rationalskepticism.org

CharlieM wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
Organisation in nature is a product of conflicting forces, not an orchestrated intentional event.

The organization is not so much the product of conflicting forces. It is more accurate to say that conflicting forces are used in the organization.

No, you've added a teleology there that's not evident or supported.

CharlieM wrote:The question is, what is doing the organizing? The researchers imply, in this case, that it is the human body. This is rather vague which isn't very surprising as it is something that's very hard to pin down. It is certainly not the genome that's doing the organizing. The genome of itself can do nothing and also the same genome sits in the stomach cells and in the skin cells.

Not the human body, but the chemical environment within the human body, in an isolated package - the cell.

CharlieM wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:
Snow drifts are 'organised' by the wind, by the aerodynamic qualities of the various geometric shapes on the ground, and gravity. They come out fairly highly organised, and are quite repeatable given very similar circumstances. Something can be 'incredible' in the sense of looking at the final product, but perfectly mundane when looking at how it arrived at that level of organisation.

You are comparing snow drifts with this!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKW4F0Nu-UY[/youtube]

Yes, that's precisely what I am comparing it to. Just think - what are the chances that all of those billions of flakes of snow, being blown about in the wind, will settle in such an ordered shape? Moreover, new drifts will form with the same contours in the same places again and again.

Obviously the 2 scenarios use completely different mechanisms, but the organisation element is functionally analogous. The result is not the consequence of intent, but of physical forces and constraints - in evolutionary terms, there's a mechanism you know as natural selection that provides the analogous walls, lean-to's, and eddies in the snowdrift scenario.

Also obviously, the entire point of living organisms is the hereditary retention of beneficial changes to the organisation process itself. In fact, snow flake settling is far harder to predict - it's far more chaotic, as it doesn't have a process that stabilises it over generations.