Replies

j8 ...

Evolution does not move "towards" anything, at least not anything knowable, because there is no static state that can be known as "fitness". Whatever works and whatever succeeds succeeds. Most of the living mass of the planet, by weight, is made up of bacteria. Evolution does not compel any "upward" trend towards "complexity".

Dispite what any given authority might say, evolution is compatible with any concrete definition of free will. The utility of the mind is in its attempt to know and adjust to the future -- a task that remains and will always remain incomplete and unfulfilled. It is this attempt to predict and manage the future that gives us the "feeling" of free will. It is the impossibility of predicting the future that makes the feeling of freedom consistent with reality.

Evolution, in fact, turns the usual cause and effect paradigm upside down. In the world of living things, cause operates from the future backwards, rather than from past to present. That's really, in a nutshell, what evolution means.

22 posted on 06/03/2003 10:57 AM PDT by js1138

fC ...

science (( no change )) vs the study of science (( change )) !

dh ...

That's a silly quibble. The universe does whatever it damn well pleases, and hasn't the slightest demonstrated notion of what a law is to constrain it. Insofar as what is demonstrable, natural laws are human inventions to help us think more effectively about nature. The claim that they are objectively existing things in and of themselves, is unproven and probably unprovable--as is likewise the claim that there is such a thing as "science" which exists independently of "the study of science".

1,398 posted on 05/14/2003 10:36 PM PDT by donh (u)

fC ...

science is evolving ?