A Modder's Guide to the Advanced Disease Structure of the Combat Mod

[Noriad2]

Most life on earth is connected through the food chain. Which means that the chemicals that make up plants are mostly the same chemicals that make up animal bodies and the human body. This is down to chemical stereo isomers. D-glucose sugar occurs widely in nature while its stereo-isomer, L-glucose, does not. Our bodies can't even use L-glucose.

Unless life on earth was "seeded" somehow from other parts of space, or was designed by the same designer, we are most likely completely inedible for extraterrestrial lifeforms.

I recall that the science fiction author Asimov mentioned in one of his "Foundation Series" books that the direction in which a screw must be turned (clockwise or counterclockwise) will probably be the same many thousands of years in the future as it is now. Because changing it is too much fuss with no benefits.

 

[Thunderbrd]

Unless life on earth was "seeded" somehow from other parts of space, or was designed by the same designer, we are most likely completely inedible for extraterrestrial lifeforms.

I'm suggesting that it's likely that it was... on both accounts. The same designer could be a natural mathematical process or intelligent design, I'm not sure it matters which, but when you study the evolution of flight it becomes impossible to think there isn't some sort of intelligent design behind the process of evolution imo. Random chance and natural selection cannot account for every complex step towards flight taking place in perfect progression as if life KNEW that eventually enabling the creature to fly was the goal. I'm not saying this is evidence of a large scale singular creator god. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If there were THAT sort of being, then these stages of development would not have been so necessary. I'm saying that life itself seems to be an ongoing modding project, with some sort of intelligence continuously working the dna codes, evolving with both long and short term goals for further adaptability and survivability for life itself, as if the essence of all planetary life forms knows that its own goal is to survive (and thrive) as a whole, no matter what form it is that it survives in. As a result, one can imagine that wherever life exists on a planet, it must therefore, as a body, also consider a means to survive being to seed the galaxy with its tendrils of life. And how likely, if that were true as well, would it be that life found Earth as a verdant place to spread, from elsewhere? Perhaps there is a more common central source?

Sure, there could be other planetary life systems entirely, where the screws turned the other way for example. And perhaps there are really only two forms of life forms. In such a case then perhaps diseases would not cross (though could be manufactured to infect only one side of the coin.) This won't be dissimilar to the mechanics of computer viruses vs actual viruses. All of this is very easily crafted though in a Disease mechanic, with UnitCombat and Heritage base prerequisites.

 

[Faustmouse]

The argument that something complex like the eye or flight could not evolve without design is just a sign than humans are bad at realizing how long billions of years are.
IIRC, a mutation that makes you 1% better at flying/surviving/saving energy etc... becomes dominant in a population after just 100 generations. For most species, that's like 100 years. You can have 10.000.000 such optimizations withing 1 billion years of evolution.

Flight didn't evolve because someone/something thought it would be usefull, but rather as a chain of events:
Feathers are very good at isolating body heat: They are light and contain quite a bit of air. They are also not too different from fur, which evolved earlier.
If you live on a tree, you have to be very good at jumping from one branch to another, or get eaten. The further you can jump, the more options you have. And feathers allowed you to glide. Then you had the first creatures that could use their "arm" for short flights (think about chicken), and then longer and longer flights.

If you could glide 1% better, you survived more often and this mutation started to spread. All features that make up a perfect flying animal (strong breast muscles, light bones, perfect aligned feathers etc) are a result from this rule.

and how likely, if that were true as well, would it be that life found Earth as a verdant place to spread, from elsewhere?

We circle a star that is just right - at our distance we have liquid water, without being so close that we get huge amounts of X-Ray radiation from it.
Our moon is extremely big for the small size of our planet. And it stabilizes earth axis a lot, avoiding extreme weather conditions.
We have a very big gas giant - Jupiter - in our outer system, that sheperds asteroids and protects us from a bombardment.
We have a magnetic field that shields us from cosmic radiation.
We are in quiet part of the milkey way - not much gamma ray bursts can hit us (but they probably did, leading to mass extinctions even if they were far far away)
Plate tectonics - they probably fueled early life.

Not saying that earth is unique with these features, but (of our current knowledge), it is extremely rare.

 

[Thunderbrd]

The argument that something complex like the eye or flight could not evolve without design is just a sign than humans are bad at realizing how long billions of years are.
IIRC, a mutation that makes you 1% better at flying/surviving/saving energy etc... becomes dominant in a population after just 100 generations. For most species, that's like 100 years. You can have 10.000.000 such optimizations withing 1 billion years of evolution.

