OK Carey, so apparently you’re talking Darwinian top-down natural selection, i.e. the selection imposed by the environment, an environment that must have your so-called “Environmental REGULARITY,” that we see only here on Earth (so far anyway), along with, I suppose, all the various (known and unknown) natural forces, that may or may not directly impact the “Environmental REGULARITY” itself.

However, I suspect that most Darwinians would consider the fact that there’s an Earth at all with the requisite “Environmental REGULARITY,” to be the result, ultimately, of random or “effectively random” things. So that while you may decree that “natural selection is a NON-random force,” this so-called “force” seems to require, in addition to effectively random mutations to select from, an “Environmental REGULARITY” that is itself the result of “effectively random” things that have occurred over the last 14 billion years—ultimately, eventually, your so-called “NON-random force” of Darwinian “natural selection” ends up being the result of random or effectively random things.

Be that as it may, let me repeat the more interesting point made in my last post to you regarding your misunderstanding/misinterpretation regarding Penrose.

As you, Carey, have acknowledged at http://www.behavior.net/bolforums/s...990&postcount=4 — “Mutation is the ultimate source of all variation present within a population . . . without mutation, there would eventually be nothing for natural selection to select, and evolution would halt.”

IOW, whether selection be top down, bottom up, “natural,” “artificial,” blind, mindless, whatever, it can only select from what is already available; from, in a sense, what already has blindly, directionlessly, “effectively randomly,” changed/mutated/evolved; at least according to current Darwinian dogma.

So I doubt Penrose is saying, as you opine, that he "can't possibly believe that natural selection, lacking any foresight, produced biological complexity." Rather I think he’s saying exactly what he said: "To my way of thinking, there is still something mysterious about evolution, with its apparent 'groping' towards some future purpose. Things at least seem to organize themselves somewhat better than they 'ought' to, just on the basis of blind-chance evolution and natural selection."

And I’d add that while Penrose indicates that he himself is a strong believer in “natural selection,” I suspect that he, like I, fully realizes that “natural selection,” whether it be a top down or bottom up selection, is ultimately little more than a circular account that really doesn’t explain or predict all that much.