Nonsense, but don't let that stop you. And what in the heck is "intellectual siberia"?
You have a proud ideological heritage you guys.
You mean like these guys?
Posted on 02/12/2005 4:24:09 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
Nick Matzke has also commented on this, but the op-ed is so bad I can't resist piling on. From the very first sentence, Michael Behe's op-ed in today's NY Times is an exercise in unwarranted hubris.
In the wake of the recent lawsuits over the teaching of Darwinian evolution, there has been a rush to debate the merits of the rival theory of intelligent design.
And it's all downhill from there.
Intelligent Design creationism is not a "rival theory." It is an ad hoc pile of mush, and once again we catch a creationist using the term "theory" as if it means "wild-ass guess." I think a theory is an idea that integrates and explains a large body of observation, and is well supported by the evidence, not a random idea about untestable mechanisms which have not been seen. I suspect Behe knows this, too, and what he is doing is a conscious bait-and-switch. See here, where he asserts that there is evidence for ID:
Rather, the contemporary argument for intelligent design is based on physical evidence and a straightforward application of logic. The argument for it consists of four linked claims.
This is where he first pulls the rug over the reader's eyes. He claims the Intelligent Design guess is based on physical evidence, and that he has four lines of argument; you'd expect him to then succinctly list the evidence, as was done in the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ on the talkorigins site. He doesn't. Not once in the entire op-ed does he give a single piece of this "physical evidence." Instead, we get four bald assertions, every one false.
The first claim is uncontroversial: we can often recognize the effects of design in nature.
He then tells us that Mt Rushmore is designed, and the Rocky Mountains aren't. How is this an argument for anything? Nobody is denying that human beings design things, and that Mt Rushmore was carved with intelligent planning. Saying that Rushmore was designed does not help us resolve whether the frond of a fern is designed.
Which leads to the second claim of the intelligent design argument: the physical marks of design are visible in aspects of biology. This is uncontroversial, too.
No, this is controversial, in the sense that Behe is claiming it while most biologists are denying it. Again, he does not present any evidence to back up his contention, but instead invokes two words: "Paley" and "machine."
The Reverend Paley, of course, is long dead and his argument equally deceased, thoroughly scuttled. I will give Behe credit that he only wants to turn the clock of science back to about 1850, rather than 1350, as his fellow creationists at the Discovery Institute seem to desire, but resurrecting Paley won't help him.
The rest of his argument consists of citing a number of instances of biologists using the word "machine" to refer to the workings of a cell. This is ludicrous; he's playing a game with words, assuming that everyone will automatically link the word "machine" to "design." But of course, Crick and Alberts and the other scientists who compared the mechanism of the cell to an intricate machine were making no presumption of design.
There is another sneaky bit of dishonesty here; Behe is trying to use the good names of Crick and Alberts to endorse his crackpot theory, when the creationists know full well that Crick did not believe in ID, and that Alberts has been vocal in his opposition.
So far, Behe's argument has been that "it's obvious!", accompanied by a little sleight of hand. It doesn't get any better.
The next claim in the argument for design is that we have no good explanation for the foundation of life that doesn't involve intelligence. Here is where thoughtful people part company. Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the appearance of design in life as the result of random mutation and natural selection acting over immense stretches of time. Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.
Oh, so many creationists tropes in such a short paragraph.
Remember, this is supposed to be an outline of the evidence for Intelligent Design creationism. Declaring that evolutionary biology is "no good" is not evidence for his pet guess.
Similarly, declaring that some small minority of scientists, most of whom seem to be employed by creationist organizations like the Discovery Institute or the Creation Research Society or Answers in Genesis, does not make their ideas correct. Some small minority of historians also believe the Holocaust never happened; does that validate their denial? There are also people who call themselves physicists and engineers who promote perpetual motion machines. Credible historians, physicists, and engineers repudiate all of these people, just as credible biologists repudiate the fringe elements that babble about intelligent design.
The last bit of his claim is simply Behe's standard misrepresentation. For years, he's been going around telling people that he has analyzed the content of the Journal of Molecular Evolution and that they have never published anything on "detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures", and that the textbooks similarly lack any credible evidence for such processes. Both claims are false. A list of research studies that show exactly what he claims doesn't exist is easily found.
