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Darwinian Evolution plus Time Travel

Silver

Just maybe
What if life didn't evolve in a Darwinian sense.

Only sensible possibilities please.
 
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Quintessence

Consults with Trees
Staff member
Premium Member
I imagine if humans could time travel, we would break evolution and confound its influence with our incessant meddling, therefore making the investigation an act of destroying the very evidence it seeks to find.
 

Reptillian

Hamburgler Extraordinaire
Then, I'm fairly confident, several laws of physics would get broken.

Mainly the laws of thermodynamics. I know the second law for sure would be violated. Perhaps the first law too. I suspect that a universe in which time travel into the past is possible would likely collapse quickly.
 

painted wolf

Grey Muzzle
Actually, evolution isn't entirely "Darwinian"... there are a lot of things we know about how evolution works today that Darwin couldn't have known about.

Most of it has to do with genetics and the interaction between environmental factors and gene expression. For example Darwin didn't know about eppigentics or horizontal gene transfer. Mind you natural selection still works on these other evolutionary mechanisms.

wa:do
 

Gomeza

Member
There actually is one avenue of speculation that falls into the realm of possibilities and most proponents of the scientific theory of evolution and creationist alike agree on this, at least in the most rudimentary sense and that is a propagating event taking place, possibly more than one event. Time travel is interesting, extra-terrestrial intervention; either intentional or accidental is interesting as well.
 

PolyHedral

Superabacus Mystic
Mainly the laws of thermodynamics. I know the second law for sure would be violated. Perhaps the first law too. I suspect that a universe in which time travel into the past is possible would likely collapse quickly.
Time travel doesn't break any laws of thermo, but non-evolving life probably does. (The mechanism would have to be very strange.)
 

Reptillian

Hamburgler Extraordinaire
Time travel doesn't break any laws of thermo, but non-evolving life probably does. (The mechanism would have to be very strange.)

Time travel does violate the laws of thermo. Heres a thought experiment: Suppose I have a prototype time machine that allows me to send things into the past...for simplicity's sake, we'll presume that its basically a small portal sitting on my desk that I can throw things into so that they appear on my desk in the past. I decide to run a little experiment. I decide that I'm going to take off my wrist watch and send it 20 minutes into the past. Sure enough, 20 minutes before I run my experiment the watch appears. I inspect newly arrived watch from the future, seems to be running smoothly. No worse for the wear. Note that now I have two watches; the one from the future, and the one on my wrist. The 20 minutes passes and I decide to send the watch from the future back instead of the watch on my wrist. Now that watch exists independently of other things in the universe in a sort of time loop. It violates the second law in that it ran perfectly depsite aging 20 minutes on each loop iteration. It also violates the first law in that it is "extra" matter in the universe that only exists for a 20 minute period.

Or imagine I have a time machine and run across a red radioactive rock with the words, "Shakespeare rules and God totally exists" written on it. Now I hop in my time machine, go back 5 years, and leave the rock in the exact place that I will find it 5 years hence. Where did the rock's mass-energy and radioactvity come from? I mean, the total mass-energy of the universe at any time slice must be the same as in the preceding time slice. Why was it red? Why did it have Shakespeare rules written on it? Seems like a violation of both laws one and two.
 

PolyHedral

Superabacus Mystic
Both of those are basically variants on the grandfather paradox. What you put in is not what you got out, and that doesn't happen in an consistent universe.
 
Life almost certainly didn't evolve in a Darwinian sense, meaning random mutations filtered by natural selection. That's an idea that's based on mid-19th century ignorance. It has not stood the test of time.
 

fantome profane

Anti-Woke = Anti-Justice
Premium Member
Life almost certainly didn't evolve in a Darwinian sense, meaning random mutations filtered by natural selection. That's an idea that's based on mid-19th century ignorance. It has not stood the test of time.
Thanks for that. Now, do you have an alternative possibility.
 

Reptillian

Hamburgler Extraordinaire
Both of those are basically variants on the grandfather paradox. What you put in is not what you got out, and that doesn't happen in an consistent universe.

Even without logical paradoxes and time loops, you still have problems. You've gotta figure; if you're in a time machine, then there exists a frame of reference (yours) where the entropy isolated systems is decreasing. I look out my time machine's window and see heat going from cold bodies to warm bodies, I see broken dishes reassembling, irreversible chemical reactions reversing, etc. Seems to violate the 2nd law to me. Also, isn't conservation of energy violated the moment the time machine arrives from the future?...I mean because you've got the mass-energy of the time traveller apparently coming out of nowhere.
 
fantôme profane;2894837 said:
Thanks for that. Now, do you have an alternative possibility.

The theory that (a) the original lifeforms were designed, and that, subsequently, (b) evolution is a directed process.

Basically: The powerful abductive argument that the information required for life to exist points overwhelmingly towards a designer, combined with James A. Shapiro's "Natural Genetic Evolution," which shows that life evolves via internal processes. Shapiro, by the way, has been publishing peer-reviewed literature for nearly 50(!!!) years.
 
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