Doesn’t having ATIA imply an interpretive process on the part of that which has access? Otherwise there is no utility to having it.
Yes ATIA (Access To Information About) does imply that the information is acquired and then used in some way.
Consider the Gull on the rock. A cat approaches and it likes to eat Gull. If the Gull doesn’t mind being eaten then that is what happens, the Gull eating cat population thrives and the Gull population dwindles.
If the Gull objects to being the cat’s dinner then it will try to escape by flying away. The cat is lean and hungry. It moves fast and can leap into the air. Gulls with a low Power/Weight Ratio are slow to take off and are caught by the cat. Better equipped Gulls live to escape another day and breed baby gulls with similar capabilities.
The baby Gulls are similar but not identical. Some babies are not as good at escaping as their parents and some are better. This generates a bias because the cats catch more of the slower gulls so the beneficial traits increase in frequency in the Gull population.
The Gulls continue to improve so the cats go hungry and the slow cats starve leaving only the ones fast enough to catch gulls. Baby cats are born that are better than their parents at catching gulls. So an “Arms Race” develops between predator and prey.
After a few million years of this the genomes of gull and cat are “Historically informed” about the environment in which reproducers are reproduced.
This is the process of Natural Selection identified by Darwin. Organisms’ abilities to survive are constantly tested against the environment. This results in adaptation to that environment.
a priori:
Who is the author or what is the source of the information in ATIA?
If you are asking “Who is the Author of the laws of physics and the material content of the Universe” then science has to say that it doesn’t know. If religious people say that they do know then I ask "How can you know something (Rather than just believe you know) that science doesn’t know)?
Given the existence of the laws of physics and the Earth in orbit around the sun, Evolution by Natural Selection is clearly able to cause replicating organisms to accumulate information about the environment and cause those organism to become historically informed and well adapted to it. The environments have corresponding “Fitness Landscapes” and Natural Selection directs the evolution of breeding populations towards local peaks in those landscapes.
Natural Selection is ***NOT ***a “Random Process” is it a ***DIRECTED ***process.
a priori:
It seems that chance doesn’t make sense to anyone.
Indeed so.
a priori:
But many people just have too much at stake to allow themselves the objective possibility that God might exist and that He is informing the process of natural selection.
Well that’s not my position and even Richard Dawkins would not go that far.
However, I see no evidence that God, Allah, Satan or Aliens are informing Natural Selection as it proceeds. I see “Nature, red-raw in tooth and claw” and that means that Satan must be the top suspect for this horrific way of accumulating the mere 3 billion base pairs in human DNA. A God would surely just create that in an instant without 4 billion years of horrific Dog-eat-Dog and Cat-eat-Gull carnage.
a priori:
To accomplish this, one has to build up NS as its own creative entity, rendering God unnecessary.
Yes I agree with that.
a priori:
This reminds me of the Reagan administration calling ketchup a vegetable during the debate over the funding of school programs.
One can pump all the cosmic steroids they want into NS but it will never bulk up to the status of sole creative force in the evolution of life. IMHO. (But then again, I’ve already stipulated my epistemological credentials.)
In that you state a belief and not an explanation. Evolutionary Theory delivers enormous explanatory power that is backed up by evidence. If it can be shown to be wrong then science and scientists would not object to that. They would be very interested in the argument.
a priori:
Fair enough. Where did it come from? Remember, using words derived from any time or space reference is cheating.
Science doesn’t know where the Universe came from and I cannot know what science doesn’t know. So I don’t know where it came from.
Emotel.
We are all descended from hydrogen. I think it’s a pretty good conclusion given the raw data.