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Comment by threethirtytwo | Hacker News Reader

This is technically random. The entire creationist argument is that complexity cannot come from randomness but evolution is the method in which it does.

Evolution is just a sort of way for low entropy structures to form from randomness. It’s still random all the way down.

The man is just trying to reconcile a belief in god with the scientific reality. He needs to bend the evidence to fit his identity he cannot bend his identity to fit the evidence because that could break his identity. The fact he commented here on this topic is sort of unhinged. It seems like the article presented evidence that is strikingly against his world view and he needed to justify something in order to prevent his identity from rearranging itself according to external reality.

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Look, the leap from “a human in a lab coat mixed some chemicals and got something that grows and divides” to “therefore no God (or no transcendent intelligence) is necessary for life to exist”

is not a valid inference. It is a category error dressed up as science.

Demonstrating that intelligence can produce life (or a lifelike system) is the opposite of demonstrating that intelligence is not required. It is literally evidence in favor of the design hypothesis, not against it. The only thing it would rule out is a very narrow version of young-earth creationism that says “God would never let any natural process produce life under any circumstance”.

Also, scaling from “possible on a planet” to “therefore no intelligence was required anywhere in the process” is still the same non sequitur, moving the (apparent) design from the origin of the first cell to the origin of the cosmic initial conditions and laws that permit planetary abiogenesis.

This equation of “intelligent design = creationism = Adam and Eve” is a cultural artifact of the American culture wars, not a reflection of logic or the global scientific community.

>Look, the leap from “a human in a lab coat mixed some chemicals and got something that grows and divides” to “therefore no God (or no transcendent intelligence) is necessary for life to exist”

That is not my chain of reasoning, nor has lab created life has ever been created. So what you're saying can never be used as valid proof of creationism. And I certainly did not use that evidence to make such a claim. Additionally I never said god does exist or does not exist.

"It's all random all the way down" is just another religious belief. Besides, has anyone estimated the probability of creating organisms so complex using this random evolution scheme? Another problem is why would randomly-evolved organisms be so geometrically symmetric? I'd expect a random process to create an unholy blob of matter.

You're lacking imagination and understanding of how these systems form. Symmetry is very commonplace in nature, for very unsurprising reasons, because what's random is how the processes that create those forms change over time, not the entirety of those processes themselves. And yes, there is a huge amount of study of how life could form in the kinds of environments we think existed on earth near the start of life. ATM it's not so much 'how could this happen at all' and more 'what looks like the most likely way that it happened'.

It's not. It's derived from real time observation, logical induction and other historical evidence that's inline with logic and observation. See my other reply to a sibling commenter of yours.

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