“I refuse to believe that mankind is a random byproduct of molecular circumstance, no more than the result of mere biological chance.” – Alien: Covenant
A LEGO® store opened in my hometown. People lined up for blocks.
There are times that life seems random, chaotic. In our current time, especially, change is moving faster than a Disney™ transvestite can ruin a childhood.
It seems random.
But it’s not.
As I look deeper and deeper into the world, I see that the world, and in fact the entire Universe, is as it is for a reason. That’s a big claim. So why am I certain that this is the case?
Physics, baby.
The Universe is tuned for life. There’s a quantity called the “fine structure constant” which is roughly 1/137. And, there aren’t any units, so I can’t even poke fun at the communist metric system.
What the fine structure constant represents is the relationship between the elementary charge of an electron, how hard it is to make a spark, pi, the speed of lights, and the relationship between wavelength and energy of a photon. So, it’s a lot of stuff to mix up, and I’m surprised the number of lime-flavored PEZ™ bricks in Guatemala isn’t included as well, but I didn’t get a vote.
When photons pass each other do they just wave?
What’s important, though, is that if it were much different than its current value, life doesn’t exist. If the number is much bigger, electrons are bound too closely to the atom this shrinks the size of the atom, making your mother even shorter and denser. I can hear the kids now: “Your momma’s a neutron star.”
Also, chemistry is built around electrons zooming from one atom to the next, so if the electrons don’t move, poof. No steak.
If the fine structure constant is much smaller, important things like carbon and oxygen couldn’t stick together, and, boom. No beer.
Life existing requires this one number being within a fairly narrow range around that 1/137. 4/137 and, zap, no more Toaster Strudels™. Of any flavor.
I wrote a book about using stairs. It’s a step-by-step guide.
Throw everything up randomly, and nothing useful exists. Our Universe is really like Goldilocks was so picky that she had to have her porridge between 112.312°F and 114.452°F (between 4 and 7 liters). Yes, she would have starved.
That’s not all – change the strong nuclear force, the gravitational constant by just a few percent and no useful structures can ever form. Ever.
That’s the big picture. But I’m far from original, and this is far from new knowledge.
The Greeks stole my thunder and had the Fates: Clotho, Larry, and Curly, I think. The Romans had Fortuna: Fortuna was worse than vodka at bringing both prosperity and ruin. The Norns knit the fates of the Vikings while drinking mead and sitting under Yggdrasil. Oh, and Matthew 10:29 would like a word as well:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”
Yes, I know that’s not a sparrow.
I generally leave my house within the same thirty second window every day. I know that’s crappy OpSec, but it does soothe my autism. When I’m delayed, I’ve often had the thought that wasn’t without a reason, good or bad. What seems to be random chance is almost certainly not. If I lose a sock, get a flat, or have “stumble” upon an article, it’s just me being a part of the play.
Now it may surprise you, but my life isn’t perfect. There have been goofs I’ve made, and I’ve had both good and bad luck. But I’ll tell you, it often wasn’t something I could perceive right at that moment. The old Chinese parable comes to mind:
A farmer’s horse runs away, prompting neighbors to lament his bad luck. “Maybe,” he replies. Days later, the horse returns with a herd of wild horses. “Good luck!” the neighbors say. “Maybe,” he says. His son, taming the new horses, falls and breaks his leg— “Bad luck! The neighbors sat. “Maybe,” the farmer shrugs. Soon, war breaks out, and the Emperor’s army comes through town, drafting all the able-bodied young men, but the son’s injury spares him from conscription. “Good luck!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” the farmer repeats.
See, what the farmer realized is that his son might end up married to Greta Thunberg.
Life’s no crapshoot, though – the place was designed for us. There are no coincidences—our wins, our flops, even that flat tire last Tuesday are part of the plan, and it’s no accident you’re reading this.
And we don’t talk about time travel.
The paradox is, though, you’re not a pawn, you’re also the player. Our actions matter. Life isn’t a cosmic slot machine, but the things we do and experience are lessons and mold us, or mold someone else. And it’s in that narrow window that wonderful things happen.
How do I know that?
We’re here. And so is beer. And so is every other wonderful part of creation.
Except for the metric system. The French can have that one back.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vmgGNe0jouU
Ha! Too far back!
Things are never as they seem, even physics. Enjoy the ride, and try to be better next time around.
Physics. Not JUST a good idea. IT”S THE LAW!!!
