God's role in extinctions?

joshua_ste

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I think it's fascinating and wonderful and so awe-inspiring that each species carries within us (and without us) parts and glimmers and vestiges and imprints of our previous evolutionary paths. Between our encoded DNA, our various species' bodies, the bones of the histories of life underneath our feet -- the information for our existence is written everywhere around us just waiting to be deciphered.

I saw this and thought I'd share. Richard Dawkins states so plainly some of the mysteries around us. It's a short clip.

YouTube - Richard Dawkins: Vestigial Organs: The Wings of the Flightless Cormorant
 

midlifebear

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I think it's fascinating and wonderful and so awe-inspiring that each species carries within us (and without us) parts and glimmers and vestiges and imprints of our previous evolutionary paths. Between our encoded DNA, our various species' bodies, the bones of the histories of life underneath our feet -- the information for our existence is written everywhere around us just waiting to be deciphered.

(I clipped the last bit

I agree, joshua_ste. Every once in a while my little lizard brain gets a hankering for a juicy Hawks Moth, but my current tongue is just not long and sticky enough to zap one. :smile:
 

JustAsking

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I think it's fascinating and wonderful and so awe-inspiring that each species carries within us (and without us) parts and glimmers and vestiges and imprints of our previous evolutionary paths. Between our encoded DNA, our various species' bodies, the bones of the histories of life underneath our feet -- the information for our existence is written everywhere around us just waiting to be deciphered.

In fact, if you take the basic axioms of genetic inheritance, and random mutation, it forms the criteria for a Markov Process that creates Markov Chains. And Markov processes are the only known mathematical process that can produce a graph structure that is genealogical with the nested hierarchies that we find in the universal tree of life.

So not only is the information laying around waiting to be deciphered, it's structure conforms to a mathematical system that predicts the very family tree that we see in nature.

The chances of the one million living species we have studied having genetic relationships that conform as they do to Markov mathematics thorugh any simply random (and non genealogical) process is astronomically small.

I know this Markov stuff is really geeky, but I find it amazing that we can prove out a process that took place over billions of years with such mathematical precision.

Even when it comes to evolution, Galileo's comments still apply, which is that if God spoke a language for the creation of the universe, it was the language of mathematics.
 

JustAsking

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I agree, joshua_ste. Every once in a while my little lizard brain gets a hankering for a juicy Hawks Moth, but my current tongue is just not long and sticky enough to zap one. :smile:

See, now this is a much better response to joshua_ste's posting. This is why I am never invited to parties.