GilDodgen

In a previous UD post I commented on an article by mathematician Granville Sewell, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution.” Since then Granville and I have corresponded and he forwarded a follow-up piece entitled, “Can Anything Happen in an Open System?”

The essence of the thesis is as follows:

If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it NOT extremely improbable.

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I seem to have a talent for raising the ire and indignation of anti-ID folks. Check out the number of comments here (126 comments at this writing). This is a good sign for ID, because it’s obvious that my posts strike sensitive nerves. Defending the indefensible is a difficult task that requires a great deal of passion. But wait, there’s more, at no additional charge! Check out this article. Random mutation and natural selection really is miraculous. It not only explains the intricacies of the machinery of the cell, it explains the intricacies of the bat’s echolocation system and its integration with the bat’s flight-control system. Examples like this reveal why Darwinian fundamentalists are in a state of panic. They Read More ›

Tom English challenged me with this:

I say categorically, as someone who has worked in evolutionary computation for 15 years, that Gil does not understand what he is talking about. This is not to say that he is trying to mislead anyone. It is simply clear that he has never grasped the nature of a simulation model. His comments reflect the sort of concrete thinking I have tried to help many students grow beyond, often without success.

The reason for Tom’s lack of success is that he, and Darwinists in general, try to explain everything with an overly — indeed catastrophically — simplistic model. Here’s what’s involved in a real-world computer simulation:

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All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process. If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors. Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.

Over at Evolution News and Views there is a notice about a new organization in the UK, Truth in Science, that seeks “…to promote good science education in the UK. Our initial focus will be on the origin of life and its diversity.” From their website: For many years, much of what has been taught in school science lessons about the origin of the living world has been dogmatic and imbalanced. The theory of Darwinian evolution has been presented as scientifically uncontroversial and the only credible explanation of origins. This is despite the National Curriculum which states: “Pupils should be taught… how scientific controversies can arise from different ways of interpreting empirical evidence (for example, Darwin’s theory of evolution). The Read More ›

If you haven’t run into this essay from The Mathematical Intelligencer by mathematician Granville Sewell, I recommend it. In a concise and easily accessible fashion he summarizes why a mathematician might be driven to skepticism about orthodox Darwinian theory. I continue to find it entertaining that many Darwinists are convinced that only religious fanatics, the uneducated, and/or not-very-brights don’t buy their arguments.

In the last sentence of my last UD post I wrote: “A microbe did not mysteriously mutate into Mozart and his music, and most people, thankfully, are smart enough to figure out that this is a silly idea.” In a comment I asked: “Is the ‘m’ alliteration in the last sentence of my post by design or by chance? Did you detect it? Explain.” In a follow-up comment I challenged: “Had I written, ‘A microbe did not mysteriously mutate into Mozart and his music, and most people, mercifully, are much too smart to swallow this silly idea,’ would you have detected alliterative design? How many alliterative M’s would it take to make design an obvious, slam-dunk conclusion? Explain.” No one Read More ›

The first insight I had into the nonsensical nature of the random mutation (RM) part of the RM plus natural selection (NS) hypothesis came through my mathematical studies and experience in software engineering. See here for some probabilistic calculations about the most simple of all computer programs. Of course, Darwinists always ask, How can you know that RM+NS can’t account for all of life? The answer is simple, and it’s called probabilistic combinatorics. The underlying biochemical and information-driven functions of living systems are tightly integrated and controlled by an unimaginably complex, sophisticated, fault-tolerant, self-repairing, self-replicating computer program. Components of such a system cannot be altered to produce significant innovation without the simultaneous, coordinated alteration of the components with which they Read More ›

For those not familiar with “turtles all the way down,” I offer the following from wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

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Denyse just alerted me to this latest gem of wisdom in the evolutionary psychology arena, concerning the origin of musical ability and appreciation: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/03/survival_of_the_harmonious The one thing that always amazes me is that Darwinists concentrate on the survival value of a certain trait (why natural selection would select that trait), while assuming that the trait can be had on the cheap and for the asking. Do any of them ever ask, What random mutations would it take to genetically rewire a non-musical brain so that it could appreciate and create music, and what are the probabilities that these mutations could have arisen by chance and been fixed in the population in the time available, with the number of generations available Read More ›

Stu Harris is my once long-lost first cousin. He ferreted me out after I posted some ID-apologetic comments at ARN — Gilbert Dodgen is obviously a fairly rare name. Apparently there are some nefarious Dodgen-ID-gene-memes that have been lurking in the background of our evolutionary history, waiting to rear their ugly heads, since we are both converts from a materialistic worldview. Stu offers an interesting link on the topic of peer review: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/13/soa/peerreview.htm But wait! There’s more, at no extra charge! You too can earn your degree in postmodernist thinking (PT), without having to think at all! Stu offers this indispensable tool for those aspiring to rise to the apogee of PT: Here’s an essential tool for any postmodernist writing Read More ›

Let’s face it, the reason Darwinian evolution is so controversial, especially in the public schools, is that it has profound implications concerning who we are, where we came from, and whether or not our lives have ultimate meaning and purpose. This is not the case in chemistry, physics or mathematics. Schoolchildren are not as unperceptive as some people would like to believe, and they pick up on these implications immediately, as my daughter did in the seventh grade.

