Organodynamics	Grant Holland, Apr 25, 2014
Slide: Can Probability be of an Analog for Intentionality?	Nav Refs Top Bottom Previous Next 90m 90m 45m 45m 25m 25m
Prior to Darwin, the overwhelmingly prevailing explanation for the origin and maintenance of life on earth boiled down to the existence of an intentional creator being. In other words, the explanation devolved into one of teleology – intentionality, purposefulness, a causal chain of events controlled by a creator. But Darwin’s theory of evolution introduced chance variation in the form of genetic copy errors and mutations as being responsible for the maintenance of life on earth. And, because of the limitations of resources resulting from living organisms consume each other; chance further operates through the process of natural selection. Thus, chance is everywhere involved in driving biological evolution. Jacques Monod, co-discoverer of the gene synthesis and regulation processes and Noble laureate is even more explicit….	Is probability really at the heart of the origin and evolution of life? Is the theory of evolution really a probabilistic analog of the teleologically created, causal process that is life on earth? That is, can the apparently intentional and deterministic creation of life on earth be adequately described by a theory based on chance and articulated by probability? Organodynamics says Yes to this proposition.
“We call these events [molecular genetics] accidental; we say that they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structures, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.” [Monod 1972]	I am not alone in this suspicion. Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, who co-discovered both the gene expression and the gene regulation mechanisms shortly after the discovery of DNA, expresses a belief in the primacy of chance in the development and evolution of life on earth thusly (see frame to the left):

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