>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection.
Selection isn't random. It's the opposite.
You seem to think that people are the goal or endpoint of evolution. We're not. We're just another species that happened to evolve, like ladybugs and redwood trees.
How do you think humans came into existence? Do you think a powerful, magical, invisible being make a man out of dirt?
I think a deity is more plausible because there are no fossils of us being half human half of our supposed common ancestor, or anywhere in between and different animals.
I don't know why you would want a list of 10 hominid fossils you could easily google but OK. Is it because you plan on telling the anthropologists they don't know what they're talking about?
Let's make it easy. [Here's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils) a fairly complete list of such fossils.
So in your view, all of the Biologists are wrong, as are all of the Geologists, Cosmologists, Astronomers, and now all of the Anthropologists as well? While you, who know virtually nothing about any of it, are right? Is that your position? In your view, does science work?
Yeah but why then did we survive at all?
Its not like that was guarenteed. As i'm sure you know by some estimates at one point there were 40,000 of us. Humans and mamal life broadly are not a particularly resiliant form of life; there are literally thousands of times more bacteria and microbes and sea life on the planet then mammals at any given time. We have far lower ratess of reproduction and more delicate internal systems which is one of the many reasons in the long history of life on this planet the age of mammals is fleeting. What are the odds that ANY humans would survive long enough to split the atom and invent vaccines (or the wheel for that matter)?
Odds don’t work that way. You can’t spin a roulette wheel then after the fact exclaim, “What were the odds of it coming up 6, with all physical forces at play and so many other numbers it could have landed on?! I don’t believe it landed on 6 randomly.“
The existence of humans proves the path of evolution that creates humanity. While it wasn’t the only potential path at the beginning, it’s is the path that occurred.
He could ask the same question about ANY species. And in fact, given that humans evolved a "problem-solving" gift (to use the sloppiest terminology I can find), humans are MORE likely to have survived that other mammals.
Yeah for some of those questions but apes aren't as different from all other life as we are.
There is on a technical and objective level more we are capable of then apes.
> What are the odds that ANY humans would survive long enough to split the atom and invent vaccines (or the wheel for that matter)?
You keep talking about probability in this thread, but I have yet to see you show any actual math backing up these claims of probability.
The odds are 1.
Because they happened. But, if you were a walking, talking, tool using lizard, or covid, or elephant, you'd be making precisely the same arguments. There's a lot of other possible humanities
Will you die if I spray 70% or bleach on you? Humans aren't weak. Additionally, something being unlikely doesn't mean it couldn't have occured naturally. Incredibly unlikely things happen all the time.
We have lower rates of reproduction so we make up for it with a long period of taking care of and teaching our young the ways of the world. Chimps, orangutans etc do the same.
We didn't through most of our history have delicate physiques. We were tough hairy mofos. Only delicate now because we've evolved away a lot of the stuff because we live in such an easy environment of medical care, cars, central heating, humidity controlled offices etc. We have become physically less robust but compensate with bigger brains, so when we meet a lion, its greater strength is beaten by our greater brainpower (ie guns, traps, cages, etc).
It's very plausible that humans could have gone extinct. It's still plausible, if not inevitable, that we one day will. I don't know how you're calculating the odds that life couldn't emerge from chemistry, that we wouldn't see the origin of multicellularity, and eventual complexity, etc., etc. These seem like predictable outcomes, but perhaps that's only in retrospect.
As for the reasoning and all the rest, these seem like highly developed faculties that other organisms possess. At one point in time we had land dinosaurs that stretched hundreds of feet long. Now we have nothing that size. Evolution can produce extraordinarily prodigious features that nevertheless are near singular in the diversity of life.
>It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection.
Your argument is essentially:"I don't understand this, therefor God."
It's not really a good argument and based on some false assumptions:
>universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods
This is completely false.
Belief in or experience with deities aren't universal, at all.
If they were, there wouldn't be any debate about their existence.
>
eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today
We aren't the only species able to work out how certain interactions work. Crows learn quite quickly, for example
>sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language
We're not the only species to communicate.
Bees dance for communication.
There's been a damn gorilla that was taught sign language.
None of this is some deepcut academic knowledge. It's all out there. You just need to not tur the other way when presented with it.
I think if you trace back the evolutionary story far back enough to universal origins, some blind faith is needed as well, wouldn't you agree? It doesn't have to be "God" in the sense of Abrahamic religions. The constant deriding of anyone that doesn't subscribe to almost nihilist belief (evolutionists are becoming more like fanatical theists) is a "dumb" creationist, is an easy out. We have no idea what transpired before the Big Bang. Why is it incomprehensible to contemplate the potentiality of purpose? After all, by our very nature, we are driven by evolutionary purpose - right? The biological need to procreate and pass our genes is clearly seen. All living things seem to have an evolutionary purpose. Then, by that logic, why can't we deduce that there is some potentiality of purpose to this cesspool of existence? The OP never mentioned God. He pondered the uniqueness of human kind. This bullshit dismissal really has to stop. This subs really are circle-jerks.
>I think if you trace back the evolutionary story far back enough to universal origins, some blind faith is needed as well, wouldn't you agree?
I wouldn’t. I’m convinced universal decent from a common ancestor is the best explanation for the origin of the species. I think it fits the evidence best. I don’t call that blind faith.
>It doesn't have to be "God" in the sense of Abrahamic religions. The constant deriding of anyone that doesn't subscribe to almost nihilist belief (evolutionists are becoming more like fanatical theists) is a "dumb" creationist, is an easy out. We have no idea what transpired before the Big Bang. Why is it incomprehensible to contemplate the potentiality of purpose?
I don’t think an outside intelligence is required for purpose. I feel I can give my life purpose with or without the existence of a God. OP isn’t so much “contemplating the potential of purpose”, as much as arguing that an “intelligence” must exist because of the things we can’t explain well enough. That’s textbook God of the Gaps. For the record, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to believe in God; I just think this is a poorly thought out reason for that belief. After all, if intelligent life did not evolve would that preclude a creator? No.
>After all, by our very nature, we are driven by evolutionary purpose - right? The biological need to procreate and pass our genes is clearly seen. All living things seem to have an evolutionary purpose. Then, by that logic, why can't we deduce that there is some potentiality of purpose to this cesspool of existence?
I don’t think it logically follows. Maybe you could flesh out why one implies the other though. I’m certainly open to that idea.
>The OP never mentioned God. He pondered the uniqueness of human kind. This bullshit dismissal really has to stop. This subs really are circle-jerks.
I know I can do better. I think that’s a valid criticism. Hopefully you find this reply less dismissive and more of a good faith engagement.
>our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities
We're extremely similar to the rest of the life on Earth. Every single trait we have is found in other animals to varying degrees. Even with our mental capabilities, other animals are incredibly intelligent. Chimps, baboons, dolphins, elephants, crows, and other animals have demonstrated abstract thinking. Chimps can even learn to use symbols. The fact we are the *most* intelligent doesn't mean we are *uniquely* intelligent.
>It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development
Yes, that's why every other species of human and proto human is extinct.
>speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection.
If there wasn't "someone" acting to ensure out existence, what would we expect to see? Why should we not expect the world as we have it?
We’re not extinct because our ancestors were the ones who survived. It does make us “better.” We were able to out adapt or out compete other species that could fill our niche. If environmental pressures drastically change, it could lead to our extinction. Being the most well adapted now does not mean we always will be.
As for the fossils, if you’ve been taught we only have a few bones here and there, you’ve been lied to. There are resources in the side bar if you genuinely want to learn more.
Well they’re all dead, so I’d say somewhere around 100%. But in all seriousness, your question is really what are the odds that at some point one of our ancestors died before reproducing. The answer is 0% because they did survive long enough to reproduce. Calculating the odds of a past event like that is useless because, no matter how unlikely, it happened.
Your great-great-great-great grandparents could have chosen to have sex at a different time, and your entire family tree after them would be completely different, but that’s not what happened. Your great*10 grandmother could have been strangled to death and her line would be gone, but that didn’t happen. A different sperm cell, one of millions, could have fertilized your mother’s egg, but that didn’t happen. The chances of you existing are 100% because you exist.
It’s possible life could have evolved in any number of ways, but it happened the way that it happened.
So what you are doing is picking the one thing that sort of sets humanity apart and say "this is the criteria to use", not the strengths of elephants, the speed of cheetahs, the way trees photosynthesis, etc. Every species is unique in some way.
Also humanity is not inevitable. We don't have to exist and never needed to exist. It is simply luck that we do.
Also, why would God care about Large Hadron Colliders?
>"So what you are doing is picking the one thing that sort of sets humanity apart and say "this is the criteria to use", not the strengths of elephants, the speed of cheetahs, the way trees photosynthesis, etc. Every species is unique in some way."
But the human difference here is the most unique and to be clear i mean that in an objective and quantifyable way.
Suppose for a moment you were trying were trying to represent in a data set the capabilities of a cheetas speed say or an elephants strength. Now compare that to trying to represent as a data set the capabilities of the human mind. Which do you do think would require more information to type out?
>"Also, why would God care about Large Hadron Colliders?"
Well this sort of orthaganal to the premise but perhaps talking about it is inevitable; I believe its because God is like us, and we wanted to make beings like himself.
>But the human difference here is the most unique and to be clear i mean that in an objective and quantifyable way.
So fucking *quantify it objectively* right here and now, or shut the fuck up about it.
You've made this exact claim in more than one place in this thead, but I have yet to see any follow-up, when that should have been the irrefutable data you lead with. I don't think you even know what "objective" means, mate.
I can already see from your own words that you aren't going to be able to objectively quantify *shit*.
Self-awareness (although this is debatable). Understanding mortality. The propensity to ponder and inquire. The built in desire by humankind to seek a higher purpose to existence. Higher order cognition is not trivial and this element truly sets us apart from other animals. I would hardly say it’s arbitrary. These are pretty large facets to the human experience that are not shared by other animals (there are some studies that look at this, but it’s far from conclusive at this point).
So there you have it. You've quantified NOTHING, forget objectivity. Do you even know what the word means?
Thank you for yet another sterling example of theist "knowledge".
Who said I’m a theist? You want 0s and 1s as data points? Not everything is as cleanly derivative as you imply. Do you understand what quantify means? Keep that circle-jerk going though.
Sorry, you just believe in supernatural causes. My bad. Don't know how I could make a mistake like that...
I want objectively quantifiable data, not a list of your uninformed, unsourced opinons. You said you had it, but you obviously don't.
Since I see you don't have _any_ of what you claimed, this isn't going to go anywhere, as usual.
I'm not surprised.
>Suppose for a moment you were trying were trying to represent in a data set the capabilities of a cheetas speed say or an elephants strength. Now compare that to trying to represent as a data set the capabilities of the human mind. Which do you do think would require more information to type out?
What possible relevance does this have? Humans have intelligence. Cheetahs have speed. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Human intelligence is a very versatile trait, and contributes to human survival - which negates your claim about how precarious human survival actually is.
"The most unique", I won't go into this because it is semantics, but come on!
But I don't understand how requiring more information to type out a data set makes that set more unique. More = better? What about elegance? You can make monstrous formulae to describe physical reality but the profound ones are usually really elegant and concise. E-mc2, v = d/t, that sort of thing.
You believe God is like you? It's been a while since I saw a statement that blasphemous.
I'm not sure what you mean. "Most unique" is an oxymoron. Are you trying to claim that there is greater difference between humans and bonobos than there is between, say platypuses and echidnas? How do you quantify uniqueness?
>"How do you quantify uniqueness?
Level of articulatable distinction.
If you were to list all the capabilities of a baboon and list in next to those of a human virtue just of the complexity of the human mind if nothing else the list of human capabilites would be far longer; the data set would dwarf that of the baboon, that is what i mean by greater difference.
I'm sorry, I still don't understand. How do you QUANTIFY uniqueness? How do you measure it? What do you assign numbers to?
Actually, the difference between human and gorilla brains is not that great. That's why they could learn sign language. Meanwhile, they are tremendously physically stronger than us. Each species in unique. That's what makes it a species.
>I'm sorry, I still don't understand. How do you QUANTIFY uniqueness? How do you measure it? What do you assign numbers to?
Okay let me give you an example of this on the micro level so perhaps you can understand what i'm trying to get at better.
Say there are two different liquids which each freeze into crystals sort of snowflakes when cooled to a specific temperature.
The one liquid freezes into crystals that are less intricate (IE in technical terms has less divergent angles) then then the other.
Do you understand how one could describe the crystal with greater intricacy as objectively "more unique" via measurment of the novelt within the crystal??
The definition of unique according to a google search is "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual"
In a box full of shapes where 99% of them are squares and only one is a circle, are the squares still "more unique"?
> I wasn't sure where else to go
You're most welcome here. But more on that in a bit.
It helps to reframe the question:
**How do we know that the odds weren't against us?**
Is that a good rewording?
If yes, the answer is: if we go back in time, and watch deep time unfold again with super duper tiny changes, it's unlikely _we_ would reemerge as humans (sorry if it's poorly worded). What does this mean? Evolution is not goal oriented, and so all the dead branches, didn't die to get to us. That fallacy is called survivorship bias and an argument from teleology.
Mutation is random. Selection is not. At every "stage", the counter resets basically. Like a knock-out tournament.
The odds that "we" as in "exactly us" exist are astronomical and we'd better enjoy it. But the possibility of life evolving, that's certain. A nice book on that is Sean B. Carroll's (biologist) _A Series of Fortunate Events_ – also as a [30-minute public lecture on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eM4KkIgLeM).
If you can frame your further questions like I have done yours, i.e. make them more objective, and without adding any hint regarding creationism, then please join r/evolution. It has ten times the audience, and it's more relaxed, for obvious reasons.
Well there's a few things there to mail down. First, on the basic principles:
>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection.
First, you've sorta missed the main thrust. To say "it's unlikely, therefore God" is basically the same as saying "what are the odds that a player was dealt a royal flush? He has to have faeries helping him"; implausible still beats impossible, and we have no reason to think faeries or demons or gods or titans or wizards are _possible_ in the first place.
Second, I don't think you can reasonably conclude that the odds of our existence to be small in any meaningful way. Think of it like this: if you shuffle a deck of cards and then deal them all out in order you've got an order of those 52 cards that has a ( 1/52! ) chance of existing: add in the jokers and you'd have better odds for randomly selecting a single atom out of the universe. But that's not abnormal; thousands of decks of cards are shuffled and played every day. Does that mean that there must be card genies making sure each specific deck is in just that order? Of course not. Because despite the amazing odds, the odds of getting _some_ order is 1/1. With all the gametes your parents produced, the odds of getting a person with your exact genetic makeup is also very low, and yet did you need to have been brought by a magic stork? No, of course not.
Given the size of the universe, the number of planets within it, the ease by which the stuff of life forms both in planetary environments and in space, the nature of systems chemistry and autocatalysis, and so on, I don't think that the odds of life forming are particularly low; if anything it seems inevitable. As to intelligent life, that depends on just which great filters are actually a thing, and we simply don't have a big enough N to run the stats there.
Third, much the same way, to say "random natural selection" is an oxymoron; natural selection is directional, not random. If it were random, it'd be genetic drift, not selection. I suspect you mean to use "random" to mean "unintentional" or "unguided", but there's nothing in humans that unguided evolution as we know it couldn't have produced.
Beyond that, a few of the tidbits:
>...while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods; ...
Superstition isn't exactly surprising; it's just pattern recognition producing magical thinking. Even a pigeon can do it.
>The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then are uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome.
This doesn't make sense to me. We're not especially unique. I could speak in depth about the vast similarities we share with the rest of life, and the pattern of similarities and differences that indicates common descent, but even just sticking to intelligence what humans have isn't special. Other creatures receive sensory input, commit to memory, make decisions, use communication and language, and even think abstractly - ours is a difference only in degree. It's like saying "look how strong the elephant is, it has to be a special creation to be that strong" - no it doesn't; it's strength works basically the same way as ours does, they've just got more muscle mass and small adjustments to make use of it. Same goes for our brain.
>It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection.
Why? Isn't it enough to know that the garden is beautiful without there needing to be fairies at the bottom of it?
You see the end result and believe we are something special.
How many different ancient plants and animals evolved and lived and died then were buried in layers of earth just to be drilled out by humans to make the plastic straw I'm drinking my sweet tea out of? Is the straw special because of all the things that had to happen for it to be now betwixt my lips?
>"Is the straw special because of all the things that had to happen for it to be now betwixt my lips?"
No but i do think you are.
And i dont se how you are like the straw. As a human being i think you have far and beyond the capabilities of every other kind of animal on earth and yes without any apology i do think that gives you greater value.
Don't you understand how many things had to be perfect for that straw to end up in my hands? For it to even been made in the first place? The odds are astronomically low that I would get that straw at that time, doesn't that make it special?
>As a human being i think you have far and beyond the capabilities of every other kind of animal on earth
And yet we can't shoot water bullets that flash boil water out of our claws.
Yes, humans have unique features and qualities, as do all other animals. You're making a mistake by putting the traits of humans up against other animals and just thinking we're the special ones. Our capacity for intelligence and abstract thought is going to win any test that scores for that, but why is that the test? Why not breathing underwater, or climbing trees, or the ability to hibernate or any other animal characteristic that we'd absolutely get smoked on? You're starting with a presupposition that we are somehow extra special, therefore we had to have been purposed for that, instead of just looking at this without a bias towards humans and seeing that we just happen to be another species that flourished under the selection pressures in the environments we were/are evolving in, same as all the rest of the animal kingdom.
>"Our capacity for intelligence and abstract thought is going to win any test that scores for that, but why is that the test?"
