The local paper had an article last Monday about the Avida program run by Robert Pennock at Michigan State. It's a computer simulation of Darwinian evolution in which organisms, called Avidians, diversify and evolve much as real organisms are believed to do in the natural world. The program is interesting, but, despite the attempts by some to employ it in the battle against Intelligent Design, it's really quite irrelevant to that issue. We wrote about Avida a year ago (see here) and cited a critical piece by Jonathon Wells which makes this point pretty clearly.
Nevertheless, this passage in the article in our paper piqued our interest:
For instance one of [Pennock's] students is trying to show the evolution of sex. In the basic Avida program, organisms reproduce asexually, but the student changed the code to allow simulated sexual reproduction in order to understand the evolutionary advantages. While there are many theories on the subject, "everyone agrees we don't have an answer on [how sex evolved]," Pennock said.
Hmmm. Let's see. In order to get the Avidians to switch from asexual to sexual reproduction an intelligent programmer had to intervene and "mutate" the software code to facilitate the switch. From the Avidians' standpoint this looks an awful lot like a miracle, doesn't it? Isn't this confirmation of the sort of thing that IDers have been saying about evolution for the past two decades - that it doesn't happen apart from intelligent input? Just asking.
