[Virginia-American]

Actually, I agree with what you're saying about the outlines of a more predictive and precise theory of evolution (in #118) until the last sentence, "On the other hand, the whole set up looks an awful lot like a recursive computer program, so the argument-from-no-design collapses." What is the argument from no design? To me it looks like linked differential equations. Seems like we need a mathematical model of ecosystems, in a fair amount of detail, before we can describe the way that the environment modifies species in it over many generations.

[The_Reader_David]

The "argument-from-no-design" is my way of describing the sociology of Darwinism not as science but as a dogma of materialistic atheism. I have before observed that the Darwin-fish-with-legs is a very odd phenomenon if Darwinism functioned merely as a scientific hypothesis.

Once one has a nice orderly system of differential equations governing the dynamics, the presence of a stochastic element in the genesis of biological diversity no longer makes a compelling counter to argument from design. Particle physics as presently understood has a stochastic element in the collapse of the wave function, but has such a beautiful, elegant feeling that no atheist brings it up as an anti-design polemic--it looks too much like the product of a brilliant mind.

My only real quarrel with Darwinism as science is the fact that its practitioners tend to formulate it in a non-falsifiable way (and I am a Popperian). My quarrel with certain Darwinists is that they are appealing to our ignorance of the non-stochastic part of what should be turned into a proper scientific theory (in the Popperian sense) when they draw philosophical inferences (the non-existence of God, the purposelessness of human existence, etc.) from the sketch of a scientific theory Darwin provided.