75 Theses ~ Science Against Evolution

[Guy Threepwood]

Thanks for that - it immediately came to mind when reading @Guy Threepwood's post you quoted - but I was getting lost trying to keep in mind all of the points there were to refute and basically gave up.

I thought it was a pretty simplistic thing to have a grasp of... but I believe that a lot of times "thinking" tends to stop once a point has been reached that sees the subject matter even slightly corroborating the thinker's chosen narrative. I've been guilty of this myself, from time to time... with a difference being that I feel remiss if I am not always looking to adopt the understanding that makes more sense.

We are all prone to this, when I was a staunch believer in Darwinian evolution, I was content to write off any potentially problematic areas, as mere details that would surely be solved somehow.. reverting to the more comfortable 'broad perspective' that I found so utterly compelling- that I confess I thought any skeptic must be somehow intellectually lacking

I was forced to look further in coding models that were supposed to prove this undeniable power of natural selection to unbelievers... there is something very humbling about trying to argue with a computer!

 

[Guy Threepwood]

You really don't understand it do you.

Firstly though, lets stop these silly car analogies, cars do not breed.

superior designs survive to be replicated with higher frequency than inferior ones- am I talking about life or cars? I don't know either, cars are just one example, but actually it works for most products. Point being that this truism says nothing about new superior designs being introduced by pure blind chance

You say "nobody debates that a significantly superior design will out perform an inferior one" yes we do. That is natural selection.

That's my point, obviously a significantly superior design will tend to be naturally selected, we observe this in any line of products,

Again. arrival of the fittest is a far more interesting and crucial question than mere survival. The only confirmed method we have is through creative intelligence, not to say that a naturalistic mechanism is impossible, it's just never been verified scientifically

So, for example, a giraffe is born with a longer neck than her siblings, she can reach higher leaves, that is an advantage and in times of famine she may be one of the few survivors and her genes will be passed on. Whereas the one with the shorter neck may well have starved.

Try reading science books instead of Answers in Genesis

never read it, cmon Fishy, lets stick to substance, it's much more interesting

So yes, the Giraffe is one of the classic, kindergarten examples we can all intuitively understand in theory,

But as far as practice... any luck finding that short necked Giraffe yet?

 

[SkepticThinker]

superior designs survive to be replicated with higher frequency than inferior ones- am I talking about life or cars? I don't know either, cars are just one example, but actually it works for most products. Point being that this truism says nothing about new superior designs being introduced by pure blind chance

You're talking about cars. You are not talking about biological organisms. For what, the hundredth time?

That's my point, obviously a significantly superior design will tend to be naturally selected, we observe this in any line of products,

Again. arrival of the fittest is a far more interesting and crucial question than mere survival. The only confirmed method we have is through creative intelligence, not to say that a naturalistic mechanism is impossible, it's just never been verified scientifically

 

[Guy Threepwood]

You're talking about cars. You are not talking about biological organisms. For what, the hundredth time?

So you are saying that superior designs/body plans/ compositions, whatever word you prefer, - in life, do not outperform inferior ones?? they don't survive to be replicated in greater numbers?

 

[Altfish]

So you are saying that superior designs/body plans/ compositions, whatever word you prefer, - in life, do not outperform inferior ones?? they don't survive to be replicated in greater numbers?

NO!! We are not.

What we are saying is that improvements in man-made products are not like evolution.
Evolution relies on random variations/mutations in the genes of a living organism.
Man-made products due not change randomly, they are very targeted, tested, tweaked, re-tested and finally released in the new model. Even then if they don't work you can revert to what you started with.

 

[SkepticThinker]

NO!! We are not.

What we are saying is that improvements in man-made products are not like evolution.
Evolution relies on random variations/mutations in the genes of a living organism.
Man-made products due not change randomly, they are very targeted, tested, tweaked, re-tested and finally released in the new model. Even then if they don't work you can revert to what you started with.

This. ^^

 

[Guy Threepwood]

NO!! We are not.

What we are saying is that improvements in man-made products are not like evolution.
Evolution relies on random variations/mutations in the genes of a living organism.
Man-made products due not change randomly, they are very targeted, tested, tweaked, re-tested and finally released in the new model. Even then if they don't work you can revert to what you started with.

Okay, so forms with a superior performance, tend to outlast inferior ones, and so be replicated in greater numbers- cars or life? both of course


Yes they are different, that's the whole point of the analogy- different, yet survival of the fittest applies to both, and so is a wash, what we are interested in is the origination of significantly superior designs, not that they are selected and thrive- we have established that as a given

So you tell me, what do you think would happen if we decided to save on R&D, simply follow evolution's lead, and make completely random changes to each car design for the new model year, letting the best be selected?

