Grunt,
First of all the bit you quote is in response to a specific argument made by creationists, rather than being a stand-alone statement of why evolution is a fact. In other words, it isn't so much a rationale for evolution - that relies on actual hard evidence - as debunking a particular nonsensical argument against evolution by creationists. If, for example, you stated that the Moon is made of greenish-blue cheese, say gorgonzola, because both things have similar color, rather than having its known composition based on the evidence, my reply might be as follows: "Your argument doesn't hold water because, equally, the moon might be made of diced Thai lake shrimp because of their color.
The point being not that I believe that, but that it shows the invalidity of the cheese argument. So, the experiment re: Shakespear's play is not anything like a proof of evolution, and it is not meant to be - it is just a demonstration that the argument of the creationists is invalid.
Creationists assume that life has to take a particular form - a target - and the experiment demonstrates that if a target is known, then it can be discovered through what is called evolutionary computation much faster than people think. If Shakespeare's play is the target, then it can be found randomly very quickly. You ask for a new and original play. But that's changing the rules - the basic premise of the Creationist's argument is that only one sort of life form (let's say RNA/DNA life) is possible and it could not be found randomly. If the target is known, then it can be found quickly, thus debunking the argument. Wanting a new play, is like wanting a new sort of life - but creationists, in their assumption that God is perfect, don't usually like that possibility. Thus the argument of the creationists is demonstrably false - the means by which that argument is refuted does not in itself constitute an argument for evolution nor is it intended to be such.
In fact, there is no reason the think that life can only be based on a single form - the multitude of past life forms to some extent demonstrate that. Why are there no longer trilobites? Of course all known life on earth, past and present, is nucleic acid based. But it's possible that evolution has found only a single solution (RNA/DNA life) out of a space that conceivably could contain many answers. There's no real way to know the answer to that and it is irrelevant anyway. The physical evidence demonstrates the fact of evolution. Hard as it may be to accept, facts are facts and the creationists have no facts to go off since they reject the facts becaus ethey fail to conform to their preconceived notions.
The barn analogy is a bad one by the way - there are no straight lines in nature (or very few) for a reason. Life is essentially a liquid phase process and the construction of barns, watches, etc. is thus a bad analogy. A better analogy might be a slurry of inorganic molecules which can form amino acids, or even the complexity of structure that can "by accident" result from something as simple as a freezing drop of water or a pan of hot oil.
Finally I'd ask the question, if order in the universe is evidence for a creator, then what about the disorder, including the chaotic motion of various asteroids that every now and then wallop a planet such as the Earth. What is that evidence for?
Gedanken
Edited by - Gedanken on 4 August 2002 23:39:14