Flight didn't evolve because someone/something thought it would be usefull, but rather as a chain of events:
Feathers are very good at isolating body heat: They are light and contain quite a bit of air. They are also not too different from fur, which evolved earlier.
If you live on a tree, you have to be very good at jumping from one branch to another, or get eaten. The further you can jump, the more options you have. And feathers allowed you to glide. Then you had the first creatures that could use their "arm" for short flights (think about chicken), and then longer and longer flights.

If you could glide 1% better, you survived more often and this mutation started to spread. All features that make up a perfect flying animal (strong breast muscles, light bones, perfect aligned feathers etc) are a result from this rule.

When you look at the mutation stages that led to flight, there are many places where this thinking breaks down, where the next step in the progress was clearly less beneficial than the prior. The design wasn't just one natural more beneficial step after another.

 

[tmv]

when you study the evolution of flight it becomes impossible to think there isn't some sort of intelligent design behind the process of evolution

I am very sorry but I cannot let that stand. Evolution of flight strongly supports the theory of evolution - in fact, flight has evolved (at least) three times: Insects, birds, mammals (bat). The problem with Intelligent Design is that flight was developed independently - the fact that this problem had already been solved has not made this process easier, and sometimes a different solution was found. On top of this:

If a feature which developed in mammals only 10 million years ago suddenly appeared fully-formed in a reptile from the same period with no reptilian antecedent, this would be an example of a feature jumping from one branch of the evolutionary tree to another. This is quite normal in man-made systems. For example, fuel injection started in race cars and slowly developed from primitive mechanically metered injectors to sophisticated computer-controlled fuel-injection systems. But when the Ford Crown Victoria switched from carburetors to fuel injection, it did not follow this slow progression; computer-controlled fuel injection systems simply appeared in the product line one year, having jumped there from other product lines where all of this development had occurred.

We have never found even a single example of such a "branch-jumping" event anywhere in the millions of species of the animal kingdom. Features slowly develop within their branch of origin, and advanced versions do not suddenly appear in other branches. Sub-cellular parasites can transfer genetic material between organisms on occasion (in fact, we have "parasitic" mitichondrial DNA in our own bodies, which only further establishes the pathways of evolutionary transmission), but the kind of advanced feature migration which is common in man-made systems is completely absent from the animal kingdom. [source: http://www.creationtheory.org/Introduction/Page08.xhtml]

This is from an engineer who has written quite a lot about "Creationism versus Science" (which is in fact the headline of that site).

When you look at the mutation stages that led to flight, there are many places where this thinking breaks down, where the next step in the progress was clearly less beneficial than the prior.

Could you give an example? I really cannot think of one regarding flight, but with eyes, a development of light-sensitive cells is already beneficial, and from there these cells can develop further.

 

[JosEPh_II]

This thread is rapidly going nowhere now.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

I am very sorry but I cannot let that stand. Evolution of flight strongly supports the theory of evolution - in fact, flight has evolved (at least) three times: Insects, birds, mammals (bat). The problem with Intelligent Design is that flight was developed independently - the fact that this problem had already been solved has not made this process easier, and sometimes a different solution was found.

1) I don't have any disrespect whatsoever for your outlook and so I take no offense whatsoever in your statements. I feel that if whether or not there is an intelligence BEHIND design is incredibly debate worthy, intensely interesting, and if there IS, one thing that can be clear is that such an intelligence has cleverly sought to make it impossible to determine that it exists. Perhaps that's the point of the design in the first place, to give itself limitless games to play (manifest into) where it could forget how limitlessly powerful it actually is. AKA, any possible creator does NOT want us to be able to prove it exists and has been very clever to cover its tracks and leave alternative answers. Therefore, nobody could be blamed for being able to find a way to discount larger scale intelligences operating behind the curtain.

2) From one angle or another, the path to flight must vary and we aren't talking about simple engineering but coding in DNA which has its own massive unique challenges to overcome to get a successful life form from point A to point B that would differ dramatically depending on what point A actually is. In other words, designing flight onto the template of an insectoid base form would be a very different challenge from designing flight onto a form much like a dinosaur and so on. The fact that it CAN be designed at all, given the massively complex physics involved, is a big part of what, to me, indicates intelligent design underlying things. I'm sure an insectoid species, if it could (and perhaps it does) think AS a hive species mind considering its role in the future and how to guide its own survival adaptations, would think at some point, gee it would be a hell of an advantage to be able to fly from here to there. Without having such an aspect of large scale oversight, would the genetic code itself ever consider this on a chemical level where it has no concept of having a 'strategy' for development? I doubt it. This means that given the proliferation of flight and all the many different ways it has been discovered possible by different species, it cannot be uncommon for a species to 'desire' this adaptation and without that 'desire' I doubt life could ever have achieved it, through even one species, let alone so many different ways.

