Scott Aaronson: On Two Blog Posts of Jerry Coyne: "David ...

Scott Aaronson: On Two Blog Posts of Jerry Coyne: "David Gelernter... right-wing commentator... argued that recent work has definitively disproved Darwinism as a mechanism for generating new species, and until something better comes along, Intelligent Design is the best available alternative.... Gelernter���s argument falls flat... because it indulges in bad math and computer science.... Gelernter says that (a) a random change to an amino acid sequence will pretty much always make it worse, (b) the probability of finding a useful new such sequence by picking one at random is at most ~1 in 10^77, and (c) there have only been maybe ~10^40 organisms in earth���s history. Since 10^77 >> 10^40, Darwinism is thereby refuted���not in principle, but as an explanation for life on earth. QED. Gelernter can���t personally see how a path could cut through the exponentially large solution space in a polynomial amount of time, so he asserts that it���s impossible. Many of the would-be P���NP provers who email me every week do the same. But this particular kind of 'argument from incredulity' has an abysmal track record: it would���ve applied equally well, for example, to problems like maximum matching that turned out to have efficient algorithms. This is why, in CS, we demand better evidence of hardness���like completeness results or black-box lower bounds���neither of which seem however to apply to the case at hand. Surely Gelernter understands all this, but had he not, he could���ve learned it from my lecture at the workshop in France!...

#noted