My talk at AAI


Josh Timonen has put up a video of my talk at AAI. Tear into it!

One of the things I neglected to say more clearly, but should have, is that what I’m complaining about is the creationists’ blithe conflation of complexity with order. We can build up immense amounts of complexity from nothing but noise, so just babbling about how complicated something is says nothing about the impossibility of its origin from chance events. Order, functionality, and, as Joe Felsenstein defined it, adaptedness are more relevant properties, and we have a natural mechanism for generating those, too. It’s called selection.

Someone over at the RDF also mentioned that he thought the Q&A was really good, too. I agree — I need to learn to shut up more and just get the interactivity going. Maybe my ideal talk would be 5 minutes of raillery and inflammatory incitement, followed by 55 minutes of questions and comments.