Is Darwinism “completely worthless to science”?
| August 14, 2018 | Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design |
Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t mince words:
I despise Darwinism. It is, in my view, an utterly worthless scientific concept promulgated by a third-rate barnacle collector and hypochondriac to justify functional, if not explicit, atheism. Richard Dawkins got it right: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. A low bar, admittedly, but “natural selection” satisfied, and still satisfies, many. Even bright Christians, regrettably.
Darwin still has some cache among design advocates — the usual trope is that he provided evidence for common descent and explained microevolution. In this I differ from some of my friends and colleagues sympathetic to ID/Thomism. Darwin’s “theory” is completely worthless to science, a degradation of philosophy, and lethal to culture.
As Jerry Fodor (an atheist philosopher) has pointed out, natural selection is an utterly empty concept. It does no work; it explains nothing. Evolution is driven by natural history and genetic and phenotypic constraint. “Natural selection” adds nothing to our understanding of the process. Of course things change and survivors survive. Any real understanding of change in populations entails understanding the natural history of the changes and the biological constraints imposed by nature. Some of this evolutionary change is best explained as accidental. Some is best explained as design, and the conjunction of accident and design is where evolutionary change takes place. “Natural selection” is meaningless junk science — dismal logic put to the service of atheism. Darwinism is the most effective engine of atheism in modern times, except perhaps for consumer culture, for which Darwin bears some responsibility. “Survival of the fittest” casts a scientific imprimatur on acquisition as a life-goal. Michael Egnor, “A Darwinian Pilgrimage” at Evolution News
Hat tip: Philip Cunningham
See also: The brain is not a “meat computer.” Dramatic recoveries from brain injury highlight the difference
and
Neurosurgeon outlines why machines can’t think: The hallmark of human thought is meaning, and the hallmark of computation is indifference to meaning.
116 Responses to Is Darwinism “completely worthless to science”?
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That vitriol, though.
I can think of one contribution Darwin’s theory (at least the modern version) made to science, even if “Darwinism” is false—evolutionary algorithms.
The journal Nature says that evolutionary algorithms were inspired by Darwinism. That hardly qualifies as a “contribution”.
BartM,
I’m happy to rephrase a bit. Darwin’s theory inspired the field of evolutionary algorithms, so it is arguably not worthless to science.
There is no such thing as a true ‘evolutionary’ algorithm. Only ‘guided searches’ with a fixed goal.
Of course “natural selection” is nonsensical. It’s beyond comprehension how this guy Darwin has been fooling so many people for so long:
http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/
1. Natural Selection concept fails since phenotype does not determine survival which is also tautological with “best adapted”
2. “Blind, mindless, purposeless, natural, and process” qualifiers fail
3. Phenotype is an unstable infinite set (hence unknowable and theoretical)
4. Fitness concept is redundant since never defined independently of survival
5. “Selection” is Survival
6. The only selection is Intelligent Selection – always done by an Intelligent Selector
7. Selection is limited to a narrow set of adaptations – one cannot selected what is not there
8. Selection and Mutations lack creativity, therefore cannot explain body designs
9. We do not observe “divergence of character” but ‘limited variations around a mean’
10. Extinct organism were not flawed and their features were not “selected away”
11. Intelligent Selection should replace Natural Selection but only if we ever transmutate organisms
12. Humans do not apply Natural Selection because it doesn’t work
13. Designs must cross an inevitable optimization gap making evolution impossible
14. Breeding is much more than “artificial selection” and unrelated to any natural process
“Natural selection” proponents must answer these simple questions – pick any biologic entity including populations and give the 80/20 Pareto without too much accuracy or precision :
1. What is that biologic entity’s phenotype?
2. What is its environment?
3. What is its fitness function?
4. What is the relationship between its phenotype, environment, fitness, and survival/reproductive success?
The five ridiculous claims of “natural selection”
1. “Design by multiple choice” is ridiculous
2. “Multiple choice from ALL random answers” is ridiculous
3. “Designing without trying” is ridiculous
4. “Self design” is ridiculous
5. “Design by incremental optimization” is ridiculous
Well, no. The use of evolutionary principals and methods across the life sciences demonstrates this is not the case.
One example that Egnor might find interesting is “fitCons“, an approach to identifying potentially pathogenic mutations that relies on population and phylogenetic estiamtes of the stength of selection. It’s used widely in clinical genetics.
Whose word shall we take on the value of Charles Darwin’s contribution to the science of evolutionary biology, that of a neurosurgeon or that of biologists themselves?
What I despise is the form of religious Lysenkoism practiced by Egnor and his kind. Anything which is perceived as a threat to their beliefs and cannot be bent to conform to them is to be reviled and rejected.
The irony is that Egnor’s professional career as a neurosurgeon is founded on a naturalistic, materialistic understanding of the brain as an immensely complex physical organ. When he operates, I seriously doubt he puts on a helmet, lowers the “blast shield” and “reaches out” with his feelings to perform the procedure. “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them”. He would certainly lose his license if he tried.
What Egnor preaches is both bad science and bad Christianity.
Seversky:
What do the biologists say? Have they found any evidence for Darwin’s claim about natural selection? No.
No, that is only your misguided opinion. Materialism is useless in trying to understand anything. Naturalism is useless when trying to understand anything. Those are both dogmas which are the antithesis of science.
As if any doctor treats people by saying life arose from non-life just because. You are deluded, Seversky- deluded and clueless.
Amblyrhynchus:
Nice equivocation. No one uses blind watchmaker principles for anything.
daves:
And yet those same algorithms use telic processes to solve the problems they were designed to solve. So even though Darwin’s ideas may have inspired them they don’t use Darwin’s ideas as he intended. His was design without a designer without any telic processes.
Darwin’s work on earthworms was pretty neat, though.
DaveS
Of course, not worthless. However, its benefits are indirect. I respect Darwin’s work. Now we know that it is not a working model in general (there are some corner cases of corner cases where it works). But anyway… it does Darwin credit anyway. By the way, he was not a biologist himself, was he?
I completely agree with ET on evo algorithms. GAs model artificial selection, not natural selection and therefore the fact itself that GAs exist does not lend any support to (neo)-Darwinian claims.
It is probably fair to say that GA are inspired by, but not based on, biological processes. GAs assume perfect no noise conditions. They employ explicit fitness function and carefully constructed neighborhood operators. They measure the delta(fitness) with high accuracy, and control the search for a solution based on the deltas. In biological systems there is noise (such as drift), there is no explicitly defined fitness function, and selection filtering is very coarse grained.