3) Regardless of whether there is an intelligence (or intelligences) BEHIND design, all arguments to suggest there are not must admit that the result of successful design, leading to the long term adaptable survival of a species, is INTELLIGENT. This means that I can go back to the original point of the argument that life will naturally gravitate towards successful mechanisms and thus it should not be unusual to find, where life exists on other planets, very similar species with very similar functions and thus finding a new batch of hostile microbes, able to exploit our defenses in ways our Earthbound developed selves could never imagine, would be extremely HIGH rather than unlikely to be compatible enough to infect us, and vice versa.

This is from an engineer who has written quite a lot about "Creationism versus Science" (which is in fact the headline of that site).

The engineer makes an excellent argument that supports what I said earlier, that there is not ONE underlying force of intelligence in design. Rather, it strongly supports that each species somehow forms its own underlying intelligence to guide its development.

Could you give an example? I really cannot think of one regarding flight, but with eyes, a development of light-sensitive cells is already beneficial, and from there these cells can develop further.

I'm not sure if there could be found an objective example... that would be an interesting subject of further research. I've seen some shows that break down all the stages from dinosaurs to avians and it really struck me that many of those stages would NOT be more beneficial, particularly in some of the bone and hip structure adjustments, so it was very unlikely that we are looking at a survival-driven evolution of purely the path of least resistance, which mathematically is what would be necessary for no intelligence to exist behind design. But if life, through the process of survival of the fittest, CAN find its way to flight in so many different ways as has been pointed out, then THAT strongly suggests that the architect of physics itself wanted this process to take place, for is not flight a fantastic IDEA? For that to be the natural result of a natural process of evolution strikes me as beyond the pale to imagine then that 'what is natural' was not intelligently designed itself.

If we look too closely, we may miss the beauty of the artist by looking at the manner in which the brushstrokes took place. Beauty, is not often the result of chaos.

This thread is rapidly going nowhere now.

Don't miss the point... we're talking about the full range of what the disease system should and should not be capable of modeling. There IS a point. Then again, the whole point of game modeling is to consider creation itself in new ways. IMO, game design is a very spiritual effort, no matter what you believe. You're ALWAYS making a much deeper point, whether you know you are or not.

 

[Faustmouse]

This means that I can go back to the original point of the argument that life will naturally gravitate towards successful mechanisms and thus it should not be unusual to find, where life exists on other planets, very similar species with very similar functions and thus finding a new batch of hostile microbes, able to exploit our defenses in ways our Earthbound developed selves could never imagine, would be extremely HIGH rather than unlikely to be compatible enough to infect us, and vice versa.

Why?
I agree that chances are high that other life we find is based on carbons, and probably uses DNA and Proteins mainly. There are other alternatives than DNA thought.
But the main reason that I doubt that is that you won't find a computer virus targeting specifically the system "Bloinks". Simply because it doesn't exist. You have no reason whatsorever to design such a virus because it targets nothing at all. Once you invent the Bloinks system, chances are that the virus to target it will come up. BUT if the system is completely different from anything we know and you are only allowed to create your virus by alterning existing ones, it would never happen. That's the same as coming as a human to a new world.

 

[JosEPh_II]

Don't miss the point... we're talking about the full range of what the disease system should and should not be capable of modeling. There IS a point. Then again, the whole point of game modeling is to consider creation itself in new ways. IMO, game design is a very spiritual effort, no matter what you believe. You're ALWAYS making a much deeper point, whether you know you are or not.

Okay I'm out of this one. Bye Bye have fun.

JosEPh

 

[Thunderbrd]

Why?
I agree that chances are high that other life we find is based on carbons, and probably uses DNA and Proteins mainly. There are other alternatives than DNA thought.
But the main reason that I doubt that is that you won't find a computer virus targeting specifically the system "Bloinks". Simply because it doesn't exist. You have no reason whatsorever to design such a virus because it targets nothing at all. Once you invent the Bloinks system, chances are that the virus to target it will come up. BUT if the system is completely different from anything we know and you are only allowed to create your virus by alterning existing ones, it would never happen. That's the same as coming as a human to a new world.

