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"What ails modern civilization? Fundamentally, our society's affliction is the decay of religious belief If a culture is to survive and flourish, it must ... not be severed --- from the religious vision out of which it arose. The high necessity of reflective men and women, then, is to labor for the restoration of religious teachings as a credible body of doctrine."

Maybe it's absurd to you, but you're not the one with DR in front of your name either.

I think he probably knows more about what he is talking about then you do.

Also, evolutionary programs have actually created circuits that work BETTER then human designed ones, and we can't figure out how they work. All we know is that they DO work, and many have been patented.

Evolutionary science is going WAY beyond biological and paleantology science now, it is going into the realm of electronics and software. Programs that are allowed to evolve on their own to become something that no human could have programmed.

Evolution works, and it's being PROVEN EVERY day.

What a disappointment for you, huh Andrew?

[Evolutionary design," says Pennock, "can often solve problems better than we can using our own intelligence."]

Absurd! Even leaving out the often does not make the statement much more believable.

You remind me of the guy in "The Princess Bride" who kept declaring, "inconceivable!" whenever something happened that he hadn't thought to take into account. Rather than go "oops", or stop to figure out where his mistake was, he just declared it preposterous.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya

Your personal astonishment is hardly a valid rebuttal to Pennock's statement. Furthermore, I believe I've seen you on threads where the following was already posted:

Evolution *can* and indeed *does* produce results which exceed those of "our own intelligence". Deal with it. In this case, it made a cubic function generator circuit which outperforms the best that all electronic engineers were capable of producing in all the history of electronics.

The circuit at the top was patented in 2000, and is the current state of the art. The circuit at the bottom was produced by pure unaided evolution, and outperforms the human version. It's also complex enough that no one's figured out how it works yet...

"Evolutionary design," says Pennock, "can often solve problems better than we can using our own intelligence."

Absurd! Even leaving out the often does not make the statement much more believable.

Artificial evolution, in the form of genetic programming, is employed quite regularly now to solve problems better than humans have been able to. I worked on one to do optimal cuts in lumber mills a few years back. Human brains have pretty tightly constrained upper limits in regard to problem-solving capacity. Humans can handle linear problems with up to about 7 variables, with practice. Ie, toy problems in artificially simplified domains.