"What did you find astounding about it? I found it to be an ordinary collection of the fallacy of the argument from ignorance, unsupported assertions, "God of the gaps", etc."
First of all, the man is not a creationist and is unbiased in that regard. Secondly, his understanding of evolutionary theory is sound - you are not the only person here with a bio science background. Thirdly, he shows where it just can't be as presented by its proponents - something is missing.
"Arguments from ignorance?" Hardly, he makes the hard core evolutionists look ignorant. Probability and mathematics are much easier to test via the scientific method than evolution.
Please provide some support for this statement.
Secondly, his understanding of evolutionary theory is sound - you are not the only person here with a bio science background.
His understanding of evolutionary theory is frequently off base (as he himself admits, "Biology is, of course, not my specialty.") For one example, he says of Gould's work, "The saltationist view, revived by Stephen Jay Gould, in the end represents an idea due to Richard Goldschmidt." Horse manure. As Gould himself writes:
"In particular, and most offensive to me, the urban legend rests on the false belief that radical, "middle-period" punctuated equilibrium became a saltational theory wedded to Goldschmidt's hopeful monsters as a mechanism. I have labored to refute this nonsensical charge from the day I first heard it."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, "Punctuated Equilibrium's Threefold History"
Thirdly, he shows where it just can't be as presented by its proponents - something is missing.
That's how he invokes the "God of the gaps" -- the age-old declaration that lurking in the gaps (however small) in our current knowledge, there is Something Big And Significant. The fallacy here is that by definition, if we don't know it, one can't jump to conclusions about whether it's going to eventually be found to fit within existing theory and expectations, or not. But that's precisely what Schützenberger tries to do when he asserts his belief that the unanswered questions are flatly unanswerable within current theory.
Ironically he almost addresses this issue himself when he writes, "These cascading interactions, with their feedback loops, express an organization whose complexity we do not know how to analyze". As he himself makes clear in this passage (but seems to fail to grasp the implications), many of the unanswered questions are unanswered *NOT* because current theory has been shown lacking, but because the systems themselves are "messy" enough that it will take a while before we are able to fully describe them and their interactions (which is the first step to performing a full analysis on what can or cannot have been responsible for their formation).
"Arguments from ignorance?" Hardly, he makes the hard core evolutionists look ignorant.
Where, exactly? The few places he attempted to snottily describe evolutionists as too simplistic in their approaches, the real case was that evolutionists had long been studying the very "complications" that Schützenberger arrogantly (and ignorantly) falsely accuses them of overlooking.
For example, "The idea that causes may interact with one another is now standard in mathematical physics; it is a point that has had difficulty in penetrating the carapace of biological thought." This is a completely specious charge. The evolutionary literature is replete with countless examinations of the implications of "the idea that causes may interact with one another".
For a direct example of Schützenberger's arrogant ignorance, he flatly states, "A typographical change in a computer program does not change it just a little. It wipes the program out, purely and simply." Well, "simple" things for simple minds -- but in reality "typographical changes" in computer programs are one of the many fruitful methods by which real results are produced in the field of genetic programming, which harness the power of EVOLUTION to do exactly that which Schützenberger here declares impossible, "pure and simple". The field of genetic programming had exploded long before this 1996 interview --what was Schützenberger's excuse for such ignorance?
Finally, the "argument from ignorance" doesn't mean someone's making an ignorant argument -- it means that they are invoking the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. Schützenberger employs this again and again, generally in the form, "I can't conceive that evolution could produce such complexity, thus it clearly couldn't have".
Probability and mathematics are much easier to test via the scientific method than evolution.
Whenever a biological issue is understood well enough to allow a valid mathematical or probabilistic analysis, evolution has passed it with flying colors.