You wrote:
I just think that nobody really believes we're the product of pure random chance. I just don't believe it.
I think that ultimately you're correct but for me it's a little deeper than that. I believe that we are the product of what we call "pure random chance". But as I've previously suggested, my belief is that in this Universe there is no such thing as "true randomness". The things we think of as "pure random chance" are actually being manipulated by hidden variables. The die are loaded. The Prof Ian Stewart example of these hidden variables in three dimensions is when you toss a coin, whether it will land heads or tails is a function of a hidden variable, that variable being the angle of the coin in the spin as it lands in your hand, it's not a particularly good example because one could argue that the angle of the coin is a function of randomness, but he gets the point across nontheless. I think that events in this Universe are controlled by hidden variables from a higher spacial dimension, we do see directly observable evidence for at least one higher spacial dimension -- this evidence is seen in the results of accelerator collisions, when particles get translated in such a way that is probably due to them stepping into 4D space, rotating, and then stepping back into 3D space, well nobody has come up with a better explanation of how they change like they do.
An example that is easy to visualise: take any two scalene triangles that are exactly the same, lying on a table. Lift one of the triangles off of the table, flip it over and place it on the table again. It's impossible to get the first triangle to be the same shape as the flipped triangle unless you take the first triangle into n+1 (3) dimensions and flip it. This is maybe what happens to particles in some high energy collisions, if so it gives us direct evidence to a place where we cannot live as humans (Heaven?), but maybe someone or something can? It's suspected that our three spacial dimensions are projections of higher spacial dimensions, like shadows on a canvas, what seems random to us could well be the hand of a 4D being called "God".
You wrote:
If I were driven by a hardwired chemical need to procreate more effectively than you, I wouldn't do a darn thing to help you under any circumstances.
So I assume that my example of a population that survived because it had a conscience (the golden rule gene) didn't move you at all? The need that you describe is like in the movie Highlander, ie. "there can be only one", the human race is obviously not like that because there are lots of us, according to United Nations estimates the population of the Earth has gone like this:
| Year | Billions |
| 1900 | 1.65 |
| 1910 | 1.75 |
| 1920 | 1.86 |
| 1930 | 2.07 |
| 1940 | 2.30 |
| 1950 | 2.52 |
| 1960 | 3.02 |
| 1970 | 3.70 |
| 1980 | 4.44 |
| 1990 | 5.27 |
| 2000 | 6.06 |
These numbers are US (1,000,000,000) billions, not UK (1,000,000,000,000) billions :-) Clearly there must be more to us than just survival of the fittest. Also I'm left wondering how many humans the Earth can actually support ..
The "knee in the population curve" - or the explosion - seemed to happen around 1700 AD, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Population_curve.svg for a fascinating chart. I wonder what happened during that time? The combination of medicine plus travel perhaps?
Still on the stack:
Pete Doherty
Spock's Mind Meld
PS. I'm sorry to hear about your cousin. Glad that he had those "extra" 12 years. Sometimes it's all about staying alive.
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