Nonlin.org
Too many too terse points. If you want to engage anyone in a discussion, please provide some wording to support your claims. To my estimation, it is not ridiculous or tautological. The Darwinian model does have feedback from environment to phenotype to adjust the system parameters to make sure there takes place fixation of traits. It is just that this feedback is too weak to lead to anything non-trivial in practice. It is a valid model but it cannot achieve anything in practice. That is why it has taken people time and computational resources to realize that.
I agree that the word ‘selection’ is a misnomer and Darwin himself realized it. True, nothing is being actively selected, it is only culling that takes place.
Your using of the word ‘ridiculous’ suggests that Darwinists are fools. Maybe some of them are, but surely not all 😉
The best characterization of the Darwinian model I came across was due to David Abel. The Darwinian selection is from among available functions, not for a future function. The question is, where these available functions came from in the first place. That is the real question. The Darwinian model cannot have any means to address it other than random variation (the only “creator” of information in it). Random variation can only operate in a given functional context, but I agree, new sophisticated function cannot arise by random variation selecting away non-viable options. New sophisticated function can only arise by intelligence.
The starting point for Darwinian evolution is a population of biological replicators. However, to get a biological replicator one must have a code translator. How does this translator arise? Only by intelligence since it is only intelligence that can instantiate logic relationships “A represents B” into physicality.
daveS @ 3
Evolutionary algorithms are just glorified trial and error solutions aided by computers. Nothing evolutionary there.
Eugene S,
Excellent commentary. Definitely worth reading.
Thanks.
Eugene S,
I coincide with PeterA on his comment about what you wrote.
Well done! Thanks.
Of further (humorous) note to the claim in post 1, “I can think of one contribution Darwin’s theory,, made to science,, evolutionary algorithms.”
Some of the main Darwinian ideas seem to be a product of our human tendency to easily read too much into things. Apparently some of those ideas resulted from a gross extrapolation of what the guy observed in some islands near Ecuador.
We miss the point of what we see, read or hear. We tend to make any text to mean either less or more than what it really says. We humans also easily miss to grasp the meaning of our experiences. We all have experiences, but perhaps not many think deeply about their meaning.
Then, to make things worse, we humans don’t test everything to hold only what is good. We pretty much go with our emotions, preferences, desires.
In the first verse of the third chapter of Genesis someone reacted to the question “Did God actually say…?” tragically wrong. We’re still doing the same today.
We humans communicate with one another very poorly. Communication requires that all the involved parties are similarly interested in the truth about what is being communicated. We must meet important conditions to communicate: sufficient time, same protocol and language, interest in understanding what others are trying to say and what they mean, interest in presenting one’s ideas as clearly as possible, so that others can understand well the meaning of what we are trying to convey.
We see examples of these problems all over. For example, just take a look at the discussions going on here in this website. Note how we talk past each other.
Also we have lost the sense of wonder we had as small children. As consequence, rather than singing worship hymns and joyfully surrendering our will to our Creator, we prefer Paul Anka’s hit song “My way”.
This is a pathetically sad situation. Unfortunately there’s no natural way to get out of this mess.
Why?
Because “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
The only hope is to genuinely repent and follow the One who claimed to be “The Way, The Truth and The Life” and proved it with His death on a Roman cross and His supernatural resurrection.
Only He can bless us by making us poor in spirit.
Then we will be humble enough to look at amazing things in awe.
That will solve all these misunderstandings and miscommunications too.
Being made in IMAGO DEI implies that we are the only creatures in this planet with the capacity to communicate with our Creator, who is the absolutely perfect communicator. Only God’s spirit can restore us to that level of communication and understanding.
Praise Adonai!
“Evolutionary algorithms” are just a software implementation of a feedback loop. The analog version was well-developed in clocks by 1500 and in steam technology by 1800. Long before Darwin. Turning it to software didn’t require any contribution from Darwinism.
polistra,
I like your comment.
Thanks.
As Egnor (and Fodor) alluded to, “natural selection is an utterly empty concept. It does no work; it explains nothing.”,,,
Even the late William Provine himself admitted, “Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, create, modify, shape, operate, drive, favor, maintain, push, or adjust. Natural selection does nothing…”
Jerry Fodor (and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini) went further and stated “the theory of natural selection is internally flawed; it’s not just that the data are equivocal, it’s that there’s a crack in the foundations.”
Michael Egnor explores that ‘crack in the foundations’ of natural selection in a bit more detail here
,,, simply put, despite what is falsely imagined, natural selection simply does no real work in the real world. As Adam Sedgwick originally pointed out to Charles Darwin himself about his theory of natural selection, “what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts.”
Since natural selection does not actually exist in the real world as a scientifically rigorous definable force of some kind,,,
,,, Since natural selection does not actually exist in the real world as a scientifically rigorous definable force of some kind, the primary ‘work’ of natural selection has never ever really been in the real world but has always been in the realm of man’s imagination.
As Gould himself honestly admitted (and caught flak for), “When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection.”
And as Crevinfo stated, “Fodor’s beef with natural selection appears to stem from its storytelling propensity”.
And as Masatoshi Nei stated, “If you say evolution occurs by natural selection, it looks scientific compared with saying God created everything.”
Here are a few more quotes along that ‘designer substitute’, ‘story telling’, line
Simply put, Natural Selection is ‘not even wrong’ as an explanation for the ‘apparent design’ we see pervasively throughout life:
To sum up, the primary ‘work’ of Natural Selection has always been in the realm of man’s imagination to function as a ‘designer substitute’. i.e. To function as a ‘stand in’ for God for people who find the idea of being personally accountable to the God, who ‘designed’ them, to be unpalatible.
As Michael Ruse honestly confessed, “Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion a full-fledged alternative to Christianity.,, This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
Basically Darwinists, with natural selection, have constructed, as the ancient pagans in the Bible constantly did, an imaginary false idol to worship instead acknowleging the true and living God who alone is worthy of our supreme worship and love.
Eugene S,
Thanks for the substantive response.
I would agree with this, especially wrt the example of EA’s I suggested.
I know almost nothing about Darwin, including whether or not he actually should be called a biologist (or even a “citizen scientist”, like Forrest Mims). Did he contribute anything valuable to science? I think that’s a better question.
But more importantly, it’s clear you are able to evaluate this material dispassionately, and even give some credit where it’s due. I think Egnor might have more difficulty keeping his emotions in check.
I agree.
Yes, I would even say it’s conceivable that while GA’s are effective at solving certain problems, the biological analog is completely ineffective at generating now species.
