The Miracles of Darwinism

[Byelotsar]

Whilst debating the ToE elsewhere, someone put forward this article entitled "The Miracles of Darwinism". It's an interview with a mathematician and medical doctor named Marcel-Paul Shutzenburger (hey... no non-English character function?). He offers a rational non-religious rebuttal to the ToE, and I was wondering what others had to say about it (especially where and how he is wrong, if he is).

 

[I_Love_Cheese]

Whilst debating the ToE elsewhere, someone put forward this article entitled "The Miracles of Darwinism". It's an interview with a mathematician and medical doctor named Marcel-Paul Shutzenburger (hey... no non-English character function?). He offers a rational non-religious rebuttal to the ToE, and I was wondering what others had to say about it (especially where and how he is wrong, if he is).

It looks like a variation on the argument from probabalistic incredulity, hardly new, and I saw Wistar briefly so this may be where it came from, it has all been rebutted before I'm pretty sure but I will read it tomorrow in more detail.
BTW if you can't do an umlaut, just add an e after the vowel, ie Schuetzenberger would be acceptable.

 

[Apos]

I'm not sure he really understands what he is talking about. Unfortunately, being very smart can often bea problem when you try to understand a discipline outside your own, because you are too quick to assume that you understand what's going on and aren't missing key elements.

Mostly he just seems uninformed about the nature of the study of development in genetics. This is a huge and very productive and active field, and yet he seems to think the whole enterprise is basically impossible and nothing can be done in it. It's a little like listening to a guy calmly explain how its impossible to travel faster than 20mph in a world with jet plane and racecars.

He doesn't just think that evolution is impossible: he quite litterally seems to think that our genes don't contain enough information to develop our organs. I don't even know many creationists who think that, and certianly there are countless mathematicians and genetic experts that would disagree.

Unfortunately as well, his objections are expressed in a way that's pretty unclear and takes a lot of work to figure out exactly what he's getting at. If you could sum up what you believe his key points are, it would be easier to have a discussion rather than trying to refer back to him directly.

 

[Byelotsar]

Unfortunately as well, his objections are expressed in a way that's pretty unclear and takes a lot of work to figure out exactly what he's getting at. If you could sum up what you believe his key points are, it would be easier to have a discussion rather than trying to refer back to him directly.

That's actually the problem I'm having, but I was hoping that it was that I simply lacked sufficient familiarity with the literature or the science than that he was in fact being unclear.

However, tomorrow I'll definitely go through and see if I can lay out what I think his points are. At least that way I can refute those (if possible), and if someone says "No, he means this," then I can take a look at that perspective.

BTW if you can't do an umlaut, just add an e after the vowel, ie Schuetzenberger would be acceptable.

Ah, yes. I've seen that before. I've even used it before. I don't know why I didn't think of it here.

 

[I_Love_Cheese]

Rather than try to rebut the entire article, do you have any idea what your opponent thinks this article demonstrates. If you know that it may get a lot easier to rebut.

 

[I_Love_Cheese]

Here is another note on Schuetzenberger, he apparently has been picked up by the ID crowd for some work he did in 1966 about genetic algorithms, needless to say it is way out of date.

Cosma Shalizi raised by email a question I've always wondered about, namely the connection between Chomsky's anti-Darwinism and that of his co-author Marcel-Paul Schuetzenberger (N. Chomsky and M. P. Schuetzenberger, The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages (Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland, 1963, pp. 118-161; M. Schuetzenberger. 1967. "Algorithms and neo-Darwinian theory." In Paul S. Moorhead and Martin M. Kaplan, ed. Mathematical challenges to the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution, p. 73. The Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph No. 5.) Cosma pointed out that Schuetzenberger (who outside of this context was an accomplished mathematician) "influenced David Berlinski, and I think Behe and Dembski too, though I'm less sure of that. For Berlinski, see his characteristically idiotic essay "The Deniable Darwin", _Commentary_, vol. 101, no. 6 (June 1996). Dembski quotes a particular argument Schutzenberger gave, for the impossibility of evolving computer programs, in 1966; of course by 1975 John Holland and his group had done enough work on genetic algorithms that Holland could publish a classic book on the subject... "
Schuetzenberger's anti-Darwin arguments have nothing to do with Gould's spandrels, but rather involve calculating the (in S's view vanishingly small) probablity that random processes could result in observed biological complexity. I imagine that Chomsky heard these arguments in the early 1960s, and they probably form part of the history of his opinions about neo-Darwinism.

source

 

[Dr.GH]

Whilst debating the ToE elsewhere, someone put forward this article entitled "The Miracles of Darwinism". It's an interview with a mathematician and medical doctor named Marcel-Paul Shutzenburger (hey... no non-English character function?). He offers a rational non-religious rebuttal to the ToE, and I was wondering what others had to say about it (especially where and how he is wrong, if he is).

The most obvious facts about the interview are that A) The fellow was old and about to die (consider this relative to Anthony Flew), B) it was 10 years ago and all of his confident assertions that developmental regulatory genes could not be understood have proven to be false; his assertion that bipedalism was simultaneous with increased brain size was false; his dismissal of the Santa Fe Institute was merely glib and so on....