… 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.
colewd,
No, Bill. That’s just you making shit up.
If you want to know what I’m claiming, read my actual words.
phoodoo and logic, like oil and water
keiths,
Cumulative selection is a biological term. In biology an evolving gene does not have a target sequence. How does Weasel demonstrate that power since it is working with a known sequence?
What Weasel does is validate that you need to know the sequence in order to find it by trial and error. As Alan Fox said we 30 years past and this is what we are talking about.
Huh? You are acknowledging that there is no measure of fitness of individuals or there IS a measure of fitness of individuals?
Can you try to stick to one viewpoint at the very least.
Because the aspect in which it DOES resemble real biology, is in cumulative selection. Doh!
No, more nonsense from you. Is this the same way you make up facts about how you know someones religious beliefs, because you say so?
In the Weasel program, the selection is cumulative, because you know the target, so there is a path that leads to one target.
In biology, there is no target, thus there is no ONE path. So if I say I am going to accumulate a path towards Pittsburgh, but I am also going to head towards Sri Lanka, and also perhaps to Venus-then you won’t keep heading towards Pittsburgh.
So they are two completely different concepts of accumulating, and you are trying to call them the same thing.
So you are wrong.
no it doesn’t, try to keep up for fuck’s sake
So you see, phoodoo, how fitness always means the same thing.
Do you think this is obvious? Because it’s not obvious to me. Do you think you should support this claim, or that we should just take your word for it?
The “cumulative selection” in Weasel isn’t like real biology at all and even Dawkins knows it.
Mung,
Allan’s newest iteration is:
But hey, it all means the same thing. You say potato…(fuck off Allan).
I wonder if the mean number of organismal cycles accruing to carriers of no traits get counted? Or more than one trait? Or non-carriers of multiple traits?
Do you promise to list phoodoo as principal author?
No because of the evidence. Things aren’t true just because I say so. 🙂
That’s not why selection is cumulative in the weasel. It is cumulative because every generation works from the results of the previous generation. That is why selection in the Weasel is cumulative.
And that is also how cumulative selection works in nature: By working on the results of the previous generation.
There is also no ONE path in the weasel. There is one target yes, but many paths to it.
..w..what? Did anyone follow that meaningless gibberish?
No, they are two related concepts of cumulative selection, and are alike exactly in that both of them work from the results of the previous genration.
So I am right.
Yes.
Okay.
I think I already have.
We shouldn’t just take anyone’s word for anything, we should think for ourselves and look at the evidence.
Yes it is, in exactly the way it is supposed to be: selection works on the results of the previous generation cumulatively.
Weasel is not like real biology in it’s totality, but it IS like cumulative selection, in that the selection really is cumulative.
So you see, you can’t really know the fitness of anything, until they have gone through enough cycles to go extinct.
So in the case of the 500 dogs, of course I can tell you the fittest. Just wait a few hundred years, when they are all dead, then I will tell you which one was fit.
(Note-another small problem, dam, how do we know it was one of the 500 that was fit, and not not the son of one of the 500 that was fit, since he has a different genome then the father but he is carrying on his fathers genes? Oh, well, he still carries a trait right? Or he is a carrier of a non-trait. Or a non-carrier of a trait. Whatever, the point is, if you want to be fit, you better hope your great grandchildren don’t get a mutation that makes them unfit, because that is bad for your health. Very bad!)
You can make oil and water mix with an surfactant. I fear against hope that there is no such mediator for phoodoo and logic.
It’s there.
You see, I take into account the actual context. Unlike keiths. This is what the whole argument over cumulative selection is for. It’s not just about refuting creationist claims about tornadoes and junkyards, as some people would try to have it.
Rumraket,
Cumulative selection in biology does not have a target sequence to compare to. How will the sequence not just drift to non function with random changes and no target to compare those changes to?
If cumulative selection is valid why can’t you build a working model without a target sequence?
Trivially false, as we know the relative fitness of E coli at many generations going all the way back to the beginning of the experiment over 20 years and 67.000 generations ago. And they’re not extinct.
Don’t ask that question, they say its not fair. How can you expect them to have such a model, it won’t work. That doesn’t mean it can’t work.
He’s not talking about the Weasel there buddy. Sorry. 🙂
So? I wrote an algorithm that was even more powerful than Weasel. You weren’t paying attention then and you still aren’t.
Snore. It was a red herring before and it still is. But you know where you’re going and by golly you’re going to get there no matter what. Facts be damned!
So? He’s setting the stage. You think he just pulled Weasel out of his hat in chapter three and it had nothing to do with what he wrote in the previous two chapters?
Really?
If you don’t model actual organisms and an actual environment, wherein the orgnanisms have actual modeled or simulated properties, then you are correct that in such a case, if we don’t make a target, there will not be something to which selection can tune the string of symbols and so it will just drift around randomly.
You can, and it has been done. Such a program exists and it’s called Avida. You can run Avida without any targets and cumulative selection will still take place in it.
already done, try to keep up
Rumraket:
Rumraket,
Do you know the relative fitness of dog?
You don’t know the fitness of anything, you put bacteria in a dish, you decide what you will use to kill it, and after it is dead, you say, see, it wasn’t fit. But I could put the same bacteria in a dish, from 25,000 generations ago, let them prosper, and say, see they are fit.