Eugene S @12
Since you cannot be bothered to open the link provided and read the proofs http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/, here are just a few points with detailed explanations:
…
2. No. Natural Selection fails since survival is not directly tied to phenotype and “survival of the best adapted” is tautological. In a small farm, only organisms closely related to their wild cousins survive, but agribusinesses select for chickens with oversize breasts and research labs select for populations with specific genetic mutations requiring tight environments to survive. As shown, all these different organisms may or may not survive regardless of their phenotype. The only measure of “selection” is survival – we only know if and organism was selected if it survives and reproduces. “Best adapted” is also unknowable separate from survival. [This proof contradicts your statement, Eugene]
…
5. Plant and animal breeding is not the “artificial selection” described by Darwin and has nothing to do with any natural process. Breeding requires a desired outcome, selection (just a minor step!) and isolation of successive generations of promising individuals, active mating or artificial insemination, optimization of growth conditions for the selected individuals, and/or other genetic technologies. Without most of these active steps nothing happens. Chihuahua and Poodle have no superior survivability to common dog or wolf, but happened anyway because humans worked hard to make them possible. But no one ensures all these active steps in nature. To take only one example, how could humans have “evolved” distinctly from chimps when no one separated each and every new generation based on a teleological model? Why did the proto-human not mate back with his/her regular chimp cousins to put an end to the split? Who and how could have separately optimized conditions for both chimp and human so both lineages survived in what looks like very much similar environments? ‘Selection’ of both “artificial” and “natural” type is thus the wrong word and should be phased out.
6. Natural Selection is Intelligent Selection which is always done by an Intelligent Selector such as Darwin’s breeder which is an intelligent and willful player that takes intentional actions to reach preset goals. Predators, plants, birds, insects or bacteria, all show intelligence and the willful pursuit of predetermined goals. When interacting with the inert environment, organisms self-select rather than being selected by this environment. As soon as the organism dies and becomes part of the lifeless universe, all selection of that entity ceases. Rocks do not select each other, do not self select and are not selected by the environment.
…
12. Humans would apply the Natural Selection method if feasible, but we don’t because it isn’t. A Natural Selection software would use a random generator and a selection criteria to maximize survivability in an available niche. For instance, a family vehicle should optimize the transport function (survivability) given a set of environmental constraints (regulations) and an existing design as starting point. Random minute changes could be tested and retained if the transport function is improved. However, this method can only remove minor oversights but will never create any new designs. Any significant departure such as a new fuel, material or environment either results in a suboptimal design, or requires a cascade of changes to improve the survivability function. That is why the auto industry, like most other industries, introduces minor redesign annually and major revamps every few years. And while even the minor improvements must come in harmonized packages rather than one off (to reduce negative ramifications), in the absence of those major redesigns a firm would shortly go extinct.
13. Designs do not transform into better designs without crossing an inevitable optimization gap. Given a certain environment, once a design is optimized for a certain function, it becomes suboptimal as soon as the function, the structure, or the materials changes. Until the new design is optimized for that particular change, it remains inferior to an old design already optimized to that environment. Humans optimize new designs (with multidimensional differences from previous versions) conceptually before abruptly replacing old designs. A Darwinist biologic gradual design transition would thus be impossible hence never observed in nature. Had the compound eye been optimized first, a transition to non-compound eye would inevitably had to be suboptimal for a while and vice versa. Only if all eye designs had started from the same point, each following an independent path and at the same pace would we have so many different designs today, each optimized for its function. This however implies a coordinated original grand design incompatible with Darwinian evolution.
…
Hope this helps 🙂
BA
“As Michael Ruse honestly confessed…”
Impressive!
In addition to Egnor and Fodor’s observation that, “natural selection is an utterly empty concept. It does no work; it explains nothing.”,,,
In addition to that, Fodor also observed that, “The conclusion here is inescapable, that the driving force for these invariant scaling laws cannot have been natural selection. It’s inconceivable that so many different organisms, spanning different kingdoms and phyla, may have blindly ‘tried’ all sorts of power laws and that only those that have by chance ‘discovered’ the one-quarter power law reproduced and thrived.”
That is to say that although the ‘utterly empty concept’ of natural selection is suppose to work on the ‘3-Dimensional’ level when supposedly selecting an organism, “their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional”.
And again, as usual, Darwinists have no clue why these things should be as they are:
The reason why these ‘universal’ and ‘uniquely biological’ ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling laws are impossible for Darwinian evolution to explain is that Natural Selection operates at the 3-Dimensional level of the organism and the ’4-Dimensional’ quarter power scaling law are simply ‘invisible’ to natural selection. The reason why 4-Dimensional things are, for all practical purposes, completely invisible to 3-Dimensional things is best illustrated by ‘flatland’:
And the reason why living things operate as if they were 4-Dimensional, instead of operating as if they were 3-Dimensional, is because, contrary to the materialistic framework upon which Darwinism sits, it is ‘physically real information’ which is foundational to life and it is not matter and energy that are foundational to life as is presupposed in the materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution.
Here are a few notes on the physical reality of ‘immaterial’ information:
As Talbott observes, it is readily apparent that it must be this ‘information’ that is keeping us alive “precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer”
This higher dimensional information that is keeping us alive for ‘precisely a lifetime and not a moment longer’, also provides evidence that we do indeed possess a soul that is capable of living beyond the death of out temporal, material, bodies, As Stuart Hameroff stated.
Verses:
No one uses blind watchmaker evolution for anything. It is a useless and worthless heuristic.
Nonlin.org
Thanks.
“we only know if and organism was selected if it survives and reproduces”
What about fixation of traits?
“Best adapted” does not just mean survival. It means reproductive success. A differential in phenotypes leads to a differential in reproductive rates. The best adapted individuals possessing a trait will tend to leave most offspring. At some point, theoretically, all the population will have that trait, which is the fixation point.
In practice, there is drift that eliminates beneficial mutations. So the real problem of Darwinian model is to get over the statistical barriers of visibility. In actual environments, for Darwinian process to kick off the percent of the population possessing the trait in question must be statistically significant.
That is the real problem of the Darwin’s model, not that it has something ill defined or tautological.
I do not understand your problem with this. Maybe I am missing something.
“Chihuahua and Poodle have no superior survivability to common dog or wolf, but happened anyway because humans worked hard to make them possible.”
Agreed. It is an artificially controlled telic process.
“Selection” is the wrong word, I agree.
“Rocks do not select each other”
Chemists could say otherwise 😉 Again, “selection” is a misnomer, but bubbles go up and dust settles down. It is this regularities that all amount to minimization of total potential energy that evolutionists try to employ.
I do not believe in the power of chemical “selection” on the prebiotic stage at all (because I do not see the principle for selection on the prebiotic stage, is it stability or instability or what?), but I have to be a chemist to defend my disbelief professionally.
