Two distinguished scholars, Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute and William Dembski of Baylor University, will be participating in a symposium and debate on "The Origins of Order," today from 4-6 p.m. in Room 101 of Woodward Hall.
The symposium is jointly sponsored by the University Honors Program, the Center for Advanced Studies and the UNM Psychology Department and is supported by a grant from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley.
Dembski also delivered a lecture titled "Darwin's Unpaid Debt" Monday at the Continuing Education Center.
Kauffman and Dembski have written extensively about the search for laws of self-organization and complexity and their careers have been devoted in large part to attempts to explain the origin of the striking complexity and order of the natural world.
Kauffman has argued in a series of publications that computer simulations indicate order arises spontaneously in his Boolean networks and that this is suggestive of what might have happened in biology. For example, "the origin of life itself comes because of what I call 'order for free'- self-organization that arises naturally," he said in a statement.
Dembski, in contrast, armed with proofs regarding the conservation of information, argues that it is possible to assert limits on what can reasonably be attributed to a combination of chance and necessity.
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For example, the "No Free Lunch" theorems show that evolutionary algorithms, apart from careful fine-tuning by a programmer, are anything but universal problem solvers," he said in a statement. "Consequently, these theorems cast doubt on the power of the Darwinian mechanism to account for all of biological complexity."
Staff Report
