Man Oh man this has gotten way out of hand. I believe Blank_cd and I agreed we would keep this rational and not mock each others personal views. Then Bohdi comes in here like a 5 year old that just discovered his " peepee" for the first time and expects us all to be impressed. Grow up bro, your links to wikipedia show no more intelligence then the irrational comments you make about my faith. That being said, blank_cd, you have still not given me a response to the videos or article...i'm waiting, simply because you seem to be rational and I expect a reasonable answer from you.
Now, I have spent the last week doing vast amounts of research on this subject. I am no scientist or expert, so doing experiments myself was out of the question. How then did I look deeper into this debate? I reasearched papers, exerpts from books, articles, and ancient human and natural history. I was shocked to come to the conclusion i have now. I will list several points numerically...
1. The theory of evolution, or, Dawrinism does lay out some very interesting evidence.Rick KennedyDarwin’s theory has legs. It has vast explanatory power. In many cases it even predicts what later will be discovered. Although there are big mysteries still out there, “black boxes” where Darwin’s theory is seriously strained, Darwin’s theory is one of the hardest working theories in science and continues to be more successful than not.
Darwin’s two-stage mechanism cannot be proven true in the strictest sense because it depends on unprovable assumptions of randomness and naturalness. What we have are lots of observations in laboratory settings and fossil remains that point to the near absolute certainty that variation and selection are happening in regularly all around us. But being unprovable is not a deal breaker for a hard-working theory like Darwin’s. Variation and selection not only is observably at work; the assumptions of randomness and naturalness make sense.Richard Dawkins, in Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), creates a parable of a mountain climb to answer the mathematical problem that troubles Darwinian natural history. The mathematical problem of Darwinian natural history is portrayed in Dawkins’ book as a steep cliff that blocks climbers from getting to the top. Dawkins recognizes that genetics may have found DNA and people can watch in laboratories the process of variation and sexual selection, but he also acknowledges a problem with the mathematics. There does not seem to be enough time in earth’s history to allow enough random variation through sexual selection to create complicated things like the human brain. The math in natural history is a daunting problem that he depicts as a steep cliff.
There are various ways to handle this mathematical problem. “Chaos theory” posits the possibility of fast spurts of variation and selection. Theories of multiple universes allow us to spread the mathematics broader so that the calculations of random variation work. The idea that Dawkins likes best emphasizes algorithms. In Dawkins’s parable, an easy trail, the algorithm, winds up the back of the mountain, avoiding the mathematical cliff. The randomness in random variation is not really random, because variation is affected by algorithmic “pressure.”
Daniel Dennett, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), describes Darwinian evolution as “algorithmic sorting processes which take the probabilities or biases that are due to fundamental laws of physics and produce structures that would otherwise be wildly improbable.”These would be some problems found with in the theory of evolution.An algorithm is a closed information system in which infinite possibilities are honed into a finite form by the action of a recurring set of rules. Algorithms domesticate wildness. Modern computers, the World Wide Web, and hopes for continuing development of artificial intelligence are rooted in the wonders of algorithms. Probably nothing in mathematics is so inspirational to futurists as the idea that algorithms seem to make simple the complex. David Berlinski, in his breathless The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea that Rules the World (2000), writes that after Newton’s calculus, the algorithm “is the second great scientific idea of the West. There is no third.”
Limited time is a problem for natural history. Louis Agassiz, whose mountain namesake is appropriately not in the Evolution Range, could not accept Darwinian evolution because he thought the islands of the Galapagos were geologically too young for the mathematics of chance variations being sexually selected. Dawkins points out that “if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work.” Dawkins believes “Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection.”
The possibility that algorithmic pressures affect natural history solves some problems but raises others. Not the least of these problems is: how did the algorithm get started? If algorithms work from rules, where do the rules come from?





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