Re: objections to QTI

From: Russell Standish <r.standish.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 13:24:01 +1000

Minor quibbles, which don't actually detract from your argument:

On Mon, May 30, 2005 at 01:19:28PM -0700, Norman Samish wrote:
> 1) How did life originate if not through a miraculous circumstance? In
> other branches of the multiverse, perhaps most of them, there is no life.

There is evidence that life might arise fairly easily, given the right
conditions. This is the so-called "early appearance of life
argument". See arXiv:astro-ph/0209385.


> 2) An article at
> http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/may28/humans-528.html
> suggests that all of earth's present human inhabitants originated from about
> 2,000 breeders, about 70,000 years ago. Humans were then very close to
> extinction. In many other branches of the multiverse extinction did, in
> fact, occur.

Endangerment of a species does not follow from a genetic
"bottleneck". Consider a beneficial mutation arising 70,000 years ago,
and rapidly increasing to 100% fixation within the human
population. The genetic data would point to us all being descended
from a single "Adam" or "Eve" at the time, and the number of
individuals whose descendants ultimately breed with Adam or Eve's
descendents. All other germ lines are eliminated from the population
by natural selection. Thus a genetic bottleneck. However, the breeding
population may have been any number - eg 1 million, hardly an
endangered species.


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Received on Mon May 30 2005 - 23:42:55 PDT

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