Quote from: RE on Today at 09:41 AMThat was a long way of saying you believe the Universe and Life is Random, but it clearly isn't.
Oh please. While I can count on a vast majority of people knowing nothing about statistics (and even fewer their involvement in the geosciencese), I did not imply random in my siloloqui to have it characterized so simply.
Life is NOT random, it just requires the right combination of circumstances/timing/ingredients, all the basic molecular components of which float around in space until...they no longer float around...and instead form...stuff....and said stuff sometimes becomes life. Or not. Might look random, or sound random, but you should know better. All these independent distributions of stuff...combining in weird ways, life of our type being one outcome, life of another type undoubtedly exists...elsewhere..and at other times. When a systeem as large as our Universe delivers life ONCE, there is no longer random, there is absolute certainty of a given outcome, the only question being the liklihood of occurrence across the unfathomable number of combinations of dead galaxies and current galaxies and galaxies yet to come. In that system, we are proof of certainty, and in that certainty, guarentee its existence. The only question is what are the odds of occurrence. Nothing more random that the odds on a rooullette table, which on any given table are immutable and known.
Human exitence isn't required for this math to work, the prokaryotes 3.7 billion years ago were sufficient. The only question left is the liklihood of occurrence per unit of whatever. Random....please....there is a distribution describing the occurrence EXACTLY...we just lack the information to know it yet.
Quote from: REAnyhow, DNA's structure and how it works is something that was inside the box we didn't know before 1953, now we do. There's a whole lot more inside the box we still have little clue on, but in a million more years we might have had a shot. How the brain works to organize thoughts and emotions is pretty much a mystery, besides identifying a few areas in the organ responsible for various tasks. Better understanding that might have given a clue as to the purpose of the organization necessary to build it. Not gonna happen though
RE
The hubris of us bipeds. We know DNA. We be smartz. The amount we DON'T know yet is likely orders of magnitude beyond what we DO know yet. The Wright Brothers did cooler stuff, but DNA will probably be more useful in the long run. So what? Think it will cure our urge to over-exploit everything we touch? Will it stop people from suffering "us versus them" attitudes? Politicians from deciding the "good" citizens from the "bad" ones based on skin color and nationality?
Based on your understanding of DNA, do you think it has potential to cure humans from doing stupid things before collapse finally shows up and reduces our population enough to qualify as one?