SPONTANEOUS ORDER, EVOLUTION, AND NATURAL LAW |
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As noted above, Dennett (1995b, p. 206) asserts that "if Darwin is right, your great, great... grandmother was a...macro...That is the unavoidable conclusion of the previous chapters ...you descended from macros..." According to Dennett (1995b, p. 156), "we all know it well in outline: before there were bacteria with autonomous metabolisms, there were simpler quasi-living things, like viruses...viruses...'do things'...they reproduce or self-replicate...Computer programmers call a cobbled together fragment of coded instructions that performs a particular task a "macro", so I propose to call these pioneers macros to stress that...they are...bits of program or algorithm...like computer viruses..." "[I]t is now clear," Dennett (1995b, p. 206) writes, "that they spent the better part of a billion years evolving on Earth before there were any [truly] living things [things with autonomous metabolisms]." In the first place this scenario, "we all know well", a scenario developed from Dawkins, is empirically false. Early life, or "quasi-life" as Dennett describes it, would have had to have evolved under water to escape the intense ultra-violet rays hitting the Earth at that time due to the absence of a protective ozone layer atop the atmosphere (that came into being with the ascendancy of global oxygen levels beginning some 2 billion years ago). This presents a fatal problem for Dennett's scenario. The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and until roughly 4 billion years ago, as a consequence of meteoric bombardment, it was too hot for oceans to form (e.g., Schopf, 1983; Cloud, 1988). Bodies of water, in other words, would have evaporated. But 4 billion years ago is just when prokaryotes (bacteria) are known to have appeared on Earth, namely, as soon as the Earth was cool enough to support oceans (e.g., Cloud, 1989). Thus, there was no one billion year window for the imaginary world of "naked algorithms" that Dennett asserts got life going. In addition, even if there were such a billion-year window, there is no other evidence that such a world of naked algorithms ever existed. The Category Error-Life As Metabolic
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