A computer model of a process is, of course, a mathematical abstraction, not the thing itself, so a perennial danger is that the model doesn’t correctly represent the process—that critical but unappreciated details are left out of consideration—yielding misleading results.

studies of self-organization may shed some light on how life behaves, they say little to nothing about how life arose or developed.

Science and purpose were made for each other.

the number of organisms you’d have to observe to get statistically significant evolutionary results is so enormous that no university animal facility or agricultural station could hold them all.

although sequence similarities are good evidence for common descent, they cannot show whether random mutation and natural selection could build even the simplest system or, given that simple system, whether it could be expanded or improved by Darwin’s mechanism.

A surprising but compelling conclusion is that Darwin’s mechanism has been wildly overrated—it is incapable of producing much biological change at all.

The more uncertain the starting assumptions and the longer the term it tries to account for, the less reliable the model. Those caveats should be kept in mind for all computer studies of evolution.

I had been led to believe in Darwin’s theory not because of strong evidence for it. Rather, it was for sociological reasons—that simply was the way educated people were expected to think these days.

If research clearly shows that the effects of natural selection and random mutation are limited, why do so many smart scientists still hold that Darwinism is the major force behind the development of life?