Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

...
In chapter 7 of my new book, I show that, based on certain
reasonable assumptions, any planet in the universe where intelligent
life evolved must follow the same Generational Dynamics model as human
beings. (Thus, S&H showed that the generational paradigm holds for
six cycles in the Anglo-American timeline; in my first book, I showed
that it holds for any tribe, society or nation throughout history,
and in my second book I showed that it even applies to intelligent
life on other planets!!)

Incidentally, this proof has never been independently checked, and
I'd be grateful if anyone cared to do so. My new book,
Generational Dynamics for Historians, can be read for free on
my web site.

We know of only one kind of life -- DNA/RNA life. There was no Beta-Max competitor,
--Croak

What about laser disc Froggy?

Of course, nothing ever came out on it so they'd likely be a very bored species. *Everything* came out on VHS and I'm *still* bored.

Originally Posted by Milo

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

...
In chapter 7 of my new book, I show that, based on certain
reasonable assumptions, any planet in the universe where intelligent
life evolved must follow the same Generational Dynamics model as human
beings. (Thus, S&H showed that the generational paradigm holds for
six cycles in the Anglo-American timeline; in my first book, I showed
that it holds for any tribe, society or nation throughout history,
and in my second book I showed that it even applies to intelligent
life on other planets!!)

Incidentally, this proof has never been independently checked, and
I'd be grateful if anyone cared to do so. My new book,
Generational Dynamics for Historians, can be read for free on
my web site.

We know of only one kind of life -- DNA/RNA life. There was no Beta-Max competitor,
--Croak

What about laser disc Froggy?

Of course, nothing ever came out on it so they'd likely be a very bored species. *Everything* came out on VHS and I'm *still* bored.

One thing interesting about laser discs is that they're digital, and so are genes. As such, there may be a convergence of encryption modality, which is what you might expect from our advancement toward the Singularity.

Whatever the Singularity will be, it will be digital.

--Croak

You know several reputable scientists posited that massive galactic civilization must exist. A paper was written recently that their visiting Earth might be quite likely and urged a closer review of UFO reports. Couple that with the concept of panspermia and you get the idea that maybe we were deliberately SEEDED with DNA/RNA life.

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by Milo

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

...
In chapter 7 of my new book, I show that, based on certain
reasonable assumptions, any planet in the universe where intelligent
life evolved must follow the same Generational Dynamics model as human
beings. (Thus, S&H showed that the generational paradigm holds for
six cycles in the Anglo-American timeline; in my first book, I showed
that it holds for any tribe, society or nation throughout history,
and in my second book I showed that it even applies to intelligent
life on other planets!!)

Incidentally, this proof has never been independently checked, and
I'd be grateful if anyone cared to do so. My new book,
Generational Dynamics for Historians, can be read for free on
my web site.

We know of only one kind of life -- DNA/RNA life. There was no Beta-Max competitor,
--Croak

What about laser disc Froggy?

Of course, nothing ever came out on it so they'd likely be a very bored species. *Everything* came out on VHS and I'm *still* bored.

One thing interesting about laser discs is that they're digital, and so are genes. As such, there may be a convergence of encryption modality, which is what you might expect from our advancement toward the Singularity.

Whatever the Singularity will be, it will be digital.

--Croak

I was kind of hoping for one of those tin smiley face robots from the 50s froggy, with a giant mess of vacuum tubes and wiring harnesses, and no shortage of blinking lights.

I love the idea of Hitchhkers Guide being a large post-singularity society. The only limits are not scientific but financial and Bureaucratic. The English somehow seem to understand the perverse and bloody-minded nature of humanity better than anyone. ( Terry pratchets Discworld emphasizes this as well)

Originally Posted by spudzill

I love the idea of Hitchhkers Guide being a large post-singularity society. The only limits are not scientific but financial and Bureaucratic. The English somehow seem to understand the perverse and bloody-minded nature of humanity better than anyone. ( Terry pratchets Discworld emphasizes this as well)

Is there a tendency of the X-generation to view everything as escapist media metaphors. The Lost Generation, X's cohort forebearer, seemed to dwell on alienation metaphors, like Hemmingway's "Islands In The Stream" or O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." What's with the Xers, anyway? And where is their literature?

Come on, you little thumbsuckers, get a life! (heh, heh, heh, and screw the emoticons.)

--Croakmore

Originally Posted by spudzill

One planet with life? One utterly insignifigant planet around an unremarkable yellow sun in the unfashionable end of the western spiral galaxy whose inhabitants are so mind -bogglingly primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea?

