On 11/01/2011 10:31 AM, scott wrote:
>> The trouble with unpredictable systems such as the Earth's atmosphere is
>> that arbitrarily tiny perturbations of the initial state yield huge
>> divergences in the end result.
>
> Same if I have a 4GB chaotic simulation running on my machine, just one
> bit different in the initial conditions will yield 4GB of completely
> different data. Yet it will be totally repeatable.

Only because it's data in a computer.

> Sure, but what if you set up your Earth with the *exact* same initial
> conditions?

In general, that's not physically possible.

It's like the fact that, according to the laws of physics, it is 
possible to UNscramble an egg. But have you tried it recently? It's 
quite hard.

> So if you got a computer simulation running here on Earth, that somehow
> simulated molecular interactions etc, and then you started it off with
> the DNA of an ant or something, you would have an ant "alive" in your
> computer. If you made the computer big enough that you can simulate more
> complex lifeforms, and then intelligent lifeforms, how would they ever
> figure out what was going on outside of their "world"? Obviously the
> "world" and complexity of the simulation would have to be orders of
> magnitude smaller than our universe, but that simply means some "parent"
> universe of ours would just need to be bigger and more complex.

Right. If you accept that our universe is a computer simulation and that 
ID's "designer" is outside out universe, then the theory becomes at 
least logically plausible. (And still not testable.)

That's *a lot* of assumptions just to avoid accepting the vast amount of 
evidence supporting evolution.

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