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It is the presuppositions that are built into the program that I question. Once those are hardwired, no one questions them... they just look at the output and say it was "computer generated" and scientific.

That is total and complete bull, and you don't know what you're talking about.

I do quantum chemistry. There are multiple competing programs in the field, and people are constantly checking and measuring them against each other, as well as against experiment. The same is true for bioinformatics.

I urge everyone who has an interest in these types of issues to read this editorial. The author, Dr. Richard Lindzen, is a professor at MIT. Note especially the climate of fear that has been created by "objective" scientists against any scientist who dares question the same set of data and see a different rubric. How funding is withheld from those who see data differently. How academic promotions are withheld. In short, how everyone in an entire department can end up believing the same thing and advocating the same thing - even if it is not proven or simply not true. And yet at the same time, they can do all this under the guise of "science". It is a way to stifle all dissent and independent thought. And it happens every day in most fields of endeavor.

It's paranoid nonsense. Sorry, an MIT prof. can be a paranoid nutter just like anyone else.

Don't think for a moment that everything described by Dr. Lindzen doesn't equally apply to those humans who work with biological data and devote themselves to proving evolution.

No one in biology is concerned much with 'proving' evolution. That's a done deal. But if you doubt their work, by all means get the same data they have - it's all publicly available on the National Library of Medicine database, write a program - none of the algorithms are particularly mathematically sophisticated - and run it yourself. You said you write software. It should be a piece of cake.

rwp,
thanks for responding - even though we disagree.

I know it's not bull. It is human. I doubt, for example anyone has gotten inside this "program" to examine it's presuppositions since the article was just published so recently.

If you have not taken time to at least read the article I cited, how can you possibly know what it says? You are revealing, I think, a less than objective bias yourself by jumping so quickly to discounting what he wrote. Did you read the essay?

Actually, I did not write that I am a programmer. That was someone else on the thread.

I maintain what I wrote. The history of science is that many major shifts in view come from outside the field of study because of the groupthink inside a discipline that renders them crippled (often) when it comes to examining their own beliefs in the mirror.

best to you,
ampu