Modifications can happen simultaneously. I never understood why it rules out a deity anyway, why wouldn't the deity provide the ability to respond to the environment? Yes I know that is not an objective statement. I have never seen proof that he does not exist.

>Note the author was a Phd professor of physics in Canada

He's also considered something of a crank by many other Ph.Ds in physics.

>because we cannot know all the conditions (usually initial conditions) of a system.

Actually, the reason is that the initial conditions are often themselves statistical in nature, and not absolutely determined. This is built into the identity of the **system**.

It's philosophically naive to assume that statistics and probability are placeholders allowing us to deal with a presumed lack of knowledge regarding absolutes. In many systems, there are no absolutes. And that's part of the **identity** of the system itself.

>Yes there is. You are clearly postulating a deity

Crick's notion of intelligent aliens inventing terrestrial life has nothing to do with a deity. There's nothing irrational about the scenario of Dr. Frankenstein building his monster. Neither the doctor (the creator) nor his monster (the creature) violates "A is A."

Many Objectivists wrongly believe "A is A" is a license to believe in a pure materialist metaphysics. Nonsense.

>you are ignoring that is inconsistent with logic and reason and A is A.

You're confused.

>Also you statement that natural selection is random shows a profound lack of understanding of evolution.

Try reading more carefully. At no time did I write that natural selection is random. I said that it was "blind" (i.e., it has no way of seeing what the *next* change will be, nor does it select a modification for the sake of anything in the future; by definition, it always selects for an immediate survival advantage, because natural selection only "knows" the present). I also wrote that it was "purposeless", which is another way of saying that it only selects for immediate survival advantage, not for any long-term goal or purpose.

Darwinism is: random modification (via mutation of sequences along DNA or RNA), leading to some unpredicted and unpredictable modification in the organism; the modification is then "selected" by natural selection if it confers greater reproductive success than its earlier unmodified form, and greater reproductive success than species competing with it for factors such as food, space, sunlight, etc.

Although natural selection is presumed to work in a kind of automatic "ratchet-like" mechanism, pole-vaulting the organism up "Mount Improbable" (Dawkins's metaphor), each new evolutionary step is presumed in Darwinism, by definition, to be unpredicted and unpredictable from its previous step: that's why the modifications — not the selection of the modification, but the modification (i.e., the mutations that presumably provide the new material for natural selection to act upon) — are said to be random. And since they are random, they are probabilistically independent from one another. That means each step of a Darwinian process would appear like this:

[beneficial random mutation #1 : selected by natural selection] x [beneficial random mutation #2 : selected by natural selection] x . . . . etc.

That the beneficial random mutation in each square brackets is selected is irrelevant. Since natural selection can only select something that first occurs by accident — randomly — there's no way to predict what the second bracket is going to be, based on what the first bracket already is.

This is already a killer for the Darwinian thesis. If the chances of a positive mutation in DNA/RNA are, e.g., one-in-one hundred thousand, that's expressed as 1/10^5. If it's about the same for each square bracket, the odds of getting just 2 beneficial mutations selected to ratchet an organism up Mt. Improbable are 1/10^5 x 1/10^5 = 1/10^10, or 1 chance in ten billion. To radically alter one organism into another — let's say, e.g., a bear-like terrestrial organism into a whale-like aquatic animal — requires many thousands of mutations, not just 2. If it takes, realistically, 10,000 beneficial changes to turn a bear-like creature into a whale-like one, and if each beneficial mutation has about a 1/10^5 chance of occurring, and since mutation #2 cannot be predicted from the existence of mutation #1, and mutation #3 cannot be predicted from the prior existence of mutations #1 and #2, then the odds of the complete series occurring are (1/10^5)^10,000, which is 1 chance in 10^50,000 — a number that is effectively zero because there are [1 - (1/10^50,000)] chances of the series NOT occurring. That second number is very close to "1"; the first number was very close to "0".

Also, given the fact that Darwinism is presumed, again by definition, to work incrementally (one random mutation at a time, each independent from the previous one), and gradually (taking many generations of procreation to "fix" the mutation as a bona fide new trait in the population), the theory has simply run out of time: the Earth is about 4 billion years old, that's only 4x10^9. Something with odds of 1/10^50,000 of occurring are not going to occur in a time period that is 41,000 orders of magnitude smaller. To think so would be to believe in mathematical miracles.

Unlike Darwinist believers, I don't believe in mathematical miracles, nor do I believe in natural physical ones. When left by itself — without intelligent intervention, making things happen that ordinarily would not — nature always plays the odds.

>Really show me one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean...

"The theorem has numerous proofs, possibly the most of any mathematical theorem. These are very diverse, including both geometric proofs and algebraic proofs, with some dating back thousands of years. The theorem can be generalized in various ways, including higher-dimensional spaces, ***to spaces that are not Euclidean,*** to objects that are not right triangles, and indeed, ***to objects that are not triangles at all, but n-dimensional solids.*** The Pythagorean theorem has attracted interest outside mathematics as a symbol of mathematical abstruseness, mystique, or intellectual power; popular references in literature, plays, musicals, songs, stamps and cartoons abound."

Non-Euclidean Proofs of Pythagorean Theorem, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean...

Scroll webpage and see:

proof from spherical geometry
proof from hyperbolic geometry
proof from differential geometry

>>>Quantum Mechanics: A number of books (I can provide you with references) have come out discussing the problems of modern physics.

A number of books have come out discussing the problems with Newtonian physics. All paradigms, assumptions, and axioms have problems.

>>.but that is like someone proving Pythagorean’s theorem, but saying they did not draw upon the ideas of Euclid,

As a matter of fact, there are many proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem that do not rely on Euclidean axioms of point, line, and plane.

>But that is a basic premise of the selection principle of Evolution.

Not Darwinian evolution.The idea that living things use their most effective traits to maximize their survival was observed and appreciated since the Epic of Gilgamesh, 4,000 years ago. There is nothing specifically Darwinian about that observation. To claim that mankind only realized since 1859 (the year Darwin published "Origin of Species") that living things use what they have to survive is, well, silly.

Furthermore, the basic premise of Darwinian evolution is not "survival of the fittest" but, 1) descent with modification from, ultimately, a universal common ancestor, 2) the modification occurring on its own, without being directed toward any goal or by any purpose, completely random and accidental, and 3) the descent occurring by means of something called "natural selection", in which blind, purposeless, material nature presumably selects a newly appearing trait resulting in a survival advantage (i.e., higher rates of offspring that live) for that particular organism.

There is also nothing in your Rand quotation that contradicts Crick's statement, or is contrary to it, so while Rand herself might have disagreed with Crick, it couldn't be on the basis of philosophy: there is nothing "non-Objectivist" in hypothesizing that living organisms on Earth were intelligently designed by advanced intelligences. Crick made that statement because as a biochemist he realized that the Darwinian mechanisms (random mutation and natural selection) were inadequate to account for the kind of hierarchical organization life shows at the molecular level. His statement — coming as it does from a biochemist, a Nobel laureate, and a co-discoverer of the code-structure of DNA — is certainly startling, but there's nothing inherently silly or absurd about it. Conversely, Darwinian explanations for the creation of life from chemicals ("chemical evolution"), and the appearance of new forms of life through "descent with modification", ARE silly.

Silly, as well as unscientific.

What seems different in your point is that you hold the view that all species choose to use the trait or characteristic that helps them survive. Logically a bird does not choose it's colors. It is because they have a certain trait or characteristic that they do survive and reproduce. Man has reason therefore he can invent to survive.