[tortoise]

Now I find this interesting but I would like a little help with the word, "instantiation". When a hard drive is optimized, the designer (I am partial to this word) knows what optimization means and presumably sets parameters to achieve this result. As to living forms, I would not have a clue what optimization means in the context of 300,000 species.

The design parameter for a species is reproductive fitness, an important part of which is survival. The design selection process in nature takes care of itself, though the rather loose selection parameters permit quite a bit of divergence. As for "instantiation", it was my way of saying that biological evolution would be an implementation of a general mathematical pattern (mathematical patterns having little or no context on their own).

[Phaedrus]

The design parameter for a species is reproductive fitness, an important part of which is survival. The design selection process in nature takes care of itself, though the rather loose selection parameters permit quite a bit of divergence.

Thanks.

Reproductive fitness and survival are both slippery concepts; i.e. the Evolutionists can tell us which species were fit and which were not but only after the fact, based on their "survival". They cannot tell us, now, which species exhibit reproductive fitness and will survive and which do not. So how much scientific meaning do such concepts have? Looking back, anyone can play Monday morning quarterback and impose patterns where they may or may not in fact exist.

I presume by "the design selection process in nature takes care of itself" you refer to environmental constraints, and those constraints are certainly real. But this is the passive aspect of Evolution on which all or most can agree.

Endless repetition to the contrary by the Evolutionists notwithstanding, and acknowledging the common amino acid bases, genetic similarities and the increasing complexity of forms over time, it has simply not been shown that any species can or does evolve into another. The evidence is simply not there, in the fossil record, in the lab, anywhere. So while Evolution has a nice, linear, cause-and-effect feel and tone, it simply isn't supported by the data.

Exploring possibilities a little, mutation has been posited as a change agent. But mutation is destructive and produces freaks, genetic information is lost, not gained. It's a dead end. Gould celebrated "chance" as at the bottom of things for a while but as a mathematician you know that such a position is utter scientific nonsense and laughable. At all events, species have a tendency to show great stability over long long periods of time, not change.

Well, you're getting the drift, I'm sure. The case has not been made so the best that can honestly and scientifically be said is "We don't know".

Now the Evolutionists are in denial about this and here the implications become quite interesting to me, but that is a whole nother realm, the realm of the Culture War.