Chance is not a creative force. Few proponents would admit it as such, but Darwinian Evolution is based on the premise that chance can be a creative force. "Natural selection" contributes nothing. "Natural selection" is simply extinction by degrees.
This is a matter of semantics and certainly not a subject of science. At most this is a philosophical proposition.
No, it's not. It is, perhaps, the most common observation ever made by human beings throughout human history. It is an observation that is the common source of all creation belief systems and the religions built around them. Peoples separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles, peoples who never even knew of each other's existence, all made the same exact observation. They all concluded that this, all of this, didn't happen by chance. The only animals on earth who can recognize an arrowhead from a creek bed of the same types of stones are human beings. As creative beings, we recognize created things. "This did not all happen by chance.", is perhaps the most common observation ever made by human beings. "This did not happen y chance.", does not need to be taught from one generation to another. "This did not happen by chance.", may be the most common sense observation that human beings have sensed about what they observe in human history. For me, it's axiomatic. Something can't come from nothing, and chance is not a creative force.
No, evolution is not primarily based on chance being a creative source. Natural selection and sexual selection are non-random processes that account for most of the creative force of evolution.. Chance creates variation though genetic mutations and reshuffling of chromosomes. Chance also plays a part in the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
This discussion spans science, general philosophy, philosophy of science, and of course religion. While we cannot know exactly how all of the universe got started of exactly when, did time exist always etc... evolution is far better understood than the time of Darwin. We have a plethora of observations of evolutionary niches since Darwin's observations of finches, like: a far more detailed fossil record, drosophila observations, molecular genetics, biochemistry, and microbiology, all show evolution, and natural selection pressures. A great many animals now are observed to have imagination, creative minds, the ability to reason in their own language and some can communicate in part in our own language. In astrophysics and cosmology, it is well evidenced that particles just outnumbered antiparticles to give rise to matter, and atheist scientists say this is 'chance.' Well, maybe it is chance, meaning no divine or creative purpose was behind it, or maybe it was still 'chance' even if a greater force was behind it because we sure had no power behind it occurring, and maybe it was not predestined to create what we have now. What we do know is that evolutionary theory is not "just a theory" as a layperson would mean it, and it is not a hypothesis, or speculation, or conjecture; it is a fact, despite us not understanding precisely where it came from. What we also know is humans did not just arise up independently on their own or in a secret garden; we share a common ancestor that came before us.
What is truth? How do you define a liberal? What are their attributes? I am genuinely curious. What are your thoughts on evolution? What are your thoughts on chance?
Truth comes from disseminating information... No to Evolution, in the Darwinian sense. Nothing is "chance" insofar as living organisms is considered, or we'd see at least one Tornado go through a junk yard, and create a jet by now. The rest I discern through interaction. Why? Looking to make my list?
Thanks for the reply. We disagree, but I appreciate your straightforward and honest answers. I just wanted to better understand your earlier reply; ty.
Not a problem. I'm blunt, and not easily swayed, and fight fire with fire. Which explains the infractions I get. That IDGAF about.
Evolution is not word or concept Darwin originated nor would have ascribed to. A theory of evolution predated Darwin, and many after him applied the concept of natural selection in an attempt to bolster their interpretation of a value based progress of the human species to a form of superiority of the Victorian civilization as the ideal and as justification for imperialism expansion and domination over lessor evolved peoples in the world... a doctrine, borrowed from the Brits and more fully embraced by the Nazis. The underlying principles of Natural Selection are simple, logical, and continually observed, and is even exhibited even the change of the human population in the Western Countries over that last 200 years. That there are statistical variations among any species that can provide the basis for species change via natural selection is obvious. If it were not, the human species would consist of exact clones, yet in any given sample of humans, including a sample of two, their is variation. Some of those differences provide an increased potential of those differences being passed to descendants. It’s a principle that has been known for centuries, many exploited by Humans (as the natural selection mechanism) in the selective breading of both animals and plants; something Mendel more fully described in his studies using peas, and again acknowledge the Nazis tried to exploit to create their idealized master race.
Chance is somewhat meaningless in the context of an infinite multiverse. If it can happen, it does. And perhaps for every universe filled with atoms and molecules and flora and fauna, there are a million failed universes where matter couldn't form. Our universe exists as it does because it is guaranteed to happen an infinite number of times. This strikes me as the most logical explanation for the "Fine-Tuned Universe". The physical constants have the values they do because given enough universes, they were guaranteed to eventually assume the values needed for us to exist, by chance. Or, there could be physical laws that operate in a multiverse that we can't yet imagine.
The idea that chance mutations accumulate into ever increasing functional complexity is an absurd idea. The idea that life came to be by chance is even more ridiculous, but the idea that matter, and therefore time/space, came into being by chance has to be the most foolish idea that I have encountered so far. Something cannot come from nothing, and chance is not a creative force.
