Consider the ramifications of your argument: what you are claiming is that even if an asteroid had not hit the earth 65 million years ago that there would have still been “something like” people and these people would have inevitably invented “something like” an iPod. But that's clearly ludicrous. I almost refuse to believe that you could think such a thing is true.

You argument, whether you realize it or not, is making the claim that the future of evolution and of markets are predictable to a vast extent. Granted we can predict many things — general trends, patterns, even convergent evolution given the right elements — but that does not mean that everything is therefore predictable. And sure, this isn't what you're claiming, yet it's closer than you would care to admit.

You are espousing a very grandiose position. You are simultaneously claiming that the “something like” the iPod is the inevitable production of the human mind and that the human mind is the inevitable production of nature. Yet you'll never find a competent historian of economics to admit the first proposition and you'll never find a competent evolutionary biologist to agree to the second. You are, I'm sorry to say, just completely wrong on that point.

The other point you seem to bring up is that of the doctor predicting the effects of medicine. This, I'm sorry to say, is a fallacious use of different scales. I grant that you could predict short term goals in both evolution and the market (increased rain fall will cause this species of plant to overtake that species; increased revenue for Google will cause Microsoft to lose marketshare), but this is entirely different from the long scale implications of my original contention. Yes, if I spend five dollars on a Big Mac I can see the direct correlation. A little less Yes, I can see how buying stuff from McDonald's will increase their profits. A little less, I can see how increased profits will cause further company expansion. A little less, I can see how this might cause McDonald's to enter foreign markets. A little less, I can see how there might be problems based on cultural differences. But that doesn't mean someone could have predicted McDonald's problems in India when the company was first created.

You're screwing up your time scales. Yes, prediction is possible, but not prediction on the level that you are claiming. If you actually believed what you were saying, give it some thought, and tell me what inventions will rule the market place even ten years from now.

Removing water from the earth would constitute a significant change in the environment enough so that a man-like creature would not evolve.

Grazers in Australia and Grazers in America separately evolved the same features even though the closest common ancestor had had none of the grazing features. Something is going to fill the “trade” of grazing, and that thing will be selected by the same pressures because the environments are similar.

Also, assuming in your new market world, humans are still humans with human desires and the physical world is the same. Humans still like music, humans like small portable shit, Silicon is around …I would call that a similar (SAME) environment to what we have now. All those things are strong selective factors that would result in the development of Something to fill that “I like music and small portable stuff” trade. If you take away silicon and or the desire for music, we wouldn’t get anything like an iPod.

I realize the market and evolution have no goal. But I can say that if I take an antibiotic in a kinda-sorta type of way, the bacteria will evolve to not respond to that antibiotic anymore. To say that evolution is without a goal is different than to say that evolution in no way can be predicted. Doctors predict it every time they prescribe an antibiotic and tell you to take the whole prescription. They absolutely can't predict the evolution down to the nth degree, but they can tell you to take every damn pill or else predictable evolution is gonna happen. Scientists can predictably CREATE different species of fruit flies just by changing their environment. Evolution has no goal, but to some degree it can be predicted. The market has no goal, but I CAN predict that the “transportation” trade will be filled even if I don’t know HOW specifically it will be.

Even with the dinosaurs staying ALIVE, intelligent mammals easily could have evolved on planet earth. Just because dinosaurs dying helped that happen faster in OUR past, doesn’t mean that that is the ONLY way it could have happened.

I said that if you go back hundred million years and let the tape play again you'd never end up with anything like homo sapiens. I'll even go further and say you'd never end up with anything even close to modern human beings. Not even the apes or monkeys or prosimians.

Put another way, imagine if the dinosaurs didn't go extinct. Mammals likely would have never gotten past being minor scavengers (akin to todays moles or squirrels for instance).

Evolution has no design, it has no purpose. Natural selection isn't trying to guide nature to “us” or even anything like us. It has no goal or end product in mind. This can be seen by taking the converse of my example: try predicting what life will be like 100 million years from now. It's impossible to do because evolution simply doesn't work that way.

As Michael Shermer and Stephen Jay Gould have pointed out, there is an intricate interplay between necessity and contingency that makes it impossible for there to be anything like an end goal for natural selection.

The same thing occurs in the market. Try, right now, to predict the inventions we'll see in 50 years or 100 years. It's impossible because that's not how markets work.

They are self-organizing systems that rely heavily upon time-dependent variables. As such there is a sort of bifurcation of possibilities that are nothing short of im.poss.i.ble. to predict.

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

Perhaps we wouldn't get homo sapiens exactly – but chances are we'd get something A LOT like them.

After all, we modern humans had to beat out 2 other prominent competitors to fill our current species “trade.”

Similarly, given a consistent environment and a fresh free market starting point I wonder if we wouldn't have gotten an something REALLY close to an iPod.