>2) The programs you wrote, debugged, refined, tuned, and published in
>the web with forethought, were designed. The products of your
>programs are the products of design. Design was involved somewhere,
>you cannot rule it out.
Then you haven't bothered to read my web page very carefully, I know this as
surely as the sun will rise. If you had, you would know that those programs
were arrived at by MISTAKE. I had NO intention of producing those programs.
I made several serious mutational errors during the programming.
What happened, was that I was bored one day at lunch and decided to write a
program for Sierpinski's gasket from memory. I had one at home but I wanted
to watch it. I wrote what I thought was the program for Sierpinski's gasket,
but when it ran, there was nothing on the screen. I made a few changes to
the program and still nothing. I made another change and came up with the
most beautiful pattern I had ever seen, but it wasn't Sierpinski's gasket.
I saved the program on a floppy so I could see what I had done wrong. I took
the program home and examined it. The next day at lunch, intriqued, I
wanted to study the program again. But I discovered I had left the floppy at
home. I tried to re-write the program from memory and screwed it up again.
This time I got an even more beautiful pattern but it was totally different
than that from the other day. Once again I saved it.
I assure you I had no intention of coding what I coded. Nor did I design
this program for this particular effect. It just happened from my bad typing.
This is also a perfect illustration of why I do not earn my living as a
programmer.
However, even though mistakes were made during the discovery of that
program, I learned some very important lessons that Loren has alluded to in
his post. I learned that if God created the first cell and allowed it to
reproduce with mutations, the rest of life very simply could flow out of
that effort. While I produced the initial program by error, the final
program was designed to take advantage of randomness in the production of
screen critters. I DESIGNED randomness into this program and got a
self-reproducing, but evolutionary system.
Who is a better designer--the God who must create each and every life form
de novo, or the God who can create a cell and have the rest of the living
world arise from that relatively simple effort? I would say that the
greater Designer is the one who can create a system which can produce the
rest of life rather than the constant tinkerer.
You also wrote:
>
>Glenn, I prepared a long design and my MAC crashed before I was able
>to send it. I'm afraid the MAC was not really designed for Netscape
>file handling.
>
>I don't have the time to rewrite the whole things so let me just
>mention two main points.
>
>1) When you anicipate my answers (which BTW were not my answers) you
>are assuming I am something I'm not.
You miss something very, very important about internet. For every
participant there are about 10 lurkers. Often when I 'anticipate" answers,
it is for the benefit of the lurkers, many of whom will have those ideas.
You are free to correct me anytime about this, but in these public forums,
the conversations are not strictly speaking two-way, but three+ way.
>
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm