From: George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Date: Mon Aug 04 2003 - 11:03:23 EDT
Darryl Maddox wrote:
>
> Hello Glenn, Geoge, and others reading this and the related postings.
>
> I don't know whether or not a sieve is a formula for generating a sequence,
> seems different in procedure to me but am willing to let each have his own
> definition, at least they are ways of determning which numbers are and which
> are not members of a sequence but it seems to me the real issue of
> "created" vs "natural" is the ability to unambiguously determine, by a
> specified and objective methodolgy which "things" were "created" and which
> are the result of a natural process and I think this is what Glenn (and
> possibly others) has been trying to say. Perhaps two examples will make
> this more clear to those who (like myself) don't speak mathematics as a
> primary or even secondary language. .................................
I think that any real case of putative "design" in nature than confronts us is,
in fact, going to boil down to a more or less subjective decision & will not be settled
by a mathematical discussion about whether or not some pattern can be generated
naturally. Suppose that in "Contact" the aliens had skipped the business with the
primes and were just continuously beaming back to us the Hitler clip from the 36
Olympics. If that were detected & verified to be coming from outside the solar system,
there would be little question that it was the result of "design" even before anyone
calculated the probability of such a phenomenon.
But I still think it would eb interesting to know why some biological systems
seem to generate a few of the Fibonacci numbers.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Aug 04 2003 - 11:02:39 EDT