Intelligent Goal Focussed Evolution vs evolution by natural selection

I lean more towards quantum Quack for you your self and your goal setting is a natural act of creation. You are part of nature believe it or not. Think like a rock and you to can sit on the coach and be a rock. Just turn off the T.V. and stop wasting the electricity. Oh you are thinking about that movie you where watching. O.K. but after you finish turn it off O.K.

 

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Determinism is a man made abstraction, a hypothetical explanatory ideal. It does not exist in nature, only approximations created by the operations of the laws of probability.

 

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Probability is a man made construct as well

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Peace be unto you

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this whole thread and every thread on sciforums past, now and in the future is an exercise in qualifying speculation.. [ ack probability ] so what?
Someone once said rhetorically "Is it the universes fault that we as a race are just too stupid and arrogant to understand it?"

 

So cause and effect, determinism, etc, do not have a special place as part of reality. They are no more real - and maybe less, since they can be derived from it - than randomness.

 

The speculation about randommness just apears to be more of a gamble than determinism when considering that cause and effect can be closely related, intuitively , logically, and supported materially where as randomness can only be supported theoretically and in speculative abstraction.

Just different degrees of qualified speculation on a universe we can according to current philosophical thought know nothing about other than subjective speculation.
So probability is merely qualifed speculating on a speculation.

 

When discussing the natue of the universe at this level it is difficult to do so with out confusing perspectives.
By discussing this topic we have to take an "aloof to the universe" or "God" perspective other wise the "IS" or "self evident" or "self justifying" or "the circle" is unable to be witnessed.
Like taking the dot on the line of a circle and putting it somewhere outside that circle for a better, and unemmeshed view.

The notion of goal focussed evoltion is premised on a self justifying automatic system of universal growth or change. The fact that it is self justifying creates all sorts of problems for science and philosophy as we tend to always consider our actions to be separate and additive to the universe where as they are merely self justified by the universe. A postion of naturally derived arrogance in perspective [ God compex]
Region has historically always placed the Creator God as aloof and separate to his creation, where as the Pantheist notion treats the universe as all inclusive [ certainly this is my understanding of Pantheism]

So we have mankinds tendancy to arrogantly exclude himself from his own creation [ reflected in his religions of an excluding God(s)] and we have what I believe to be a greater reality where by the creation is not excluded from the creator as they are one and the same thing. [Pantheism]
Intelligent Goal focussed evolution, removes the need for an excluded God creator and makes the creation both created and creator thus self creating.

 

Yes, but to a much lesser degree than the non-random (which is utterly unknown..).

 

If you look at lipids, they will form a bi-layer membrane type structure. This occurs since this is the lowest energy state within water. This type of determinism does not always have to imply a connection to God, but it can also occur simply due to the laws of science.

If we did not know about the natural laws responsible for this bi-layer, some may argue divine design. While others might attribute this to random events and natural selection. Still others will dig deeper and try to find a logical explanation for this determinism, but within the realm of the laws of science.

Relative to the bi-lipid membrane, even before there were lipids in the universe, the bi-layer lipid schema would be inevitable, when lipids and liquid water appear together and combine, simply because of the way natural laws define how these organics and water need to interact. We could do it on paper even before all the conditions are met.

For example, one can start with iron ore. If we apply heat and add carbon we can get steel. Even before the first steel was even made, these conditions define one way to make steel due to laws of nature. Within natural laws are all future things that have the potential to exist.

Life is more complicated than just the formation of a membrane, but still if the laws of nature of consistent then under certain conditions the natural design of life is already on paper before it appears.

 

Struggling to find anything new to add however this little gem came up that I thought may be amusing:
Quote:

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."~ Robert Wilensky

The point being:
The chances of things evolving the way they have are so remote that to seriously consider a "chance or random premised notion" is utterly absurd....

 

This thread topic is referred to 'Theistic Evolution' by some high theists who have gone over to it, but it has problems.

Also, natural selection is the scientific alternative to Intelligent Design, not chance, and certainly not chances all in a row.