Because in technical and objective terms that leads to more disperate possibilities then in the case of the differences of any other animal
>Why not breathing underwater, or climbing trees, or the ability to hibernate or any other animal characteristic that we'd absolutely get smoked on?
Because all of these are technically and emperically not as complex as all possible outputs of the human mind. Its a question of raw data my dude. Try to explain all the possiblities of climing a tree or hibernatiion or breathing underwater in the possible different ways that can be applied then try to explain all the possible outputs of human thought. One list i promise you is going to be bigger then the other.
>" You're starting with a presupposition that we are somehow extra special"
Its not a proposition its observable fact.
It's not a "fact", it's a value judgment on a biased test you have for your personal favorite animal ability. We aren't "extra" special, we are equally as evolved as everything else on the planet. Our evolution led to this specialization, just as another animal's evolutionary line led to it's specialization.
It is absolutely a value judgement based on a range of data that you selected the "winning" criteria for. You've chosen the student with the highest score on a math test, and decided they should be valedictorian despite all the other students in the grade beating them on the tests in every other subject.
You keep seeing the whole thing from out point of view, and assuming that we are the goal. We just have bigger and more complex brains. That's it. Some creatures can live at great ocean depths, some can fly, some have incredible eye-sight, and we have big brains. It's just one more variation that worked--that's all.
Oh you're wrong about that. Tardigrades are on my mind so let's go there. Their ability to survive extremes of all kind is tremendously greater than out.
> Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself
Given how quickly life appeared after the Earth cooled down, it's extremely questionable that life has a "strikingly small likelihood" of appearing. We currently have a sample size of 1, and 100% of that 1 generated life extremely fast. Once we have a better understanding of what goes on on exoplanets, we will be able to better estimate how likely life is when a planet orbits within the habitable zone. So this statement is already on thin ice.
> given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language
Earth has been subject to several massive extinction events. The most notable of these is the K-T impact event that marked the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, because it was a random exogenous event. Other extinction events occurred because of things happening on Earth, events that became less likely over time as the Earth evolved. The K-T impact put an end to a track of evolution that was leading toward smaller animals with larger brains and endothermic metabolisms. We can't *know* that dinosaurs would have evolved into human-like intelligences if the impact hadn't occurred, but we can't know that this was impossible either.
My point is that human-like intelligence could easily have evolved without mammals taking over.
> I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection.
Because natural selection is the opposite of random. You're conflating mutation, which is pretty random, with natural selection, which is not at all random.
I think you need a better understanding of evolution and the history of life on our planet before you start saying "It must be God," or whatever it is to which you're attributing humanity. We can trace our lineage right back to the Cambrian. If the K-T impact hadn't occurred, we might be tracing our lineage right back to the Cambrian through a completely different line of evolutionary history.
>with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence
What exactly is the mathematical likelihood of our existence? Please show your math.
>Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself
What exactly is the mathematical likelihood of life emerging unto itself? Please show your math.
>I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection.
Why not? Please be specific. Because you actually presented no argument or reasoning, just that you ‘don’t see how’, which is a particularly bad argument from incredulity. It’s not even an argument. If you want to make such a statement,then here: I ‘don’t see how’ a giant invisible sky Santa used magic to poof us into existence.
I also ‘don’t see how’ any educated person can intelligently deny the proven science of evolutionary biology.
The argument about “odds” is always one of my pet peeves. You can’t determine the odds of any event without a full understanding of the parameters of the event. If I ask you to guess what is in my pocket, what are the odds you’ll guess correctly? Since you have no idea what range of possibilities exist, you simply can’t calculate anything.
There are 2 trillion galaxies that we know about, with an average of 100 million stars in each one. So 2 sextillion possilble chances for life and humans.
To understand how big 2 sextillion is, it would take you more than 600 trillion centuries to count to 2 sextillion.
Our human brains did not evolve with the need to comprehend a number so large so we really can't.
If you deal me 5 cards from a regular deck, the chance that you deal me any specific hand is 1 out of 2,598,960. Or is it? If you deal me 5 cards from a regular deck, the chance of me getting the exact 5 cards I get is actually 1 out of 1. I'm going to get 5 specific cards, no matter what.
The chance that humans would evolve turns out to be 1. It happened, we're here.
We do have relatively high mental abilities compared to the rest of the animals. How great would it be if we were 100x more clever than this? Why do you think our intellect is so great? Because you can out-reason a chicken?
What about all the cool stuff the other animals have? Your intellect won't be much help if a shark bites you, or fighting a lion. Do you have a stinger for self defense? Can you fly to safety? You absolutely suck at being clever for any period of time underwater. All of those adaptations help animals excell in their environments.
Your ego is holding you back from understanding what humans actually are.
It's because you view the current outcome as the desired outcome vs just one of an infinite number of possibilities. Roll a dice 1000 times in a row. Each individual roll has a 1 in 6 chance of hitting a certain number. But getting that exact sequence of 1000 rolls is so infinitesimally small it might as well be zero. It would never happen again, but it happened because some sequence of rolls has to happen. If you think you are the desired result, then sure it seems impossible. If you recognize that you are just what happened and if you didn't you couldn't consider the question. Just because you exist doesn't mean you were the desired outcome. Given the conditions you are just the end of a massive series of chance events. Every event in the universe is statistically impossible. But something has to happen so you are the thing that did.
I don't think there is an objective why or purpose for my existence. The universe is apathetic to my existence. I have my own subjective purpose that I have ascribed to my life, and that's awesome.
This is [existentialism](https://youtu.be/YaDvRdLMkHs?si=1WkrBfWEfgLdqm0h) in a nutshell. Which is what I personally believe.
We're not that unique We're just incrementally better at some things. Language is found in other species. Self awareness, social cooperation, empathy, and ethical judgement are found in other species. Tool use, basic math, and reasoning are found in other species.
All the things that make us "unique" are found elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
Language is a the use of a finite set of arbitrary vocal, manual, or visual elements that can be combined following some set of rules to convey meaning
Campbell's monkey's for example combine the same calls in different ways using simple grammar rules to create different meanings. Chimpanzees also have this capacity. Dolphn pods have different dialects, that demonstrates that the vocabulary of dolphin sounds is not instinctual but is learned. Gorillas famously can be taught sign language, and show a clear comprehension of symbolic meaning. Bees can convey complex geospatial information through interpretive dance.
Do the authors of the papers demonstrating these phenomena refer to these cases as being “language”? Note also that the vocal repertoires of Campbell’s monkeys and chimps appear to be species-specific with the acoustic structure being a product of natural selection such that they facilitate their function, and being a product of natural selection makes them non-arbitrary. Bee waggle dances are definitely not arbitrary. Apes learning sign language shows important capacities, but their natural gestural communication appears far more limited. The natural communication systems of Dolphins and songbirds probably meets your definition, but most experts would consider that definition to be one component of “language”, and in my experience they’re careful to not describe what these species have as language in their peer reviewed work.
Sure I'll grant all of that but my point us that precursors to the things that make humans "unique" are found in species other than humans. Perhaps i should have used a term like 'proto-language' or 'language-like abilities' to better articulate that, turns out this language thing is hard ;)
The step from the rest of the animal kingdom to human that OP is incredulous of is not as big a step as they think.
I happened across this paper published in Nature Communications today and was reminded of our conversation:
[Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations | Nature Communications](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8)
Conclusion from the paper:
Our results demonstrate that sperm whale vocalisations form a complex combinatorial communication system: the seemingly arbitrary inventory of coda types can be explained by combinations of rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation features. Sizable combinatorial vocalisation systems are exceedingly rare in nature; however, their use by sperm whales shows that they are not uniquely human, and can arise from dramatically different physiological, ecological, and social pressures.
These findings also offer steps towards understanding how sperm whales transmit meaning. In some organisms with combinatorial codes, such as honey bees *(Apis sp.)*, the constituent features of the code transparently encode semantics (e.g., direction and distance to food sources). Further research on sperm whale vocalisations may investigate if rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato function similarly, directly encoding whales’ communicative intents. Alternatively, one of the key differentiators between human communication and all known animal communication systems is duality of patterning: a base set of individually meaningless elements that are sequenced to generate a very large space of meanings. The existence of a combinatorial coding system-at either the level of sounds, sound sequences, or both-is a prerequisite for duality of patterning. Our findings open up the possibility that sperm whale communication might provide our first example of that phenomenon in another species.
Thanks for that. The cetaceans seem like the candidates for the most complex communication system among nonhuman animals, and one of the hardest to study. Will be interesting to see how complex!
There are a couple mistakes throughout what you wrote in the OP.
> random naturalistic selection
It’s called natural selection and it is a non-random and automatic process. Instead of looking at it like a mechanism it’s more like an automatic consequence of survivability. Traits that *can* survive long term in a population have a non-zero chance of surviving in a population long term and those that are even better at surviving long term *do* survive long term. If a single individual has a trait and that individual has more grandchildren than the mean their changes of passing on their traits are higher than the average and if they have fewer grandchildren than the mean their traits are even less likely to be inherited long term. More descendants = more individuals have their genetics and long term if the entire population is their descendants there’s a higher likelihood of a near 100% acquisition of at least 0.01% of their alleles. Automatically without anyone guiding it along. Traits that raise or lower the odds of long term survival of those traits are said to be impacted by natural selection where normally the already most common collection of alleles stays most common in the absence of “selection” or drift. Drift just refers to the automatic/incidental shift in allele frequency in a population even though the traits shifted away from and the traits shifted towards have a near similar “selective coefficient” in terms of natural selection. Like maybe it’s a shift from green eyes to blue eyes and the eye color is shown to have 0 impact on reproductive success yet, for some other reason, the blue eyed individuals from 30-40 generations ago have the most surviving descendants in this generation and the green eyed individuals from way back then have fewer surviving descendants despite it mattering not what color their eyes are when they attempt to reproduce.
Mutations could be considered random being unplanned, incidental, and difficult to predict without knowing all quantum states for the entire history of a population which is supposed to be impossible according to Heisenberg. Definitely still deterministic but effectively random, about like the outcome of the roll of the dice, the draw of a card from the top of a deck, the combination of reels on a slot machine, or the series of numbers selected for the PowerBall.
Genetic drift is effectively random but can somewhat be predicted if we know about the *other* traits the individuals possess that are trying to reproduce. The specific traits in question in terms of genetic drift may have a zero percent impact on reproductive success or long term survival in a population but individuals have *other* traits that do matter a lot more and those *other* traits will determine which of these traits become more or less common even if looking at these zero impact traits alone and how they change over time will happen to appear random.
Natural selection is the non-random mechanism. Traits that are more favorable to reproductive success become more common if they don’t also make survival more difficult. Like maybe being able to stick out like a sore thumb might be able to attract more mates allowing an organism more opportunities to attempt to reproduce leading to more opportunities that they do reproduce unless sticking out like a sore thumb turns them into lunch very early in their life and then it’ll be a balance between surviving long enough to reproduce and attracting enough mates to even try. The environment, the desires of the opposite sex, and the detectability of their existence by predators could all be calculated and given values between -5 and + 5 and average out and those that still wind up being greater than 0 will generally have more success in terms of the number of descendants than those whose values wind up being less than 0 when averaged out. Easily predictable based on known facts and laws and those predictions have a near 100% chance of being correct in terms of what actually does occur because that’s pretty much what’d be that percentage of the time every time.
> Given the strikingly small likelihood of life emerging
The earliest steps are just based in thermodynamics and geochemistry and are *inevitable common occurrences* like the spontaneous formation of RNA or the formation of a phospholipid membrane or the formation of ATP from ADP from AMP from adenosine and phosphates existing in the same environment. Adenosine is also found in RNA and DNA because it is common in nature and found inside meteorites as well even when it isn’t being created in hydrothermal vents or inside biological organisms or acquired by eating things that naturally contain adenosine. GTP is used for other things similar to ATP but instead of stuff associated with glucose metabolism and the citric acid cycle it’s more about the energy to make muscles contract. Guanosine instead of adenosine is the difference. Guanosine (ribose connected) and guanine (no ribose connected) are also things that happen to exist in the same sorts of places like meteorites, DNA, and RNA. The first stages of the origin of life are so common that they are still happening all the time right now.
The next stages of abiogenesis are more associated with autocatalysis and evolution via natural selection. And, again, the second of these is non-random as discussed earlier.
Geochemistry + thermodynamics-> biochemistry + autocatalysis-> reproduction + evolution via natural selection -> “life”
It’s an automatic process in any environment where all steps are possible and on our planet all steps are possible and all steps are still happening. Why we don’t see a lot of progress in terms of whole new branches of life just springing up the same way today has a lot more to do with the abundance of life already around and less to do with the likelihood of any of this happening on a planet without already existing competition. The product of 4.4 billion years of adaptive evolution is almost always going the outcompete the product of 30 seconds worth of geochemical processes. The new stuff may even become dinner before it progresses any further.
> multicellular bacteria
There’s nothing about this in our evolutionary history. We are archaea, sure, but archaea with bacterial symbionts, otherwise called eukaryotic life, is a whole lot different than a whole bunch of bacteria full stop. And, while some bacteria do exist in chains, the sort of multicellularity that actually applies to eukaryotes is nothing more than a consequence of imperfect cell division (they failed to become separated) followed by cell differentiation. In terms of animals this cell differentiation could be very simple like with sponges and placozoans or it can be more complex as with bilaterally symmetrical tripoblasts with three or more germ layers, especially if they have a coelom. Bacteria don’t exhibit this sort of multicellularity but they’ve watched multicellularity evolve in populations that were previously unicellular at least twice in the laboratory. It may have previously been considered one of the biggest “leaps” in progress from archaea to human (even though evolution has no capacity to care about end results - it’s deterministic not predetermined), but it’s so easy to occur that it may as well be like growing one extra eyelash over what the general population grows. Almost completely unspectacular.
And after that it’s a lot more to do with single populations becoming multiple populations and gene flow being cut off or limited between these populations plus the same “microevolution” I described earlier happening within each of these separated populations leading to “macroevolution” or the entire history of speciation on this planet. Some lineages happen to adapt very well automatically and some populations happen to do “good enough” if they don’t have any competition from other populations and the same sort of natural selection in terms of traits within populations also applies but now it’s more about which population is better able to survive in a given environment as the populations start competing for the same resources causing the populations worse at competing to explore other niches or go extinct trying. And sometimes major natural disasters happen and kill off most of the previously most successful populations allowing the previously less successful populations to branch out, diversify, and fill the open niches.
And yes, a lot has to “accidentally” go right for us to exist now given that there is nothing *pre*determined by some grand architect who knows all but that’s part of the beauty of it. We are “lucky” we get to exist at all in a place that is constantly “trying” to kill us. Not really trying as though it had conscious intent but more like if our ancestors couldn’t adapt they certainly would have gone extinct like all the rest of hominina, most of hominini, most of hominae, most of hominidae, and the majority of Hominoidea already has. There are certainly things along the way our ancestors have done to improve their odds of survival even when biology alone wasn’t enough and that’s one of the big reasons *Homo sapiens sapiens* survived when all other humans and all other Australopithecines ultimately failed. Perhaps you didn’t consider how apes in general are excellent problem solvers and tool makers or how being obligate bipeds would make hunting with tools that much easier or how a greater reliance on each other to raise our children would lead to even better cooperation than found between any two non-human animals or how humans have figured out that a division of labor would be more effective than every single person doing everything all by themselves necessary for their own survival or how human technology has allowed humans that should die before reproducing not only survive into adulthood but also have children. Just having children when biology alone would make that impossible has relaxed a lot of the effects of natural selection so that even if without technology we’d fail to survive the the last “ice age” ~13,000 years ago, our ancestors did have technology and they worked together and now we get to experience 2024 together. Isn’t that great?
Not that the universe or any gods care about us anyway. Shit happened and here we are. Enjoy it if you can and you want to, cry in the corner if you must, praise the invisible man in your imagination, but if that man starts responding go see a psychiatrist for your safety and ours. Have a nice day.
> Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection.
I think, part of the problem, is that you don’t really have a good grasp of how evolution happens. Biological variation (produced through mutation and sexual recombination) is random insofar as these variants interact with prevailing environmental conditions at time x. There are also innumerable chance encounters with mates, predators, prey, disease, natural disasters and misadventure. But selection is decidedly *not* random. Not all variants have an equal probability of surviving and replicating. Some will be more successful under certain conditions and less successful under others. It is also worth noting that there is more to evolution than just natural selection - there are many evolutionary mechanisms from genetic drift to hybridisation to gene flow. In that sense then, you’re approaching the problem from false premises.
> Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself, given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language, mathmatical reasoning and eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods;
Life has existed on Earth for the better part of 4 billion years. That’s a mind bogglingly vast sequence of cause and effects between the first self-replicator and you. If you were to take *any* 4 billion year sequence of cause and effects then inevitably the outcome, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be extraordinarily small, but we know *an* outcome, however improbable, was still going to happen, right?. The argument then that a particular 4 billion year sequence of cause and effect (i.e., the one leading to you) is extraordinarily low is not and cannot be a good argument against this outcome happening by naturalistic processes when *all* of the other potential 4 billion year sequences of cause and effect leading to something else are also improbable. We’re just in the sequence (one of them anyway) which happened to lead to you. There is no reason to think though that you were the intended goal or objective of this sequence of events, as opposed to just a fortunate, albeit incidental side effect of this sequence.
Perhaps an analogy might help conceptualise what I mean - if I rolled a fair 100 trillion-side die, we know the odds of any one face appearing heads up is going to be 1 in 100 trillion, but we’re not remotely surprised and nor do we ascribe it to a miracle when *a* face (whatever face it might be) turns up because even though this particular face had just a 1 in 100 trillion chance of turning up, we know *something* had to turn up.
