Dawkins and the Intelligent Design proponents are entirely in agreement--and, I think, entirely in error--on this crucial point: They both believe that complexity cannot arise ab initio. For the Intelligent Design people, complexity can arise only by design; for Dawkins, complexity can arise only from simplicity. But if either of these conclusions were correct, it would apply equally well to arithmetic. Not even religious people believe that arithmetic was designed by God, and not even Dawkins believes that arithmetic evolved through natural selection. Therefore Dawkins and his opponents are equally wrong.
This is horribly, horribly wrong, and I talked about it on an Open Thread here.
I continued my critique on my blog, which drew Landsburg out of the workwork and had a back-and-forth with him, which continued onto his blog. He did follow-up posts here and here, but I haven't replied much further on those, because I was really starting to get caught up in "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.
Anyway, here's what's wrong (if you don't want to read the links): there is no consistent definition of terms that makes Landsburg right. After a lot o...
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
ETA: It would seem that rationality quotes are no longer desired. After several days this thread stands voted into the negatives. Wolud whoever chose to to downvote this below 0 would care to express their disapproval of the regular quotes tradition more explicitly? Or perhaps they may like to browse around for some alternative posts that they could downvote instead of this one? Or, since we're in the business of quotation, they could "come on if they think they're hard enough!"