"Intelligent Evolution"? And Are We Lucky to be Here?

 A couple of papers came out that I want to make note of. One claimed that "Intelligent Life is Rare" and suggested that based on the transition windows between biological milestones like mulit-cellularity, we are probably the only intelligent life in the cosmos, based on naturalistic assumptions. Even with all of the planets that are out there, the advancement of life to sentience may be against the odds. This is separate and apart from the issue of the "fine tuning" of the fundamental forces of the universe "just so" in order to allow a universe able to support life to exist. 

Of course I don't think "the odds" matter because we were meant to be here. It wasn't chance at all, but intent. If an intelligent agent brings about an effect, it doesn't matter how unusual it would be for nature alone to produce it. This is the opposite take from the shallow assumption that nature alone has produced universe full of planets and alien life because there are so many planets out there. If intelligent life is difficult enough to obtain, even this universe doesn't give enough chances to make it probable. 

It also cited a 2007 study: 

The fact that eukaryotic life took over a billion years to emerge from prokaryotic precursors suggests it is a far less probable event than the development of multicellular life, which is thought to have originated independently over 40 times (Grosberg and Strathmann, 2007)

Wow. Some scientists think that multi-cellular life arose independently over 40 times? So much for evolution from a common ancestor! 

A second paper was discussed in an article with the ridiculous title "Is Evolution More Intelligent than We Thought"? "Evolution" is a label for a set of ideas about nature's role in shaping life. It can't be "intelligent" at all, nor can nature itself in any ordinary sense. Rather nature could have been designed by some Intellect to operate in an intelligent manner. In the case of the article it was noticed that "nature" seemed to learn from its "mistakes" in evolution. Of course the skeptic could say that an all-knowing God would not have to learn from His mistakes, but the Christ-centered model for early Genesis expects creation to operate like this. Nature has some power to bring forth living things, but only with God's help. It is almost amusing to watch scientists try to explain why nature looks as though it is designed when it really isn't. 

You Tube Channel