I wish I could take credit for that, but I heard it about 30 years ago at The Annual Martin Luther King Birthday, 45.70 Shoot. (A bunch of folks, vets, Seal team guys, San Diego cops, re-enactors, and one Class lll guy, with machine gunsess, by invitation only and me) out in the Anza Borrego, Navy bombing range (they ALWAYS had the week end off).
Anyway, this year, there were 4 new (old) guys. They were all brainiac physicists. They all grew up together, went to school together, became money making industry, physicists. AND they all considered themselves hippies. Then, one day, as fate would have it, one of the guys went into Big 5 Sporting Goods, to get some carabiners and climbing gear, innocently, he strays by the gun area counter and his eye is attracted to this amazing masterpiece of machine artistry. He comes to an involuntary stop. It’s an evil gun!!! It’s an ancient Mauser. Sharp eyed gun seller swoops in. “Hi sir, would you like look at this 1916 WW l Mauser?” Flummoxed, he responds “NO! Yes.” As he’s holding it, he KNOWS there are thousands of 1990’s worth of dollars in this ancient rifle. Sales guy, noticing his enrapturement, pipes up with “It’s 99 bucks,” WHAAH!?!?, “I’ll take it.” It’s California, he picks it up 10 days later. Doesn’t tell his hippie friends. The next month it’s a Mosin Nagant, doesn’t tell his buddies. The next month, it’s a Chinese SKS. At some point his buds stop by for, something, and see these !!GUNZ!! “WHAT IS THIS!?! WHAT HAPPENED!?! WE’RE HIPPIES!!!”. He knew this would happen, he’s prepared, “Hippies with guns.” They’re all geeks, they all APPRECIATE the workmanship, artistry, history. They all become, hippies with guns. They start out on the cheap, Big 5 Sporting Goods, gateway. entry into “the gun world”, they go to the range and meet GUN PEOPLE!! They’re nice, helpful, amazingly smart for “regular folk”. They know someone in our crew and get invited. They progress to refined, elegant, pricy, guns. They get invited back and become regulars. They were a hoot, for Brainiacs. More “Evil gun” converts, happens a lot.
Tree Mike
It is hard to suggest with a straight face that all of this is just a random coincidence. On the other hand, the existence of a God, gods or some other supernatural creative force does not mandate you choose one of the established organized religions.
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!” – Rush
For myself, it was Planck’s constant that accounted for the anthropogenic universe.
Yup, and it’s buried in the Fine Structure Constant.
“There are no coincidences…”
Dang. You beat me to one of the signature lines in my books.
There’s so much profundity in this one that I think I’ll quibble about typos. “Sooth” is a somewhat archaic noun meaning “truth.” “Soothe” is a verb, meaning to calm or placate.
And now, with my coffee finished and my own autism placated, I’ll get myself a few km down the road …
Are you a soothe seeker?
Fixed! Thank you!
Everything happens for a reason, so to speak. Being raised a Presbyterian, it’s Predestination in our credo. If you want good outcomes, believe in them and follow your gut instinct.
After I got fired from my marriage back in 1987, every large decision presented to me wasn’t a well thought out choice. I’d say to myself, “if it feels good, it’s the best (better?) option.”
As for France & the metric system, both suck (excepting Frog wines), along with the 10-day week. Ribbit, Ribbit.
I get very few readers from France, so I guess they don’t like me, either.
This is a deeply profound topic on several levels. I absolutely believe there is something literally supernatural going on here. Where I have trouble is attributing this to an individual being of incredible abilities whose plan is to let me live forever so I can sing its praises. I’m not sure the mind of humans is capable of ever truly understanding the reality of what is going on. But it’s fun to try, and we call that fun activity science.
Intractable mysteries like the fine structure constant and its importance to life have led many scientists into a philosophical hall of mirrors called the Anthropic Principle and the related concept of the multiverse. This has led to a lamentable downgrading of the experimental scientific method, which depends on theory falsification as a path to Truth. How can you run experiments on and theoretically invalidate or confirm something that is imbedded in the very fabric of reality? The Anthropic Principle cannot be falsified; any counterexamples would be in some other universe in a multiverse. The AP would be Topic Number One of The Paradox Club.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/12/is-anthropic-principle-scientific.html
Focusing on the fine structure constant itself is a fascinating topic, right up there with the double slit experiment. It is the focal of quantum electrodynamics or QED, for which the scientific patron saint Richard Feynman won his Nobel Prize in physics. Accordingly, he had a lot to say about it.
