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Evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself?

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Yes, but the idea all goes downhill, fast backward, from there, as it must, with Darwin’s followers watching.

From Nautilus:

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.”

Aw, cut the crap. If what Philip Ball is saying is correct, Darwin’s was not only not “the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” it wasn’t even correct.

What grovelling sissies. Look, Darwin’s tax-funded trolls are not that scary. We’ve borfed them for years. And if what you say is true there is nothing especially benighted about creationism or wrong about divine providence. It’s all a matter of evidence.

Grow up, will you? Meanwhile,

In the late 1990s a team of researchers at Stanford University created around 6,000 mutants of brewer’s yeast, each of them lacking a different single gene, and found that many of them thrived just as well as the unmutated yeast did.5 The same proves to be true for many other organisms: You can obliterate many of their individual genes to no obvious effect. But this is no surprise if there are plenty of similar gene circuits that do much the same job as the original one. Looked at this way, robustness is complementary to innovation: Any network that can evolve new features and forms among a vast array of alternatives must necessarily be robust against small changes, because it almost certainly has an alternative on hand that performs equally well. This realization offers an antidote to an excessively deterministic view of genes: Exactly which genes you have may not matter so much (within reason), because the job they do is more a property of the network in which they are embedded.

It sounds a lot like information manipulated for a purpose. Indeed, we learn, “These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself.”

Which comes from where? Oops, just happened, despite the probabilities. Or, more likely, not supposed to ask.

Will we see author Philip Ball and his interview subjects cringing before Darwin’s followers in some publication later, taking back any adventurous free thought they may have indulged in?

It’s the times we live in. You must choose: Science or grovelling to Darwin. If you do not choose, others will choose for you.

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Comments
Philip Ball reviewed Andreas Wagner's new book without even mentioning the book (Arrival of the Fittest). Isn't this impolite? Or did he want this article not to be classified as a "book review"?ppolish
January 9, 2015
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"In the late 1990s a team of researchers at Stanford University created around 6,000 mutants of brewer’s yeast, each of them lacking a different single gene, and found that many of them thrived just as well as the unmutated yeast did." This statement alone should be an absolute Darwin stopper! We know from neutral theory that natural selection will even allow slightly deleterious mutations to flourish. Therefore, a gene should become goo unless it has a pattern of offering benefit to the organism. I see two possible Darwinian explanations for this: First is that in certain environments, the gene does offer advantage. If this environment is a sufficiently common occurrence, NS should be able to purify out the mutants. Second, it could be that the genes are goo, that there just happens to be a start code, a bunch of goo, and a stop code. This pattern should be able to mutate freely until either the start or stop gets mutated. Such pattern of "goo genes" should happen periodically. Of course there may be a third way that natural selection can preserve such genes. Please feel free to enlighten me. However, if it can be demonstrated that none of the above explanations is valid then Darwinism should be falsified. If, for instance that the yeast needs gene a or b, but not both, if having one but not the other is fully sufficient to maintain the function of the organism, then Darwinism should be falsified.Moose Dr
January 9, 2015
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