… with Mung. In a recent comment Mung asserted that
If Darwinists had to put up their hard earned money they would soon go broke and Darwinism would be long dead. I have a standing $10,000 challenge here at TSZ that no one has ever taken me up on.
Now, I don’t have $10,000 to bet on anything, but it is worth exploring what bet Mung was making. Perhaps a bet of a lower amount could be negotiated, so it is worth trying to figure out what the issue was.
Mung’s original challenge will be found here. It was in a thread in which I had proposed a bet of $100 that a Weasel program would do much better than random sampling. When people there started talking about whether enough money could be found to take Mung up on the bet, they assumed that it was a simple raising of the stake for my bet. But Mung said here:
You want to wager over something that was never in dispute?
Why not offer a meaningful wager?
So apparently Mung was offering a bet on something else.
I think I have a little insight on what was the “meaningful wager”, or at least on what issue. It would lead us to a rather extraordinary bet. Let me explain below the fold …
Mung accepted that Weasel programs reach their goal far faster than random sampling. However Mung also said (here) that
Weasel programs perform better than blind search because they are guided. I didn’t think the performance was in dispute, nor why the performance was better.
and elsewhere characterized Weasels as succeeding because of “intelligence” as opposed to ignorance.
So let’s imagine what might happen if we took Mung up on the $10,000 bet. We would bet that the Weasel would succeed, because of cumulative selection. Mung would bet that (because of “intelligence” or being “guided”) the Weasel would succeed. The stake would be held by a house of some sort, which would not take a commission.
The Weasel would be run. It would succeed. So the house would declare that we had all won. The stake would be given to the bettors, in proportion to their bets. But alas, no one actually bet against the Weasel. So the winnings would be zero. Everyone, Mung and the rest of us, would get their stake back, and that’s all.
To bet against Mung, we have to come up with some event that distinguishes cumulative selection from “intelligence” (or being “guided”). That seems to be the issue on which Mung was offering a $10,000 bet, and declaring (here) us all to be “pretender[s]” because we would not put up or shut up.
So there it is. We’re all betting on the same side, and no one will win or lose a penny. Unless Mung can come up with some test that distinguished “intelligence” or being “guided” from cumulative selection.
Now I am possibly misunderstanding what the bet actually would be. I hope that Mung will straighten us out on that, so that we can understand what test is proposed, and place our bets.
Allan Miller,
If I sent you to 5th century Europe, and told you, Ok, go find a place to sleep and get some food, do you think you would do as well as the people from the fifth century?
If not, does it mean man’s fitness has gone down?
Furthermore, even if you freeze the bacteria from 10,000 generations ago, and put them in with other bacteria, as soon as you freeze that new population, if they still existed, there are just as fit as the other ones. What criteria are you using to say they are not fit?
Of course with you, you just change how you define fit, for whatever suits your need.
So Dawkins’s “single step selection” is an oxymoron. Can we also agree on that?
There is no measurement for degree of adaptation.
Things either exist or they don’t.
Is a fish more adapted or a dog?
phoodoo,
Or perhaps Rumraket believes that bacteria are the most adapted organism since there are more of them than other organisms.
The alternative, God forbid, is that the program does not reflect the actual evolutionary process.
See above.
Which one? There are many. 🙂
No, it isn’t. That’s the point.
No, If you have several populations frozen, you can take them up, thaw them, and then test their reproductive success in an identical environment. If one population manages to make more offspring than another, in the same environment, then it is more fit in that environment. It is literally better adapted to that environment.
Yes there literally is. The organisms that are living in Lenski’s flasks today literally reproduce three times faster than when the experiment began over 20 years ago.
Lenski has bacteria frozen from back when the experiment began. When he thaws them and tests their ability to reproduce, and compare them with the ability to reproduce for the bacteria that now exist in his flasks, the ancestral population literally takes three times longer to go through a single generation.
When the experiment began, the doubling time for E coli was about an hour. Today it is about 20 minutes. They have become better and better at reproducing in the environment over the course of 67.000 generations (over 20 years).
They have higher fitness.
No, the actual irony is found in you making this statement.
phoodoo,
Not necessarily. The missing component is heritability.