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

So you tell me, what do you think would happen if we decided to save on R&D, simply follow evolution's lead, and make completely random changes to each car design for the new model year, letting the best be selected?

Car manufacturers would rapidly go out of business because their products would not perform for the customers. Standardization of design is part of what makes the large-scale production of automobiles possible. Each time a car fails, it would be up to the owner or repair providers to identify what went wrong and to come up with a repair to fix it--and it would not be generalizable to any other car. If the manufacturers and not spending on R&D, or learning from customer/service provider feedback, then cars will continue to be manufactured without any standardization, and people will stop buying their products.

That's just the point--automobiles are NOT randomly generated, and cannot be.

On the other side, life, of any kind, offers random variations, most of which don't survive or reproduce in the natural environments--what fails becomes food for other life. Some of the variations, however, do survive in the environment they find themselves in, and leave offspring that must either survive and reproduce, or fail and become food for others.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

This. ^^

Car manufacturers would rapidly go out of business because their products would not perform for the customers. Standardization of design is part of what makes the large-scale production of automobiles possible. Each time a car fails, it would be up to the owner or repair providers to identify what went wrong and to come up with a repair to fix it--and it would not be generalizable to any other car. If the manufacturers and not spending on R&D, or learning from customer/service provider feedback, then cars will continue to be manufactured without any standardization, and people will stop buying their products.

That's just the point--automobiles are NOT randomly generated, and cannot be.

On the other side, life, of any kind, offers random variations, most of which don't survive or reproduce in the natural environments--what fails becomes food for other life. Some of the variations, however, do survive in the environment they find themselves in, and leave offspring that must either survive and reproduce, or fail and become food for others.

right, the overwhelming majority of random changes would be deleterious, And this is true of life also, there are always infinitely more ways to degrade a sophisticated design, than there are to significantly improve it.

so why don't life forms rapidly go out of business? because the variation occurs within specific parameters--- and this WOULD work perfectly well for cars also.

consider the (genetic/digital) code that determines the paint color for a car on the production line will be painted, lets totally randomize that control info and ship them out to dealers. More dark colored cars will be sold in Minneapolis, and more light color cars in Phoenix... the dealers can order more of the better adapted cars based purely on their popularity, without any 'intelligent design' regarding why they are more popular.- the algorithm works in this controlled capacity

But you understand why this same process could never be used to design the car itself, including the very capacity for adaptation we are trying to account for, no more than gravity could ever be explained using only classical physics

Scales matter, things do work differently at different scales, it's not just a quirk of reality, it's a logical necessity

 

[Jose Fly]

You're talking about cars. You are not talking about biological organisms. For what, the hundredth time?

Apparently Guy thinks that even if repeating the same flawed analogy doesn't accomplish anything the first hundred times, repeating another hundred times might do so.

 

[Altfish]

Okay, so forms with a superior performance, tend to outlast inferior ones, and so be replicated in greater numbers- cars or life? both of course

Yes they are different, that's the whole point of the analogy- different, yet survival of the fittest applies to both, and so is a wash, what we are interested in is the origination of significantly superior designs, not that they are selected and thrive- we have established that as a given.

Not necessarily. Superior is not a good word to use. Better adapted to suit the environment in which they live is a much better description. e.g. Concorde was the fastest most superior airplane of its time; but modern designs need to be bigger, more economical and speed is not the prime driver.

So you tell me, what do you think would happen if we decided to save on R&D, simply follow evolution's lead, and make completely random changes to each car design for the new model year, letting the best be selected?

What would happen is that change would be very slow, take thousands/millions of years and there would be lots of dead ends. A bit like evolution really!

 

[Polymath257]

So you tell me, what do you think would happen if we decided to save on R&D, simply follow evolution's lead, and make completely random changes to each car design for the new model year, letting the best be selected?

Best by what criterion? preference of the society for driving? Fuel economy? efficiency of the drive chain?

Next, make sure it is random changes to the design, which *each car getting a different selection of characteristics* (alleles). So we have a large population of cars, each of which is different, with random changes to the design from their 'parents'.

Then select those cars that are 'best' by your criteria, allowing only those best cars to be the base for the next generation. Then create 'children' by pairing off 'parent' cars and mixing their designs, with some random changes thrown in. Do this type of mating, mixing, random change, and multiple children each year for a century.

What will happen? Over a few years, the cars available in every area will become 'adapted' to those areas, being the 'best' for the people in that area. As the population of people changes (the environment), so will the 'best' in the cars in each area. The cars in some areas will be quite different than cars in other areas (say, mountainous versus by the coast) because different criteria will be used for what is 'best'.

