re: #111 Akiva

One of the big problems with this approach is an early statement in the article, “some plants may make choices”. (I’m sure many others mentioned it, but I’m not reading through all the comments.) Since when do species make choices on their design? The statement obviously means species self design?

Some will say this is just a language mistake. However, this is frequently an approach mistake. Either there are an accumulation of random mutations that result in new species features improving the species for it’s environment, thereby resulting in an increases survival rate and “selection” of the trait, or there is design. Trying to find “intent” leads to a natural focus to find “intendor”. Since that couldn’t be a “designer” - indicative of a Higher Power, people tend to personalize it upon the species itself, or the amorphous “nature”.

Clearly the incredible complexity of not only the accumulation of random genetic mutation to create a non-dangerous species change in an individual combined with a multi-species interaction scheme such as is the case in a pepper which has developed a feature for the spread of seed through consumption by another species yet avoiding consumption by negative impacting species is so mind numbingly complex and statistically unlikely that many of us see direction (and therefore a Director) in the beauty of the possibly-statistically-impossible result.

The plants don’t know about the rats and the birds and their differential seed-destroying tendencies and their differential reaction to capsicum any more than they make choices about how hot to mutate. Some random mutations simply exploit their host organisms’ surrounding environments better than others do, and thus are selected by it (meaning that they reproduce more successfully, than other organisms of their species which lack the mutation - for instance, mild peppers that get consumed by rodents instead of birds, and whose seeds get crushed instead of excreted whole and fertile). And those selecting environments includes not only the temperature, the sunlight, sea saltiness or the rainfall; they also include the predators, the prey, the parasites, the food sources, the soil nutrients…everything that can comprise an ecological niche, and is present to be exploited. What would be statistically unlikely would be for species NOT to in the fullness of time eventually produce mutations that functionally exploited each structural facet of their environments.

The reiterative manifestation of simple algorithms can lead to complex-appearing phenomena (the flocking of birds and the schooling of fish just depend upon each member being instinctually programmed to maintain a distancy between x and y from all its neighbors).