Author: gpuccio

Stimulated by the nth discussion with Zachriel on this point, I would like to offer here some thoughts about the difference between Natural Selection and Artificial Selection. First of all, the dramatic limitation of NS is the following: it works on one functional specification, and one functional specification only: reproductive advantage. In a sense, that specification is Read More…

In Kairosfocus’ very good thread about functional complexity, I posted about antibody affinity maturation as an example of a very complex engineering process embedded in biological beings. Both Kairosfocus and Dionisio suggested that I could open a new thread to discuss the issue. When such good friends ask, I can only comply.  🙂 For lack of Read More…

In a recent post, I was challenged to offer examples of computation of dFSCI for a list of 4 objects for which I had inferred design. One of the objects was a Shakespeare sonnet. My answer was the following: A Shakespeare sonnet. Alan’s comments about that are out of order. I don’t infer design because Read More…

First of all, I want to apologize for shamelessly copying the title and structure of a recent post by VJ Torley. VJ, I hope you will pardon me: imitators, after all, are an undeniable mark of true success! 🙂 That said, let’s go to the subject of this post. I have discussed a little bit Read More…

So, in the  first  part of this discussion, I have tried to show with real data from scientific literature how much of the human genome is conserved, and how that conservation is evaluated and expressed. Then I have argued that we already have good credible evidence for function in a relevant part of the human genome Read More…

Conservation of sequence in the course of natural history has always been considered a sign of function. But does function always coincide with sequence conservation? And are there other important aspects which must be considered? This topic has been discussed recently with some passion here, so I will dedicate a series of two posts to it, in Read More…

What is function? What is functional information? Can it be measured? Let’s try to clarify those points a little. Function is often a controversial concept. It is one of those things that everybody apparently understands, but nobody dares to define. So it happens that, as soon as you try to use that concept in some reasoning, your kind interlocutor Read More…

As this is my first OP, I thought it would be good to start with something really basic. And as I like explicit definitions in discussions, what could be better than discussing the definition of design in a place dedicated to the theory of Intelligent Design? Maybe it is too basic to be interesting, but Read More…