Kim writes:

>  Ok, if we 'evolved' from whatever, and it all was random, why should it be
>  orderly ?  Why should there be laws of nature ?  If your brain is
by-product
>  of random chance, why/how can I trust that it's conclusions are accurate
and
>  not random ?
>
>  I've seen more than once that the odds of just 'evolving' a living,
>  breathing mammal, are greater than the number of molocules in the earth...
>  Since Powerball is at 150 million, I'd have much better odds this
weekend...

That's a common argument in the Creationist literature, but it's not how
evolution works. Jacob Bronowski, the physicist-poet, used to use the phrase, "the
barb of selection," and that's exactly what happens within competing
populations.

Any advantage, no matter how slight, tends to be statistically retained in
the population for the very simple reason that those individuals who bear the
favorable traits reproduce at slightly greater rate than those that aren't
constructed in the same manner. When this competitive, selective process is
replicated for hundreds, thousands or millions of generations, the extraordinary
quality of the end result certainly seems as if it were "designed."

Selection, whether conducted either naturally or by artificial means, as it's
done in agriculture, is always a relative process. The variants within the
population are compared to one another, not some absolute ideal, and those
variants that prosper best are the most likely to leave the greatest number of
offspring and become the basis of the genetic material that will form the next
generation.

Evolution doesn't explore every possibility. It isn't enumerative. Rather the
evolution of a phyletic lineage "falls down" the throughs of the adaptive
topography (what engineers call the "payoff matrix" in their optimization
problems). In the process, the evolved structure accumulates enormous improbabilities
when measured against all possible combinations.

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a small paper on this effect. It's on-line, if you
wish to read it. It's at:

     http://aics-research.com/research/accel.html

But the most important paragraph in the paper for this discussion is this one:

"The most rapid physical reactions known operate on the order of
femtoseconds. The amount of information in the mammalian genome is such that a random
rearrangement of the base pairs offers 10^3 billion possibilities. Should a
million million experiments be run every femtosecond for the presumed life of the
galaxy, only 10^45 possibilities could have been tried and evaluated. That is,
only 10^-2,999,999,955 of the experiential state space could have been
enumeratively explored, an unimaginably small number. This simple calculation must
forcibly lead an observer to either one of two conclusions:

     (i) that the evolution of life, especially higher-ordered life, by means
of simple natural phenomena and process is so beyond possibility as to be
completely discountable, or obversely,

     (ii) that the evolution of highly ordered structures is guaranteed once
self-replication is in place.

No middle ground is arithmetically [or philosophically] tenable."

Wirt Atmar

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