The fourth claim in the design argument is also controversial: in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life. To evaluate this claim, it's important to keep in mind that it is the profound appearance of design in life that everyone is laboring to explain, not the appearance of natural selection or the appearance of self-organization.
How does Behe get away with this?
How does this crap get published in the NY Times?
Look at what he is doing: he is simply declaring that there is no convincing explanation in biology that doesn't require intelligent design, therefore Intelligent Design creationism is true. But thousands of biologists think the large body of evidence in the scientific literature is convincing! Behe doesn't get to just wave his hands and have all the evidence for evolutionary biology magically disappear; he is trusting that his audience, lacking any knowledge of biology, will simply believe him.
After this resoundingly vacant series of non-explanations, Behe tops it all off with a cliche.
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
Behe began this op-ed by telling us that he was going to give us the contemporary argument for Intelligent Design creationism, consisting of four linked claims. Here's a shorter Behe for you:
The evidence for Intelligent Design.
That's it.
That's pathetic.
And it's in the New York Times? Journalism has fallen on very hard times.
This article was first published on Pharyngula and appears here by permission.
What silly nonsense. Abortion and assisted suicide are pre-modern concepts that are thousands of years old, with a well-catalogued presence throughout ancient and medieval societies both Western and non-Western.
See: George Devereux, "A Typological Study of Abortion in 350 Primitive, Ancient and Pre-Industrial Societies," in Therapeutic Abortion, 1954.
See: Emanuel E J, "Euthanasia: historical, ethical, and empiric perspectives," in Archives of Internal Medicine, 1994.
You seem to see the impediment to scientific progress as theism. I do not. I see the impediments are ossifying orthodoxy and overly interial bureacracy and established process, whether theistic or atheistic.
And today the one of the most reactive of impediences to delightful scientific progress is the evolutionist orthodoxy -- I think that is obvious.
Nonsense, but don't let that stop you. And what in the heck is "intellectual siberia"?
You have a proud ideological heritage you guys.
You mean like these guys?
Support of evolution is not synonymous with atheism, regardless of what your prejudices might be whispering in your ear.
magically turn into flaming liberals when confronted with anything that questions their religion.
Okay, I'll bite -- who on this thread has "magically turned into flaming liberals" in your fevered imagination? And what "religion" might you be speaking of? Hint: If you don't know the difference between science and religion, your "contributions" on this subject are likely to be of minimal value.
I seem to recall a pharisaic attitude that once said the earth the center of the Universe.
...supported by Biblical verses, too.
Wasn't Galileo a Christian? Ah, yes, he was. Hmm...
Persecuted by the church for daring to state the plain truth...
So we have Christian Scientists vs. the 'religious' establishment. Sounds like a familiar story going on today.
Whatever. Some people seem to enjoy feeling persecuted. Did you have anything to add to this thread other than that?
Yet today all of these are proposed for all peoples in the world and abortions number in the millions. It is this global tolerance and massive numbers which were initiated by the secularists and underpinned by evolutionist theocracy to which I refer.
If you say so.
You seem to see the impediment to scientific progress as theism. I do not.
No, I don't. But keep trying.
And today the one of the most reactive of impediences to delightful scientific progress is the evolutionist orthodoxy -- I think that is obvious.
And I think that you find this "obvious" because you've been reading *way* too many creationist sources, and far too few scientific ones.
Evolutionary biology is one of the most "delightful scientific progresses" of the past couple of centuries, and it is supported by vast, overwhelming amounts of evidence. If you think it's "the most reactive of impediences [sic]" (the word you're looking for is "impediments"), it's because someone with an "ossifying orthodoxy" is feeding you a truckful of manure, and you have swallowed it rather than taken the time to look into the matter yourself.
If you wish to avoid confusing your readers, you should consider using more precise language - although that might undermine the bankrupt visceral rhetoric your arguments depend upon. By example, if the Spartans committed "regular infanticide" as you admit, then to be sure they did so not just in one case but in many thousands of cases.
Since the entire Roman Empire, Near East, South Asia, and Far East were also simmering with infanticide throughout much of their history even through to the present day (in some remote areas), then I would deduce that your "one case" swiftly becomes millions of cases - none of which were predicated by knowledge of evolution.
Do you realize how much of a tinfoil-hatter you sound like here?
