Dr Rick

And neither is evolution; evolution is not a completely random process. Evolution cannot be illustrated or simulated with a completely random process because evolution is not completely random. A major part of evolution (natural selection) is non-random, so it is wrong to compare it to completely random processes or refer to it as completely random.

As Salmon of Doubt points-out, it involves BOTH random processes (mutations) AND selective pressures. Evolution would not and could not occur without both.

That is a logical fallacy known as a false analogy; Evolution is mindless, but it is not random.

Evolution is not random because natural selection is not random; therefore, it is fallacious to draw analogies between evolution and completely random events.

Rick

Dr Rick

Evolution, intelligently designed or not, won't work without reproductive organisms, but that's just a quibble; your assertion is acceptable.

Agreed.

Huh?

You just introduced two new, undefined terms, nature and purpose that were completely absent from your two assumptions!

That's not a proof; it's just an irrelevant conclusion! 3 in no way is demonstrated by 1 and 2 or even related to them. You just arbitrarily tacked it on. Your assumptions say nothing about purpose or nature, so no rational conclusion you draw from them can, either.

Specific traits don't have to have optimal utility to confer a reproductive advantage under the mindless, non-random pressures that the environment exerts; they just have to offer some advantage relative to those individuals that don't possess the trait."

Rick

Keith

How is it meaningful to speak of a "reproductive advantage" if reproduction is not essential to "nature's" purpose? You call my conclusion "irrelevant" but you aren't going to have the intelligently designed process work at all without reproduction, right? How can reproduction possibly be irrelevant to this process?

Dr Rick

I didn't assert that reproduction is irrelevant to the process of evolution, nor did I dispute that evolution won't work without reproduction; I specifically posted that I agree with this assertion. I find it difficult to believe that you innocently misinterpreted what I clearly and unambiguously posted. Your argument here is at best a fallacious strawman.

Your conclusion that nature has purpose does not logically follow from your assertions about evolution and reproduction; that conclusion, and not the assumptions about evolution and reproduction, is irrelevant.

Rick

Doubting Didymus

We need to wind back and start again from basic principles. I think I'll repost that little article I wrote for micheal a few months ago.

Keith

It looks to me like you're stuck. As you know, not every individual within a given species has to reproduce, but some reproduction MUST go on without fail in order for a species to carry on into the next generation. The only alternative is extinction.

Because reproduction is so critical to the process of evolution, and reproduction is not assured for any individual member of a species, every species must somehow make reproduction happen, and happen reliably generation after generation. But now we're talking super-sophisticated complexity again, the kind that needs an intelligent designer. And of course if nature is devoid of purpose, why should "nature" worry about reproduction at all?

Keith

Lobstrosity

The GA "program" is nothing more than a self-replicating molecule. That's it. That's all it takes. If you want to argue that God made the first self-replicating molecule, then fine, that's a whole different discussion. We can sit around praising God's awesome ability to make a molecule. Go God!

Once you have a molecule that can replicate under specific conditions, you have a fully-functional genetic algorithm. You have my very program. My program is no more complex than this. Well, that's a lie. My program is slightly more complex than this because it uses the scheme of sexual reproduction rather than pure replication. I chose this path because in the real world some DNA is now more than just a self-replicating molecule. Many species have evolved ways in which to merge two different DNA strands into one new one, and this is facilitated by sexual reproduction. Other older, simpler life forms out there, however, reproduce simply by replicating their DNA (bacteria and viruses, to name a few). Evolution will occur according to both reproduction schemes, but it has been shown that the former (i.e. sexual) scheme is more efficient at probing phase space. Diversifying the gene pool results in a population that can reproduce slowly (well, slowly compared to the reproduction rate of bacteria) and still remain resilient to environmental change.

I could easily write a genetic algorithm that would work using only mutation (i.e. no sexual reproduction). It just wouldn't work as fast as one that utilizes sexual reproduction. So please, try to understand: a gentic algorithm is simply a self-replicating molecule that is constrained to replicate only under certain conditions (i.e. it is influenced by environmental factors). It's no more complicated than that. This works on a computer and it's exactly the scenario faced by DNA (a self-replicating molecule) in the real world.

