Is there an invisible hand that guides everything?

[Kadarin]

You know what you NEED to LEARN? Evolution.

You think you heard and know what it is, but you don't. That's why you are asking such failure of questions.

The thing is, people like him don't want to learn the Theory of Evolution. What they want is to read just enough to be able to vomit up inane arguments against it in order to promote "God did it" religious claptrap.

 

[Fritzo]

I have an invisible hand that guides my penis while I watch porn.

At least I think it's invisible...I've never looked down to see, but oooh baby it knows what I like!

 

[Taejin]

That's the thing I'm trying to understand. How exactly does self-selection work? Not every living creature has parents to teach them what works best so it must be transferred in the genetic code. Is there a known process to this or do we just assume that all natural actions, whether physical like radiation on the epidermus or knowing which creatures are predator or prey, gets ingrained in our DNA?

Living creatures hone their skills over time and this is impossible if they have to start-over everytime they're born.

you are making the mistake that there is some sort of 'intent' with evolution. what you see happening now is the result of molecules that began spontaneously self replicating - this is the part we haven't conclusively teased out yet. We know and have seen small molecules that do spontaneously self replicate, but we have trouble figuring out exactly how or where life started, since conditions would probably have to be just right.

EIther way, molecules that began self replicating would naturally self select for those that replicate faster. At some point, you have rudimentary membrane formation from micelles, blah blah blah -> millions and billions of years later you have life as we know it on earth. Basically, life can be seen as a race that started for no reason, no ending, and no underlying meaning. It started, and life just goes because it just is.

Addressing your question about learning... as I understand it, lower life forms rely heavily upon their instincts in order to survive. There is no hand telling them what to do, they do it because they've evolved to fill that ecological niche. Higher life forms can learn, but most do so to a limited extent. Indeed, you could say that their genes have interred in them the instinct to copy and learn from others as well. Anyways, this is why viruses and tapeworms and other creatures can be eradicated - they are only following their genetic programming, and cannot adapt to the situation when humans apply pressure, and therefore perish. You need to recognize your own biases when you suggest that a creature has an invisible hand guiding its evolution, and then blame humans for making it go extinct. Its either evolution or its an invisible hand..one or the other.

If you are wondering about the complexity of life, consider the Eye.
1. There are bacteria(?) that can use photosynthesis to make light. They have a light sensing dot. This allows them to sense if there is light or not, but not the direction of it.
2. At some point, the light sensing dot became larger and acquired bumps/dip. Flatworms have very rudimentary eyes that have a little dip in them. The dip allows light to cast shadows in the eye, giving the flatworm the ability to tell, if very crudely, which direction the light is coming from.
3. as that 'bump' deepens, you would get more of a pinhole. Remember, pinhole cameras were the first ways to focus light.
4. As you get a 'depression' in the eyes, you'd need a membrane to cover the top. Creatures who had better membranes would be able to see better, allowing them a greater advantage. This membrane, for some creatures, would eventually become the lens.

The reason why you dont see many creatures roaming around with crappy eyes is because they're all dead or dead-ends in the evolutionary tree. The eyes we see now on creatures are uniquely suited to their environment, by which I mean the physical characteristics of their surroundings as well as the prey/predators they are surrounded by.

Just as example of simple -> complex, due to the randomness of evolution.

 

[Taejin]

well shit, my explanation of the evolution of the eye is baed. just go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

 

[feralkid]

Natural selection. Everyone knows this (except Kansas).

And Texas, starting next year.

 

[BeauJangles]

And Texas, starting next year.

 

[DaTT]

I want an invisible handjob

Wet Dream.

 

[meltdown75]

yes, it is this hand:

*smmmmmmack*

 

[Bryophyte]

There's an invisible man in the sky that makes worms that crawl out of our butts and guides our hands from ass to mouth to make more worms. And he loves us.

 

[SlitheryDee]

There is slight (or on rare occasions large) variation on the ingrained instinctual behaviors, body shapes, organ placement, etc. of every individual in a species. The variation is not enough to have a strong negative impact on the survival of a species as a whole, but it is enough to occasionally bring about individuals who are better at surviving than their peers. These better individuals stay around longer and make babies more often, resulting in a certain percentage of offspring who are likely to continue this favorable behavior or bodily attribute. Some of their offspring may, through the same variation, be even better at surviving. Inch by inch, the variations continue until an intelligent creature like a human comes along and perceives exactly what it was these creatures, who really never knew that their genes were doing, were adapting to. The creatures will have moved perceptibly in a direction that causes them to be suited to their environment, and their adaptation will look like it was "designed" for that environment. In actuality the environment was acting on them like an erosive agent on stone that is composed of minerals of varying densities. That which resists erosion remains, and in the case of life replicates itself, while that which is washed away is gone forever.

