Re: Nature article on ID

Iain, re the last sentence, I think that might be where the immensity of the universe comes into play. JimA

Iain Strachan 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.
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Sun May 1 11:22:22 2005