“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!” ……..Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129.
Basically the FSC is the probability that an electron (matter) will absorb a photon of light (energy). You can measure this in a lab. Nobody has ever suggested or discovered a reason why it should be this value. This really bugs physicists – there’s ALWAYS a reason why a probability is what it is. You roll snake eyes one out of every thirty six times because dice have six sides. You get heads half the time because coins have two sides. So…the FSC is telling us something very fundamental and profound about the “shape” of electrons and photons…but what?
Interestingly, there IS a geometry relationship that yields the FSC. Everybody knows that the mysterious number pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference and diameter, which is equivalently twice its radius. So pi = C / 2r. Imagine you have a polygon of n sides instead of a circle. Define the “radius” of said polygon to be the distance from the polygon center to the center of one of its sides.
As noted out there on the internet: “Let P(n) be the perimeter length of an n sided polygon and r(n) be the distance from its centre to the centre of a side. In analogy with the definition of p = C /2r we can define an integer dependent generalization, p(n), of p as p(n) = P(n) / (2r(n)) = n tan(p / n). Let us define a set of constants {a(n1,n2)} dependent on the integers n1 n2 as a(<n1, n2) = a(n1, ∞) p(n1 x n2) /p, ………………………* where a(n1,∞) = cos(p / n1) / n1. The numerical value of a, the fine structure constant, is given by the special case n1 = 137, n2 = 29. Thus a = a(137,29) = 0.0072973525318… The experimental value for a is aexp = 0.007297352533(27), the (27) is +/- the experimental uncertainty in the last two digits."
So maybe n1 = 137, n2 = 29 describes the "dice and coin" shapes out there in quantum land for electrons and photons? Nobody knows. Yet.
As for the element of randomness and luck and such in life, it's always important to remember exactly what life is : various chemicals swimming around and bumping into each other in sacks of water called cells. Sometimes these sacks of water exchange chemicals with other sacks of water they happen to be connected to. That's all life is. If you have a hundred billion or so of these sacks of water connected together, you have a human being. And all they are, all we are, are randomly swirling chemicals in tiny sacks of water.
It's a miracle. Watch the first minute and then the three minutes at 1:10:00 of this film. I'm sure you'll agree.
various chemicals swimming around and bumping into each other in sacks of water called cells. Sometimes these sacks of water exchange chemicals with other sacks of water they happen to be connected to. That’s all life is. If you have a hundred billion or so of these sacks of water connected together, you have a human being. And all they are, all we are, are randomly swirling chemicals in tiny sacks of water.
So, you would agree with the formula:
H2 + heat + pressure ➡️ people
If the reaction time given is long enough?
LOL. I agree that is indeed a one sentence description of the history of the universe. So far.
I’m working up to a double slit post. Gotta get it right. Video is open . . . probably get to it tomorrow.
What did not occur to me until I was older and mature enough to pull my head out of my own arse is that sometimes the universe does not revolve solely around me. I am sure that we’ve all been someone else’s angel or devil at various times, without having so much as a clue. That stranger you bumped into by accident on the sidewalk may well have had the course of his life altered forevermore by your clumsiness, saving him from disaster (or steering him headlong into oncoming traffic).
The flighty chick who dumped me back in freshman year of college broke my heart at the time. But today she is 250 pounds of fugly and I could not possibly thank her enough for freeing me from my self-imposed chains.
Everything happens for a reason, but there is no obligation on fate to clue you in as to why. Sure, you have ‘agency’. But even your ‘agency’ is part of the much, much larger plan.
What made all those thin and svelte girls in the Seventies turn into middle aged land whales?
Oh, that’s easy! The food pyramid. 😉
(and too many romance novels and soap operas instead of being out, about, and active!)
There isn’t. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the “why” of things that happened, and just a taste of the bigger picture.
I read a novel by Charles Sheffield in my younger days that touches on this very concept (I think it was “Sphere’s of Heaven” but it was so long ago, that I can’t remember for sure). Basically an Earth spaceship makes a jump into a parallel universe where some of these universal constants were slightly different than our own. Being a physicist by training, Sheffield fleshed out the details of this alternate universe based on the modified constants and it made for a very interesting story. Many of the changes were very subtle but IIRC, some were life threatening to the crew (and in relation to things we normally take for granted).
