Tom English: (If Mung does not know that authors at Evolution News and Views often disagree with one another, but never point out their disagreements, then I’ve given him way too much credit. For instance, Dembski told us that “evolutionary search” really does search for targets. But Meyer and Axe have both gone out of their ways to explain that “evolutionary search” actually does not search.)
Did Tom ever reveal his sources?
New article up at Evolution News and Views:
Douglas Axe on Evolution’s Search Problem
Are they flat out lying?
Joe Felsenstein,
There is NO evolutionary algorithm that isn’t a search. I believe Mung has challenged you in the past to show one, and you have be unable to do so.
I don’t believe in Godless evolution. It’s not like God is hands off in some evolution and hands on in other evolution. So I reject the language of “intervention.”
The world is not out there acting on it’s own without God, with God occasionally popping in to tweak things. That’s Dawkins and his Blind Watchmaker.
Is his thesis not available for anyone to read? It would be nice to see it finally published though.
I swear I’m human! 😉
Well, they can’t allow scrutiny of their “research.”
What if it doesn’t lead to Jesus?
That, and the thumbscrews they’d otherwise face for daring to deny Darwin.
Glen Davidson
Do you believe in “islands of function” or not?
But I’ve not claimed that there is no gradual pathway. I’m not sure that Behe has ever ruled out a gradual pathway either.
The question is, does evolution just manage to stumble upon it by sheer dumb luck. That’s what the debate is over.
The same question can be asked of the origin of life, where Darwinian evolution isn’t even relevant. Was it a one time event of pure happenstance virtually indistinguishable from a miracle?
Is it illegitimate to speak of the OOL as a search? Or is it only after you have life that there’s no more searching allowed?
Mung,
Why did your god deliberately evolve parasites that blind children? Is it so that they can learn a lesson that otherwise could not have been taught, as FMM claims with cancer?
Everyone believes in islands of function, including me. Not every conceivable combination of nucleotide sequences produces something functional.
Islands don’t matter when you have a god-boat that can navigate between such islands. So don’t expect an answer.
Perhaps one day you will be able to ask Him yourself. What is it with atheists and their fixation with God?
Thanks for clarifying. In that case your version of what actually happened is completely indistinguishable from unguided evolution.
I’m not going to argue with you over the meaning of things like “search”. Prof. Felsestein has already addressed that.
More on the logical implications of your view: if you think that evolution doesn’t “stumble upon” functionality by sheer luck, even though there are pathways that allow for it, and if you think that…
does that mean that you think all mutations are directed? It seems to me that’s the only possible way to reconcile your premises
By “islands of function” I mean that the fitness landscape is scarce in functionality and can’t be explored in a gradual, step-wise pathway. You already said you don’t believe that. Is that right?
He knows exactly what you mean.
My god is more powerful them Mung’s puny god. My god can make a universe where life arises, or not. Mung’s puny god can only make a universe that stops working without constant intervention.
The funny thing about all this is they apparently see no mismatch between a god that goes out of it’s way to make it look as if things evolved without any intervention at all, and a god that lights up bushes and destroys whole cities as object lessons.
I think it’s because their god is bi-polar. It’s the most obvious conclusion that fits all the facts. Simultaneously hiding behind ‘random’ mutations and then getting out there in full force with the broom of destruction!
OMagain,
Your body is filled with Jesus killers.
Just like a Darwinist (or anybody else, of course).
Glen Davidson
Citation or link? “I believe” is not good enough.
Or by “search” do you mean any simulation of evolution where genotypes have different fitnesses? That would certainly make your point valid, if silly.
Amazing how a thread can so quickly devolve into yet another instance of atheists railing against a God they claim to lack any belief in or even know how to define. Is that what atheists do on Sundays?
ETA: Call it Atheism’s God Problem.
We just want to know what your alternative hypothesis entails, to evaluate it.
So Joe, take the following:
and
These are claims about what evolution can do.
ETA: “…scientists’ conventional interpretation [is that evolution is] an undirected process of change deriving from random variation of offspring and natural selection.” (English and Greenwood, p. 8)
Is it not relevant then to ask whether Avida is a search algorithm and to ask for relevance if evolution is not a search?
Feel free to start a thread to discuss it. I’d prefer this one not get hijacked by atheism’s God problem.
Why bother? you obviously have no intention to address the logical conclusions of your premises. It’s not “atheism’s God” that we want to evaluate, it’s yours.
But with what you have stated so far, it’s pretty obvious your designer must produce every single mutation out there, because you reject the random aspect of evolution and that’s mutation. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge the consequences of your beliefs is very telling
Of course Mung is not a creationist, right?
Yet how often does the Design Intervention have to occur to have his theory work? Once every species? Once every mutation? At what point does Intelligent Design simply become old-fashioned creationism?
Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics will appeal to enthusiasts in science, engineering and apologetics, as well as those interested in the information-theoretic components of closely examined evolution.
I can’t wait. Rush to order your copy now!
In the classical sense of the word, I certainly am.
Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity
Joe Felsenstein,
About once every time a new protein function appears if Axe’s probability estimates are correct. Unless there is a sequence generator in the cell we have not yet identified.
What Design Intervention?
But function is context specific? So a single protein could have many as-yet unknown functions, right? So does that change the calculation at all?
And if not? How wrong does Axe have to be before no designer intervention is required at all?
and
So how does this creationism thingie work without constant Design Intervention?
