On Aug 10, 9:56 am, Sanny hotmail.com> wrote:

But a blind person can feel around and listen and along with human
nature create pretty good theories of everything. This was an
excellent post until you got to the very last part where it seems that
you are arguing against some position not present in the body
paragraphs. The conclusion isn't bad but in order to make it more
persuasive you might have added a note somewhere about how some people
are skeptical of the possibility of life on in other parts of the
universe. Maybe you should have said instead of: [If a blind cannot
see someone that does not mean the things do not exist. So if we are
unable to detect such living things it does not mean they do not
exists.] Maybe say something life, Just as the blind may miss
something for the lack of sight maybe we should be open to the
possibility of life at extremely divergent sizes and metabolic rates.

But as the conclusion stands it is on the verge of "ad ignoratio"

The argument from ignorance ("appeal to ignorance") or argument by
lack of imagination, is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that
a premise is true only because it has not been proved false or that a
premise is false only because it has not been proved true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

Famous in the history of science is the (argument _ad_ignorantiam)
given in criticism of Galileo, when he showed leading astronomers of
his time the mountains and valleys on the moon that could be seen
through his telescope. Some scholars of that age, absolutely convinced
that the moon was a perfect sphere, as theology and Aristotelian
science had long taught, argued against Galileo that, although we see
what appear to be mountains and valleys, the moon is in fact a perfect
sphere, because all its apparent irregularities are filled in by an
invisible crystalline substance. And this hypothesis, which saves the
perfection of the heavenly bodies, Galileo could not prove false!

(Copi and Cohen, _Introduction to Logic_, p. 117)

1. The evolutionary theory of aging may be considered as part of a
more general life history theory, which tries to explain how evolution
designs organisms to achieve reproductive success (i.e., avoid
extinction).

2. Life history theory is based on mathematical methods of
optimization models with specific biological constraints.

Among the questions posed and answered by life history theory are:

Why are organisms small or large?
Why do they mature early or late?
Why do they have few or many offspring?
Why do they have a short or a long life?
Why must they grow old and die?

..............

Evolutionary theories of aging and longevity are those theories that
try to explain the remarkable differences in observed aging rates and
longevity records across different biological species (compare, for
example, mice and humans) through interplay between the processes of
mutation and selection. The appeal for understanding the biological
evolution of aging and lifespan comes also from puzzling observations
of the life cycles of some biological species. For example, a bamboo
plant reproduces vegetatively (asexually) for about 100 years, forming
a dense stand of plants. Then in one season all of the plants flower
simultaneously, reproduce sexually, and die. About 100 years later
(depending on the exact bamboo species) the process is repeated[33].
This intriguing observation, as well as other similar observations of
“suicidal” life cycles of species like pacific salmon[34,35,36], has
promoted the idea that sexual reproduction may come with a cost for
species longevity. Thus, in addition to mutation and selection, the
reproductive cost, or, more generally, the trade-offs between
different traits of organisms may also contribute to the evolution of
species aging and longevity. The evolutionary theories of aging are
closely related to the genetics of aging because biological evolution
is possible only for heritable manifestations of aging.