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Harold Delaney, (505) 277-5224
Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821 |
November 8, 2001
DISTINGUISHED SCHOLARS TO HOST SYMPOSIUM ON “ORIGINS OF ORDER”
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,” on Tuesday, Nov. 13 from 4 to 6 p.m. in
Woodward Hall, room 101 on the UNM campus.
The symposium is jointly sponsored by the University Honors Program, the Center
for Advanced Studies, and the UNM Department of Psychology and is supported
by a grant from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Cal-Berkeley.
Additionally, Dembski will also give a lecture at 7 p.m., Monday, Nov. 12,
on “Darwin’s Unpaid Debt” at the UNM Continuing Education Center,
1634 University Blvd. N.E.
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, e.g., “the origin of life itself
comes because of what I call ‘order for free’— self organization
that arises naturally.”
Dembski, in contrast, armed with proofs regarding the conservation of information,
believes it is possible to assert limits on what can reasonably be attributed
to a combination of chance and necessity.
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. Consequently, these theorems cast doubt on the power of the Darwinian
mechanism to account for all of biological complexity.”
Despite such differences, both Kauffman and Dembski have been willing to make
bold proposals regarding a possible fourth law of thermodynamics.
Additional information can be found under “Seminars” on the Center for Advanced Studies Web page, at http://panda.unm.edu/CAS/CAS.html.
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