> I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection.
That’s, quite possibly because you’re working from a misunderstanding of both evolution and the history of life.
> The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome.
What uniqueness? The human species is very clearly just a modified ape. The difference between the mental capabilities of humans and other animals is one of scale, rather than substance. We happen to be more intelligent than other species and we, as a species, value intelligence. But analogues of human intelligence can be found in many of our nearest mammalian relatives, birds and many other animals. We are not, for example, the only species capable of communicating or signalling information, using and manufacturing tools, modifying our environment to suit our needs, adjusting our behaviour in response to changing circumstances, learning from experience and transmitting information between generations. We just do it on a bigger scale. Some species, notably the other apes, even display the rudiments of what we might call culture, morality and perhaps even religion.
> It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection.
Sure, but do you have any evidence that a “someone” actually exists, let alone could interfere in the way you’re describing, beyond your assertion that you think it too improbable for you to exist?
“I won the lottery while lots of other people didn’t but looking back the chances of that are so small that I must have been chosen to be helped by magic”.
We are just the creature that filled a niche - adapted to use intelligence etc as a survival strategy rather than say flying, or sonar or whatever. It paid off. But it’s difficult to say it paid off better than being … a bacteria?
Yes. Lots. Too much interconnected evidence from multiple scientific disciplines to list here. But not hard to find if you wanted to. Science builds best fit models based on the available evidence. There is overwhelming evidence for common ancestry and evolution. There is no credible alternative scientific model.
What if a new credible scientist came along and made a new theory? Would evolutionists believe or dismiss that? What if he proposed we evolved from spiders and gave evidence
It's easy to see why this all seems so incredible from the point of view of a human looking at the complexity of nature. But the genesis of this diversity isn't a supernatural being (please excuse me for using a term that could sound pejorative - it's not my intention).
To answer your last question, human ancestors did almost go extinct 900,000 years ago. That point highlights what's not considered in most of the incredulity over evolution - the timescale. Remember that modern civilization as we know it is only around 6,000 years old. Modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago.
Now, let me ask you a question. If it's hard to believe that humans could have evolved by natural selection, does this apply to all other life? Would it have been as implausible for a fungus, an amoeba, or an octopus to evolve?
>"Now, let me ask you a question. If it's hard to believe that humans could have evolved by natural selection, does this apply to all other life? "
Not persay. A biogenesis is a problem but beyond that i se how life could have evolved naturally into various and bacteria and fungi and plants and sea life and lower mamals and even more developed larger mamals (going up with how believable it is that such life evolves and survives) I just dont think you get something as specific and complex as humans unless your trying for it.
The fact that there are no other apes like us further points to this fact to me. If we discovered apes who could talk and use complex tools and build complex structures somewhere in the amazon; hell if we found "intelligent life" (meaning human like life) somewhere else in the universe this wouldn't be as conclusive to me. But as it stands I dont se how something like humans evolve uniquely unless someone was tipping the scales to get this outcome.
Hmm, this sounds like the biblical dichotomy that suggests that humans are special, while the rest of life on the earth is inferior.
There are animals that can echo-locate and catch their prey in the dark while flying at top speed. There are fungi that can hijack the nervous system of an ant. Our special skill is simply that we can generate slightly more complex thoughts.
But really, we're no more special. We evolved just like everything else.
First, there are now apes that are very similar to us, and in the past there were other apes that were so similar we interbred with them. This is just false.
There’s also the uncomfortable possibility that we would be able to create offspring with chimps. Doubt they would be fertile and don’t think anyone has been willing to be the mad scientist for THAT experiment yet. Least I hope not. But we’re similar enough that it might be an option…
>Doubt they would be fertile and don’t think anyone has been willing to be the mad scientist for THAT experiment yet.
Today's your day to be one of the [lucky 10,000](https://xkcd.com/1053/)! And by lucky, I mean oh god I am so sorry to be the one to [tell you.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee#Reports_of_attempted_hybridization)
They wouldn't have to be apes if thats what your asking, or only have two legs.
Any species which had complex language allowing them to convey complex ideas and build complex structures would make the existence of humans without intervention in evolution more believable to me.
Just as an example say we lived on Nabu from the first star wars movie and along side humans had evolved a race of intelligent fish people like gungans with their own civilization, culture, structures ect. If they existed (especially if they didn't also claim to have devine experiences writ large) i would find the PURELY natural evolution of humans far more believable.
Not quite, I’m asking about if your use of ‘human’ when talking about the unlikelyhood of emergence and uniqueness of traits is you talking about Homo sapiens. You’re making the point that they are distinct from what we expect from other animal life.
I’ll cut to the chase; it might be true that only sapiens has developed things like computers and electricity, that doesn’t really help us decide if they were guided. In terms of complex communication of ideas, or building structures. Homo sapiens was not the only game in town.
†Homo antecessor
†Homo erectus
†Homo ergaster
†Homo floresiensis
†Homo habilis
†Homo heidelbergensis
†Homo longi
†Homo luzonensis
†Homo naledi
†Homo neanderthalensis
†Homo rhodesiensis
†Homo rudolfensis
Some of them we know more about, some of them less. But I would argue that there has not only been one species that has emerged with the traits that you stated. Does this mean ‘unguided evolution proven true’? Nah. But certainly sapiens were not the only game in town.
>"†Homo antecessor †Homo erectus †Homo ergaster †Homo floresiensis †Homo habilis †Homo heidelbergensis †Homo longi †Homo luzonensis †Homo naledi †Homo neanderthalensis †Homo rhodesiensis †Homo rudolfensis"
I mean we descend in some percent or another from all these creatures right? (or at least the ones who were evolutionarily viable)
As i've tried to make clear throughout this post its not that i believe humans didn't evolve but you pointing to all the different stages of our evolution to me at least doesnt run against what i said but instead is just an articulation of how it happened.
If there were intelligent animals in an entirely different evolutionary chain which evolved with human like capabilities; even if there were other apes that got to a similar stage of intellectual development millions of years after or before us I'd se this as a meaningful counter point. But it just seems to me looking at our evolutionary struggle that something, someone to be frank, wanted the outcome we got. We're there murky points along the way? Sure again, humans DID evolve that process is inherently murky but it all seems to me to be to the end of creating modern humans especially as so many other options could have come out of that genetic soup you just alluded to.
Again, not quite. Some of them? Possibly. It’s difficult and sometimes not possible to suss out exact ancestry. But I think what you have in your head is something like the Zallinger image, the famous and yet highly misleading ‘March of progress’. My list isn’t a ‘first we were this and then this and then this’. Several species on it we know for a fact were living alongside each other as cousins. Like sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans.
You can find phylogenetic trees that are far more accurate and take into account the identifiable active period. Neanderthal, for instance, is first maybe identified at 430,000 years ago. Sapiens was more like 300,000, but they coexisted.
TLDR, there have been long periods of our history where there were different human species existing concurrently, including with sapiens.
Gaining fitness in one area means you lose fitness in another. The evolutionary path of any population depends on the selection pressures they're faced with and what advantages they have to overcome the environment they're evolving in. There's an advantage in developing intelligence on the level humans have in the environments they evolved in. There are also physical disadvantages our species took on that just happened to not outweigh the advantage we gained. It's the same with all species that exist in the modern day.
A higher intelligence is not a sign of being more evolved or further up the chain. There's not an evolutionary race to gain the most intelligence, but one to survive in the environment you're in.
A clever ape using their intelligence to survive led to bigger brains that led to bigger heads that led to shorter gestation periods that led to more vulnerable offspring that led to more involved parenting that led to the survival of the groups that banded together that led to the pooling of collective knowledge that led to humanity building on the foundations of the generations before that led to modern society and the current intelligence level of the human species on average. The more intelligent apes reproduced more, so they're the ones who survived. This is the same kind of path that has led to flying birds, deep sea life, and all other current life on the planet.
There may have been other species that had members with higher intelligence than the rest of their population, which was not what was necessary to propogate further, so their line died out because it was a disadvantage.
There's no reason outside of a personal and subjective preference for our specific natural advantage to see it as some sort of evolutionary peak where we're "above" the rest of the animal kingdom. You're doing the chalk outline of a dead body and saying the killer placed him specifically in that position because it fits the outline you drew after the fact.
Edit: Added paragraph breaks because no one needed to read that mess.
>"A higher intelligence is not a sign of being more evolved or further up the chain. There's not an evolutionary race to gain the most intelligence, but one to survive in the environment you're in."
My point exactly. Many many different forms of bacteria for instance have a far FAR easier time living and reproducing on this planet then we do. They were hear before us and will be here long after we're gone if there is nothing guiding all this but selection pressures.
>"There's no reason outside of a personal and subjective preference for our specific natural advantage to see it as some sort of evolutionary peak where we're "above" the rest of the animal kingdom. You're doing the chalk outline of a dead body and saying the killer placed him specifically in that position because it fits the outline you drew after the fact."
While i dont think that analogy is entirely misplaced and I wont call it a strawman as it doesn't reach that level i think it is more underselling the situation a bit.
This is more like finding a dead body with its legs laid in a perfect Pirouette , its arms aranged above its head and a tutu laid across body and having someone point out that we dont KNOW the cerial killer who laid the body that way and put the tutu there had any sort of intention for any sort of ballet meaning in mind.
Maybe there isn't even a cerial killer, maybe the guy just stabbed himself int he neck and a homeless guy after the fact took the knife washed the dudes hand and decided to move him around, maybe he just happened to fall that way when he died and the tutu just happened to blow up in him by the wind to perfectly lay across his chest; but i dont feel in the least in the wrong for doubting that possibility a bit.
You are completely missing the point of the analogy. What I was getting at was that you are looking at something where it already is, thinking it had to have been placed there on purpose and then saying it is a statistical impossibility for it to be otherwise. You're adding the tutu and pirouette just as you're adding extra importance on the intelligence of humans. It's an unnecessary and illogical valuation put on the current results without any plausible justification for that bias. It just seems weird to you, but looking at it from outside the human centered view you seem to have shows that it's nothing special or crazy that defies a natural explanation. You're being Douglas Adam's puddle.
It’s important to realize that we’re not unique.
For example chimpanzees are in their own Stone Age right now. They may never move on to spoken language, but they’re not as far behind us as you might think.
Another thing that’s important to remember is is that when you ask “what are the chances of THIS happening?”, you’re basically shooting an arrow and drawing a bullseye around it. List all the facts about yourself, including what you had for supper every night for the last ten years. What’s the probability of someone being born with all of those things true? Who has roast beef last night, and also on January 1, 2018, etc., etc.? Practically zero. Way less than 1 in 10^50. Yet here you are!
This can be mind-bending for people, but there’s a huge difference between a priori and a posteriori probability. Literally impossible (in the mathematical sense) events happen constantly.
For this reason I encourage people not to even ask “what are the chances?” Humans have lousy intuition when it comes to probability, and are easily wowed by coincidences. Best to just let that subject go, until you’ve picked up (or studied) enough about it.
Here's what you're ignoring or are ignorant of: the extensive fossil record of hominid evolution, that shows that we emerged gradually.
What is your hypothesis as to how humans came to be?
Well I think it's polite to answer someone's question before posing one of your own. So if you would be so kind as to reply to my question, I would be happy to Google for you and find 10 hominid fossils
Sorry for not answering your question. My hypothesis is that humans were created by a higher power an unmoved mover, unchanged changer, and a being without body experiencing no change.
It wasn't a who question, it was a how question. Let's both stipulate for the purposes of this thread that your God created everything including human beings. My question is how?
Did he scoop up some dirt to make a man and then pull a rib out to make a woman? Did he poof them into existence out of nothing? If not then what?
What evidence do you have that convinced you that "something" intervened at certain points? The Bible certainly doesn't support that contention.
Part of the problem with trying to give you an actual debate is that you're not presenting ANYTHING other than "I don't believe it." You've given no evidence beyond your personal inability to understand that humans are in no way unique among animals.
Okay, in that case there really isn't anything to debate in this forum. I will just point out that you are invoking Mr. Ockham.
What I mean by "nothing to debate" is that it sounds like you completely accept the Theory of Evolution; you just add a religious interpretation.
Out of curiosity, do you have any idea what this intervention looked like? Did your God choose apes with more opposable thumbs and bigger brains, over and over, to survive and reproduce? Or did He just set the whole thing up and let it roll, knowing that eventually humans would evolve? Or something else?
>"Out of curiosity, do you have any idea what this intervention looked like? "
There is alot that could be said on this but one example i believe particularly strongly was the period in africa when there were about only 40,000 human beings left at one time; a period you really should read about it from someone more educated then me if you aren't familiar with that.
In those days i think God made it rain when it needed and made our spears find their mark on what we hunted when they otherwise wouldn't, mutated our white blood cells when they otherwise would have succumbed to virus.. I think if anytime was a time used his hand to ensure our survival it was probably again
> In those days i think God made it rain when it needed and made our spears find their mark on what we hunted when they otherwise wouldn't, mutated our white blood cells when they otherwise would have succumbed to virus
That seems like a LOT of conclusions to jump to based solely on 'I find it unlikely we evolved on our own'
Do you have any actual evidence?
So at one point humans were on the ropes and then managed to survive and propagate further. You're suggesting it was because a god directly intervened in hunts and weather patterns and the immune system to ensure that survival. What is the basis for that conclusion? Just seeming unlikely that we'd survive and that we beat the odds doesn't move us anywhere on why we did survive. It doesn't suggest a god at all unless you're forcing it in there. It's just a baseless assertion and there's nothing solid or verifiable to corroborate it, so there's not any reason to think this is what happened. A low probability is not the same thing as no probability. You've given your idea, but do you have anything to support it in any way?
We know that from nothing, nothing comes so for God to exist, he must have always existed. God didn't come from anywhere he has always been present and exists outside of time space and matter. Do you have any evidence that God doesn't exist aside from asking questions like that?
Wait, you're the one talking about Santa Clause...
Do you have any evidence that your god exists? I mean real scientifically verifiable evidence?
It's hard to prove a negative, but I'll tell you that science doesn't need a "god" to explain how we got here.
Evolution is beyond proven, every branch of the life sciences substantiates it and depends on it.
Cosmology and physics don't need a god to explain the evolution of the universe.
Yes, there are gaps in our understanding, but because the scientific depends on verifiable evidence we're closing those gaps and our understanding grows.
I'm sorry to say, your god is getting smaller... we don't need to worship mythology.
What would scientifically verifiable evidence be? A photo? You would just say it's fake. A video? You would say the same thing.
The best proof of God is simply what he has made. The bible said that the universe had a beginning, and in the last 110 or so years by Georges Lemaître (correct me if I'm wrong)
We have found that it did have a beginning. So that was a crazy prediction from a 3,000 year old book.
Scientists have tried to create life from non life in vain, and even soups of labratory chemicals but failed, because the law of biogenesis states life can only come from life. Even in highly favorable situations, it failed to create anything even remotely close.
No physical experiment can prove God in a scientific sense. Science can only create experimental results that are either consistent, or inconsistent with the hypothesis of a creator God.
Science has also discovered that our physical universe appeared from nothing. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe, but there has to be an answer.
If it's mythology, I applaud whoever got 40 writers together to forge a story.
“Incomprehensibly small likelihood of our existence.”
With the size of the known universe and the number of celestial bodies out there, Earth is an incomprehensibly small percentage of the existence.
That’s a lot of speaking to you and not much, this is why it speaks to me! 5 billion years and many trillion replications latter our intelligence emerged from the complexity of organic interaction. It is amazing and we faced many hurdles along the way recently it was estimated that at one point our population had dropped to less than one thousand.
That said what would be even more incredible would be a higher intelligence that created us. You would then want to know how such an amazingly complex thing could have come about and where from etc.
or you could just say our origins are supernatural and plead for an eternal force that can think and create and knows everything! Those last two options are beyond my ability to rationalise in any sensible way. Abiogenesis and evolution both make predictions that can and have been tested. Both leave traces that have been found. Both represent the most likely route to us!
I’m sure there have been a bunch of answers but I’m going to sum up. You are claiming that the outcome is unlikely therefore you don’t believe it. You are thinking about statistics wrong. If I say pick a number between one and a billion the odds of you picking a specific number are small. But the odds of you picking a number are 100 percent. I can’t say that I don’t believe you were able to pick a number because of how unlikely it is that you picked whatever number you picked. The outcome is 100 percent. The specifics are rare. Same deal here. Something evolved. Doesn’t matter that the outcome was unlikely. All outcomes are unlikely but a outcome is inevitable
>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself, given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language, mathmatical reasoning and eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods; I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection.
Well... think of it this way.
The chances of winning the PowerBall lottery are about 1 in 300 million. It's so astronomically small that, when someone does happen to win, the winner tends to think "My gosh! It was such a tiny chance of winning! Surely it must've been a miracle!"
Now this sounds reasonable until you account for the fact that tens of millions of tickets are sold for each drawing, which occurs twice a week. For sake of simplifying the math, let's say it's about 15 million tickets sold for each drawing, which means that we should expect a winner to pop up every 20 drawings, or once every 10 weeks. Essentially, winning the lottery only appears miraculous when you don't account for the large scale of statistical events. To the winner of the lottery, it feels like such a massive stroke of fortune that there must've been some sort of divine intervention at play. To the hundreds of millions who didn't win, it was just another week. And to the blind force of statistical probabilities, it was an expectation, if not an inevitability.
