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To: Phaedrus
Lev: Dawkins 'cooked' his rules not to prove evolution but to show the difference between a purely random process and a process with a fitness function.

Nonsense.

You are wrong. Here's what Dawkins said:

Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining the distinction between single-step seleciton and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective 'breading', the mutant 'progeny' phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WASEL. Life isn't like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress towards some distant goal seems, with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of short-term selection. The 'watchmaker' that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has n o long-term goal.

360 posted on 03/08/2002 7:55:11 PM PST by Lev
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To: Lev
Lev, you are indulging in semantics. Dawkins' exercise purports to show that random processes can drive evolution, which is absurd on its face, semantically and mathematically, always assuming that words mean things. Dawkins is intelligent and he designed the program, and the only point he proves is the very one he intends to overcome. "Evolution has no long-term goal"? Fine. Then we should find chaos. We don't. We find exquisite order, everything relating to everything else. At the very foundation of science is the assumption that the order is "out there" to find. That is what science has been stunningly successful at doing in recent centuries. Randomness begets randomness, Lev, and nothing else. And any attempt to equate randomness with science is further ludicrous on its face. It is in fact anti-scientific.

The more interesting question by far is "What drives you people to so desperately seek ultimate 'answers' that do not involve God?" You simply have no case. It is obvious that the universe was indeed intelligently designed. The part of that design that we think we understand are called laws of physics or laws of nature. Science is engaged in discerning only the surface of that intelligence, breast thumping by the so-called scientists notwithstanding. But "intelligence" is a wholly inadequate word here. The capacities required are so far beyond genius that humanity can only hope ever to plumb the shallowest of its depths.

361 posted on 03/08/2002 8:52:10 PM PST by Phaedrus
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