[Diamond]

Actually, I think even more fitting to a stochastic methodology (and certainly funnier) were the suggestions proffered before mine that hunble throw a floppy disk into a swimming pool or bake it in the sun.

Cordially,

[The_Reader_David]

You misunderstand my point. I fully expect a stochastic element to be present in the best scientific explanation of biological diversity. It will, however, be present in a form which does not give rise to a denial of the argument from design.

There is an provable example of stochastic processes giving rise to increased order: the hardening of metal. By appropiate heating and quenching, one can adjust the crystal size in a metal, either increasing the average size (hardening) or decreasing it (annealing). The micro-level process is thermal, and therefore stochastic. The result is designed, so much so, that if one found either hardened or annealed metal in an excavation, one would immediately conclude that it was not natural, but part of an artifact.

My point is that "fitness" and "natural selection" are tautological concepts in standard Darwinism (and thus not scientific in the Popperian sense). It is in the missing "theory of fitness" that the order and law-like properties of adaptive ecology will reside, and once the laws begin to be uncovered, the rhetorical heart of Darwinism as an argument-from-no-design will be cut out. Stochastic search of a designedly constrained space of possibilities with a designed notion of fitness is exactly what the Darwinist's latest triumph, genetic programming, models. It is a good advance for evolutionary biology, but a blow against Darwinism-as-creation-myth.