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Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

nytimes.com

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Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#41

Post by beefok »

milesf wrote: post #35
projektir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess part of it is what to do with a religious claim. If you say: "God created us all", that's fair, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go from there. I can either agree with you or disagree, but I can't really discuss it.

Every community I have been a part of (church, family, techs, software development, Ruby Programming, etc) have been multifaceted. I will only talk about my camp, Evangelical Christians, because that's what I know. When I was a new Christian back in 1990 I was a bit baffled by the anti-intellectualism I witness among my friends at a local Pentecostal church. I found a sufficient answer in the book "Fit Bodies Fat Min…

"But consider this: Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Princeton are all Universities that started off as Christian seminaries. Their roots are founded in the idea that academics and reasoning are inherently noble pursuits."

The key here is that they started off as Christian seminaries. Are they any longer? Perhaps this same reasoning led them to stop being Christian seminaries in the first place.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#42

Post by sago »

milesf wrote: post #31
cortesoft wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order for discussion to have any meaning, the things we claim have to be 'falsifiable'; there has to be SOME observable consequence of a claim being either true or false, even if we aren't able to currently observe it. So, for religious discussions, what can we possibly discuss? Take any religious claim, and when we ask 'What observation could you make that would demonstrate to you that the claim is false?', the a…

"the answer is almost always nothing" That's just not true. The whole area of Christian Apologetics attempts to answer many of the questions that are raised.

> Christian Apologetics attempts to answer many of the questions that are raised

With respect, either you misunderstand the point you are responding to, or you misunderstand apologetics, as actually practiced and taught in evangelical institutions.

Apologetics, in the evangelical sense (like all terms, it has had varied practical forms), is the rational defence of pre-existing doctrine. It deals with epistemology, natural philosophy, hermeneutics, and other areas only when they can be used to support the doctrine. It is pretty much the opposite of rational inquiry, because it explicitly begins with the conclusion and seeks arguments to justify it. It is, in practice, an example of the parent comment: what falsification of the doctrine would an apologist accept? There would always be another argument, another apologia to bolster the claim.

[Source: theological degrees and was an evangelical apologist for 20 years. Books such as Louis Markos, Apologetics for the Twenty-First Century, Crossway, 2010; Peter Kreeft, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, IVP, 1994; and much of the rest of IVP's output.]

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#43

Post by awinter-py »

wyager wrote: post #18
awinter-py wrote: post #12

higher purpose = species survival over individual survival. That's why genomes have features in place which, for individuals, can suck -- senescence and cancer being the top 2. See also conatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus , a philosophical property whereby a thing tends to improve.

Your wiki link ("conatus") suffers from selection bias. We're only likely to see things that are stable.

Stable systems get beaten by their competitors.

It's systems/species that are organized to improve which will tend to survive.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#44

Post by psadri »

What we call "evolution" is simply the bias towards survival present in self replication.

The bias is present because the genomes that did not exhibit it died out in competition with the ones that did.

The fact that we as humans feel it so profoundly is a testament to the complexity that can emerge from a simple process given enough time.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#45

Post by athenot »

charonn0 wrote: post #33
milesf wrote: post #16

Do you think it's reasonable that conversations like this are fine on HN, but anytime I bring up Christian thought on the matter I am pressured to "not talk religion"? Wrestling with these top shelf Maslow's questions like "why am I/we here?", "what is the meaning of life" and other big life questions are common among all of us. So why the willingness to conjecture that (we live in a simulation | aliens may have seed…

Unless you're willing to allow that Christianity is conjecture, "introducing Christian thought" is not a discussion but a sermon.

I'm not hindu but I won't force my hindu friends to renounce the strength of their beliefs as a prerequisite for discussion.

I'm not atheist but I won't force my atheist friends to admit that there is a God as a prerequisite for discussion.

I think it's possible to have fruitful discussions while holding respect for other belief systems.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#46

Post by woofyman »

projektir wrote: post #32
phkahler wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet this article points out that these other notions are equivalent to saying god made it. It's OK for elon musk to think we are a simulation created by someone, but not on to say "religion". I found Musk's idea equally stupid for that very reason. May as well say the universe is on a turtles back. But what's that turtle standing on? It's turtles all the way down.

