“It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian,”
In that respect, I’d say he’s right. I think Dawkins has said the same thing, in fact. But you’re right that there’s no reason to expect that any extraterrestrial life would look more like us than our most distant earthly relatives.
natural selection seems largely consistent with how other physical laws operate (and therefore we can model genetic evolution by using physical processes such as random walks, brownian motion, etc).
This is not a bad assumption.
But, by the same token, there’s no reason to think that evolution will produce the same outcome everytime. Even if you have selection forces on a randomly moving particle the path and therefore outcome, will not be the same every time.
Is this guy’s paper pretty much universally refuted by LWers?
Have biochemists found any other molecular combinations that are of as good a fidelity as RNA and DNA to reliably transmit information?
But any DNA based combo could be equally likely. The superhappies of eliezer’s fiction sounded like a DNA based species having genetic memory and they looked like blobs.
In that respect, I’d say he’s right. I think Dawkins has said the same thing, in fact. But you’re right that there’s no reason to expect that any extraterrestrial life would look more like us than our most distant earthly relatives.
natural selection seems largely consistent with how other physical laws operate (and therefore we can model genetic evolution by using physical processes such as random walks, brownian motion, etc).
This is not a bad assumption.
But, by the same token, there’s no reason to think that evolution will produce the same outcome everytime. Even if you have selection forces on a randomly moving particle the path and therefore outcome, will not be the same every time.
Is this guy’s paper pretty much universally refuted by LWers?
I agree.
Have biochemists found any other molecular combinations that are of as good a fidelity as RNA and DNA to reliably transmit information?
But any DNA based combo could be equally likely. The superhappies of eliezer’s fiction sounded like a DNA based species having genetic memory and they looked like blobs.