Re: Evolution

Quetzalcoatlus

I sometimes wish I had been a biologist ... for there are so many questions that need to be answered about life here on Earth ... and possibly elsewhere. Yes, an enormous amount of information has been learned since the double helix was unwound in 1968, but so much more needs to be discovered. This blog entry will not answer any of these questions ... I am but a neophyte ... but it will nevertheless ask some..

A while back I wrote a piece about how Darwin was losing his luster ... see: God’s Darwin. Dear reader, please go to this blog entry and watch the video so that you might understand what I am trying to get to in this posting.

I somehow can’t buy Divine Intervention or even Musk’s supposition that we are living in a simulation created in a gigantic future quantum computer. Over the 4.6 billion years that the earth has been around natural forces have created our history and our present. We just need to discover how this occurred. And I’m convinced we will. It may take a few hundred years ... but I am certain we will come close.

Before we start, I suggest that you readers also spend a few hours filling in your knowledge base on evolution ... see: Waikato Lesson and DNA Facts ...

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Now that your are an semi-expert, here are some questions that I have about how this all came about:

- Before the Earth had its thicker ozone layer to protect more fully organisms against cosmic rays, did this stronger radiation cause faster and more dramatic mutations?

- The origin of life is often assumed to be a singular event in a primordial soup sometime in the far distant past ... maybe even coming in on space dust. Have there been multiples of this event creating a panoply of primary life forms based upon different chemistries and different genetic structures ... most of which did not prevail? And are new primordial live forms still being created to this day?

- If this is true, then it seems possible that these multiple life-form starts are now distinguished by taxonomy’s higher-order classifications — domains, kingdoms and maybe even phylums? And, if this is the case, maybe something like Darwin’s natural-selection theories can take over from there?

Evolution

One wonders, among all the animals, whether the impetus for the evolution of the primate hand, instead of being a paw, a claw or a hoof, might have been influenced by onanism?

Designer DNA

Recently, this blog highlighted the conflict between Darwinism and Intelligent Design ... neither of which satisfactorily explain how we have had and now enjoy the wide variety of very complex species here on Earth ... see: God’s Darwin. In that entry, I said I thought that “Punctuated Equilibrium” was close to what I thought explained things ... bursts of evolution driven by environmental changes.

Let me go even further than this brief explanation. I surmise that somehow DNA has its own designer logic ... like, “Gee, with all these trees, wouldn’t it be nice to have a prehensile tail? So let’s get on it you other DNA (or RNA) sequences!” I won’t try to justify such heresy mathematically ... but I do suspect that such microscopic “intelligence” could bring such evolutionary calculations within the bounds of plausibility.

Is this Punctuated Equilibrium controlled by a “Designer DNA sequence” shared by all living things? I would like not just to speculate so ... but, obviously, to know so. ‘Twould explain a lot.

Science Dunces

Is it any wonder that the climate-change crowd gets away with their silly suppositions?  We are obviously a nation of science dunces … viz: a recent National Science Foundation survey found that one-quarter of all Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth … see: CNET Piece. And roughly half don’t seem to understand the notion of evolution.

This latter ignorance is a little forgivable given contradictory Biblical teachings.  But this former scientific lapse seems nothing more than an indictment of our educational system.  Witness the fact that our Environmental Protection Agency … and by proxy our President … can label carbon dioxide a “pollutant gas” when it is the basis of our Earth’s capturing and storage of the sun’s energy … and thus the nexus of all living things on our planet.  This is equally stunning in my mind.

I wonder sometimes if we are not on the verge of slipping back into the equivalent of the Dark Ages.

Afterward: To this point, I think that too many people equate smoke with carbon dioxide.  No, CO2 is but a small part of smoke ... mostly consisting of soot, water vapor, carbon monoxide, sulfur oxides, etc. as well as carbon dioxide (aka, essential plant food).

Fish Bones

I think most of us have encountered a few bones in a delicious piece of fish … not enough to spoil the meal, but still a small blot on our prandial perfection.  This irritation also occurs in politics. Often, someone running for political office, who espouses views that are mostly congruent with our value system, still may have a few quirks that cause us to think twice.  He doesn’t believe in evolution.  She, on religious grounds, opposes abortion or gay marriage.  He once smoked marijuana or used cocaine.

The question then becomes … do we let perfection become the enemy of the good?  I believe too often we do … particularly if this political-office aspirant's quirk is belittled in the media. Isn’t it funny?  Pope Francis can be against abortion but he is for income redistribution … so he is an OK fellow.  Whereas a Tea Party member, who wants to rein in big government, yet mimics Pope Francis on this social issue, is castigated by the national media and then by the voters.

It constantly amazes me how much influence the media can have in public opinion formation.  We are witnessing this dynamic at work today in the brouhaha surrounding Governor Chris Christie.  He has a very strong personality and likes to have his political way … often the conservative way.  And yet he still won an overwhelming re-election victory in a deep blue state, New Jersey.  But, as soon as he starts edging out Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential polls, these assets are suddenly turned into liabilities.  I am fascinated watching how the media is trying to pull off this legerdemain.

We voters certainly are a fickled bunch … that’s why we too often stick with fish-fillet candidates.

Afterthought: Actually there are people who won't eat fish at all because of the bones.  The analog in this context is the single-issue voter.  ("if you don't pay for my birth control, you won'y get my vote!")  Such are the bane of the democratic process.

Entropy

I am taking a sidetrack today and dipping into one of my other blogs ... Junkier Science ... to present another take on science.  I hope you enjoy it.

Many scientists predict that the universe will eventually wind down into a permanent state of entropy. That is, all forms of energy (or activity) will have decentralized themselves and all semblance of cosmic (and maybe even atomic) order will have disappeared. A scientific internet website’s definition of entropy is: “Energy spontaneously disperses from being localized to becoming spread out if it is not hindered from doing so.” (Remember, energy doesn’t really disappear. There is still the thermodynamic law that states that all energy is preserved either in its kinetic form, its potential form, or as electromagnetic radiation.)

Therefore entropy is a complete state of chaos where electromagnetic radiation and energy still exist but are so dispersed as to be effectively non-existent at a singular point. Eventually (billions and billions of years hence), all suns will have burned out … all planetary motion will have ceased … and all knowledge will have been lost. Thus, the antonym for entropy could be (and often is) stated as “organized information”. But, I have a somewhat different take on entropy’s antonym -- I think it is “evolution”. If entropy is the ultimate winding down of information … then evolution is the spontaneous winding up of order … encoded into the billions of DNA chemical pairs of millions of species on this earth (and perhaps on millions of other earth-like planets.) This is complimented by the quadrillions of bytes of information that is stored in our printed and electronic libraries – all enabled by the information encoded in the DNA of humans.

This makes evolution even more unique and, yes, precious – it is a guppy swimming upstream against the tsunami of ever-growing entropy. Thus, there is a race to the death, albeit a multi-billion year race, between physical entropy and biological evolution. I have no idea which one will win this race, but I suspect that our eventual fate is not as predetermined as many today predict.