What's the point of speaking of evolution as having purpose?

Thanks for showing up, rosborne. Teleology is the word I learned long ago for all that.

Warning: constant rambling ahead.

It seems that when we look at patterns found in nature, when we group them, often attached to these understandings of the events found in nature we attach things such thing as "purpose" to them. For example, we look at the ecosystem, we see that there is a food chain occuring, and some of us try to justify certain things in society by referring to it. It's as if the events occuring in nature outside humanity is given a God status to it, a status that is not to be violated. A person thinking that they can do whatever they like would justify their actions by saying that "hey in nature, the strong takes over the weak." Such rationalization is what we now call an anti-social argument, an argument used by psychopaths or sociopaths. Behind these arguments, the argumentors fail to realize, that just because something is happening in nature, it does not give it any inherent justification. Events occur for random things (in all probability), meaning that it is not guided by a supreme hand that controls every events. They also fail to realize that events are not static, they change. Finally, what they fail to realize most of all, is that people are a part of nature. Thus, many people see the irrationale of such arguments, and they look for the truth, looking at not merely facts recited in words but facts recited in the understanding of a certain thing, and we see how such an argument has no basic grounds.

We are part of the system and anything we do or say is an event occuring in the system, so an argument of something doing a certain thing because it's naturally justified will not hold.

So why speak of evolution as something purposeful?

Maybe because the odds against all of this happening purely accidentally are astronomical. This world is not an accident my friend.

Maybe because the odds against all of this happening purely accidentally are astronomical.

Ray wrote:

So why speak of evolution as something purposeful?

Evolution has no purpose, and is not a purpose. It is an aspect of nature, nothing more.

Many people have a hard time imagining a universe without purpose, or even a world without thought. Try it for a moment... it gives a strange feeling if you can get it...

Imagine the primordial Earth, with only single celled creatures living in its seas. The sun rises and sets each day, the waves lap at the shores. Storms sweep the oceans and the land, but there is nothing there to see it, nothing watching, nothing thinking. The planet is like this for hundreds of millions of years as continents drift about on the surface like butter on a hot skillet. Life is growing in the seas, but there is nothing watching, nothing cares.

This may seem like a fantasy world to many, but it really happened. It's our history and it's very real. Just as the world existed before each of us was born, it also existed before the human race was born. And it existed before the first flickers of thought ever formed the the simplest of neural bundles in the crawlies of ancient seas.

The naked truth is that there is nothing watching us and nothing putting things in motion. There never has been. As far as we know, even today, we humans are the first and only thing which has ever perceived the processes of nature. Is it any surprise that most people see those processes as reflections of themselves, and ascribe to them, a purpose.

John Creasy wrote:

Maybe because the odds against all of this happening purely accidentally are astronomical.

When dropping a penny from a skyscraper, the odds against it landing on a *particular* spot are astronomical. And yet the penny will land someplace every time.

Since we will either evolve to ask the question or not, and since the question is always the same once we evolve to ask it, the chance that we are asking it, is not astronomical, but inevitible.

Maybe because the odds against all of this happening purely accidentally are astronomical. This world is not an accident my friend.

We are reading the aftermath of 'chance' and any awe is totally unjustified. The wondrous colours of butterfly wings are mere sideshows to the virulent paracitic uglyness of the 'natural kingdom'.
It is now our opportunity to change evolutionary history, create new forms of life that need not kill each other to survive; or the whole thing may go up in smoke!

The fact is, the conditions of this planet are so fragile that if you changed one aspect (oxygen, distance to the sun, etc.) life would be impossible. Yet we are still spinning around perfectly after all these thousands of years....

What are the odds against an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being that created everything?

What are the odds that non-life can produce life by pure chance?

The fact is, the conditions of this planet are so fragile that if you changed one aspect (oxygen, distance to the sun, etc.) life would be impossible.

We are here because of our environment....not the earth is here because of us.

I disagree; our environment is not defined by "our needs." Nature does whatever it does without regard to "our needs."

John Creasy wrote:

The fact is, the conditions of this planet are so fragile that if you changed one aspect (oxygen, distance to the sun, etc.) life would be impossible.

No. Only *our* form of life might be impossible, but other forms of life would have evolved to fit the new conditions you propose. And if those forms of life happened to evolve intelligence, they would be asking the exact same questions we are asking, and they would be saying "our conditions are perfect for life, any change would make us impossible".

And that brings us fill circle to where we are now.

Arguments of probability and arguments of condition perfection are non-sequitir.

rosborne979 wrote:

John Creasy wrote:

The fact is, the conditions of this planet are so fragile that if you changed one aspect (oxygen, distance to the sun, etc.) life would be impossible.

No. Only *our* form of life might be impossible, but other forms of life would have evolved to fit the new conditions you propose. And if those forms of life happened to evolve intelligence, they would be asking the exact same questions we are asking, and they would be saying "our conditions are perfect for life, any change would make us impossible".

And that brings us fill circle to where we are now.

Arguments of probability and arguments of condition perfection are non-sequitir.

Can you prove that a single celled orgainism is my ancestor?

Why didn't all single celled organisms evolve? How did the first organism just magically come to life from nothing?