Re: [asa] Romans 1:20 (disregard my last post)

Though the picture of a staggering drunk in a hallway isn't my favorite, it does have somewhat of a crude picture of randomness with boundary conditions. In a sense, we see that kind of bounded randomness at every level of nature. At the microscopic level, it's definitely randomness bounded by the distribution of the wavefunction. A little higher and it is Brownian motion under the influence. Then random molecular collisions and pressure. At the high end of the length scale it is galaxies colliding, or not, and black holes forming, etc. And right in the middle of it all is the development of living cells, a random process at the core with some kind of bounded--or preferential--direction.

Note that Simon Conway Morris has been talking about the tendency for convergence in evolution though no one knows what drives it. I think we need to be careful to distinguish between bounds on randomness, environmental factors that preferentially induce certain outcomes, selection that happens at the molecular level instead of the organism level, and the divine hand of the creator. The extent to which Dawkins doesn't believe evolution is fully random, he does not refer to the last option. We should not be induced to find divine guidance under the guise of bounded or constrained randomness. The absence of being "fully" random is not the sign of divine guidance.

A key point of "randomness" that Gould was famous for pointing out was the observation that if you run the tape again, you wouldn't get human beings with the specific genome that we currently have. You might get a sentient species but with quite a different set. Morris thinks maybe you would get the same. We really don't know. Rich's point, I think, is that God can carry out his will through whatever process he chooses, be it "purely" random or determistic or "miraculous" or whatever label we can think of. At the moment it looks like he chose a process that is an intriguing mixture of somewhat random mutations with natural selection. How this led to a 'predestined' group of human beings is a mystery indeed.

Randy

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: John Walley
  To: 'Rich Blinne'
  Cc: 'asa'
  Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 11:00 AM
  Subject: RE: [asa] Romans 1:20 (disregard my last post)

>BTW, no one including Richard Dawkins believes that evolution is fully random.

  Ok, now it is getting interesting. Another Eureka moment for me.

  If Dawkins doesn't believe that evolution is fully random then does that mean he concedes some kind of guiding process or law embedded in life? Remember we discussed on this list Gould's analogy of a staggering drunk in a hallway making forward progress but by the hardest? Would Dawkins accept this thought as well?

  If so, then the question turns on the existence of the analog of the hallway in nature that constrains life to make forward progress. What would that be? Maybe if that is ever understood then it would not be as easy for Dawkins to consider it as being self-existent.

  To me this "hallway" is some divinely embedded algorithm in the primordial epigenome that guided it ultimately to where we are today. I guess that is subjective and the same philosophical impasse we have with Dawkins on the source of evolution today. But if you tell me he at least acknowledges its possible existence that is news to me but I am glad to hear that.

  I have long thought that the best way to defend the faith was by falling back to line of defense of an embedded algorithm because it seems most consistent with what we see in cosmological ID and less likely to be disproven like the bacterial flagellum and junk DNA arguments.

  But now we are back full circle to the thorny question that started this. If evolution was guided by a divine embedded algorithm then you can almost understand ID's assertion that it was not random. Maybe we could bridge this gap between ID and TE if they instead argued it was not self-existent instead of not random? They like me have a hard time distinguishing the difference in these terms. And this embedded algorithm is what I mean by ID in biology.

  If ID, TE and Dawkins all agree on Gould's hallway analogy then I don't see what all the fuss is about other than language and miscommunication. Dawkins will look at it and conclude self-existence and we will look at it and conclude God but if the impasse is purely philosophical then all the science gets factored out and this becomes real simple.

  Thanks again,

  John

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Received on Wed Nov 21 17:47:24 2007