Fwd: Nature article on ID

Meant to send this to the list not just to Robert. If anyone wants to know
about the proposed evolutionary origins of depression I'll have to look it
up. If Alfred North Whitehead's maxim is true, then we must assume that
depression is part of maximizing overall beauty :-(

Iain

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
Date: May 2, 2005 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: Nature article on ID
To: Robert Schneider <rjschn39@bellsouth.net>

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).

I have a problem here. Is Cancer the product of evolution? Is depression the
product of evolution? I have read a number of books on depression (e.g.
Lewis Wolpert's "Malignant Sadness", and Paul Gilbert's book on Cognitive
behaviour therapy), and it is frequently argued that depression is in fact
an adaptive feature that has evolutionary origins. But, since I speak to
many people with depression, I would not describe it as beautiful at all -
it is a horrible thing that sucks all the colour and zest out of your life
and makes you want to lie down and die. It leaves your head full of racing
anxious thoughts and delusions that you can't escape from. It is surely one
of the most ugly things there is.

Iain

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<http://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.
> >>
> >
> >
>
>

-- 
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There are 3 types of people in the world.
Those who can count and those who can't.
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-- 
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There are 3 types of people in the world.
Those who can count and those who can't.
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