Why Steven Novella is wrong... again

Random interactions? Assuming you mean natural selection?
Yes, in the case of evolution the force that accumulates complexity is natural selection.
Not sure what makes the interactions of neurons "random"?
Random is indeed a bad choice of words, undirected maybe would have been better, but that does not change the gist of what i am trying to say.

We can not predict how neural pathways are going to be strengthened or weakened because that is caused by feedback from unpredictable interactions with itself and the outside world.

In the case of design it is the usefulness or popularity of an idea or a design that decides on its survival. In the case of design it is human selection that is the force that accumulates complexity.

The watchmaker argument ignores that there is an accumulation of complexity in design. The watch it talks about could not have been designed without the tens of thousands of years of technological evolution that lead up to that achievement. there would not have been a technological evolution without the billions of years of biological evolution. And there would not have been a biological evolution without billions of years of cosmological evolution.

So what we recognize in evolution, as well as in human design, is accumulated complexity.

If we had much more examples of different ways of accumulating complexity, we would maybe be able to categorize them and recognize the way of accumulating through the specific patterns.

At this moment we can only recognize that a complexity exists, not how it accumulated.
Although i still do not understand how people can view nature as designed if the only species that knows complex design only comes in to play only in the very recent past.
 
Bart - If I read Neo-Darwinism correctly, I believe that it would be 'random' mutation which gets us complexity and not natural selection. Natural selection gets us editing. I'm also not comfortable calling natural selection a force. (my 2 cents)
 
Bart - If I read Neo-Darwinism correctly, I believe that it would be 'random' mutation which gets us complexity and not natural selection. Natural selection gets us editing. I'm also not comfortable calling natural selection a force. (my 2 cents)
You need both to drive the changes toward complexity, at least if you want a reasonable rate of evolution. Random changes alone will just produce random differences.

~~ Paul
 
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