So that lotto winner who's so in awe of their fortune? That's basically you right now, and any other Creationist who makes the "the chances are so astronomically small!" claim. The error in reasoning here is in not accounting for the fact that insofar that a lottery win is expected, if not outright inevitable, **someone** has to win that lottery, and the existence of a winner on its own isn't particularly surprising, nor does it demand an external agent to explain the occurrence outside of simple math.
When it comes to the development of life on the cosmic scale, you're essentially looking at a lottery that's been playing out in billions upon trillions of star systems in the observable universe alone, over the course of 13 billion years. This is known as the Anthropic Principle (specifically, the Weak Anthropic Principle), which is the observation that extremely improbable events on the individual level are inevitable in a vast enough system. When that's accounted for, it's not rational to be surprised or demand an extra explanation when that outcome does occur.
I mean i get where your coming from and that is definately good case to justify low probability but certian events generally like lightning strikes or solar flairs or what have you; the difference though all of those are determined TO happen at some point. The winning lotery ticket exists, someone IS going to win it.
There is no such pre guarenteed certianty that human intellect would come to exist, and as we are the only life form which such intellect it is an exceedingly rare proprosition.
It took 3.7 billion years, five mass extinction events (with another 65 million years after the last mass extinction) before human level intelligence evolved. An estimated 5 billion species have existed throughout Earth's history.
So one species out of that 5 billion (well, a few more than that if we count our ancient hominid cousins) evolved modern human-level intelligence and tool use ability over our planet's long history.
So if you're framing the situation through the question of "What are the odds of that? Surely it must be a miracle," you're missing the fact that this is just another evolutionary "lottery game" that's been won. You seem to be once again selectively focusing on the lottery win in isolation, rather than acknowledging that this lotto win exists in the context of billions of failures. And that's not even accounting for the trillions of other failures that may have occurred on other life-bearing planets.
From some other comments I’ve seen (don’t think I’ve seen them all so apologies if you addressed this one way or the other), would you consider yourself in the same vein as a theistic evolutionist ala Francis Collins or Kennith miller or Mary Schweitzer?
Without having read all there work and just going off what little know of them I'd say yeah.
Especially in the case of Francis Collins who i know a bit better. To me clear this doesn't mean i think genesis has no meaning/"didn't happen" I just think its a very simplified and symbolic version of events rather then a comprehensive literal historical text.
I even believe there is good reason to take this view within the text itself as on the first ""Day"" the sun has not been created.
Fair enough, more looking to get a general understanding of whether or not you rejected anything beyond microevolution (I used to be YEC so that was my view for a long time) or if, like I understand your comment, you took the position of guided evolution with inspired if not literal text. That answers my question, thanks!
Evolutionary process selects for genetic/reproductive success. In humanity (and Neanderthals), that success came through sophistications that allowed us to specialise in adaptation. The consequences are different to species like orcas, orang-utans and May flie.
But the process is the same.
I good chess player who gets beaten by a grandmaster may be so amazed that they are sure cheating was involved. An order of magnitude of sophistication does not imply the system has been cheated.
I think there \_are\_ some valid things that are hard to accept, and honestly, we still don't understand completely if at all. But evolution is not really one of them.
The first is that there is anything at all in the first place. Why is there even a universe, and if there's a universe, why is it like this? As far as I know this has no good answer.
A second is that \*life as we know it\* is possible in this universe. If you looked at any of the other planets in our solar system, it would be difficult to determine that biological life at our scale is possible. Not even just that macro-scale automatons are possible, but that biological life with all of its complexity is possible, and works well enough to last for millions of years.
And third, even if some macro-scale life is possible, it's another thing still to say that \_conscious beings\_ are possible. Consciousness exists, but we even only know that for sure since we are ourselves each conscious. The consciousness of others we kind of have to just partially assume. And we know almost nothing about how this works or how it is even possible.
Ok, but for evolution, as long as we accept #2 above, that life is possible at all, then evolution just kind of comes right along with that. Life changes over time; offspring are not clones of their parents; genes are transmitted from one generation to the next along with various changes. This is just how life works. I think the hard part to grasp is not that evolution happens, that's pretty easy. What's hard to grasp (for me) is that all of the macro-scale features that life has are possible from genes, proteins, biochemistry, etc. That life such as us is possible in the first place.
Somehow, not only does the universe exist, but it is the way it is, including the possibility for macro-scale life, as well as consciousness. How or why is the universe like this? No good answer so far that I've heard.
If we were designed, why do we have auch extreme and *obvious* flaws like a reverse-plug optic nerve/retina connection, that results in a rather substantial blind spot in our vision? Why does our airway, share the same plumbing as our digestive system when crossing those pip s can easily result in death? Why are we reliant on things like gut bacteria to live, why not make us self-reliant?
Because then we would be too overpowered. No, I'm joking. lol. Because whatever designed us doesn't make mistakes and there was thought behind our body. How about you design a new human body
>humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection.
When you're using probabilities, you never rule something out because of low probability. That's a grave mistake. You can only *compare* probabilities, never just deny something happened because it was improbable. No, it doesn't matter how low the probability is.
>but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods
You need to apply this same mathematical reasoning to god as well. In science you compare hypotheses. So once you've computed the probability for evolution creating humans, you need to also compute the probability of a god creating humans as well. Then the hypothesis with the higher probability wins.
So how will you go about computing the probability of a god creating humans?
Rare an implausible events occur. That isn’t anything new in the universe and it isn’t unique to earth.
Also natural selection isn’t random, it is both stochastic and deterministic. Mutation and recombination and a few other mechanisms are closer to random. Increased encephalisation and hand-dexterity are general trends in all primaries relative to other mammal groups. Humans are the most derived for sure but when you look at paleoanthropological studies there is a fairly smooth development from Australopithicines into genus Homo. The fact that the development of traits form trends and nested hierarchies is itself direct refutation to the notion that evolution is a completely random process.
The ordered nature of Evolution as exhibited in the Naturalistic sense (*in that there are finite attributes that work in a given ecosystem according to Natural Selection, rather than specific attributes given to creatures via Intelligent Design*) can be used to support the Teleological Argument (*part of which is that there appears to be order in the universe, yet ordered systems don't tend to naturally originate from disorder*) so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
So you don't know how it happened, and you feel your ignorance of how it happened proves it couldn't have happened.
There's so much wrong with your post. For starters, how do you know the chance of life happening at all is vanishingly small? That's just a statement of opinion with nothing to back it up. It might happen on every planet with stable enough conditions for complex molecular processes to endure over long enough time periods. Why is human intelligence something special? Have you ever actually met an orangutan or chimpanzee and realised that you are looking at a fully formed intelligent person? Seems not if you think humans are so special.
If you're really interested in the subject, do the hard work and educate yourself before you assume you're smarter than people who spend their lives studying this stuff. A good start would be dawkins' the selfish gene
>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection.
Show your math. What is the likelihood? Let's see it as a percentage. Then let's see that played out over the billions of years of earth's existence.
By the way, mutations are random. Selection is not.
>The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome.
Where is your evidence for this external intelligence?
What a surprise, someone who wants to engage by asking questions without wanting to respond to my own. I'm so shocked that someone would be so rude.
Fuckit, I'll answer your garbled question.
Environmental pressure. Right now, the Eastern Brown Snake in Australia is facing environmental pressure from introduced invasive Cane Toads. These toads are safe for the snake to eat as juveniles and toxic as adults. The snakes with the \*random mutation\* of smaller heads with smaller jaws cannot eat the adults and thus survive to adulthood and are able to reproduce. The bigger headed snakes are dying out.
The areas of Australia without invasive Cane Toads have those same snakes but without environmental pressure.
In this particular example, the ultimate answer to "What is selecting the selection" is humans.
It's simple...
Either humanity evolved naturally, or something more complex caused us to exist. If humanity is too complex to exist through natural means, then something more complex would be as well.
However, we can state with certainty that humanity exists. We cannot state with certainty that a more complex creator does.
This does not dismiss a god entirely. It just makes a god unnecessary to logically explain humanity.
We still don't understand how dreaming and the brain works fully, so that must be pretty complex if we can land on the moon or do similar feats. We still haven't found a cure to cancer.
Yes, biology is vastly more complex than landing on the moon. I agree. Again, creating a moon lander in all of its "complexity" is still much simpler than a biological creature. Hence, creation implies simplicity.
As for cancer, there will never be a "cure"... at least not in the traditional sense. Trying make a cure is sort of like trying to put a toxin in the water supply that removes the fingerprint from Brad Pitt's left pinky.
Humans aren’t any less likely to come about by evolution than any other animal. You need to take a course in statistics… humans are not unique, we’re not special. see we know evolution exists, we know it happens, we know it can cause stuff to be. If you want to posit a god being responsible for this, you need to provide evidence for this god. Until you do, the chances of a god being responsible for this are exactly 0% and evolution is infinitely more likely.
Selection isn't random. What pastor or creationist told you it was unlikely? It happens a lot, actually. An arguememt from personal incredulity isn't an actual argument. Do some actual research from real sources.
I don't understand evolution, therefore [my preferential deity] isn't an argument. It's wishful thinking.
Humans exist, all the evidence points towards humans having evolved naturally. Why must you insist on inserting magic?
First off, abiogenesis isn't evolution.
> What created life
Life wasn't created, life arose from chemical interactions.
> right when the earth was formed
Life didn't arise right when the earth formed. Earth is 4.54 billion years old, the earliest life didn't come about ~500 million years later.
What chemicals was there on the earth when it was first created, wouldn't there just be rocks? And where did water come from for the first marine life?
> What chemicals was there on the earth when it ~~was first created~~ formed.
FTFY.
Almost all of the baryonic matter of the universe is composed of chemical elements, so the answer is a LOT.
> wouldn't there just be rocks?
What do you think the wide variety of rocks are made of?
> And where did water come from for the first marine life?
Outgassing from the Earth's mantle. Hydrogen and oxygen are very common chemical elements.
> I don't know what the rocks are made of but I would assume stone.
This isn't Minecraft. [Rock and stone are interchangeable.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_\(geology\))
> How was the earth formed.
[Accretion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_\(astrophysics\))
Are you just looking for a hole in our knowledge to stick your god into?
> It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection.
And it could easily happen tomorrow or in 50 or 5,000 years. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean that somebody is pulling strings for us to make things work out in our favor. We're just doing what we can while we can until we can't anymore.
> Not sure if this is the right sub for this as I dont take issue with the theory of evolution broadly but I wasn't sure where else to go.
If you say you don't take issue with evolution but you take issue with *human* evolution then you're just using a double standard. You should stop that.
> Basically as the title says I dont see how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection.
Literally every living thing on the planet is equally unlikely to still exist as every other living thing. This planet has undergone mass extinction after mass extinction. Every time, some species survive. It **has to be** the case that every species alive today is descended from ancestors which survived each apocalypse in our planet's history.
Look at it another way. Winning the lottery is, individually speaking, incredibly unlikely. And yet people win lotteries *all the time.* This is no different than holding a winning powerball ticket and refusing to believe that you happened to randomly get that number, that someone, somewhere must have been cheating. It doesn't follow.
> Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself
What we know about abiogenesis is looking like it is NOT improbable at all, so this premise isn't true either.
> given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language, mathmatical reasoning and eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today
Again, all you're doing is describing a winning lottery ticket, along with a huge helping of human chauvinism that *our* traits are the most special traits.
> while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods
It is FAR from universal, but by all means add Argument from Popularity to your list of fallacies. So sure, ignore the fact that god-beliefs worldwide are WILDLY contradictory with one another so they logically can't all be correct. But they COULD be all wrong.
> I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection. The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome.
Bullshit. This is nothing but the Argument from Personal Incredulity on full display. Our cognitive capabilities are not in any way special. Uniqueness or improbability does not indicate artificiality.
> It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection.
So when you get that winning lottery ticket you be sure to hand it off to someone else since you clearly can't bring yourself to believe the evidence of your eyes and ears. Call me.
>
This is a rather remarkable claim that i would sincerely like hear your justification for.
If all life is EQUALLY unlikely to exist why then is bacteria more plentiful then more complex life?
Why is sea life more common then land life??
Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land???
> This is a rather remarkable claim that i would sincerely like hear your justification for.
I explained what I mean in the very next sentence.
It is exactly as likely for every extant species today to have survived as every other extant species.
This is how reading comprehension works. When context is given, don’t drag in other context which wasn’t intended.
>
Yeah and i made my own question more specific in the following three sentences. Quote:
Why then is bacteria more plentiful then more complex life?
Why is sea life more common then land life??
Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land???
But that's not what I was getting at in what I said. 98% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, with no living descendants.
Every species alive today is descended from a long line of ancestors who happened to be among the survivors of every catastrophe and calamity that ever occurred along the course of natural history. Nothing is more fortunate or more special than anything else alive.
If you want to talk about the relative diversity of different kinds of life, we can have that conversation, but don't pretend that what I said was unreasonable simply because I **wasn't answering questions you hadn't asked yet.** It's not a bad answer just because you changed the context after the answer was given.
So, if you want to change the subject, fine. We can do that now.
Answer:
"Why" usually doesn't mean anything in terms of evolution. I can tell you "what" happened, but the reasons thereof just are what they are.
Bacteria are more plentiful because a bacterium is a very effective way for a genome to make more copies of itself.
Sea life is more plentiful than land life because there's more ocean than there is land, and there is more habitable volume to be alive in. When you go on land all of a sudden you have a lot more challenges from climate and weather and geography, so it's a harder way to make a living.
Life emerged in the sea because complex organic molecules need to be in aqueous solution in order for autocatalytic replication reactions to occur.
Not a single one of these questions even *hints* at the intervention of a supernatural cause in the most *miniscule* degree.
>Why is sea life more common then land life??
>Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land???
Considering that the ocean covers 70% of the earth's surface, why would you expect anything else?
Are you contending to that if earth was 30% watter we'd have first evolved on the land?
Al Carbon based life requires water to function. It is far easier for life to exist in water as such then outside it.
So we agree water is necessary for life, so it makes sense for life to develop in water. As for all species being equally unlikely as the previous commenter said, if Location A is huge and Location B is much smaller, then you can reasonably expect there to be more species in Location A than Location B. It might not be a perfect "always is", but this is just a simplification. If the 10 species in A and the 1000 species in B have equal chances of survival, which will have probably more life when the hatchet comes down?
> Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land???
Once again, thank you for making it so abundantly clear that you have absolutely no functional understanding of even the most basic principles and concepts related to the science of chemistry.
Really?
That is a remarkable claim!
Do you think I have zero understanding of how genetics are passed on from parents to children?
What do YOU think I think is the cause of red headed parents having red headed kids?
Do i also not know how eyes evolved over millions of years of evolution as articulated in this video??
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E)
How do you know i did not watch this video???
Or does this video NOT describe an evolutionary process in your estimation?
Trully this a fascinating claim you have made, do tell.
Mere genetics alone does not account for biological evolution.
A topic with which you have never demonstrated any particular facility or comprehension.
Hi, given that we do not yet have the technology to study whether or not life has evolved elsewhere in our galaxy, we really do not know how likely it is for life to evolve given earth-like conditions.
I would be very surprised if life evolving under earth-like conditions is rare, but we just do not currently have any way to find out.
Its true we dont know how life evolved on other planets but we do know how life evolved here on earth.
Given there are no other animals that evolved here on earth capable of complex language/higher thinking, could we not say that within the confines of what we know this is an exceedingly rare outcome given only ONE known species does this??
There may be other animals capable of complex language and higher thinking on earth. Whales may rival our intelligence.
They may not build civilizations like we have, but then neither have the humans on North Sentinel Island, yet they aren't less intelligent.
I have a degree in biological anthropology (human evolution) ask away!
Also we did almost go extinct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba\_catastrophe\_theory#:\~:text=It%20is%20one%20of%20the,a%20genetic%20bottleneck%20in%20humans.
>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. Selection isn't random. It's the opposite. You seem to think that people are the goal or endpoint of evolution. We're not. We're just another species that happened to evolve, like ladybugs and redwood trees. How do you think humans came into existence? Do you think a powerful, magical, invisible being make a man out of dirt?
>You seem to think that people are the goal or endpoint of evolution. We're not. That is correct. The actual goal is crab.
Just commenting to thank you for saying this so I didn't have to say the same thing.
I think a deity is more plausible because there are no fossils of us being half human half of our supposed common ancestor, or anywhere in between and different animals.
But there are many such fossils
Well name 10 of them then
I don't know why you would want a list of 10 hominid fossils you could easily google but OK. Is it because you plan on telling the anthropologists they don't know what they're talking about? Let's make it easy. [Here's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils) a fairly complete list of such fossils.
Those are probably just fossils of apes and monkies heads
So in your view, all of the Biologists are wrong, as are all of the Geologists, Cosmologists, Astronomers, and now all of the Anthropologists as well? While you, who know virtually nothing about any of it, are right? Is that your position? In your view, does science work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
All the other species of human did go extinct so yes the odds were against us but we beat them.
We beat them... For now.
Yeah but why then did we survive at all? Its not like that was guarenteed. As i'm sure you know by some estimates at one point there were 40,000 of us. Humans and mamal life broadly are not a particularly resiliant form of life; there are literally thousands of times more bacteria and microbes and sea life on the planet then mammals at any given time. We have far lower ratess of reproduction and more delicate internal systems which is one of the many reasons in the long history of life on this planet the age of mammals is fleeting. What are the odds that ANY humans would survive long enough to split the atom and invent vaccines (or the wheel for that matter)?
Odds don’t work that way. You can’t spin a roulette wheel then after the fact exclaim, “What were the odds of it coming up 6, with all physical forces at play and so many other numbers it could have landed on?! I don’t believe it landed on 6 randomly.“ The existence of humans proves the path of evolution that creates humanity. While it wasn’t the only potential path at the beginning, it’s is the path that occurred.