Here, one final analogy. Cancer has no purpose, but rather only exists because it reproduces. Cancer out-reproduces healthy cells and therefore exists in higher and higher numbers as time goes on. Sadly, it's too efficient at reproducing and eventually kills that which it relies upon, thereby destroying itself. There is a brief window in which we can perceive the existence of cancer in an individual. Similarly, organisms today have no purpose. They only exist because they reproduce. If they didn't pass their genetic material on to the next generations, they just wouldn't be here. If they pass their genetic material on to the next generation too rapidly and used up all their resources, they die out and are wiped from the earth. What you see remaining when you look around today are those self-replicating molecules that were best at propagating themselves under their environmental constraints. They propagate well, so they're here today. Pretty simple concept, isn't it? It doesn't require tremendous planning by an intelligent diety, just aeons of trial and error. There is no more purpose invested in life on Earth than there is in cancer.

Doubting Didymus

Preface: Please read the post.

I will begin with this quote, which introduces the angle I am going to take on this question:

Firstly, it is absolutely correct to say that random processes cannot create complexity. They can sort pebbles on a beach, organize sand into a cone, and on certain occasions, they can carve the face of an American president into a Hawaiian island. They cannot achieve much more than that. Certainly, they cannot account for a human being, nor a plant, nor a eukaryote, and not even a bacterium. What’s missing?

I will tell you. Drum roll please…

Evolution is not a random phenomenon

Ta daaa! Now that will probably come as news to you, and that is no fault of yours. Evolution, you may say, is always being called random. How often do you hear: “We are here as the result of blind random natural processes”? All the friggin’ time, that’s how often. Media, Creationists, and most awfully, respectable biologists, are frequently heard to utter this irritating statement. It is not necessarily untrue, but it is dreadfully, stupidly misleading.

Here is an ultra brief run down of the basic process of evolution. Step one: Replicator. We will leave the abiogenesis stuff out of it for now. Living things replicate, meaning that they copy themselves near perfectly. Particularly in asexual organisms, a child is a good copy of its parent.

Step two: mutation. I am not sure what you have been told about these, so I will have to assume the worst. Forgive me if this insults your intelligence, but these assumptions are not unfounded.

ahem

Mutations in organisms are not big. A mutant does not have tentacles, glowing eyes, or an appetite for human flesh. Nor are mutants born inside out and explode before they can breed. Nor are mutants ‘sharks giving birth to frogs’, or gorillas giving birth to an intelligent human. What is a mutant? Well, chances are: someone you know is a mutant. Mutations are little. They alter some feature in tiny tiny ways, or they do nothing. Importantly, mutations ARE random. This is the primary reason so many people say that evolution is random, but unfortunately for them, mutaion is only step two.

Are mutations good or bad? Have a look at this Talkorigins run down on the subject:

Are Mutations Harmful?

Aha! But everyone knows that there are more bad and neutral mutations than good ones. How can evolution be sure of only accumulating the good ones?

The answer will follow another drum roll….

Step three! Natural selection!

Ta daaa! This is how it works: An individual makes several child copies of itself in its lifetime. Importantly, and most prominently in sexual reproducers, the children are similar, but NOT the same. They have different combinations of the parental features, and they also may have positive or negative mutations. Not all of them will survive, and of those that do, there will be differences in their reproductive success. Some will have many children, some will have only a few. But who gets what? Well, obviously those with the best combination of parent features, as well as those with good mutations, will have more than those who do not have those advantages.

Think on that for just a moment, this will be on the test.

Done? Good. Now a question: of all the individuals in this new generation, what is the proportion of those possessing their parent’s good mutations and helpful features, compared to those that have negative mutations and less helpful features?

The correct answer is that good mutations get a disproportionately huge slice of the pie. Negative mutations will be less common, because the parents responsible for spreading them had a hard time, while the parents will good mutations found life a comparative breeze and bred like slutty rabbits. You will also notice that this pattern is absolutely bound to happen. Calling it ‘random’ would be rather perverse. This is the part of evolution that is not random. Natural selection is like a magic sieve, a gemstone fossickers dream: that lets only the precious stones through, and discarding only the quartz and cowpat chunks.

You should also notice that this magic sieve works on every single generation, and thus it can compound the luck. Good mutations will naturally stack on top of even more good mutations, again and again and again. Random bonuses and pleasant surprises accumulate with every single sexual experience. What are you laughing at?

