As many of the Sciencebloggers have already mentioned, Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute is up to his usual stupidity. In this particular instance, he’s attempting, in a typically inept fashion, to fisk Carl Zimmer’s recent article in National Geographic. So far, I haven’t chimed in, mostly because everyone else has done such a good job that there wasn’t much to add.
Today, though, Karmen pointed out a passage that I’d somehow missed the first time I read Luskin’s piece. In the first part of his “rebuttal,” Luskin wrote:
The article called evolution a “simple” process. In our experience, does a “simple” process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?
Karmen and PZ have both already pointed out the silliness of claiming that simple processes can’t lead to complex results. I’m going to talk about something different, but every bit as silly: the idea that evolution is a simple process.
There is a very nice book for the mathematically-ept entitled “The Simple Genetic Algorithm”. To understand this simplicity, as presented by the author, you should have a good grasp of deterministic chaos, strange attractors and all that…
I think the *process* is elegantly simple. The substrate (matter, rather broadly) is not, yet the product (diverse evolving lineages) definitely is complex with simple generalities observable throughout the bits we see. Casey Luskin could study more.…
Rustopher.
MarkCC has a rebuttal as well: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/20[…]icity_or.php
Zimmer is not a scientist.
Update