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An Alien God — LessWrong

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"A curious aspect of the theory of evolution," said Jacques Monod, "is that everybody thinks he understands it." A human being, looking at the natural world, sees a thousand times purpose. A rabbit's legs, built and articulated for running; a fox's jaws, built and articulated for tearing. But what you see is not exactly what is there... In the days before Darwin, the cause of all this apparent purposefulness was a very great puzzle unto science. The Goddists said "God did it", because you get 50 bonus points each time you use the word "God" in a sentence. Yet perhaps I'm being unfair. In the days before Darwin, it seemed like a much more reasonable hypothesis. Find a watch in the desert, said William Paley, and you can infer the existence of a watchmaker. But when you look at all the apparent purposefulness in Nature, rather than picking and choosing your examples, you start to notice things that don't fit the Judeo-Christian concept of one benevolent God. Foxes seem well-designed to c

x An Alien God — LessWrong The Simple Math of Evolution Eldritch Analogies Evolution Frontpage 247 An Alien God by Eliezer Yudkowsky 2nd Nov 2007 10 min read 163 247 "A curious aspect of the theory of evolution," said Jacques Monod, "is that everybody thinks he understands it." A human being, looking at the natural world, sees a thousand times purpose. A rabbit's legs, built and articulated for running; a fox's jaws, built and articulated for tearing. But what you see is not exactly what is there... In the days before Darwin, the cause of all this apparent purposefulness was a very great puzzl

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