Agents Under Fire

Over at Post-Darwinist is an article worth looking into. A book, "Agents Under Fire" by Angus Menuge PhD, is reviewed. This book looks at complexity from a computer science viewpoint and compares the evolutionary claims of the philosophical materialists to the reality of truly complex systems. While I haven't read the book, the review cites some things that I have pointed out before, but stated better than I likely said them.

One unexpected concept, yet obvious with sufficient thought, is that when complexity reaches a certain sufficiency, it can no longer be managed bottom-up; it must be managed top-down. An example would be trying to write an application such as Microsoft's windows one line of code at a time. Such complexity must be modularized from the top down. This of course argues for design, but is a different approach than considering the number of elements that constitute "irreducible complexity".

Of course Evolutionists argue for mutation / selection which is equivalent to one line of software at a time. So they are presuming that they started with enough code complexity that it was viable (abiogenesis); plus every line of code added to the starting complexity is a workable change (for the better). Not to mention that the code that is added is generated at random, and that mucho code is discarded rather than added. And they presume that this is somehow parsimonious.

In fact, even if all the elements of an irreducibly complex mechanism come to exist simultaneously, why would we expect them to suddenly unite into a new assembly, fully functional for a new feature? Parsimony works so heavily against such an occurrence that it can well be thought less than trivial: it is actually absurd. Yet it will be defended by materialists because, as they like to say, evolution is the only game in town. Well, materialist town, anyway. If there is only one choice, then parsimony (and absurdity) are meaningless. So improbability loses its rational basis as single-answer dogma holds sway.

We recognize that irreducibly complex features cannot be PROVEN empirically to have occurred due to any top-down co-ordination. But the inverse also cannot be proven, and is so... absurd... as to be seen as a refuge for the materialistically dogmatic, the philosophically unyielding, the irrational improbablists.

The book promises more too. Will it attack the emergent "emergence" issues? I look forward to reading it.