Evolution does not say that change in populations is mandated – it says that change occurs (as you said elsewhere) when stress makes it more likely for some modifications to produce more offspring than those without such modifications. Horseshoe crabs do seem to be a good example, having been around for some 450 million years. The tiny tardigrade is, I think, an better example, having been around for 500 million years, surviving in every environment on earth from the from the frozen tops of mountains to the hot volcanic vents on the sea floor. These little guys can even survive naked in space!
right, so that's just one of the complications we uncover when we delve a little deeper into this 'simple undeniable process'. A large gene pool, with a very large number of 'random' mutations are needed to make a significant advantage probable in any of them, but the larger the gene pool, the smaller the chance that this advantage will ever catch on. We can endow a rabbit with super-rabbit powers of reproduction, and he is just as likely to get run over before adulthood as any other. What works intuitively in thought experiments, gets a little trickier in reality.
One study posted by sayak earlier to support beneficial mutations also talks about this, that simply introducing an advantage, as unlikely as that is, ain't enough, if the population is happy and stable anyway, without stress as you say, there is little pressure to select any change.
How do you stress something that can do that? Would you allow, then, that the tardigrade is what the “designer” created all this for? Because very little has been around longer, or is likely to survive longer, either.
I would guess that a book written in french was most likely created
for a Frenchman, even if the bacteria in the pages will outlive him, and knowing the French, there's probably quite a lot of it!
So too with the universe, we are the only means we know of, by which the universe can contemplate it's own existence. Many cosmologists, including atheists, have remarked on how extraordinary it is that the universe so lends itself to our understanding.
But if a creature cannot do what the tardigrade can, what happens when change occurs (and in this universe, change is THE LAW)? Well, if you can’t survive the change, you move or die out, and if you can’t move, you die out. Or perhaps you change. And the peppered moth I mentioned elsewhere? Why, look at where and when the first darker versions show up –precisely when urban pollution began to rise as a result of industrial activity! The population in the city responds to the changed environment, while the population in the country doesn’t need to, and would in fact be at higher risk if it did.
We can observe a moth changing color, as our own offspring differing from ourselves. But again, watching an apple fall (not far from) the tree, might tempt us to extrapolate simple laws to account for all physical reality, but that was, by necessity, an overly simplistic fallacy.
And the last phrase, "exactly necessary for life as we know it," ignores the very simple notion that we see those "finely specified instructions" for no other reason than we evolved in a universe (and more on a planet) where the rules simply led to this sort of life. In another universe, with different "instructions," perhaps there's some other intelligence equally convinced that those instructions were fine-tuned specifically in order to facilitate their being.
It is an entirely anthropocentric view. It is what it is SO THAT we can be, rather than we are BECAUSE it is what it is.
I'm familiar with the argument, but it was a little more effective 150 years ago, again before GR, QM, subatomic physics, much of cosmology. Back in the days of Verne and Poe, we pondered about what
sort of folks lived on the moon, because we took for granted that life and people were everywhere, in all kinds of different environments, we had no idea how specific those conditions had to be. Now we would be blown away with a fossilized microbe on Mars. The more we learn, the more we realize that the conditions, math, instructions for life are excruciatingly finely engineered.- even just to create space/time, far less sentient life
Alter the universal constants infinitesimally, and you get an infinite variety of dark cold lifeless blobs- just as randomly corrupting the code behind this website would invariably crash it altogether, not just create a slightly different one. In fact that's the explicit rationale for the multiverse theories, that it would take an infinite probability generator to produce such a functional reality as this (if we were to banish the possibility of ID for some reason)