Since you mention viruses, consider this, a virus is an entity that re-codes the DNA when introduced into the system. You would need to have life be based on something other than DNA, which is kinda like an operating system right? So might it be possible that life cannot exist without DNA? That there really is only one operating system that works? Whether it spontaneously comes into being on one planet or another or on multiple planets, it's still DNA, following very simple chemical processes as it does now. A virus just basically inserts it's DNA and it naturally is attracted to replace sections of the DNA in the host and that tells the host cell how to replicate the virus. In itself, we have no idea where these kinds of things come from so may prove to eventually be PURELY designed by intelligent races as very little could explain them except perhaps total random chance that a DNA sequence somewhere mutated to have just this sort of viral coding in their DNA string and it just started doing what the virus does to self-replicate and there you have it. There's still a debate as to whether they are alive or not at all.

Point being that the chemical-math in the DNA stream is the coding system of life itself and if you have microbes interacting with the coding system of life itself at the most fundamental levels, why should we be surprised if alien life forms and microbes might not attack us as they have learned how to attack other DNA based life forms?

I get what you're saying but I'm saying that there may really only be one Bloinks system for all of life everywhere period and MAYBE there are some other systems that aren't based on carbon at all but everything here seems to point to there being one way for DNA to be, perhaps throughout the entire galaxy, and while DNA can take a mind numbing amount of differing arrangements, that's the basis of the system and it very well could be the only system. Obviously, AI we create, if ever to reach true intelligence, would be a system of a different nature entirely, but intelligent or not, could it ever really be called LIFE? And is there a difference between life and mere self-awareness? Could this difference be inherent in the design of life from the basis upwards? A basis there is no comparison or alternative to perhaps?

It was mentioned earlier that life could POSSIBLY have taken an entirely opposite arrangement leading to a mirrored system that isn't fully compatible with each other, but if I recall, there was a physics argument that suggested that the alternative could and would never have happened due to some kind of energetic leaning in the direction it took. Meh... don't remember enough of this discussion from Biology though.

 

[tmv]

1) I don't have any disrespect whatsoever for your outlook and so I take no offense whatsoever in your statements. I feel that if whether or not there is an intelligence BEHIND design is incredibly debate worthy, intensely interesting, and if there IS, one thing that can be clear is that such an intelligence has cleverly sought to make it impossible to determine that it exists. Perhaps that's the point of the design in the first place, to give itself limitless games to play (manifest into) where it could forget how limitlessly powerful it actually is. AKA, any possible creator does NOT want us to be able to prove it exists and has been very clever to cover its tracks and leave alternative answers. Therefore, nobody could be blamed for being able to find a way to discount larger scale intelligences operating behind the curtain.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must grow, but it doesn't tell you where the little entropy (or the massive negentropy) in the beginning came from. Statistical physics tells you that you can think of entropy as likelihood, so that makes the beginning of the universe an incredibly unlikely state to ever reach.

2) From one angle or another, the path to flight must vary and we aren't talking about simple engineering but coding in DNA which has its own massive unique challenges to overcome to get a successful life form from point A to point B that would differ dramatically depending on what point A actually is. In other words, designing flight onto the template of an insectoid base form would be a very different challenge from designing flight onto a form much like a dinosaur and so on. The fact that it CAN be designed at all, given the massively complex physics involved, is a big part of what, to me, indicates intelligent design underlying things. I'm sure an insectoid species, if it could (and perhaps it does) think AS a hive species mind considering its role in the future and how to guide its own survival adaptations, would think at some point, gee it would be a hell of an advantage to be able to fly from here to there. Without having such an aspect of large scale oversight, would the genetic code itself ever consider this on a chemical level where it has no concept of having a 'strategy' for development? I doubt it. This means that given the proliferation of flight and all the many different ways it has been discovered possible by different species, it cannot be uncommon for a species to 'desire' this adaptation and without that 'desire' I doubt life could ever have achieved it, through even one species, let alone so many different ways.

What we really need is intermediate benefits, and since dinosaurs apparently had feathers already (even the non-flying ones), that one is apparently taken care of already. Then we have gliding, which should be less demanding on the body, while giving you big advantages already, like escaping from certain death-traps on top of hills/mountains.

3) Regardless of whether there is an intelligence (or intelligences) BEHIND design, all arguments to suggest there are not must admit that the result of successful design, leading to the long term adaptable survival of a species, is INTELLIGENT. This means that I can go back to the original point of the argument that life will naturally gravitate towards successful mechanisms and thus it should not be unusual to find, where life exists on other planets, very similar species with very similar functions and thus finding a new batch of hostile microbes, able to exploit our defenses in ways our Earthbound developed selves could never imagine, would be extremely HIGH rather than unlikely to be compatible enough to infect us, and vice versa.

