Replies

"Ross is neither flogging the usual 'the Bible is true, so we've got to read it the way ordinary post-Enlightenment science and history books are read' argument of the six-day literalists, nor does he seem to be arguing for a 'tinker god' who hand-designs molecular machines. The last few points on Ross's table are actually arguments for the specialness of Earth's environment as a context for evolution!"

Ross details why "six-day literalists" aren't literal at all in books like "A Matter of Days." In his books he does detail the unique and sudden appearance of compex life forms. Using the uniqueness of Earth to point to evolution would be a big stretch because according to chance, evolution should have never produced such a world. See Ross' "A Creator and the Cosmos."

But that is the point of his line of argumentation, whether he sees it or not: honest evolutionary biologists (as opposed to dishonest cosmologists like Lee Smolin) argue that the Darwinian paradigm requires the existence of self-reproducing systems in order to have anything to discuss at all. Evolution is change in populations of self-reproducing systems, a theory of evolution, whether Darwin's, Larmark's or the neo-Darwinian synthesis is an explanation of change in properties of self-reproducing systems.

Get it through you head, that the inclusion of a stochastic (a.k.a. random) element in the Darwinian paradigm does not assert that life, or even species, arose by random chance. Our best model of financial futures pricing has a stochastic element, but futures prices are not fixed by random chance, but by the purposeful actions of traders.

That was part of my point in asking for a scientific definition of intelligence. I suggest reading Marcus Hutter's works on universal artificial intelligence. Once one digests his proposed definition of intelligence, one sees fairly easily that what the neo-Darwinian synthesis describes, is, like a functioning free market, a distributed intelligent system. Quite bizarrely given the heat of these discussions and recent court decisions, once one gets a scientifically sound notion of intelligence, neo-Darwinism implies intelligent design.

Ross convincingly (to my mind) argues that the universe and earth are remarkably special. It is only in the context of well-tuned environments that self-reproducing systems (be it terrestrial life, or genetic algorithms) exist at all.

Just as in the case of genetic algorithms, so in the case of life, the place to see the design is in the context in which the changes take place, not in the details of the changes.