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To: carranza2 who wrote (71680)	12/13/2009 1:16:36 PM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

As an engineer, the causal processes are fascinating as are the probabilities. My amazing ancestors were so spectacularly successful over a billion years that not a single one of them died before they were able to successfully launch the next generation. What are the chances of that happening? Their intellects were so powerful that they could figure out the best thing to do in any given situation to avoid an early and terminal demise. Never once in millions of years, just since my antecedents' chimpoid era, despite billions of attempts on their lives by lions, tigers, vicious murdering cannibalistic neighbouring tribes, virulent bacteria, viruses, malaria, worms, leeches and other depredations did they fall victim before successfully parenting the next generation. Never did they slip and fall over a cliff, into a river, onto a rock, out of a tree or make any other mistake that ended the line. For a billion years they never made such a mistake. In my short life there have been thousands of near misses but always my acutely alert mind has forestalled fatality. My powerful intellect produced from the cauldron of a billion years of increasing power is superlative enabling me to wield weapons to hold the most powerful predators at bay. A pride of lions is nothing to my defences. A pack of wolves knows to stay distant and seek easier prey such as huge elk with dirty great antlers. My fingernails, dull teeth and percipient eyes are sufficient weaponry to keep them at bay. Not only have I and all of my ancestors going back into billions of years been fortunate enough to avoid demise, we have also enjoyed mutations in our genes which happened, by extremely good luck, every time, to have been successful mutations causing even more advantage against the risks of failure. Just in the last million years, my brain has evolved from a chattering chimp clambering around in trees hoping a leopard doesn't come by, using his prehensile fingers to clutch a rock or stick to beat off the attackers, to a sophisticated premium processor using said fingers to caress the keyboard and express such ideas a chimp couldn't begin to comprehend. What are the chances? Umpty petaquadrillions to one. We have beaten the odds C2. Whoever designed the system has thrown all that stuff at our ancestors trying to do us in, but we beat them. What a loser they are. Nyah nyah nyah to them. My father went off to WWII and described how a shell landed beside them and splattered him with mud with shrapnel ripping through the canvas. In the desert, he said he'd wake if the rolling thunder of artillery stopped as the sound had become natural. He risked my life. We laugh at such challenges, which is a kind of chimp response, but after a few more generations, or perhaps uploading our minds to cyberspace, such primitive pointless chimp-like responses will have been filtered from of our DNA. Mqurice