cricket

I don't see a problem with the analogy either, but for creationists who do, how about allowing the letters to eventually become *any* phrase, as long as it makes sense grammatically. You wouldn't know where you were heading in the beginning, so nobody could say you were "predetermining" anything. Would that eliminate their objection, Shadowy Man?

Doubting Didymus

It would, but it's nearly impossible to do. You'd have to program into the computer exactly what humans find to be a sensible and interesting sentence, which is possibly unquantifiable.

If you really want to, there are programs where the only criteria is improved replicability, and thus can best represent natural selection. Usually, however, the simulated envirinments are too simple for any real diversity to get going. For example, if you make it so that bigger and faster indiviual biomorphs get the most replicates, then you end up with lots of big fast biomorphs. I'ts impossible to simulate enough of the variables in nature to get decent emergent, unexpected properties.

One of the best I've ever seen is lobstrosities example: Here

cricket

But if you're not a programmer, couldn't you demonstrate the concept in a simpler way?

I was thinking of what phrases might evolve if one closed their eyes and banged wildly on the typewriter. Then salvaged the bits that might be useful... save, for example, three letters in a row that work (“dog”,etc) and toss out all the rest that don’t work (“xdm”, etc). Then again bang blindly on the typewriter; any words that happen to form can then join with “dog”. (if you happen to spell “big” you can then start the next session with part of your phrase already formed: “big dog”.)

Round three: bang typewriter... see if any "words" are there to fit w/ “big dog”... if so, add on. If not, throw out the garbage, keep “big dog” and make another generation by closing eyes and banging typewriter...

etc.

Would this be a useful analogy?

cricket

When demonstrating this concept to fundy friends and co-workers, the points to make would be:

You have to build on whatever “words” you selected previously.

There isn’t a predetermined outcome; there are any number of possible sentences that might evolve.

Albion

Yes, but it's the only one they've got, so they're bound to fall back on it. It's just another example of moving the goalposts - how often do you hear creationist challenges that they'll believe evolution when someone produced a cell from a dish of chemicals, and you know very well that as soon as someone does, the response will be that intelligence was required so it doesn't support blind random chance evolution at all.

RBH

Shadowy Man wroteActually, you can remove the human altogether. Walk along a creek bed and find a gravel bar just below a rapids. Take reasonably large samples of the gravel at regular distances below the rapids and plot the average size of the gravel pieces per sample against the distance below the rapids. You'll get a nice regular (ordered) curve: Order out of a purely natural sorting (selective) process.

RBH

Aethernaut

I think I've confused the program. The phrase "the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dogs" which contains every letter in the english alphabet seems to have evolved and is now de-evolving. It's now reached nearly 10,000 generations and still can't figure it out. Fun to watch though.

Jobar

Mutation is random and selection is non-random- and creationists always try to make non-random=designed. So, in the sense that any example we can think of for evolution has to demonstrate the non-random aspect, I think all we can do is to show that the filtering process of selection is non-intelligent design; in short, there are no analogies which are not vulnurable to the objection Shadowy Man points out. We just have to be ready to refute the attempted equation.

Or so it seems to me, anyway.

passion9

Check this website out

Alix Nenuphar

Why?