Betting on the Weasel

… 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.

664 thoughts on “Betting on the Weasel

  1. colewd,

    I think Keith’s claim is that the Weasel program validates cumulative selection in biology.

    No, Bill. That’s just you making shit up.

    If you want to know what I’m claiming, read my actual words.

  2. Allan Miller: Those are the options? You are either the carrier of a trait, or a carrier of a non-trait? Jeez. You either have a bucket, or a non-bucket.

    phoodoo and logic, like oil and water

  3. keiths,

    Cumulative selection works. It’s powerful. Weasel demonstrates that power.

    Cumulative selection also puts paid to the goofy junkyard tornado arguments that IDers are so fond of

    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.

  4. Allan Miller: Which is why your nonsense about individuals is so pointless.

    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.

  5. colewd: I think Keith’s claim is that the Weasel program validates cumulative selection in biology. How can this be the case if it has little resemblance to real biology?

    Because the aspect in which it DOES resemble real biology, is in cumulative selection. Doh!

  6. Rumraket: 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.

  7. colewd: What Weasel does is validate that you need to know the sequence in order to find it by trial and error

    no it doesn’t, try to keep up for fuck’s sake

  8. keiths: In other words, it selects the fittest among the progeny, where fitness is defined in terms of closeness to the target phrase.

    So you see, phoodoo, how fitness always means the same thing.

  9. Rumraket: Because the aspect in which it DOES resemble real biology, is in cumulative selection. Doh!

    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?

    Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining the distinction between single-single-step selection and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective ‘breeding’, the mutant ‘progeny’ phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress towards some distant goal seems, with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of short term selection. The ‘watchmaker’ that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal.

    We can change our computer model to take account of this point.

    Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (p. 72). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

    The “cumulative selection” in Weasel isn’t like real biology at all and even Dawkins knows it.

  10. Mung,

    Allan’s newest iteration is:

    more strictly, the mean number of organismal cycles accruing to carriers of a trait.

    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?

  11. OMagain: phoodoo, why don’t you pick a scientific paper you say is incorrect then I can help you write a rebuttal paper?

    Do you promise to list phoodoo as principal author?

  12. phoodoo: 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?

    No because of the evidence. Things aren’t true just because I say so. 🙂

    In the Weasel program, the selection is cumulative, because you know the target

    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.

    In biology, there is no target, thus there is no ONE path.

    There is also no ONE path in the weasel. There is one target yes, but many paths to it.

    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.

    ..w..what? Did anyone follow that meaningless gibberish?

    So they are two completely different concepts of accumulating, and you are trying to call them the same thing.

    So you are wrong.

    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.

  13. Mung: Do you think this is obvious?

    Yes.

    Because it’s not obvious to me.

    Okay.

    Do you think you should support this claim

    I think I already have.

    or that we should just take your word for it?

    We shouldn’t just take anyone’s word for anything, we should think for ourselves and look at the evidence.

    The “cumulative selection” in Weasel isn’t like real biology at all and even Dawkins knows it.

    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.

  14. phoodoo: more strictly, the mean number of organismal cycles accruing to carriers of a trait.

    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!)

  15. dazz: phoodoo and logic, like oil and water

    You can make oil and water mix with an surfactant. I fear against hope that there is no such mediator for phoodoo and logic.

  16. Rumraket: Where did you get this idea? I can’t find it in The Blind Watchmaker.

    It’s there.

    I am aware that my characterization of a complex object — statistically improbable in a direction that is specified not with hindsight — may seem idiosyncratic. So, too, may seem my characterization of physics as the study of simplicity. If you prefer some other way of defining complexity, I don’t care and I would be happy to go along with your definition for the sake of discussion. But what I do care about is that, whatever we choose to call the quality of being statistically-improbable-in-a-direction-specified-without-hindsight, it is an important quality that needs a special effort of explanation. It is the quality that characterizes biological objects as opposed to the objects of physics. The kind of explanation we come up with must not contradict the laws of physics. Indeed it will make use of the laws of physics, and nothing more than the laws of physics. But it will deploy the laws of physics in a special way that is not ordinarily discussed in physics textbooks. That special way is Darwin’s way. I shall introduce its fundamental essence in Chapter 3 under the title of cumulative selection.

    Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (p. 24). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

    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.

  17. Rumraket,

    Because the aspect in which it DOES resemble real biology, is in cumulative selection. Doh!

    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?

  18. phoodoo: So you see, you can’t really know the fitness of anything, until they have gone through enough cycles to go extinct.

    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.

  19. colewd: If cumulative selection is valid why can’t you build a working model without a target sequence?

    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.

  20. Mung: It’s there.

    I am aware that my characterization of a complex object — statistically improbable in a direction that is specified not with hindsight — may seem idiosyncratic. So, too, may seem my characterization of physics as the study of simplicity. If you prefer some other way of defining complexity, I don’t care and I would be happy to go along with your definition for the sake of discussion. But what I do care about is that, whatever we choose to call the quality of being statistically-improbable-in-a-direction-specified-without-hindsight, it is an important quality that needs a special effort of explanation. It is the quality that characterizes biological objects as opposed to the objects of physics. The kind of explanation we come up with must not contradict the laws of physics. Indeed it will make use of the laws of physics, and nothing more than the laws of physics. But it will deploy the laws of physics in a special way that is not ordinarily discussed in physics textbooks. That special way is Darwin’s way. I shall introduce its fundamental essence in Chapter 3 under the title of cumulative selection.

    Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (p. 24). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

    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.

    He’s not talking about the Weasel there buddy. Sorry. 🙂

  21. keiths: Cumulative selection works. It’s powerful. Weasel demonstrates that power.

    So? I wrote an algorithm that was even more powerful than Weasel. You weren’t paying attention then and you still aren’t.

    keiths: Cumulative selection also puts paid to the goofy junkyard tornado arguments that IDers are so fond of.

    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!

  22. Rumraket: He’s not talking about the Weasel there buddy.

    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?

  23. colewd: Rumraket,

    Because the aspect in which it DOES resemble real biology, is in cumulative selection. Doh!

    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 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.

    If cumulative selection is valid why can’t you build a working model without a target sequence?

    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.

  24. colewd: If cumulative selection is valid why can’t you build a working model without a target sequence?

    already done, try to keep up

  25. Rumraket:

    Trivially false, as we know the relative fitness of E coli

    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.

  26. phoodoo: How can you expect them to have such a model, it won’t work.

    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.

  27. Rumraket: …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.

    I bet keiths is going to disagree with you again. So in this scenario, did cumulative selection simply cease, and if so, why?

  28. Mung: Rumraket: He’s not talking about the Weasel there buddy.

    So?

    Thank you for this tacit concession.

    He’s setting the stage.

    For the general subject of the book, not the Weasel program in particular.

    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?

    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.

    CHAPTER 3
    ACCUMULATING SMALL CHANGE

    We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin’s answer, is by gradual, step-by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point. The cumulative process is directed by nonrandom survival. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of this cumulative selection as a fundamentally nonrandom process.

    -p43.

    (…bla bla analogies about sieving and stuff about probability calculations…)

    What matters is the difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step selection: about a million million million million million years. This is more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far existed. Actually it would be fairer just to say that, in comparison with the time it would take either a monkey or a randomly programmed computer to type our target phrase, the total age of the universe so far is a negligibly small quantity, so small as to be well within the margin of errorfor this sort of back-of-an-envelope calculation. Whereas the time taken for a computer working randomly but with the constraint of cumulative selection to perform the same task is of the same order as humans ordinarily can understand, between 11 seconds and the time it takes to have lunch. There is a big difference, then, between cumulative selection (in which each improvement, however slight, is used as a basis for future building), and single-step selection (in which each new ‘try’ is a fresh one). If evolutionary progress had had to rely on single-step selection, it would never have got anywhere. If, however, there was any way in which the necessary conditions for cumulative selection could have been set up by the blind forces of nature, strange and wonderful might have been the consequences. As a matter of fact that is exactly what happened on this planet, and we ourselves are among the most recent, if not the strangest and most wonderful, of those consequences. It is amazing that you can still read calculations like my haemoglobin calculation, used as though they constituted arguments against Darwin’s theory. The people who do this, often expert in their own field, astronomy or whatever it may be, seem sincerely to believe that Darwinism explains living organization in terms of chance -‘single- step selection’ – alone. This belief, that Darwinian evolution is ‘random’, is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is intessentially nonrandom.

    -p49.

  29. MungJoe 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

    no, he isn’t, he’s explained ad nauseam that all one needs is differential fitness

  30. phoodoo: Do you know the relative fitness of dog?

    Relative to what?

    You don’t know the fitness of anything

    Sure I do.

    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.

    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?

    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 could, but why? I wouldn’t do that as it seems to me a meaningless exercise.

    You have proved nothing.

    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

  31. Rumraket: No, the weasel is an argument for evolution.

    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.

  32. Rumraket: 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?

    Who chooses the medium? Anyone?

  33. Mung: Rumraket: …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.

    I bet keiths is going to disagree with you again. So in this scenario, did cumulative selection simply cease, and if so, why?

    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.

  34. bwaaaah, bwaaaaaaaah, bwaaaah, mods where are you? Mung and poopoo are being mean to me!11!!1!

    lulz

  35. phoodoo: Who chooses the medium? Anyone?

    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.

  36. Mung: 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.

    An argument for the efficacy of cumulative selection over random guessing is also an argument for evolution. My mind has not changed.

  37. keiths: Dawkins’ point is that evolution works by cumulative selection, not by single-step selecion.

    keiths agrees with Rumraket1 but disagrees with Rumraket2.

  38. phoodoo:
    dazz,

    What do you mean, I just asked you a question, do you know exactly how dumb you are?Its a question.

    I took some IQ tests to check if I was dumb, and they all turned up negative, so there’s that

  39. Rumraket: 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.

    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.

  40. colewd,

    What Weasel does is validate that you need to know the sequence in order to find it by trial and error.

    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’

  41. Rumraket: Did anyone follow that meaningless gibberish?

    Yes. I started on the path to Pittsburgh just the other day. But then I had to go to work.

  42. dazz: already done, try to keep up

    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.

  43. dazz: I took some IQ tests to check if I was dumb, and they all turned up negative, so there’s that

    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.

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