In article >,
Peter T. Daniels > wrote:

>They're all just so inherently implausible -- kind of like, How did the
>eye evolve?
>--
>Peter T. Daniels

Ever seen planaria flatworms? or octopusses? Eyes have evolved
something like 8 separate times, including "half-an-eye" phases where
all they are is light-sensitive patches hooked up to the nervous
system. A fuller awareness of what's already been explored in the
natural world puts things like eyes into perspective as practically
guaranteed to arise, while leaving questions like how galaxies get
spiral structures unanswered (My current pet hypothesis is that almost
all spiral galaxies have arisen from mergers of smaller galaxies which
used to orbit each other, but the events take place on such a vast
scale of time and space and my grasp of numerical solutions to General
Relativity is too weak for me to simulate the hypothesis in a computer
and see what features of galaxies it might predict which nobody has
looked for before--but watching this game from the sidelines is
certainly exciting, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html for
a wonderful archive of visual aids on this kind of topic).


--
Matthew H. Fields http://personal.www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
To be great, do things better and better. Don't wait for talent: no such thing.
Brights have a naturalistic world-view. http://www.the-brights.net/