Engineering

[Comp Sci. /Eng, Informatics] I felt compelled to offer a tribute….. A great pioneer of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and non-Darwinian evolutionary computing passed away September 20, 2007. See this Washington Post Article: Ryszard Michalski; Shaped How Machines Learn. Michalzki created the notion of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and advanced the hypothesis of non-Darwinian evolutionary computing. From Foundations of Intelligent Systems: 12th International Symposium In contrast to Darwinian evolution, an intellectual evolution is guided by an “intelligent mind,”…. Every Easter at George Mason, Campus Crusade would flood the campus bulletin boards with a list of professors offering to share their wisdom and knowledge with students. Ryszard S. Michalski’s name was always on the list.

Computer programs that purport to validate the grand claims of Darwinian (i.e., chance and necessity) biological evolution are a hoot.

In early August my aerospace R&D company sent me off to Livermore, CA for a four-day course in using a finite element analysis (FEA) simulation program called LS-DYNA, originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It models the laws of physics and material properties with astounding fidelity. It is so powerful that it is used heavily in the automotive industry to simulate entire vehicles and how they behave during impacts.

On the first day of the course the instructor warned us that it is very easy to create “cartoons” with LS-DYNA (it not only generates all kinds of data, it produces beautiful animations). By this he meant that if your initial assumptions are not correct, or if the FEA tools are not used correctly, you can get results that look really cool but don’t comport with reality. Much of the course focused on avoiding cartoon-generating pitfalls.
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No, not lysergic acid diethylamide, but LS-Dyna, perhaps the world’s most sophisticated engineering computer simulation program, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, originally for the development of nuclear weapons. I’m studying LS-Dyna feverishly, since my company is sending me off to LS-Dyna school in Livermore, CA at the end of this month.

I have a lot of experience writing computer simulations of the reasoning process in intellectual games such as checkers and chess, and nearly as much experience developing software for guided-airdrop systems, which involves a lot of simulation work. But LS-Dyna has been a real eye-opener.
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One of New York’s foremost brain surgeons, Dr. Michael Egnor, has repeatedly pointed out why Darwinism is irrelevant to modern medicine. See: Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?.

And it turns out, Michael Egnor’s claims are being supported by an uncomfortable admission by Catriona J. MacCallum, the Senior Editor at PLoS Biology. In the recent editorial Does Medicine without Evolution Make Sense? MacCallum writes:

Charles Darwin, perhaps medicine’s most famous dropout, provided the impetus for a subject that figures so rarely in medical education. Indeed, even the iconic textbook example of evolution “antibiotic resistance” is rarely described as “evolution” in relevant papers published in medical journals. Despite potentially valid reasons for this oversight (e.g., that authors of papers in medical journals would regard the term as too general), it propagates into the popular press when those papers are reported on, feeding the wider perception of evolution’s irrelevance in general, and to medicine in particular

Darwinists claim how important Darwinism is to science, but MacCallum’s editorial makes an embarrassing admission of Darwinism’s irrelevance to medicine. She also reports on the protests from medical students who find themselves forced to study Darwinism for no good reason. In reading the excerpt below, ask yourself, “why is it that a campaign has to be waged to teach Darwinism in science classes.” Do we need campaigns to teach the theory of gravitation or the periodic table?:
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Here’s an article on evolving hardware developed by Norwegian scientists. Favorite quote: “Every creature in nature is a product of evolution, and did I mention that creationism is just bull? What the team has done is add evolution to hardware (Norwegian), all hardware that you and I have used so far is made the creationism way, it’s made and can not be changed at runtime through evolution. All changes to existing hardware have to be made through software.” There’s not much detail in this article, but let me venture a guess: when the details come out, we’ll find that intelligent design (which includes evolutionary optimization) outshines unintelligent evolution at every turn. Read More ›

Scientists Discover Parallel Codes In Genes

“These parallel codes were probably exploited during evolution to allow genes to support a wide range of signals to regulate and modify biological processes in cells.” says Shalev Itzkovitz at The Weizmann Institute of Science.

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SciPhi guy Jason Renie has put up a free online Audiobook, actually a set of four interviews with proponents and detractors of ID. The other two Interviews are with Michael Shermer and Nick Matzke. Go here.

