Juan Buhler wrote:
On 2/17/06, Tom C <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I look at the world and the universe, and it's complexity, elegance, it's
many systems, chemical, organic, etc., that are all intertwined and
dependent and come to the conclusion there must be a maker. There may be no
more hard proof than that, except that many scientists, the deeper they dig,
the more evidence they find for a designer.
Intelligent design is akin to saying "the pyramids were built by
aliens--otherwise, how could they have been built"?
There is another aspect to this that has not been mentioned here as far
as I can tell: the fine tuned universe. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe for a very brief
discussion). Basically, the theory makes it seem very improbable that
all the fundamentral constants of the universe (g - the gravitational
constant), e the electron charge, the mass of many atomic particles,
the strength of the electric force, etc., are all at values that allow
long term stable systems such as galaxies, solar systems, planets, basic
building blocks of organic chemistry, etc, to exist. With even small
perturbations of any of these constants, and we end up with either a
widly oscillating glob of plasma, a very cold soup of "stuff", extremely
dense objects that would have prevented any star formation, very sparse
universes with sub atomic particles scattered everywhere, etc., i.e.
nothing that would allow any life, much less intelligent life. I.e.
either we are very lucky to have these constants, or someone made it
that way.
I once wrote a simple program that evolved tree-like structures. After
only a few generations and little computational time (think a few
hours on an old Pentium 700Mhz) I was getting incredible complexity.
The "genomes" produced had strange pieces of code that made structures
in a very non-trivial way. This isn't the basis of my acceptance of
evolution as a good enough theory to explain some things about living
things, but it really made for good illustration of what a complex
system can do.
Here are some pictures of that, in a very dated page:
http://www.jbuhler.com/LSystems/index.html
This is very interesting, I played around with this stuff back in the
early 80's. Someone had a program way back then that did this for
either the macintosh or the atari, I cant remember which one. People
have tried to use genetic programming in an attempt to solve highly
nonlinear problem sets with virtually infinite search spaces.
cheers,
rg
