Higher math and Darwin (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, April 08, 2010, 10:31 (5152 days ago) @ xeno6696

GEORGE: This looks to be the usual creationist insistence that evolution is down to "chance" and nothing else. The process of "natural selection" is not random, it's a ratchet type process, so non-gaussian distributions are nothing untoward.-MATT: George is absolutely correct here. Even my favorite Massimo Pigliucci argues that evolution isn't random ... especially when animal behavior can influence evolution. I say now (as I did when I came on this forum) that chance vs. design is a false dilemma.-Round and round we go, though I guess that's the nature of this debate. George may be "absolutely correct", but Matt's conclusion seems to me to highlight the imbalance caused by such a selective argument. Two points, then, in an attempt to redress the balance:
 
TO GEORGE: It has been acknowledged ad nauseam that natural selection is not random, but ... if I may echo you ... this looks to be the usual atheist insistence that evolution is down to "natural selection" and nothing else. The chance argument relates (a) to the origin of the mechanisms that made life and evolution possible, (b) to random mutations, and (c) to random changes in the environment to which the evolutionary mechanisms respond. Natural selection does not create anything new.-TO MATT: the dilemma of chance v. design, as far as I am concerned, relates principally to (a) above. I don't have a problem with the role played by chance once those mechanisms are in place, but we do not have one scrap of evidence that chance is capable of assembling them. Even if we ourselves were to create from scratch life, reproduction, senses, consciousness etc., (and it's a big "if"), we would only have proved that such creation requires intelligence. It might sway the balance of the argument for some of us, as might the discovery of other life forms elsewhere ... particularly if they have evolved as we have ... but the choice between chance and design will still depend on faith and not on fact. I would say, then, that the dilemma is only false to someone who has already made up his mind.