There are also quite a few examples of bad adaptations (like the nerve "wiring" of the eye or the fact that breathing through the mouth has given us the "ability" to choke) that speak rather strongly against this.

Point being that the chemical-math in the DNA stream is the coding system of life itself and if you have microbes interacting with the coding system of life itself at the most fundamental levels, why should we be surprised if alien life forms and microbes might not attack us as they have learned how to attack other DNA based life forms?

DNA on its own does nothing, you also need the "translation" to proteins.

 

[Faustmouse]

Since you mention viruses, consider this, a virus is an entity that re-codes the DNA when introduced into the system. You would need to have life be based on something other than DNA, which is kinda like an operating system right? So might it be possible that life cannot exist without DNA? That there really is only one operating system that works? Whether it spontaneously comes into being on one planet or another or on multiple planets, it's still DNA, following very simple chemical processes as it does now. A virus just basically inserts it's DNA and it naturally is attracted to replace sections of the DNA in the host and that tells the host cell how to replicate the virus. In itself, we have no idea where these kinds of things come from so may prove to eventually be PURELY designed by intelligent races as very little could explain them except perhaps total random chance that a DNA sequence somewhere mutated to have just this sort of viral coding in their DNA string and it just started doing what the virus does to self-replicate and there you have it. There's still a debate as to whether they are alive or not at all.

A virus needs special molecules to recognize a host cell. It's not only DNA that allows a virus to infect a cell, otherwise your plants could catch a cold If you don't have DNA but RNA or PNA or something else, a virus possibly could not infect you, but that's not all that stops it from doing so.

IF DNA or life was designed by intelligent life, where did that came from? It has to start somewhere.

A virus is not alive. It lacks many features that in the definition of life. And evolution is pretty simple: the DNA wants to replicate as often as possible and therefore adopsts new features. That could be light sensitive cells, toxins, beautiful feathers to attract mates, intelligence... everything that helps. A virus is nothing different. A small package of DNA that adopted to efficiently replicate itself. Also, the fact that a virus targeting bacteria (which appeared over 1 billion years earlier) are WAY more advanced than those targeting higher cells supports the theory of evolution.

Early life started as DNA packed in lipid membranes. Extremely simple. It's easy to merge your (if you are a proto-virus) membrane with these from your host cells. The cells evolve in a different way, getting more complex, while you are getting better at hacking them. It's a step by step process, not something that appeared over night.

Point being that the chemical-math in the DNA stream is the coding system of life itself and if you have microbes interacting with the coding system of life itself at the most fundamental levels, why should we be surprised if alien life forms and microbes might not attack us as they have learned how to attack other DNA based life forms?

Because biological processes are extremely specific. Just because you have a key and a door has a lock, you can't open it.It has to fit. And you would never make a key that doesn't fit a specific lock that doesn't exist.

I get what you're saying but I'm saying that there may really only be one Bloinks system for all of life everywhere period and MAYBE there are some other systems that aren't based on carbon at all but everything here seems to point to there being one way for DNA to be, perhaps throughout the entire galaxy, and while DNA can take a mind numbing amount of differing arrangements, that's the basis of the system and it very well could be the only system.

DNA consists basically of a backbone to formchains and 4 bases that can form weak bonds with each other. There are MANY different molekules that have the same features. True, it might be the best system and life everywhere relies on it, but we don't know. And as I said, even if an alien virus / bacteria would be based on the excact same DNA we do, it still won't target us because it won't recognize our cell surface proteins as host cells, simply because it never encountered us.

It was mentioned earlier that life could POSSIBLY have taken an entirely opposite arrangement leading to a mirrored system that isn't fully compatible with each other, but if I recall, there was a physics argument that suggested that the alternative could and would never have happened due to some kind of energetic leaning in the direction it took. Meh... don't remember enough of this discussion from Biology though.

There are many more possibilities than just a mirrored world.
But even if we take the panspermie theory (life originated somewhere and then spread from there) and we have common anchestors with aliens, we have 3+ billion years of evolution in different ecosystems that seperate us now. That's hell a lot time!

 

[Thunderbrd]

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must grow, but it doesn't tell you where the little entropy (or the massive negentropy) in the beginning came from. Statistical physics tells you that you can think of entropy as likelihood, so that makes the beginning of the universe an incredibly unlikely state to ever reach.

Sounds like a good argument for a central intelligence existing.

What we really need is intermediate benefits, and since dinosaurs apparently had feathers already (even the non-flying ones), that one is apparently taken care of already. Then we have gliding, which should be less demanding on the body, while giving you big advantages already, like escaping from certain death-traps on top of hills/mountains.