As you MUST know by now, mean number of offspring accruing to the two types. If you put the bugs in an environment together and one always outcompetes the other, then one is fitter. In the specific setup of Weasel, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASET will always outcompete THE QUALITY OF MERCY IS NOT STRNEN. It produces more offspring – is copied more often – if they occur in the same population.
Fuck off. I have never wavered in my definition of fitness. Prove me wrong.
I don’t know what that term means, haven’t come across it before. So I’d have to get some context to see what Dawkins meant by it before we can agree on anything regarding what Dawkins meant by “single step selection”.
Careful phoodoo. People will begin to think that you and I are hugging each other and giggling.
Yes there is: Reproductive success in the environment in question.
Really? I deeply appreciate that we have you to tell us this unsettling and unexpected factoid.
A fish is more adapted than a dog, to life in an aquatic environment? Yes!
And doges are more adapted than fish, to life on land. Yes.
And both fish and dogs exist, instead of not existing. And their reproductive sucesss varies depending on what environment they happen to be in. Because they are adapted to particular properties of their respective environments.
… where is the problem?
Whoo boy. Have you ever read The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins?
Mung,
I think the word you are looking for is ‘trolling’.
I have not.
Believe it or not, I have only ever read one book by Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene). I tried to read The God Delusion but grew bored pretty quickly.
Henceforth, when you comment on the Weasel program, I shall take what you say about it with a grain of salt. 🙂
I find it amusing. Amusing we are still discussing “Weasel” over thirty years on. No-one tries to tear Dawkins’ “Biomorphs” up. I wonder if that is because they are a better effort at modelling evolutionary processes. Evolutionary models have evolved since Weasel!
The Biomorphs are rather obviously intelligently selected and have nothing to do with actual evolutionary processes. Do you know of anywhere on the web where I can find his Biomorphs code or recreations of it?
“You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate’s trade.”
– Richard Dawkins
Reading some of the comments in this thread you would come away with the distinct impression that selection just is cumulative and that time is irrelevant.
It appears to me that for Dawkins cumulative selection is something that requires extended periods of time.
Mung,
I can’t locate or call to mind any such comments. Me, I would come away with the distinct impression that you ‘n’ p will try anything.
Well, of course Dawkins came up with the model. Maps and territories. There is a lot of equivocating between various models of aspects of evolution and the reality of evolution.
Well, that may be your view. I find playing with the biomorph program quite illustrative of the selection process.
Did you try my link?
Alan Fox,
The name of the op is BETTING ON THE WEASEL.
Artificial selection, sure, why not?
Mung, Selection. Artificial vs natural is a false dichotomy! 🙂
colewd, I see that, Bill. Your point?
If you consider nature is designed then things could be both artificial and natural.
Alan Fox,
What else is out there that simulates “how” natural selection might evolve a new gene.
Single-step selection vs cumulative selection is a false dichotomy!
Good that I have the book then. I’ve now read the chapter where he talks about cumulative vs single step-selection and found these nice bits:
– The Blind Watchmaker p45.
The Blind Watchmaker p49.
I really should get my shit together and read The Blind Watchmaker, I forgot how brilliant a writer Dawkins is. Hate him all you want but he knows how to get his point across.
Sidewalks and stairs are a false dichotomy.
Yes but that just makes it all the more perplexing why IDcreationists think single-step selection is the only alternative to Design when they try to make it appear as if evolution HAS to work as if it was by single-step selection. Dawkins is absolutely right.
Yes what a terrible quote. In order to be an advocate for something, you have to know how to do persuasion. Man what an evil person that Dawkins character is.
Dawkins is equivocating over the meaning of selection. Selection is iterative, by definition. Single-step selection is not iterative, by Dawkins own admission. He’s comparing two different things and using the same term for both.
Also, just because each generation is the basis for the next generation it doesn’t follow that the process is not random. That’s simply a non-sequitur.
No you would not.
It appears to me that for Dawkins cumulative selection is something that requires an amount of time that scale with the particulars of the problem in question, but that in all relevant and realistic cases, will massively outperform the IDcreationist strawman of evolution that portrays it as just random chance without selection.