Step *away* from the creationist screeds...
PS. I might add that you do yourself no rhetorical favors by conflating abortion with infanticide, because the latter practice was nearly institutionalized in much of the pre-modern world. I restricted my initial reply to abortion since that's what you stated, but the only reason abortion wasn't even more widespread in those times was because infanticide was a conventional and far less risky alternative to the mother.
I should add just to avoid misunderstanding that I do not support or hardly advocate either recourse, but the historical record is what it is.
I've got a suggestion - why don't you actually read some of the research results in this field before you attempt to (mis)characterize it again? Currently, you're just looking foolish in these rants with your cartoon-version of evolutionary biology, which bears only a very passing resemblance to the real thing.
["the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence."]
Percy Bridgman, scientific experimenter without-par, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1946, countered that line more rationally that Bruce Alberts (who should return to the Tijuana Brass. maybe, to make a more honest nickle).
Not in the passage you quoted, he didn't. Are you sure you understood it?
And that's "Herb Albert" in the Tijuana Brass, not Bruce Alberts, you goof.
"I don't think the impact of Annie Darwin's death on Charles Darwin was part of the scientific process. I do think, however, that given Annie was 10 years old, and that Charles Darwin adored her at the time of her death, that Charles may have decided that hating God and writing him out of existence was easier than trying to make sense of the loss of a child."
I've seen you toss this crap out before. It's so irrelevant that any idiot could see that. I lost a son at birth due to a terribly tragic medical "accident" a few years ago. It affects my science not one ultramicroscopic bit. That you would use this against Darwin shows how desperate you are and how intellectually challenged you are and how thoughtless you are. Keep these topics for psychobabble threads.
Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life
Infanticide is one of the most common, yet least understood of all human crimes. Although academic articles document isolated aspects of this problem, a single, unified analysis of infanticide has not been completed until now. In "Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life," Larry Milner provides the first exhaustive survey of infanticide, drawing on historical data from around the world. He then uses this survey as a basis for investigating why infanticide has been present in every form of human society throughout history. Both comprehensive and compelling, this important study will intrigue students of human psychology, social welfare, and child abuse, and will promote further research on this alarmingly overlooked atrocity.
************
| A Brief History of Infanticide General Historical Evidence In 1978, Laila Williamson, an anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History, summarized the data she had collected on the prevalence of infanticide among tribal and civilized societies from a variety of sources in the scientific and historical literature. Her conclusion was startlingly blunt: Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule. There is ample historical evidence to document the incredible propensity of parents to murder their children under an assortment of stressful situations. In nineteenth century England, for example, infanticide was so rampant throughout the country that a debate over how to correct the problem was carried out in both the lay and medical press. An editorial in the respected medical journal Lancet noted that "to the shame of civilization it must be avowed that not a State has yet advanced to the degree of progress under which child-murder may be said to be a very uncommon crime. Infanticide has pervaded almost every society of mankind from the Golden Age of Greece to the splendor of the Persian Empire. While there are many diverse reasons for this wanton destruction, two of the most statistically important are poverty and population control. Since prehistoric times, the supply of food has been a constant check on human population growth. One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood. Darwin believed that infanticide, "especially of female infants," was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man. While female infanticide has at times been necessary for survival of the community-at-large, there have also been instances where it has been related to the general societal prejudice against females which characterizes most male-dominated cultures. Evidence in Arabia |
Sexism was particularly prominent in Arabia before the time of Mohammed (570?-632 AD). The Persian world was a very paternalistic society, and females were generally seen as an undesirable burden to a family struggling to survive. A common proverb held that it was "a generous deed to bury a female child." Nevertheless, the Koran, which collected the writings of Mohammed, introduced reforms that included the prohibition of female infanticide. Mohammed outlined the wrongfulness of infanticide in various sections of his holy scripture.
He asked, with censure ' for example, how would a father account for his actions, "When the female child that had been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death?"
Evidence in Judaism and Christianity
While we also find discrimination in the treatment of women within the Western religions of Judaism and Christianity, there were safeguards in both practices to prevent social acceptance of infanticide by its adherents. The Jews were clearly against the taking of human life, and generally forbade the killing of any newborn infant. Maimonides (1135 - 1204 AD), the renowned Jewish philosopher and physician, pointed out that a single man was first created in Genesis, "to teach us that if any man destroys a single life in the world, scriptures imputes it to him as though he has destroyed the whole world." Each life, each spark of being, was a gift of God and only the Holy Father could extinguish its flame. Infanticide was therefore rare and never socially accepted by the Jews.
