Originally Posted by
bigdjiver
Professor Flew allegedly believes that the rate of development of species was too rapid to be explained by the "Blind watchmaker" chance process. If he is right and "intelligent design" is behind our ecosystem and it would be interesting to know if the intelligent designer was what many call "God", or whether it was an alien intelligence at our level a long time ago.
What do you mean by 'blind watchmaker process'? The phrase could apply either to evolution or to design.
As for the time involved:
From an essay by Richard Dawkins, talking about a computer program experiment into how long it would take to evolve an eye.
"...they chose pessimistic values for the coefficient of variation (that is, for how much variation there typically is in the population) and the intensity of selection (the amount of survival advantage improved eyesight confers). They even went so far as to assume that any new generation differed in only one part of the eye at a time: simultaneous changes in different parts of the eye, which would have greatly speeded up evolution, were outlawed. But even with these conservative assumptions, the time taken to evolve a fish eye from flat skin was minuscule: fewer than 400,000 generations. For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye. "
Personally I would guess at DNA being the result of lots of advances and steps back, collecting more and more genes that have been switched off.
In times of environmental stress genetic damage is likely, and the "switch off" genes are as susceptible as any other.
Whether there by intelligent design or by random processes surges in evolution due to switch of genes being destroyed are much more likely than the chance of a useful gene being acquired. By acquiring useful genes for later DNA could be considered to have "learned", one of the elements of intelligence, and to be able to modify its behaviour according to stimuli, another characteristic.
You see, I try to follow your posts, I really do. But you don't write carefully enough (or I'm stupid, answers on a postcard please). The result is that I can't follow what you mean: I have to make too many guesses and/or assumptions so that I don't know whether I have actually received your message. I thought I was doing OK here until I read the bit about DNA being able to modify its behaviour. I have no idea, and I did try to comprehend, how it can be meaningful to say DNA has 'behaviour'. So I'm left clutching at straws.
If an intelligent designer was seeding a planet to terraform it one possibility would be to build a long string of DNA with higher functions present but switched off and the only active genes being there to produce simple but rugged single cell plants and microbes. Genetic damage to it would tend towards producing known superior DNA. Evolution would occur much faster than random processes.
This is all speculation, but some "simple" organisms have DNA strings much larger than seems necessary compared to much more complex organisms. "Intelligent design" does not necessarily mean "God".
Why do we have to posit somebody trying to develop life on our planet? It's not in keeping with the principle of parsimony. If it is postulated that earth was 'seeded' by aliens (a great s-f conceit, incidentally, leading to some great stories over the years, not least 2001 - the book not the film) we then have to start asking how life developed on the alien planet, leaving us with the same questions to ask all over again.
Plus, there is still no evidence whatsoever of intelligent life anywhere else in the universe, so the parsimony principle is broken in at least two ways.
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