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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (3224)	11/8/2000 11:04:16 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 28931

You have to remember that eyes are not 100% positive. They represent a very vulnerable soft place on the body- and a direct open link to the brain. If you had them on both sides of your head, if you were being beaten how would you protect your "face"? You couldn't. It's good to have eyes- but it's even better to have them where they are, and where they can be protected. There are, of course, creatures with multiple eyes. Most of them aren't very long lived. When you look at long lived animals- like ourselves- you need to think about robust systems. Things like eyes aren't really built for durability. Of course two is good- because redundancy in a critical system that is vulnerable is always a good idea. Bilateral symmetry gives us lots of redundancy.

To: Solon who wrote (3224)	11/9/2000 12:37:57 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

but I think it needs to be insisted that they keep trying to perfect these responses. That is the nature of science. Perfection only exists in dogma. I don't know of a single scientist who is much of a scientist who claims to a) know all the answers, b) think that every theory is perfect. Even determinist Newtonian mechanics situations only exist as an ideal. Sure at some scales they work as adequate approximations. I was telling this to my friend saying, "If you drop ping pong balls out of the back of a C-130, there is no way to calculate where they will fall in classical dynamics." Even in a vacuum, the fall wouldn't be perfectly Newtonian because a) no vacuum is perfect, and b) you can never know the initial conditions. Besides the C-130 couldn't fly in a vacuum, but you know what I mean. Evolution is much the same. The ways that genetic material can move from one species to another is not strictly limited to sexual and asexual means. There are viruses and invasions, plus parasitisms, commensal or symbiotic relationships that can create other pathways for genetic exchange. E. coli even has a mode of scrounging DNA from the environment and other E. coli from tube-like extensions. The world is a wild and wooly place, defying our best attempts at boxing it in.