“Without intelligence behind evolutionary design means that random chance engineered apparent design. Look at today’s top designers of engineering products, maybe a Ferrari F1 engine. If I said that the Ferrari engine happened by accident and without intelligence behind then I would be laughed at like an idiot. Yet look at the complexity in the engineering of the human hand which is literally infinitely more complex and this happened by accident. What about the human eye ? Again even our top most intelligent scientists cannot come close to the engineering capability of something that again happened by accident.”

It is an oddly common (and I suspect often deliberate, at least among proponents of intelligent design) misconception that a complex creature (or element of one, such as a hand) as seen by a Darwinist is nothing more than a happy accident. This assumption fails signally to understand how evolution works. No Darwinist would suggest for a picosecond that the human hand is the result of an extended medley of dice throwing.

The process, which involves random chance (mutation) together with cumulative selection, occurs in minuscule steps starting from very humble (and thus realistic/credible) beginnings over a huge number of generations. Mutation may be random, but selection is not.

For instance, to use the old eye chestnut: once upon a time a single cell mutated and became sensitive to light. A single photocell gave a small advantage over the creatures with no photocell, perhaps gaining them the sight of a few extra scones. So the former became healthier and more prevalent. Then another mutation improves this most primitive of eyes a tiny bit further; that slightly improved creature again multiplies while the ones with less useful mutations die off.

“Heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success” to quote Darwin. So the eye is steadily honed (”climbs mount improbable”, to paraphrase Dawkins) over a large number of small steps into the glorious baby blues we have today, bringing with it to some a seductive illusion of design.

“Thus the creationist’s favourite question ‘What is the use of half an eye?’ Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant.” (Dawkins)

“If there is no intelligence behind our evolutionary development, this means that only matter exists and the human mind, the human soul and the human spirit only appear to have a separate conscious ability and existence. If this is not the case then how and where have they come from ?”

I’ve never thought of my mind as anything other than a deliciously complex machine. The eye is impressive, the brain even more so, but fundamentally I don’t see why the two couldn’t have emerged similarly through evolution. The dualistic idea of the mind existing in some way separately from the rest of my flesh ‘n bones (I guess what people mean by soul or spirit), or being anything other than matter coursing with chemicals and electricity is alien to me, though I can see the romantic appeal of the notion. Muscles contract, rods and cones are sensitive to light patterns, brain cells process information, simple. Or rather, complex.

If the audio is linked with vision then obviously it matters. I wired my projector the wrong way into the stereo and it was quite odd seeing people walking from left to right while hearing their steps pattering from right to left.

Swapping the L&R of a piece of music should not affect its objective integrity. It’s still exactly the same piece of music after all, with nothing added or subtracted. The trouble is it then has to strike our ears and be processed by two halves of brain in order to be heard and enjoyed. If the listener is habituated to certain conventions such as the spatial arrangement of an orchestra, e.g the trombones parping on the right, then to hear them suddenly on the left may produce a feeling of unease, much as one feels looking at a photo of oneself when used to seeing one’s ugly fizzog in the mirror. This is I suspect merely due to conditioning and could presumably be reduced with repetition.

More interestingly perhaps are subtle disctinctions between both the ways in which the different ears respond to sound and the way in which sounds are processed by the two brain hemispheres.

“From birth, the ear is structured to distinguish between various types of sounds and to send them to the optimal side in the brain for processing,” explains Yvonne Sininger, Ph.D., visiting professor of head and neck surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Yet no one has looked closely at the role played by the ear in processing auditory signals.” LOL at David Geffen school of medicine. School of rawk, surely?

“The auditory regions of the two halves of the brain sort out sound differently. The left side dominates in deciphering speech and other rapidly changing signals, while the right side leads in processing tones and music. Our findings demonstrate that auditory processing starts in the ear before it is ever seen in the brain [...] even at birth, the ear is structured to distinguish between different types of sound and to send it to the right place in the brain.”

So could this mean, for example, that rhythms might be processed more effectively if piped in on one side and complex melodies or harmonies on t’other? And thus to swap over one’s favourite track could ensure we process it suboptimally and don’t enjoy it as much as we should? Are sound engineers aware of this? I suspect the brain is so fast it makes little difference, but you never know. Either way, if it’s Oasis blaring out I’ll be using my third ear only, to mark my appreciation.

This does not, of course, mean that I don’t find the universe incredible, perplexing, wonderful and mysterious – of course I do – rather that it is sufficiently so (understatement) to make the mental conjuring of another layer of complexity (god) redundant and unlikely, at least to my small mind.

Naturally this makes me wonder how religion ever came to arise in the human mind. The disturbingly stubborn longevity of religion (indeed in some quarters it’s actually gathering strength, even in these supposedly enlightened times) strongly suggests to me that there must be (or have been) a survival advantage to harbouring religious beliefs. If there wasn’t, I’d expect natural selection to have weeded it out.

Another school of thought holds that religion is simply an exaptation, an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.

Then there are those who suspect a hardwired religious gene, which may cause a predisposition to episodes interpreted as religious revelation.

Whatever the cause, it’s still very much a prevalent social phenomenon. The conditioning of young children (often by well-meaning parents) into religion when they are at their most credulous is easy and not necessarily a tragedy, though the idea of calling someone a “Muslim child” or “Christian child” before they are old enough to make a rational choice of their own is depressing.

More sinister, however, is that religion is still a perfect tool for nasty people to acquire and prolong a great deal of power, influence and money, often at considerable cost to others.

Still pondering this one, hence the sloppy unfinished feel.

Actually I’m a bit confused by this dreadful online dictionary’s definition of astrology:

“The study of the positions and aspects of celestial bodies in the belief that they have an influence on the course of natural earthly occurrences and human affairs.”

Clearly the moon is sufficiently close to earth to mess with our sea levels, giving rise to tides. Occasionally Mars gets in the way of the sun and we have an eclipse, and so on. I wouldn’t argue with that, but in my view these are the observations of astronomy, not astrology. Stupid dictionary. However once the celestial bodies are sufficiently far away (obeying the inverse square law) then the gravitational effect they will have on earth is minuscule and outweighed by objects closer to home, such as, in the case of the newborn, a rotund midwife. Are there other mechanisms by which astrologers think the planets etc, interfere with us and if so what? I am genuinely interested, for the next seven nanoseconds, even though I don’t believe a word of it.

Given a sufficiently large set of data you will be able to sift through it in an almost infinite number of ways and eventually find some sort of correlation with something that involves movement/alignment of the stars, planets etc.: it would be a surprise if you didn’t as the permutations and opportunities for curve-fitting are endless. On finding a so-called magic correlation the mistake is to attribute any causality to it.

Coincidences are much more common than we might imagine as there are so many ways in which they can happen. How often does a flushed yummy mummy gracefully dismount her urban tractor to exclaim: “How amazing! I bumped into someone in Waitrose today with exactly the same name as me, her daughter goes to my old school and do you know she’s even wearing exactly the same fur gilet that I bought last month from Agnès B! What are the chances of that?!”

Well, the chances of someone meeting these predetermined conditions would be minuscule, granted, but of course she didn’t predetermine them. It is likely that there would be an immense pool of things the two people might have in common and the three mentioned represent only a fraction. In fact it would be unusual for coincidences like this NOT to happen as there are so many ways in which they can. Put another way, some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place. The paradoxical conclusion is that is would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. (with thanks to Paulos for that, whose excellent book on innumeracy also bewails the fact that it is often a source of pride to people that they are bad at maths).