Evolution and Probability

Hi Dinker. Welcome to EVCForum!I'd like to continue with your discussion of the rather apt domino analogy (although as with any analogy this one starts falling apart at some point).You stated: There are a couple of problems here. Let's see if I can set them out logically.1. There are a great number of observations that lead us to the conclusion that there exists a pile of dominos. It is a rather unusual pile in that we can detect a definite pattern or series of patterns in the pile - i.e., the pile is not strictly random. One of the more consistent patterns we can discern is a certain tendency towards linearity. Lots of the dominos seem to line up.2. Based on the existence of the pile and the patterns we can discern within it, we can develop a hypothesis that explains how the pattern arose. The hypothesis that seems to make the most sense in this case is that the dominos were aligned standing upright, and then an adjacent domino fell forward knocking over its neighbor. We have, in essence, proposed a mechanism for how the pattern we observe could have emerged.3. We then test the hypothesis by looking around to see if we can find support for our Theory of Domino Collapse. Amazingly enough, we find that the domino collapse is still occurring, and that we can actually observe the last two or three dominos falling in exactly the pattern predicted by our theory. We may not be able to "prove" that all the dominos in the pile collapsed in this fashion, and there are some intriguing patterns that aren't readily explained (like a couple of dominos way back at our inferred beginning of the pile seem to have merged, rather than collapsed; there are several lines that appear separated from our main pile with no obvious connection; there are some places where the dominos we'd expect to see seem to have disappeared, etc), but we can state that overall, the preponderance of observations seems to support our hypothesis.Although we can be pretty sure our Theory of Domino Collapse is sound, the most interesting question remaining is the "initialization" question you broached. To stretch the domino analogy past the breaking point, we are in the position of trying to determine what the first domino actually was. We don't have the Last Universal Common Domino (LUCiD) to compare, and subsequent dominos are all different - and in truth change over time. In fact, we can't really be sure there WAS a LUCiD, all we can know is that it wasn't a domino-as-we-know-it. So we're looking for other things that might have been precursors to dominos that have the necessary properties to start our domino chain.Naturally, the analogy completely falls apart from the fact that no two "dominos" in the ToE are the same; the fact that dominos don't replicate themselves whereas the organisms in the ToE do; dominos don't inherit traits from their predecessors; dominos aren't normally subject to selective pressures that might cause one type of domino to outlast another type of domino; evolution isn't a chain of progression (like dominos toppling); and the ToE's "dominos" morph from one type of domino to another or to things that aren't even dominos over time.Hope this clarifies why your objection doesn't work.