Yep. There's a growing suspicion among biologists and planetary scientists that Earth may in fact be a rare, rare exception to the general rule.

There are two 'factions' in the science community over this, one you might call the Drake (i.e. the Drake Equation) faction. Carl Sagan was famously affiliated with them, some others are. They tend to see the Universe as likely to be overflowing with intelligent life.

But there is a growing 'rare Earth' faction who suspect that the 19th century view of Earth's rarity may have actually been closer to right. They point out that there are several individually unlikely steps that have to occur for life to reach sapience and technological ability.

(Caveat: This refers to 'life as we know it, or reaonably close'. But you have to use that limit or else speculation becomes unlimited.)

To begin with, you need planets. That isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds. The heavy materials that go into rocky solid planets are formed in supernovae, which means that the oldest stars probably have no solid worlds at all, just gas giants or nothing, and their gas giants (if they have them) would likely be mostly hydrogen and helium.

So you need a second or better yet a third-generation star, one that's incorporated material from previous stellar cycles. That rules out the majority of the stars in the outer reaches of the galaxy. Even in our reaches, the Sun has a higher metalicity than average.

If you have the metals (in this context, metals are anything heavier than helium), you then need for a suitably planet to form at a suitable distance from the star. This also means you need the right kind of star. Contrary to the Hitchhiker's Guide, the Sun is not unremarkable, it's unusually big, unusually hot, and unusually bright, and it appears that it may have an unusually orderly planetary system.

The large majority of stars are spectral-class M 'red dwarf' suns. They are much smaller and less masive than the Sun, and cooler, emitting less energy. An 'Earth-like (broadly defined)' world would have to orbit much closer to a red dwarf than to the Sun to stay at a suitable temperature, but orbiting that close would mean the planet would likely experience 'tide lock', in which the rotation would be slowed down by tidal action until one side of the planet always faced the star, and one side always away, making a clement environment very iffy.

(The Moon is tide-locked to Earth, for an example of that same effect.)

If the planet in question had a great big moon, they would tide lock to each other and continue to rotate faces to the star, but that might not be enough even so. Also, many red dwarf stars are 'flare stars', suddenly emitting intense surges of energy that could easily do major damage on a world close enough to normally be clement.

If you have the right sort of star, you then you need a planet in the right place. Based on observations of other star systems, it appears that big gas giants have tendency in many cases to go strolling downhil to take up orbit close to the star. If that happens, worlds in the 'Goldilocks Zone' tend to get either thrown into the star or out into interstellar space.

So along with a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, you need for the big gas giants and water giants to stay out in the dark and cold.

The planet has to be big enough to retain an atmosphere, of course. It also needs to be big enough to retain sufficient heat for an active geological life, to produce the atmosphere, and to provide the heat it needs a healthy dose of radioactives like potassium-40.

A big moon at the right distance can be helpful in various ways, but there's no consensus about whether it's a necessity.

There's another requirement, too. It helps a lot for the planet to be near the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone, because main sequence stars tend to get hotter as time passes. If the planet is clement at its start, but too near the inner edge of the comfort zone, it may overheat as the parent star gets stronger over time.

(The Sun is calculated to be about 30% stronger now than it was at the start of biological history. Earth actually orbits uncomfortably near the inner edge of the clement zone in our own Solar System, some scientists calculate that the inner edge will pass us in around 200 million years.)

Once you have all that, you need a planet that is relatively calm, sufficiently safe from external dangers to permit life to thrive. External dangers can range from too stready a rain of meteorites (though the occasional big impactor might stimulate evolution) to nearby supernovae or other big radiation sources.

Which now rules out most of the innermost part of the galaxy. The galactic nucleus is a violent, dangerous region with lots of hard radiation. So you're far less likely to find Earth-like worlds there than in our region of the Galaxy.

So once you have all that, you have a world where life can theoretically exist. What does it take to start it? Nobody knows. Anybody, scientist or amateur, who applies a probability figure is guessing, we don't have a clue about the matter. It may be easy, it may be so impossibly hard that it happens one time in a zillion reasonable chances.

But once it gets going life is tenacious. But there are still a lot of barriers to cross before unicellular life builds radios and spacecraft.

