I recently had an email exchange regarding how we got here...
"Wow, I came upon the statement from a neuroscientist on the Internet this morning as one of the explanations for the perplexing question of "Why are we (humans) here?" Tell me what you think.........."
quote:
"Any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms
that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and
light-years until gravity and chance brought them together here, now.
These atoms now form a conglomerate — your brain — that can not
only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think
about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to
wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe
has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest
mystery of all."
I gave it a little thought...not too much...and responded:
"It's hard for me to fathom how randomness and coincidence brought us to where we are. The reason is because I can see how that might happen maybe all across the universe in a limited fashion -- here and there -- but it would have had to happen many times here on our little planet. We have such a diversity...have had over the eons...that it doesn't look like randomness to me. Life forms from a virus or lichen to the deep sea vent tube worms to the dinosaurs, corals and hummingbirds have all been created here. We have no proof that these exist anywhere else.
But, I know why I'm here...somebody has to clean out the litter box.
Ken"
The issue stayed with me a while and I pondered it a little more.
I worked in statistics and dealt with randomness and research for twenty years. I wonder whether the neuroscientist or others who make similar statements are working backwards rather than in a forward fashion. Do they frame the question with the end product (us -- our existence) as the starting point? Randomness is absolute. One should start at the beginning - not at the end. There are countless random events -- atoms crashing together or missing each other -- in the universe. There are possible random outcomes that would foster a certain outcome but there are countless random forces working against any single outcome...many more than are working to push the outcome forward. Chaos.
I can see that maybe somewhere a chemical compound randomly comes together and maybe once in 100,000 years it has a spark of life....that is snuffed out by the cold of interstellar night or the searing heat of scorching light of a nearby sun. Maybe in 100,000 tries the spark survives and something like a virus lives, sustained in some manner off of neighboring chemicals. In many cases that is as far as it goes but once in a while the conditions might allow it to grow and even replicate itself into a colony of virus thingys. Maybe once in a great while conditions would fall into place where one of these very rare virus thingy colonies get big enough to look like a stain on a rock and then, eons later, it develops into something that we would think looks like a small lichen. Billions of years go by and it has progressed to be something a astronaut would want to be careful to clean off her shoe....not recognized as a being at the apex of life's creation on this far away planet.
People - scientists - are searching for intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. They are looking for a sign -- some sort of signal from an intelligent being. So far we have not found evidence of unintelligent life in any form except on our planet. Intelligent beings are messy -- we make waste and we make clutter. We leave evidence behind when we do anything or go anywhere. Somehow, I think we would be aware of somebody else's trash if there were many similar random outcomes of intelligent beings cropping up in the universe.
Of course, next week we will have a visitation from some other planet....go figure.
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Update: interesting article discusses the difficulty of evolution (July 2014)
http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2014/06/evolution-depends-on-rare-chance-events.html#.U74PInbnbbU
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