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.
LS-Dyna models the laws of physics and the material properties of the components of a dynamic, non-linear system with extreme mathematical and computational precision (assuming the user knows what he is doing), but if a single assumption is erroneous, or a single detail left out, the model can produce worthless (even subworthless, i.e., misleading) results. Fortunately, LS-Dyna simulations can be tested in the real world to verify their validity.
For an example of what LS-Dyna can do, see this short AVI of the simulation of a car airbag.
Computer simulations are often touted as verifying the power of random mutation and natural selection. Over at Evolution News and Views, we read:
On June 26 the New York Times ran an article by Douglas H. Erwin, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in which he stated as demonstrated fact the power of natural selection to create the eye. We now can see (forgive the pun) that natural selection “is the primary agent in shaping new adaptations.â€Â
His example? “Computer simulations,†he declares, “have shown how selection can produce a complex eye from a simple eyespot in just a few hundred thousand years.â€Â
Really, Dr. Erwin? Where is your proof of this important fact? What computer simulations, published where and when and by whom? Just a citation or two will do.
One also might scoff at the exaggerated faith shown computer simulations in general, since they frequently cannot even predict next week’s weather accurately. But leave that topic alone for now. Let’s just have the evidence of published computer simulations referred to by Dr. Erwin.
As it turns out, in this case the referenced computer simulation never even existed.
Then there is Avida, which is touted as having refuted the challenge of irreducible complexity. You can read Eric Anderson’s take on this here at ISCID.
The take-home lesson is that computer models can produce valid results, if the problem is thoroughly understood and the model accurately represents reality. Even then, modeling something as straightforward as a car airbag inflating is a Herculean task, and the results can only be finally trusted when the simulation is tested against the real thing.
Computer simulations that claim to provide insight into biological evolution are massively oversimplified caricatures of the real thing, and are so divorced from the real world that no one should take them seriously.
When they actually exist, they turn out to be digital just-so stories.