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by spudzill

I love the idea of Hitchhkers Guide being a large post-singularity society. The only limits are not scientific but financial and Bureaucratic. The English somehow seem to understand the perverse and bloody-minded nature of humanity better than anyone. ( Terry pratchets Discworld emphasizes this as well)

Is there a tendency of the X-generation to view everything as escapist media metaphors. The Lost Generation, X's cohort forebearer, seemed to dwell on alienation metaphors, like Hemmingway's "Islands In The Stream" or O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." What's with the Xers, anyway? And where is their literature?

--Croakmore

I think a big difference between the Lost and the Xers is World War I. The First World War gave the Lost a focusing experience that the Xers have not gone through, nothing on the scale has happened to our entire Generation at once.

As a result, the Xers are more like our younger selves than the Lost were at our approximate ages. For good or ill.

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Originally Posted by spudzill

One planet with life? One utterly insignifigant planet around an unremarkable yellow sun in the unfashionable end of the western spiral galaxy whose inhabitants are so mind -bogglingly primitive they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea?

Yep. There's a growing suspicion among biologists and planetary scientists that Earth may in fact be a rare, rare exception to the general rule.

There are two 'factions' in the science community over this, one you might call the Drake (i.e. the Drake Equation) faction. Carl Sagan was famously affiliated with them, some others are. They tend to see the Universe as likely to be overflowing with intelligent life.

But there is a growing 'rare Earth' faction who suspect that the 19th century view of Earth's rarity may have actually been closer to right. They point out that there are several individually unlikely steps that have to occur for life to reach sapience and technological ability.

(Caveat: This refers to 'life as we know it, or reaonably close'. But you have to use that limit or else speculation becomes unlimited.)

To begin with, you need planets. That isn't necessarily as easy as it sounds. The heavy materials that go into rocky solid planets are formed in supernovae, which means that the oldest stars probably have no solid worlds at all, just gas giants or nothing, and their gas giants (if they have them) would likely be mostly hydrogen and helium.

So you need a second or better yet a third-generation star, one that's incorporated material from previous stellar cycles. That rules out the majority of the stars in the outer reaches of the galaxy. Even in our reaches, the Sun has a higher metalicity than average.

If you have the metals (in this context, metals are anything heavier than helium), you then need for a suitably planet to form at a suitable distance from the star. This also means you need the right kind of star. Contrary to the Hitchhiker's Guide, the Sun is not unremarkable, it's unusually big, unusually hot, and unusually bright, and it appears that it may have an unusually orderly planetary system.

The large majority of stars are spectral-class M 'red dwarf' suns. They are much smaller and less masive than the Sun, and cooler, emitting less energy. An 'Earth-like (broadly defined)' world would have to orbit much closer to a red dwarf than to the Sun to stay at a suitable temperature, but orbiting that close would mean the planet would likely experience 'tide lock', in which the rotation would be slowed down by tidal action until one side of the planet always faced the star, and one side always away, making a clement environment very iffy.

(The Moon is tide-locked to Earth, for an example of that same effect.)

If the planet in question had a great big moon, they would tide lock to each other and continue to rotate faces to the star, but that might not be enough even so. Also, many red dwarf stars are 'flare stars', suddenly emitting intense surges of energy that could easily do major damage on a world close enough to normally be clement.

If you have the right sort of star, you then you need a planet in the right place. Based on observations of other star systems, it appears that big gas giants have tendency in many cases to go strolling downhil to take up orbit close to the star. If that happens, worlds in the 'Goldilocks Zone' tend to get either thrown into the star or out into interstellar space.

So along with a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, you need for the big gas giants and water giants to stay out in the dark and cold.

The planet has to be big enough to retain an atmosphere, of course. It also needs to be big enough to retain sufficient heat for an active geological life, to produce the atmosphere, and to provide the heat it needs a healthy dose of radioactives like potassium-40.

A big moon at the right distance can be helpful in various ways, but there's no consensus about whether it's a necessity.

There's another requirement, too. It helps a lot for the planet to be near the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone, because main sequence stars tend to get hotter as time passes. If the planet is clement at its start, but too near the inner edge of the comfort zone, it may overheat as the parent star gets stronger over time.

(The Sun is calculated to be about 30% stronger now than it was at the start of biological history. Earth actually orbits uncomfortably near the inner edge of the clement zone in our own Solar System, some scientists calculate that the inner edge will pass us in around 200 million years.)

Once you have all that, you need a planet that is relatively calm, sufficiently safe from external dangers to permit life to thrive. External dangers can range from too stready a rain of meteorites (though the occasional big impactor might stimulate evolution) to nearby supernovae or other big radiation sources.