Darwinian theory has been singled out for special scrutiny in public education not only for this reason, which should be enough, but because the evidence is not nearly as solid as it is in the hard sciences such as those mentioned above.

In a previous thread (https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1514) I commented about the suppression of evidence and discussion concerning Darwinian theory in the public schools. I don’t advocate for the teaching of ID in the public schools, and I do agree that evolution has occurred. Things are not now as they once were, so “evolution” has taken place by definition — living things have changed over time. There is no substantive controversy here.

What I object to is an incomplete at best, and dishonest at worst, presentation of the evidence for Darwinian theory in public education. Here are some proposals for how the evidence could be more appropriately presented without “subverting science.” Perhaps commenters could add to the list, and I’d be curious as to why anyone would object to such an approach.

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I was going to post this as a comment in Salvador’s thread (https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1481) but it became too long, so I’m posting it as a new topic.

On the subject of computer checkers I have some observations. I hate to brag (okay, I lied!) but I am one of the world’s leading authorities on this subject.

I know David Fogel. He is a very bright researcher and a really cool, nice guy. (Plus, he is a very talented pianist and musician. We have shared our piano CDs. Is there some correlation between music, mathematics and computer science?)

There are three essential elements in an artificial-intelligence (AI) games-playing computer program:

1) A move generator. The board and pieces must be represented in the computer’s memory, either as arrays or bit-maps. An algorithm must be devised to generate moves based on the rules of the game.

2) A tree-search algorithm. This is even more complex and requires sophisticated software engineering. The game tree explodes exponentially, so an alpha-beta minimax algorithm is employed. Other sophisticated algorithms must be used to curtail the exponential explosion: quickly accessible hash tables that contain previously-seen positions, iterative deepening with best-move prediction accessed from the hash tables, use of killer moves and move sorting based on a history heuristic, and much more.

3) A terminal-node evaluation function which attempts to ascertain the value of a position statically, since the tree search must terminate at some point. These values are backed up through the search tree with the alpha-beta minimax algorithm.

Most of the playing strength of these programs comes from the tree search (which is not possible without the move generator), since humans have a hard time keeping track of this much detail.

Fogel and his team of software engineers programmed elements 1 and 2, without which element 3 (the product of the genetic algorithm) would have been completely useless. The fitness function was the definition of a win at the end of the tree search: no moves left for the opponent. This was a goal defined by the programmers. The leaf-node evaluation function is not essentially strategic; “strategy” is mostly a byproduct of the tree search.

This is not to say that Fogel’s research is meaningless. It is intriguing and worthwhile. What all this means is that a cleverly designed trial-and-error process, combined with a lot of even more clever software engineering and human-devised algorithms, can produce interesting and productive results.

It should be noted that human-crafted (i.e., intelligently-designed terminal-node evaluation functions) totally trounce Blondie’s eval function with ease.
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The existence of information is a fundamental refutation of materialism. Information has no mass. It has no physical dimensions. And it can exist in multiple places at the same time. It has no physical or materialistic properties whatsoever. Put a gigabyte of information on your computer’s blank hard disk, and check out how much more the disk weighs. Back up your hard disk and that information will exist in two places at the same time. You can transmit that information at the speed of light (at which speed nothing with rest mass can travel). Life is not fundamentally based on atoms, molecules and chemistry. These represent the media and low-level mechanism in which life’s information is stored and expressed. As Read More ›

Which claims in the ID versus Darwinism/materialism debate are extraordinary? ID asserts that the fine tuning of the universe for life (thoroughly documented by astrophysicists in increasingly excruciating detail), the origin of living systems from non-living matter, and the evolution of a single cell into humans capable of inventing science, technology, art and philosophy, are best explained by design. Design is a straightforward conclusion that screams at most people from all quarters, which is why only a small percentage of the American populace accepts blind-watchmaker evolutionary theory. ID is an ordinary claim, and evidence for it is mounting rapidly, on scales from the astronomically huge to the submicroscopically small. Materialistic philosophy asserts that the fine tuning of the universe for Read More ›