Philosophically speaking, I do wonder if this perfect alignment of universal constants is a sign that God created us. But then I also wonder whether God might have created an infinite ensemble of parallel universes–each varying slightly in terms of these universal constants–just as a way to introduce some variety. Life on every parallel universe would be very different in form due to the difference in constants, but creatures living in say “Low G, high R” universe would still be created in “God’s image” just as much as we are.
Yup, though there is a band outside of which nothing is possible. And it’s not a wide band.
John, over a life time of choices (often bad) and circumstances that did not turn out the way I anticipated, I have learned to simply wait for the longer term. Many times “bad” circumstances have ultimately turned out for the good.
Defensible argument for God? Not for most. But I have seen too many things work of for my good and His Glory to have any questions.
Exactly. We live in a world of miracles, if we are open to seeing them.
“Beer is proof God loves us, and wants us to be happy.” – Benjamin Franklin
Meanwhile the eye that you’re using to read this requires hundreds to thousands of unique chemical conduction reactions, the lack of any one of which renders you completely blind.
There are no “shades of gray” there. Either you’re seeing this in living color, or everything is black.
And it doesn’t grow like stacking LEGO blocks. It’s assembled at birth, via DNA, in a chip-coding process that reeks of reams of data so complex we still cannot even fathom it, let alone reproduce it.
Positing this as the development of blind (no pun intended) chance via Evolution is roughly equivalent to positing a redwood growing a branch which became the Golden Gate Bridge, or endless Kansas tornadoes assembling a functional 747 out of random parts.
The universe is too young to accommodate all the necessary failed steps on that pathway.
And that’s just to account for the eye and human vision.
One may as well recount the time Texas Instruments engineers found the first integrated circuit chip, whole and flawlessly functional, in silica strata from a mine in Bavaria in 1958. {Note: that never happened either.}
IOW, holding it occurred by random mutation requires adherence to nonsensical religious dogma slavishly followed far beyond the boundaries of profound mental retardation.
Universities call this belief Darwinian Evolution.
Turn loose the poo-flinging monkeys, upset at this reality.
Evolution is an experimentally established scientific fact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
People underestimate what body changes can ultimately result from evolution because we can’t comprehend what quadrillions^quadrillions of individual organisms can accomplish over trillions of generations over billions of years. If humans can create dog bodies ranging from Chihuahuas to Great Danes in a mere 15,000 years of domestication in a relatively few scattered “kennels”, the universe at large can certainly create “eyes” in a few million years of evolution in a planetwide ocean full of life.
https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/senses/eye/
Opposition to evolution is frequently seen as a required prerequisite to piety in religion. I personally reject this viewpoint. Whatever underlies the miraculous wonders around us is perfectly capable of using evolution as a tool to achieve its ultimate goal.
And certainly “tools” far more mysterious than “evolution” have been used to get life on Earth to its current level of sophistication. For example, the Big Bang 14 billion years ago only created the first four elements on the Periodic Table – hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. Life needs DNA and DNA needs carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus atoms. The only way to get those elements is to cook them up via hydrogen fusion in stars that later explode to create dust clouds that re-condense into new stars and planetary systems. So…the very nature of spacetime itself had to cause all mass in the universe to attract all other mass and so condense the original hydrogen into the initial stars. Spacetime itself having the needed characteristics to spontaneously generate the initially non-existent elements and atoms needed for DNA (ie, “gravity”) is a LOT more outlandish than “evolution” shaping that resulting DNA into specific body forms.
The thing is, I am not at all convinced that humanity or even life itself is the pinnacle or final outcome of whatever is going on here. DNA and life may be as trivially incidental to the Universal Process underway as Waste Heat is to a Stirling Engine. The creation of new elements seems to be the progress measurement of the ongoing Universal Process. Each new generation of stars cooks up a new batch of elements from the ashes of the previous stars. There’s new stable elements beyond uranium that are probably gonna be formed by the next generation of stars that burn the ashes of our current world when they condense together yet again billions of years from now. Carbon enables life; iron is an amazing key metal in stars for various reasons; uranium enables radioactivity. Who knows what unimaginable level of existence is yet to be enabled billions of years from now when the Milky Way itself is consumed and recast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#/media/File:Nucleosynthesis_periodic_table.svg
I don’t expect we’re gonna figure this all out in the decade or two I hope to have left, but that’s OK. I’m enjoying the ride.
Gainsaying isn’t proof.
Dogs varying in breed is no more complex than finches with differing beaks.
Species mutating internally is not species becoming new species.
What you can’t do is have horseflies morphing into horses.