That some early Christian parents did indeed expose unwanted female infants to the elements was evident in the writings of the Church Fathers who were concerned over future acts of incest. Saint Justin Martyr (114-166 AD) cautioned that it was wicked to expose children for, "almost all those who are exposed are raised to prostitution." He then added a warning against consorting with prostitutes because it was thereby possible that one would be guilty of having intercourse with his own child. Clement of Alexandria (150-211 AD) similarly advised of this danger. For the most part, however, as with the Jews, this criminal act was not accepted by Christian Society, and infanticide remained a clearly impious and illegal act.
Evidence in India and China
Despite the clear theistic prohibitions against child-murder by the three major Western religions, female infanticide has been for centuries a prominent and socially acceptable event in two related areas of the world: India and China. Even today, the extent of the problem is measured in frightening proportions: "at least 60 million females in Asia are missing and feared dead, victims of nothing more than their sex. Worldwide, research suggests, the number of missing females may top 100 million. "
The data is truly astounding, Estimates indicate that 30.5 million females are "missing" from China, 22.8 million in India, 3.1 million in Pakistan, 1.6 million in Bangladesh, 1.7 million in West Asia, 600,000 in Egypt, and 200,000 in Nepal.
It is clear that the onerous costs involved with the raising of a girl, end eventually providing her an appropriate marriage dowry, was the single most important factor in allowing social acceptance of the murder at birth in India. In China, economics also played a significant role since it is a poor country with one of the lowest rates of agricultural output per acre of arable land in the world. With an extremely high infant and child mortality rate, because of sparse food supply and medical care, a married couple needed to raise three sons in order to ensure the survival of one into adulthood. Females were only consumers and a serious financial burden to a poor family. They were therefore often killed at birth
Infanticide in Modem Times
Colonial America
The colonists brought infanticide to America from England while at the same time finding that the Indians practiced it as well. As was the case in Germany extreme discipline characterized family life in puritanical colonial America and parents were given extensive liberty to punish their children, even to the point of death. In 1646 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay had enacted a law where "a stubborn or rebellious son, of sufficient years and understanding, " would be brought before the Magistrates in court and "such a son shall be put to death." "Stubborn child laws" were also enacted in Connecticut in 1650, Rhode Island in 1668, and New Hampshire in 1679.
How ingrained was the attitude of rigid parental control over the discipline of children can be evidenced by a comparison to concern over animal welfare. Henry Bergh founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in 1866.4 After first completing his campaign to improve the plight of cats and dogs, Burgh brought by special warrant to the Supreme Court of New York, the case of Mary Ellen who claimed that the child's custodians had beaten her cruelly and that she should be brought under the protection of the court.
The resulting court action and publicity led to the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children which was a parallel protection agency to his first endeavor. Such watchgroups for the welfare of children were much needed in the United States during this era. In antebellum Virginia, during the 1850's, the mortality of children under the age of one year of age was 16-20%. It is believed that many of these were actually due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
Modern America
"In 1966, the United States had 10,920 murders, and one out of every twenty-two was a child killed by a parent."
Despite our predilection for considering modern civilization "advanced," the crime of infanticide has continued to pervade most contemporary cultures. The major difference between the nature of infanticide in the twentieth century, when compared to the rest of recorded history, however, is due to the impact of one modern medical advancement: the widespread availability of safe, and legal, means of abortion. The ability to easily terminate a pregnancy, and thereby eliminate an unwanted child before it is born, has had a profound effect on the prevalence of infanticide. The human species has killed almost 10% - 15% of all children born. The majority of these murders have been associated with reasons of necessity at least in the minds of the infanticide parent - or with untoward reactions against an unwanted birth. With little ability to abort an unwanted pregnancy safely, troubled parents have had little choice but to wait until full-term delivery before disposing of the conception.
