Has Intelligent Design some merit to get to new theories?

[AndyWalsh]

Well, it has happened again. Since the last time was recent, I won’t repeat myself about my own efforts with evolutionary simulations and irreducible complexity. I’ll refer the interested reader to an earlier post.

The Burden of Proof and the Problem of Composition

In a process akin to the summoning of Beetlejuice, if irreducible complexity and constructive neutral evolution get mentioned, I am bound to show up and talk about X-Men. I explored that simulation further over a series of blog posts to demonstrate that irreducibly complex systems can evolve and they can even do so when complexity provides no selective advantage. Not only is it possible, it is the most common outcome in these experiments. I’ve been wondering if this could be demonstrated theoretically with a formalism similar to representing entropy in terms of the size of the state space where different microstates have the same macrostate, such that systems tend towards high entropy because those are the largest portions of state space. Likewise, there are simply more solutions that involve two parts than one, and more that involve three parts than two, etc*. I’m not sure if such a result would be interesting or is already known or would be considered trivial. Caveat: This patte…

And if my own work seems to amateurish, I recommend the work of Richard Watson on simulations which produce irreducible complexity.

Compositional Evolution

The book has been discussed in some detail previously:

Richard A. Watson: Compositional Evolution

Wondering if anyone here has read the book Compositional Evolution by Richard A. Watson and what your thoughts are. I am particularly interested in hearing from computational biologists. Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity on the Gradualist Framework of Evolution