On Dec 4, 2007 9:45 PM, Charlie Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Not necessarily. You could just be repeating buzz-words (in fact, > "complexity" is a red-flag buzz-word in precisely the same way > "transitional fossils" or "macroevolution" are - makes me think you're > alluding to William Dembski, but I'd be shocked and disappointed if > you were). Which is why I was asking for a more in-depth discussion of > the perceived issues complexity has to a specific "Darwinian model". > If you can do that, then we can have a discussion. If you can't, or > won't, then it's just a waste of time.
I'm talking about the Santa Fe Institution people and those doing related work. Kauffman, Waldrop, Holland, Arthur, Lewin, etc. I've read probably 20 such books, none in the last few years, so I may be somewhat behind. I did most of an undergraduate degree in biology until I switched into writing and rhetoric. I got interested in genetics when I was a kid; as a college freshman in 1975, one of my first programs on a PDP-8 modeled Mendelian inheritance. Just looked to see who Dembski is. I guess I need to say clearly that I am not nor ever have been a proponent of intelligent design. I find that whole idea and movement rather nauseating. It seems to me to be rather obviously based in fear, not science. I feel the same way about people who assume that anybody who is unsatisfied with Darwinian -- natural selection as the over-reaching mechanism of speciation -- must be proponents of intelligent design. It's like it's impossible to engage in debate without first rejecting the lunatics. > Emergence isn't trivial, it's actually an important insight, one of > those (like natural selection) that seems so damned obvious in > hindsight that it's hard to imagine not understanding it. However > you're right in that pointing out that a system exhibits emergence > doesn't tell you much about it unless you bother to discover the > nature of the simple causes and how they generate complex results. I wasn't saying that emergence is trivial. I was saying that it is trivial to describe emergence. As I think you're saying, figuring out the implications of emergence is challenging. There's a lot to be discovered by those who can figure out the mathematics that will allow us to model many kinds of emergent phenomena, which currently seem to be beyond-astronomical in magnitude. So... perhaps I can answer your question this way... we don't know much much of evolution is driven by simple rules that are inherent in the universe (thus the anthropic principle) v. how much is driven by competition. It's a lot easier to see competition at work because our main tool for studying emergence is modeling that rapidly sucks down all the computing power we can throw at it. Saying it another way... complexity says that the interactions of lots of agents gives rise to unpredictable (so far) phenomena. At the simplest mathematical levels, it is meaningless to describe those interactions as competitive or cooperative, but at higher levels of observation, such behaviors appear to emerge. Nick -- Nick Arnett [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages: 408-904-7198 _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