You have proved nothing.
If you changed the program to have a short-term “target” it would still have a target. LoL. But what exactly would it be that accumulated? With Weasel and a long-term goal we can clearly see what accumulates, and how many generations it takes, and we can see it perform better than single-step selection. But life isn’t like that.
Joe keeps wanting me to wager that blind search performs as well as cumulative selection, but as near as I can tell he’s counting on a distant ideal target, and that’s something he’s not allowed to do.
I bet keiths is going to disagree with you again. So in this scenario, did cumulative selection simply cease, and if so, why?
Thank you for this tacit concession.
For the general subject of the book, not the Weasel program in particular.
He quite clearly says that the Weasel is a refutation the creationist strawman of evolution as nothing but random chance as with cumulative selection, it succeeds in very short time where random guessing is almost incomprehensibly unlikely to.
-p43.
(…bla bla analogies about sieving and stuff about probability calculations…)
-p49.
Rumraket,
Ha, you are still trying to claim you know what Avida does.
More Rumraket made up facts.
no, he isn’t, he’s explained ad nauseam that all one needs is differential fitness
Relative to what?
Sure I do.
I do? Why do I do this? Why don’t I just measure the reproductive success of different generation populations in a flask environment with minimal medium and compare them to each other?
You could, but why? I wouldn’t do that as it seems to me a meaningless exercise.
If I do what you say, I agree, then I prove nothing.
If instead of doing what you say, I do instead what Lenski does, then in fact I DO measure the relative reproductive success of populations at different generations.
lol
I’m not trying to claim it, I am claiming it.
It seems like Weasel is an argument for whatever you want it to be an argument for according to the exigencies of the moment. Please make up your mind.
phoo-poe-doonnig-kruger effect™
Who chooses the medium? Anyone?
Do you know how dumb you are?
Someone took away his picture blocks.
Maybe he will but that’s fine, I’m not here because I want to hear only things I agree with.
Anyway, to answer your question. I think that is actually not that easy to answer as I think it becomes a matter of looking at the actual code of the Weasel program to see how it works.
And I’m not exaclty sure on the details there. Assuming it works like phoodoo and yourself implied it does, by generating a number (500?) of the same string with mutations in it, and then it compares them to the target string, picks the best fit and discards the rest. Then when we say we remove the target in the Weasel, I’m supposing that we alter the code of the program such that, instead of picking the “best fit” string from among some larger set of mutated strings, it just picks one at random.
In that case, there’s still something being selected in favor of something else, and copied to the next generation and all the others are discarded. So in that case there’s still “selection” of a sort. And it still works on the basis of the previous generation, so it’s also still cumulative. So we get what you could call aimless cumulative selection. But there is no feedback from an environment, so it isn’t biased towards adaptation.
bwaaaah, bwaaaaaaaah, bwaaaah, mods where are you? Mung and poopoo are being mean to me!11!!1!
lulz
I do. I’d be willing to try different types, and then I could measure the relative reproductive success in different mediums, and I expect it would be different for different mediums. But that isn’t an issue with the concept of fitness.
In the same way that different cars might travel at different velocities on different surfaces, but that doesn’t mean the idea of faster and slower cars is nonsensical, it just means that when we say one is faster than the other, we are saying that in the context of a specific surface on which they drive.
Same with relative reproductive success.
An argument for the efficacy of cumulative selection over random guessing is also an argument for evolution. My mind has not changed.
dazz,
What do you mean, I just asked you a question, do you know exactly how dumb you are? Its a question.
keiths agrees with Rumraket1 but disagrees with Rumraket2.
I took some IQ tests to check if I was dumb, and they all turned up negative, so there’s that
Is it your position then that even if nothing at all accumulated it would still be cumulative selection, because every generation works from the results of the previous generation?
See, if you ask me what it is that accumulates in Weasel, it would be the total number of letters that match the target phrase.
colewd,
You are one confused dude.
What Weasel shows is that a target phrase that is virtually unreachable by single-step selection can easily be reached by cumulative selection, given a fitness function that rewards partial matches proportionately. It therefore does exactly what it was designed to do — demonstrate the power of cumulative selection
Given cumulative selection’s demonstrated effectiveness, ID proponents are reduced to claiming that real biological fitness surfaces don’t support cumulative selection (via.the failed ‘islands of function’ argument, for instance). Unfortunately for them (and you), the evidence points in the opposite direction.
A good place to start is with Wagner’s book, which you either refuse to read or cannot understand. If the former, acknowledge it. If the latter, ask questions. People here are likely to help as long as they think you are genuinely trying to learn.
See this OP also:
Things That IDers Don’t Understand, Part 2a – Evolution is not stranded on ‘islands of function’
Yes. I started on the path to Pittsburgh just the other day. But then I had to go to work.
keiths wrote a DriftWeasel program. It too showed the power of cumulative selection. I forgot how many generations it took to reach the target phrase. But that’s no matter, because it really was powerful.
I completely believe that to be true, you took some IQ tests and they turned up negative.
Its probably one of the first times this has ever happened.
I owe you a beer for that one, lol.