Halbert wrote:
> Too many people get stuck on the idea that humans and intelligent life are 
> like the goals of a deterministic process when nothing could be further from 
> the truth. Evolution has no agenda, people are not special and it is simply 
> the best stratigy for the evironment is going to be the one that comes to 
> dominate.

As an aside, the most successful organisms on this planet... are not 
humans. By any stretch of the imagination.

If you happen to be a human-sized organism, then certainly humans are 
the most visible lifeforms around here. But, truth be told, the most 
numerous animals are unicellular. By some considerable margin.

Also, people tend to look down on animals such as living fossils and so 
forth. As if "yeah, they were great in their day, but superior organisms 
have evolved now". But you know what? Unsegmented worms are *still* here 
today, which means that one way or another they *still* manage to 
compete successfully with the "superior" organisms around them.

The goal of evolution is not to come up with more and more sophisticated 
designs. It's to come up with STUFF THAT WORKS. However clever or dumb 
that might turn out to be.

> The idea that evolution was "programmed" at the start makes the assumption 
> that the programmer had knowlege of all the environmental changes that would 
> happen over 1,000,000,000 or more years. A premise that sounds somewhat less 
> likely than the premise of natural selection.
> So, no. there was no magical programmer to set everything in motion. There 
> is no merit to discuss ID in a scientific framework.

Er, yeah.

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