It amuses me when I run across some peoples ideas about evolution. It seems that many people have some pretty grand ideas about evolution being some kind of progression toward perfection. As if nature 'wants' to cause changes that lead toward more ideal oganisims.
Nature doesn't 'want' anything. It just is. Life is just the stuff that tends to self-replicate and hasn't failed to do so. Yet. Evolution is just the (usually gradual) accumulation of errors in the replication. The errors that don't replicate as well tend to die off. Thats it, nothing grand about it.
Does it happen on other planets? Almost without a doubt. Does it always lead to the complexity we see here on Earth? Hard to say. Probably only in a narrow range of conditions. There is probably some horrendously complicated math that could accurately describe the probability of complex self-replication occuring under given conditions, but its likely beyond our current capacity to grok. Where it occurs, the vast majority of self-replication probably never progresses beyond simple cyclic chemical compounds. And there are probably places at the other end of the spectrum where changes are chaotic, and so complex replicators cannot develop. Somewhere inbetween is where we find ourselves. Just the right amount of energy and materials and time to allow for layer upon layer of anomalous copies to build up into things like ourselves.
Pretty remarkable from my prespective, I'm glad that it happens and that I have the capacity to appreciate it.
About Me
- Codesuidae
- Programmer, lover-of-knowledge, arm-chair philosopher and general under-achiever. I'll work hard at anything once. After that its pretty hit-n-miss. I'm more of an explorer than a cartographer.
1 comment:
Most people seem to loathe the idea that there may not be a grandiose plan behind everything, whether attributed to God, Nature, or whatever. No one wants to be meaningless, and most are too lazy to make their own meaning.
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