You’re trying to substitute small “e” evolution for large “E” Evolution: The Origin of Species.
Which isn’t the same thing at all.
A million perennially “missing links” are always a tomorrow away, and we haven’t found a single one in a century of looking.
Evolution is Lucy, pulling the football away from adherents, forever, every time they try to kick it.
Human vision fails the basic test Darwin himself set up when positing his theory: something far too complex to be accounted for by natural selection over time. Even billions of years.
Species do not select a hundred or a thousand steps, when none of them provide any advantage until you have obtained all of them. Human vision is the 747 in a field that even a billion billion tornadoes never constructed, nor ever could.
Darwin glossed over that, because of a stupefying ignorance of reams of scientific information at the cellular level of which his entire generation was wholly ignorant. He literally didn’t know how much he didn’t know. His theory was obsolete before the ink was dry.
The problem remains the same: You can’t go from nothing to a cell, and then a cell to humans with binary megacolor vision, even within the entire timespan the earth has existed. Not even if humans were mating like rabbits, with a gestation measured in weeks, rather than months. Getting from a cell to the vision chain is like going from a grain of sand to the Hubble Telescope: you can get there, provided you add the directed intelligence and specific design input of hundreds of thousands of people all along the way.
Random chance? A billion to the billionth power of impossible.
It’s simply mathematically impossible, on the order of buying the winning lottery ticket a million times in a row.
This is why a religious faith in something mathematics shows one is impossible is indefensible, except on the grounds of insanity, or a personal requirement to exclude any possibility of a deity from the universe.
Starting with Darwin himself, whose butthurt towards the Christian God was deep-seated and well known.
QED
And the number of people in every generation with a God hatred is only pretty much all of them, as far back as there are written records. So if Darwin had invented oxygen, he could hardly have become more popular with humanity.
Everyone once “knew” the universe revolved around the earth.
Until they looked a bit harder, and found out it didn’t.
Just like they now think they “know” everything came from nothing. then it exploded into everything.
So pardon those of us who aren’t buying that antiquated codswallop for suspecting, with good cause, that all the people who do buy that are going to be proven wrong about that superstition as well.
Once they look a bit harder.
What you actually find is what is, and it doesn’t care how convenient – or not – it is to what you were looking for.
Everything that’s a theory can be disproven. In fact, must be disprovable to be a legitimate theory.
Anything which cannot be disproven – like most people’s belief – belief, mind you, not certain knowledge of – in Evolution is, by definition, religious dogma.
I didn’t make that rule. But it exists. You could look it up.
If adherents of Evolution would simply admit that obvious truth, the world would be a happier place, and we could put their religious teachings where they belong, back in their own church, rather than the well of public knowledge, as if they had a monopoly on Truth.
Then everyone would be free to do what they ought to do, regardless of their religious predilections:
look harder.
The only things the answers you find will hurt will be your own feelings.
Sorry, not sorry.
“Either you’re seeing this in living color, or everything is black.”
You of all people should know that vision is not an “either/or” proposition. There are many conditions that can affect one’s perception of color, including not being able to see color at all. Asserting that everything needs to be 100% in place in order to have any kind of vision is simply not true.
And, yes, if the eye were in fact irreducibly complex, then that would throw a wrench into evolutionary theory. But that’s not necessarily the case, as we can see with many organisms which exhibit “proto-eyes” today. We can extrapolate a cumulative progression from a) simple stigma, or eye spots that detect light, to b) cup shaped eyes that can determine the direction of light, to c) pinhole eyes capable of perceiving blurry images all the way to our current vision and even the vision of hummingbirds, who can see a wider spectrum of colors than humans.
(incidentally, proto eye examples a, b and c above can be found in existing organisms, implying that evolution is a continuing process even today)
Random chance is a red herring because the mechanism of evolution, Natural Selection, is not the same as random chance, as anyone who has taken the time to honestly examine the concept must concede. We didn’t get these advanced eyes in one fell swoop. It was by means of cumulative micro changes over many generations that were useful to the organism and provided a reproductive edge.
I make no claims to “know” how everything started, or whether the universe has been fine tuned for life. It does, however, seem solipsistic to claim that it was all done for our benefit.
“The believer, thinking himself the center of creation, accuses the atheist of hubris.”
The above comment was by me (I had cleared my cache prior and was pressed for time). I’m not a fan of anonymous posting but didn’t want to hunt down my PW.
