Smart or stupid planning?
peace. You recently wrote a column about astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I wonder what your take on his words here (I copied from a lecture): “I want to quickly come out with a rebuke about stupid planning and it will be quick. Look at all the things that want to kill us, most planetary orbits are unstable, the process of star formation is completely inefficient, most places in the universe will kill life instantly! People say ‘all the forces in nature are aimed precisely at life’. Look at the size of the universe where we cannot live, you will die instantly. That is not what I would call ‘heaven’. The orbits of galaxies that we orbit once every few hundred million years, we will eventually get close enough to a supernova that will wipe out our ozone layer and kill all life on the surface. That is, anyone who does not have dark skin because the radiation level will give you cancer. We are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, our spiral is lost, as beautiful as it is, and of course, we are in the universe Which expands in one direction, that the abyss of oblivion will end as the temperature of the universe asymptotically approaches zero. And that’s just the universe. On Earth – volcanoes, tsunamis have killed, you know, I think the number is even higher up to 200 thousand people, floods, tornadoes, none of that is a sign of someone benevolent somewhere. And the 90 percent there should be 99 percent as mentioned earlier, meaning 99 percent of all life that has ever existed has gone extinct. A solar system like ours is like a shooting range: comets, asteroids, bend over! And look how long it took to ‘build’ multicellular life. Not since the beginning of time on Earth did life happen quickly, but not multicellular life, we needed the blue-greens to assemble all the oxygen to start the ‘budget’ of oxygen and then you could have a kind of rocket fuel for multicellular life, but it took 3.5 billion years. You can’t call that an efficient plan. (Intelligently) thinking about us (humans). And in humans, it’s the most tragic of all. I’m not even including the free will insurance where humans want to kill each other, I’m talking about nature killing us without the help of humans. Aggressive leukemia in children, hemophilia, all of that, all of that (list…) and we… so much praise for the human eye but, anyone who has seen the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum knows how blind we actually are and some of that blindness means we can’t see we can’t detect magnetic fields, ionizing radiation, radon, we’re there like stationary targets for ionizing radiation. We have to eat all the time, because we’re warm-blooded. A crocodile eats chickens once a month and everything’s fine, so we’re always looking for more food. These gases at the bottom of the list? You can’t smell them or taste them, if you breathe them in, you die. So… about birth defects, most… all of that, abuse, infections and other things related to humans and here – we have no idea (in percentages) and you know, birth defects are particularly tragic for the families that suffer from them and you look at all these pictures of aborted fetuses and most of them are stillborn, others are born with their hearts outside the body and so on, it’s all just stupid design. And the problem is that you look for what’s smart and yes, you can find things that are really beautiful you know, for example the ball socket of the shoulder, lots of things that you can point to, but then you stop looking at the things that will challenge that ‘revelation’ and so, for example if I come across a frozen waterfall and it overwhelms me with its beauty I will then turn to the rock next to me and try to find a centipede or some deadly striped newt and then put it all in context and understand, of course, that the universe is not here for us for any particular single purpose. My favorite example is of course that we breathe, eat and drink from the same opening in our bodies, which guarantees that a certain percentage of us will choke to death every year. Imagine if you had A separate opening for breathing and eating and talking would be really cool, wouldn’t it? I mean, you can drink, breathe and just talk and you’ll never choke and that’s not an unreasonable request, dolphins eat and breathe through separate openings in their bodies, and this is a mammal so I’m not asking, you know, it’s like, Santa Claus could grant a wish like that and this is of course, my favorite – what’s going on between our legs? You’ve probably heard it before, an entertainment complex located in the middle of the sewer system, no engineer would ever design something like that.”
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Natural selection relies on randomness and chance as basic explanatory factors, so how is this a question about it?
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