 

[Red Squirrel]

This "invisible hand" would be God. Well really, he "programmed" everything ahead of time, while he might influence certain things I'm pretty sure he just lets everything be. Living creatures are very complex and I doubt we will ever figure it out 100%.

 

[Key West]

There is slight (or on rare occasions large) variation on the ingrained, instinctual behaviors, body shapes, organ placement, etc. of every individual in a species. The variation in not enough to have a strong negative impact on the survival of a species as a whole, but it is enough to occasionally bring about individuals who are better at surviving than their peers. These better individuals stay around longer and make babies more often, resulting in a certain percentage of offspring who are likely to continue this behavior. Some of their offspring may, through the same variation, be even better at surviving. Inch by inch, the variations continue until an intelligent creature like a human comes along and perceives exactly what it was these creatures, who really never knew that their genes were doing, were adapting to. The creatures will have moved perceptibly in a direction that causes them to be suited to their environment, and their adaptation will look like it was "designed" for that environment. In actuality the environment was acting on them like an erosive agent on stone that is composed of minerals of varying densities. That which resists erosion remains, and in the case of life replicates itself, while that which is washed away is gone forever.

Damn. Well said. You have a knack for expressing yourself eloquently and effectively.

 

[manlymatt83]

i dont understand how the CPU in my computer came to exist, and its too complex for me to understand, but i dont attribute it to some magical hand. do you?

You're kind of contradicting yourself there. I have no idea how a CPU exists, nor how it works (other than logically), but if it were explained to me, I could understand it.

The problem is, no one really knows how things came to exist, or where physics came from, or how everything first started. If they did, it could probably be explained to me and I'd understand it. The "magic hand" of the CPU exists because someone more knowledgeable than I created it.

 

[Kadarin]

The problem is, no one really knows how things came to exist, or where physics came from, or how everything first started. If they did, it could probably be explained to me and I'd understand it. The "magic hand" of the CPU exists because someone more knowledgeable than I created it.

No one really knows YET how things came to exist. We may someday find out, and that's the beauty of science. "I don't know" is a perfectly valid answer which can change as new information is discovered. Science makes no assumption that anything is unknowable; it is merely the process by which we learn new things.

 

[Narmer]

Thanks for the good posts. I never really learned evolution, even though I went to school in NYC. You just hear about it here and there. Anyway, variations makes a lot of sense. That is evolution. One stickler, though, is the dog putting dirt on its shit. They all seem to do it.

 

[SlitheryDee]

One stickler, though, is the dog putting dirt on its shit. They all seem to do it.

That behavior popped up as one of the minor variations sometime in the dog's distant past, possibly before the dog was even domesticated. It may have started out as an individual that randomly kicked dirt after defecating. Sometimes the dirt would land on the dog's spoor, and it turns out that this has some survival value. Maybe it makes the dog's den, where it spends the most time and does the most defecating, harder for predators who might attack its pups to identify by smell. Of course an action that increases offspring's chances of survival would be a very strong survival attribute, and would eventually be present in every individual in a species. From there it only takes a couple more minor variations to modify the behavior from being random dirt kicking to being directed at the feces, which would have the strongest survival value.

You mentioned that the dog missed when he kicked dirt, which is a sign that since domestication, the behavior may not have the same strong survival value as it once did. There are few predators living amongst human communities that might prey on the young of dogs, and therefore this behavior which suddenly makes no difference to survival has begun to drift.

 

[Narmer]

That behavior popped up as one of the minor variations sometime in the dog's distant past, possibly before the dog was even domesticated. It may have started out as an individual that randomly kicked dirt after defecating. Sometimes the dirt would land on the dog's spoor, and it turns out that this has some survival value. Maybe it makes the dog's den, where it spends the most time and does the most defecating, harder for predators who might attack its pups to identify by smell. Of course an action that increases offspring's chances of survival would be a very strong survival attribute, and would eventually be present in every individual in a species. From there it only takes a couple more minor variations to modify the behavior from being random dirt kicking to being directed at the feces, which would have the strongest survival value.

You mentioned that the dog missed when he kicked dirt, which is a sign that since domestication, the behavior may not have the same strong survival value as it once did. There are few predators living amongst human communities that might prey on the young of dogs, and therefore this behavior which suddenly makes no difference to survival has begun to drift.

Thanks for the informed post. I forgot that animals defecate within their own home so this action would make sense.