LogFAQs > #960142068

Unbridled9 posted...

But here's the thing. Inbreeding happens a lot already. Think of yourself. You exist (that's 1) and you have two parents (that's 3). Each of those parents have two parents (7) and each of them has 2 (15), and so-on and so-on. If you had 0 inbreeding you wouldn't even be able to get back to medieval times IIRC before your number of unique ancestors would outnumber the total number of humans that ever existed. And God forbid you wanna get married to someone who is also completely genetically independent from you (that doubles the load) and your kid also wants to marry someone genetically different.

On average, you share roughly 5% of your variable genome (that is, the part of the genome that isn't common to every human simply for being part of the species) with every other person in the world. Each step along your family tree reduces genetic similarity by 50% (parents/siblings are 50% similar, uncles/aunts/grandparents are 25%, etc), which means that by the time you get to second cousins, you're only sharing an average of 3.13% of your genome, which is so little that you're likely sharing more than that just because of random chance. Generally speaking, "inbreeding" refers to reproduction among individuals that are more closely related than that background similarity, since there's really not much point to the concept if it applies to everyone (see Syndrome's contribution to the discussion). That's reflected in laws against incest: second cousins are fair game pretty much everywhere (though finding a date at a family reunion is still going to leave a funny taste in people's mouths) because they aren't any more closely related to you than a stranger would be.

wolfy42 posted...

How did the laws of the universe that we have discovered come to be? What makes gravity work the way it does, why does light travel at the speed it does. Something had to create those rules/laws, they didn't just poof appear, some intelligent design needed to be behind so many things that work together perfectly.

That's just the paradoxical nature of existence. The notion of something always existing is impossible for us to wrap our heads around, so the assumption remains that something must have created everything. That thing in turn, however, must have either existed forever or been created by something else, so ultimately, we eventually need to accept the concept of eternal existence.

That said, rather than thinking about the laws of physics in terms of a deity enforcing them, I think there's merit in thinking of those laws themselves as being deific. They are, after all, all-powerful forces that govern our universe, and what does that sound like if not a god? God didn't have to make physics, physics can just be God.

As for the idea that they must have been intelligently designed because they work perfectly together, that falls into the same trap that applying that logic to biological evolution does: If the complex systems in question didn't work properly together, they wouldn't have survived. There's no reason whatever primordial nothingness became the universe can't also be considered in terms of biological evolution, randomly forming with different rules until something eventually works. From our perspective, it looks like the dice have rolled nothing but sixes, but that's not as implausible as it seems when you take into account a selective force that's erased every non-6 result that's ever occurred.

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