Evolution is a random walk in the parameter space and, as such, faces all the troubles random walk can face in astronomically large configuration spaces. It means that occasionally, it can climb a hill (and it will, if all the relevant conditions are met). However, on average it does not do well.
Another reason why this is so is because biologically meaningful configurations in that space may be confined to relatively small and sparsely scattered islands. E.g. recently an estimate of the sparseness of functional polypeptides in the space of possible polypeptides was worked out to be 1 in 10^77.
Sparseness of function and the vanishingly small fraction of the astronomical configuration space that evolution could have ever visited by random walk are the two real problems of biological evolution.
“but will never create any new designs”
Absolutely!
I also agree with you point against Darwinian gradualism.
Overall, in my estimation, your arguments are sound except the one about tautology 😉
Paolo,
Give me a break! First you posted a misleading comment referring to me as PeterA, but soon after that you wrote a long sermon on miscommunication. Can you explain?
BA, Egnor, News,
Jerry Fodor is useless. Yes, he denies NS, but he still thinks incoherently that “evolution” is true.
Eugene S @26
My “survives and reproduces” means “reproductive success”. One has to survive to reproductive age to reproduce.
How can you not see the tautology? Survival of descendants is the ONLY thing out there, not “fit”, not “best adapted”, not “selection”, not “beneficial mutations”. To see this, imagine an experiment where you want to determine one of those four without any information whatsoever about survival of descendants. Can you? No way! Even the improperly called “artificial selection” does not become effective until survival is affected. Until then it’s just an empty declaration of intent.
Interesting challenge, but “bubbles go up and dust settles down” and chemicals react with particular other chemicals because something else causes that, not because they “select” each other.
at 28 Nonlin.org states:
Yet aside from the fact that Jerry Fodor was in fact “useful” for teaching me and many others that “natural selection is an utterly empty concept. It does no work; it explains nothing” (even if he has not yet fully embraced the fact that life is “Intelligently Designed”), Jerry Fodor is not now, nor has ever been, intrinsically ‘useless’.
Only under a Atheistic Darwinian worldview are people intrinsically and completely “useless”.
Perhaps the greatest proof that Darwinism is “an utterly worthless scientific concept” is the fact that Darwinism and/or Atheistic materialism renders humanity itself “utterly worthless” since our lives, under Darwinism, truly are utterly meaningless.
As Adam Sedgwick warned Charles Darwin of the dire consequences of his theory, (and as testified to by abortion, euthanasia, concentration camps, gulags, etc..,,), “humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it—& sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.”
Indeed, the social consequences of the Atheistic Darwinian worldview have been devastating.
Here’s what happens when Atheists/evolutionists/non-Christians take control of Government:
And here are a few quotes, out of many quotes I could list, that reveal their depressing, “useless”, view of humanity.
Fortunately, we now have abundant scientific evidence that strongly indicates that man is not nearly as “useless” and/or “worthless” as atheists have presupposed us to be
Verse:
jawa,
That was a mistake, a mental lapse. I’m sorry that happened.
Apparently I was thinking about what you wrote in the “chromatin” thread, where you treated me a little harsh.
We may be missing a different take on this. I suspect that Dr. Egnor is at least partly parodying the way that Darwinists and atheists often belittle and put down ID — giving them back a taste of their own medicine, as it were. We all know how ID is often treated in articles and Internet postings. Regardless of the truths behind his polemic, Dr. Egnor may simply be reflecting some of that diatribe back to its usual source. Just a thought.
Was reminded of this thread when I ran into this paper today. Population genetics an natural selection models being used to predict the progress of individual tumours. Evolutionary genetics approaches are now used very widely in cancer biology.
Despite the name, an evolutionary algorithm is an example of intelligent design.
Also, the key feature of the evolutionary algorithm, variation of the genome, is better attributed to Mendel than Darwin.
If we were to make the evolutionary algorithm Darwinian, we would have some kind of artificial life simulation with living, dying and procreating programs, and the actual problem to be solved would not be used for selection.
Ambly:
DARWINIAN evolution. This thread pertains to DARWINIAN evolution. Don’t drop the meaningful adjective and act like all is well. That is called equivocation.
That said, I do agree that DARWINIAN evolution can cause cancer. That is most likely the most creative thing it can accomplish
I’m not sure what’s more Darwinian than natural selection?
Paolo,
i apologize for sounding so harsh to you.
it was not my intention.
however, i still don’t understand what you wrote here.
Can you explain?
thanks.
jawa,
it’s alright. You’re forgiven.
Are you referring to my comment @154?
Paolo,
Yes, that’s exactly.
Why did you write that?
What’s that for?
What do you expect from that exercise?
It’s really so off-topic for that discussion thread.
jawa,
that was my reaction to something George Castillo wrote in the preceding comment (@153):
For those interested in an actual discussion of the “tautology argument”, you could start here :
Ambly:
Natural selection- the elimination process that should get rid of cancer-prone genomes?
What do you think natural selection is doing with respect to cancer?
bornagain77 @ 30
Yet the US, according to the faithful a Christian nation founded by Christians on Christian principles, had a murder rate of 5.35 per 100,000 while more atheist-leaning countries such as the UK had a murder rate of 1.20 per 100,000, Sweden was at 1.08, Norway 0.51 and Iceland 0.30. Should we assume on this basis that Christian belief makes people more likely to kill one another unlawfully?
Seversky references:
Yes, and in the end it is all just contingent serendipity. That is because those adaptations and functional efficiency can be something that makes you slower, faster, less functional such that the anti-biotics no longer bind but take away the anti-biotics and you are the weakling, taller, shorter, striped, dotted, fur, no fur, translucent fur that looks white because the way the light refracts inside of it, eyes, no eyes, wings for flying, wings that don’t help you fly- it all depends-> ie contingent serendipity.
With a process of elimination only a small % fails to make the cut. As Ernst Mayr said in “What Evolution Is”:
Behavioral changes are the most likely to aid in survival. They are inheritable and can effect larger portions of a population than waiting for some just-so/ right mutation to offer a variation that can help. If it ain’t already in existence the wait could kill ya.
Seversky:
False premise
Amblyrhynchus per post 33, 36 and 37,
You speak of natural selection as if it were a real thing instead of a figment of Darwinian imagination.
Could you please tell me exactly what the basic units of measurement are for the ‘evolutionary pressure’ of natural selection? i.e. Exactly what is natural selection measured in?
I can’t seem to find anything listed in the SI units of measurement which would be applicable to Natural Selection.