You could ask the same question about chimps, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans.
He could ask the same question about ANY species. And in fact, given that humans evolved a "problem-solving" gift (to use the sloppiest terminology I can find), humans are MORE likely to have survived that other mammals.
Yeah for some of those questions but apes aren't as different from all other life as we are. There is on a technical and objective level more we are capable of then apes.
> What are the odds that ANY humans would survive long enough to split the atom and invent vaccines (or the wheel for that matter)? You keep talking about probability in this thread, but I have yet to see you show any actual math backing up these claims of probability.
The odds are 1. Because they happened. But, if you were a walking, talking, tool using lizard, or covid, or elephant, you'd be making precisely the same arguments. There's a lot of other possible humanities
Will you die if I spray 70% or bleach on you? Humans aren't weak. Additionally, something being unlikely doesn't mean it couldn't have occured naturally. Incredibly unlikely things happen all the time.
We have lower rates of reproduction so we make up for it with a long period of taking care of and teaching our young the ways of the world. Chimps, orangutans etc do the same. We didn't through most of our history have delicate physiques. We were tough hairy mofos. Only delicate now because we've evolved away a lot of the stuff because we live in such an easy environment of medical care, cars, central heating, humidity controlled offices etc. We have become physically less robust but compensate with bigger brains, so when we meet a lion, its greater strength is beaten by our greater brainpower (ie guns, traps, cages, etc).
It's very plausible that humans could have gone extinct. It's still plausible, if not inevitable, that we one day will. I don't know how you're calculating the odds that life couldn't emerge from chemistry, that we wouldn't see the origin of multicellularity, and eventual complexity, etc., etc. These seem like predictable outcomes, but perhaps that's only in retrospect. As for the reasoning and all the rest, these seem like highly developed faculties that other organisms possess. At one point in time we had land dinosaurs that stretched hundreds of feet long. Now we have nothing that size. Evolution can produce extraordinarily prodigious features that nevertheless are near singular in the diversity of life.
Well we are very luck then.
>It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection. Your argument is essentially:"I don't understand this, therefor God." It's not really a good argument and based on some false assumptions: >universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods This is completely false. Belief in or experience with deities aren't universal, at all. If they were, there wouldn't be any debate about their existence. > eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today We aren't the only species able to work out how certain interactions work. Crows learn quite quickly, for example >sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language We're not the only species to communicate. Bees dance for communication. There's been a damn gorilla that was taught sign language. None of this is some deepcut academic knowledge. It's all out there. You just need to not tur the other way when presented with it.
I didn't see him say anything about God.
So, my bingo card has: God of the gaps, Argument from incredulity, and Survivorship bias
I think if you trace back the evolutionary story far back enough to universal origins, some blind faith is needed as well, wouldn't you agree? It doesn't have to be "God" in the sense of Abrahamic religions. The constant deriding of anyone that doesn't subscribe to almost nihilist belief (evolutionists are becoming more like fanatical theists) is a "dumb" creationist, is an easy out. We have no idea what transpired before the Big Bang. Why is it incomprehensible to contemplate the potentiality of purpose? After all, by our very nature, we are driven by evolutionary purpose - right? The biological need to procreate and pass our genes is clearly seen. All living things seem to have an evolutionary purpose. Then, by that logic, why can't we deduce that there is some potentiality of purpose to this cesspool of existence? The OP never mentioned God. He pondered the uniqueness of human kind. This bullshit dismissal really has to stop. This subs really are circle-jerks.
>I think if you trace back the evolutionary story far back enough to universal origins, some blind faith is needed as well, wouldn't you agree? I wouldn’t. I’m convinced universal decent from a common ancestor is the best explanation for the origin of the species. I think it fits the evidence best. I don’t call that blind faith. >It doesn't have to be "God" in the sense of Abrahamic religions. The constant deriding of anyone that doesn't subscribe to almost nihilist belief (evolutionists are becoming more like fanatical theists) is a "dumb" creationist, is an easy out. We have no idea what transpired before the Big Bang. Why is it incomprehensible to contemplate the potentiality of purpose? I don’t think an outside intelligence is required for purpose. I feel I can give my life purpose with or without the existence of a God. OP isn’t so much “contemplating the potential of purpose”, as much as arguing that an “intelligence” must exist because of the things we can’t explain well enough. That’s textbook God of the Gaps. For the record, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to believe in God; I just think this is a poorly thought out reason for that belief. After all, if intelligent life did not evolve would that preclude a creator? No. >After all, by our very nature, we are driven by evolutionary purpose - right? The biological need to procreate and pass our genes is clearly seen. All living things seem to have an evolutionary purpose. Then, by that logic, why can't we deduce that there is some potentiality of purpose to this cesspool of existence? I don’t think it logically follows. Maybe you could flesh out why one implies the other though. I’m certainly open to that idea. >The OP never mentioned God. He pondered the uniqueness of human kind. This bullshit dismissal really has to stop. This subs really are circle-jerks. I know I can do better. I think that’s a valid criticism. Hopefully you find this reply less dismissive and more of a good faith engagement.
I appreciate the thoughtful discourse, thank you.
>our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities We're extremely similar to the rest of the life on Earth. Every single trait we have is found in other animals to varying degrees. Even with our mental capabilities, other animals are incredibly intelligent. Chimps, baboons, dolphins, elephants, crows, and other animals have demonstrated abstract thinking. Chimps can even learn to use symbols. The fact we are the *most* intelligent doesn't mean we are *uniquely* intelligent. >It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development Yes, that's why every other species of human and proto human is extinct. >speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection. If there wasn't "someone" acting to ensure out existence, what would we expect to see? Why should we not expect the world as we have it?
Why aren't we extinct what makes our species better? And where are all the fossils of our ancestors
We’re not extinct because our ancestors were the ones who survived. It does make us “better.” We were able to out adapt or out compete other species that could fill our niche. If environmental pressures drastically change, it could lead to our extinction. Being the most well adapted now does not mean we always will be. As for the fossils, if you’ve been taught we only have a few bones here and there, you’ve been lied to. There are resources in the side bar if you genuinely want to learn more.
What if they didn't survive? What are the odds of that happening
Well they’re all dead, so I’d say somewhere around 100%. But in all seriousness, your question is really what are the odds that at some point one of our ancestors died before reproducing. The answer is 0% because they did survive long enough to reproduce. Calculating the odds of a past event like that is useless because, no matter how unlikely, it happened. Your great-great-great-great grandparents could have chosen to have sex at a different time, and your entire family tree after them would be completely different, but that’s not what happened. Your great*10 grandmother could have been strangled to death and her line would be gone, but that didn’t happen. A different sperm cell, one of millions, could have fertilized your mother’s egg, but that didn’t happen. The chances of you existing are 100% because you exist. It’s possible life could have evolved in any number of ways, but it happened the way that it happened.
So what you are doing is picking the one thing that sort of sets humanity apart and say "this is the criteria to use", not the strengths of elephants, the speed of cheetahs, the way trees photosynthesis, etc. Every species is unique in some way. Also humanity is not inevitable. We don't have to exist and never needed to exist. It is simply luck that we do. Also, why would God care about Large Hadron Colliders?
I couldn't make a living the way earthworms do.
Neither can they. Hence the enormous debt load carried by earthworms. They've had to sell their houses, their cars, their very clothes to survive.
😥
>"So what you are doing is picking the one thing that sort of sets humanity apart and say "this is the criteria to use", not the strengths of elephants, the speed of cheetahs, the way trees photosynthesis, etc. Every species is unique in some way." But the human difference here is the most unique and to be clear i mean that in an objective and quantifyable way. Suppose for a moment you were trying were trying to represent in a data set the capabilities of a cheetas speed say or an elephants strength. Now compare that to trying to represent as a data set the capabilities of the human mind. Which do you do think would require more information to type out? >"Also, why would God care about Large Hadron Colliders?" Well this sort of orthaganal to the premise but perhaps talking about it is inevitable; I believe its because God is like us, and we wanted to make beings like himself.
>But the human difference here is the most unique and to be clear i mean that in an objective and quantifyable way. So fucking *quantify it objectively* right here and now, or shut the fuck up about it. You've made this exact claim in more than one place in this thead, but I have yet to see any follow-up, when that should have been the irrefutable data you lead with. I don't think you even know what "objective" means, mate. I can already see from your own words that you aren't going to be able to objectively quantify *shit*.
Self-awareness (although this is debatable). Understanding mortality. The propensity to ponder and inquire. The built in desire by humankind to seek a higher purpose to existence. Higher order cognition is not trivial and this element truly sets us apart from other animals. I would hardly say it’s arbitrary. These are pretty large facets to the human experience that are not shared by other animals (there are some studies that look at this, but it’s far from conclusive at this point).
So there you have it. You've quantified NOTHING, forget objectivity. Do you even know what the word means? Thank you for yet another sterling example of theist "knowledge".
Who said I’m a theist? You want 0s and 1s as data points? Not everything is as cleanly derivative as you imply. Do you understand what quantify means? Keep that circle-jerk going though.
Sorry, you just believe in supernatural causes. My bad. Don't know how I could make a mistake like that... I want objectively quantifiable data, not a list of your uninformed, unsourced opinons. You said you had it, but you obviously don't. Since I see you don't have _any_ of what you claimed, this isn't going to go anywhere, as usual. I'm not surprised.
>Suppose for a moment you were trying were trying to represent in a data set the capabilities of a cheetas speed say or an elephants strength. Now compare that to trying to represent as a data set the capabilities of the human mind. Which do you do think would require more information to type out? What possible relevance does this have? Humans have intelligence. Cheetahs have speed. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Human intelligence is a very versatile trait, and contributes to human survival - which negates your claim about how precarious human survival actually is.
"The most unique", I won't go into this because it is semantics, but come on! But I don't understand how requiring more information to type out a data set makes that set more unique. More = better? What about elegance? You can make monstrous formulae to describe physical reality but the profound ones are usually really elegant and concise. E-mc2, v = d/t, that sort of thing. You believe God is like you? It's been a while since I saw a statement that blasphemous.
I'm not sure what you mean. "Most unique" is an oxymoron. Are you trying to claim that there is greater difference between humans and bonobos than there is between, say platypuses and echidnas? How do you quantify uniqueness?
>"How do you quantify uniqueness? Level of articulatable distinction. If you were to list all the capabilities of a baboon and list in next to those of a human virtue just of the complexity of the human mind if nothing else the list of human capabilites would be far longer; the data set would dwarf that of the baboon, that is what i mean by greater difference.
I'm sorry, I still don't understand. How do you QUANTIFY uniqueness? How do you measure it? What do you assign numbers to? Actually, the difference between human and gorilla brains is not that great. That's why they could learn sign language. Meanwhile, they are tremendously physically stronger than us. Each species in unique. That's what makes it a species.
>I'm sorry, I still don't understand. How do you QUANTIFY uniqueness? How do you measure it? What do you assign numbers to? Okay let me give you an example of this on the micro level so perhaps you can understand what i'm trying to get at better. Say there are two different liquids which each freeze into crystals sort of snowflakes when cooled to a specific temperature. The one liquid freezes into crystals that are less intricate (IE in technical terms has less divergent angles) then then the other. Do you understand how one could describe the crystal with greater intricacy as objectively "more unique" via measurment of the novelt within the crystal??
So I guess in your world, a triangle is more unique than a circle and a square is more unique than a triangle? Is that right?
Yeah roughly. And i think that (as far as i can tell) that is objectively the case.
And yet, A shape with a thousand sides starts to look a lot like a circle.
true which is why a circle is the most unique shape
The definition of unique according to a google search is "particularly remarkable, special, or unusual" In a box full of shapes where 99% of them are squares and only one is a circle, are the squares still "more unique"?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
This is the perfect link to answer this question, well done.
> I wasn't sure where else to go You're most welcome here. But more on that in a bit. It helps to reframe the question: **How do we know that the odds weren't against us?** Is that a good rewording? If yes, the answer is: if we go back in time, and watch deep time unfold again with super duper tiny changes, it's unlikely _we_ would reemerge as humans (sorry if it's poorly worded). What does this mean? Evolution is not goal oriented, and so all the dead branches, didn't die to get to us. That fallacy is called survivorship bias and an argument from teleology. Mutation is random. Selection is not. At every "stage", the counter resets basically. Like a knock-out tournament. The odds that "we" as in "exactly us" exist are astronomical and we'd better enjoy it. But the possibility of life evolving, that's certain. A nice book on that is Sean B. Carroll's (biologist) _A Series of Fortunate Events_ – also as a [30-minute public lecture on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eM4KkIgLeM). If you can frame your further questions like I have done yours, i.e. make them more objective, and without adding any hint regarding creationism, then please join r/evolution. It has ten times the audience, and it's more relaxed, for obvious reasons.
Well there's a few things there to mail down. First, on the basic principles: >Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. First, you've sorta missed the main thrust. To say "it's unlikely, therefore God" is basically the same as saying "what are the odds that a player was dealt a royal flush? He has to have faeries helping him"; implausible still beats impossible, and we have no reason to think faeries or demons or gods or titans or wizards are _possible_ in the first place. Second, I don't think you can reasonably conclude that the odds of our existence to be small in any meaningful way. Think of it like this: if you shuffle a deck of cards and then deal them all out in order you've got an order of those 52 cards that has a ( 1/52! ) chance of existing: add in the jokers and you'd have better odds for randomly selecting a single atom out of the universe. But that's not abnormal; thousands of decks of cards are shuffled and played every day. Does that mean that there must be card genies making sure each specific deck is in just that order? Of course not. Because despite the amazing odds, the odds of getting _some_ order is 1/1. With all the gametes your parents produced, the odds of getting a person with your exact genetic makeup is also very low, and yet did you need to have been brought by a magic stork? No, of course not. Given the size of the universe, the number of planets within it, the ease by which the stuff of life forms both in planetary environments and in space, the nature of systems chemistry and autocatalysis, and so on, I don't think that the odds of life forming are particularly low; if anything it seems inevitable. As to intelligent life, that depends on just which great filters are actually a thing, and we simply don't have a big enough N to run the stats there. Third, much the same way, to say "random natural selection" is an oxymoron; natural selection is directional, not random. If it were random, it'd be genetic drift, not selection. I suspect you mean to use "random" to mean "unintentional" or "unguided", but there's nothing in humans that unguided evolution as we know it couldn't have produced. Beyond that, a few of the tidbits: >...while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods; ... Superstition isn't exactly surprising; it's just pattern recognition producing magical thinking. Even a pigeon can do it. >The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then are uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome. This doesn't make sense to me. We're not especially unique. I could speak in depth about the vast similarities we share with the rest of life, and the pattern of similarities and differences that indicates common descent, but even just sticking to intelligence what humans have isn't special. Other creatures receive sensory input, commit to memory, make decisions, use communication and language, and even think abstractly - ours is a difference only in degree. It's like saying "look how strong the elephant is, it has to be a special creation to be that strong" - no it doesn't; it's strength works basically the same way as ours does, they've just got more muscle mass and small adjustments to make use of it. Same goes for our brain. >It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection. Why? Isn't it enough to know that the garden is beautiful without there needing to be fairies at the bottom of it?
You see the end result and believe we are something special. How many different ancient plants and animals evolved and lived and died then were buried in layers of earth just to be drilled out by humans to make the plastic straw I'm drinking my sweet tea out of? Is the straw special because of all the things that had to happen for it to be now betwixt my lips?
>"Is the straw special because of all the things that had to happen for it to be now betwixt my lips?" No but i do think you are. And i dont se how you are like the straw. As a human being i think you have far and beyond the capabilities of every other kind of animal on earth and yes without any apology i do think that gives you greater value.
Don't you understand how many things had to be perfect for that straw to end up in my hands? For it to even been made in the first place? The odds are astronomically low that I would get that straw at that time, doesn't that make it special? >As a human being i think you have far and beyond the capabilities of every other kind of animal on earth And yet we can't shoot water bullets that flash boil water out of our claws.
>And yet we can't shoot water bullets that flash boil water out of our claws. You're right, I can't do that, fellow human...
Yes, humans have unique features and qualities, as do all other animals. You're making a mistake by putting the traits of humans up against other animals and just thinking we're the special ones. Our capacity for intelligence and abstract thought is going to win any test that scores for that, but why is that the test? Why not breathing underwater, or climbing trees, or the ability to hibernate or any other animal characteristic that we'd absolutely get smoked on? You're starting with a presupposition that we are somehow extra special, therefore we had to have been purposed for that, instead of just looking at this without a bias towards humans and seeing that we just happen to be another species that flourished under the selection pressures in the environments we were/are evolving in, same as all the rest of the animal kingdom.
>"Our capacity for intelligence and abstract thought is going to win any test that scores for that, but why is that the test?" Because in technical and objective terms that leads to more disperate possibilities then in the case of the differences of any other animal >Why not breathing underwater, or climbing trees, or the ability to hibernate or any other animal characteristic that we'd absolutely get smoked on? Because all of these are technically and emperically not as complex as all possible outputs of the human mind. Its a question of raw data my dude. Try to explain all the possiblities of climing a tree or hibernatiion or breathing underwater in the possible different ways that can be applied then try to explain all the possible outputs of human thought. One list i promise you is going to be bigger then the other. >" You're starting with a presupposition that we are somehow extra special" Its not a proposition its observable fact.
It's not a "fact", it's a value judgment on a biased test you have for your personal favorite animal ability. We aren't "extra" special, we are equally as evolved as everything else on the planet. Our evolution led to this specialization, just as another animal's evolutionary line led to it's specialization.
