I’ll go farther and say that its wrong. Evolution may be a random walk, but random walk is a method of getting places. Evolution random walks to the next needed feature. Evolution is not at all blind.
Well, it’s debatable but I think it comes down to defining your terms.
“Evolution is blind” suggests no guidance at all, and as you say there is randomness, but an important part of the evolutionary process is survival and propagation which are guided by the environment. so arguably evolution is NOT blind.
However the evolutionary process is reactive and does not involve long-term planning so you could argue that “blind” means “looking ahead, considering more than what you can immediately sense.” so arguably evolution IS blind.
Either perspective agrees that there is no “Grand Architect” and/or “God’s Plan” which I think is the general point being made. But it’s just a little distracting.
evolution is blind because all of it is an accident. life forms that survive long enough to make more life forms get their genes to live on. any life form that doesn’t, well, doesn’t. better survivability because of an error in copying genes? more offspring. worse survivability? less offspring
there is no intention to evolution, it’s simply a consequence of the fact that some primitive life forms at some point felt a desire to copy their genes and the process of doing so is imperfect. That desire, probably a product of random copying itself, is what made all living things today
Which is, I think, exactly what happened to the homo sapiens branch. Dinosaurs lasted hundreds of millions of years, we are barely at 300k and we are killing ourselves. Dead end. (For us)
I’ll go farther and say that its wrong. Evolution may be a random walk, but random walk is a method of getting places. Evolution random walks to the next needed feature. Evolution is not at all blind.
Well, it’s debatable but I think it comes down to defining your terms.
Either perspective agrees that there is no “Grand Architect” and/or “God’s Plan” which I think is the general point being made. But it’s just a little distracting.
evolution is blind because all of it is an accident. life forms that survive long enough to make more life forms get their genes to live on. any life form that doesn’t, well, doesn’t. better survivability because of an error in copying genes? more offspring. worse survivability? less offspring
there is no intention to evolution, it’s simply a consequence of the fact that some primitive life forms at some point felt a desire to copy their genes and the process of doing so is imperfect. That desire, probably a product of random copying itself, is what made all living things today
It’s blind because in nature, it often fucks up, and the extreme fuck ups die off without continuing the process.
Which is, I think, exactly what happened to the homo sapiens branch. Dinosaurs lasted hundreds of millions of years, we are barely at 300k and we are killing ourselves. Dead end. (For us)