I would not say "more parsimonious not to invoke God", actually God is truly a very parsimonious idea, a single empty word :-D I think the reason to reject it is that it is a dormitive explanation which does not explain anything. I recently had a tiff about that with an otherwise interesting scientist.

I suppose the issue is how complexity and organisation (decreases in entropy) can be explained without invoking some outside force.

Exactly, and why it decreases, but as you know this is a scam, it appears to decrease because only the entropy of the isolated system is accounted for not the entropy of the larger enclosing system which include the energy source and which entropy does increase when the energy is consumed" during organising process. One has to wonder why such a blatant "cheat" is not noticed by creationists who are also supposed to be scientists. Beside entropy another concern they have is the "why" of the forms and shapes but this isn't magical or "mysterious" either even when the shapes of Diatoms match the orbital trajectories for spacecrafts orbiting earth [3 pages down], obviously just attractors.

Failed the link

That sounds pretty good, we should not fear global warming or any kind environmental disaster to threaten the human specie. And man hunting is now out of fashion. Ah! There remains some "alien pests" of the microbial kind, not nice... Hey! Wait a minute, the species are not threatened but what about the individuals? Not so good after all!

Take an island; etc... Very realistic and honest argument!

I can bring another anecdote to support Jeff. My brother used to be a manager in the leather business in a Jewish area in Paris mostly involved in confection. He said he was dumbfounded by the inordinate amount of time and resources the Jews spent in trying to screw each other and over peanuts.

Thanks Bayes, very nice story, Jim Hurford website also has a few interesting papers. To me the most interesting part isn't the unlearnability conjecture nor the ethical problem but the supposed inability of the lators to translate emotional content. Though this is arduous translating poetry isn't impossible and probably no more fraught with irreducible approximations than sophisticated scientific discourse. It only means that a purely logical "deep" representation (as assumed in Desperanto) does not capture all significant correlations between word meanings, an illustration of this came as a very opportune counter example at the most improbable yet relevant place (Standard Upper Ontology Working Group). In the same vein do you know of this maverick linguist Alex Gross?

societies incapable of performing the research themselves

Which societies are you thinking of? :-)

I think this explanation is needlessly sophisticated and very, very anthropocentric, it is still dominated by the overly naive projection (little green mens) about possible space aliens. My take is much more basic. 1) Though life isn't probably a rarity in favorable circumstances (water, temperature range, the right minerals, no wild seasonal overshoots, etc...) intelligent life isn't that common, intelligence only matters in very specific circumstances. 2) Even intelligent life, whales and crows, doesn't imply the need for technology. 3) Even with technology it takes the delirious culture of outgoing aggressive paranoid monkeys like us to fancy "conquering the galaxies" and The Singularity. 4) Delirious outgoing aggressive paranoid monkeys are very likely to crash their resource base and environment well before they "take off to the stars". For short, I don't see any Fermi paradox at all... 5) Addendum, last but not least, if we were to met any "aliens" resembling our actual fantasies it would probably be a disaster for both species, yet another cause of disappearance for "evolved" civilizations.

Yeah, this is also called the Wirehead Problem in AI, nice article by Geoffrey Miller, except he falters right at the end: NO "sacred breeders" will keep up with technology they will just wallow in their own fake "reality", even more nonsensical than video games. Plus the fact that the dogmas being built on random whimsical delusions the rival factions will fight each other to death for the cause, actually they call it "The Truth", isn't that great? Nice monkeys...

but they will enable uploading of existing human minds.

Bollocks, bollocks. Sorry but there can't be no rational arguments to exchange with someone so daft as to believe this. This is right at the level of religious mythology of the worst kind (and probably fueled by the same existential angst).

Interlocking positive and negative feedback loops... On a slightly different take whenever two feedback loops pertain to two different but somewhat related functionalities this is the recipe for strange attractors (growth along one dimension, shrinking along the other), and strange attractors generate wild random looking features (though perfectly deterministic).

Not that I have much knowledge about genetics but if Neanderthal women were somewhat uglier due to the their nucleus DNA, in the long run this may prove a selective pressure strong enough to remove their mtDNA from the gene pool even it it is perfectly neutral or only slightly advantageous.

Hé, hé, hé.... This is why the Singularitarians have it right on one point: it's all about intelligence, that is, our ability to handle the world's complexity. Unfortunately no one really know what intelligence IS (yet).

Caledonian: 
Considered as a whole, modern psychiatry is a religious practice, not a science or even a proper medicine. 
 
That's beside the point, the fact that both current theory and practice of psychiatry are more or less bunk (not always...) doesn't mean that there isn't some real trouble with mental health. 
Diseases were just as crippling and lethal before the occurrence of "modern medicine".

razib: 
kev, let's just say... 
 
OK, that's perfectly clear: you don't want to discuss pathological aspects of religion. 
But as a summary dismissal it's gross, given that you are far from being an idiot and given your dedication to the discussion of religion and civilization matters it makes me think that you are pushing some weird agenda that I cannot readily identify. 
Strange...

razib: 
psychiatry is by and large mumbo-jumbo too. 
 
Hu! hu! you sound like a scientologist (kidding) 
All right, as a purported cure psychiatry is often mumbo-jumbo, as for diagnostics of maladaptive behavior not so much. 
 
I have a recognized psychotic as a neighbor, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, living from a state pension (this is France...), and I can assure you that though this doesn't cut off all social skills it is definitely maladaptive. 
 
It is in this sense that I deem religion maladaptive in the current era (even schizophrenia could have been valuable at some point, see Geoffrey Miller). 
 
Religion was (and still is) beneficial to strengthen group bonding, allowing the more cohesive tribes to overtake the less so. 
But this doesn't scale, neither to the group sizes we see today, nor to demented ideologies, nor to the evolution of armament, bows and arrows allow the Yanomamos to strive, nukes... 
 
Besides, who wants to live under tribal rules nowadays?

No matter how you try to turn it Razib, religion is a matter of psychiatry, a form of paranoia, period. 
Mankind for some reason(s) got infected with this disease long ago and we are now coming closer to a deadly climax.

more cash, more irrational exuberance, higher animal spirits. 
 
Sure, "irrational exuberance" at the minimum wage (whatever it is)! 
It is also "well known" that the crime rate rises with disposable income, all those murderous billionaires... 
 
ROFLMAO

(each of which, without exception, is designed to substitute the opinion of its designer for the expression, on the market, of the opinions and wills of all those others daily benefitting from and enduring the composite effects of their economic activities). 
 
Exactly, but the market is Aesop's tongues. 
What I don't like in the market is that it indeed cater for the will of the masses and that in 99.99% of cases this is CRAP!!!