Nor can I find anything listed in the Table of Physical Constants
This is not a minor omission, and is the primary reason why Darwinism fails to qualify as a real science (instead of being the pseudoscience that it actually is).
The primary reason why Darwinian evolution lacks any of the rigor that is usually associated with the hard sciences is because Darwinian evolution has no mathematical model to test against. As Dr. Robert Marks states “Hard sciences are built on foundations of mathematics or definitive simulations. ,,, there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be.,,,”
The primary reason why nobody has ever been able to build a realistic mathematical model for Darwinian evolution to test against is simply because there is no ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe for mathematicians and physicists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon:
As Ernst Mayr himself conceded, “In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences.”
In the following article, Roger Highfield makes much the same observation as Ernst Mayr and states, ,,, Whatever the case, those universal truths—’laws’—that physicists and chemists all rely upon appear relatively absent from biology.
Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated that “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
Bottom line, natural selection does not exist in the real world but only exists in the imagination of Darwinists when they try to weave their ‘just so stories’ in which Natural Selection plays the role of ‘Designer Substitute”.
As Gould himself honestly admitted (and caught flak for), “When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.”
ET
No, natrual selection the differential survival of heritable phenotypes. One way you might learn what selection has to do with cancer is reading the paper I linked to.
BA,
We measure the strength of selection using the selection coefficient (s), which can be defined such that the fitness of a wildtype (or the mean fitness of a population) is set to 1 and the fitness of some variant is 1+s (so positive values correspond to traits that we expect to increase). Fitness is, of course, the expected contribution of a given variant to the next generation.
I’m not sure why any of that should matter, but hope it helps.
And Seversky, just why do you, an amoral atheist, find murder to be morally offensive in the first place? After all, it is just survival of the fittest is it not?
And if you are going to be, without a moral foundation, morally offended by murder rates then own up to the incomprehensible horror manifested by what Darwinian thinking has wrought when it had free reign over the government of people, instead of trying to unjustly equivocate comparatively trifling details about murder rates when compared to the wholesale slaughter of people by their own Atheistic governments.
Ambly:
Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the modern synthesis, says that NS is an eliminative process, which is as you say, so I don’t understand your issue unless it is that you cannot think.
So that’s it? A literature bluff? How do we know that you have read the paper? If you had then you should be able to make a case.
Amblyrhynchus, “fitness is either defined metaphorically, or defined only relative to the particular model or system used. It is fair to say that due to this lack, there is still no real agreement on what exactly the process of natural selection is.”
Further notes on the inadequacy of Darwinian evolution as a scientific theory:
The Strength of Natural Selection in the Wild– to wit:
OK the paper Ambly linked to above is about SUBCLONAL selection, not natural selection. Natural selection doesn’t even appear in the paper.
Yes I found the paper for free Quantification of subclonal selection in cancer from bulk sequencing data
I believe I’ve found a photograph of ET writing the above comment: http://i670.photobucket.com/al.....DOCTOR.png
(If it’s not abundantly clear, subclonal selection is natural selection that occurrs at the level of cell lineages within a tumour. It is quite understandable for someone to not know this, but what sort of idiot makes the sort of comment ET does in #53 about a topic they are clearly ignorant about?)
Paolo @41:
What does that have to do with what you wrote @39?
jawa,
Don’t you see the problem? Did you read everything carefully?
Paolo,
I think I read everything carefully to no avail.
Please, give me a hint. Thanks.
jawa,
did you notice the bold text? What does it say?
Paolo,
I see this bold text:
“prokaryotes do not have histones”
jawa,
That’s not all the bold text, is it?
Paolo,
you’re right, that’s not all the bold text.
This text is also in bold characters:
(see #125)
jawa,
That’s correct. Did you open the link and read the comment #125?
Paolo,
I have to admit that I had not opened that link or read the comment associated with it. My response @58 wasn’t accurate to say it nicely.
My fault.
Paolo,
here’s the text I missed reading before (@125):
Paolo,
Now I see a problem:
George Castillo wrote that Peter and OLV were writing persistently and tediously “on the fact that eukaryotes have histones and a complex genome organization, while prokaryotes do not have histones.”
However, I don’t see where PeterA or OLV wrote that prokaryotes don’t have histones.
Apparently they didn’t say so. Is this correct?
jawa,
that’s it! You’ve got it right.
Now, in light of your new “discovery”, would you mind going back to your comment @27 and reviewing it?
Thanks.
Paolo,
I think now I understand what you wrote better.
Your comment @17 makes more sense to me now.
Thanks for helping me to understand this better.
I agree with you.
Perhaps George Castillo could benefit from reading your “long sermon” @17 too. It might help him to read text more carefully next time. 🙂
Nonlin.org 29
“How can you not see the tautology?”
Because there is none. Think in terms of populations, not individual organisms. It is a differential to differential relation. “More adapted” = “possessing a set of traits better suited for the environment” => “produces more offspring”. Over time, with all other things being equal, the best fit traits will be fixed in the population. This accounts for microevolutionary population dynamics, given a population and the environment.
The real problem of the neo-Darwinian model is in this bit: all other things being equal. The problems I am aware of are:
genetic drift,
rarity of beneficial mutations,
low sensitivity of natural selection (statistical barriers),
the limit on the speed of evolution (Holdane’s dilemma).
On average, Darwinian evolution does not work but in rare cases it does (e.g. antibiotic resistance). That said, to my knowledge, cases of evolution leading to rapid substantial increases in functional complexity (real innovations) are nowhere to be found in the literature.
“and chemicals react with particular other chemicals because something else causes that, not because they “select” each other.”
Of course, they do not select! Selection is always done from among a set of alternatives, where each alternative state is characterized by minimum potential energy, on a pragmatic utility-based criterion. It can be done automatically (like in artificial decision making systems) but ultimately there is always consciousness involved in order to steer events towards optimum utility.
Nature can only steer events towards min potential energy states. Fluctuations occur but statistically the tendency towards min potential energy holds nonetheless. This is no true choice, of course.
Amblyrhynchus apparently holds that differential survival among cancer cells within an organism is proof of the efficacy of natural selection to create all life on earth.
And what obvious fact is Amblyrhynchus missing in his ‘cancer’ demonstration of the all creative power of his ‘designer substitute’ of Natural Selection?
Contrary to what Amblyrhynchus may believe, differential survival of deadly cancer cells within an organism is NOT proof that his imagined ‘designer substitute’ of Natural Selection can create the organism, or any other organism, in the first place. (See Jonathan Wells – Does Cancer Really Innovate?)
Amblyrhynchus, nor any other neo-Darwinist, has any real evidence that Natural Selection can do what he and other neo-Darwinists claim it can. Namely create all the different variety of life on earth.
