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RE: Letters From Darwin - An Evolutionary Coin Flip
The coin required an intelligence, or this case a shyster, to have it continually land on its head. (He had two coins) And it required this intelligence/shyster to flip the coin and to also create the con/trick. It is an act of creativity ... so I see an intelligence at work and not just chance and natural selection. Question remains where does the intelligence originate. What drives the ideas? The con of course wants money and attention and this will serve his chances of procreating and having offspring that will survive. But where did the idea for the con come from? Where did the idea for a coin come from?
Lolz, there was only one coin, this was a thought experiment, so we have already ruled out cheating. However your point about what drives the idea or where it comes from doesn't really matter, the main message is, that the appearance of any 'guiding intelligence' is purely in our minds.
Cg
If there is no second coin and no trick, then this is a work of fantasy. You have violated known rules of the universe, which is okay in fantasy, but there must be some parallelism for the fantasy to work as an analogy, for it to be symbolic of actual experience. Where is the link to evolutionary mechanics? In your tale gurus can defy the statistical odds and do magic. How would that be possible without a guiding intelligence that is capable of defying physical limits and rules of chance and chaos. You cannot defy physical laws and rules of chance, unless by 'magic' whatever that means or they are not actually laws and binding rules, unless they are simply patterns that we take note of. That is possible, we know far less than we think we do.
Evolution is not bound to a coin toss. The known mechanism is natural selection. Those who fit best into the environment, survive and reproduce. Some posit there is an intelligence guiding the selection and creating evolutionary leaps of sorts. I am not sure but I would hazard that is true. The book Darwin's Black Box makes a compelling case for this.
Let's get meta. Where do our minds come from ... the intelligence found within? Do we assume that all our thoughts are our own and we alone generate them. I used to assume this. I do not anymore. Meditation has taught me the mind is more like a radio ... capable of broadcasting and receiving but often unaware that it is doing so. We have a great deal less free will than we think we do.
I would still say the coin toss was rigged ... for my I have more faith in the rules of chance than I do gurus that would waste such incredible powers on coin tossing. But you did set up the parameters and I will have to concede you the plot. LOL. But your analogy does not support the idea of a lack of guiding intelligence. It does the opposite. It does however also point to our tendency to believe in charlatans and magic, our tendency to jump to and insist on conclusions.
The position remains ... our very existence is statistically impossible and when we look at the nature of space ... so is our continued existence. All the monkeys in the world typing for eternity would never produce the works of Shakespeare and yet some suggest nothing but random chaos created and maintain a very complex universe ... let alone the world. That is a lot of lucky coin tosses. I am too much of cynic to buy that many lucky coin tosses.