Re: Nature article on ID

I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that the purpose of
evolution is to maximize beauty. I was struck immediately by the force of
that statement and believe it to be true (though not the whole truth). The
only things on this earth and in this universe that are ugly were created by
human beings. It's true even of beetles, for which God (as J. B. S. Haldane
once remarked) seems to have "an inordinate fondness."

Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Roberts" <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk>
To: "Iain Strachan" <igd.strachan@gmail.com>; "D. F. Siemens, Jr."
<dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
Cc: <jhofmann@exchange.fullerton.edu>; <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2005 2:17 PM
Subject: Re: Nature article on ID

> Iain
> I can hardly slide a razor blade between your evolutionary ID and my
> evolutionary view which sees God as behind the lot with a certain amount
> of fine-tuning thrown in. I see design in a wider way as did James Orr
> writing in 1890s for whom beauty was part of God's design. This afternoon
> we went for a walk by a wooded reservoir. It is difficult not to see God's
> hand in everything whether the beauty or the inter-locking relationships
> within the evolved sorry created order. Or the sheer wonder of the design
> of our 6 month collie pup, who discovered the joys of running along the
> tops of walls with incredible balance, - she's got Striding Edge coming
> her way in the autumn! (Best mountain ridge in the Lake District)
> To me the weakness of Behe is that he basically has adopted
> God-of-the-Gaps and also does not seem to realise that biochemistry is an
> incredibly young science. in the 30s biochemistry had more in common with
> Delia Smith and cookbooks than what we have today.
> See my chapter in Debating Design ed Ruse and Dembski, or my article in
> PSCF Dec 1999 comparing Buckland i.e. Paley and Behe (see www.asa3.org and
> put in my name)
> The other trouble with ID is that they focus on unexplained biochemical
> processes (and thus I cant comment on them as I do not have the
> biochemistry) but I cannot see how any of the principles of ID especially
> those of Dembski can be applied to most of science and especially geology.
> Hence my silly but serious question "In what ways are glaciers and
> moraines designed?" Now apply Dembski's "gates" to a study of moraines. I
> have tried to do it in relationship to work I did on glaciers and the Ice
> Age and it simply got absurd.
>
> Michael
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Iain Strachan" <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
> To: "D. F. Siemens, Jr." <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>
> Cc: <jhofmann@exchange.fullerton.edu>; <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk>;
> <asa@calvin.edu>
> Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2005 10:05 AM
> Subject: Re: Nature article on ID
>
>
>>> >
>>> 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 Mon May 2 00:00:48 2005