I’m all in favor of mocking stupidity, and here’s something definitely worth mocking.
In arguing for evolution, author Alan R. Rogers appeals to the Nilsson and Pelger paper on how simple it is to evolve an eye. He writes:
If eyes evolve, they must do so often and easily. Could it really be so easy?
Dan-Eric Nilsson and Susanne Pelger have answered this question. They constructed an evolutionary story much like the one that I told above.
– The Evidence for Evolution. p. 42.
And what did he write about the story that he told above?
This story is of course a fabrication. p. 40
I’m serious! Can it get any more stupid than that?
Do evolutionists believe fabrications? When it comes to how to evolve and eye it would certainly seem so.
Def: a (1) : strength or energy exerted or brought to bear : cause of motion or change :
I assign it a fitness of 0.333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
To infinity and beyond!
So natural selection is the cause.
So there you have it folks. Some evolutionists claim the eye is improbable, other’s claim it ain’t. My takeaway from this is that evolutionary theory itself doesn’t say which it is.
What difference does it make whether you call it a “force” or not?
Joe, in your book which I quote from above, where do you define fitness? I have it on good authority that evolutionists always define their terms. Yet a search on the term in your book fails to reveal an actual definition.
Joe, in your book which I quote from above, where do you define gradually? I have it on good authority that evolutionists always define their terms. Yet a search on the term in your book fails to reveal an actual definition.
He didn’t even define book
If it is referred to as a force it would be a cause , of course it can also be a effect of a mechanism of design, like the environment or a subtle designer.
Umm…Everything?
Good point , sum divided by the the number of data points, though reading about the calculation it is some heavy duty math. Second one would need to know what point phoodoo was making to determine if the analogy fails miserably, any idea?
Why?
Its not my analogy, so why would you need to know my point to know if it fails? You made an analogy about a point you don’t know, and you are hoping it applies?
Section II.2. In the following two sections I cover simple cases of overlapping generations and diploidy. I do not give a perfectly general definition — because for more complicated models things get intractable.
Note also the distinction between relative and absolute fitnesses, which I have not gotten into in the comments here.
I did not discuss that issue in the book as far as I can recall. It would come up most naturally late in Chapter II after the material on kin selection.
Does this require that we read your entire book to know why you are referring to discussions about overlapping generation and diploids, as a response to a definition of fitness?
A definition for which you state you don’t give because it gets intractable?
Humans, birds, termites and body cells are observed to be intelligent agents in that they all act in such a way as to achieve some goal by perceiving and reacting to the environments they find themselves in. The genetic material does not act in this way, it is acted upon rather than instigating an action. It is the means rather than the causal agent.
A sperm acts so as to fertilise an egg, The zygote actively uses its genome in such a way that it can reproduce and multiply itself, and so on. Intelligence is not the same thing as consciousness.
Mung,
I don’t think you’ll find any evolutionist claiming anything other than what Ridley claims there – that without evolution the arrangement of matter in eye form is improbable. Your attempts to set one scientist against others appear somewhat foolish, when one parses the actual texts you use.
Yes, eyes are improbable arrangements, but their evolution is not.
Allan Miller,
That’s not what Ridley says. Do you think Ridley has trouble expressing himself?
You have come back to make up things?
Did they teach you that in evolution religion school?
I heard it takes 360,000 years for eyes to evolve. You know how they know this? Two people wrote a paper about a computer model that they wanted to make (but they were busy, so couldn’t do the model, BUT they did use some computer graphics in the paper {not sure if they used color, but they could have if they wanted}) that said so. It was very easy, the paper even said so.
John Harshman is very impressed by it. I am sure you would be.
As usual phoodoo your posts are without logical content. They just express your opinion. Can you try to formulate the issues you see as arguments, instead of just statements exemplifying your disbelief?
Like, “evolution requires that mutations that affect phenotype in this way would happen, but they can’t happen because that would also mean … etc. etc.” <- something like that.
You don't have to construct formal syllogisms or state your case in symbolic logic, but at least you can try to argue a case, rather than just declare the fact of your disbelief.
We had an entire thread on that subject, you were wrong then, you’re still wrong now.
This is what you call logical content?
More logical content?
I realize English isn’t your first language, but is it your fourth?
*twiddles thumbs*
It is exactly what Ridley says.
Not at all, It made perfect sense to me and I fully agree with it.
Actual I liked my analogy. Mung found it a miserable failure. Since it is possible for either of us to be mistaken and since you are the expert on meaning of the point perhaps you could restate in again in other terms or not. It concerned your insights into fitness.
newton,
First we need to know what your analogy is supposed to be analogous to. Until you can tell us that, how in the hell am I to know what you are talking about?
I knew it! I’ve had you pegged from the beginning as a thumb twiddler.
His analogy, summing up temperatures to obtain the global temperature, was supposed to ne analogous to adding together the the members of a set in order to create the set.
