NP: Ben Folds, Songs For Silverman

I try to avoid the whole evolution-intelligent design brouhaha currently unfolding again in -- where else? -- Kansas. It's one of those things that's too hard for me to wrap my head around, and by "too hard for me to wrap my head around," I mean "makes me want to cry and/or move to Canada."

But one thing that always strikes me as odd are the quiet parallels between ID and complexity theory. If I can accurately put forth the complexity notion from the one and a half books I've read on it, there are certain underlying patterns or organizing principles to seemingly impossibly complex systems. ID goes on to posit that those organizing principles = God. Complexity theory tends to describe them as "self-organization," and builds itself on the back of evolution rather than tries to supplant it. The statistical probabilities of evolution being just random mutation are pretty daunting, but that's not the same as saying it's not an unaided process. If I'm not oversimplifying or completely misinterpreting it, anyway.

I guess what I can't figure out is whether or not the consensus opinion of evolution allows for non-random chance in light of the work of, say, the Santa Fe Institute. It seems that there's a middle ground here. Heck, there could be a scalable operational definition of God here, if looked at properly.

Of course, I'm likely talking out of my ass on this one, so feel free to poke holes as you see fit. But I'd love to try to mash up the work of Stuart Kauffman and Joseph Campbell and see what emerges. I wouldn't love it enough to, you know, go to grad school or anything, but you know what I mean.