Which now rules out most of the innermost part of the galaxy. The galactic nucleus is a violent, dangerous region with lots of hard radiation. So you're far less likely to find Earth-like worlds there than in our region of the Galaxy.

So once you have all that, you have a world where life can theoretically exist. What does it take to start it? Nobody knows. Anybody, scientist or amateur, who applies a probability figure is guessing, we don't have a clue about the matter. It may be easy, it may be so impossibly hard that it happens one time in a zillion reasonable chances.

But once it gets going life is tenacious. But there are still a lot of barriers to cross before unicellular life builds radios and spacecraft.

If the above analysis proves to be accurate, it will either put paid to what Shemsu Heru called 'planetary chuavinism' over on the "Outer Space" thread, or else put paid to the entire space program. Of course, the L-5 enthusiasts would prefer the former, since it would be the best thing that could possibly happen to their hopes for humanity's future in space.

Dear Richard,

Originally Posted by Croakmore

> John, please allow me to express my view on this issue of
> universal life and intelligence.

> I don't think it's wise to include extraterrestial intelligence as
> an operative assumption. We have not yet even discovered
> extraterrestrial life, and, in my opinion, the road to human-like
> intelligence is too improbable to be located on any reasonable
> map. Most of my peers agree with me.

> I don't think your model needs to have universal applicability.
> There is, as yet, no model know to biologists that can reasonable
> predict extraterrestrial life, much less intelligence.

> Just thought I'd add my hard-core POV.

> BTW: A giagantic clue to the non-universal condition of life is
> this: We know of only one kind of life -- DNA/RNA life. There was
> no Beta-Max competitor, no natural selection from a variety of
> regimes or configurations of either codes or molecules. Just one
> life-form, strictly that, but with curious variations off the
> theme, of course. If life were so ubiquitous in the universe you
> might expect more than one measely code and molecular encrytion.

> The origin of life is an absolute mystery to biologists. As long
> as we remind so dismally ignornant I have to conclude that life is
> just a lucky one-off in this universe.

> Say, wouldn't that support the notion that, in the beginning, God
> referred to only one Earth when He saw that it was good?

Richard, I'm actually quite surprised that you're expressing this
view.

As a technical point, I do not assume extraterrestial intelligence,
but only say that IF such extraterrestial intelligence exists, then it
must follow the same generational paradigm as humans on earth, must
reach Singularity#1 as their technology improves, and must reach
Singularity#2 as a fixed limit point. This means that any planets
throughout the universe with intelligent life, IF THEY EXIST, must end
up at precisely the same end point that the earth will end at.

But I do in fact believe that extraterrestial life must exist, with
very high probability, and it surprises me that, with your knowledge
of science, that you reject that view.

You give as an argument that there was no "BetaMax competitor" to
DNA/RNA life, and then you say, "The origin of life is an absolute
mystery to biologists."

Well, these two statements appear to contradict each other, because
you don't know that there was no competitor. If we think of the
primordial soup as a laboratory in which quadrillions of experiments
were tried over eons of time, then it's possible that thousands or
millions of alternate forms of life appeared, but DNA/RNA won out
because it was the most efficient.

And if DNA/RNA won the efficiency race in earth's primordial soup,
then it seems natural to conclude that DNA/RNA would win the
efficiency race in other planets' primordial soups.

What puzzles me most about your posting is you allusion to religion
as the basis of your conclusion, because I'm not aware of any major
religion that poses any theological restriction on the belief in
extraterrestial life. In particular, there's nothing in the Bible
that imposes any such restriction. If the Bible says that God
referred to just one earth and saw that it was good then that's OK,
but the Bible doesn't say that there's "one and only one" such
planet. From the point of view of religion, why would God have
created so many trillions of solar systems, if not to create multiple
Adams and Eves? If the purpose of creating humanity was the
Glorification of God (a concept that I've always found bizarre ever
since a fundamentalist Christian explained it to me in college), then
won't that purpose be met so many more times over if there are
multiple intelligent species in each of multiple universes?

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
john@GenerationalDynamics.com
http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

John,

I think it is important to differentiate our POVs on universal life and intelligence.

Yours seems to me to be romantic in the Sagan-esque tradition ("This means that any planets throughout the universe with intelligent life, IF THEY EXIST, must end up at precisely the same end point that the earth will end at."), while mine is logical in the empiricist tradition. Stephen Jay Gould would be a good reference point for my POV, and he is famous for insisting that your suggestion of convergence is nonsense. There simply is no principle by which to reason extraterrestial life if all you know is just one kind of life on one kind of planet. Any conjecture in the extrerrestrial direction therefore is too risky to be useful.