“Species do not select a hundred or a thousand steps, when none of them provide any advantage until you have obtained all of them.”
You’re right. However, this is not what happened with eye evolution. Starting with a flat photoreceptor, minute structural changes lead to continuous improvement in value of that photoreceptor to the organism. See Fig. 2.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14UdTUluyt2Ip6UF-ekMx6i9a7V7emGqO/view?usp=sharing
If you accept eye evolution as the scientific reality it is instead of reject it as part of a religious agenda, then a whole new level of miracles, er, comes into view.
We think of eyes as generating IMAGES to process, but this is a late stage of eye evolution requiring the development of lenses and multiple photoreceptors. Before that, the fluid filled cup of the eye slowly develops over time and provides ever more precise information on the DIRECTION from which the light is coming. Eye evolution is thus driven by alwys getting better at, er, Moving Towards The Light.
If you’re photosynthetic, minding your own business and making your own food, this has obvious survival advantages.
It also puts you in closer proximity among higher concentrations of other organisms that are doing the same. Which suggests a new survival strategy in this target rich environment. Eat them.
So the evolutionary pressure switches from eye cups / light direction / photosynthesis to lenses / images / predation. And multicellular brains to process the images / animals as a new non photosynthetic class of life / take-what-I-need violence spontaneously comes to be. A miracle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
And all this because water as a liquid chemical just happens to be transparent to the exact red-to-violet wavelengths that make up the majority of the Sun’s light output.
Another miracle.
Bottom line, eye evolution back then is the root cause of why we gotta worry about World War 3 today.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
All those imaginary evolutionary progressions evolution has to posit don’t break down that way when the record is examined.
Nor is there any evidence for the supposition.
It’s just shoehorning examples all over the map which existed at the same time, and still do, and trying to fashion them into an evolutionary staircase that doesn’t exist.
That’s before we look for all the failed blind examples at every level which don’t exist, but necessarily must have at every step until the next tumbler was picked.
The simplest light sensing requires more steps than can be accounted for by evolutionary steps.
A simple mousetrap has only eight pieces, but no one would find a mousetrap and claim all eight items splurted out of the cosmos simultaneously absent a builder. The simplest vision chain is dozens of biochemical and physiological pieces and processes, absent any part of which, there’s no reason fo their existence without all of them. Darwin had the excuse of absolute ignorance of biochemistry to claim the opposite. That won’t cut it presently.
“It would be nice if something too complex for evolution existed, but of course nothing is” demonstrates the un-disprovable religious dogma nature of the theory nicely.
And there is so very, very much more.
A (non-verified) story goes that Paul Dirac, author of the elegant and famous Dirac notation describing atomic particles, died and arrived at the Pearly Gates. Now, Dirac, was infamous for his intellectual arrogance and self certitude, say his graduate students. Peter admits Dirac and he promptly asks for an audience with the Allmighty. This is granted and Dirac asks the Creator about all the mysteries of universe and God lays it all out for him. “But”, says Dirac, what about that ludicrous fine structure constant, 1/137. It just makes no sense.” So God lays that out for him as well, whereupon Dirac exclaimed: “No, no, you’re wrong !” Whereupon he was probably condemned to teach physical science to high school freshmen in Calexico for eternity.
He had to be on LSD when he developed the Dirac delta function…..
Ha! I’d never heard that one!
Ever see Steve Bannon’s videos? A sign on shelf behind him declares:
“There are no Conspiracies” but then adds: “There are no Coincidences”
Neil
I have not. I like it.
What a great article and comment thread, everybody. Aesop really came through on this, super smart guy, except when it comes to Russia (wtf?).
Sorry ’bout my tarded speil on “physics, it’s the law”, thing. I haven’t even smoked or drank anything, huh.
Tree Mike
Russia is nobody’s friend.
Including Russians’.
All I have in proof of that is all of recorded history.
“…un-disprovable religious dogma…”
Once again you are correct.
I freely admit I cannot disprove that once upon a time a lightning bolt hit a patch of clay to suddenly form Adam in all his original Jewish golem glory, or that a tornado went up his nostrils to create not a 747 but instead that special gleam in his perfectly formed binocular color vision eyes as he first beheld his beautiful Eve.
(The split infinitive was deliberate. I figure if the Star Trek credo has one, the Genesis story deserves one too.)
I’m wondering where you imagine a lightning bolt had anything to do with it.
I’ve got another one along these lines that, if I’m ever good enough to write it, should be pretty interesting.