Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist
Humans were
in the cards

    1.0   Mayr: If Mother Nature had to do it over again, it is next to impossible that she would come up with Man

    If we define intelligence narrowly as human-level intelligence – the ability to generate and comprehend sophisticated
    abstract thoughts – was the development of this level of intelligence predictable? Was Mother Nature pregnant with
    man since the first cell appeared? Could she have avoided giving birth to her smartest scion?

    In his now famous SETI debate with Carl Sagan, [1]  Mayr, answers no to the first two questions and yes to the third.
    He argues that, if God had to do it all over again, the chances of coming up with Adam (Gen 1) or the Tree of
    Knowledge (Gen 2:17) would be next to nil. Mayr uses statistics to illustrate just how unusual life is and how much
    more yet human-level intelligence. According to Mayr, almost anything could have changed our history along the
    way and veered our species off course. He seems to be uncomfortable with determinism. Such a process suggests
    control from ‘above’ and makes for a dull, predictable world – ironically, a world scientists spend time trying to prove
    is predictable. Mayr in effect emphasizes tactical, free-will aspects of evolution over the grand strategic factors raised
    by physicists and engineers.


    2.0   Life developed from the simple to the more complex

    However, even Mayr must admit that there are certain patterns, certain chronological progressions in the evolution
    of life that seem predictable and could not have happened in any other way. Evidently, hominids did not arise before
    the dinosaurs and dinosaurs did not evolve before the amphibians. Why is life moving from the simple to the complex,
    from the primordial cell to multi-cellular organisms and not the other way around? Didn’t the amphibians have to
    invent the ear before mammals could inherit hearing?  

    Therefore, we must deal separately with the issues of determinism and free will on one side and of the inevitability of
    Man and his intelligence on the other. Unknown to Mayr, we are not dealing with the same question.

    I see four problems with Mayr’s reasoning:

    •        his belief that we can predict an object that already exists,
    •        his misconceived notion of determinism, (which most analysts like him share)
    •        his unjustified emphasis of free will over determinism
    •        his tendency to gloss over the grand, predictable patterns in plant and animal evolution

    I counter-argue that once life developed, the coming of Man was just a matter of time. Humans and their ability to
    understand complex, abstract concepts were as inevitable as mammals! Once the strategic environmental conditions
    were established, Mother Nature had as much freedom of spawning Man as the Earth has of orbiting in reverse
    around the Sun.
I had spaghetti for
lunch. Why?

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    Last modified 03/03/08


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