Orgel's rule

Orgel's rule (English: Organ 's rule or organ 's second rule ) is named after the evolutionary biologist Leslie Orgel and was - by Daniel Dennett actually more in jest - by Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule, situated. The formulation of the rule is:

• " Evolution is cleverer than you are" ( "Evolution is more sophisticated than you are ").

One should not interpret this rule as an empirical law, but at best as a heuristic rule, which define a search strategy to find new solutions to biological problems positions. As such, it could be, for example, by the recent success, or more generally by the often observed superiority of evolutionary trial and error strategies towards forward planning justified by human intelligence. This particular, if complex systems are affected.

This second Orgelsche rule will be interpreted as a response to scientifically untenable objections to biological evolution, which makes especially the false conclusiveness of argumentation ad ignorantiam ( arguments from ignorance) significantly. To an argumentum ad ignorantiam is when someone can consist of a fact for which he knows no natural explanation or imagine the fallacy that pulls the fact basically can not be naturally explained. Specially makes Orgel's rule shows that it represents, for example, no evidence against the emergence of complex ( molecular) biological systems according to evolutionary theory, if present is unknown how this development proceeded, or some can not imagine the development in accordance with evolutionary theory. It also reveals that many pseudo-scientific objections to the theory of evolution of an implied, the organ 's rule out the opposite and unsubstantiated assumption that human planning (or more generally also planning through a human-like "intelligence" ) of biological evolution or natural mechanisms would be fundamentally superior.

There is also another Orgelsche rule (which is why the above is probably referred to as "second" rule), which was published by Leslie Orgel in a publication from 1960 in the Journal of Inorganic and Nuclear Chemistry. This means that molecules of type MX_4Y_4 should adopt a dodekaederische stereochemistry.

• Evolution