Side Comments on Progress after the Royal Society Conference

[lee_merrill]

@Joe_Felsenstein

OK, so evolution of animal nervous systems is not ruled out by Lee Merill’s argument. So Merrill’s argument is that imperfect processes could produce reasoning, just not valid reasoning.

Sort of, I would say not reasoning like humans do, “… our present act, claims and must claim, to be an act of insight, a knowledge sufficiently free from non-rational causation to be determined (positively) only by the truth it knows.” (C.S. Lewis, Miracles)

@Joe_Felsenstein

I suspect that Lee Merrill does not think evolutionary processes such as natural selection can do much of anything, but his
argument involving imperfect processes is not why.

Yes, that is my view, evolution can’t do much more than two mutations, on the way to a new function, is the reason I believe evolution can’t do much of anything. See the video of Rob Stadler and James Tour, discussing this, or Michael Behe’s book, “The Edge of Evolution”.

@Joe_Felsenstein

And Merrill knows nothing about whether I consider ChatGPT my “friend”

I certainly hope you don’t! But I’ve heard of people saying this…