If you deal a five card poker hand, the odds of getting that specific hand is 1 in 3 million. Isn’t it remarkable that this specific hand occurred, a 1 in 3 million chance on the very first try.
By the way, no matter what species evolved they would be a singularity in the universe. Every species is different from the rest.
And what a tragedy that the hyperintelligent squid has yet to evolve. Think what an animal could have done with our brain and eight tentacles!
No, if words have sense, it can’t be said that a bonobo represents an absolute singularity compared to, say, a chimpanzee, a gorilla or a gibbon.
As for the absolute singularity of Homo sapiens, here are some quotes that nicely make the point:
“It is not that difficult to tell a human from an ape, after all. The human is the one walking, talking, sweating, praying, building, reading, trading, crying, dancing, writing, cooking, joking, working, decorating, shaving, driving a car, or playing football. Quite literally, from the top of our head (where the hair is continually growing, unlike gorillas) to the tips of our toes (the stoutest of which is non-opposable), one can tell the human part from the ape part quite readily if one knows what to look for. Our eye-whites, small canine teeth, evaporative heat loss, short arms and long legs, breast, knees, and of course, our cognitive communication abilities and the productive anatomies of our tongue and throat are all dead giveaways” Paleo-expert Jonathan Marks
“We are unique and alone now in the world. There is no other animal species that truly resembles our own. A physical and mental chasm separates us from all other living creatures. There is no bipedal mammal. No other mammal controls and uses fire, writes books, travels in space, paints portraits, or prays. This is not a question of degrees. It is all or nothing; there is no semi-bipedal animal, none that makes only small fires, writes only short sentences, builds only rudimentary spaceships, draws just a little bit, or prays just occasionally” Evolutionist Juan Arsuaga
“Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape” Evolutionist Jacob Bronowski
“ Even allowing for the poor record we have of our close extinct kin, Homo sapiens appears as distinctive and unprecedented ….there is certainly no evidence to support the notion that we gradually became who we inherently are over an extended period, in either the physical or intellectual sense” Evolutionary paleo-expert Ian Tattersall.
Given the unprecedented singularity of man compared to animals (it is clear that mankind is transcendent above all other living things), John Sanford even argue (rightly IMO) that in a taxonomic sense mankind should most accurately be placed in a separate kingdom (i.e., plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human kingdom)
Yeah, well that just shows Sanford knows even less about taxonomy than he does about population genetics.
The emotional distaste some people feel at the fact that they are animals is a big reason, IMHO, that they refuse to accept evolution. Not sure why it matters so much to them, but there it is.
I suspect it’s part of the deflated ego problem.
Didn’t J. B. S. Haldane, or Julian Huxley, or one of those folks try to give Homo its own private kingdom? Then again, Carolus Linnaeus couldn’t find a good reason to give humans their own genus separate from chimps.
What’s interesting is you can always tell when someone is cribbing from Sanford’s book “Contested Bones” when they use the term “paleo-expert.”
Why Sanford didn’t just write “paleoanthropologist” as a descriptor is beyond me.
Not sure to understand your point here!
The odds of getting a remarkable hand, say a royal flush, is low whereas the odds of getting an unremarkable hand is high. The same is true with the prehuman ancestor, I.e., the odds that, by an evolutionary process, this prehuman ancestor gives rise to an absolute singularity such as Homo sapiens is as low as one can imagine.
It conforms to an independently given pattern, I.e., a specification
Yeah that’s all nice, and I share your amazement and appreciation of these capacities, but I’m still left wondering what the point is? Things could have gone a different way, and considering the total number of other possibilities would have been much more likely to, but didn’t. That would be true no matter what way it went. I can extend that same sort of thinking to my own existence. Of all the possible combinations of alleles it’s me as I am, instead of some other person who could have been very different.
And no organisms other than humans do? How is that?
Um, poker hands are completely subjective. Nothing independent about them.
I can make up a card game where the best hand is a 1 of hearts, king of spades, 3 of clubs, 5 of diamonds and a 2 of hearts.
It’s only special if I say it is. That’s why so many specification arguments are question begging
Is there a casino that has a poker table where you can win money with this hand?
Is there a multicellular organism that can survive without a ubiquitin system or system to regulate the cell cycle?
Specification is real in games as it is in biology.
There would be if I invented the game…
Are you suggesting that a royal flush is some objective, totally independent thing that would exist even if humans didn’t exist? Lol
After the fact, yeah. After we decide to make a certain order of cards meaningful.
Specification is so subjective and so prone to false positives and negatives that it’s
completely useless. I notice none of the ID and CSI proponents commented on @Rumraket post the other day when he shared something he found. None of you tried to determine, or even seemed interested, the origin of it. And that’s because it’s useless. It strictly exists to put some scientific gloss on your intuition. I can even grant some qualities of life, especially human life, seem more likely on theism. But I’m not getting to that conclusion using that lousy specification stuff.
Wrong: Every poker player involved in a game is subject to rules that are independent of him or her.
That were invented subjectively…
Yes, but that is not the point. When Messi scores a goal, it is an objective event, even if the rules of soccer are subjective.
I am suggesting the specification of a winning hand (royal flush) is part of the design of the game as your specification would be with the new game you are proposing.
As the ubiquitin system is part of the design of multicellular eukaryotes.
Before the game has any meaning. If you have a target it is meaningless unless you specify the objectives. As long as you do this prior to playing the game it is not the TSS fallacy.
A royal flush is a specified part of the game called poker. If you observed enough poker hands and saw that a royal flush always won you could infer the specification as the best possible hand. It would take much less time to infer that 2 pair were better than a single pair.
In biology we can infer specification through observing it. We observe a set of DNA sequences that perform a specific function such as manufacturing an enzyme that breaks down a molecule. In the case of biology some specifications are more precise than others yet only a specific group of sequences can perform the function.
Since the DNA sequence is isolated from the amino acid sequence by the transcription/translation mechanism the inference of specifications in the system is pretty evident.
What would you say if clouds in the sky were arranged in such a way as to form the following sentence: « Specification is so subjective and so prone to false positives and negatives that it’s
completely useless »? Wouldn’t you say it was produce by an intelligent agent? If yes, why?