Happy Wonderer

Not responsive. I am not asking about opinions of what a function is useful for.or what individuals think the point of a game is.

Read again:

Let's review. Your statement (paraphrased) is roughly "lots of creatures have a goal of reproducing, therefore it must a goal of nature." My counter argument is "lots of soccer players desire to score points, therefore is that also a goal of nature?"

Your response is that Nature's goal isn't to score points in soccer. You haven't provided any reasoning to show how the logic of the second statement differs from the first.

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I note that you like to conflate terms. You do not define the amorphous term nature, but its clearly not the same entity as the process of evolution. In addition, you conflate nature with most living things, but then describe it as an individual with "wants". Let's be clear here -- I presume you are not talking about Wicca or how Mother Earth is a conscious entity composed of all living things.

When you mean "evolution", please say "evolution." When you mean to say that us silly evolutionists think that "nature desires creatures to evolve" please say so. It makes conversation easier and keeps us from going off on weird tangents.

HW

Happy Wonderer

How come we can't know the "reason for everything he does" but we do know that he has a reason. What's the difference between the two types of knowledge? And how come the things we "can't know" happen to be the reason for facts that contradict the idea that life is intelligently designed, but support the idea of Evolution?

HW

pz

Ummm, no. This is obviously true. The photoreceptors are in the outermost layer of the neural retina, and light must pass through multiple layers of non-receptive cells before it reaches the photoreceptors. This unavoidably scatters the light to some small degree, and represents a loss of resolution and sensitivity.

One could argue that this is a compromise with other important factors in development and function of the eye, but you can't really pretend it is an optimum for acuity or detection.

Happy Wonderer

You have just given a (implausable) reason that a species might go extinct. Has anybody on this thread been arguing that species don't go extinct? How does a species going extinct contradict evolution?

Huh? It seems like you are arguing for an a individual bat has an allele that causes its children to be deaf. How does that affect other individual bats who don't have that allele?
A statement that I can agree with. Survival is never assured, but if an individual has a feature that makes it more likely to survive than its peers, then that feature will eventually become part of the population. Sound familiar?

HW

Happy Wonderer

There you go again. Read
How does this get translated in your mind into a claim that "there is no such thing as goals?" As far as we know there is no goal by a species to wipe out another species. It is not a necessary assumption for evolution.

A super-efficient form of spider may have the effect of causing less-efficient spiders to go extinct. Do you think the super-spider thinks "gee, only 37 of that other kind of spider left, wonder when I'm going to get them all?" Or do you think the fact that the super-efficient spider displaces the less efficient ones has something to do with it?

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In fact, spider's action is probably purposeless; spider minds are not very complex. Complex webs can be built using fairly simple rules that are likely hardwired into the spider. (Gee, almost seems like an analogy here...) Do you really think the spider thinks "gee, I'm getting a mite peckish, how 'bout I build web pattern #362 right here by the garden shed and wait for a nice lunch?"


HW

Web Spinner II GA for web building

Principia

No doubt, Keith, you've have demonstrated more than adequately that science in general does not matter to you at all. But, since I care not for your God and since you have provided no significant challenges to the TOE, I'll end my discussion with you until such time as you demonstrate intellectual curiosity about the natural world around you.

Happy Wonderer

Very interesting, but still unresponsive to "You claim if nature is devoid of purpose, speaking of utility is incoherent. Support that claim. " You made a statement about the logical incoherence of a claim, in order to buttress your argument. Support it.

The statement "echolocation has a lot to do with bat survival" in no way contradicts the statement that "nature is devoid of purpose." More to the point, it in no way contradicts the statement that "evolution is devoid of purpose. " It would contradict the statement that "echolocation isn't useful for bats" but nobody is arguing that.

If we supposed evolution to have a purpose, would that purpose to improve the ability of bats to catch insects, or to improve the ability of insects to avoid bats? This is one reason that complexity evolves; creatures do not exist in a vacuum. As insects get better at not eaten, bats have to get better at finding them. Sometimes "stuff" happens and both predator and prey go extinct. How is that purposeful?


HW

Try to keep the ad-homs out of it, it makes for a more enjoyable conversation. Relax, this is for fun!

Lobstrosity

I have no idea how applicable this is, but it seems like it might pertain to the original topic of this thread, so I'll mention it. Maybe Keith can get some insight out of it, or maybe not.

About six years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I did a programming project for the state science fair entitled "Virtual Mating" in which a population of artificial organisms evolved over time to talk to each other. Basically, each organism had a genetic structure that encoded how it would respond to certain environmental stimuli (think of these as insects with incredibly simple brains, so actions are based on instinct, not behaviors learned over one individual's lifetime) as they moved around on a wrap-around grid representing their world. If a male found a female, they would produce offspring whose genetic structures were a mixture of their parents with mutations added at some low fixed rate (meant to mimic the genetic crossover that occurs through biological sexual reproduction).

