Discussion

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I’m going to abandon what I just said.

-- Alberto Ortiz, Director of Software Verification, NASA

‘Said upon hearing new information that allowed him to inform a new opinion. This may be one of the most intelligent utterances I have ever heard.

You don’t have to boil the ocean.

-- Thomas Hood, Software Verification Lead, Verocel

What I got from Thomas Hood’s statement was that you don’t need to show everything in a person’s argument is wrong. You just have to show a small part is incorrect to have a pretty good idea of the health of person’s argument.

Discussions documented on this set of web pages cover two theories, evolution and Intelligent Design. My motivation for this has been twofold. Since my son doesn’t believe that evolution is true, I wanted to provide him an opportunity to see someone attack the theory of evolution and defend the theory of Intelligent Design (aka, ID) and see what a decent defense and counter-attack might look like. Wow, I don’t know if I did a decent job. But I sure tried. Also, I felt compelled to give believers of ID an opportunity to show me errors in my thinking and in my research.

These hands have not killed anybody yet, and I’m proud of that. Lately, they type words such as “Pass”, “Fail”, “Safety Requirement”, “Not Safety Requirement”, “Catastrophic”, “Major”, “Minor”. Recently, these hands have typed “Based on our conversation and further investigation, we should fail the following RVA associated with…”, and I continued to name a safety critical component of a Flight Management System for a well-known commercial airliner.

And I have to say, I love discovering when someone has made a mistake, particularly when it’s not me! It’s so exciting to arrive at truth when someone else who is smart has erred. Sure, it’s a feather in my cap. It’s one of the things I do. Sometimes I design. Sometimes I build. And sometimes I verify. And I admit. It’s a let-down when some person ends up being correct when I’m claiming he/she is wrong. One loses credibility in my business for being wrong too many times. So, it’s smart to keep one’s mouth shut or at least limit speech to questions until one has the truth.

There have been real world consequences for telling the truth in my business. There is tremendous pressure to get a product out the door. I have been sent packing after typing words such as, “I respectfully acquiesce.” Wow, I hate ending up on the street! But I do sleep just fine at night.

This same stubborn desire to ferret out truth has been applied in this document and the questions have not always been welcome. However, I have to tell the truth as I see it. I can do nothing else.

I recognize that failure to correctly ascertain truth has large implications if I have really blown it. So, I don’t take what I have written lightly.

Because ID has as its central premise that a deity creates new species at will, I have taken this conversation outside of the scope of science at times to explore that using scientific and rational thought as best I could. Though this deity is a central and crucial character to the theory of ID, it has not been developed as a concept in a coherent way. So, responses from both Luskin and Hunt are usually “from the hip”. From discussions and contemplation, either this deity is an unbelievably talented and cruel designer or she must be a celestial teenager run amok: incompetent, callous and oblivious to the consequences of her actions.

Through these conversations, I have observed that evolution answers many questions about why our world is the way it is and makes many predictions that are borne out when studied. It was easy to defend, and I don’t recall ever having a gotcha moment where I could not draw from the theory in order to respond to queries. I am excited about what I have learned as a result of these discussions. It is a great and beautiful theory. It is a fact of science, discovered by Darwin and Wallace. It is as solid as is our theory of gravitation is. It’s like the planet Mars. We’ve known about it for a long time, but we will be exploring it for the foreseeable future.

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