Besides a lack of empirical evidence to support his claims, mathematical modeling also fails to provide any evidence that the ‘pressure’ of Natural Selection is anything other than a figment of Darwinian imagination:
In fact, because of this failure of natural selection within the models of population genetics, most Darwinists, such as Graur and Moran, who are aware of this insurmountable difficulty, have ditched natural selection as a driver of evolution in favor of a theory called ‘neutral theory’ and/or ‘genetic drift’.
Thus, with Natural selection being tossed aside by the mathematics of population genetics, and by empirical evidence, as the explanation for the ‘appearance of design’ that we see in life, Darwinists did not accept such a devastating finding from mathematics as an outright falsification for their theory, as they should have done, but are instead now reduced to arguing that the ‘appearance of design’ that we see in life is, basically, the result of pure chance with natural selection now playing a very negligible role if any role at all.
To call such a move on the part of Darwinists disingenuous would be an understatement.
As William Murray comments on this development within Darwin’s theory,
Secondly, the mathematics of population genetics has forced Darwinists to claim, via the genetic load argument, (and against all common sense and the results of ENCODE), that the vast majority of our DNA is junk.
To put this kindly, anyone who claims the vast majority of our DNA is junk, especially after ENCODE, is not playing with a full deck.
And last but not least, Amblyrhynchus claims that natural selection is defined by ‘fitness”
Yet, in this following video and article, Donald Hoffman has, through numerous computer simulations of population genetics (where ‘fitness’ plays the key role), shown that if Darwinian evolution were actually true then all our observations of reality would be unreliable.
Thus, in what should be needless to say, a worldview that undermines the scientific method itself by holding all our observations of reality are unreliable is NOT a worldview that can ever be firmly grounded within the scientific method!
Moreover, completely contrary to what Donald Hoffman found from the mathematics of population genetics,, conscious observation, far from being unreliable, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics had predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if Darwinists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are unreliable!
Moreover, as if all that was not bad enough, Darwinian evolution, since it is based on ‘reductive materialism’, denies the reality of the immaterial realm. That is to say, there simply is no place for the immaterial, “Platonic”, realm of mathematics to find grounding for its reality within the reductive materialism that undergirds Darwinian thought.
Therefore, besides Darwinian evolution already being shown to be mathematically impossible (by Sanford, Dembski, Marks, Axe, Behe, Durston etc.. etc..), Darwinian evolution is further falsified by mathematics as being a scientific theory since Darwinism denies the very reality of one the thing it most needs, i.e. mathematics, in order to be considered scientific in the first place.
Of supplemental note on ‘fitness’, Sanford and Basener have, (by including realistic mutation rates into the model) recently falsified Fisher’s supposed mathematical proof that fitness must always increase
Ambly:
That’s your opinion. Unfortunately for you, you cannot support it. Clearly you have issues, Ambly
EricMH (and Eugene S if interested):
Agreed on both counts.
Here’s an interesting application of evolutionary computation to a mathematical problem, namely finding new lower bounds for Van der Waerden numbers (which you might already be aware of).
Intuitively, it seems reasonable that EC might be relatively effective strategy for a problem such as this. This problem has to with sequences of integers 1, 2, 3, …, N with certain properties.
For example, to find a lower bound for W(7, 3), you search for integers N (as large as you can find) for which there is a 7-coloring of the integers 1 through N such that are no 3 elements of the sequence in arithmetic progression with the same color. You would not want 1, 5, and 9 to all be red, for example.
My question is, if we consider other properties these integer sequences could have, for which would evolutionary computation be relatively effective?
Perhaps an intractable problem, but it might give insight into when evolution “works” or not.
Why do people keep clinging to Darwinism like a child’s security blanket? Because it provides a metaphysical hand and glove fit with atheistic naturalism/materialism. However, what Darwinism– specifically “modern” Neo-Darwinism– doesn’t fit with is the scientific evidence.
I disagree with Egnor when he says, “Darwin still has some cache among design advocates — the usual trope is that he provided evidence for common descent and explained microevolution.” I am very open to other non-Darwinian forms, of evolution. However, the problem for the Darwinist (read: naturalist/materialist) is that any other form of evolution brings in teleology or design. That’s anathema for the Darwinist who is so wedded to his paradigm that he must force fit the evidence into his theory. Unfortunately that is exactly backwards from the way empirically objective science is supposed to work.
Eugene S @69
You keep talking about “better suited”, “best fit”, “beneficial mutations” and “natural selection”, but why not do the thought experiment I asked @29?
It’s not that beneficial mutations are a rarity. Instead they are all trade-off mutations, not “beneficial”.
How does “evolution” work in antibiotic resistance? If antibiotic resistance were an absolute “beneficial mutation” it would spread in the bacteria population and never disappear. But this is NOT what happens contrary to the alarmist predictions. Antibiotic resistance is a problem only in hospitals and a few isolated places. But cut the use of antibiotics and it GOES AWAY in time! And this is not even “evolution” but a built in defense mechanism of bacteria. Our immune system works the same way and we don’t call that “evolution”.
For Ambly- According to Ernst Mayr the individual is the target of natural selection. He says it is quite clear that a gene as such can never be the object of natural selection.
Why do you keep doing this ET? Doubling down on your ignorance like this?
In the cancer of tumour evolution, the individual is a cell. If cells with a particular genotype divide more rapidly than other cells that genotype will become more common. A heritable variant will rise in frequency as the result of increased reproductive success. That’s natural selection.
The importance of evolutionary biology to cancer biology is no so great that Nature has a special page highlithing their papers on this topic. So, perhaps it’s time to step back from the keyboard and learn about this topic, instead of embarrassing yourself like this?
Ambly:
Total nonsense. Also in order for it to be natural selection the variation has to be due to chance (Mayr) and there isn’t any way you can demonstrate such a thing.
Do you think there is a program in human cells designed to introduce cancer mutations? Or are you just making sh*t up as you go along now?
Amblyrhynchus
And that is precisely the point. Natural Selection is not an actual cause of anything but is defined as an after the fact ‘effect’. Yet in the literature, Darwinists continue to talk of natural selection as if it had some sort of causal power.
As Adam Sedgwick originally pointed out to Charles Darwin himself about his theory of natural selection, “what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts. Development is a better word because more close to the cause of the fact.”,,, and yet,,, “You write of “natural selection” as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent.”
And as Egnor pointed out in the OP “Evolution is driven by natural history and genetic and phenotypic constraint. “Natural selection” adds nothing to our understanding of the process.”
