Life is Amazing
The many forms that DNA creates
30 years ago Simon Fraser University started a program called Philosophy Cafe. A moderator would introduce a philosophic topic and then a group would discuss. This would happen in an actual coffee shop. People would come on dates. I was associated with them for a long time and eventually became a moderator myself
One night early on we were discussing evolution. A guy across the room called out that evolution was impossible. I called out that that was not true. The discussion carried on but at the end I went over and introduced myself to him - he was Ray - and I suggested we meet to talk about it further and he agreed and after that we'd met every week for several years.
Ray was into what then was called Creation Science, now it's Intelligent Design (ID). Ray was very well informed. He knew a lot about science in terms of physics and mechanics and even biology. But for him it was unbelievable that the wonders of nature could have evolved by a random process.
Today I was reading a magazine that I may subscribe to at
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2020/building-bodys-tubes-and-branches.
The complexity of our innards is kind of hard to comprehend even just in terms of physical plumbing - the networks that process and move various fluids around. How could a random process create such a complicated thing?
Ray would point to the example of Paley finding a watch on a heath and upon looking inside realized that such a structure of gears and wheels needed a designer - it wouldn't happen by chance. Ray's conclusion was that the complexity of life implies a designer too.
He also talked about 'irreducible complexity"; the idea it would be impossible for a complex organ like an eye to evolve since all the components had to be in place before the eye would be of any use to anything.
The article I referred to above was looking at the seemingly endless complexity of our innards and discussing the details of how such networks form and grow. But it seems there are only a few ways that you can make a tube out of cells and the resulting tube is pretty comprehensible on that microscopic level.
The apparent complexity is the result of a space filling algorithm that involves growing into an empty space and avoiding an occupied space.
An earlier article at that site was about Alan Turing's work explaining the patterns on the surface of animals - why does a tiger have stripes. Turns out that the same math that Turing discovered also accounts for the frequency of branching in tube networks.
One of the themes apparent in my own reading about evolution is that nature reuses the mechanisms that work again and again. Very many animals have a body plan like ours; head with mouth and brain, digestive system leading to anus, 4 limbs and a tail . . . . That's all based on a particular sequence in our dna at a particular place at a particular time.
Evolution acts pretty slowly. When the Rift Lakes formed a hundred thousand years ago they were only populated by a few species of fish. Those few evolved to fill every ecological niche the lakes offered. Now there are hundreds of distinct species - in 100000 years. That's an eternity on a human scale but a blink compared to an evolutionary scale.
An interesting thing is that the appearance of a fish in a particular niche was similar to other fish in similar niches in other parts of the world.
I'm amazed that the world of nature could emerge with such a paucity of possibilities at the start and look what we have now.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.