complexity is in the eye of the beholder.

Behold that the simplest answer must be the correct answer, or that a less convoluted solution must be closer to the truth. Yah know to me, that just doesn't sound very scientific and yet scientist love to use it. Furthermore isn't simplicity a rather qualitative measure? Where I come from simpleton is a put down. Simple is simple does. And just like one mans trash is another mans treasure. I say one man's complexity is another man's elegance. When was the last time you looked at the biology of the human body. It's no longer just ours but complex symbiosis of millions of microbes along with ours. It's worse that anything Gene Rodenberry ever dreamed up to infect the crew of the Enterprise. As if the human machine wasn't complex enough with all it's little organells in it's cells and that indeciferable gray matter. Surely breathing a little bit of the holy spirit into a lump of clay on a 6000 year old planet would have been much simpler. Do you believe that, well do yah punk. And yet I've met many a geologist that thing a 200 million year old bed of sand spread out over an area the Houston or Cairo should be simple. Simplifying is indeed a virtue but primarily for teaching, and selling a pitch to the bean counters. Afterall they have to simplify their spreadsheets into a picture in powerpoint for the geologist right. I don't intend that you go forth and look for the most complex crazy idea to be the most likely scientific solution, but don't kid yourself into thinking that simplicity versus complexity is measure of correctness or error.

as a late addendum. I've since come to realize part of the attraction to this theory of occam's is that people like to solve problems and people like the easy way out so this is sort of like being baptist and figuring that you get to live forever if only you believe some philosopher is going to save you post-mortem and protect you from everything you've done wrong because he was put to death two millennia ago.