So if something is extremely improbable, all you have to do is sprinkle a little evolution dust on it, and it becomes probable. LoL.
And people believe this.
Just curious, Mung, but how do you go about calculating the probability of matter and energy existing?
Yes, only I am trying to figure out why he thinks this has anything to do with anything I have said. I am quite sure he has no idea, since I never said anything about adding anything together.
No, just read sections Ii.2 – II.4.
You will see in section II.4 that it starts to get complicated when you try to define fitnesses in diploids.
This is a definition of intelligence so broad as to be meaningless.
The genetic material does not act in this way, it is acted upon rather than instigating an action. It is the means rather than the causal agent.
It’s a chicken-egg problem or, rather, non-problem. The reason all these organisms and cells react to their environment is because of processes whose elements are encoded in DNA. And the differences in how humans and termites perceive and react to their environments are due to differences in their DNA.
Nor is it the same thing as reactivity, which you seem to think. The zygote doesn’t “use its genome”. The genome is just part of the system that makes up the zygote. There is no agent, separate from the genome, that uses anything. You’re creating a dualism that doesn’t exist.
Your definition for fitness takes up entire sections of your book now? For a definition? Are there ANY words in Merriam Websters dictionary that require entire sections of the book to be defined?
No wonder every time your definition changes. I am pretty sure you don’t have one. I guess that is why you can’t post it here.
A few moments’ thought should suffice to understand that complex concepts might be described by single words, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a few additional words can cover them. Take a word like “politics” – you can define it in 5 words, or in 5 paragraphs, or in 5 entire books, or in entire college degrees, or in entire careers! There is depth to these words. “Fitness” is one such word — it covers enough territory so that ANY shorthand definition is bound to be laughably inadequate for any useful purpose..
If you are convinced that no concept is so deep, wide or complex that it can’t be fully encapsulated in a quick thumbnail definition, your critique isn’t with Joe but with your conviction that one short phrase is sufficient to cover anything. But it seems to be that case that there ARE people whose eyes glaze over beyond that short phrase, and think all additional understanding is meaningless.
God: def
(in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.
synonyms: the Lord, the Almighty, the Creator, the Maker, the Godhead; More
2.
(in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.
There are 260 chapters in the Bible explaining the concept of one version of God.
I don’t. And I wish people would stop abusing probability.
How do you go about calculating the probability of a structure like the eye, it’s probability without evolution, and it’s probability with evolution?
And yet you were able to post a definition that was two sentences long! Imagine that.
Observationally. You simply observe the number of times something happens given some set of conditions and compare them.
Eyes have evolved many times, but they’ve never just spontaneously assembled (or if they did they didn’t leave evidence behind).
Loosely speaking things that happen many times, or frequently, given some set of conditions, are likely under that set of conditions. And things that never happen, or so rarely/infrequently nothing ever manages to record it, are unlikely under that set of conditions.
The claim is not that we know the absolute prior probabilities. It is just a statement about what we observe.
I just posted this comment in the wrong thread, so here it is again, this time in a bit more precisely correct thread:
OK, for those unable to read a few pages of my online text, I have extracted the relevant passage from the beginning of section II.2:
The rest of the section derives the formulas for the change of gene frequency as a function of the fitnesses
, and also introduces the ratios of fitnesses called relative fitnesses, which are what actually affect the gene frequencies.
The next section shows, for a model of overlapping generations in continuous times that the comparable roles are played by differences between birth and death rates, the intrinsic rates of increase. The section after that is for a diploid species with random mating. It makes the point that, if the fitnesses are functions of both genotypes in a mated pair, there may not be a simple fitness that you can attribute to a genotype (because it depends on who mates with who).
In those sections, I am being fairly bloody-mindedly precise, something I have not seen from the other side in this discussion.
Joe Felsenstein,
How would you calculate probability based on genotype? I know there are possibilities based on beak size and moth color where the survival probability goes up but how much? Is the variation primary due to recombination or cross over? If so how is a speciation event ever going to occur?
Given that relative fitnesses “are what actually affect the gene frequencies,” they must be causes.
Who here, when their phone rings, thinks that their phone number is what caused their phone to ring?
So Rumraket’s answer is we don’t actually need to calculate probabilities.
Not sure why I was being asked how I would go about it.
Rumraket complains because he’s never seen an eye spontaneously generate.
I complain because I’ve never seen an eye evolve. 🙂
Probabilities are based on observation. Variation is mostly due to mutation. It’s unclear what you think any of this has to do with speciation, what you think “speciation” means, and whether you think speciation actually does happen. Can you clarify these?
John Harshman,
Natural Selection, Not Mutation: Recombination in Drosophila Increases Diversity
Robin Mejia
Published: November 13, 2012https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001423
Seems like it would be evidence for design if you had. Is it evidence against design because you haven’t?
newton,
With the right equipment you can. It starts from a zygote. 🙂