And lo On Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:41:26 -0000, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake thusly:

> Tim Cook wrote:
>> "Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>> According to his book, all the species that now exist were "programmed  
>>> into" the first lifeforms when the Intelligent Designer first built  
>>> them. Over time, these species came and went, according to the  
>>> Designer's original plan.
>>  Well, if you make your program well enough, and let it run for  
>> however-many aeons, and it spits out huge varieties of things, couldn't  
>> you say that, in a way, they were "programmed into" the first things?

Depends. If I create a programme that just spouts 16 random 0 and 1's and  
I stop it at 16 1's was that result programmed in? On the other hand if I  
wrote the programme such that tests if a 1 appears and if surrounded by  
1's (assume circular) keep it steady when 16 1's appear is that programmed  
in?

> He made it sound as if all the species that would ever exist, and the  
> exact time that they would arrise and die out was pre-ordined in the DNA  
> of the first lifeforms. In particular, that the "unused" parts of the  
> DNA are actually the encodings for later lifeforms.

Sound's like he's been reading Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children  
without clocking to the bit about them being fiction.

> All of which is *highly* implausible. How is the supposed Designer  
> supposed to know how the climate of the planet is going to evolve over  
> the next thousand millennia? Or, for that matter, how do you encode  
> several hundred billion genomes into just one (deterministically)?

And yet IIRC frog dna contains multiple context situations dependant on  
the temperature of the frogspawn.

> Of course, he could be right... but it's not falsifiable.

Or to be precise it doesn't present any form of experimental ability  
regardless of current ability. I'm thinking of String Theory here which is  
currently untestable, but happily provides rigid experiments that could be  
provable.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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