Gregory Chaitin has a new book out, Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical. I have always appreciated Chaitin, and consider him a friendly critic. He is one of the few Darwinists who can (a) appreciate the weaknesses of his own argument, (b) takes the time to examine the other hypothesis, and (c) disagree without trying to kick you out of the conversation.
In fact, this book comes on the heals of his recognition of critical flaws in the Darwinian idea. He began his quest to develop a mathematical model of Darwinism because he thought that the idea that there wasn’t one was a major flaw for such a sweeping theory. He has in the mean time written much on metabiology (modeling evolution via equations), and I presume that this book will be the cumulative of that work.
I’m looking forward to getting and reading the book, and I suggest it to the rest of you, too. Chaitin isn’t your typical Darwinist or ID critic – he’s out to address the issue seriously, and his work deserves to be taken seriously by both the ID and Darwinian communities. If nothing else, it should inspire us on how to make models of complex ideas!
For those who want to follow Chaitin’s work generally, here’s his home page, which looks like it now includes a video course on the book’s ideas.