Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Mark Chu-Carroll on Edge of Evolution   posted by Razib @ 6/05/2007 10:56:00 AM
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I'm not normally a big fan of fisking anti-evolutionists (the rotten fruit hands too low), but Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math, Bad Math has a very funny (and obviously enraged) response to Michael Behe's newest piece of work, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Readers of this blog might find Carroll's analysis of Behe's misuse of the idea of fitness landscapes very informative. I find fitness landscapes fascinating myself, but if your reading of them is telling you that evolution can't happen, then I think the logical thing would be to look at the problems with landscapes. They aren't exactly rock-hard formal systems at this point. Until recently they weren't really formal at all, and Will Provine has made the case that for two scientific generations everyone used them in an incoherent fashion (including their originator, Sewall Wright).

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