Some groups of cars will diverge so much that 'mating' won't produce a viable design, and we would then have speciation: a new species of car. They can still be viable depending on the environment and how popular they are (fitness).

In other words, there would be evolution of cars, just like there is evolution of languages and evolution of living species.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

the overwhelming majority of random changes would be deleterious, And this is true of life also, there are always infinitely more ways to degrade a sophisticated design, than there are to significantly improve it.

Yes, that is absolutely true--and it's a basic observation of biology that there are many, many more offspring that fail to survive and reproduce than actually do survive and reproduce. Those that are better adapted to the environment are the ones that will survive and reproduce.

 

[Guy Threepwood]

Not necessarily. Superior is not a good word to use. Better adapted to suit the environment in which they live is a much better description. e.g. Concorde was the fastest most superior airplane of its time; but modern designs need to be bigger, more economical and speed is not the prime driver.

sure, though I'm using 'superior' as taking that into account, the best all round design, which involves some compromise in life as in cars right? I never flew on Concorde, but I think I'd prefer a good old 747 with more room and less cost!

What would happen is that change would be very slow, take thousands/millions of years and there would be lots of dead ends. A bit like evolution really!

hmm- you could argue this with beenherebefore also... but the odds of creating a superior car by random chance- not good, the product line would be invariably degraded. the fittest would still be selected yes, but from progressively less fit generations. And that's a fallacy with survival of the fittest, that it somehow demands survival of the fitter .. nothing in the mathematical algorithm demands this, that part is inserted by our own anthropomorphic bias

 

[Altfish]

hmm- you could argue this with beenherebefore also... but the odds of creating a superior car by random chance- not good, the product line would be invariably degraded. the fittest would still be selected yes, but from progressively less fit generations. And that's a fallacy with survival of the fittest, that it somehow demands survival of the fitter .. nothing in the mathematical algorithm demands this, that part is inserted by our own anthropomorphic bias

It is not as hard as you think. Don't get me wrong, it'll take a long time.

Let's take something a bit simpler, What are the chances of throwing Five 6's at dice. Now if every time you threw the dice you have to start again, it is a very large number, it 1 in 6^5 = 1 in 46656.
However, if every time you throw the dice you can 'keep' any 6's you throw, so if on the first throw you throw 2, 2, 4, 5, 6; the 6 is put aside as an advantageous gene would do in evolution. The odds of hitting a 6 with 5 dice is quite high = 5 in 6
You then only throw 4 dice, the odds of hitting all 4 have now dropped to 1 in1296; but odds of getting one six is now 4 in 6 and so one
The same would happen in a much larger scale with the car. Evolution 'keeps' the gains, as would the car designer n and discard the rest; so your comment about '...progressively less fit generations.' is not correct.

 

[Polymath257]

It is not as hard as you think. Don't get me wrong, it'll take a long time.

Let's take something a bit simpler, What are the chances of throwing Five 6's at dice. Now if every time you threw the dice you have to start again, it is a very large number, it 1 in 6^5 = 1 in 46656.
However, if every time you throw the dice you can 'keep' any 6's you throw, so if on the first throw you throw 2, 2, 4, 5, 6; the 6 is put aside as an advantageous gene would do in evolution. The odds of hitting a 6 with 5 dice is quite high = 5 in 6

<pedant mode>
Not quite. The odds of getting at least one 6 are 1-(5/6)^5 =60%.

You then only throw 4 dice, the odds of hitting all 4 have now dropped to 1 in1296; but odds of getting one six is now 4 in 6 and so one

Again, not quite. The odds for at least one 6 are 1-(5/6)^4 =52%

</pedant mode>

 

[Guy Threepwood]

It is not as hard as you think. Don't get me wrong, it'll take a long time.

Let's take something a bit simpler, What are the chances of throwing Five 6's at dice. Now if every time you threw the dice you have to start again, it is a very large number, it 1 in 6^5 = 1 in 46656.
However, if every time you throw the dice you can 'keep' any 6's you throw, so if on the first throw you throw 2, 2, 4, 5, 6; the 6 is put aside as an advantageous gene would do in evolution. The odds of hitting a 6 with 5 dice is quite high = 5 in 6
You then only throw 4 dice, the odds of hitting all 4 have now dropped to 1 in1296; but odds of getting one six is now 4 in 6 and so one
The same would happen in a much larger scale with the car. Evolution 'keeps' the gains, as would the car designer n and discard the rest; so your comment about '...progressively less fit generations.' is not correct.