Of approximately 6.4 million pregnancies in the United States in 1988, 3.6 million were unintended and therefore subject to dangerous consequences. 1.6 million of those unwanted pregnancies resulted in abortion. In Britain, more than 160,000 legal abortions, or terminations of pregnancy, were carried out each year during this same period of time. The Family Planning Association in Russia says that there are more than 3 million abortions performed each year, more than double the number of births. In France, there are almost one million abortions each year, equal to the number of births. This means that over five million pregnancies were aborted in the Western world alone each year, and if the births of those children would not have been prevented, it is very likely that many of those infants would have been victims of infanticidal rage.
Morally right or wrong - a case of murder or manifestation of a woman's right to choose - the fact remains that the frequent use of abortion has eased the necessity for killing an infant after its birth.
Statistical Analysis - United States
Statistically, the United States ranks high on the list of countries whose inhabitants kill their children. For infants under the age of one year, the American homicide rate is 11th in the world, while for ages one through four it is 1st and for ages five through fourteen it is fourth. From 1968 to 1975, infanticide of all ages accounted for almost 3.2% of all reported homicides in the United States.
The 1980's followed similar trends. Whereby overall homicide rates were decreasing in the United States, the rate at which parents were killing their children was increasing, In 1983, over six hundred children were reported killed by their parents, and from 1982-1987, approximately 1.1% of all homicides were children under the age of one year of age. When the homicide of a child was committed by a parent, it was the younger age child who was in the greater danger of being killed, while if the killer was a non-parent, then the victim was generally older.
The characterization of the type of parent that is likely to kill their child has changed little over the years. As far back as the middle ages, the children of the poor "Were by far the most common victims of the parental negligence and despair." Today, infanticide is still most commonly seen in areas of severe poverty.
And just as infanticide was described as a crime that was committed by the mother in medieval times, such a likelihood remains true today. Although men are more likely to murder in general, statistical review of prosecutions show that infanticide is usually committed by the mother. When mothers killed their children, however, the victim was usually a newborn baby or younger infant. Some research shows that for murders of children over the age of one year in the United States, white fathers were the perpetrators 10% more often than white mothers, and black fathers 50% more than black mothers.
Other risk factors can include young maternal age, low level of education and employment, and signs of psychopathology, such as alcoholism, drug abuse or other criminal behavior. The most common method of killing children over the ages has been head trauma, strangulation and drowning. Most of the murders today are committed with the use of the mother's hands, either by strangulation or physical punishment.
Copyright © 1998, Dr. Larry S. Milner. All rights reserved.
Your own words tell. "Simmering" versus "regular". While not unknown in any period, throughout history infantcide has NOT been the common practise. Yes in some few times and in some few particular cultures it has been tolerated to a degree that made it for that short while in that particular culture, common, and in even rarer cases infantcide has been institutionalized and regularized.
The article gives no per capita, no rates of child-murders per birth. Thus no guidance as to what "simmers" versus what is "regular".
The book is the coherent summary. You have the link.
Your own words tell. "Simmering" versus "regular".
Whatever inane conclusion you drew from my choice of words is obviously wrong.
While not unknown in any period, throughout history infantcide has NOT been the common practise.
This is incorrect. At this point, you are clearly lying for whatever reason I don't care about.
Yes in some few times and in some few particular cultures it has been tolerated to a degree that made it for that short while in that particular culture, common, and in even rarer cases infantcide has been institutionalized and regularized.
This is highly misleading. In was many times in nearly all cultures tolerated - either overtly or obliquely - to a degree that made it for a lengthy while an extensive practice.
The article gives no per capita, no rates of child-murders per birth. Thus no guidance as to what "simmers" versus what is "regular".
The choice of "simmers" was my own and has no bearing on what the cited scholarship establishes. I'm unsurprised you fail to acknowledge the distinction. In any case, consider your request satisfied:
*************
Infanticide is one of the commonest, yet least understood of all human crimes. Estimates of its frequency, based upon historical studies and modern data, indicate that up to 10-15% of all children ever born have been killed by their parents: an astounding seven billion victims! Yet, the mass media generally affords front-page headlines to news of parricidal homicides as most people find it difficult to accept that anyone, except the most severely mentally disturbed felon, would kill their own child. Pictures of the accused parent are usually boldly displayed, so unusual and shocking are the details to the average reader.
