[maro]

Occam's Razor is a seductive principle, but it really has a very limited field of application. The problem is defining degrees of freedom, and how we count hypotheses. Someone who believes in Intelligent Design could posit one extra assumption, God, and claim that evolution requires two or three or four. Are these commensurable? Hardly. Because Occam's Razor does not tell us how to count in situations like this, it is pretty useless. On the math front--if you can PROVE mathematically that evolution has occurred, I would be glad to hear of it. So far as I am aware, the biologists have a lot of plausibility arguments and hand-waving, but no PROOFS.

[maro]

By the way--an example of such a proof would be a computer program that gives rise to more complicated forms of artificial life, culminating in a self-aware computer program. If evolution works in the macro-world, it should be susceptible to modelling in a computer program. The nice thing about computers is that each "generation" can occur in milliseconds, so we wouldn't have to wait for millions of years to see who's right.