Doubting Didymus

A brand new Creationist has come to fill the gaping void left by darling Vanderzyden.

Posted By Matthew144
Me!

Here is my response: and thank you for giving me the opportunity to write it. It has been a little dull around here without anyone disagreeing with us. Its long.

Preface: Please read the post.

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

Firstly, you are absolutely correct when you 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. So yes, so far you are leading the stakes. 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 recent thread in this very forum, started by my pal Vandy, for a big pile of beneficial mutations.

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001596" target="_blank">Good Mutations, Anyone?</a>

Aha! But everyone knows that there are more bad and neutral mutations than good ones. What is the answer to that?

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, there will be a 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 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. (what I wouldn’t have done for one of those when I hunted sapphires on my vacations).

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 more good mutations, again and again. Random bonuses accumulate with every sexual experience.

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 and a glass of brandy. 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 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:

<a href="http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Software/software.htm" target="_blank">World of Dawkins Evolution Simulators links page</a>

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.

Psycho Economist

Wow... that's cool. I've been meaning to get to Dawkins ever since I read Nonzero by Robert Wright (an English anthropologist who's a huge fan of Dawkins).

I've got to say, though... to a lot of people "random" is equivalent to "not overseen by a willful agent", and I think that's a large part of the problem. Most people can't conceive of a middle ground between total chance and absolute determinism from start-to-finish.

Edited to give props to you for this:

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

[ December 04, 2002: Message edited by: Psycho Economist ]</p>

Dr Rick

Excellent, DD.

Rick

Doubting Didymus

Gasp! Praised by a hunky doctor!

Neruda

I knew we could count on you, Didymus.

Defiant Heretic

I originally posted this in <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=001229&p=2" target="_blank">another thread</a> about four months ago, and I think it may help you understand how exactly natural selection works.


There are three possibilities of how life arose.

1) Evolution (or some variant thereof)
2) Creationism (or some variant thereof)
3) Other (anything other than 1 or 2)

I included option 3 so as to point out that even if evolution were disproved completely, it still wouldn't prove creationism.

Now I am going to state the general theory of evolution in its simplest terms. However, for the sake of completeness, I do at times state the obvious.

1) Organisms differ from one another. (e.g. We are not all clones)
1a) Organisms change with each passing generation.
1b) Organisms that reproduce sexually receive traits from both parents.

2) Organisms pass on traits to their offspring.
2a) If an organism reproduces, its traits will be included in the next generation.
2b) If an organism does not reproduce, its traits will not be included in the next generation.
2c) An organism must be alive in order to reproduce.

3) Organisms depend on certain resources in order to survive.
3a) There are a limited amount of resources available.

4) Certain organisms (e.g. carnivores) prey upon other organisms
4a) Carnivores are more likely to prey upon organisms that are easy to kill.

5) Because of (3) and (3a), organisms must compete for available resources.
5a) Organisms that successfully compete survive.
5b) Organisms that do not successfully compete die.

6) Because of (4) and (4a), organisms must compete (indirectly) to avoid being eaten by carnivores.
6a) Organisms that successfully compete survive.
6b) Organisms that do not successfully compete die.

7) Some traits are beneficial to an organism. (e.g. a chameleon's ability to camouflage)
7a) Some traits are detrimental to an organism. (e.g. blindness)

8) Organisms with beneficial traits are more likely to successfully compete as detailed in (5)and(6).
8a) Organisms with detrimental traits are less likely to successfully compete as detailed in (5)and(6).

9) Because of (8), organisms with beneficial traits are more likely to survive long enough to reproduce.
9a) Because of (8a), organisms with detrimental traits are less likely to survive long enough to reproduce.

10) Because of (9) and (2a), beneficial traits are more likely to be included in the next generation.
10a) Because of (9a) and (2b), detrimental traits are less likely to be included in the next generation.

Conclusion: Over time, beneficial traits are more likely to remain in the gene pool and detrimental traits are more likely to disappear from the gene pool.
As organisms possessing certain beneficial traits breed with organisms possessing other beneficial traits, their offspring inherit the traits from both parents, and therefore possess more beneficial traits than either organism of the previous generation.
Organisms change in each successive generation, gaining beneficial traits and discarding detrimental ones, and therefore improving the overall survivability of the organism.

Defiant Heretic

Oddly enough, that's who I wrote the argument for.

Matthew144

I appreciate this concession, I must say though that you would not have been able to make it and remain a credible evolutionist even 20 years ago, and it is only a concession that the literature has begun to make as a result of the ID(iot's) supposedly marginalized arguments.

By leaving out "abiogenisis" which I assume has to do with the origin of life and the reproduction of very basic forms of life, this is assuming much of what I think the car in the junkyard argument is about. With exception to your mutation stuff, the rest of your argument is an eloquent summary (eloquent, understandable, readable, evincing a grasp of the issues without a desire to make others feel dumb, etc. ) of the brilliance of Darwin. (Yes, the creationist concedes that Darwin was brilliant ) However, I think that it takes for granted huge advances in molecular biology that have occured since the 19th century. So if we could keep it basic, (say after life, but before macrobiology) how would you make the argument?

Shadowy Man

Doubting Didymus: (emphasis mine)

I find this analogy to be weak. As I've bolded above, you have an idea of the end product at the beginning of the process. This type of argument actually favors design.

pz

Not at all. If anything, you've got it backwards.

Evolutionists since Darwin have not claimed that 'random processes can create complexity'. It's simply never been part of the Darwinian theory, which relied almost entirely on the strong non-random process of natural selection.

The neo-Darwinian synthesis added a stronger influence by chance on the process of evolution, an influence that has since become regarded as even stronger, especially since acceptance of Ohno's neutral theory. But, unfortunately for your claim, natural selection has never been portrayed as a random process...except by creationists who know nothing about it.

IDists and other creationists have not contributed anything to this work.

I must say, though, that that is quite an accomplishment: your first paragraph here has gotten absolutely nothing correct. It isn't easy to be that wrong.
Your question doesn't make any sense. What is "macrobiology"? Are you asking that we ignore all those "huge advances" because modern data makes your antiquated superstitions untenable?