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A Philosophical Thread about Good & Evil - Catastrophes, Coincidences & Theodicy

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Given billions of years to try, even very improbable events will happen, just as if you deal billions of poker hands, the odds that you will get a royal flush will approach certainty. And while DNA is a very elegant solution to the problem of information transfer, we can suppose that is far from the only one possible. If life has evolved elsewhere, it might well have come up with a completely different mechanism, so different that we might not recognize it as life at all.

This discussion is reminiscent of a college dorm somewhere around 2 AM. I'm getting a real urge for pizza and one of those funny cigarettes...
 
Loxuru said:
That's a hindsight viewpoint.
Evolution relies on 'domestication' of diseases, tumors, bodily invaders, external or body made natural poisons, anomalies, which all suddenly and inexpectedly created useful systems, giving their carriers higher survival chances.
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"Suddenly and inexpedtely" created all kind of biological solutions to survive in every enviroment a living being could encounter, from the air to the sea until the sorrounds of underwater vulcans. Wings, legs, ultrasounds, light emiting devices, lungs, gills.. and sll that by aleatory mutations? Living beings don't addapt to the enviroment because they mutate, they mutate to addapt to the enviroment.
 
Actually we have right now an example where we can follow such processes ... variants of the Sars-CoV-2 are constantly being sequenced, there are huge amounts of point mutations; many are silent (don't change the amino acid sequence), some do change the sequence but don't change the structure.

Any changes that make the virus significantly worse at replicating will go unnoticed as they will no be available to us for sequencing (having failed to replicate). Nevertheless we've seen thousands of mutations and a few 'effective ' ones. In fact the mutation process can be studied within a single patient - if it's an immunodeficient patient with a long course of infection, you will ge an entire phylogenetic tree from one individual patient.
 
Silent_Water said:
Hrm, I would like to restrict: Not all carriers had higher survival chances, some are said to have had much less ...
I remember some Indian tribes and their final experiences with smallpox etc.
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I was rather thinking about our bloodcells, our immunity system, which are all domesticated invading bacteria, from a long past. In some occasions, their alien origin makes our immunity system turn against us, reviving their ancient 'disease' origin.

In the most primitive form, the cell nucleus and the mitochondria were unicellular creatures, devored by a a larger unicellular, but provided useful functions instead of being digested.
 
windar said:
Given billions of years to try, even very improbable events will happen, just as if you deal billions of poker hands, the odds that you will get a royal flush will approach certainty. And while DNA is a very elegant solution to the problem of information transfer, we can suppose that is far from the only one possible. If life has evolved elsewhere, it might well have come up with a completely different mechanism, so different that we might not recognize it as life at all.

This discussion is reminiscent of a college dorm somewhere around 2 AM. I'm getting a real urge for pizza and one of those funny cigarettes...
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Yeah, but I liked the discussions in college dorms at 2 A.M. very much. It was so funny and you have much more funny nonsense in a discussion at this time, don't you?
And I have a pizza next to my right hand right now!
;)
 
malins said:
The idea of evolution doesn't really posit, that an organism will by chance develop a fully formed organ that is useful only in a new environment that the animal has never before lived in, and then it'll suddenly go there be fruitful and multiply...
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Of course it takes time. I'm just saying that aleatority is out of the equation. Honestly, i don't know how a theory from the XIX century hasn't been touched in a century.
 
redzen said:
... Honestly, i don't know how a theory from the XIX century hasn't been touched in a century.
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That could possibly be, because we all do not know so many real certainties ... hm ... OK, ... usually it depends to which of these three human categories we are belonging:

1. A scientist is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat.

2. A philosopher or a metaphysicist is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat, which is probably not there.

3. A dogmatic (e.g.: Marxist, Leninist etc.) or a theologian (e.g.: Catholic, Protestant etc.) is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat, which is most probably not there and never was there, but suddenly a shouting is heard from the dark room: "I found the cat!"
 
Silent_Water said:
That could possibly be, because we all do not know so many real certainties ... hm ... OK, ... usually it depends to which of these three human categories we are belonging:

1. A scientist is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat.

2. A philosopher or a metaphysicist is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat, which is probably not there.

3. A dogmatic (e.g.: Marxist, Leninist etc.) or a theologian (e.g.: Catholic, Protestant etc.) is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat, which is most probably not there and never was there, but suddenly a shouting is heard from the dark room: "I found the cat!"
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4. And to lead the good life ... try to be the cat, and never get caught.
 
malins said:
The idea of evolution doesn't really posit, that an organism will by chance develop a fully formed organ that is useful only in a new environment that the animal has never before lived in, and then it'll suddenly go there be fruitful and multiply...
Click to expand...
Being in the post Christmas state of mild intoxication, I read that as 'the idea of evolution doesn't really posit that an orgasm will by chance develop in a fully formed organ that is useful only in a new environment ... and then (the animal) will suddenly go there and be fruitful and multiply'
Quick, I'm about to have an orgasm, must scoot to an environment where I can be fruitful and multiply! :D
 
Loxuru said:
That's a hindsight viewpoint.
Evolution relies on 'domestication' of diseases, tumors, bodily invaders, external or body made natural poisons, anomalies, which all suddenly and inexpectedly created useful systems, giving their carriers higher survival chances.
Click to expand...
But that would mean that evolution works according to the trial and error method. "So let's try this or that or another variant, maybe we can still use some of it later."
 
redzen said:
"Suddenly and inexpedtely" created all kind of biological solutions to survive in every enviroment a living being could encounter, from the air to the sea until the sorrounds of underwater vulcans. Wings, legs, ultrasounds, light emiting devices, lungs, gills.. and sll that by aleatory mutations? Living beings don't addapt to the enviroment because they mutate, they mutate to addapt to the enviroment.
Click to expand...
There is a hierarchy in genes. There are genes that contain a 'all-in genetic program' for an entire finger. One aleatory mutation may result that the 'program' is executed not, for instance, five times (e.g. with humans), but a sixth time. For us, humans, a sixth finger has no advantage, but for a species living on the soil, and relying on digging is crucial for finding food, getting air, and hiding for its predators, it can be a huge advantage. Many organs have improved by such a mutation, that makes the genetic program create an extra, or doubles its capacity.
 
Silent_Water said:
That could possibly be, because we all do not know so many real certainties ... hm ... OK, ... usually it depends to which of these three human categories we are belonging:

1. A scientist is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat.

2. A philosopher or a metaphysicist is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat, which is probably not there.

3. A dogmatic (e.g.: Marxist, Leninist etc.) or a theologian (e.g.: Catholic, Protestant etc.) is someone who is blindfold and looking in a dark room for a black cat, which is most probably not there and never was there, but suddenly a shouting is heard from the dark room: "I found the cat!"
Click to expand...
That would almost amount to the famous problem with Schrödinger's cat.
 
I don’t think this is meant to turn me on...
But it does. :babeando:

Rachel Armstrong’s work on non-living “protocells” is fascinating.. they’re scarcely more than blobs of oil and a few impurities.. yet they exhibit all sorts of “behaviours” we’d normally associate with living organisms. Or orgasms, if you’re @Eulalia :p
 
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