You can raise the Anthropic Principle if you like, but that doesn't promise exterrestrial life or intelligence; it's an Earth-centric philosophy. You can raise the ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny principle if you like, but ORP has been brutally debunked (primarily by S. J. Gould).

And, John, you can't reasonable say that "If we think of the primordial soup as a laboratory in which quadrillions of experiments were tried over eons of time, then it's possible that thousands or millions of alternate forms of life appeared, but DNA/RNA won out because it was the most efficient." There is not a shed of evidence for this; no imprint anywhere in the codes or in the critters. This is why we MUST assume that biological life is a one-off on only one planet.

I know we naturally want to believe that life is ubiquituous (the Anthropic Principle predicts this). After all, look at the profusion of life on this planet. But I don't think it helps us understand the life by assuming its extraterrestial profusion. That is a romantic projection into the unknown, where only sci fi can go to. I life sci fi, too, but I like the sci part even better.

--Croak

Dear Richard,

I strongly object, and even take slight offense, at your
characterization of my arguments as "romantic," and your own
arguments as "logical."

As I pointed out the last time, you're contradicting yourself. On
the one hand you're saying, essentially, "We know nothing," and on
the other hand you're saying "We MUST assume X." Well, if we really
know nothing, then all we can conclude is that "X and not-X are
equally likely." So either you're being illogical, or else you're
using an unstated assumption to reach your conclusion.

When I referred to "the primordial soup as a laboratory in which
quadrillions of experiments were tried over eons of time," I was NOT
being romantic. I was characterizing one of the basic principles
underlying Darwinian evolution. In order for a dinosaur to evolve to
a bird, it's necessary for nature to experiment with huge numbers of
mutations. 99.9999% of the experiments will fail immediately, some
of them will succeed for a while but fail when some other experiment
is even more successful, and some experiments will succeed for a long
time.

I am not simply using the Anthropic Principle (
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/primer.html ). If I were, then I
would have to conclude that there are billions of John Xenakis's
around the universe. If I'm making any assumption at all, it's in
the sense of Chaos Theory, where I'm assuming that among the
quadrillions of chaotic experiments in the primordial soup, life is a
chaotic attractor. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me, by
the principle of Occam's Razor. (See? I can quote principles as well
as you can.)

The reason that assumption makes sense is because of the complexity
of life (or of DNA/RNA). When you say, "we MUST assume that
biological life is a one-off on only one planet," you're making a
fundamental error of logic.

Here's your argument, boiled down to essentials: Life is far too
complex to have evolved; therefore, the fact that it did evolve is an
accident.

That's crazy. My argument is: Life is far too complex to have
evolved by accident; therefore, there must be an underlying force, a
"chaotic attractor" that caused the evolution of life. That
underlying force is, depending upon your theology, either "survival
of the fittest" or "creation."

Think of the Cosmological Proof of the existence of God (see
http://www.harborside.com/~pagani/pa...fs_of_god.html ). The
argument begins: If you find a finely crafted gold watch lying in the
middle of the desert, you don't assume that it evolved from grains of
sand; you assume that there was a watch maker. The reasoning is that
a watch is such a complex instrument that it could not have evolved
by itself.

But that reasoning is actually wrong. The evolution of birds from
dinosaurs is equally complex, and yet most scientists accept it. The
reason that you assume a watchmaker is because the watch is so
complex AND because the watch is so out of place in the middle of
the desert AND because there's no known principle like "survival of
the fittest" that goes from sand to watches.

When we conclude (without a shred of evidence) that there's a
watchmaker, we're also subtly concluding the following: There's a
watchmaker who knows how to make watches, and could make many
watches, and may actually have done so. To assume that there's only
one watchmaker, who makes only one watch, and nothing else similar to
it, and then loses it in the desert is almost as hard to believe as
the assumption that the watch evolved on its own.

In other words, the assumption that life on earth is a unique
accident is, in the sense of Occam's Razor, a far more complex
assumption than the assumption of multiple planets with life.

This long-winded argument comes down to the following: Life is too
complex to have evolved by chance. Whether by creation or evolution,
there is a principle that caused life to exist, and that same
principle would apply to many planets throughout the universe.

