Eric Holloway: The Salem hypothesis as to why engineers doubt Darwin

_{Denyse O'Leary

June 7, 2022

Evolution, Informatics, Intelligent Design}

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Not because they’re terrorists or black-and-white thinkers, as claimed. A simple computer program shows the limits of creating information by chance:

Engineers are more likely to be creationists because they are familiar with what it takes to design complex things for specific tasks. Which is exactly what we see in the biological world. Additionally, engineers who work with computers know about randomized methods, which include evolutionary algorithms. We are aware of their significant limitations…
Let’s set my evolutionary algorithm a simple, fundamental task — to count by ones…
Exponential is bad news. Exponential means it took the evolutionary algorithm twice as long to count to 10 as it did to count to 9.
Let’s put exponential on a cosmological scale. The heat death of the universe is projected to occur in 10¹⁰⁶ years. This is well beyond the lifetime of anyone who’ll even remotely know we existed. Seems like a lot of time, but not for exponential doubling!
If we generously say that a step of P’‘ runs in a nanosecond, which is nine decimal places to the right of the dot, then the universe will undergo heat death before the evolutionary algorithm can evolve a program that counts from 0 to 500. And it takes even longer if the program must start from 1 instead of 0. To go up to 501 doubles even that. Completely impossible.
Eric Holloway, “The Salem Hypothesis: Why engineers view the universe as designed” at Mind Matters News (June 7, 2022)

Takehome: Engineers doubt chance evolution because a computer using an evolution-based program to do simple tasks would be chugging away well past the heat death of our universe, as Eric Holloway demonstrates.

Note: The hypothesis was named in honor of Talk.origins contributor Bill Salem.

You may also wish to read:

Dawkins’ Weasel program vs the information life acquires en route To demonstrate what is wrong with fully naturalist assumptions like those of Richard Dawkins’ Weasel program, I developed Weasel Libs, modeled on Mad Libs. When we apply a Mad Libs “epigenetic” approach to Dawkins’ claims about how life’s information can be created, we quickly see a glaring flaw. (Eric Holloway)

