Re: [asa] Random and natural vs intelligence

We agree that randomness is a cop out and in fact totally
misunderstood by many. Now epigenetics is an interesting topic which
shows how variation can arise through interactions with its
environment for instance, showing how once again a God can interact
with His Creation via totally natural processes.

I am not sure if you were serious about your concept of God and
epigenetics, but since you suggest 'Intelligent Design', how would ID
go about establishing this? Perhaps this is an opportunity for the
design movement to show that ID is not infertile?

But evolutionary dynamics is far more interesting than people seem to
realize. For instance, even assuming random point mutations, the
effect on the protein is non-random, in the sense that it is biased by
the existing codons and the degeneracy of the genetic code. Since the
codons are biases themselves, some codons are more prevalent than
others that code for the same amino acid, it is clear that variation
itself is 'biased'. Not surprisingly since the many sources of
variation (more than 47 were identified by Allen MacNeill for
instance), need not be unbiased in their effects.

But as we all know, random as used in evolutionary theory has really
little to do with how the term is typically interpreted by laymen and
serves as a major source of conflict between evolutionary science and
some religious interpretations.

As Christians, it seems that we can help our fellow Christians by
pointing out the flaws in their position by having them realize that
evolution is much better described and understood as variation,
reproduction and selection.

On 11/5/07, John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >The truth is, if we use the word random for anything
> >other than distributions, we are probably using it to hide from our own
> ignorance of
> >entire schools of future thought (like epigenetics).
>
> Great point. Randomness and especially the "appearance of randomness"
> arguments are cop-outs.

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Received on Mon Nov 5 23:38:13 2007