Therefore, we MUST assume that whatever principle brought forth life
on earth must apply throughout the universe.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
john@GenerationalDynamics.com
http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by HopefulCynic68

Originally Posted by Croakmore

Originally Posted by spudzill

I love the idea of Hitchhkers Guide being a large post-singularity society. The only limits are not scientific but financial and Bureaucratic. The English somehow seem to understand the perverse and bloody-minded nature of humanity better than anyone. ( Terry pratchets Discworld emphasizes this as well)

Is there a tendency of the X-generation to view everything as escapist media metaphors. The Lost Generation, X's cohort forebearer, seemed to dwell on alienation metaphors, like Hemmingway's "Islands In The Stream" or O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." What's with the Xers, anyway? And where is their literature?

--Croakmore

I think a big difference between the Lost and the Xers is World War I. The First World War gave the Lost a focusing experience that the Xers have not gone through, nothing on the scale has happened to our entire Generation at once.

As a result, the Xers are more like our younger selves than the Lost were at our approximate ages. For good or ill.

I think it's because we have so much more media to choose from as well. Considering what I've read about WWI, I am quite glad we escaped that horror.

BTW what about the paper explaining the whole "Inflation Theory and Extra terrestrial visitation" You can find out about it on Space.com. I'd put a hyperlink if I knew how.

John, I think you are a perfect candidate reader for Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker," subtitled "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design." He, along with many other evolutionary biologists, eschew the meme of universal life.

Let me try to itemize what I find objectionable in your argument:

1. If we know we know nothing then how can we assume we know something? In the darkness of knowing nothing about the origin of life, or even specifically what it is, how are we supposed to assume biological ubiquity? What are the principles for assuming anything else but an incredible one-off? And how am I contradicting myself? I believe my argument is principled.

2. As for your "primordial soup" argument: it requires assumptions for which you have no bases. What underlying principles of Darwinian evolution are you talking about? Experimental randomness? Many people who do not understand neo-Darwinian evolution resort to this "randomness principle" -- give a monkey enough time and materials and he will write an exact duplicate to "Gone With The Wind." That POV assumes an ordering principle that simply requires enough trials and then Bingo, you got it. Not a single evbultionary biologist I respect will go along with that.

3. Are you clear in what you mean about "complexity"? What are your measures? Is a butterfly more complex than housefly because it has more wings? Are humans more complex than spiders, even if we can't make silk and build webs? Is intelligence a measure of complexity? It is a kind of arrogant romanticism that allows one to assume that humans are more complex than other life. (Did you know the eyes of sea urchins are a thousand times better than those of human's, and they have thousands more of them. Maybe echinoderms are more complex and we are. And, also, longer DNA molecules with more genes do not explain complexity either -- humans have neither the most genes nor the longest chromosomes.

4. "My argument is: Life is far too complex to have evolved by accident;therefore, there must be an underlying force, a "chaotic attractor" that caused the evolution of life. That underlying force is, depending upon your theology, either 'survival of the fittest' or 'creation'." John, you're at another Las Vega crapshoot again. You must believe in a "strange attractor" -- that evolution is being "pulled up from above" rather than being "pushed up from below." I must assume only the latter.

5. "This long-winded argument comes down to the following: Life is too complex to have evolved by chance. Whether by creation or evolution there is a principle that caused life to exist, and that same principle would apply to many planets throughout the universe." What? "Life is too complex to have evolved by chance." I don't grasp your point here. What does that mean?

Please don't be offended by my "romantic" comment. I'm always trying to separate New Age idealogy from neo-Darwinian biology. There are worse things to be called than romantic. I have a biologist friend who believes that neo-Darwinism is a communist plot, so I use stronger language than "romanticism" to help him see the weakenesses in his arguments. He happens to be a closet Creationsist, so his views are obscured by belief.

--Croak

So.. noone is gonna check out the paper at Space.com?

Originally Posted by Croakmore

What's with the Xers, anyway? And where is their literature?