You're honestly suggesting that with every step there's an intermediate benefit and that this DOESN'T show that there's likely an underlying intelligence in the design of the fabric of reality itself?

The argument supports an intelligence behind design either way. Either something as crazy complex and unbelievable as flight is a natural result of billions of years of evolution and that is in itself showing that just because the idea of flight is cool that the very nature of the physics of evolution will lead to creatures that fly, or intelligence is driving evolution for the sake of the species to find new and better ways to survive at all times and has the potential for long-term planning to lead to something like flight after a lot of pushing various modifications without pushing so fast as to make for an unsuccessful species along the way.

Either way you look at it, there is an intelligence guiding to flight or it would not have happened because not only HAS the unthinkable, flight, happened, it has happened in numerous different ways.

There are also quite a few examples of bad adaptations (like the nerve "wiring" of the eye or the fact that breathing through the mouth has given us the "ability" to choke) that speak rather strongly against this.

Which can be explained in many ways. No intelligence is infallible, nor does any intelligence truly have omnipotence (all this could not be if that were the case... I could argue on that one for a while but that's really getting off topic.) And there are always bugs in designs when they are introduced or attempted.

Because biological processes are extremely specific. Just because you have a key and a door has a lock, you can't open it.It has to fit. And you would never make a key that doesn't fit a specific lock that doesn't exist.

The basis of biology itself is not specific. It is like binary, based on universal math (actually life is more based on quaternary coding than binary.) That universal math may get specific but on a microbial level it's not always necessary to be so specific. Plus, there are only so many likely proteins. I'm arguing that life CAN be highly diverse, but is also not unlikely to be a lot more similar than you'd expect it to be.

But even if we take the panspermie theory (life originated somewhere and then spread from there) and we have common anchestors with aliens, we have 3+ billion years of evolution in different ecosystems that seperate us now. That's hell a lot time!

Sure... a lot of time for our biologies to have had unique microbes that could infect the other without the other having any idea what those microbes can do or how they do it. Again, like the native american, what could be a sniffle for them could be worse than the plague to us. I mean look at AIDS.. they SAY that the virus was harmless to animals and in some primate pools for hundreds of thousands of years before encountering us and taking full advantage of our lack of ability to combat it. What can make us incompatible to some alien microbes could also as easily make us incredibly vulnerable. Something helpful to them may well be harmfull to us, and possibly vice versa. Lifeforms are crazy that way. I guess the point is that since life is likely to find its way down similar pathways of development to perfect itself through the process of evolution, it is not so strange to think that life forms on other worlds may be very similar to ours and enough so that there could be some truly horrific resuls from very innocent interactions where microbial stuff is concerned.

 

[Thunderbrd]

We do need to get back on track though about the design of the system itself. I'm waiting for DH to comment on This earlier post

 

[Faustmouse]

Sounds like a good argument for a central intelligence existing.

No, because the fact that the universe came in existence is highly unlikely, but the fact that a universe came into existence, created a highly intelligence that THEN did something is just much more unlikely.

You're honestly suggesting that with every step there's an intermediate benefit and that this DOESN'T show that there's likely an underlying intelligence in the design of the fabric of reality itself?

It's the other way around. They didn't show up AND have an intermediate benefit, they showed up BECAUSE they had one. If they didn't, they would not have lead to flight.

The argument supports an intelligence behind design either way. Either something as crazy complex and unbelievable as flight is a natural result of billions of years of evolution and that is in itself showing that just because the idea of flight is cool that the very nature of the physics of evolution will lead to creatures that fly, or intelligence is driving evolution for the sake of the species to find new and better ways to survive at all times and has the potential for long-term planning to lead to something like flight after a lot of pushing various modifications without pushing so fast as to make for an unsuccessful species along the way.

If it works, keep it, if it doesn't dismiss it. Keep varying a bit and repeat. It's not intelligence, it just WORKED and thus the working genes were passed on. It's natural selection, like we have our artificial selection aka breeding. In the earlier case, the "selector" is survival, in the latter it's an intelligence with a plan (even if that plan leads to a chihuahua...)

Either way you look at it, there is an intelligence guiding to flight or it would not have happened because not only HAS the unthinkable, flight, happened, it has happened in numerous different ways.

The three quoted instances of flight developement are fundamentally different from each other. Just like eyes that developed multiple times as well. Why would an intelligence do this? Why insects don't have feathers? Why do brids not have thin skin instead of feathers? Why would you wait so long after you invented flight in insects to adapt it to mammals and birds?

