We would like to thank Roland Hirsch, George Hunter, and David Keller for helpful
discussion of and comments on biological matters. We are most grateful to William
Wainwright for a number of very helpful editorial and substantial comments.
1.We leave it as an exercise to the reader to see that Aquinas's argument could be made
valid if he were to stop allowing for the possibility of an infinite number of past
contingent beings and assume instead that there have been only finitely many such
beings.
2.Based on data in the online gene database for the Mycoplasma genitalium available at
http://www.tigr.org.
3.With two sequences counted as equivalent if they code for the same amino acids.
4.Hume (1993, section IV, part I) asked rhetorically if when we consider a priori what
will happen to a stone left without support in the air there is “any thing we discover in
this situation, which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than upward, or any other
motion, in the stone or metal.” Hume thinks the answer is negative, because he sees no
prima facie reason to think any one state is more likely to come after a given initial state
than any other state is.
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end p.136
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