What is Salty's 'semi-meiotic hypothesis'

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Scott, you are largely correct.

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The blue moon outside my window has just been temporarily obscured by a squadron of flying pigs.

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This puts a whole new interpretation on what has been called convergent evolution. Similar but unrelated forms like saber toothed placental and marsupial cats were simply employing the same preformed blueprints. I realize this requires a programmer and accept that requirement as part of my evolutionary perspective.

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This seems to be jumping to a somewhat distant conclusion.If you remember there are two parts to Berg's autogenetic theory, from which you seem to derive much of your thinking. Firstly, that nomogenesis builds new forms from pre-existing rudiments, and secondly that these are also driven by external determinants - the "landscape" as he terms it - which ensures variation is in a "determined direction."However, Berg and his followers (Lyubischev and Meyen for example) saw no need to conclude that a designer, as such, created these pre-existent rudiments. Equally Schindewolf, Grasse, Lima de Faria and Goodwin see no need to prefer a "designer" over internal processes.In fact, as Seilacher has developed these ideas, the rudiments which Berg held to be behind formal development, are regarded as "bautechnischer," - architectural techniques. Essentially these are restrictions that are the necessary result of the basic forms. They are not adaptations. This seems very much more in tune with Berg's nomogenesis than postulating an external designer.Even Berg's rudiments may ultimately be unneccesary. A close reading of Schindewolf, Grasse, Goodwin or Seilacher makes it pretty clear that internal meta-rules can constrain the evolution of form to fulfill the role of those rudiments. Berg's external determinants - his landscape - also may not fill the role he hoped for either: he was after all a Stalinist who sought to show that the "inevitable victory of the proletariat" was literally written into our genes.But whatever one makes of the original nomogentic theory, concluding a designer seems no more than a leap in the dark, mere wishful thinking, rather than following through on the principles behind the work of Berg, Schindewolf or Grasse.

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I certainly don't agree with everything Berg postulated.

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To quote yourself, iirc, "You are not disagreeing with me, but with one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century." Obviously your weaknesses go pretty deep into your thinking, to the very brink of hypocrisy.As for chance, I agree with Darwin on this one, "I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations- so common and multiform with organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree with those under nature- were due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation."I would not want anyone on this forum to be mistaken into thinking that your work in any way reflects the methodology or conclusions of Berg, Schindewolf or Grasse, however much you might try to insinuate some lineage of thought from them to you. With the exception of picking up on Berg's rudiments (the shakiest area of his work which his students quickly modified) you do little more than mine them for anti-Darwinist quotes. The whole point of their work is that constrained processes account for the teleonatural phenomena of development. Your own work might have a little more value if you had explored in the lab or the field the one process you attempted to identified: unfortunately your armchair theory adds little or nothing to the catalog of variational processes they and others saw manifest.Nor should any of our creationist friends think that you are proposing a "creator" in any familiar sense - but rather explicitly a "very impersonal" intelligence of the kind that Einstein or Spinoza saw behind the universe. However, all your insistence on a creator seems little more than an attempt to anthropomorphosize the action these constrained processes. Quite what you think an "impersonal" creator could be is beyond me - or how an "impersonal" intelligence directs evolution in a way that is incompatible with the impersonal processes of "Godless" evolutionists as you call them.Lima de Faria, I understand, saw through you on this very point: that your insistence on a directing power behind evolution, was no more than prejudice. It's one thing to experience what Einstein called the "the religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations." It's quite another to build on this foundation towers of arrogant disdain from which to snipe at other, more seduluous, thinkers.

Priceless and nicely done. Thanks for cheering me up!