And to reiterate, despite the fact that natural selection has no causal power within itself, but is in reality ‘but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts’, Darwinists continue to talk in the literature of Natural Selection as if it has some sort of causal power. As Philip Skell noted, “Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive – except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed – except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.
Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology. ”
The false attribution of ‘causal power’, even agent causality itself, to natural selection in evolutionary ‘just so stories’ is what makes ‘natural selection’, and Darwinism in general, pathetically unscientific.
As Gould himself honestly admitted (and caught flak for), “When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection.”
As to this claim in particular from Amblyrhynchus, “In the cancer of tumour evolution, the individual is a cell.”
That reminds me of this:
if evolution by natural selection were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only life that should be around should be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most ‘mutational firepower’, since only they, since they greatly outclass multi-cellular organism in terms of ‘reproductive success’ and ‘mutational firepower’, would be fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world where blind pitiless evolution ruled and only the fittest are allowed to survive. The logic of this is nicely summed up here in this Richard Dawkins’ video:
In other words, since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful, and highly efficient reproduction, be realistically ‘selected’ for?
Any other function besides successful reproduction, such as much slower sexual reproduction, sight, hearing, thinking, etc.., would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successful reproduction, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded, and/or ‘eaten’, by bacteria, as so much excess baggage since it obviously slows down successful reproduction which is practically the central, primary, tenet of Darwinian theory.
In fact, Darwin himself stated that “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species”…
Yet, contrary to this central ‘survival of the fittest’ assumption of Darwinian evolution, instead of eating us, time after time we find micro-organisms helping each other, and us, in ways that have nothing to with their own ‘survival of the fittest’’ concerns.
Ambly:
Non-sequitur. Cancer hijacks the existing intelligently designed system. And given an intelligently designed system chance mutations are the bane of its existence. Most genetic changes are by design. That means that cancer took it over and is having its way.
Also unless you can link to the scientific theory of evolution where it says that cancer is treated like an individual you don’t have anything but you making crap up as you go.
So, you agree that cancer is the result of random mutations that increase in frequency as a result of their relative reproductive success. Which is to say Darwinian natural selection is crucial for the formation of cancer? Almost as if Darinian evolution is not “completely worthless to science”?
Ambly:
The cancer is the result of Darwinian evolution. What it does after that is not.
But yes, Darwinian evolution brings us disease and deformities. So are you saying those are a help to science?
Some progress, I guess. But the paper I linked to demonstrates that evolutionary models (which include selection) are able to predict the progression of tumours. So seems like “what it does after” is also the result of Darwinian evolution.
Again, I think it would really be a good idea to read about this topic before you get into an argument you are so clearly ill-equipped for.
Ambly:
Evolutionary does not equal Darwinian evolution. And NS does NOT relate to cells on/ in an individual.
I think you might be the stupidest person I’ve ever tried to communicate with. You just agreed Darwinian evolution occurs among cells in tumor, know you are backtracking on that? Or do you just have no idea what you are saying now?
Wow, no way I am as stupid as you are. I said that Darwinian evolution CAUSES cancer. I never said Darwinian evolution causes cancer to change to become whatever you think is more fit.
But all that is moot as natural selection does not pertain to individual cells of a metazoan. And you cannot link to the scientific theory of evolution tat says otherwise.
I really don’t see any prospect of you doign anything but parrot the same ill-informed lines you have so far. But, jut to round things off.
You are now claiming that random variations that spread in a population as a result of their heritable effects on reproductive success are not an example of natural selection.
Your reason for saying this is because you personally hold that natural selection can’t operate on individual cells in a metazoan.
Even if this was the case. Who impact would giving the special case of natural selection acting on cells within a multi-cellular creature have on anything? You can give it a special name if you’d like. But we could still apply the tools of evolutionary biology to study. Egnor’s ignorant claim at this start of this thread is that Darwinian evolution is a “useless” field for the rest of biology. Whether or not you personally want to call natural selection acting within a body natural selection (and, again, I can think of no good reason to give them different names), it’s still the case that the methods of “Darwinian evolution” are being used to analyse, predict and even treat cancers.
Ambly:
Whatever you say projector-boy
I made no such claim. You have to be desperate to say such a thing.
Ernst Mayr said it in “What Evolution Is”- He said natural selection pertains to the individuals in the population- the phenotype.
He does say that if the individual genes make the phenotype less or more fit but the phenotype is still the object of NS. So that would be the humans/ organisms.
Intelligent Design is NOT anti-evolution
Analyzing, tracking and treating cancer has nothing to do with Darwin’s great idea that natural selection is a designer mimic capable of producing Paley’s appearance of design. It has nothing to do with universal common descent. But it does fly in the face of his fit individuals within a population- those with the adaptions that help them survive- are those who will take over a population given time.
What are cells in a tumour if not individuals in a population?
Ambly:
It all depends on the context. Google helps- What are cells
“It’s NOT a tumah”!
When tumors are stand-alone organisms, nay, when individual tumor cells are stand-alone organisms, come back and talk to us.
daveS #3 & Eugene S #6
I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thread, so I don’t know if anyone else made this point, but I thought I’d make it just in case.
I agree with Eugene here. This means, though, Darwin’s theory did not inspire evolutionary / genetic algorithms. In reality, the algorithms and Darwin’s theory about natural selection are both inspired by artificial selection, which is a form of design. It’s rather clear how design is worthwhile to science, and this is just one more example. On the other hand, if Darwin’s theory is somehow useful to science, it doesn’t seem to me like this would be a good example of it.
Take care,
HeKS
Greetings, HeKS.
Is the question of what inspired GAs not really an historical one? I have not read much about this, but my understanding was that the pioneers in the field were trying to simulate evolutionary processes which they believed occur in nature. At least some were “evolutionists” who accepted, rightly or wrongly, Darwin’s theory, at least broadly.
PS: I have looked only at genetic algorithms specifically, and essentially nothing else in the very diverse field of EC, so my perspective may be skewed by that.
By why should that matter. Unless you want to get into some bullshit syntactic argument based on your own shallow understanding of this topic?
Ambly:
Because it is the individual who has the cells that is the object of natural selection.
Syntactic argument? Are you daft?
The shallow misunderstanding is all yours, mr syntactic argument.
Do you apply natural selection to skin cells also? Does it apply to hair? Is hairier better? Is having excess skin mean the skin is winning?