Our perception of beauty is rooted in queues for reproductive viability and survival. Superior males mating with superior females combines the most successful features of both animals to produce a new genetic variation. So from now on I will no longer say "I'm horny". I will instead declare the more accurate "I'm feeling creative".
Interesting post. I read it several times. Assuming an infinite multiverse does exist, there is still the chance or more aptly named, the probability that a given set of conditions exist within any one of the infinite universes, so chance or the likelihood of something occurring in a particular energy field (quantumly) and coalescing as particles to classical physics, in accordance with the correspondence principle still has some randomness. I am not sure how even a multiverse, the immutable laws of thermodynamics would be violated, and quantum mechanics, as the underpinning, so while theoretically, all things can happen, some that can still would not, and how do we define "can happen" in the first place? This is interesting but vague in its current form. You lost me on our universe can happen an infinite number of times... even with big bounce theory and big crunch theory in physics, there are limitations of the theories themselves, and of course to date no direct evidence, though it is interesting for theoretical physics and cosmology. The mathematician Georg Cantor proved there were different degrees of infinite, in a so-called infinity of infinities, but can we apply this mathematical abstraction to the universe? Quantum mechanics serves as bookkeeping of sorts of all the data that is possible, and theoretically, anything is possible and 'can' happen and yet they do not due to the correspondence principles and the 5 postulates of quantum mechanics in accordance with the wavefunction as you can see below: http://web.mit.edu/8.05/handouts/jaffe1.pdf http://vergil.chemistry.gatech.edu/notes/quantrev/node20.html To begin a more philosophical discussion here is a quick brush up on phenomenology: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ Yes, we can tie it to ontology (nature of being; what is) and epistemology (what is knowledge and how do we acquire it). We need to define chance and random more precisely in this thread too since we obviously are using them very differently when reading in context.
For more of a perusal than in-depth read, but it can prove useful: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chance-randomness/ https://lss.fnal.gov/archive/thesis/2000/fermilab-thesis-2017-19.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1102/1102.3154.pdf
Genetic algorithms and other algorithms based on natural selection have been used to find the solutions to complex design problems. from Wikipedia "genetic algorithms": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm In computer science and operations research, a genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA). Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems by relying on bio-inspired operators such as mutation, crossover and selection.[1] John Holland introduced genetic algorithms in 1960 based on the concept of Darwin’s theory of evolution; afterwards, his student David E. Goldberg extended GA in 1989.[2] In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a "learning machine" which would parallel the principles of evolution.[33] Computer simulation of evolution started as early as in 1954 with the work of Nils Aall Barricelli, who was using the computer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[34][35] His 1954 publication was not widely noticed. Starting in 1957,[36] the Australian quantitative geneticist Alex Fraser published a series of papers on simulation of artificial selection of organisms with multiple loci controlling a measurable trait. From these beginnings, computer simulation of evolution by biologists became more common in the early 1960s, and the methods were described in books by Fraser and Burnell (1970)[37] and Crosby (1973).[38] Fraser's simulations included all of the essential elements of modern genetic algorithms. In addition, Hans-Joachim Bremermann published a series of papers in the 1960s that also adopted a population of solution to optimization problems, undergoing recombination, mutation, and selection. Bremermann's research also included the elements of modern genetic algorithms.[39] Other noteworthy early pioneers include Richard Friedberg, George Friedman, and Michael Conrad. Many early papers are reprinted by Fogel (199.[40] Although Barricelli, in work he reported in 1963, had simulated the evolution of ability to play a simple game,[41] artificial evolution became a widely recognized optimization method as a result of the work of Ingo Rechenberg and Hans-Paul Schwefel in the 1960s and early 1970s – Rechenberg's group was able to solve complex engineering problems through evolution strategies.[42][43][44][45] Another approach was the evolutionary programming technique of Lawrence J. Fogel, which was proposed for generating artificial intelligence. Evolutionary programming originally used finite state machines for predicting environments, and used variation and selection to optimize the predictive logics. Genetic algorithms in particular became popular through the work of John Holland in the early 1970s, and particularly his book Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1975). His work originated with studies of cellular automata, conducted by Holland and his students at the University of Michigan. Holland introduced a formalized framework for predicting the quality of the next generation, known as Holland's Schema Theorem. Research in GAs remained largely theoretical until the mid-1980s, when The First International Conference on Genetic Algorithms was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Commercial products[edit] In the late 1980s, General Electric started selling the world's first genetic algorithm product, a mainframe-based toolkit designed for industrial processes.[46] In 1989, Axcelis, Inc. released Evolver, the world's first commercial GA product for desktop computers. The New York Times technology writer John Markoff wrote[47] about Evolver in 1990, and it remained the only interactive commercial genetic algorithm until 1995.[48] Evolver was sold to Palisade in 1997, translated into several languages, and is currently in its 6th version.[49]
