Frisch

Being raised from my youth up in a fundementalist religon, I was always told that the universe was a well oiled machine. It was perfect. A few days ago I was reading up on the enlightenment, and noticed a subheading on Deism. It mentioned that Deists believed in a god who was a sort of master watchmaker who set the perfect universe in motion and let it go. After that point he didn't really fool with it to much. After that It stated that this idea of a perfect universe is no longer popular in scientific circles. Why is that so? Is the universe flawed? Or is it perfect? Is the arguement from design shot to ribbons?

Camaban

Not perfect, no.

I don't know what it is, but it's not perfect

Duvenoy

Hi Frisch, and welcome!

Over the years, I have been amazed many times by new discoverys in the Universe. It is a strange, perhaps even chaotic, place indeed. A place of peace and incredible violence; always a place of great beauty.

Perfect? No. Who would want it to be?

doov

Oolon Colluphid

Define 'perfect'. Perfect for what? And how would we know?

As far as life is concerned, the point of evolution by natural selection is that living things become adapted. So they will come to fit whatever the environment happens to be.

Therefore wherever we find life, the environment will seem perfect for it... but it is perfect for it in the same way that a hole in the ground is the perfect shape to fit a puddle of water! If the universe were different, life would be different... or wouldn't be here to wonder about it!

DT

Oolon Colluphid

It most certainly is, at least as far as living things are concerned. There are plenty of examples of poor design in nature: the designer is either a mad incompetent sadist, or there isn't a designer.

DT

bluefugue

How can one determine if something is "perfect" without reference to a prior set of criteria? What would make this universe better, or worse, than it is? According to who, and with regard to what? If friendliness to human life is the criterion, then I'd say it's rather imperfect. For one thing only a very very very very tiny portion of the universe seems amenable to our existence, and that very very very very tiny portion is full of hazards, from lightning to smallpox to dingoes to gravity itself.

Frisch

Could you point out some poorly designed things in nature?

Coragyps

Darwin's Terrier can, and probably will, give you quite a long list of "poor designs." I've got a couple that just recently occurred to me:
- The life cycles of parasites such as Chinese liver flukes, which require two or three hosts at various stages: snails, fish, and humans, IIRC, in that example. If I were forced to design a parasite, I'd try for one with at least semi-efficient transmission between hosts. Malaria parasites are similar: Plasmodium falciparum must cycle between humans (only!) and one genus of mosquitos.
- The reproductive behavior of, for example, certain clams that live, as adults, only around the "black smoker" vents on the bottom of the sea. They produce gadzillions of eggs, which 1) must get fertilized by sperm that find them drifting around in the vicinity of the vent, and 2) grow into larvae which live as free-floaters a kilometer or so up in the sea, and then 3) have to find a vent to live at in order to mature and reproduce - 1 km down and as much as 100 km away from their larval home. Maybe one in a few million makes it? Not too efficient.

Oh, and hey! Welcome to II!

[ November 18, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

scigirl

Absolutely.

I want to clarify something though - unlike my colleagues, I do not like the term "poor design" since clearly evolutionary mechanisms are capable of creating quite wonderful and complex designs.

However, there are plenty of examples of constraints in our design that not only are "sub-optimal" for their current function, but they also tell an evolutionary story.

Check out the very first post on <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001516" target="_blank">this page</a>, from Darwin's Terrier (FKA Oolon).

Also check out some human medicine examples, provided by yours truly in <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001646" target="_blank">this thread.</a>

Oh and welcome to infidels! Happy reading,

scigirl

Principia

Hi Frisch,

I would like to suggest that asking for 'poor' designs shouldn't get you any further than when you asked for 'perfect' designs, since in reality, what makes a system perfect (i.e. optimal) in a given sense, could be decidedly sub-optimal (even poor) in another. This is a problem that, say, engineers of any sort face. Furthermore, when you talk about a dynamic system such as the 'universe' or 'life', you have to wonder whether a 'perfect' or 'poorly-designed' system now reflects the optimality of any future or past states of the system. For instance, are you more poorly designed when you were born, as you are know, or when you die? Or would you prefer to believe that you are always perfect?

An emerging argument (more often in the Intelligent Design camp, I think) is that evolution by natural selection itself is somehow 'optimal' for the diversification and adaptation of life on this planet. But I believe this argument, at its core, is a fine tuning argument that escapes any scientific testing.