 

Yes, but evolution is not random, every step that approaches a better solution is preserved:

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins employs the typing monkey concept in his book The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate the ability of natural selection to produce biological complexity out of random mutations. In a simulation experiment Dawkins has his weasel program produce the Hamlet phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, starting from a randomly typed parent, by "breeding" subsequent generations and always choosing the closest match from progeny that are copies of the parent, with random mutations. The chance of the target phrase appearing in a single step is extremely small, yet Dawkins showed that it could be produced rapidly (in about 40 generations) using cumulative selection of phrases. The random choices furnish raw material, while cumulative selection imparts information. As Dawkins acknowledges, however, the weasel program is an imperfect analogy for evolution, as "offspring" phrases were selected "according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target." In contrast, Dawkins affirms, evolution has no long-term plans and does not progress toward some distant goal (such as humans). The weasel program is instead meant to illustrate the difference between nonrandom cumulative selection, and random single-step selection. [12]. In terms of the typing monkey analogy, this means that Romeo and Juliet could be produced relatively quickly if placed under the constraints of a nonrandom, Darwinian-type selection, by freezing in place any letters that happened to match the target text, and making that the template for the next generation of typing monkeys.​

Yes, the chance that they evolved as they are now is extremely low. But the probability that they would evolve in some way is much higher. There is no goal to evolution, so no guarantee that things would end up the same given the same initial conditions.

 

Thanks for posting....
The key issues that contra the "Theistic evolution" claim concerning this threads topic is that the intelligent evolution suggested does nto involve volition or "decision making" by some entity. There are no decisions needed by a reflexive instinctive intelligence, therefore any notion of "God" or creational designer is inappropriate in the context of "Intelligent goal focussed evolution"
the main question that comes to mind is:
Is volition a requirement of intelligence?
...a huge debate in itself I tend to think...

 

Yet Richard Dawkins fails perhaps to see that he is taking the role of designer and creator in his decisions about which prodegy to keep and which not to. therefore imparting a goal focussed evolution upon his population of monkeys.

To have natural non intervention evolution provide the same results would have and incredibly low probability I would think.

The chances that the human genome evolved with any truly random element wousd be incredibly remote. ["range" based randomness or restricted randomness might be less remote but them one must ask what is it that provides the restriction?]

 

That is true to an extent, but remember that if the process were wholly random (in the sense I think you mean it), and allowed to run for 4.5 billion years then the chances that *any* lifeform's genome could having evolved by chance are remote.

In the NY Lottery, you select 6 numbers from 1 to 59. A person won that lottery playing the numbers: 2 13 22 29 44 and 51. The odds of those numbers winning were 1 in 45 million. The odds those numbers would have come up were remote, but that doesn't make the numbers special and it does not prove that 2 13 22 29 44 and 51 were not selected by chance.

First, bear in mind that the human genome is not wholly random. The mutations that we tend to experience are random, but natural selection does clearly favor certain outcomes over others. If you are a meat eating predator which, due to a mutation, has no teeth, you will not do well. That's not purely random which is why it's called natural "selection".

[Note that we are using "random" here in a peculiar way, since natural selection still does have random fluctuations in it, but the process of selection is still very much constrained in that adaptations that are beneficial are disproportionately selected for, and those that harmful disproportionately selected against. ]

That it systematically favors some life over other life does not make it "intelligent" though.

 

But it's an analogy, and Dawkins is taking the role of deciding what is advantageous in this situation. In nature, natural selection decides that. There is no goal but there is incremental improvement until it reaches a plateau.

Something was going to evolve, and if it wasn't a human it would be something else.

 

Yes, random does objectively exist. You can't get any more random than ionizing radiation from radioactive decay.

 

And so it was that a spider evolved into a goat, somewhere in a galaxy far away!


Death is the 'chooser' in evolution by natural selection.

 

Exactly.

The evolutionary lottery had trillions or more possible outcomes, and it happened to land on human--but it had to land on some definite outcome. If you look at humanity in isolation and decide that that lottery couldn't be random, because the odds of getting humans was just one in many trillions, then you are misunderstanding probability. Something would have evolved, and each species that might have evolved had similar odds, a priori.

 

the thing that facinates me is that if death is the only chooser then there should be more than one form of "humanoid" inhabiting this planet in fact according to those espousing probability there should be hundreds of different "humanoid" forms on this planet and not just humans. There is no evidence of variety to the humanoid form especially that which resembles the homo Sapien and if death is the only chooser then there would be evidence of more than one type of "humanoid" genome or at least evidence of conflict that demonstrated homosapien superiority.
Why only one genome outcome and not many genome outcomes?

The issue of randomness is not just including the entire 4.5billion years in one hit. It is a huge [effectively infinte] lottery game being played every second or milli second of those 4.9 million years to end up with after an effective infiinite number of games the results we have today and will have tomorrow.
And even so if this is still plausable we still have to consider the inbuilt criteria that determines success and most importantly "sustainable" success.

Presuming a life-less universe from inception, no imperitive pre-existed for the sustainable success of life forms.

However here we have today ample evidence of this criteria and what that criteria means.
So one wonders how success, especially "sustainable success" evolved as a criteria, from a life-less universe.