N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Gary said,
Dembski said
| Quote | | Optimal design is perfect design and hence cannot exist except in an idealized realm (sometimes called a "Platonic heaven"). |
That's a position that would have created trouble for him at his last two bible seminary jobs: not many ID / creationism supporters are enthusiastic about claims for an incompetent god and an imperfect creation. Worse for Dembski, as Wesley says, biologists are already at "constrained optimization", and have a theoretical framework that explains it very well, so Dembski is staking out an uninteresting position. As Wesley says elsewhere in that article, it's not that we claim to be able to imagine better designs or problems with existing "designs", it's that clearly better designs already exist elsewhere in "creation", so they clearly would have been available to any putative designer. Moreover, clearly constrained optima follow biological lineages and have rational explanations that are consistent with independently inferred evolutionary histories.
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