YOU FORGET WHERE I STARTED way back in January 2008, the challenge I posed was to just imagine just what the passage of a less than a third of the history of the evolution of species, 1,000,000,000 years meant in terms of years, months and days were, noting that you couldn't possibly come up with anything approaching a vague notion of what was encompassed in the world in that period of time. And many of the events relevant to a consideration of how evolution happened would be timed in terms of hours, minutes. . . fractions of seconds. Human beings have no hope of imagining that because our experience is limited to a tiny fraction of a billion years, even in terms of the longest of lives.
Perhaps a more useul thought experiment to demonstate that impossibility would be to consider how much of a human lifetime, how much of the experiential life of you or the most brilliant of evolutionary scientists would be taken up by the entirely easier attempt to count, outloud, to one billion. If you conventionally - and unrealistically - thought you could count to a billion taking an average of one second per whole number, it would take you more than 31 sleepless, unceasing, not resting even to eat or drink years to accomplish that feat. And most of those numbers would take you more than a second to pronounce, in English probably as soon as you reached much past the teens.
The kind of geeks who want to figure out how long it would take on the popular forum for the such, Reddit in which a lot of them tried to figure out even just how to figure out how long it would take comes up with estimates of 256 years though there is disagreement. One points out that the polysyllablic pronuciation of numbers differs in langauges, pointing out that in German, for example, the words for thousand, million and billion have more syllables than in English so it would take far, far longer to do it.
One of the Reddit comments gave the more easily imagined, though still impossible to really imagine in terms of human experience, estimate of "89 days to count to 1 million," then noting that a billion is 1000 times a million doesn't come close to the actual duration of the, at any rate, impossible feat.
Any numbskull who contented themselves with the automatic and unasked for "AI" "answer" on Google would get the completly unrealistic answer of -
Counting out loud to one billion would take approximately 30 to 100+ years, depending on the speed and whether you count continuously or with breaks. At a rate of one number per second, it takes about 31.7 years. However, due to longer numbers taking more time to say, realistic estimates are often closer to 100 years.
I wouldn't say "out of fairness" because I don't think fairness comes in to it when it is an unconscious machine instead of a living creature, I'll point out that it gives what it comes up with as a more "realistic" estimate, minimally, and insufficiently, taking into account the needs of the counter in surviving to complete the task:
Realistic Pace: Because large numbers take longer to say (e.g., "nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine"), the, Math is Fun website suggests it could take over 100 years.
Taking it as a given that Math is Fun is written by human beings of some academic, perhaps even scientific training instead of a computer, it's clear that those humans can't conceive of the actual conditions and problems involved with doing that.
Now, consider how much more complicated the facts of the living and thriving and reproducing of any organism from a bacterium up to a large, long-lived eukaryotic organism is, much of if not all of that being part of the riddles of evolution. The idea that it could be studied by human science done by human scientists and them coming up with anything like an accurate account of that is absurd.
And that is not taking into account that the actual material existence of evolution in that more than three billion years will never be had to study except in the most minute amounts, much of that being hard to impoossible to resolve to an accurate image, nevermind the impossibility of analyzing those vanishingly few snap-shots of evolutin to analyze in order to come up with the consequent general account of evolution. About the only thing you can take as an absolute certainty, based on the history of the scientific study of evolution IS THAT THERE WILL NEVER BE ONE AGREED TO ACCOUNT OF JUST WHAT THAT IS.
Any claim to make even a tiny amount of progress to that complete understanding is the grossest of superstitions, yet that is exactly what the conventional received wisdom requires of respectable educated person demands, to pretend Charles Darwin accomplished that with the publication of On the Origin of Species.
The motives for the demand that we pretend to believe understanding was in hand c 1860 may vary, depending on who is making it.
One, the demand that the feelings of those biologists wanting to pretend they have something like a complete understanding of evolution must be respected, is probably the most potent one for many of them.
Another is the more sophisticated but even more dishonest of them pretending that alleged understanding seals the case for their entirely non-scientific ideological campaign to promote whatever species of materialist monism they favor. And I will remind you that campaign was inserted directly into the formal literature of science almost at the start, certainly by the time that Haeckel wrote his "History of Creation," which was cited as reliable science by Darwin, himself. That was Karl Marx's first concusion on his reading of the Origin of Species before his critical habits dealt with the claims of it. And he assumed a level of completeness to the arguments for it that was entirely unrealistic. I think when you're honest about it that's the motive of all of those who bought into notions such as "kin selection" and Hamiltonian "altruism" and most of the most well known advocates of what the Darwinist Stephen J. Gould called the "Darwinian fundamentalism," of Dawkins, Pinker, . . . etc. In probably the most absurd case I know of, Daniel Dennett. Their motive is as non-scientific and ideological as Marx's was and to the extent they have any philosophical awareness, in the end, identical to it.
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