The twist came from the fact that the males were handicapped such that they could move but could not see. The females were handicapped such that they could see but not move. The females were able to make eight different "sounds" that the males could hear and differentiate. The females' calls were genetically encoded to correspond to the position at which they saw the males in their fields of vision and the orientations of the males relative to themselves. The males would then make genetically encoded movements based on the calls they heard. In the absence of sound, the males would move in a cyclical sequence of eight steps that was encoded by their genetic structure. This would basically be the default "blind & deaf"-man's woman-hunting strategy--how does he move so as to maximize his chances of running into a female. Once he gets near enough to the female, the "goal" would be that she will guide him to her using her sexy, seductive voice.

Now, the initial population of organisms had its genetic structures generated completely at random, so each female would possibly give different calls for the same position and each male would possibly interpret a given female call differerently. Basically, there was no set language that these guys could use to communicate with as everyone was saying their own thing and everyone had their own idea what things should mean. So initially you ended up with a lot of confused artificial organisms. The most confused (e.g. the ones who spent their lives moving in little circles or just sitting there) died out, paving the way for generations of organisms who like to move in straight or nearly-straight lines.

Interestingly, however, over time, the organisms would genetically evolve a language (using essentially the same genetic reproductive scheme all sexual biological creatures use, hence lending credance to the notion that Darwinian evolution can actually lead to dramatic changes in a species). The females would come to all agree genetically on which calls to give for a given position in their field of vision and the males would all come to agree genetically on what each call meant. More importantly, though, the eventual evolved language would be the most efficient language such that the males would find the females in the fewest number of moves once the females caught sight of them. The males also evolved the most efficient search algorithms for finding the females (i.e. their cyclic pattern of moves carried out when not being called to). Through genetic evolution, they would evolve to increase their reproduction rate by almost two orders of magnitude.

Now let me just state here for the record, in case this wasn't clear, that I did not "program" the evolution that was observed. All I did was set up an environment and a group of things that could move in that environment based on a set of physical rules. The physical rules simply indicated that if two creatures touched, two more would be made that were essentially a mixture of their parents while at the same time the two oldest would be removed. That's it. This thing was just allowed to run as is. I wasn't in there selecting and rewarding those who I thought were the most fit to survive. There was no "purpose" to anything they did. No actions were considered "good" by the program and nothing was rewarded. If the creatures didn't "want" to reproduce, so be it. In this world there was no right and no wrong, no better and no worse. My goal was just to observe what would happen to their genetic structures over time in a world with a few select physical laws (and I had no idea what actually would happen when I first ran the program, to be honest). As such, I see the results as rather strong evidence that any population that is constrained by a set of physical rules and that reproduces sexually will experience Darwinian evolution. I honestly don't see how they can not evolve. I know evolution is just a theory, but models like this demonstrate conclusively that it actually can work. They demonstrate the theory in action without in any inherent knowledge of or bias towards evolution to begin with. Though this isn't the most realistic model, I still would argue that it realistically shows that sexual reproduction results in "evolution" of genetic material. Sexual reproduction simply makes "survival" the goal through it's passing successful genetic material into the next generation's gene pool.

And just to address the argument that these results were simply due to a massive reduction in genetic diversity as the initial random population suffered massive stupidity-related casualties:
One interesting result was that since there were five moves a male could carry out--jump (move forward two squares, skipping the one in the middle), move forward, turn right, turn left, and do nothing--while the females could make eight different sounds, you would very often get populations in which the females were not all genetically identical. A certain fragment of the population would use call 1 to be forward whereas another fragment would be using call 2 to mean forward. This is allowed because you have more calls than possible moves. In essence you'd have the evolution of dialects amongst the females.

Another highly interesting finding was that if I let the creatures have genetic tags which allow for them to be deaf/mute, they will instantly evolve to be deaf and mute. Though this does not allow for the optimal mate-finding strategy, it is very helpful in the early days when no one knows what the fuck anyone is talking about. If they can shut out the noise, they do better. Amazingly, after a long-ass time, the population will spontaneously evolve to again hear and speak and almost instantly will experience an exponential jump in reproduction. What's been happening is that the unexpressed genes that encode for the language have been evolving behind the scenes, and once they randomly reach something that's not incredibly chaotically detrimental, a mutatations can allow for hearing and speaking to once again be expressed. Basically, this would be characterized as spontaneous evolution. Certain theories exist that predict spontaneous evolution can occur in the real world, and my simple model demonstrated that sexual reproduction can indeed lead to evolutionary leaps that occur over incredibly short timeframes (at least under these simplified constraints). It even suggested one possible mechanism for such evolutionary leaps.

To summarize, I as God of this world, had no purpose in mind when I set these guys lose. They could have done whatever they wanted (i.e. their genetic structures could have remained unchanged or they could have changed according to any imaginable scheme). Despite this lack of purpose, they still evolved an incredibly complex method for maximizing reproductive success.

Starboy

Lobstrosity, that's pretty cool.

Happy Wonderer

Very cool, sure beats anything that I did at that age....


HW