[...]
>But Ridley's interest is more in what Dennett has to say in his
>latest book: "His new one, 'Darwin's dangerous idea' does the same
>for the meaning of life - there is none. His theme is that most of
>us still don't realise how corrosive of all our intellectual
>assumptions is the simple idea at the heart of Darwinism. ... once
>you consider the possibility that everything can evolve an appearance
>of purpose and design without an intelligent designer, nothing is
>sacred. .... Evolution is therefore, a mindless, necessary,
>unavoidable, "algorithmic" process that, without ever having a goal,
>produced the human brain and the software it so potently carries:
>conscious intelligence."
>
>"The Sunday Times" (24 Sept) carried a eulogy of this book by John
>Gribbin: "The dangerous thing about natural selection, in the
>eyes of many people, is that it requires nothing except the blind
>workings of chance to produce the variety of life on earth today,
>including ourselves, from a single common ancestor in the
>primeval ooze of 3.5 billion years ago. . . . . This is the best
>single- author overview of all the implications of evolution by
>natural selection available".
>
>I acknowledge that I've not read either of these books. But I cannot
>help relate it to the things Phil Johnson has been saying. This is
>naturalism through and through.
>
>Is this guy really as influential as Ridley suggests? What is our
>response? For me, I am happy with Phil Johnson's analysis. I am
>particularly interested in how the TEs react: are you going to repeat
>the kind of arguments you have been using in the past, or is there a
>need to develp your position to address the challenges thrown out by
>people like Dennett?
>
One approach to countering extreme reductionists like Dawkins or Dennett
is to point out the current move away from reductionism in science.
A good example of this is in the areas of complexity, chaos and self-
organization. It was somewhat amusing to me to see Dennett try to
draw the self-organiztionalists under the umbrella of orthodox neo-Darwinism :).
Anyone familiar with this area will be immediately skeptical.
I also want to mention a new book whose primary intent is to oppose the
reductionistic viewpoint. The book is <Nature's Imagination>, ed. by
John Cornwell, Oxford, 1995; a collection of essays written by a pretty
impressive group: Freeman Dyson, Roger Penrose, John Barrow, Gregory
Chaitin, Oliver Sacks, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Gerald Edelman and
others. There is also a dissenting view "The Limitless Power of Science"
by P.W. Atkins.
I also want to make a brief comment about Dennett's claim that evolution
is an "algorithmic" process. This may come back to haunt him :-). It is
axiomatic in algorithmic information theory that the output of an algorithm
cannot be more complex (contain more information) than the algorithm
that produces it. Here's the rub. Gregory Chaitin has determined the
algorithmic information content of the laws of physics and found that
it is very very small, exceedingly smaller than the information content
of a genome. So, evolution is just the mindless carrying out of an
algorithm. Presumably this algorithm is comprised of the blind mechanical
laws of physics. But according to the axiom above, this cannot be since
the output of the algorithm contains more information than the algorithm.
Therefore, we must conclude that life is not reducible to the laws of
physics ;-).
==
Brian Harper:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=
"I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,
044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the
Universe and the same number of electrons." Arthur Stanley Eddington
:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=