Amazing How The Water Always Makes It To The Shore

[eel_shepherd]

This is the first topic I've ever started here & wasn't sure which forum to post it at. If it doesn't belong here, perhaps someone will move it to the right spot.

 

It's about two ideas that are very similar. So similar, in fact, that it takes a certain sensibility to have any comfort level with them, because one is faulty thinking and the other isn't.

 

The first idea that we see constantly from Xtians is the one I describe as "isn't it amazing how the water always makes it to the shore?" Xtians are always pointing out how suitable this world is for our ability to live on it. How the lord is so generous in providing rocks with metal ore in them, how the ozone layer keeps us from getting fried, how the plants are happy to use up our carbon dioxide and give us nice oxygen in exchange, how gravity pulls just hard enough on us to keep us from flying the fuck away but not so strong that it won't teach little Ginnie a valuable lesson about hanging onto her helium balloon at the fair, etc etc etc. What a miracle! Such lavishness shown in the gifts bestowed upon us! It just never seems to register on them that they've got it bass-ackwards. i.e. that it's not so much a case of the world being "just right" for us to enjoy a short walk to the mall, but that if we weren't the type of critter that could survive the world as it is, we wouldn't be here to have _any_ opinion on the fittedness of the world to our lives --- we'd have died! It's not that it's a suitable place for life forms like ourselves; it's that life forms like ourselves _perceive_ it that way because our ancestors, without one single exception, were suitable to _it_. Try asking the bloodlines that didn't make it, if this is a hospitable environment.

 

This is just a hair's breadth from the other idea. What Richard Dawkins calls "the argument from incredulity." That's when someone says they find it impossible to believe that the eye could have just happened without a designer, or that a caterpillar can metamorphise into a butterfly or moth. Oh, you find it a stretch to believe? Well, hey, that's good enough for me. Proof positive.

 

That's how natural selection works; there _is_ nobody at the wheel. Wherever we've arrived at --- that's the destination. You see how similar that is to the "water always makes it to the shore" idea? You can see how easy it would be to jump track from one (sound) line of thought to the other (circular) line of thought, if you didn't have a handle on the first one, almost what you might call a feel for it, or a knack for it.

 

And it's made all the harder when people who can't pick up the difference between the two gain any measure of control over a school board and actively seek to perpetuate and promote the wrong one. As we saw in Dover, PA.

[neverclear5]

Firstly, welcome. Its always nice to see new poster's in the science section. Its been a bit quite round these parts for a while.

 

Not a bad post either. It is a bit annoying that people can't think of it the other way around. It's largely because we are all very self centred. We think of ourselves as the most important thing in the universe (whether we articulate it or not) and so it's more fitting with that initial feeling that the world is adapted for us and not the real way, we are adapted for the earth. Frankly, we arn't that well adapted. My topic on Incompetant Design elsewhere in this section is on that same subject. We can't breath underwater, we can't even breath well when we're high up. We gain energy from our food in a way that releases oxidant particles that destroy our cells and DNA (which is one theory on why we age). Ignoring all that and assuming general animal stuff is all fine, we arn't well adapted for our behaviours as humans. The spine is bent at a sharp angle to allow upright walking which causes terrible pain after a while. Feet hurt from supporting our whole weight all day and, if we lie about all day..... we get bed sores!

[Amethyst]

Welcome! Yeah, I love how fundies ignore the fact that a lot of the earth isn't very habitable to humans. Try surviving naked in the Sahara desert with nothing to use as a tool except what's in the environment around you. The vast majority of people wouldn't get far without collapsing and dying. Or try the Arctic for an opposite extreme. Heck, even MN in the wintertime isn't very habitable if you aren't prepared for the weather. People have died from exposure even in urban areas.

[white_raven23]

Living in Alaska, I can say it's quite beautiful, but in winter (like now) I can also say my entire existence consists of moving from one climate controlled area to another. Most people here carry some pretty substantial emergency winter gear in their cars. At least the smart ones do. We are surrounded by lots of nowhere, and at the very least, most people of driving age have cell phones.

 

Your car quits in a nowhere place and you don't have a phone or survival gear? That is all it takes to wind up in some very serious shit here.

[Legion]

Welcome Eel Shepherd. What you're talking about reminds me of the "weak anthropic principle."

[Legion]

Welcome Eel Shepherd.

 

What you're talking about reminds me of the "weak anthropic principle."

[Taphophilia]

Another thing is how helpless human infants are at birth. If I'm not mistaken, they are the most helpless newborn animal. Even though human females have evolved a wider pelvis because we walk upright, the human infant had to evolve to be born with a smaller cranial capacity than our previous humaniod ancestors in order to fit through it, that's why they are so helpless at birth, both were accomplished by natural selection.

[Guest Reelidgeown]

Another thing is how helpless human infants are at birth. If I'm not mistaken, they are the most helpless newborn animal. Even though human females have evolved a wider pelvis because we walk upright, the human infant had to evolve to be born with a smaller cranial capacity than our previous humaniod ancestors in order to fit through it, that's why they are so helpless at birth, both were accomplished by natural selection.