The basis of biology itself is not specific. It is like binary, based on universal math (actually life is more based on quaternary coding than binary.) That universal math may get specific but on a microbial level it's not always necessary to be so specific. Plus, there are only so many likely proteins. I'm arguing that life CAN be highly diverse, but is also not unlikely to be a lot more similar than you'd expect it to be.

They are extremely specific. Just one error in your 3.2 billion bases could kill you, if it's on the right spot. Enzymes are highly specific and distinguish between Glucose and Fructose. Proteins are consisting of at 100-500 Aminoacids at least. There are 22 Aminoacids. That alone is 500^22. Then they are mostly processed with sugars, which also have thousends of possible forms. Even the exact same Protein can be completely different if a specific amino acid is added just nanoseconds later or earlier than expected!

Sure... a lot of time for our biologies to have had unique microbes that could infect the other without the other having any idea what those microbes can do or how they do it. Again, like the native american, what could be a sniffle for them could be worse than the plague to us. I mean look at AIDS.. they SAY that the virus was harmless to animals and in some primate pools for hundreds of thousands of years before encountering us and taking full advantage of our lack of ability to combat it. What can make us incompatible to some alien microbes could also as easily make us incredibly vulnerable. Something helpful to them may well be harmfull to us, and possibly vice versa. Lifeforms are crazy that way. I guess the point is that since life is likely to find its way down similar pathways of development to perfect itself through the process of evolution, it is not so strange to think that life forms on other worlds may be very similar to ours and enough so that there could be some truly horrific resuls from very innocent interactions where microbial stuff is concerned.

As said, it's all a matter on how close we are related. Apes are very close to us. Birds not THAT close, but still close enough appearently. BUT we all have common anchestors from a time periode were most basic protein function were already established.

 

[tmv]

a universe came into existence, created a highly intelligence that THEN did something is just much more unlikely

You might have got that backwards. The initial state of the universe was extremely unlikely (think of a haystack the size of the current universe and you have to pick the one needle - you have one try). There is - by definition - no previous state that could have produced this one.

And in this case, even the (weak) anthropic principle doesn't cut it - for once. Because a highly ordered region of the universe might have been enough to produce us (even a highly unlikely barrier would still be more likely than the entire universe being ordered). The observable universe gets larger and larger, and it is still ordered - we just don't admit that we should be surprised by that.

 

[Noriad2]

Why?
I agree that chances are high that other life we find is based on carbons, and probably uses DNA and Proteins mainly. There are other alternatives than DNA thought.

Proteins consist of amino acids. Amino acids have the formula (NH2)-CH(R)-(COOH) with R being a side chain which can be anything at all. Proteins consists of many amino acids strung together head-to-tail (the COOH of one amino acid gets connected to the NH2 of the next amino acid). There are potentially millions of theoretically possible amino acids based on the exact side chain R. Yet in earth proteins used by higher organisms there are only 21 amino acids (bacteria use 23). And these amino acids are stereo specific also. All plant and animal life on earth have these 21 amino acids in common, and this initial "choice" is what makes the food chain possible. If life on an alien planet made different "choices" on which amino acid to use, we and them would be completely inedible to each other.

P.S. I wonder why earth plants stick to these 21 amino acids too, as plants don't need other lifeforms to survive, just sunlight, water, CO2, a source of nitrogen, and some trace elements. There are evolutionary advantages to being inedible.


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from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinogenic_amino_acid :
Life based on alternative proteinogenic sets
The proteinogenic set used by known life on Earth appears to be arbitrarily selected by evolution, according to current knowledge, from many hundreds of possible alpha-type amino acids. Xenobiology studies hypothetical life forms that could be constructed using alternative sets using expanded genetic codes. Miller-type experiments on artificial abiogenesis show that alpha-type amino acids predominate in water-based 'primordial soups', but beta-type amino acids dominate when less water is present. Both alpha- and beta-based sets could form the basis for alternative protein constructions and life forms."

 

[Thunderbrd]

No, because the fact that the universe came in existence is highly unlikely, but the fact that a universe came into existence, created a highly intelligence that THEN did something is just much more unlikely.