In 1994, in order to educate the public on the need to understand the reasons why parents have so often resorted to murdering their offspring, Dr. Larry Milner founded the Society for the Prevention of Infanticide (SPI). This not-for-profit organization is dedicated to informing the public about the historical and current customs of infanticide in order to promote prevention through research and scholarship. This book is one of the primary means to achieve that important goal. (emphasis added)
*************
Now, allow me to leave this topic with a little tip: You are so utterly wrong about this that you can't move the goalposts far enough to fix it. A wise person would realize it's time to cut your losses and find a more promising subject to distort.
I do have a few issues though.
In post 104 you assert that a person doesn’t have to be atheist to support evolution. On this point, I agree – but the converse is true as well. A person who does not support the classic formulation of evolution ("random mutation + natural selection > species") - is not necessarily a religionist. Crick for instance was a panspermia supporter – and the arguments for cosmic ancestry are often indistinguishable from the arguments for Intelligent Design.
Frequently, on this forum, the defense of the theory of evolution overlooks the internal conflicts about the theory itself. IOW, among those who agree that evolution has happened, there are differences as to the mechanisms. Frequently the difference breaks between biologists-chemists-paleontologists on the one side - and physicists-mathematicians-astrobiologists on the other.
Or to put it in a different framework: if the age of the universe is understood by the correspondents to be old from our space/time coordinates (13.7 by) and the existence of a fossil record as a quantizing of the continuum is accepted – then the argument reduces to the interpretation of the evidence.
Darwin didn’t have the benefit of modern science when he proposed “random mutation + natural selection > species". Nowadays there are other interpretations on the table including “punctuated equilibrium”, “autonomous biological self organizing complexity”, "cosmic ancestry" and other formulations of Intelligent Design.
When I look at all of this – I truly don’t understand all the contention towards Intelligent Design supporters. ID doesn’t name a Designer and doesn’t deny either the age of the universe or the fossil record.
It is wrongful to argue with ID supporters as if they were Young Earth Creationists. We ought to look at the issues instead.
At bottom, all the newer formulations question how complexity arose in biological systems. Sadly, ID has introduced an unnecessary new type of complexity to ask those questions ---- but, most importantly, the underlying question is valid no matter who is doing the asking.
I strongly urge the combatants on these threads to lay down their verbal arms and take up the issue of complexity and biological systems to see if we can find some common ground to answer the basic question: what do the children in publicly funded K-12 schools need to know about the various interpretations of the evidence:
Here’s a start, to define the terminology:
Complexity is ...[the abstract notion of complexity has been captured in many different ways. Most, if not all of these, are related to each other and they fall into two classes of definitions]:
2) ...the (minimal) amount of time it takes to create the system.
Least Description
Definition: The minimum number of bits into which a string can be compressed without losing information. This is defined with respect to a fixed, but universal decompression scheme, given by a universal Turing machine.
Wikipedia: Cellular Automata (aka Self-Organizing Complexity)
A cellular automaton (plural: cellular automata) is a discrete model studied in computability theory and mathematics. It consists of an infinite, regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states. The grid can be in any finite number of dimensions. Time is also discrete, and the state of a cell at time t is a function of the state of a finite number of cells called the neighborhood at time t-1. These neighbors are a selection of cells relative to some specified, and does not change (Though the cell itself may be in its neighborhood, it is not usually considered a neighbor). Every cell has the same rule for updating, based on the values in this neighbourhood. Each time the rules are applied to the whole grid a new generation is produced.
In this paper, we skirt the issue of structural and functional complexity by examining genomic complexity. It is tempting to believe that genomic complexity is mirrored in functional complexity and vice versa. Such an hypothesis, however, hinges upon both the aforementioned ambiguous definition of complexity and the obvious difficulty of matching genes with function. Several developments allow us to bring a new perspective to this old problem. On the one hand, genomic complexity can be defined in a consistent information-theoretic manner [the "physical" complexity (4)], which appears to encompass intuitive notions of complexity used in the analysis of genomic structure and organization (5). On the other hand, it has been shown that evolution can be observed in an artificial medium (6, 7), providing a unique glimpse at universal aspects of the evolutionary process in a computational world. In this system, the symbolic sequences subject to evolution are computer programs that have the ability to self-replicate via the execution of their own code. In this respect, they are computational analogs of catalytically active RNA sequences that serve as the templates of their own reproduction. In populations of such sequences that adapt to their world (inside of a computer's memory), noisy self-replication coupled with finite resources and an information-rich environment leads to a growth in sequence length as the digital organisms incorporate more and more information about their environment into their genome. Evolution in an information-poor landscape, on the contrary, leads to selection for replication only, and a shrinking genome size as in the experiments of Spiegelman and colleagues (8). These populations allow us to observe the growth of physical complexity explicitly, and also to distinguish distinct evolutionary pressures acting on the genome and analyze them in a mathematical framework.
