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Some thoughts on the intelligent design of the human race

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Starting from Australopitecus and assuming the given entropy in the generation and propagation of mutations we may conclude that humanity as we know it need not have been the only possible outcome. Perhaps a more intelligent species might have arisen or extinction and stagnation taken their toll. In short a random generation of mutations could have produced a vastly different speciation of the genus Homo.

We may treat the random mutations as a highly complex and unpredictable variable in a deterministic physical system that, as its final state, produces today's civilisation. However if we assume that the birth of civilisation on Earth as we know it was deterministic the signal was anything but random. Incomprehensible as it was in its working, it was causally equivalent to the only world we know.

However if we assume that civilization was a less probable outcome, we are left puzzled that, although less likely, it turned-out highly favorable.

Thus, we have a scale of probability between 0 and 1, the closer we get to 1 the more we encode civilisation in the "randomness", the more we move to 0 the more we tend to incline to the paradox that a highly favorable event took place that was unlikely.

One might argue that civilisation is a vague term, and thus envelopes a wide array of other possibilities all of them favorable or even more so. The above argument may seem to be weakened in this case as the event we imagine was not the only one that would have matched the predicate. As such, a civilisation would have been more likely although this civilisation may have been near impossible. This may seem to bypass the argument in that a civilisation is both likely and does not encode a certain outcome. However we may judge how likely the evolution of a civilisation may have been by looking at the phylogenetic tree starting from Australopitecus. Outside the species Homo Sapiens, all other species were extinct before history had even started. Even some groups of Homo Sapiens faced annihilation after failed colonisation attempts, or as is the case of the Maya empire, failed to develop civilisation beyond the Bronze Age. We may conclude from here that even the development of a civilisation was an unlikely event.