As a keen Yahtzee player I take your point!

But it all depends on how many possible ways there are to degrade the design v improve it, and of course a 1 in 6 chance of improvement v degradation is absurdly generous for cars or life.

it also depends on how efficient the selection process is, we can identify and retain each 6 with 100% success, we can test a car and identify the best one to keep with a very high rate also.. even if the improvement is very small-

But without a predetermined design goal in mind, nature can easily discard a perfectly good design improvement, long before it ever gets a chance to pay off, but this is a different point..


So, I disagree, the extremely low chances of creating an improvement in a car by pure chance mutation, means each generation will tend to offer an inferior selection than the previous- but take a more obvious example of the point:

photocopy an office memo every year, on an old machine that randomly distorts the image.. a chance improvement is not impossible, it's just extremely unlikely to occur within the new 'gene pool' of copies available to select from. of course the best would still tend to be selected to make the next copy from, but best does not automatically = better by this mathematical algorithm- that is the principle here.

 

[Polymath257]

photocopy an office memo every year, on an old machine that randomly distorts the image.. a chance improvement is not impossible, it's just extremely unlikely to occur within the new 'gene pool' of copies available to select from. of course the best would still tend to be selected to make the next copy from, but best does not automatically = better by this mathematical algorithm- that is the principle here.

But statistically, if the initial image was poor, the new image *would* be better. The higher risk is taking a very, very good image and degrading it, not in taking a poor image and degrading it.

And, yes, in a population, what happens is that there is variation around the 'best' with the width of the bell curve determined by things like mutation rate and selection pressures on the two sides.

So, what tends to happen is that there is always a central average and some variation around that average. The average shifts due to selection pressure as the environment changes. Initially, that will reduce the variation, but mutation will then 'reset' the variation around the new average.

 

[Subduction Zone]

As a keen Yahtzee player I take your point!

But it all depends on how many possible ways there are to degrade the design v improve it, and of course a 1 in 6 chance of improvement v degradation is absurdly generous for cars or life.

it also depends on how efficient the selection process is, we can identify and retain each 6 with 100% success, we can test a car and identify the best one to keep with a very high rate also.. even if the improvement is very small-

But without a predetermined design goal in mind, nature can easily discard a perfectly good design improvement, long before it ever gets a chance to pay off, but this is a different point..


So, I disagree, the extremely low chances of creating an improvement in a car by pure chance mutation, means each generation will tend to offer an inferior selection than the previous- but take a more obvious example of the point:

photocopy an office memo every year, on an old machine that randomly distorts the image.. a chance improvement is not impossible, it's just extremely unlikely to occur within the new 'gene pool' of copies available to select from. of course the best would still tend to be selected to make the next copy from, but best does not automatically = better by this mathematical algorithm- that is the principle here.

No "predetermined design goal" is necessary. One must remember that we are dealing with populations that will always have a range in traits. For example if the climate changes and cools off those individuals that are more fit to a cooler climate will be more likely to pass on their genes. As a result fur may get thicker and thicker. If the opposite occurs traits for less fur may be selected. Given a population with variation natural selection is all the designer that is needed for evolution to occur.

 

[Altfish]

As a keen Yahtzee player I take your point!

But it all depends on how many possible ways there are to degrade the design v improve it, and of course a 1 in 6 chance of improvement v degradation is absurdly generous for cars or life.

it also depends on how efficient the selection process is, we can identify and retain each 6 with 100% success, we can test a car and identify the best one to keep with a very high rate also.. even if the improvement is very small-

But without a predetermined design goal in mind, nature can easily discard a perfectly good design improvement, long before it ever gets a chance to pay off, but this is a different point..


So, I disagree, the extremely low chances of creating an improvement in a car by pure chance mutation, means each generation will tend to offer an inferior selection than the previous- but take a more obvious example of the point:

photocopy an office memo every year, on an old machine that randomly distorts the image.. a chance improvement is not impossible, it's just extremely unlikely to occur within the new 'gene pool' of copies available to select from. of course the best would still tend to be selected to make the next copy from, but best does not automatically = better by this mathematical algorithm- that is the principle here.

The Zahtzee example was only given to demonstrate that evolution involves selection too, not just random variation.

There is no predetermined goal in evolution. The mutation/variation is random but the success of that mutation depends on the ability of that mutant to breed and pass the gene on. That's why the car analogy fails because their design is to a large extent predetermined.

The photocopy analogy falls down because the copies will always deteriorate/distort i.e. more blurred or whatever the fault is, a photocopier cannot improve a picture's quality. - in evolutionary term they would not succeed and be discarded and die out