature of information-dense genetic systems to make more complex organisms was already here on Earth before the actual emergence of subsequent greater terrestrial complexity.
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"The most crucial genes relevant to evolution of hominids, as indeed all species of plants and animals, seems likely in many instances to be of external origin, being transferred across the galaxy largely as information rich virions."

Summarizing:

"In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion — life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind."

There is a new paradigm-breaking paper in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology: "Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?" (at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...0718300798). There are 33 authors, biologists and other scientists at universities around the world. These scientists are not in any way ID advocates, or members of the Discovery Institute. But they still conclude that the origin of life, and in particular the Cambrian Explosion of new animal body plans, can't be explained by neo-Darwinism, and in desperation conclude that panspermia must be the answer. They believe that new genetic material must have been delivered from space via virus-like organisms. 

I think for some of the authors it's more a question of questioning mainstream ideas about evolution because they are long-term advocates of panspermia. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Fred Hoyle's former student and collaborator, is one author (as are two other Wickramasinghes). 

Not all the authors are scientists - for example Robert Temple, the author of The Sirius Mystery, is an orientalist by training (and judging from online sources, it's doubtful whether he really has an academic affiliation).