Or is it all “front-loaded”?
Mung,
Perhaps next time you’d have better luck next time if titling an OP something exciting like Evolution’s Search Problem you actually put some effort into making the body of the OP interesting also. You know, make a case for who you think is lying, or not lying and why. Then perhaps people might be less interested in your answers to the bare questions you ask.
If evolution has a search problem, what is the solution to that? Or do you just care about getting one person to admit another person is lying or wrong or whatever?
Mysterious ways?
If it’s constant then it’s not interventionist. Interventionism implies that it’s only occasional. My God is ever present. He doesn’t sometimes uphold all things in existence and sometimes not uphold all things in existence.
Though I suppose one could believe that God re-creates the world every plank interval.
Like using atheists to fund a Baptist organization? Sure, why not.
And how does he do that? Once again, if you accept Axe’s “islands of function” you’re essentially left with two options:
1. If you accept the evidence for common descent, then you must believe at some point organisms give birth to something with an entirely new function. Perhaps, phenotypically, with characteristics that don’t look anything like their parents’, like some bird ancestors giving birth to something with wings and capable of flying. Again, almost like dogs giving birth to cats
2. Otherwise, the designer must create those new functions in organisms specially created ex-nihilo
OMagain,
Just a swag but maybe if he is off 70 orders of magnitude you can start thinking about evolving the eukaryotic cell without a sequence generator.
Constant intervention is still intervention, but if you want to call it something else, it doesn’t make any difference.
So their god could be replaced by mindless rules?
Ok….
What do you say to critics of that work who say it does not represent a realistic scenario?
Your orders of magnitude is irrelevant. All that is necessary for evolution to work is that it is possible to modify any functional sequence without destroying the function. In other words, if alleles are possible, evolution is possible.
Read Wagner.
I’ve answered this several times already. Yet your rhetoric suggests that Mung has got this incisive question that nobody can handle. Here’s a question for you: Why should I give you the time of day, when you play the tiresome games you do?
It occurs to me that you have not even paid the ante. I insist that you explain to us what computer scientists mean by algorithm.
It’s been amusing to watch you ignore Dembski in this thread, after quoting my contrast of him with Axe and Meyer. (Axe explains that evolution does not search in the ordinary sense of the term, as he has before. So why are you making a big deal of my delay in giving you a link to where he said it before? I genuinely cannot make sense of your behavior.) Dembski was utterly pathetic in his swan song at the University of Chicago, attempting to use the number of Google hits for “evolutionary search” as evidence that biologists have been saying that evolution really does search. Dembski characterized evolution as the “teleological search for teleology” (or some such — I’m quoting from memory). The Conservation of Information Theorem predicates a target. To make things perfectly clear, Dembski, Ewert, and Marks explained that they addressed targeted search. Why the hell would they talk about the active information of the search if they were not talking about a literal search for the target? I don’t think you’re dumb, Mung. So I have to believe that you do know that Dembski and Axe are saying the opposite about search.
The fact of the matter is that term evolutionary search has itself engendered a great deal of confusion. The smartest guy you ever had in the ID movement, save Johnson, was confused terribly by it: “… if gold rust, what then will iron do?”
Because it’s stupid to explain that what you mean by search is not what people ordinarily mean, but instead exploration, and then refuse to use the term exploration. The burden is not on me to explain why you should use exploration — Axe has already used it to convey what he actually means. The burden is on you to justify continued use of the term search — particularly after Dembski, Ewert, and Marks used it in the ordinary sense.
OMagain,
I think more work needs to be done to determine what scenario is correct. The interesting part of Axe’s experiment is that it used a real evolutionary mechanism; the resistance to penicillin.
In this case one binding substrate was required but we know in nuclear proteins and multi protein complex’s that multiple binding is required so my guess is there is a range of probabilities depending on the function of the protein.
In a discussion with Diogenes on Larry Moran’s site he argued that sequence specificity was related to the size of the binding substrate.
Colewd, you get a lot of mileage out of pretending the only types of mutation that exist are single nucleotide polymorphisms and gene duplication.
Besides, Axe’s probability estimates most definitely aren’t correct. There are a host of experimental observations that should be unbelievably unlikely if they are.
petrushka,
If the cells have the ability to develop complex sequences, then evolution is certainly possible. I have read Wagner and believe he understands the challenge of generating novel sequences.
Mung,
As I’ve told you before, in “no free lunch” analysis, there are two components of a black-box search:
1. a sampling process, and
2. a transformation of the sample to an output.
I prefer to say that a space of alternatives is sampled by an evolutionary process. I’ve seen some biologists do the same in technical papers (but suspect that it is not common practice). As I recall, Joe Felsenstein is fine with my usage (which is not to say that he endorses it). There is nothing in biological evolution that corresponds to the second component.
An evolutionary algorithm does more than to simulate evolution.
You will have to cite
Wagner on that. I think you are dead wrong.
Every generation of everything has novel sequences. that is one of Wagner’s points.
What are alleles?
How can there be alleles if neutral or nearly neutral changes to sequences aren’t possible or don’t happen?
Please demonstrate that there is a challenge in that challenge. And by that I don’t mean you quote some sort of number.
I mean show with a calculation that that number is actually a problem.
phoodoo,
What would bug you most – to say that evolution is a search, or to say that it isn’t? Whatever your answer, that‘s what it is.
Mung,
I know, right? It’s not like Intelligent Design has anything to do with an actual Designer.