Pigliucci Challenges Randomness (Religion)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, January 18, 2010, 18:11 (5421 days ago) @ David Turell

Fallacy 4: Natural Phenomena Mean Randomness
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> > "For some reason many people, not just creationists, seem to think that if something is natural, then it must also be random (in the sense of being undirected and therefore, in the minds of those with a misunderstanding or ignorance of natural selection, clearly not designed). This is the basis for one of the most persistent fallacies of creationism: that evolution cannot be true because it purports to explain complexity in the biological world by means of random accidents."
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> > Before I continue, David, dhw, does any of this pertain to your views? I don't want to waste valuable time. 
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> In my analysis evolution happened. What we are debating or arguing is the methodology by which evolution goes from simple to complex. I cannot believe that what we see, in ourselves, for example, is simply the result of a series of random contingent events. Yes, I understand that any single unexpected event can appear against seemingly enormous odds. But the size of the series of such events is so enormous that odds for randomness become unreasonable. Life, with all its recognized complexity appeared in 800 million years from the establishment of a planet, and about 400 million years after the temperature dropped to extremophile levels. All the odds I have seen calculated favor my contention: DNA is coded for advancing complexity and evolution. Therefore there is a universal intelligence. Where does the information in DNA come from? Have any of us ever seen a code developed randomly? Randomness in this situation demands absolute faith.-I'll grab pigliucci's argument when I get home--because he argues that what you call "random" isn't random at all. What I'd like to discuss at the moment, is what I talked about in the Quantum thread. -One of the conservation laws that exist is one of information; in our universe, information in systems is conserved. It is possible to build a program that as its output, outputs other small programs at random. -If we use the English language as an example, think of how much complexity surrounds such a very simple structure.-All sentences have a subject and predicate, and the basic logic of sentences, using AND, OR,or NOT, give an insane number of useful statements. How many useful small statements can we create? If we exchange random letters for random words, how many of them will be useful, especially when you don't have to be precise? "this OR that" is interchangeable for example. A Shakespearean play might be amazingly complex, but it is ultimately nothing less than repetitions of the same basic informational structure over and over and over again. How is life any different?-In Lloyd's book, he shows how beginning from that quantum soup, all the physical structure in the universe can be created by simply using NOT. While his explanation doesn't go so far as to explain higher-order mechanisms such as what we see in chemistry, it demonstrates in an undeniable fashion that amazing complexity IS possible from 0, 1, 0 + 1, and NOT. -More on this later...

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"