On 05/12/2007, at 3:04 PM, Nick Arnett wrote: > On Dec 4, 2007 7:39 PM, Charlie Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> >> >>> I'll certainly allow that it *may* be true, but >>> it certainly isn't proved -- our understanding of evolution is far >>> from >>> complete. >> >> Yours may be - that doesn't mean others don't have a far better >> grasp... > > > Ah, ad hominem.
Nah-ah. Just a fact. No-one knows everything in a field, and lay- people often think they have a far better grasp of a technical field than they do. > One doesn't have to be an expert in evolutionary biology to > understand the state of knowledge. I'm not an expert software > engineer, but > I have a pretty good idea of what is possible and what isn't. Really? I *am* a biologist, and I wouldn't claim to have a grasp on the state-of-the-art. What I meant was, it depends greatly on your sources, and what you're reading. > > >> >>> Everything doesn't arise from competition >> >> No, but competition does provide much of the direction. > > > And how do you know that? From doing a degree in the subject (specifically, Zoology, with my focus in my final year on evolutionary biology, ecosystems and artificial life), and looking at a lot of models. What causes variation is one thing, what provides direction is another. Competition can be interspecies, intraspecies, intergender, within sibling groups, across groups. Different circumstances can provide different strengths to these pressures, but if there's any distinct pressure, then competition in one of its many guises is a likely candidate for that pressure. In any system with finite resources, there will be competition. >>> and we have mathematics >>> (complexity) that demonstrates that, or at least very strongly >>> suggests that >>> Darwinian models are substantially incomplete. >> >> Which particular models are you thinking of? > > > Darwinian ones, as I said. All of them. Complexity poses a serious > challenge.\ Yes, you said "Darwinian models". "All of them" is just side-stepping the question. I'm asking you to show a specific example of an incomplete model. Unless you actually mean "Darwin's models"? In which case, of course they were incomplete, it was 150 years ago. Your use of "Darwinian" sends up a red flag, 'cause the only people who use that are strict gradualists or old-school biologists like Dawkins who use it from habit from before it was hijacked, and creationists (and they're using it in rather a different way). In my opinion, complexity poses no real challenge at all, as emergence and chaos etc were being incorporated into models when I was graduating, and successfully, and that was over 10 years ago. So again, please enlighten me with a specific example of how complexity is troubling a "Darwinian model". > > >> >> >> I happen to think religion is an emergent phenomenon. >> > > Although "emergent" is a difficult term (and well-loved, yet ill- > defined by > the complexity folks), I suspect you're right. But calling phenomena > "emergent" may be saying little more than "this doesn't come about > by any > mechanism we can understand other than the way the universe operates." It's defined well enough as "complex-appearing behaviours or attributes which arise from a few simple rules or characteristics". Charlie _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
