smb@ulysses.UUCP (07/20/83)
Which is a more amazing feat, arranging billiard balls in an orderly pattern by hand, or strewing them randomly across the table, hitting the cue ball, and having them end up in an orderly pattern?
debray@sbcs.UUCP (07/23/83)
>> Which is a more amazing feat, arranging billiard balls >> in an orderly pattern by hand, or strewing them randomly >> across the table, hitting the cue ball, and having them >> end up in an orderly pattern? Actually, if you're referring to an "omnipotent" entity, with all its power, taking billions of years to get the pattern orderly (I might even question whether it *is* very orderly yet!), and with such unsuccessful experiments as dinosaurs along the way, I'd say that was pretty amazing all right - amazingly incompetent! Saumya Debray SUNY at Stony Brook
drforsey@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Forsey) (07/24/83)
smb@ulysses' analogy is somewhat misleading. If the environment was indeed like a flat surface, no variation, no changes then evolution could not occur. Lets extend the analogy to a flat surface with a triangular depression in the middle. Fling the balls randomly across the table and then jiggle the whole thing for a while. In a completely random system, with completely random perturbations try to *not* end up with all the balls sitting in the hole. The flat surface analogy is an excellent example of how the 'randomness' of evolution is missconstrued by so many. Randomness of this type is about a big a rebuttal of evolution as it would be a rebuttal to the processes involved in a chemical reaction. Just because the motions of the atoms themselves are random, it does not mean that the process itself is random. Dave Forsey Computer Graphics Laboratory University of Waterloo Waterloo Canada.