In my last entry, I showed that the origin of Mr. Kurzweil’s long-term exponential trend was really the fractal nature of our tree of life.  All species will tend to have exponential trends leading up to them if you just choose their taxonomic branching points as data points.  This refutes the Singularity because it shows that there is no exponential progressive trend leading up to us. 

However, a technology-creating species might still be the inevitable result of evolution without having an exponential trend.  There might merely be a herky-jerky trend leading up to us which, I suppose, Kurzweil might say is enough.  After all, we have evolved, haven’t we?  SO there must have been a trend leading up to us.  Therefore, the Universe somehow wants intelligence. 

The obvious argument against this is that all organisms must have trends leading up to them.  Look at the ancestors of giraffes and you will see a trend towards longer necks.   This doesn’t mean that the long neck of the giraffe was inevitable, it merely means that random phenomena (like natural selection) can produce things that look like trends. 

The figure below shows three results of a random series of 10,000 coin flips where I add ‘1’ when I get heads and subtract ‘1’ for tails.  Note how Series 1 shows what looks like a trend towards heads even though the program was entirely random.  Series 2 initially moves towards tails but then lurches back towards heads whereas Series 3 stays close to zero. 

This shows that just because you see a trend or pattern in some data it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is some external force driving the trend or that the trend will continue.  The data might still be random even though it looks like it is heading somewhere. 

Therefore, unaided and RANDOM natural selection is more than enough to produce an intelligent technology-creating species without that species being inevitable.  The burden of proof shifts to the Transhumanists who must show that there is a trend leading up to us that is over and above what might have been produced by mere randomness.  This, I think, is scientifically impossible.