Why would we assume that the universe must have come into existence first? Would not the architect predate the construction project? I know there is the argument that what came before God to create God but thta's extremely bio-organically based thinking. If you reduce the universe to a state of one energy pool at a zero state, self awareness itself may have been the first thing to emerge. Imagine all of the universe thinking as one being, that being would have infinite power to imagine, consider and design and then implement to its heart's content a world that is no more real than our own envisionings but since it follows solid mathematical procedure at every turn, FEELS real to be a part of. This requirement to follow such mathematical cause and effect for the purpose of making the illusion 'real' is exactly why we have such a hard time 'proving' whether a God exists or not. But there are hints and clues to suggest there is. And I'm pointing out that the fact that flight exists in three different forms on Earth alone is a fantastical occurance that cannot possibly be an accident or string of accidents alone and IF it IS a string of successfull accidents then it is impossible to think that the path of least resistance for life was not pre-plotted out... which would be the other way to KNOW, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was an architect indeed.

When you look closely at the path of evolution leading to Humanity, today, where we stand now, and what we can and cannot acheive, it becomes hard to beleive we aren't the Earth's hope for spreading it's life to other shores so as to expand its capacity for survival. And if you consider how likely it is that life itself has one or many hiveminds (possibly for each species) operating on subconscious levels in the background, the overall goal of that collective is clear... survive. Just survive. Keep surviving. Keep life alive. Diversification itself seeks this goal and does it VERY well. Too well for it to be pure chance and billions of years... that's just the mechanism, not the drive to use it.

It's the other way around. They didn't show up AND have an intermediate benefit, they showed up BECAUSE they had one. If they didn't, they would not have lead to flight.

And that is not a fantastical concept alone? That all the billions of little factors that would be required to obtain this amazing feat is actually the end result of the path of least resistance for survival? Feathers, for example... necessary for flight for birds. Developed far before many other aspects of flight as one of many bio-organic projects that all happened to just come together to be perfect for that end goal to be manifest suddenly? No... no way. One would, in my opinion, HAVE to have an outright emotional bias against the idea of there being intelligence or intelligences behind design in the universe to deny how unlikely that actually is. And its only one of a great many examples that takes place in large scale and small scale synchronicities in our own lives. But given how much religion has been used to subvert and twist the masses for people in power, I totally understand that bias as well. I'd suggest to look past the trees to see the forest though.

If it works, keep it, if it doesn't dismiss it. Keep varying a bit and repeat. It's not intelligence, it just WORKED and thus the working genes were passed on. It's natural selection, like we have our artificial selection aka breeding. In the earlier case, the "selector" is survival, in the latter it's an intelligence with a plan (even if that plan leads to a chihuahua...)

There is intelligence IN design, in that intelligence is defined as the display of ability to identify a problem and solve it. The only argument is whether that intelligence got to where it is by outside observation of problems and the seeking of solutions or is just reactive by random mutation alone. The answer to that is a moot point as the end result is intelligent either way. Furthermore, life's method of mutation is an innovation itself that has resulted in an intelligence, our own intelligence, for example. But also the fact that flight is an intelligent answer to an enable an incredible array of methods for life to newly exploit to overcome problems suggests the incredible intelligence IN that design. If we, as computer programmers, wanted to design a system of self-teaching AI, which we are currently doing, then the system would likely closely model that evolutionary process itself: Try lots of small new ways to achieve a better success rating, adopt those that achieve it and abandon those that fail. This IS intelligence!

The three quoted instances of flight developement are fundamentally different from each other. Just like eyes that developed multiple times as well. Why would an intelligence do this? Why insects don't have feathers? Why do brids not have thin skin instead of feathers? Why would you wait so long after you invented flight in insects to adapt it to mammals and birds?

The goal isn't just to find out how to do it... that's human thinking. The goal is to find out how many ways it can be done. Plus, we're talking about different points of development and different forms that wish to develop into flight. These are creatures of massively different sizes and thus factors of physics. Pretty sure the way a bumble bee flies, along with many other factors in its biology, can only work at a particular size and weight range. Also blending different properties and capabilities would be a goal for an underlying 'life' intelligence because the goal, as always, for that being, would be to survive and the more forms it knows it can mutate its children into, the more differing ways it can ensure adaptive tricks to survival.

BUT we all have common anchestors from a time periode were most basic protein function were already established.

Going back to my original point that this far back may still be pre-Earth. Someone said it earlier... panspermia. I am a fan of that concept.

 

[Thunderbrd]

We do need to get back on track though about the design of the system itself. I'm waiting for DH to comment on This earlier post

Still...

 

[Faustmouse]

Going back to my original point that this far back may still be pre-Earth. Someone said it earlier... panspermia. I am a fan of that concept.

I was the one who said this^^
I'm going to cut this here, since we both have a point of view we won't change.
Was amazes me here is that you said flight is to complex to just "happen" without an intelligent designing plan, but on the other hand accept that a great being with so much power just happens to come into existence.