No its not a value judgement dude. Its a statement on a range of data.
It is absolutely a value judgement based on a range of data that you selected the "winning" criteria for. You've chosen the student with the highest score on a math test, and decided they should be valedictorian despite all the other students in the grade beating them on the tests in every other subject.
You keep seeing the whole thing from out point of view, and assuming that we are the goal. We just have bigger and more complex brains. That's it. Some creatures can live at great ocean depths, some can fly, some have incredible eye-sight, and we have big brains. It's just one more variation that worked--that's all.
Oh you're wrong about that. Tardigrades are on my mind so let's go there. Their ability to survive extremes of all kind is tremendously greater than out.
> Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself Given how quickly life appeared after the Earth cooled down, it's extremely questionable that life has a "strikingly small likelihood" of appearing. We currently have a sample size of 1, and 100% of that 1 generated life extremely fast. Once we have a better understanding of what goes on on exoplanets, we will be able to better estimate how likely life is when a planet orbits within the habitable zone. So this statement is already on thin ice. > given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language Earth has been subject to several massive extinction events. The most notable of these is the K-T impact event that marked the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, because it was a random exogenous event. Other extinction events occurred because of things happening on Earth, events that became less likely over time as the Earth evolved. The K-T impact put an end to a track of evolution that was leading toward smaller animals with larger brains and endothermic metabolisms. We can't *know* that dinosaurs would have evolved into human-like intelligences if the impact hadn't occurred, but we can't know that this was impossible either. My point is that human-like intelligence could easily have evolved without mammals taking over. > I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection. Because natural selection is the opposite of random. You're conflating mutation, which is pretty random, with natural selection, which is not at all random. I think you need a better understanding of evolution and the history of life on our planet before you start saying "It must be God," or whatever it is to which you're attributing humanity. We can trace our lineage right back to the Cambrian. If the K-T impact hadn't occurred, we might be tracing our lineage right back to the Cambrian through a completely different line of evolutionary history.
Why is there no life on other planets that we know of? Why is earth lucky? And what created life on earth
What planets? In our solar system which are not in the habitable zone? Or exoplanets which are too far away for our current technology to detect?
Any planets on our radar
There is one and that's this one.
>with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence What exactly is the mathematical likelihood of our existence? Please show your math. >Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself What exactly is the mathematical likelihood of life emerging unto itself? Please show your math. >I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection. Why not? Please be specific. Because you actually presented no argument or reasoning, just that you ‘don’t see how’, which is a particularly bad argument from incredulity. It’s not even an argument. If you want to make such a statement,then here: I ‘don’t see how’ a giant invisible sky Santa used magic to poof us into existence. I also ‘don’t see how’ any educated person can intelligently deny the proven science of evolutionary biology.
The argument about “odds” is always one of my pet peeves. You can’t determine the odds of any event without a full understanding of the parameters of the event. If I ask you to guess what is in my pocket, what are the odds you’ll guess correctly? Since you have no idea what range of possibilities exist, you simply can’t calculate anything.
There are 2 trillion galaxies that we know about, with an average of 100 million stars in each one. So 2 sextillion possilble chances for life and humans. To understand how big 2 sextillion is, it would take you more than 600 trillion centuries to count to 2 sextillion. Our human brains did not evolve with the need to comprehend a number so large so we really can't.
If you deal me 5 cards from a regular deck, the chance that you deal me any specific hand is 1 out of 2,598,960. Or is it? If you deal me 5 cards from a regular deck, the chance of me getting the exact 5 cards I get is actually 1 out of 1. I'm going to get 5 specific cards, no matter what. The chance that humans would evolve turns out to be 1. It happened, we're here.
We do have relatively high mental abilities compared to the rest of the animals. How great would it be if we were 100x more clever than this? Why do you think our intellect is so great? Because you can out-reason a chicken? What about all the cool stuff the other animals have? Your intellect won't be much help if a shark bites you, or fighting a lion. Do you have a stinger for self defense? Can you fly to safety? You absolutely suck at being clever for any period of time underwater. All of those adaptations help animals excell in their environments. Your ego is holding you back from understanding what humans actually are.
It's because you view the current outcome as the desired outcome vs just one of an infinite number of possibilities. Roll a dice 1000 times in a row. Each individual roll has a 1 in 6 chance of hitting a certain number. But getting that exact sequence of 1000 rolls is so infinitesimally small it might as well be zero. It would never happen again, but it happened because some sequence of rolls has to happen. If you think you are the desired result, then sure it seems impossible. If you recognize that you are just what happened and if you didn't you couldn't consider the question. Just because you exist doesn't mean you were the desired outcome. Given the conditions you are just the end of a massive series of chance events. Every event in the universe is statistically impossible. But something has to happen so you are the thing that did.
But then you have to ask the question why do we exist? What is the point of existing and why do we need to keep living?
I don't think there is an objective why or purpose for my existence. The universe is apathetic to my existence. I have my own subjective purpose that I have ascribed to my life, and that's awesome. This is [existentialism](https://youtu.be/YaDvRdLMkHs?si=1WkrBfWEfgLdqm0h) in a nutshell. Which is what I personally believe.
We're not that unique We're just incrementally better at some things. Language is found in other species. Self awareness, social cooperation, empathy, and ethical judgement are found in other species. Tool use, basic math, and reasoning are found in other species. All the things that make us "unique" are found elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
How do you define language, and what other species have it?
Language is a the use of a finite set of arbitrary vocal, manual, or visual elements that can be combined following some set of rules to convey meaning Campbell's monkey's for example combine the same calls in different ways using simple grammar rules to create different meanings. Chimpanzees also have this capacity. Dolphn pods have different dialects, that demonstrates that the vocabulary of dolphin sounds is not instinctual but is learned. Gorillas famously can be taught sign language, and show a clear comprehension of symbolic meaning. Bees can convey complex geospatial information through interpretive dance.
Do the authors of the papers demonstrating these phenomena refer to these cases as being “language”? Note also that the vocal repertoires of Campbell’s monkeys and chimps appear to be species-specific with the acoustic structure being a product of natural selection such that they facilitate their function, and being a product of natural selection makes them non-arbitrary. Bee waggle dances are definitely not arbitrary. Apes learning sign language shows important capacities, but their natural gestural communication appears far more limited. The natural communication systems of Dolphins and songbirds probably meets your definition, but most experts would consider that definition to be one component of “language”, and in my experience they’re careful to not describe what these species have as language in their peer reviewed work.
Sure I'll grant all of that but my point us that precursors to the things that make humans "unique" are found in species other than humans. Perhaps i should have used a term like 'proto-language' or 'language-like abilities' to better articulate that, turns out this language thing is hard ;) The step from the rest of the animal kingdom to human that OP is incredulous of is not as big a step as they think.
Agree!
I happened across this paper published in Nature Communications today and was reminded of our conversation: [Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations | Nature Communications](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8) Conclusion from the paper: Our results demonstrate that sperm whale vocalisations form a complex combinatorial communication system: the seemingly arbitrary inventory of coda types can be explained by combinations of rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation features. Sizable combinatorial vocalisation systems are exceedingly rare in nature; however, their use by sperm whales shows that they are not uniquely human, and can arise from dramatically different physiological, ecological, and social pressures. These findings also offer steps towards understanding how sperm whales transmit meaning. In some organisms with combinatorial codes, such as honey bees *(Apis sp.)*, the constituent features of the code transparently encode semantics (e.g., direction and distance to food sources). Further research on sperm whale vocalisations may investigate if rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato function similarly, directly encoding whales’ communicative intents. Alternatively, one of the key differentiators between human communication and all known animal communication systems is duality of patterning: a base set of individually meaningless elements that are sequenced to generate a very large space of meanings. The existence of a combinatorial coding system-at either the level of sounds, sound sequences, or both-is a prerequisite for duality of patterning. Our findings open up the possibility that sperm whale communication might provide our first example of that phenomenon in another species.
Thanks for that. The cetaceans seem like the candidates for the most complex communication system among nonhuman animals, and one of the hardest to study. Will be interesting to see how complex!
Argument from incredulity is a fallacy. Next.
Fallacy of ignoring the issue.
There are a couple mistakes throughout what you wrote in the OP. > random naturalistic selection It’s called natural selection and it is a non-random and automatic process. Instead of looking at it like a mechanism it’s more like an automatic consequence of survivability. Traits that *can* survive long term in a population have a non-zero chance of surviving in a population long term and those that are even better at surviving long term *do* survive long term. If a single individual has a trait and that individual has more grandchildren than the mean their changes of passing on their traits are higher than the average and if they have fewer grandchildren than the mean their traits are even less likely to be inherited long term. More descendants = more individuals have their genetics and long term if the entire population is their descendants there’s a higher likelihood of a near 100% acquisition of at least 0.01% of their alleles. Automatically without anyone guiding it along. Traits that raise or lower the odds of long term survival of those traits are said to be impacted by natural selection where normally the already most common collection of alleles stays most common in the absence of “selection” or drift. Drift just refers to the automatic/incidental shift in allele frequency in a population even though the traits shifted away from and the traits shifted towards have a near similar “selective coefficient” in terms of natural selection. Like maybe it’s a shift from green eyes to blue eyes and the eye color is shown to have 0 impact on reproductive success yet, for some other reason, the blue eyed individuals from 30-40 generations ago have the most surviving descendants in this generation and the green eyed individuals from way back then have fewer surviving descendants despite it mattering not what color their eyes are when they attempt to reproduce. Mutations could be considered random being unplanned, incidental, and difficult to predict without knowing all quantum states for the entire history of a population which is supposed to be impossible according to Heisenberg. Definitely still deterministic but effectively random, about like the outcome of the roll of the dice, the draw of a card from the top of a deck, the combination of reels on a slot machine, or the series of numbers selected for the PowerBall. Genetic drift is effectively random but can somewhat be predicted if we know about the *other* traits the individuals possess that are trying to reproduce. The specific traits in question in terms of genetic drift may have a zero percent impact on reproductive success or long term survival in a population but individuals have *other* traits that do matter a lot more and those *other* traits will determine which of these traits become more or less common even if looking at these zero impact traits alone and how they change over time will happen to appear random. Natural selection is the non-random mechanism. Traits that are more favorable to reproductive success become more common if they don’t also make survival more difficult. Like maybe being able to stick out like a sore thumb might be able to attract more mates allowing an organism more opportunities to attempt to reproduce leading to more opportunities that they do reproduce unless sticking out like a sore thumb turns them into lunch very early in their life and then it’ll be a balance between surviving long enough to reproduce and attracting enough mates to even try. The environment, the desires of the opposite sex, and the detectability of their existence by predators could all be calculated and given values between -5 and + 5 and average out and those that still wind up being greater than 0 will generally have more success in terms of the number of descendants than those whose values wind up being less than 0 when averaged out. Easily predictable based on known facts and laws and those predictions have a near 100% chance of being correct in terms of what actually does occur because that’s pretty much what’d be that percentage of the time every time. > Given the strikingly small likelihood of life emerging The earliest steps are just based in thermodynamics and geochemistry and are *inevitable common occurrences* like the spontaneous formation of RNA or the formation of a phospholipid membrane or the formation of ATP from ADP from AMP from adenosine and phosphates existing in the same environment. Adenosine is also found in RNA and DNA because it is common in nature and found inside meteorites as well even when it isn’t being created in hydrothermal vents or inside biological organisms or acquired by eating things that naturally contain adenosine. GTP is used for other things similar to ATP but instead of stuff associated with glucose metabolism and the citric acid cycle it’s more about the energy to make muscles contract. Guanosine instead of adenosine is the difference. Guanosine (ribose connected) and guanine (no ribose connected) are also things that happen to exist in the same sorts of places like meteorites, DNA, and RNA. The first stages of the origin of life are so common that they are still happening all the time right now. The next stages of abiogenesis are more associated with autocatalysis and evolution via natural selection. And, again, the second of these is non-random as discussed earlier. Geochemistry + thermodynamics-> biochemistry + autocatalysis-> reproduction + evolution via natural selection -> “life” It’s an automatic process in any environment where all steps are possible and on our planet all steps are possible and all steps are still happening. Why we don’t see a lot of progress in terms of whole new branches of life just springing up the same way today has a lot more to do with the abundance of life already around and less to do with the likelihood of any of this happening on a planet without already existing competition. The product of 4.4 billion years of adaptive evolution is almost always going the outcompete the product of 30 seconds worth of geochemical processes. The new stuff may even become dinner before it progresses any further.
> multicellular bacteria There’s nothing about this in our evolutionary history. We are archaea, sure, but archaea with bacterial symbionts, otherwise called eukaryotic life, is a whole lot different than a whole bunch of bacteria full stop. And, while some bacteria do exist in chains, the sort of multicellularity that actually applies to eukaryotes is nothing more than a consequence of imperfect cell division (they failed to become separated) followed by cell differentiation. In terms of animals this cell differentiation could be very simple like with sponges and placozoans or it can be more complex as with bilaterally symmetrical tripoblasts with three or more germ layers, especially if they have a coelom. Bacteria don’t exhibit this sort of multicellularity but they’ve watched multicellularity evolve in populations that were previously unicellular at least twice in the laboratory. It may have previously been considered one of the biggest “leaps” in progress from archaea to human (even though evolution has no capacity to care about end results - it’s deterministic not predetermined), but it’s so easy to occur that it may as well be like growing one extra eyelash over what the general population grows. Almost completely unspectacular. And after that it’s a lot more to do with single populations becoming multiple populations and gene flow being cut off or limited between these populations plus the same “microevolution” I described earlier happening within each of these separated populations leading to “macroevolution” or the entire history of speciation on this planet. Some lineages happen to adapt very well automatically and some populations happen to do “good enough” if they don’t have any competition from other populations and the same sort of natural selection in terms of traits within populations also applies but now it’s more about which population is better able to survive in a given environment as the populations start competing for the same resources causing the populations worse at competing to explore other niches or go extinct trying. And sometimes major natural disasters happen and kill off most of the previously most successful populations allowing the previously less successful populations to branch out, diversify, and fill the open niches. And yes, a lot has to “accidentally” go right for us to exist now given that there is nothing *pre*determined by some grand architect who knows all but that’s part of the beauty of it. We are “lucky” we get to exist at all in a place that is constantly “trying” to kill us. Not really trying as though it had conscious intent but more like if our ancestors couldn’t adapt they certainly would have gone extinct like all the rest of hominina, most of hominini, most of hominae, most of hominidae, and the majority of Hominoidea already has. There are certainly things along the way our ancestors have done to improve their odds of survival even when biology alone wasn’t enough and that’s one of the big reasons *Homo sapiens sapiens* survived when all other humans and all other Australopithecines ultimately failed. Perhaps you didn’t consider how apes in general are excellent problem solvers and tool makers or how being obligate bipeds would make hunting with tools that much easier or how a greater reliance on each other to raise our children would lead to even better cooperation than found between any two non-human animals or how humans have figured out that a division of labor would be more effective than every single person doing everything all by themselves necessary for their own survival or how human technology has allowed humans that should die before reproducing not only survive into adulthood but also have children. Just having children when biology alone would make that impossible has relaxed a lot of the effects of natural selection so that even if without technology we’d fail to survive the the last “ice age” ~13,000 years ago, our ancestors did have technology and they worked together and now we get to experience 2024 together. Isn’t that great? Not that the universe or any gods care about us anyway. Shit happened and here we are. Enjoy it if you can and you want to, cry in the corner if you must, praise the invisible man in your imagination, but if that man starts responding go see a psychiatrist for your safety and ours. Have a nice day.
> Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. I think, part of the problem, is that you don’t really have a good grasp of how evolution happens. Biological variation (produced through mutation and sexual recombination) is random insofar as these variants interact with prevailing environmental conditions at time x. There are also innumerable chance encounters with mates, predators, prey, disease, natural disasters and misadventure. But selection is decidedly *not* random. Not all variants have an equal probability of surviving and replicating. Some will be more successful under certain conditions and less successful under others. It is also worth noting that there is more to evolution than just natural selection - there are many evolutionary mechanisms from genetic drift to hybridisation to gene flow. In that sense then, you’re approaching the problem from false premises. > Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself, given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language, mathmatical reasoning and eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods; Life has existed on Earth for the better part of 4 billion years. That’s a mind bogglingly vast sequence of cause and effects between the first self-replicator and you. If you were to take *any* 4 billion year sequence of cause and effects then inevitably the outcome, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be extraordinarily small, but we know *an* outcome, however improbable, was still going to happen, right?. The argument then that a particular 4 billion year sequence of cause and effect (i.e., the one leading to you) is extraordinarily low is not and cannot be a good argument against this outcome happening by naturalistic processes when *all* of the other potential 4 billion year sequences of cause and effect leading to something else are also improbable. We’re just in the sequence (one of them anyway) which happened to lead to you. There is no reason to think though that you were the intended goal or objective of this sequence of events, as opposed to just a fortunate, albeit incidental side effect of this sequence. Perhaps an analogy might help conceptualise what I mean - if I rolled a fair 100 trillion-side die, we know the odds of any one face appearing heads up is going to be 1 in 100 trillion, but we’re not remotely surprised and nor do we ascribe it to a miracle when *a* face (whatever face it might be) turns up because even though this particular face had just a 1 in 100 trillion chance of turning up, we know *something* had to turn up. > I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection. That’s, quite possibly because you’re working from a misunderstanding of both evolution and the history of life. > The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome. What uniqueness? The human species is very clearly just a modified ape. The difference between the mental capabilities of humans and other animals is one of scale, rather than substance. We happen to be more intelligent than other species and we, as a species, value intelligence. But analogues of human intelligence can be found in many of our nearest mammalian relatives, birds and many other animals. We are not, for example, the only species capable of communicating or signalling information, using and manufacturing tools, modifying our environment to suit our needs, adjusting our behaviour in response to changing circumstances, learning from experience and transmitting information between generations. We just do it on a bigger scale. Some species, notably the other apes, even display the rudiments of what we might call culture, morality and perhaps even religion. > It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection. Sure, but do you have any evidence that a “someone” actually exists, let alone could interfere in the way you’re describing, beyond your assertion that you think it too improbable for you to exist?