A monkey will never type a Shakespearean play, but imagine yourself embodying natural selection for a moment. You have a monacle, a top hat, a nasty cruel whip in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. You review the monkeys scripts, keep every letter they type that makes the script look more like Shakespeare, whack him for every letter he gets wrong, and get the monkey to retype the rest. On the first and second runs all you have a page of gibberish and a well-spanked monkey. But then something quite amazing happens. With every new run, you have a script that is beginning to make sense, because you keep every letter that the monkey gets right. He is not allowed to touch them anymore, but he does retype the mistakes. Eventually, half the script will have been randomly hit correctly, then as the poor little feller continues to correct his mistakes, he will be retyping less and less of the page, until he is correcting only a few spelling errors, and then nothing. You have your script, you heartless Dickensian slave driver, and the monkey can go free. All because you accumulated his random ‘good’ hits, and forced a retype on his boo-boos.

This is not flippant speculation. It actually works. This page is a summary of the various online computer programs that simulate mutation and natural selection. The goals are not pre-programmed, and the mutation is not directed, but by accumulating hits and discarding the misses, complex shapes can form from simple dots on screens, that could never be accounted for by chance alone:

World of Dawkins Evolution Simulators links

If you were at all interested in Lobstrosity's program (and why wouldn't you have been? It certainly impressed the pants off of ME to be sure), download some of these and any accompanying help files and have a look for yourself. What you can see occuring is an unguided process, without any pre programmed goals, the end result of which is a more complex entity than it started with. You are looking at evolutionary principles slowly and surely increasing the complexity of simulated organisms. You can call it 'guided' i suppose, because a human is taking care of the selection side of things, but it should be easy for you to see that natural selection, with its favouritism for better reproducers, could easily produce the same results.

This is what Dawkins achieved through simply selecting randomly mutating replicators. Again, none of the information for these creations was pre programmed, and each started from a single pixel under the guidance of a few programmed 'genes', each of which looks only like a big ugly tree when expressed on its own. These pictures are emergent entities.

Happy Wonderer

I'll reply to this one because others have done a good job with your other replies to me.

Note that you have now abandoned your argument that the evolution of complexity shows that evolution/nature has a purpose. You have also abandoned the argument that individuals showing purpose shows that nature has a purpose. Good, those were not going anywhere.

Evolution is a theory of how complexity arises without purpose. That is why the selection component is called natural selection: to distinguish it from artificial selection which is the sort of slection that pigeon breeders do. It doesn't mean "nature selects" as if nature is an entity (although some misinterpret it that way.)

So, onwards to the new argument. I'm having some trouble formulating your latest statements as an argument. Looking at the list, it seems to me to be in the form of four interesting facts followed by a statement:

Let's see, 1 and 3 are


Whew! Good start. I'd say that is a winner of a statement. Moving on to that and 2:



So far, so good. Here is where I run into trouble. I'll quote what I think you mean by 2, but it is so obviously false that I'm afraid I'm creating a straw man:



That is clearly not a valid inference. The first reproducing organism could have been designed (Go God!) without any knowledge of the evolution that would follow. Perhaps aliens wanted to convert all the methane on earth into oxygen for some reason, and the organism that they created to do that got out of hand. (Boy will they be surprised when they get back...) Feel free to correct me if that is not what you mean.

Number 5 is an interesting fact that I'm not sure how to fit into the argument, perhaps


No, that isn't quite right. I need help on that one. Maybe "since reproduction is a purpose and part of nature, nature has a purpose?" No, we are back to the soccer teams. Maybe "nature wouldn't exist without reproduction?" No, the moon is natural and has no reproducing critters that we know of. "Nature would be really sad if the process of evolution didn't exist?" Not right, either. Truthfully, I'm really not sure how number 5 goes in with the rest of the discussion, maybe some parts of the argument are missing.

Note that technically statement 4 (reproduction is designed) not only assumes the conclusion, but is not about evolution at all. It would be much simpler to state "Reproduction is complex, therefore designed, therefore there is a designer." That really should go into a different thread, which I welcome you to open.

HW

Theli

Sounds to me like Keith is trying to pull an anthropomorphic version of evolution.
Even if we were to refer to the ecosystem as one living entity, we shouldn't apply human attributes (like choice, wants and purpose) to it.
I fear that this line of thinking has come from watching too many disney movies where animals talk and think just like humans.