[betty boop]

Darwinistas, your revolution has failed. Get out of the way, or get with the program. We don’t need your tall tales and unworkable utopian dreams any more.

Gee. I think we could have done very well without that "editorial." What does it have to do with science?

Thanks for the interesting post, Michael!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your insight!

Gee. I think we could have done very well without that "editorial."

Indeed, it is just those kinds of unnecessary condemnations which reflect poorly on the speaker (whichever side he is on). We read something like that in Hawking's lecture on imaginery time where he took several swipes at young earth creationists which were completely unnecessary and detracted from his material. Ditto for Pinker. But it is never right to respond "in kind" for something which was wrong to begin with.

IMHO, the general public is always "turned off" by bickering - thus, the first side to master the diplomacy always has the upper hand.

[Michael_Michaelangelo]

Gee. I think we could have done very well without that "editorial."

Sorry you were offended by his comments, BB. Next time I go to post something from that site, I'll be sure to not include the Editor's commentary if it contains potentially flammable material. (truth be told - I find his commentary refreshing, informative, and funny)

[OhioAttorney]

Thanks for the pings.

The point of the posted commentary, I take it, is that biologists use concepts from control theory to understand how biological structures work, and the commentator thinks this fact is 'a powerful affirmation of intelligent design theory from scientists outside the I.D. camp'.

My (brief) comments, below, are made on that understanding. If I've gotten it wrong, I'm sure someone will tell me. (Of course, even if I've gotten it right, there's a nontrivial chance someone will tell me I've gotten it wrong anyway. But I feel able to deal with the signal-to-noise problem.)

There is nothing remotely newsworthy about the fact that biologists use mathematical concepts from control theory, cybernetics, and such in order to understand how biological systems and structures work. Such models have to do with function, not origin, and they imply nothing either way about where the system in question 'came from'.

If we need to become design engineers to understand biology, then attributing the origin of the systems to chance, undirected processes is foolish.

Which, of course, is why Darwinists don't do so. The existence of apparent design is where Darwinist theory starts, and its question is precisely: this stuff obviously didn't happen at random, so how did it happen?

Our commentator's conclusion is a remarkable one: a scientific theory is being declared wrong on the grounds that the phenomenon it seeks to explain exists in the first place.

Talk about a straw man chasing a red herring up a blind alley without a paddle after a horse of another color has been stolen in midstream.

Darwinistas, your revolution has failed.

I don't think so. Indeed, the fact that biologists are now using mathematics to understand biological structures is clear evidence that the Darwinist revolution has succeeded even beyond the wildest dreams of Darwin himself.