At 03:00 PM 8/22/00 -0400, Bertvan wrote:
[...]
>Hi Chris,
>I hate to see you sounding like a typical Darwinist, accusing anyone
>skeptical of "random variation and natural selection" of believing in a
>literal translation of Genesis. Especially when I gather your aren't even a
> real Darwinist, which you've sometimes characterized as passe. You
>apparently believe nature possesses a "natural order" and variations might
>not necessarily be without meaning or purpose. If the variations are already
>rational and meaningful, Natural Selection wouldn't have to do any designing,
>would it? On the other hand, if the variations were actually random,
>without meaning purpose, plan, or design, surely they would outnumber any
>occasional advantageous variation so as to completely drown it out.
As has been noted many times, random in this context does not mean
"without meaning purpose, plan, or design". Any "meaning purpose, plan, or
design" is not detectable with scientific instruments. For example, in
information
theory one measures the quantity of information in a message irrespective of
what it means. One would not conclude from this that messages have no meaning.
Also, consider the engineer that designs complicated mechanisms by mimicking
Darwinism, i.e. by random variations coupled with a selection criteria.
Would the
random variations be "without meaning purpose, plan, or design" in this case?
[...]
Brian Harper
Associate Professor
Mechanical Engineering
The Ohio State University
"One never knows, do one?"
-- Fats Waller
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