Re: Nature article on ID

The following link probably demonstrates something of what I'm thinking:...

http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1319

It's a critique by an ID proponent of the Lenski et al Nature paper on the
evolution of biological complexity. The views of the paper on the Lenski et
al simulation coincide precisely than mine.

In essence in this response article, entitled "Evolution by Intelligent
Design", the author points out that Lenski et al designed a digital world
where the evolution of an apparently irreducibly complex organism took
place. The design that went in to the algorithm allowed a stepwise
progression from simple "organisms" to complex ones by giving increased
merit to digital "programmes" that contained more elementary logical
functions than ones that contained less ones. Since, therefore there was a
smooth gradualist pathway to the intended target by design then it was
inevitable that an evolutionary process would succeed. The article also
points out that Lenski's paper illustrates the unevolvability of irreducibly
complex systems by not giving incremental credit to intermediate forms and
re-running the simulation. In this case no instances of the desired target
were able to evolve.

Thus, as they say, Lenski "stacked the deck" at the outset in order to
illustrate the evolution of biological complexity. I (not the article) would
say that Lenski et. al were playing at God - they created this little
digital universe so that inevitably a desired result would be obtained.

In the same way, it appears that the universe is ingeniously constructed so
that there are smooth pathways whereby complex features can evolve. Thus it
appears (to me) that the deck of the universe was also similarly stacked (by
God) so that Man appears and is able to worship Him. In essence, this is
evolution by Intelligent Design, and I'd have thought really it was pretty
close to Theistic Evolution.

Iain.

On 5/1/05, Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > It appears to me that all you attibute to ID is implicit in TE.
>
> That was precisely the point I was trying to make. TE = ID
> Evolutionism. God "shaped" evolution by designing the laws of the
> universe so that the result was predestined. (As in the discussion of
> the Sierpinski gasket).
>
> Seems I've become a proper heretic now .. but I will say that it is
> via the valid objections raised by ID arguments of, e.g. Michael Behe,
> that I'm able to come to this conclusion. Anyone who has worked in
> optimization (my own area was in training of neural networks and I've
> also dabbled with genetic algorithms ) knows you have to design the
> problem representation so it can succeed. In principle, certain
> types of neural network can "learn" to reproduce any mathematical
> function from empirical data, but if you don't apply sensible
> pre-processing to the data (scaling, transforms etc) then the neural
> net doesn't stand a chance of learning. (Even with much more powerful
> optimization techniques than Genetic Algorithms, like Quasi-Newton
> optimization). By the same token, Genetic Algorithms aren't a black
> box that will solve any problem you want - to get them to work you
> have to design the problem formulation so they have an easy time
> solving it because they can't solve difficult problems where there are
> lots of "cliffs" requiring several simultaneous changes.
>
> Just how God could have designed a universe where there weren't these
> "cliffs" in fitness space is quite beyond me, and I suspect anyone at
> the moment, but to doubt that He could have is surely to doubt his
> omniscience.
>
> Iain.
>

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