“It is better to ask some of the questions than know all of the answers.” – James Thurber
Having recently joined this forum, I have been told that it is customary to write an introduction thread.
I’m an agnostic who’ve decided to take the concept of teleology in nature - or intelligent design, if you will - on an intellectual spin. Suppose the first life on Earth was intelligently designed with its future evolution in mind. What would follow from this conjecture? Does it open any interesting new areas of inquiry? How far can one take it before reality starts getting in the way?
I’m not interested in “toppling materialism” or influencing educational policy. I don’t consider my views as science, and I don’t think they should be taught in schools.
I don’t think I’ve got everything figured out, and I’m not here to convince anyone of the errors of their ways. I’m looking to have my views critically examined from unexpected angles and to be exposed to material I wouldn’t have found on my own.
This forum looks like a good place do to that, and I’m looking forward to participating.
PS. Does anyone know how to get one of those little descriptions next to your name? I’m talking about those “Earth Science Student” or “Freethinking Atheist” descriptions that everyone but me seems to have.
As I think it’s bad form to arrive at a party and start arguing with other guests before I’ve even taken off my coat, I’ll try to keep this introduction thread from evolving into an argument. So just a few brief comments for now, hopefully to be expanded on elsewhere.
If the first life on Earth was the product of geochemical processes, I would have very different expectations than if it was the product of intelligent design. For one, I would expect the first life to be a lot more similar to the simplest cells found today than to the sloppy, simplistic replicators envisaged in OOL theories.
Of course, differentiating between the two isn’t everything. I’m fine with my views just being a different perspective on things for now.
As for life being designed with a particular outcome in mind, here’s a thought scenario:
Imagine you’ve been tasked with seeding a lifeless planet with life in such a way so that at some point the planet will be home to, say, multicellular life. How do you do it? Knowing what you do about natural selection, is there any way you can design that first population of cells with the tools to evolve multicellularity?
I’m not a particularly argumentative person. I much prefer friendly discussions. On the other hand, Internet forum threads tend to become arguments.
I’m not imaginitive enough to have thought that through.
To me, the important distinction is between external design and self-design. I tend to think of biological evolution as a system of self-design. This is partly a matter of a population “designing” its successor population, and partly a matter of a developing organism designing itself through the development process.
As a mathematician, I think I’ll leave that to the biologists and biochemists.
Let me elaborate slightly. The first would seem impossible to prevent. Given life, evolution can’t be avoided. So this leads nowhere.
The second would seem impossible to implement, assuming we’re saying that modern species, e.g. Homo sapiens, were programmed into the first cell. So that leads nowhere too.
We are left with one further possibility, the so-called pool shot, in which the initial conditions were so carefully set up that, like the perfect break in pool, all the balls end up in pockets in the right order. In terms of life, this means that the conditions of the universe at the time of the first life were adjusted so the occurrence of each subsequent mutation was aligned just so. In a Newtonian universe, that would be possible. In a quantum mechanical universe, I don’t think it’s even theoretically possible. It would require an ability equivalent to knowing exactly when a given nucleus of K40 would spontaneously decay.
Well, if you want multicellularity, the simple solution would be to design multicellular life at the start. If you want something that might eventually become multicellular, the smart money based on the evolutionary record is that you need to have it be a eukaryote from the start, and of course that didn’t happen. Nobody knows why only eukaryotes became multicellular (at least 5 times by my count) while prokaryotes didn’t (assuming we don’t count multicelluar bacteria with only two or three cell types). I see no way to design the evolution of eukaryotes into the system, so we’re back to the old solution: you can’t avoid the possibility of multicellular life when you start up life, so it’s as if there’s no design involved at all.
Prokaryotes did become eukaryotes…
Based on the rules of blackjack it is inevitable. If you have enough prokaryotes, some of them will be come eukaryotes…
Same rules of blackjack ensure the emergence of multicellular organisms, animals and hominids (atleast) if there is enough time and enough of a population…
It looks very improbable… but who can calculate the probability…
