Unintelligent Design

Unintelligent Design

discovermagazine.com

A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth.

That represents a radical change in thinking about life's origins: Viruses, long thought to be biology's hitchhikers, turn out to have been biology's formative force.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is striking news, especially at a moment when the basic facts of origins and evolution seem to have fallen under a shroud. In the discussions of intelligent design, one hears a yearning for an old-fashioned creation story, in which some singular, inchoate entity stepped in to give rise to complex life-forms—humans in particular.

Now the viruses appear to present a creation story of their own: a stirring, topsy-turvy, and decidedly unintelligent design wherein life arose more by reckless accident than original intent, through an accumulation of genetic accounting errors committed by hordes of mindless, microscopic replication machines. Our descent from apes is the least of it.

With the discovery of Mimi, scientists are close to ascribing to viruses the last role that anyone would have conceived for them: that of life's prime mover.

discovermagazine.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

We are observers. We emerge from and are forcibly resubmitted to the Earth. But let's rejoice in our time; to have existed and been aware of it is the most remarkable of all things. The probability of physical experience in the form of a local observer surrounded by up to eleven greater dimensions (in our current understanding of physics) is inconceivable to all but those who have been granted this gift (excuse the poor choice of word).

The problem that mere biology had developed a mind is the most important question. While the mind is definitely a fitness-oriented adaptation, and as any evolutionary lineage subject to competition become more complex in nature as time goes on-the mind emerged as an adaptation and was not in any respect a spontaneous phenomenon-I do not believe it is particularly special, or that its existence warrants a creator whose intelligence is reflected in us... However, that alone does not invalidate the universal quality of the mind, nor reduce its significance and improbability. Of course, rare things have consistently merited attention by humans in the past. But is that a reflection of our evolutionarily constrained epistemology or is it the fact the mind is a reflection of a definite state of the universe more important?

reply to post by cognoscente


Man, I couldn't have said it any better.


The emergence of awareness, although an emergence drawn out by conditions of survival, is in itself an amazing thing to experience.

It itself is the foundational element of the noosphere; something I experience almost tangibly when I visit the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History...

Everytime I watch The Matrix I see more and more truth to what is being said. This is another perfect example:

Agent Smith:

I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.

reply to post by QuantumAlien


There's not one scrap of truth in that clip. Agent Smith apparently can't differentiate between a virus and an invasive species, and neither can you. It's mindless tripe.

reply to post by Lasheic


Please learn to recognise a joke when you see one

I simply posted that because it fit perfectly with the whole description of human evolution beginning as more like a virus than anything else.

Sheesh, some people will take anything seriously.

reply to post by QuantumAlien


That is just crazy! The line from the movie bluntly says the exact thing that the article does. Wow. So many Matrix parallells, I really thought it was silly to think of when I first started seeing people make this comparison, but it is simply uncanny.

Geat post

Just got me thinking. Could panspermia be true? Quite possible that intelligent aliens seeded the earth with virus like organisms and then waited till intelligent life evolved? Could they still be watching us?

Maybe our DNA is coded by aliens and that is why we have evolved as we have? I was reading something on Micheal Wolf the other day and he claims that extra-terrestrials have genetically "corrected" us for over 65000 years.