Further Dawkins equates single-step selection with chance, which is a false equivalence.
So once again we get back to random genetic drift. Each generation is likewise the basis for the next, and each new generation builds on the random genetic changes of the previous generation. Cumulative random genetic drift.
Is there some reason that cumulative random genetic drift cannot bring about the same amazing designs as cumulative selection?
No, he’s not using the same term for both as both terms consist of multiple instead of a single word.
Single-step selection.
and
Cumulative selection.
Since he both defines what he means by both terms, and consistently uses the full term (‘single-step selection’ or ‘cumulative selection’) when contrasting with the other, there is never any equivocation going on.
Can I ask you how you understand the word random?
Yes yes. Back to evolution as a problem solver. How to evolve an eye.
Chance + cumulative selection + time + wash-rinse-repeat = poof! an eye!
Why can’t cumulative random genetic drift evolve an eye?
You realize, don’t you, that both water and air are fluids?
So if evolutionists find similarities they can always blame it on the fact that both dogs and fish operate in a fluid environment. lol
It can’t be a false equivalence if he simply defines the term to be equivalent to chance. That’s generally how it is when you make up a new term.
You may question why the hell he would make up a new term for a concept with an already well-known word for it, which I would join in, but that’s rather substantially different from saying there’s a false equivalence at work.
Yes, that’s how genetics work. The effects are cumulative. Which makes it all the more perplexing why creationists think evolution is like having to generate the entire human genome from scratch in a single event, as opposed to incrementally over millions of generations from millions of ancestors.
And they really do think like that. I had an IDcreationist come to another forum and ask how the hell the whole human genome could evolve, with it’s ~3 billion base-pairs. What are the odds of generating a human genome at random?
The solution to that fatuously stupid question is found immediately in genetics. The cause of any particular genome, is the one it was copied from, only deviating with a few mutations in it. So the explanation for the vast majority of the genome is immediately alighted upon: The one it was copied from.
This is why the mere mechanism of the way inheritance works constitutes a complete refutation of IDcreationis probability calculations. Simply put, a person with their critical faculties intact, cannot rationally entertain IDcreationist probability calculations intellectually when they understand how genetics work.
It seems to me if there is a total absense of selection, then that is akin to saying there is no feedback from the environment about what is a successful adaptation or not, and as such no particular thing is retained because of it’s adaptive properties, so everything changes in random directions, instead of being biased towards functionality and reproduction.
There fixed it for you.
Just to make sure I understand what you’re trying to say: You are thoroughly perplexed that anyone would say a fish is more adapted to an aquatic environment, than a dog, and that the dog in turn is more adapted to life on dry land? Okay Mung.
I’ve said before, the Dawkins I find on reading his popular works (and his less popular The Extended Phenotype) on biology is far from the demonic parody of his critics.
It’s like he’s writing just for you Rumraket. 🙂
Nah I think it’s for people who are intellectually curious in general, not just me.
for all I know it may have contributed, problem?
LoL. No wonder people think what they do about the chance-based nature of evolution.
And no wonder people think evolution depends on the origin of life. If you haven’t explained current living things from the ground up starting with things simple enough to have come about by a single act of random chance alone then you haven’t explained living things.
This is exactly what Bill argues to question common descent. So if you think that’s a good argument, why do you believe in common descent? Do we need to know every detail about the tree of life, from the ground up, all nodes included plus the origin of life, or else common descent explains nothing?
Do you perhaps believe in common descent for the wrong reasons?
And could you tell us exactly why you do accept common descent?
Mung,
And yet there appears to be no explanation on the horizon better then “the designer did it” from the ID crowd. The funny thing is we do know many explanations regarding living things. We can look far far into history and trace their evolution over time. And not a single one of the explanations generated so far involves intelligent design as defined by the ID crowd. So I suppose you can comfort yourself with the hope that this time unlike every other time previously, this time your intelligent designer (the abrahamic god) is necessary.
I mean, roll that dice enough times and sometime your number has to come up, right?
Are you asking me?
Same way as Richard Dawkins and Allan Miller.