At 04:18 PM 10/02/2000, you wrote:
>****If I might comment on Nelson's comments....see below...
>mine are preceded by *****
>
>
>
> >I spoke at the University of Colorado a couple
> >of weeks ago, a bright undergraduate came up after
> >the talk and said, "Dr. Nelson, you've just GOT to
> >go on the net and play Conway's 'Game of Life' --
> >that will answer all the questions you have about
> >natural selection!" I listened as this young man
> >described the remarkable, organismal-appearing
> >patterns that arise from what he called "a few
> >simple rules."
>
> >Interesting, I replied. But then there's Conway.
> >Right?
>
>Ed
>***Do you think this scores a point for I.D.?
>I still see it at best as a stalemate.
>If Conway's program was invented to mimic random
>mutation and selection then it doesn't matter WHO
>or WHAT came up with the original program.
>Obviously the human mind has a lot of knowledge at
>it's disposal with which it can do marvelous things,
>but it was not always so. Mankind's own knowledge
>was gained over hundreds of thousands of years,
>and began to advance most rapidly after the advent
>of written languages and numbers. In fact, one might
>argue that it often advanced by trial and error,
>or mutation and natural selection.
Further, the computer and the software are only a means of experimenting.
The question is, do (or can) any of these programs relevantly model
*unintelligent* natural events, such as autocatalytic molecule evolution?
The answer is that they can, in various ways. In fact, in some ways, the
very *dumbest* computer model is the best, because it demonstrates the
ultimate power of unintelligent cumulative variation to produce complexity,
especially *without* selection (ID folks need to claim -- and prove -- that
selection *prevents* complexity, not that it can't *cause* or create
complexity). Besides, the power of variation is provable in a strictly
mathematical way, so such algorithms are experimental tools for doing
things that we *don't* know how to do mathematically yet, such as study the
effects of various kinds of selection on the distribution of kinds of
results versus the results that would occur *without* selection, etc.
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