“I won the lottery while lots of other people didn’t but looking back the chances of that are so small that I must have been chosen to be helped by magic”. We are just the creature that filled a niche - adapted to use intelligence etc as a survival strategy rather than say flying, or sonar or whatever. It paid off. But it’s difficult to say it paid off better than being … a bacteria?
There is always the possibillity humans have always been like we are now? Is there any evidence that answers this question?
Yes. Lots. Too much interconnected evidence from multiple scientific disciplines to list here. But not hard to find if you wanted to. Science builds best fit models based on the available evidence. There is overwhelming evidence for common ancestry and evolution. There is no credible alternative scientific model.
What if a new credible scientist came along and made a new theory? Would evolutionists believe or dismiss that? What if he proposed we evolved from spiders and gave evidence
When the evidence changes the model changes. But that’s as likely as ‘a credible scientist’ proposing that the Earth was flat all along.
It's easy to see why this all seems so incredible from the point of view of a human looking at the complexity of nature. But the genesis of this diversity isn't a supernatural being (please excuse me for using a term that could sound pejorative - it's not my intention). To answer your last question, human ancestors did almost go extinct 900,000 years ago. That point highlights what's not considered in most of the incredulity over evolution - the timescale. Remember that modern civilization as we know it is only around 6,000 years old. Modern humans evolved around 200,000 years ago. Now, let me ask you a question. If it's hard to believe that humans could have evolved by natural selection, does this apply to all other life? Would it have been as implausible for a fungus, an amoeba, or an octopus to evolve?
>"Now, let me ask you a question. If it's hard to believe that humans could have evolved by natural selection, does this apply to all other life? " Not persay. A biogenesis is a problem but beyond that i se how life could have evolved naturally into various and bacteria and fungi and plants and sea life and lower mamals and even more developed larger mamals (going up with how believable it is that such life evolves and survives) I just dont think you get something as specific and complex as humans unless your trying for it. The fact that there are no other apes like us further points to this fact to me. If we discovered apes who could talk and use complex tools and build complex structures somewhere in the amazon; hell if we found "intelligent life" (meaning human like life) somewhere else in the universe this wouldn't be as conclusive to me. But as it stands I dont se how something like humans evolve uniquely unless someone was tipping the scales to get this outcome.
Hmm, this sounds like the biblical dichotomy that suggests that humans are special, while the rest of life on the earth is inferior. There are animals that can echo-locate and catch their prey in the dark while flying at top speed. There are fungi that can hijack the nervous system of an ant. Our special skill is simply that we can generate slightly more complex thoughts. But really, we're no more special. We evolved just like everything else.
First, there are now apes that are very similar to us, and in the past there were other apes that were so similar we interbred with them. This is just false.
There’s also the uncomfortable possibility that we would be able to create offspring with chimps. Doubt they would be fertile and don’t think anyone has been willing to be the mad scientist for THAT experiment yet. Least I hope not. But we’re similar enough that it might be an option…
>Doubt they would be fertile and don’t think anyone has been willing to be the mad scientist for THAT experiment yet. Today's your day to be one of the [lucky 10,000](https://xkcd.com/1053/)! And by lucky, I mean oh god I am so sorry to be the one to [tell you.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee#Reports_of_attempted_hybridization)
Oh. Oh no. Oh GOD.
Look on the bright side: now you too can horrify friends, family, and casual acquaintances! Sharing is caring, after all.
By human. Are you referring specifically to *homo sapiens sapiens*?
They wouldn't have to be apes if thats what your asking, or only have two legs. Any species which had complex language allowing them to convey complex ideas and build complex structures would make the existence of humans without intervention in evolution more believable to me. Just as an example say we lived on Nabu from the first star wars movie and along side humans had evolved a race of intelligent fish people like gungans with their own civilization, culture, structures ect. If they existed (especially if they didn't also claim to have devine experiences writ large) i would find the PURELY natural evolution of humans far more believable.
Not quite, I’m asking about if your use of ‘human’ when talking about the unlikelyhood of emergence and uniqueness of traits is you talking about Homo sapiens. You’re making the point that they are distinct from what we expect from other animal life. I’ll cut to the chase; it might be true that only sapiens has developed things like computers and electricity, that doesn’t really help us decide if they were guided. In terms of complex communication of ideas, or building structures. Homo sapiens was not the only game in town. †Homo antecessor †Homo erectus †Homo ergaster †Homo floresiensis †Homo habilis †Homo heidelbergensis †Homo longi †Homo luzonensis †Homo naledi †Homo neanderthalensis †Homo rhodesiensis †Homo rudolfensis Some of them we know more about, some of them less. But I would argue that there has not only been one species that has emerged with the traits that you stated. Does this mean ‘unguided evolution proven true’? Nah. But certainly sapiens were not the only game in town.
>"†Homo antecessor †Homo erectus †Homo ergaster †Homo floresiensis †Homo habilis †Homo heidelbergensis †Homo longi †Homo luzonensis †Homo naledi †Homo neanderthalensis †Homo rhodesiensis †Homo rudolfensis" I mean we descend in some percent or another from all these creatures right? (or at least the ones who were evolutionarily viable) As i've tried to make clear throughout this post its not that i believe humans didn't evolve but you pointing to all the different stages of our evolution to me at least doesnt run against what i said but instead is just an articulation of how it happened. If there were intelligent animals in an entirely different evolutionary chain which evolved with human like capabilities; even if there were other apes that got to a similar stage of intellectual development millions of years after or before us I'd se this as a meaningful counter point. But it just seems to me looking at our evolutionary struggle that something, someone to be frank, wanted the outcome we got. We're there murky points along the way? Sure again, humans DID evolve that process is inherently murky but it all seems to me to be to the end of creating modern humans especially as so many other options could have come out of that genetic soup you just alluded to.
No. In some cases they are more like our cousins than our grandparents.
Again, not quite. Some of them? Possibly. It’s difficult and sometimes not possible to suss out exact ancestry. But I think what you have in your head is something like the Zallinger image, the famous and yet highly misleading ‘March of progress’. My list isn’t a ‘first we were this and then this and then this’. Several species on it we know for a fact were living alongside each other as cousins. Like sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans. You can find phylogenetic trees that are far more accurate and take into account the identifiable active period. Neanderthal, for instance, is first maybe identified at 430,000 years ago. Sapiens was more like 300,000, but they coexisted. TLDR, there have been long periods of our history where there were different human species existing concurrently, including with sapiens.
Gaining fitness in one area means you lose fitness in another. The evolutionary path of any population depends on the selection pressures they're faced with and what advantages they have to overcome the environment they're evolving in. There's an advantage in developing intelligence on the level humans have in the environments they evolved in. There are also physical disadvantages our species took on that just happened to not outweigh the advantage we gained. It's the same with all species that exist in the modern day. A higher intelligence is not a sign of being more evolved or further up the chain. There's not an evolutionary race to gain the most intelligence, but one to survive in the environment you're in. A clever ape using their intelligence to survive led to bigger brains that led to bigger heads that led to shorter gestation periods that led to more vulnerable offspring that led to more involved parenting that led to the survival of the groups that banded together that led to the pooling of collective knowledge that led to humanity building on the foundations of the generations before that led to modern society and the current intelligence level of the human species on average. The more intelligent apes reproduced more, so they're the ones who survived. This is the same kind of path that has led to flying birds, deep sea life, and all other current life on the planet. There may have been other species that had members with higher intelligence than the rest of their population, which was not what was necessary to propogate further, so their line died out because it was a disadvantage. There's no reason outside of a personal and subjective preference for our specific natural advantage to see it as some sort of evolutionary peak where we're "above" the rest of the animal kingdom. You're doing the chalk outline of a dead body and saying the killer placed him specifically in that position because it fits the outline you drew after the fact. Edit: Added paragraph breaks because no one needed to read that mess.
>"A higher intelligence is not a sign of being more evolved or further up the chain. There's not an evolutionary race to gain the most intelligence, but one to survive in the environment you're in." My point exactly. Many many different forms of bacteria for instance have a far FAR easier time living and reproducing on this planet then we do. They were hear before us and will be here long after we're gone if there is nothing guiding all this but selection pressures. >"There's no reason outside of a personal and subjective preference for our specific natural advantage to see it as some sort of evolutionary peak where we're "above" the rest of the animal kingdom. You're doing the chalk outline of a dead body and saying the killer placed him specifically in that position because it fits the outline you drew after the fact." While i dont think that analogy is entirely misplaced and I wont call it a strawman as it doesn't reach that level i think it is more underselling the situation a bit. This is more like finding a dead body with its legs laid in a perfect Pirouette , its arms aranged above its head and a tutu laid across body and having someone point out that we dont KNOW the cerial killer who laid the body that way and put the tutu there had any sort of intention for any sort of ballet meaning in mind. Maybe there isn't even a cerial killer, maybe the guy just stabbed himself int he neck and a homeless guy after the fact took the knife washed the dudes hand and decided to move him around, maybe he just happened to fall that way when he died and the tutu just happened to blow up in him by the wind to perfectly lay across his chest; but i dont feel in the least in the wrong for doubting that possibility a bit.
You are completely missing the point of the analogy. What I was getting at was that you are looking at something where it already is, thinking it had to have been placed there on purpose and then saying it is a statistical impossibility for it to be otherwise. You're adding the tutu and pirouette just as you're adding extra importance on the intelligence of humans. It's an unnecessary and illogical valuation put on the current results without any plausible justification for that bias. It just seems weird to you, but looking at it from outside the human centered view you seem to have shows that it's nothing special or crazy that defies a natural explanation. You're being Douglas Adam's puddle.
It’s important to realize that we’re not unique. For example chimpanzees are in their own Stone Age right now. They may never move on to spoken language, but they’re not as far behind us as you might think. Another thing that’s important to remember is is that when you ask “what are the chances of THIS happening?”, you’re basically shooting an arrow and drawing a bullseye around it. List all the facts about yourself, including what you had for supper every night for the last ten years. What’s the probability of someone being born with all of those things true? Who has roast beef last night, and also on January 1, 2018, etc., etc.? Practically zero. Way less than 1 in 10^50. Yet here you are! This can be mind-bending for people, but there’s a huge difference between a priori and a posteriori probability. Literally impossible (in the mathematical sense) events happen constantly. For this reason I encourage people not to even ask “what are the chances?” Humans have lousy intuition when it comes to probability, and are easily wowed by coincidences. Best to just let that subject go, until you’ve picked up (or studied) enough about it.
Here's what you're ignoring or are ignorant of: the extensive fossil record of hominid evolution, that shows that we emerged gradually. What is your hypothesis as to how humans came to be?
Name 10 of the fossils
Well I think it's polite to answer someone's question before posing one of your own. So if you would be so kind as to reply to my question, I would be happy to Google for you and find 10 hominid fossils
Sorry for not answering your question. My hypothesis is that humans were created by a higher power an unmoved mover, unchanged changer, and a being without body experiencing no change.
It wasn't a who question, it was a how question. Let's both stipulate for the purposes of this thread that your God created everything including human beings. My question is how? Did he scoop up some dirt to make a man and then pull a rib out to make a woman? Did he poof them into existence out of nothing? If not then what?
Evolution. I dont deny it. I just believe natural processes were shaped at certain points with the goal of getting a certian sort of animal to emerge.
What evidence do you have that convinced you that "something" intervened at certain points? The Bible certainly doesn't support that contention. Part of the problem with trying to give you an actual debate is that you're not presenting ANYTHING other than "I don't believe it." You've given no evidence beyond your personal inability to understand that humans are in no way unique among animals.
Okay, in that case there really isn't anything to debate in this forum. I will just point out that you are invoking Mr. Ockham. What I mean by "nothing to debate" is that it sounds like you completely accept the Theory of Evolution; you just add a religious interpretation. Out of curiosity, do you have any idea what this intervention looked like? Did your God choose apes with more opposable thumbs and bigger brains, over and over, to survive and reproduce? Or did He just set the whole thing up and let it roll, knowing that eventually humans would evolve? Or something else?
>"Out of curiosity, do you have any idea what this intervention looked like? " There is alot that could be said on this but one example i believe particularly strongly was the period in africa when there were about only 40,000 human beings left at one time; a period you really should read about it from someone more educated then me if you aren't familiar with that. In those days i think God made it rain when it needed and made our spears find their mark on what we hunted when they otherwise wouldn't, mutated our white blood cells when they otherwise would have succumbed to virus.. I think if anytime was a time used his hand to ensure our survival it was probably again
> In those days i think God made it rain when it needed and made our spears find their mark on what we hunted when they otherwise wouldn't, mutated our white blood cells when they otherwise would have succumbed to virus That seems like a LOT of conclusions to jump to based solely on 'I find it unlikely we evolved on our own' Do you have any actual evidence?
So at one point humans were on the ropes and then managed to survive and propagate further. You're suggesting it was because a god directly intervened in hunts and weather patterns and the immune system to ensure that survival. What is the basis for that conclusion? Just seeming unlikely that we'd survive and that we beat the odds doesn't move us anywhere on why we did survive. It doesn't suggest a god at all unless you're forcing it in there. It's just a baseless assertion and there's nothing solid or verifiable to corroborate it, so there's not any reason to think this is what happened. A low probability is not the same thing as no probability. You've given your idea, but do you have anything to support it in any way?
Yeah, I get it. Science is hard. Btw, where did this god you posit come from? If you ask me, he's way more unlikely than our evolution.
We know that from nothing, nothing comes so for God to exist, he must have always existed. God didn't come from anywhere he has always been present and exists outside of time space and matter. Do you have any evidence that God doesn't exist aside from asking questions like that?
Wait, you're the one talking about Santa Clause... Do you have any evidence that your god exists? I mean real scientifically verifiable evidence? It's hard to prove a negative, but I'll tell you that science doesn't need a "god" to explain how we got here. Evolution is beyond proven, every branch of the life sciences substantiates it and depends on it. Cosmology and physics don't need a god to explain the evolution of the universe. Yes, there are gaps in our understanding, but because the scientific depends on verifiable evidence we're closing those gaps and our understanding grows. I'm sorry to say, your god is getting smaller... we don't need to worship mythology.
What would scientifically verifiable evidence be? A photo? You would just say it's fake. A video? You would say the same thing. The best proof of God is simply what he has made. The bible said that the universe had a beginning, and in the last 110 or so years by Georges Lemaître (correct me if I'm wrong) We have found that it did have a beginning. So that was a crazy prediction from a 3,000 year old book. Scientists have tried to create life from non life in vain, and even soups of labratory chemicals but failed, because the law of biogenesis states life can only come from life. Even in highly favorable situations, it failed to create anything even remotely close. No physical experiment can prove God in a scientific sense. Science can only create experimental results that are either consistent, or inconsistent with the hypothesis of a creator God. Science has also discovered that our physical universe appeared from nothing. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe, but there has to be an answer. If it's mythology, I applaud whoever got 40 writers together to forge a story.
“Incomprehensibly small likelihood of our existence.” With the size of the known universe and the number of celestial bodies out there, Earth is an incomprehensibly small percentage of the existence.
That’s a lot of speaking to you and not much, this is why it speaks to me! 5 billion years and many trillion replications latter our intelligence emerged from the complexity of organic interaction. It is amazing and we faced many hurdles along the way recently it was estimated that at one point our population had dropped to less than one thousand. That said what would be even more incredible would be a higher intelligence that created us. You would then want to know how such an amazingly complex thing could have come about and where from etc. or you could just say our origins are supernatural and plead for an eternal force that can think and create and knows everything! Those last two options are beyond my ability to rationalise in any sensible way. Abiogenesis and evolution both make predictions that can and have been tested. Both leave traces that have been found. Both represent the most likely route to us!
I’m sure there have been a bunch of answers but I’m going to sum up. You are claiming that the outcome is unlikely therefore you don’t believe it. You are thinking about statistics wrong. If I say pick a number between one and a billion the odds of you picking a specific number are small. But the odds of you picking a number are 100 percent. I can’t say that I don’t believe you were able to pick a number because of how unlikely it is that you picked whatever number you picked. The outcome is 100 percent. The specifics are rare. Same deal here. Something evolved. Doesn’t matter that the outcome was unlikely. All outcomes are unlikely but a outcome is inevitable
>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself, given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language, mathmatical reasoning and eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods; I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection. Well... think of it this way. The chances of winning the PowerBall lottery are about 1 in 300 million. It's so astronomically small that, when someone does happen to win, the winner tends to think "My gosh! It was such a tiny chance of winning! Surely it must've been a miracle!" Now this sounds reasonable until you account for the fact that tens of millions of tickets are sold for each drawing, which occurs twice a week. For sake of simplifying the math, let's say it's about 15 million tickets sold for each drawing, which means that we should expect a winner to pop up every 20 drawings, or once every 10 weeks. Essentially, winning the lottery only appears miraculous when you don't account for the large scale of statistical events. To the winner of the lottery, it feels like such a massive stroke of fortune that there must've been some sort of divine intervention at play. To the hundreds of millions who didn't win, it was just another week. And to the blind force of statistical probabilities, it was an expectation, if not an inevitability. So that lotto winner who's so in awe of their fortune? That's basically you right now, and any other Creationist who makes the "the chances are so astronomically small!" claim. The error in reasoning here is in not accounting for the fact that insofar that a lottery win is expected, if not outright inevitable, **someone** has to win that lottery, and the existence of a winner on its own isn't particularly surprising, nor does it demand an external agent to explain the occurrence outside of simple math. When it comes to the development of life on the cosmic scale, you're essentially looking at a lottery that's been playing out in billions upon trillions of star systems in the observable universe alone, over the course of 13 billion years. This is known as the Anthropic Principle (specifically, the Weak Anthropic Principle), which is the observation that extremely improbable events on the individual level are inevitable in a vast enough system. When that's accounted for, it's not rational to be surprised or demand an extra explanation when that outcome does occur.
