Evolution, Random Process or Not?

The "scientific" perspective today is that evolution happened randomly. This means that all the biological mutations that culminated in humans appearing on Earth happened by pure chance.

Humans believe that their buildings and technologies are the products of chance. Just kidding. We see our creations as the result of the most exquisite intelligence: ours. However, we don't see ourselves as the creation of an intelligence, but pure chance. Is there a contradiction here? Our creations pale in comparison with the simplest of life forms on Earth. Not a single one of our creations so far has a chance of surviving 2.5 billion years, self-sustained through the ages, the way single-cell organisms have survived in the planet.

Also, logically, if chaos created us and we created our creations, chaos created our creations. Our creations are ultimately the result of random occurance and not, as we would like to believe, exquisite intelligence.

Scientists tell us that the mutations that led to human beings were somehow desirable. One measure of desirability is survival. They say that having eyes is more conducive to survival than not having eyes. First of all, this is bullshit, as demonstrated by the number of organisms that have no eyes and have had no problem surviving for billions of years more than the snotty, vision-endowed newcomers.

Also, saying that the eyes were one of the desirable traits that brought us humans is tautologic. In engineering school, for textbook problems we couldn't solve, we used to look at the answers in the back of the book and then try to work our way backwards. That's what scientists try to do to explain evolution most of the time. They know the answer and try to tell us why having two arms is better than no arms, or four arms, for that matter. But that's just their opinion, with the exception of a few cases where the evolution of certain traits or organs has been traced thanks to fossil records and old species that survive.

Which brings us to another problem, the opinion of scientists is often mistaken for science. That's why I put "scientific" between quotation marks at the beginning. Is the prevailing perspective really an outcome of the scientific process? I believe there is a way to quantify how likely it is that pure randomness is driving evolution.

To be continued.


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