05.30.07
Hitchens, what if Dawkins is a fraud?
HItchens, sit down and read Dawkins’ Climbing Mt. Improbable, with its argument for incremental evolution? Do you buy it? You are supposed to be our smart public intellectual, what if you bit on the hook of a deception?
The whole ball game depends on this argument. And yet, looked at objectively, it is completely implausible.
It sells books, and made Dawkins’ game, big bucks, as a wishfulfilment for young kids entering science, a juicy market, but does it work as real science? The computer program argument is pure crap, as pointed out by many critics. So that’s a red flag warning. And in fact, over and over and over critics (none of them in academia or sci/orgs, you don’t get hired to think about such things) have warned this argument of Dawkins is weak to the point of failure.
You are smart, Hitchens, take a look, and tell us what you think. Maybe you can take a lie detector test so we can be sure your motives aren’t mixed up in the wishfulfilment market on natural selection.
How about it? Loudmouthing in the big media, without doing your homework, is getting tiresome.
The whole game is out of control, no? Bad science plus intimidated/brainwashed scientists vs Big Bucks. Big bucks has won out.
Waiting on your expert judgment. Depending on what you conclude you should give back the money.
It reminds me of the crystallization of Christianity: noone could stop the formation of mass belief, and the racket of its exploiters.
James said,
June 1, 2007 at 11:20 pm
“The computer program argument is pure crap, as pointed out by many critics.”
I don’t know if the Darwinists are playing dumb or if they truly don’t understand the nature of the theory. Look at the letters Berlinski received for “The Deniable Darwin.” He had to go through great pains to explain the nature of Darwinism to the Darwinists.
“This point seems to be less straightforward than I imagined, so let me spell out the mistake. Starting from a random string, suppose the computer generates the sequence bndit disne sot sodiswn toswxmspw sso. Comparing the sequence with its target, it proposes to conserve the initial “B.” But why? The string is gibberish. Plainly, the conservation of vagrant successes has been undertaken with the computer’s eye fixed firmly on its future target, intermediates selected not for what they are (gibberish, after all), but for what they will be (an English sentence). This is a violation of the rule against deferred success. Without the rule, there is nothing remotely like Darwinian evolution. What the computer has in fact done is to match randomly selected items to a template, thus inevitably reintroducing the element of deliberate design that was banished from the Darwinian world.”
http://www.2think.org/letters.shtml
nemo said,
June 2, 2007 at 6:12 pm
http://darwiniana.com/2007/06/02/dawkins-computer-fantasies/
Good comment, referenced in current post for today (june 2)