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Ok, I put on my blogger's hip waders and sloshed through it. His main point : natural selection is not forward looking. Well, we COULD say that he's looking at it in a serial sense, one monkey typing on one typewriter to generate 4^9999 probabilities. Obviously the cambrian explosion was a time of massive PARALLEL computing, anything and everything was being tried as a response to being the top predator; in a new, oxygen-rich environment.

There is a theorem in mathematics called the Pappas Theorem of self organization. Using his ball and string analogy : put 100 dots at random places on a sheet of paper. Now connect each dot with each other dot by lines, a continuous line from #1 to #2(any other dot)to #3, #4....to #100 and back to #1 again. It looks just like random dots connected by random length/angle lines, a chaotic mess.

NOW take the center points of each line and draw a SECOND line between each center dot. Thus you'll see it gets a bit smaller but almost equally messy/chaotic. Then a THIRD line(iteration)between those NEW second line-dots, then a FOURTH, FIFTH.....

LO and BEHOLD : ORDER begins to appear almost like magic as either an oval or figure 8 appears as the re-re-re-....iterated figure gets smaller and smaller.

You can do this right on your own TV screen with the right software program. My sotware engineer nephew did such a program for me several years ago now. As you zoom in(the figure gets smaller and smaller)sure enough : no matter how many random points you start with, it ALWAYS becomes an oval or figure 8.

Dr Sternberg obviously isn't aware of the Pappas Theorem where order NATURALLY appears from chaos, and I'm sure there are other self-ordering theorems out there as well. He also doesn't understand the Jurassic Park principle : Life always finds a way...

Life is tenacious, from ice worms to hot springs algae, it is OPPORTUNISTIC, exploiting every possible niche. Even those purported micro-organisms in martian rocks(meteorites found in antarctica) may be "ice worms" as well.

Another thing Dr Sternberg overlooks is micro-organisms in the GROUND. It is said that perhaps 2/3rds of earth bio-mass is these rock-dwelling bacteria. He's only looking at a 5M to 10M window of SURFACE mutatagenic changes. What if these complex forms/cells had been evolving for a billion years UNDER the ground and they only emerged when SURFACE conditions allowed?

So the debate continues. Would anyone here like to hear an explanation of what the period from 4.4B to 3.9B was like, and how Gen 2:6 is a KEY CLUE?