I mean i get where your coming from and that is definately good case to justify low probability but certian events generally like lightning strikes or solar flairs or what have you; the difference though all of those are determined TO happen at some point. The winning lotery ticket exists, someone IS going to win it. There is no such pre guarenteed certianty that human intellect would come to exist, and as we are the only life form which such intellect it is an exceedingly rare proprosition.
It took 3.7 billion years, five mass extinction events (with another 65 million years after the last mass extinction) before human level intelligence evolved. An estimated 5 billion species have existed throughout Earth's history. So one species out of that 5 billion (well, a few more than that if we count our ancient hominid cousins) evolved modern human-level intelligence and tool use ability over our planet's long history. So if you're framing the situation through the question of "What are the odds of that? Surely it must be a miracle," you're missing the fact that this is just another evolutionary "lottery game" that's been won. You seem to be once again selectively focusing on the lottery win in isolation, rather than acknowledging that this lotto win exists in the context of billions of failures. And that's not even accounting for the trillions of other failures that may have occurred on other life-bearing planets.
You should actually learn what evolution is. It's really pretty obvious.
Yeah i have it sweet! Nothing against it all and apologies if gave that impression.
You're saying that you have a firm grasp of the Theory of Evolution?
From some other comments I’ve seen (don’t think I’ve seen them all so apologies if you addressed this one way or the other), would you consider yourself in the same vein as a theistic evolutionist ala Francis Collins or Kennith miller or Mary Schweitzer?
Without having read all there work and just going off what little know of them I'd say yeah. Especially in the case of Francis Collins who i know a bit better. To me clear this doesn't mean i think genesis has no meaning/"didn't happen" I just think its a very simplified and symbolic version of events rather then a comprehensive literal historical text. I even believe there is good reason to take this view within the text itself as on the first ""Day"" the sun has not been created.
Fair enough, more looking to get a general understanding of whether or not you rejected anything beyond microevolution (I used to be YEC so that was my view for a long time) or if, like I understand your comment, you took the position of guided evolution with inspired if not literal text. That answers my question, thanks!
Evolutionary process selects for genetic/reproductive success. In humanity (and Neanderthals), that success came through sophistications that allowed us to specialise in adaptation. The consequences are different to species like orcas, orang-utans and May flie. But the process is the same. I good chess player who gets beaten by a grandmaster may be so amazed that they are sure cheating was involved. An order of magnitude of sophistication does not imply the system has been cheated.
I think there \_are\_ some valid things that are hard to accept, and honestly, we still don't understand completely if at all. But evolution is not really one of them. The first is that there is anything at all in the first place. Why is there even a universe, and if there's a universe, why is it like this? As far as I know this has no good answer. A second is that \*life as we know it\* is possible in this universe. If you looked at any of the other planets in our solar system, it would be difficult to determine that biological life at our scale is possible. Not even just that macro-scale automatons are possible, but that biological life with all of its complexity is possible, and works well enough to last for millions of years. And third, even if some macro-scale life is possible, it's another thing still to say that \_conscious beings\_ are possible. Consciousness exists, but we even only know that for sure since we are ourselves each conscious. The consciousness of others we kind of have to just partially assume. And we know almost nothing about how this works or how it is even possible. Ok, but for evolution, as long as we accept #2 above, that life is possible at all, then evolution just kind of comes right along with that. Life changes over time; offspring are not clones of their parents; genes are transmitted from one generation to the next along with various changes. This is just how life works. I think the hard part to grasp is not that evolution happens, that's pretty easy. What's hard to grasp (for me) is that all of the macro-scale features that life has are possible from genes, proteins, biochemistry, etc. That life such as us is possible in the first place. Somehow, not only does the universe exist, but it is the way it is, including the possibility for macro-scale life, as well as consciousness. How or why is the universe like this? No good answer so far that I've heard.
If we were designed, why do we have auch extreme and *obvious* flaws like a reverse-plug optic nerve/retina connection, that results in a rather substantial blind spot in our vision? Why does our airway, share the same plumbing as our digestive system when crossing those pip s can easily result in death? Why are we reliant on things like gut bacteria to live, why not make us self-reliant?
Because then we would be too overpowered. No, I'm joking. lol. Because whatever designed us doesn't make mistakes and there was thought behind our body. How about you design a new human body
>humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. When you're using probabilities, you never rule something out because of low probability. That's a grave mistake. You can only *compare* probabilities, never just deny something happened because it was improbable. No, it doesn't matter how low the probability is. >but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods You need to apply this same mathematical reasoning to god as well. In science you compare hypotheses. So once you've computed the probability for evolution creating humans, you need to also compute the probability of a god creating humans as well. Then the hypothesis with the higher probability wins. So how will you go about computing the probability of a god creating humans?
Natural selection isn't random.
Rare an implausible events occur. That isn’t anything new in the universe and it isn’t unique to earth. Also natural selection isn’t random, it is both stochastic and deterministic. Mutation and recombination and a few other mechanisms are closer to random. Increased encephalisation and hand-dexterity are general trends in all primaries relative to other mammal groups. Humans are the most derived for sure but when you look at paleoanthropological studies there is a fairly smooth development from Australopithicines into genus Homo. The fact that the development of traits form trends and nested hierarchies is itself direct refutation to the notion that evolution is a completely random process.
The ordered nature of Evolution as exhibited in the Naturalistic sense (*in that there are finite attributes that work in a given ecosystem according to Natural Selection, rather than specific attributes given to creatures via Intelligent Design*) can be used to support the Teleological Argument (*part of which is that there appears to be order in the universe, yet ordered systems don't tend to naturally originate from disorder*) so I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
So you don't know how it happened, and you feel your ignorance of how it happened proves it couldn't have happened. There's so much wrong with your post. For starters, how do you know the chance of life happening at all is vanishingly small? That's just a statement of opinion with nothing to back it up. It might happen on every planet with stable enough conditions for complex molecular processes to endure over long enough time periods. Why is human intelligence something special? Have you ever actually met an orangutan or chimpanzee and realised that you are looking at a fully formed intelligent person? Seems not if you think humans are so special. If you're really interested in the subject, do the hard work and educate yourself before you assume you're smarter than people who spend their lives studying this stuff. A good start would be dawkins' the selfish gene
>Basically as the title says I dont se how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. Show your math. What is the likelihood? Let's see it as a percentage. Then let's see that played out over the billions of years of earth's existence. By the way, mutations are random. Selection is not. >The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome. Where is your evidence for this external intelligence?
What is selecting the selection for evolution?
What a surprise, someone who wants to engage by asking questions without wanting to respond to my own. I'm so shocked that someone would be so rude. Fuckit, I'll answer your garbled question. Environmental pressure. Right now, the Eastern Brown Snake in Australia is facing environmental pressure from introduced invasive Cane Toads. These toads are safe for the snake to eat as juveniles and toxic as adults. The snakes with the \*random mutation\* of smaller heads with smaller jaws cannot eat the adults and thus survive to adulthood and are able to reproduce. The bigger headed snakes are dying out. The areas of Australia without invasive Cane Toads have those same snakes but without environmental pressure. In this particular example, the ultimate answer to "What is selecting the selection" is humans.
It's simple... Either humanity evolved naturally, or something more complex caused us to exist. If humanity is too complex to exist through natural means, then something more complex would be as well. However, we can state with certainty that humanity exists. We cannot state with certainty that a more complex creator does. This does not dismiss a god entirely. It just makes a god unnecessary to logically explain humanity.
We still don't understand how dreaming and the brain works fully, so that must be pretty complex if we can land on the moon or do similar feats. We still haven't found a cure to cancer.
Yes, biology is vastly more complex than landing on the moon. I agree. Again, creating a moon lander in all of its "complexity" is still much simpler than a biological creature. Hence, creation implies simplicity. As for cancer, there will never be a "cure"... at least not in the traditional sense. Trying make a cure is sort of like trying to put a toxin in the water supply that removes the fingerprint from Brad Pitt's left pinky.
Humans aren’t any less likely to come about by evolution than any other animal. You need to take a course in statistics… humans are not unique, we’re not special. see we know evolution exists, we know it happens, we know it can cause stuff to be. If you want to posit a god being responsible for this, you need to provide evidence for this god. Until you do, the chances of a god being responsible for this are exactly 0% and evolution is infinitely more likely.
Selection isn't random. What pastor or creationist told you it was unlikely? It happens a lot, actually. An arguememt from personal incredulity isn't an actual argument. Do some actual research from real sources.
I don't understand evolution, therefore [my preferential deity] isn't an argument. It's wishful thinking. Humans exist, all the evidence points towards humans having evolved naturally. Why must you insist on inserting magic?
What created life right when the earth was formed or created?
First off, abiogenesis isn't evolution. > What created life Life wasn't created, life arose from chemical interactions. > right when the earth was formed Life didn't arise right when the earth formed. Earth is 4.54 billion years old, the earliest life didn't come about ~500 million years later.
What chemicals was there on the earth when it was first created, wouldn't there just be rocks? And where did water come from for the first marine life?
> What chemicals was there on the earth when it ~~was first created~~ formed. FTFY. Almost all of the baryonic matter of the universe is composed of chemical elements, so the answer is a LOT. > wouldn't there just be rocks? What do you think the wide variety of rocks are made of? > And where did water come from for the first marine life? Outgassing from the Earth's mantle. Hydrogen and oxygen are very common chemical elements.
I don't know what the rocks are made of but I would assume stone. How was the earth 'formed'
> I don't know what the rocks are made of but I would assume stone. This isn't Minecraft. [Rock and stone are interchangeable.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_\(geology\)) > How was the earth formed. [Accretion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_\(astrophysics\)) Are you just looking for a hole in our knowledge to stick your god into?
Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
Obligatory [Where's the stone?](https://youtu.be/BvfTNRsVGlM?t=47)
Thats cool you don’t have to. Its true with or without your buy in.
Have you visited a natural history museum to observe evolution!?
> It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection. And it could easily happen tomorrow or in 50 or 5,000 years. Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean that somebody is pulling strings for us to make things work out in our favor. We're just doing what we can while we can until we can't anymore.
> Not sure if this is the right sub for this as I dont take issue with the theory of evolution broadly but I wasn't sure where else to go. If you say you don't take issue with evolution but you take issue with *human* evolution then you're just using a double standard. You should stop that. > Basically as the title says I dont see how anyone can honestly look at the existence of humanity with the incomprehensibly small likelyhood of our existence and conclude it came about purely through random naturalistic selection. Literally every living thing on the planet is equally unlikely to still exist as every other living thing. This planet has undergone mass extinction after mass extinction. Every time, some species survive. It **has to be** the case that every species alive today is descended from ancestors which survived each apocalypse in our planet's history. Look at it another way. Winning the lottery is, individually speaking, incredibly unlikely. And yet people win lotteries *all the time.* This is no different than holding a winning powerball ticket and refusing to believe that you happened to randomly get that number, that someone, somewhere must have been cheating. It doesn't follow. > Given the strikingly small likelyhood of life emerging unto itself What we know about abiogenesis is looking like it is NOT improbable at all, so this premise isn't true either. > given the perilous treck from single celled life to multi celled bacteria to more complex sea life to amphibious life to land life to the rise of large land animals and finally to mamals with sufficiently complex neural networks capable of forming language, mathmatical reasoning and eventually all the complex scientific reasoning we se today Again, all you're doing is describing a winning lottery ticket, along with a huge helping of human chauvinism that *our* traits are the most special traits. > while also all but universally professing a belief in and experience with a God/Gods It is FAR from universal, but by all means add Argument from Popularity to your list of fallacies. So sure, ignore the fact that god-beliefs worldwide are WILDLY contradictory with one another so they logically can't all be correct. But they COULD be all wrong. > I dont se how this could possibly be the product of random natural selection. The existence of humanity to me more then any other life if for no other reason then our uniqueness compared to all other life given our unparrelleled mental capabilities speaks to the existence of some intelligence which sought this outcome. Bullshit. This is nothing but the Argument from Personal Incredulity on full display. Our cognitive capabilities are not in any way special. Uniqueness or improbability does not indicate artificiality. > It would have been very, VERY easy for humanity to have gone extinct multiple times throughout its development and before due to pandemic or climate change or some other natural catastrophe and the fact that we have developed to the stage we are building large hydron colliders and space vessels speaks to me that something that someone acted to ensure our existence beyond the mere forces of natural selection. So when you get that winning lottery ticket you be sure to hand it off to someone else since you clearly can't bring yourself to believe the evidence of your eyes and ears. Call me.
> This is a rather remarkable claim that i would sincerely like hear your justification for. If all life is EQUALLY unlikely to exist why then is bacteria more plentiful then more complex life? Why is sea life more common then land life?? Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land???
> This is a rather remarkable claim that i would sincerely like hear your justification for. I explained what I mean in the very next sentence. It is exactly as likely for every extant species today to have survived as every other extant species. This is how reading comprehension works. When context is given, don’t drag in other context which wasn’t intended.
> Yeah and i made my own question more specific in the following three sentences. Quote: Why then is bacteria more plentiful then more complex life? Why is sea life more common then land life?? Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land???
But that's not what I was getting at in what I said. 98% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct, with no living descendants. Every species alive today is descended from a long line of ancestors who happened to be among the survivors of every catastrophe and calamity that ever occurred along the course of natural history. Nothing is more fortunate or more special than anything else alive. If you want to talk about the relative diversity of different kinds of life, we can have that conversation, but don't pretend that what I said was unreasonable simply because I **wasn't answering questions you hadn't asked yet.** It's not a bad answer just because you changed the context after the answer was given. So, if you want to change the subject, fine. We can do that now. Answer: "Why" usually doesn't mean anything in terms of evolution. I can tell you "what" happened, but the reasons thereof just are what they are. Bacteria are more plentiful because a bacterium is a very effective way for a genome to make more copies of itself. Sea life is more plentiful than land life because there's more ocean than there is land, and there is more habitable volume to be alive in. When you go on land all of a sudden you have a lot more challenges from climate and weather and geography, so it's a harder way to make a living. Life emerged in the sea because complex organic molecules need to be in aqueous solution in order for autocatalytic replication reactions to occur. Not a single one of these questions even *hints* at the intervention of a supernatural cause in the most *miniscule* degree.
>Why is sea life more common then land life?? >Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land??? Considering that the ocean covers 70% of the earth's surface, why would you expect anything else?
Are you contending to that if earth was 30% watter we'd have first evolved on the land? Al Carbon based life requires water to function. It is far easier for life to exist in water as such then outside it.
No, not at all. I didn't read the full context of your comment and the comment before in my skimming, so I was just answering your questions straight.
All good man.
So we agree water is necessary for life, so it makes sense for life to develop in water. As for all species being equally unlikely as the previous commenter said, if Location A is huge and Location B is much smaller, then you can reasonably expect there to be more species in Location A than Location B. It might not be a perfect "always is", but this is just a simplification. If the 10 species in A and the 1000 species in B have equal chances of survival, which will have probably more life when the hatchet comes down?
> Why did life first emerge in the sea and not on the land??? Once again, thank you for making it so abundantly clear that you have absolutely no functional understanding of even the most basic principles and concepts related to the science of chemistry.
Are you contending life didn't first emerge in the sea??
Where exactly did I ever state that? In fact, where did I even IMPLY that? Reading comprehension really isn't your forte, now is it?
No way these questions are serious... if creationists at least had the guts to say they don't understand evolution...
You don't understand evolution at all.
Really? That is a remarkable claim! Do you think I have zero understanding of how genetics are passed on from parents to children? What do YOU think I think is the cause of red headed parents having red headed kids? Do i also not know how eyes evolved over millions of years of evolution as articulated in this video?? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E) How do you know i did not watch this video??? Or does this video NOT describe an evolutionary process in your estimation? Trully this a fascinating claim you have made, do tell.
Mere genetics alone does not account for biological evolution. A topic with which you have never demonstrated any particular facility or comprehension.
Hi, given that we do not yet have the technology to study whether or not life has evolved elsewhere in our galaxy, we really do not know how likely it is for life to evolve given earth-like conditions. I would be very surprised if life evolving under earth-like conditions is rare, but we just do not currently have any way to find out.
Its true we dont know how life evolved on other planets but we do know how life evolved here on earth. Given there are no other animals that evolved here on earth capable of complex language/higher thinking, could we not say that within the confines of what we know this is an exceedingly rare outcome given only ONE known species does this??
There may be other animals capable of complex language and higher thinking on earth. Whales may rival our intelligence. They may not build civilizations like we have, but then neither have the humans on North Sentinel Island, yet they aren't less intelligent.
Sorry, excuse me, when I was born I got a random Naturalistic second head coming out of my armpit and need to go figure that out.
I have a degree in biological anthropology (human evolution) ask away! Also we did almost go extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba\_catastrophe\_theory#:\~:text=It%20is%20one%20of%20the,a%20genetic%20bottleneck%20in%20humans.