--Croakmore

A subject near to my heart froggy. The first wave xers never learned how to write complete sentences (present company excluded, of course, although I guess neither did Hemingway), although they could rock for sure (not to mention find a way to get paid and become famous for being filmed having hockey pucks shot at them at high speed while they were clad only in a jockstrap). You might be able to expect great things from the children of the 70s (and early eighties) in this department though (even if we still can't tie our shoes, or is that just my problem?). A great many great writers don't get going until their early thirties, and the second wavers are just starting to get there. I humbly predict that 70s (and 80 and 81) cohorts couldl a) reject the advice of their boomer mentors, for whom small and personal was better, and start speaking to national themes again (that means no more boring poems about how our mean alcoholic fathers beat us - you silents did that stuff well, and the boomers gave us a lot of cheap confessional rip off artists [but lots of good movies and music]; it was already starting to happen when I was in college, and there seems to be a shitload of 2nd wave x talent out there) and b) also reject the boomers' hostility towards modernism and classicism and formalism (for something like a soulful, cynical neo-modernism, or a postmodernism that speaks to national themes) and c) possibly, just maybe, produce the greatest body of poems, plays, and fiction since the 1890s cohorts (although the 1930s cohorts are no slouches, especially when it comes to the novel...perhaps there is some underlying artistic value to being born in a decade of economic upheaval...the 1890s, 1930s, and 1970s were all bad times economically). Expect perhaps great painting and sculpture too on American themes. Compared with the raucous first wavers, we were I think often quiet, gentle kids though, given to painting dark, purty pictures and playing with clay (when we weren't swearing like pirates or blowing up the evil neighbor's mailbox with m-80s), and its really too late for us to match what 60s cohorts did musically (though maybe blue stater will be our exception). I also don't expect us ever to produce a president or many noteworthy politicians either (our politics are too eccentric), and it seems that most of the leading men and women xers are first waves too.

Dear Richard,

Originally Posted by Croakmore

> "Life is too complex to have evolved by chance." I don't grasp
> your point here. What does that mean?

It appears that we're talking above each other's head. I don't
understand your reasoning, and you don't understand mine. Such is
life.

I will make one more attempt to explain myself, a last gasp perhaps.

Suppose you flip a coin 1000 times, and it comes up heads every time.

You say, "Wow! That's an incredible coincidence. That won't happen
again in 20 billion years. I'll bet nobody in history has ever
flipped a coin 1000 times and had it come up heads every time."

Is that really what happened? Is that the correct conclusion to
draw?

Obviously it's not. The correct explanation is that the coin is not
a fair coin. Because, as a practical matter, getting 1000 heads
is too unlikely to have happened by chance.

Similarly, the probability of life evolving purely as a accident
is too low for it to have happened by chance. It must have been
an "unfair coin." That is, since it couldn't have been an accident
that life evolved on earth, there must have been a guiding force -
either creation or survival of the fittest, depending on your
theology.

Therefore, the most reasonable conclusion is that the same guiding
force must exist on other planets, and so life must have evolved on
other planets as well.

Sincerely,

John

John J. Xenakis
john@GenerationalDynamics.com
http://www.GenerationalDynamics.com

Originally Posted by Croakmore

You can raise the ontogeny-recapitulates-phylogeny principle if you like, but ORP has been brutally debunked (primarily by S. J. Gould).

Mr. E.,

So you completely reject everything the Evo-Devo guys are discovering and talking about? I agree that hard ORP (a la Haeckel) is wrong, but wouldn't you agree that some soft version of ORP is logically necessary? I know we've been here before, but I forget how we ended up.

The hard anti-ORP position (whether you hold it or not) reminds me of the Wolfpoffian school of paleoanthropologists wrongly taking on the geneticists (they'll lose) for honorable reasons (an attempt to celebrate diversity plus a fear of what human nature might actually be like).

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Richard,

It appears that we're talking above each other's head. I don't
understand your reasoning, and you don't understand mine. Such is
life.

I will make one more attempt to explain myself, a last gasp perhaps.

John,

Instead of "gasping", and (please God) before you explain your 300 years of internet experience and how both A and B have a mutual responsibility to accept the narrow-mindedness and pomposity of A, why don't you take a second look at this:

Originally Posted by Croakmore

John, I think you are a perfect candidate reader for Richard Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker," subtitled "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design." He, along with many other evolutionary biologists, eschew the meme of universal life.

Don't you think it might be helpful to read the book Mr. E. suggested? Hell, through googling you might even find an annotated version or a summary. Do you have any significant familiarity with the works of Stephen Gould or Richard Dawkins, the experts Mr. E., cited in this thread? Even if one disagrees with their conclusions (and many do - hell they even disagreed with each other!) it is strange that one would hold the positions you do with such certainty without some knowledge of their arguments.

Xer lit. Douglas Copeland,anything he writes. Brett Easton Ellis. The guy who wrote Fight Club. It's out there man, it's by no means obscure, I mean we got the name of our entire generation from Mr. copelands book. ( Yes, yes I know it has a longer brand than that coming from a documentary of the Teddy boys of English youth in the Early Sixties, to Billy Idols band in the mid to late 70's to Doug's book.)

