When pursuing my terminal degree, some good freinds of ours (both our sons in Tae Kwon Do, scout troop, etc. etc. together) were 1. A molecular biologist; and 2. A geneticist. Both research faculty at MSU.

Neither of them particularly religious; or, for that matter, “spiritual.”

So one fine evening over wine and cheese we start talking about “Intelligent Design.”

As the sun sank lower in the evening sky, and as the stars came out, I learned a whole lot about human DNA- and the modern taliban in the USA.

There are- I forget the word, but it wasn’t “recessive” per se but a similar concept- there are thousands of potential mutations in human DNA that can be turned “ON” or turned “OFF.”

Like gills. Fins. The ability to breathe an air rich in CO2. or rich in Methane (!). The ability to survive in very. very, harsh climates by current human biological standards.

Two questions were pondered that night; one small, one big. The small question was already being investigated and discussed at international conferences. The small question is: What are teh triggers to turn these mutations on and off; how can we manipulate these embedded genome clusters?

The large question- which is absolutely, 100% taboo (our freinds- both people of color- jokingly referred to the question as the “biological science equivalent of shouting the N word at a Black Panther meeting in Chicago”) was this:

How did those sequences get in there in the first place?

What is the *evolutionary* explanation for an a priori sequence of genes that would lead to a (non random) mutation of the basic human organism to allow it to survive across a wide range of environmentally deadly circumstances?

We sipped our wine and wondered. And talked about pre-cambrian biological sophistication. And negative entropy.

And how, in fact, by seeking answers to mysteries; by chasing randomness out of our understanding of the physical world around us, we were really seeking- and finding- God.

Now *this* is a concept much too large for a whole lot of very (seemingly) well-educated folks.

Thomas Aquinas, call your office . . .

I must say, as I read through the book, I struggle with the tension of what is random, and what is “not.”

Much of his examples are based on the market, and he is right, there seems to be much “noise” when you watch market prices on a second by second basis. Of course, transactions aren’t “accidental” (at least, we hope not) and thus they are purely “random” actions. The vast majority of trades are made through a decision, and thus are in that sense deterministic. So we are left with what appears to be random, but was by most measures “deterministic” (or at least deliberate).

I believe this is where we step back and seek out the overall trend, or order, in the Universe.

Therein lies the challenge of evolution: when scientists seek to explain the “choices” they inevitably use the language of “decision” which implies the existence of a “decider.” Hmmm….

Sorry to hear about your “unplanned event!” Glad that the net effects were/are manageable . . . assumption based on your posting above.

Determinists would argue, of course, that nothing is “random” at all. Certain naturally ocurring phenomena/behaviors can be *modeled* as random events . . . sometimes quite usefully . . . but that does not mean that they are truly random; just that our understanding of the underlying causality is incomplete.

Is this just a “distinction without a difference?”

I think not.

Consider the case of the deeply religious scientist . . .

The pursuit of science, is, after all, the removing of uncertainty in nature. When we remove all of the uncertainty, we have found the underlying order that does truly “explain everything.”

We have also found . . . ?