RE: Detecting design or intent in nature
January 23, 2015 at 4:48 pm
(This post was last modified: January 23, 2015 at 4:49 pm by Surgenator.)
(January 23, 2015 at 4:15 pm)Heywood Wrote:Sorry but I'm not interested in your equivocation fallacy. It is questionable if meme's even exist, unlike genes. Also, I fail to see how selective pressure is placed upon memes.(January 23, 2015 at 4:07 pm)Surgenator Wrote: Automobiles do not evolve. Automobiles come from automobile factories. Automobiles do not grow up to be automobile factories. Automobile factories do not mate with other factories to make automobiles.
Evolution doesn't require self reproduction only replication. If you think evolution requires self reproduction you do not understand evolution. Memetic evolution is a concept that has been around longer than you have been alive and memes do not self reproduce....but they do evolve. Why? Because they are replicated.
Quote:(January 23, 2015 at 4:07 pm)Surgenator Wrote: As an example of evolution without intellect, how about bacteria evolving to consume plastics or nylon. In both cases, humans didn't do any selection process or genetic engineering. This wasn't done is some science lab. The only thing humans did was throw away trash.
You are giving an example of the system of biological evolution. We have no observations of this system being implemented. It fails to support proposition 2.
If I take the nylon example, the bacteria in the waste water pond develops the ability to break up a compound that NEVER EXISTED on planet earth before. The bacteria's cousins (non-waste water version) do not have this ability. So what do you conclude, an intelligence secretly engineered these bacteria to eat nylon? Or, did the bacteria evolved the property itself?