Originally Posted by John J. Xenakis

Dear Richard,

Originally Posted by Croakmore

> "Life is too complex to have evolved by chance." I don't grasp
> your point here. What does that mean?

It appears that we're talking above each other's head. I don't
understand your reasoning, and you don't understand mine. Such is
life.

I will make one more attempt to explain myself, a last gasp perhaps.

Suppose you flip a coin 1000 times, and it comes up heads every time.

You say, "Wow! That's an incredible coincidence. That won't happen
again in 20 billion years. I'll bet nobody in history has ever
flipped a coin 1000 times and had it come up heads every time."

Is that really what happened? Is that the correct conclusion to
draw?

Obviously it's not. The correct explanation is that the coin is not
a fair coin. Because, as a practical matter, getting 1000 heads
is too unlikely to have happened by chance.

Similarly, the probability of life evolving purely as a accident
is too low for it to have happened by chance. It must have been
an "unfair coin." That is, since it couldn't have been an accident
that life evolved on earth, there must have been a guiding force -
either creation or survival of the fittest, depending on your
theology.

Therefore, the most reasonable conclusion is that the same guiding
force must exist on other planets, and so life must have evolved on
other planets as well.

John, this Grand Natural Crapshoot, or Coin Toss, you prefer for explaining the origin of life on is not off the list of potential causes. But it has almost no appeal for me. It reeks of the "Strange Attractor" principle, for which there is no empirical evidence. Evolution, I think, is a "bottoms up" affair, not a "top down" configuration, with the vital strings held by the Great Puppeteer.

I'm hot for strange attractors, but not so far as biological evolution is concerned. There were so many taxonomic bifurcations on Earth over the past 3+ billion years that led to humans, for example, that you would have to assume they all occurred under the infuence of this Strange Attractor. All I'm asking is: How can you make this assumption? Flipping coins doesn't do much to convince me that intelligent life will naturally pop out from a big-enough experiment. Your randomness principle is misplaced; it is better to apply it to random genetic drift, where it actually works. But it does nothing to explain the origin of life, IMO.

Without that explanation, we're screwed. I prefer to simply admit it, and then work with what we know.

--Croak

Is a Strange Attractor when you see a hot chick with some fat ugly guy? I just think it's about money when I see that. Anyhow, most of the big Science type guys who think about this stuff say this: There are massive galactic civilization out there and some have likely visited. Also the current vogue is for a theory called panspermia. ( It sounds like a gay porno film to me) That says life is everywhere and it's very tenacious. How come these guys are ignoring this on their debate? Space.com man, and it's siter site Livescience.

Originally Posted by spudzill

Is a Strange Attractor when you see a hot chick with some fat ugly guy? I just think it's about money when I see that. Anyhow, most of the big Science type guys who think about this stuff say this: There are massive galactic civilization out there and some have likely visited. Also the current vogue is for a theory called panspermia. ( It sounds like a gay porno film to me) That says life is everywhere and it's very tenacious. How come these guys are ignoring this on their debate? Space.com man, and it's siter site Livescience.

:lol: Spud, you kinda remind me of the "Crasher" character from Strauss & Howe's book 13th Generation.

Originally Posted by spudzill

Xer lit. Douglas Copeland,anything he writes. Brett Easton Ellis. The guy who wrote Fight Club. It's out there man, it's by no means obscure, I mean we got the name of our entire generation from Mr. copelands book. ( Yes, yes I know it has a longer brand than that coming from a documentary of the Teddy boys of English youth in the Early Sixties, to Billy Idols band in the mid to late 70's to Doug's book.)

Yes, but as much as I like Brett Easton Ellis' stuff (that adaptation of American Psycho was tres hillarious - especially that scene with Bateman talking about Huey Lewis and the News) his sense of narrative form is lacking (Less than Zero would've been better as a genuine tragedy, maybe with a neurotic, obsessive Blair blowing away Clay for cheating on her then killing herself, but I actually almost went to the same school he had gone to in the San Fernando valley [I ended up going to its rival, and went on to go to a college attended by a certain "asshole" in Rules of Attraction] and the characters in that book are disturbingly real fascimiles of people from that world) and like most of the other xer writers to date he's no Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald (although I'm prepared to give anyone the benefit of the doubt that they could one day become that good). The one xer writer that does I think measure up to his lost generation ancestors is Dennis Lehane who wrote Mystic River. I think I'm a pretty hard judge of these things, but I also think he's every bit as good as the lost hardboiled crime writers Hammett, Cain (who wrote Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity, and the Postman Always Rings Twice), and Chandler.