Comments I just posted at the site:

“First let me applaud Jason Rennie for some interesting dialogues. In his opening remarks, his pro ID perspective shows, but in the interviews he remained largely neutral. That kind of interview approach works well in this type of controversy, where emotions run high. Personally, if it were I interviewing Michael Shermer, I fear I would have become unrestrained, and challenged him on many of the points he made. But for this kind of objective comparison, Rennie’s approach is best. Read More ›

An article in the February 2007 Scientific American titled Molecular Lego talks about bis-amino acids and bis-peptides. These are synthetic amino acids and peptide chains formed from them.
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I read this Huffington post which notes that the U.S. leads Europe by quite a margin in those who reject orthodox evolution as scientific fact. They go on to an unsupported conclusion that this means the U.S. must be trailing in scientific and engineering accomplishments. Au contraire, mon ami, au contraire! Read More ›

I just watched Cracking the Ocean Code on the Discovery Science Channel last night. It’s on again at 3pm Eastern Time today and tomorrow. Really amazing. Venter basically circumnavigated the globe stopping every 200 miles to sample the microscopic life in the ocean which he is now shotgun sequencing back at his lab. In the shakedown cruise to the Sargasso Sea hundreds of new species and over a million unique new genes were discovered upon analysis. We’ve only catalogued about 1% of all species on the planet and have sequenced just a tiny fraction of those catalogued. As sequencing methods improve and prices plummet saying this is just the tip of the iceberg is a vast understatement.

Accepted July 2006

Physics of Life Reviews

[Update: thanks to Todd for a link to the full paper:]

Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models

[Update: IDers Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and R.L. Olsen were cited as well!! They wrote the book in 1984 which is considered the beginning of the modern ID movement. Also, critical remarks were made indirectly of Dawkins.]

Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models

by David Abel and Jack Trevors

Self-ordering phenomena should not be confused with self-organization. Self-ordering events occur spontaneously according to natural “law propensities and are purely physicodynamic. Crystallization and the spontaneously forming dissipative structures of Prigogine are examples of self-ordering. Self-ordering phenomena involve no decision nodes, no dynamically-inert configurable switches, no logic gates, no steering toward algorithmic success or “computational halting”.
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http://www.ffame.org/sbenner/cochembiol8.672-689.pdf

The opening discussion:

To decide whether life has a common chemical plan, we must decide what life is. A panel assembled by NASA in 1994 was one of many groups to ponder this question. The panel defined life as a ‘chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’ [16]. This definition, which follows an earlier definition by Sagan [17], will be used here. Read More ›

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060918202123.htm

Applying techniques derived from classical and quantum physics calculations may radically reduce the time it takes to simulate the way that proteins fold.
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(this also servers as a partial response to a formal request for a response fielded by the UDer’s mortal enemies, the Pandas, specifically Dave Thomas in Take the Design Challenge!)

This is part 2 a of discussion of evolutionary algorithms. In (part 1): adventures in Avida, I exposed the fallacious, misleading, and over-inflated claims of a Darwinist research program called Avida. Avida promoters claim they refuted Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity (IC) with their Avida computer simulation. I discussed why that wasn’t the case. In addition, I pointed out Avida had some quirks that allowed high doses of radiation to spontaneously generate and resurrect life. Avida promoters like Lenski, Pennock, Adami were too modest to report these fabulous qualities [note: sarcasm] about their make-believe Avidian creatures in the make-believe world of Avida. One could suppose they refrained from reporting these embarrassing facts about their work because it would have drawn the ridicule the project duly deserves from the scientific community.
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http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20060425_dna.html

IBM today announced its researchers have discovered numerous DNA patterns shared by areas of the human genome that were thought to have little or no influence on its function and those areas that do.

As reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), regions of the human genome that were assumed to largely contain evolutionary leftovers (called “junk DNA”) may actually hold significant clues that can add to scientists’ understanding of cellular processes. IBM researchers have discovered that these regions contain numerous, short DNA “motifs,” or repeating sequence fragments, which also are present in the parts of the genome that give rise to proteins. Read More ›