Comments

seversky is clueless. There isn't any scientific theory of evolution. Evolutionary biologists don't even know what determines biological form.ET_{June 8, 2022
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Seversky
What possible threat can the theory of evolution pose to engineering?
the theory is stupid... that is the threat... these scientists spread stupid ideas ... no surprise that the theory was developed by natural science graduates ... it is unbelievable, that in 21st century it is still being taught in universities... seriously, this is unbelievable.... I said it before, but let me repeat it: In 21st century!, this theory claims, that sophisticated fully autonomous self-navigating flying systems somehow self-designed, with no help from engineers. The theory is as stupid as it gets ... PS: let me remind you what Alon Musk said in 2021 about self-driving cars (self-driving cars much easier than flying systems, because flying systems have to move in 3 dimensions.) The article starts:
Tesla boss Elon Musk has finally admitted what many automotive industry experts have long realised: autonomous vehicle technology is a lot more difficult than it seems, due to the countless variables a car must learn, detect, and avoid while on the move.
Alon Musk:
Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-boss-elon-musk-admits-autonomous-tech-is-a-hard-problem-and-the-difficulty-is-obvious/
"Didn’t expect it to be so hard," ... if i wouldn't know who Elon Musk is, i would think he is a biologist.martin_r_{June 8, 2022
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"Evolution" is not merely a proven false theory like many others but it is also the atheistic Bible. Sadly, many misguided theists accept this proven false theory which cannot be said about atheists and religious teachings. Engineers, including the scientist sub branch, have an edge seeing through the nonsense. That's all.Nonlin.org_{June 8, 2022
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Seversky
Engineers build on and from what is already known.
and where comes the knowledge from ? :))) We discussed this before, without engineers, there won't be any science. Without engineers, there won't be a sheet of paper. Look around you ... every single thing you look at is the product of an engineer. Go to any lab. Every single thing in that lab is the product of an engineer. You heard about Large hadron collider ? There are lots of scientists working there. But who built the collider ? Scientists or engineers ? Are you saying, that engineers don't know anything and have to ask scientists how to design things ? Are you saying, that without scientists there won't be engineers ? Or what are you trying to say ? In fact, without engineers there won't be a thing.martin_r_{June 8, 2022
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Engineering is a fine profession but engineers are not scientists. Engineers use - but did not invent - algebra or geometry. Neither Newtonian mechanics nor Maxwell's equations were discovered by engineers. The strange realities of relativity or quantum theories were not revealed by engineers. Engineers build on and from what is already known. Where lives depend on them getting it right, they cannot afford to do anything else. Science, on the other hand, is about exploring the unknown with all the uncertainty that entails. Biologists generally accept the theory of evolution, in spite of its imperfections and shortcomings as the best account we have at this time of how life has diversified and flourished on Earth. A significant number of engineers attack the theory with a vehemence that suggests that they fear it somehow poses a threat to their most fundamental religious beliefs. If they were truly as scientific in their approach as they claim then they would be asking themselves why this should be. What possible threat can the theory of evolution pose to engineering?Seversky_{June 7, 2022
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Dawkins' weasel program is a failure in the grand scheme. Meaning that sentence cannot just be randomly inserted in any book and expect to be coherent. "Four score and seven years ago, methinks it is like a weasel", doesn't sound like the makings of an inspirational speech. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, methinks it is like a weasel!", would have the audience scratching their heads.ET_{June 7, 2022
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Polistra, As to parity bit on memory, I have a better example, and it is somewhat closer to what a cell has to deal with... Let me quote from a debate on Quora.com Keyword: Checksum Someone asked a question about how reliable is the windows file copy process. Someone replied:
No you cannot trust any copy process at all, if I/O gets interrupted e.g. network outage while copying from local to network, the target file will reside there and have the full filesize while the content of the file is filled with only zeros. Even if the writing process does a checksum of the bytes that were sent to the File Handle, there could still be some low-level program/driver (like antivirus) that fools the application and reports that the bytes have been written while in reality they did not arrive on the filesystem or they have been crippled in some way on their way from the application through all the layers down to the physical disk. If you need to make sure that something was copied guaranteed, there is only one chance to do that: after the copy finished, you have to read the target file and make a checksum of the contents, compare them with source.
martin_r_{June 7, 2022
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Yes, close to perfect. The real secret is that a mechanism with analog negative feedback doesn't have to be close to perfect. A well-designed loop can factor out some imperfections, and life has an infinite number of loops guarding loops. Later thought: Computers do have one self-checking feature, the parity bit on memory. But it doesn't try to fix the error, just warns when something is wrong.polistra_{June 7, 2022
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I am also an Engineer and agree with you both. Materialists often try to point to "poor design" as some sort of "evidence" against ID. But we have quashed that argument often. Here is one example: https://thopid.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-bad-design-argument.htmlFasteddious_{June 7, 2022
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Polistra
We know that a bug-free product is impossible, so we recognize that the self-debugging process of life can’t be 100% perfect.
obviously, it is close to perfect. Some species have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Can you imagine anything man-made working for 100 years without any outside intervention /maintenance/repair ? I could, if i was a fairy tail writer or a Darwinist (which is basically the same) PS: the fact that such species still exist, is the ultimate proof of design.martin_r_{June 7, 2022
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The Salem "logic" is typical pop psych, like Dunning-Kruger or "bullies are insecure". I'm tired of that crap. Life doesn't work that way. Engineers are designISTs because engineers are designERs. We know the power and the limits of design. We know that a bug-free product is impossible, so we recognize that the self-debugging process of life can't be 100% perfect. Even so, we also recognize that it's infinitely beyond anything we can design. The closest we can come to self-debugging is a mechanism that improves with wear, like the sleeve-valve engine. But it's still not self-repairing or self-checking like every cell in the world.polistra_{June 7, 2022
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Not because they [engineers] are terrorists or black-and-white thinkers, as claimed. Engineers are more likely to be creationists because they are familiar with what it takes to design complex things for specific tasks.
i am a mechanical engineer with a decent IT background, so it would be weird, if i won't comment on this ... I as an engineer, I have no doubt that life on Earth was created. I would stake my life on it. I know what i see and i can only laugh in any biologist's face ... The only question is, how it was done. Biologists can claim what they want ... they are dead wrong ... they are so wrong, they even don't realize how wrong they are ... because they never made anything ... they don't know what they are talking about ... the problem with biologists is, that their unqualified claims mislead lay people ...martin_r_{June 7, 2022
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