Amazon reviewer Gordon posted this question:
Perry, why have you not referenced any of Stephen Meyer’s books (“Darwin’s Doubt” or “Signature in the Cell”) or William Dembski’s books (“Debating Design” or “Signs of Intelligence”)? Please respond.
Answer:
In Chapter 17 of Evolution 2.0 I give a full explanation:
Do modern Genetic Algorithms prove Darwinian evolution?
An Amazon reviewer named L. Sojo posted this scathing critique:
“Pay the Prize”
The author writes: …then why don’t engineers use Darwinian evolution to design cars or write software? … I am offering an award to the first person who can discover a process by which nonliving thins can create code.
The answer is: that person already exists, his name is John Koza and his process is called “genetic programming”, which is used to design engines, pictures, music, computer code, etc by itself. You can learn buying the John Koza books here in Amazon. So, the author can pay the prize.
The author is missing the truth when he calls these developments “curiosities “. The truth is that they are used in many industries. By rejecting the already known, the whole argument of the book of collapse as a building of cards.
By trying to take advantage of the ignorance of both engineers and scientists of genetic programming, he only manages to show his own or even worse, his bad intentions, improper in a true scientist.
ANSWER:
The UK Magazine Front Line Genomics ran a story on Evolution 2.0, interviewing me along with judges George Church of Harvard / MIT, Michael Ruse of Florida State University, and Denis Noble of Oxford:
I appeared on WTVR’s “Good Morning Virginia” talking about Evolution 2.0:
Can Anybody Actually Win The Evolution 2.0 Prize?
Science, God, and
Happy Chemical Accidents
There’s a million codes out there. HTML, bar codes, zip codes, Java, English and Chinese.
A million codes. 999,999 are designed by humans.
There’s one code we don’t know the origin of – and that’s DNA. We don’t know of any codes that are not designed. This implies design in DNA.
So far, nobody has solved the design problem in biology. Not David Hume, not Charles Darwin, not Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or anybody else.
That’s an unsolved science mystery. So I and a group of Private Equity Investors have formed a company, Natural Code LLC, to offer a $10 million dollar technology prize for Origin Of Information.
There are two kinds of evolution:
1) There’s the version that you read about in the bookstore. It’s two-thirds science fiction.
2) Then there’s the version that PhD biologists, cancer researchers and genetic engineers use to do their jobs.
The two are entirely different.
Popular books tell you evolution works like this: Read more »
I got this question from John:
Perry, I am a former Christian turned deist. I could not believe in the god of the Bible because of the Bible’s flaws and because of morality problems with how the Old Testament Yahweh is portrayed but I could not give up my belief that an Intelligence had to have jump-started all this and then put natural laws into place to guide it to where we are today.
I read your thesis and would like to comment on how much I enjoyed it. I think your strength is to take a basically simple message–cell design/replication is intelligently designed–and explain it in simple, no-nonsense, no-frills terms.
I liken what you say to the belief by some atheist biologists arguing that chance could explain billions of English letters floating in a giant bowl of soup and then spelling out the complete works of Shakespeare when it is poured onto a table, given enough time.
Just curious: have you ever been drawn to deism as a better explanation for the origins of life–an Intelligence that has no note of or concern about the unspeakable levels of suffering that goes on down here regardless of how many prayers are sent up to Him?
My Reply:
John,
I can well relate to the Read more »
Don Muncie asks a great question:
How is your fundamental argument different from the classical teleological argument?
Answer:
In Paley’s watch argument, the analogy between a watch and a living organism was unclear. However, the definition of code in biology and its definition in computer science (Claude Shannon) are identical.
Paley tried to force you to a conclusion. I offer Read more »
I have a New Years Resolution for 2018, inspired by a recent blog comment.
Yesterday, a reader of this blog indicated that he was not interested in reading Evolution 2.0. Then he posted six very long blog comments that contained 20, maybe 40 questions.
I responded: “Most of your questions are answered in Read more »
