Kim writes:

> this link has a number of questions that evolutionists find hard to answer.
>
>  http://www.drdino.com/cse.asp?pg=articles&specific=3

The questions that are in this list are some of the most basic and actively
pursued questions of evolutionary biology and cosmology. Some of the
questions are easy to answer and I could go on for a few days answering them.
Others are a little more difficult simply because our knowledge is still in
an evolving state.

And there are others that are simply impossible to answer (e.g., "Question 6.
When, where, why, and how did life come from dead matter?" You could answer
3.965231 Gyr, on a Thursday, at 4:13 PM, just 14 miles NE of the current
location of the Cocos Islands, but you'd know I'd be a charlatan if I said
that. All evidence of the initial microscopic event has obviously long ago
been washed away.)

But let me just address these two questions:

     20. *How did thought evolve?
     25 *What is so scientific about the idea of hydrogen as becoming human?

Earlier this month, I gave two talks to the artificial intelligence group of
graduate students at the Computer Science department at New Mexico State on
very much the subject of how thought evolved:

     http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~mmartin/aiseminar.html

Although the original invitation was to present a 50 minute talk, as many of
you have noted in the past, brevity is not the soul of Wirt, thus the talk
eventually went three hours, broken into to two halves, presented on two
subsequent weeks.

If you understand a natural process, you can mimic it. More than that, you
can outrightly exploit it. Indeed, that's the fundamental nature of
engineering, if not it's definition. We understand the physics of the
evolutionary process well enough now that we are on the verge of building
learning machines that can simulate the evolutionary process. While no claim
is being made that these machines would be in any way "conscious" or
"self-aware," the possibility of building rapidly evolving machinery that
learns its environment and responds to it correctly is now well within our
grasp.

The subject of my talk was a hard-nosed, no-nonsense way to go about building
that machinery, using hundreds or thousands tiny non-von Neumann-architected
processors, operating in a highly competitive environment.

Apparently the talk went down well enough that I've been asked to give it
again to a different lab on campus. In fact, the invitation was to discuss
the possibility of collaborating in actually constructing the device. The
tentative date for the next presentation was set just this morning to be
January 13th. If you'd like to attend, you're more than welcome to.

There are three groups of people who are nowadays actively interested in
evolutionary biology. Biologists are one group, but the other two are
computer science people and astronomers. As it occurs, the first slide in my
talk was the subject of Question 25. It was an image of a note that was
obviously put up by a graduate student on the door of the office of the Las
Campanas observatory in La Serena, Chile. The note read:

     "Hydrogen is a light, odorless colorless gas, that if given sufficient
time, eventually becomes intelligent."

I mentioned that if I had to condense my philosophy of evolutionary biology
down to a single bumper sticker, that sentence would be it, simply because it
implies not only that we are now beginning to understand the entire sweep of
the process but its inevitability as well.

Wirt Atmar

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