If an organism's complexity is a reflection of the physical complexity of its genome (as we assume here), the latter is of prime importance in evolutionary theory. Physical complexity, roughly speaking, reflects the number of base pairs in a sequence that are functional. As is well known, equating genomic complexity with genome length in base pairs gives rise to a conundrum (known as the C-value paradox) because large variations in genomic complexity (in particular in eukaryotes) seem to bear little relation to the differences in organismic complexity (9). The C-value paradox is partly resolved by recognizing that not all of DNA is functional: that there is a neutral fraction that can vary from species to species. If we were able to monitor the non-neutral fraction, it is likely that a significant increase in this fraction could be observed throughout at least the early course of evolution. For the later period, in particular the later Phanerozoic Era, it is unlikely that the growth in complexity of genomes is due solely to innovations in which genes with novel functions arise de novo. Indeed, most of the enzyme activity classes in mammals, for example, are already present in prokaryotes (10). Rather, gene duplication events leading to repetitive DNA and subsequent diversification (11) as well as the evolution of gene regulation patterns appears to be a more likely scenario for this stage. Still, we believe that the Maxwell Demon mechanism described below is at work during all phases of evolution and provides the driving force toward ever increasing complexity in the natural world.
Given a system whose function we want to specify, for which the environmental (input) variables have a complexity of C(e), and the actions of the system have a complexity of C(a), then the complexity of specification of the function of the system is:
Wikipedia: Irreducible Complexity
The term "irreducible complexity" is defined by Behe as:
In his recent book The Fifth Miracle, Paul Davies suggests that any laws capable of explaining the origin of life must be radically different from scientific laws known to date. The problem, as he sees it, with currently known scientific laws, like the laws of chemistry and physics, is that they are not up to explaining the key feature of life that needs to be explained. That feature is specified complexity. Life is both complex and specified. The basic intuition here is straightforward. A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex (i.e., it conforms to an independently given pattern but is simple). A long sequence of random letters is complex without being specified (i.e., it requires a complicated instruction-set to characterize but conforms to no independently given pattern). A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified...
How does the scientific community explain specified complexity? Usually via an evolutionary algorithm. By an evolutionary algorithm I mean any algorithm that generates contingency via some chance process and then sifts the so-generated contingency via some law-like process. The Darwinian mutation-selection mechanism, neural nets, and genetic algorithms all fall within this broad definition of evolutionary algorithms. Now the problem with invoking evolutionary algorithms to explain specified complexity at the origin of life is absence of any identifiable evolutionary algorithm that might account for it. Once life has started and self-replication has begun, the Darwinian mechanism is usually invoked to explain the specified complexity of living things.
But what is the relevant evolutionary algorithm that drives chemical evolution? No convincing answer has been given to date. To be sure, one can hope that an evolutionary algorithm that generates specified complexity at the origin of life exists and remains to be discovered. Manfred Eigen, for instance, writes, "Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of information," where by "information" I understand him to mean specified complexity. But if some evolutionary algorithm can be found to account for the origin of life, it would not be a radically new law in Davies's sense. Rather, it would be a special case of a known process.
Principia Cybernetica: Metatransition (a kind of punctuated equilibrium)
Consider a system S of any kind. Suppose that there is a way to make some number of copies from it, possibly with variations. Suppose that these systems are united into a new system S' which has the systems of the S type as its subsystems, and includes also an additional mechanism which controls the behavior and production of the S-subsystems. Then we call S' a metasystem with respect to S, and the creation of S' a metasystem transition. As a result of consecutive metasystem transitions a multilevel structure of control arises, which allows complicated forms of behavior.
Have you ever killed a child?
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