God and simulation to me are fundamentally different, but that may be because I dabbled in religion a lot. The simulation hypothesis, to me, is not terribly surprising or interesting. Why wouldn't someone be able to create a simulation like ours at some point? I am not following why Musk's belief is stupid? Yeah, obviously there's another layer above, and this doesn't explain that much, but I don't understand the stu…

To me, they're the same because both can't be proved or disproved. It's a matter of faith. I find Musk's statement stupid because he just didn't say it's possible. He said it was probable.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#47

Post by posterboy »

socmag wrote: post #25

Well duh. Yes I realize that comment seems "trite" What is it that the genome is doing. Look around and see how it is expressing itself. I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins recently after he went a bit nuts on the whole atheism thing. Not because of the atheism thing but because it distracted him from what he was really about. The genome is expressing itself, and it is way more than selfish. That thing is regression analys…

>That thing is regression analysis to a large power. Constantly calculating minimal cost to self preservation and better versions of itself

Edited:

That doesn't sound very articulate, hence doubtful. Your interpretation is just that, recognizing already known patterns. Does that relate to the evolutionary "purpose" from the title? The implicit idea of order ("better") is largely based on the temporal succession of what, as far as I can tell, is indistinguishable from randomness, because it relies on random mutation and other genetic variation moduli. What existential property this really optimizes for is open.

The crux is, existence itself is hardly a logical property. I mean, "exist to exist" really is not a new revelation. It's philosophically akin to "I think therefore I am", but trivially speaking, that's just the pattern recognition at work.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#48

Post by socmag »

projektir wrote: post #38
socmag wrote: post #25

Well duh. Yes I realize that comment seems "trite" What is it that the genome is doing. Look around and see how it is expressing itself. I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins recently after he went a bit nuts on the whole atheism thing. Not because of the atheism thing but because it distracted him from what he was really about. The genome is expressing itself, and it is way more than selfish. That thing is regression analys…

I would say that the genome is not getting to be truly selfish here, rather, it's just a tool of evolution, and evolution as a whole is the one with the purpose, but I don't know if it has enough forward-vision to create a specific entity as much as go for higher complexity whether it's through one complex being or a complex network of simple beings. There's a lot of odd downvoting in this thread...

"Evolution" is a man made term for "The Genome is trying to create a better entity than itself"

I think with regard to humans it is well on its way to manifesting itself with that purpose... It's called" The sum total of the Internet".

Not sure I agree with its choices, but compared to an individual there is quite a large organism at large there, for better or worse, and that thing is just as potent and self protective as DNA. Go try attack it. Good luck.

Evolution just got evolved. The Genome is building new infrastructure as we speak.

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#49

Post by socmag »

posterboy wrote: post #47
socmag wrote: post #25

Well duh. Yes I realize that comment seems "trite" What is it that the genome is doing. Look around and see how it is expressing itself. I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins recently after he went a bit nuts on the whole atheism thing. Not because of the atheism thing but because it distracted him from what he was really about. The genome is expressing itself, and it is way more than selfish. That thing is regression analys…

>That thing is regression analysis to a large power. Constantly calculating minimal cost to self preservation and better versions of itself Edited: That doesn't sound very articulate, hence doubtful. Your interpretation is just that, recognizing already known patterns. Does that relate to the evolutionary "purpose" from the title? The implicit idea of order ("better") is largely based on the temporal succession of wh…

It's highly rational.

Reduce Entropy. Period

Re: Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’?

#50

Post by projektir »

milesf wrote: post #35
projektir wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess part of it is what to do with a religious claim. If you say: "God created us all", that's fair, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go from there. I can either agree with you or disagree, but I can't really discuss it.

Every community I have been a part of (church, family, techs, software development, Ruby Programming, etc) have been multifaceted. I will only talk about my camp, Evangelical Christians, because that's what I know. When I was a new Christian back in 1990 I was a bit baffled by the anti-intellectualism I witness among my friends at a local Pentecostal church. I found a sufficient answer in the book "Fit Bodies Fat Min…

My theory on why certain kinds of people believe in things like religion has to do with different styles of information collection and perceiving the world. Religion is often adapted, or rejected, on moral grounds, rather than strict evidence grounds, because it's a lot more relevant to life on Earth than it is to who created the world at the end of the day.

Given that, it's not too surprising that religion can affect things without being true. The moral parts of religion are a lot more interesting and influential than the creationist parts, but the creationist parts make it sound true.

But what are the arguments for the creationist parts? The Bible simply says, in the beginning there was this and that. Most arguments after that are more about the fact that Jesus existed and made miracles, and therefore he had unusual powers, and if he had unusual powers, perhaps what he said was true.

I've never seen any from the ground up evidence about creation itself. Intelligent design to me is a counterargument more than an argument, and, apart from that, I haven't heard much at all.

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