 

 

Hmm, I've never compared human infants to other animals. Now that I think of it you are probably right, I'm thinking of this video I remember seeing of a giraffe being born. He gets plopped on the ground, licked a few times. He then struggles to get up but succeeds after a few tries. And then he looks around and is like "sup gang wutz happenin." Such a big difference.

 

I guess we are smarter than other species because we needed to be to survive?

[eel_shepherd]

Thanks for the kind replies everyone. Now, at the risk of getting whacked upside the head for doing a large cut-&-paste, I just had to add this bit of traffic that I stumbled on in the Text Comments section to a YouTube video called "Atheist Walking". It's from the current page 65 [!] of comments, as I type this, so you can see from that that the guy made a worthwhile video. The reason I post this stuff is just to show that there really are people out there who can't get a feel for the idea that any survivor of an ecology will perceive that ecology as benign. Nonono, it must be some benevolent god who balances the forces of nature just so. The "travisb243" user just can't or won't take that in.

 

travisb243 (6 months ago)

If the elements in our atmosphere were even a few percentage points different, every living thing on earth would die. The odds of a single protein molecule forming by chance is 1 in 10^243 (that is a 10 followed by 243 0s). A single cell is comprised of millions of protein molecules.

 

(Reply)

Driux (6 months ago)

Research publication please! Why you are even applying a uniform probability distribution is beyond me. What do each of the 10^243 possibilities represent, and why are they uniformly distributed? It is a physical mechanism with governing physical laws, it should not be uniform at all.

 

[Later, not having taken in word one of the person's reply, his chip gave this read-out:]

 

travisb243 (6 months ago)

The teleological argument is that since the universe displays such an amazing design, there must have been a Divine designer. For example, if earth were even a few hundred miles closer or further away from the sun, it would not be capable of supporting much of the life it currently does.

 

(Reply)

Driux (6 months ago)

The potential to generate life exists in all planets, all with an opportunity to generate life like systems if conditions happen to fit. If the orbit of the earth was different, it is expected that the evolution was have converged to those different conditions or failed (thus you never ask the question). This is the anthropic principle.

 

(Reply)

educationalvideos (6 months ago)

travisb243, your arguments are backward. for example, the earth isn't the right distance from the sun so that we can live on it. instead, we live on the earth because earth is the right distance from the sun. as for citing odds like "1 in 10243", even if that figure is right it constitutes a high probably when condidering the billions of years and molecules in your equation. also, life regenerates, so it doesn't need to roll dice upon every birth.

[neverclear5]

Another thing is how helpless human infants are at birth. If I'm not mistaken, they are the most helpless newborn animal. Even though human females have evolved a wider pelvis because we walk upright, the human infant had to evolve to be born with a smaller cranial capacity than our previous humaniod ancestors in order to fit through it, that's why they are so helpless at birth, both were accomplished by natural selection.

 

 

Thats actually a benifit, evolutionarily speaking. If you are born able to run away and eat grass then thats all you do. Our greatest survival tool is our brains and, by being helpless at birth, we must stay with our mothers and learn from them, substituting ability to learn (intelligence) for basic instinct as the benificial trait. You can see this with most animals, the smarter they are, the longer they remain with their mothers after birth.

[eel_shepherd]

Look what turned up at some anti-evolutionist site, cited in another thread in the Science And Religion section. This 2-paragraph quote gives an object lesson in the theme of this current thread:

 

"...2. [Creationists suggest that] natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed the fittest.

 

First, we have “late-breaking” news for Mr. Rennie. It is not just creationists who have stated that natural selection is a tautology based on circular reasoning. His evolutionary cohorts (rightly or wrongly) have been saying the same thing for years. T.H. Morgan, the eminent geneticist and pioneer of fruit-fly research, seems to have been the first to spot the problem. He wrote early in this century: “For it may be little more than a truism to state that the individuals that are best adapted to survive have a better chance of surviving than those not so well adapted to survive” (as quoted in Bethell, 1976).

 

Evolutionist Francis Hitching observed that “Darwinism, as Darwin wrote it, could be simply but nonsensically stated: survivors survive. Which is certainly a tautology; and tells us nothing about how species originate, as even Darwin’s supporters admit” (1982, p. 84, emp. added). [Mr. Rennie, it appears that creationists aren’t the only ones who make “nonsensical” statements!] Dr. Hitching even went further to note that “a tautology (or truism) is a self-evident, circular statement empty of meaning, such as ‘Darwin was a man,’ or ‘biology is studied by biologists.’ The trouble with natural selection (and survival of the fittest) is that it seems to fall into this category” (p. 84, parenthetical items in orig.)..."

 

See? Over and over again.

 

For the record, survivors survive _for some reason_; and, having survived _for that reason_ (whatever it was), they get to reproduce. Unlike the ones which didn't survive, which, being now dead, find it harder to get it up than when they were younger.