What if one cancer cell in the tumah wants to take over and starts eating the other cancer cells? Would the others stick together (he he) to prevent it?
daves has a valid point. Even though they missed the mark the GAs were based on their misunderstanding of what Darwin was saying. They thought they were mimicking natural selection but they just didn’t fully understand the concept so their product didn’t reflect their intent. The solution or solutions are actively searched with the program providing everything needed to achieve the goal. Natural selection isn’t even a search heuristic let alone one dedicated to solving specific problems
HeKS,
PS to my #95: Here is an excerpt from Mitchell’s An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, pages 2–3. I added bolding to highlight the beginning of the part on genetic algorithms.
Eugene S @12
The words you bolded “selection from among” and “selection for” led to me having a eureka moment with respect to understanding Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini’s book. As of now, in my opinion, their book becomes a little less opaque if you read it not as about “selection” versus “selection for” but as about “selection from” versus “selection for”. So now I’ve achieved about a 15 percent understanding of that book.
And-
As far as the debate over cancer is concerned, a Darwinian interpretation is in a Catch 22 situation. If the probablistic resources exist for the tumors to gain mutations that give it an advantage, then we’re looking at “selection from”. That can be modeled scientifically but it gives no insight into how evolution achieves the illusion of design. If the cancer does not have such probablistic resources, then the question becomes how does it achieve the variation. That would be “selection for” and that requires a designer.
Notice how Jerry Coyne along with many others (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins etc.) argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution virtually proves that atheism and atheistic materialism are true. In other words, Darwinist’s are using “science” to establish a metaphysically based world view.
From Egnor’s article:
There is no doubt that Darwin was not primarily motivated by science but by a materialistic world view which he came to embrace because of the influence of family and friends. He saw design in nature and was trying to disprove it. Two biographies by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist and Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins clearly documents Darwin’s personal evolution from a Christian theist to an atheistic materialist. His “theory” resonated with 19th century scientists not because of its science but because of its materialistic worldview.
Up above @ 74 I asked: “Why do people keep clinging to Darwinism like a child’s security blanket?”
The answer: “Because it provides a metaphysical hand and glove fit with atheistic naturalism/materialism.”
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/is-darwinism-completely-worthless-to-science/#comment-663097
No other theory of evolution will do. In other words, Darwin’s theory and Darwinism are not falsifiable.
john_a_designer @101
Actually, Darwinism and its neo is falsifiable and proven false:
Gradualism fails – http://nonlin.org/gradualism/
Natural selection fails – http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/
Divergence of character fails – http://nonlin.org/evotest/
Speciation fails – http://nonlin.org/speciation-problems/
DNA “essence of life” fails – http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/
Randomness fails – http://nonlin.org/random-abuse/
Abiogenesis fails – http://nonlin.org/warmpond/
Science against Religion fails – http://nonlin.org/philosophy-religion-and-science/
etc., etc.
And let’s test it again and make sure it fails again and again: http://nonlin.org/evotest/
Not for a dogmatic Darwinist.
HeKS @94
An excellent point.
hnorman5 @100
I had a similar eureka moment when I read about it in David Abel’s articles. Yes, the concept of probabilistic resources is key.
Nonlin.org
I am sorry if we have gone a full circle but I still think ‘fitness’ is about a population of organisms (not an individual) and it is measured ‘post-factum’ based on the number of offspring having a particular trait as a proportion of the population. We can do predictions about if and how fast this or that trait is fixed in the population before fixation happens. It seems really straightforward and I still see no tautology there 😉 Maybe I am missing something.
daveS @73
You raise a very interesting question. I have no ready answer to it.
daveS #95 and #99
It’s possible I was not as clear about my meaning as I should have been.
What I was trying to point out is that Darwin was inspired by artificial selection, and then when it came to Genetic / Evolutionary Algorithms, what they actually ended up modeling was artificial selection, not natural selection. So they ended up modeling the thing Darwin’s theory was inspired by rather than the theory itself.
That said, you’re right that as a purely historical issue they were inspired by Darwin’s theory. I guess what I would ask, though, is whether GAs would have failed to have ever been conceived of in the absence of Darwin’s theory about Natural Selection? Perhaps so. But given that they ultimately ended up modeling a process that had been around and known long before Darwin came on the scene, and given that Darwin made specific reference to that process (Artificial Selection) as his own inspiration, it seems rather questionable to me that Darwin’s theory about Natural Selection was a necessary condition for the eventual creation of GAs. That they happened to have been inspired by Darwin’s theory seems more like an historical accident than an historical necessity because, in the end, all the roads lead back to artificial selection. And if that’s the case, the creation of GAs really doesn’t give us much reason to disagree with Egnor’s assessment of the value of Darwinism to science as expressed in the OP.
Still, it was inaccurate for me to say that GA’s were inspired by artificial selection and you were correct in your statement about their inspiration. I should have said that it was Darwin who was inspired by artificial selection, while evolutionary and genetic algorithms ultimately modeled the thing that Darwin was inspired by (regardless of the fact that they were technically inspired by natural selection), making artificial selection the idea that was actually useful to science.
Take care
HeKS,
I also doubt that Darwin’s theory was a necessary condition for the creation of genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation in general. I thought about asking in my first or second post where this field would stand if “Darwinism” (or some equivalent) had never caught on. I suspect something like EC would have eventually come about, so I agree there is indeed some factor of historical accident involved.
I would like to come back to the statement that, say, genetic algorithms (and EC generally) model artificial selection, not natural selection.
The examples of computation via GAs that I’ve looked at are very abstract, and quite far removed from physical reality. It’s not clear to me how we know a particular GA models one kind of selection but not the other. What features of GAs allow one to make that determination?
Genetic algorithms use an active search heuristic to solve the problems they were intelligently designed to solve. Natural selection is not a search heuristic and it is not actively trying to solve anything. Natural selection is really nothing more than contingent serendipity.
HeKS,
This might serve as a good example. This response to a question (“What is a simple example of a genetic algorithm?”) on the website quora.com explains very briefly a GA approach to the Traveling Salesman problem. Here’s the essential part:
Eugense S @105
So you agree “fitness” can only be measured by survival (not independent). If so, what is the point of “fitness”?
Isn’t a population made of its members? What can be a property of the population but not of the individual in this case? Any gene variant is a property of the individual and only then of the population, right?
What predictions can you make on “fitness” traits other than status quo aka stasis? Example? If you’re thinking something like “the spread of a virus in a population”, that is not “fitness”.
@ET
The % of biologists that support ‘natural selection’ is in the high 90s. Until you convince most of them, well, you’re not even wrong.
UD Editors: Wow evil. Around 1500 the % of scholars who believed the sun orbited the earth was in the high 90s. So was Copernicus not even wrong? *palm forehead* We suppose appealing to consensus is comforting if all you want is a confirmation of your bias. It also allows you to draw conclusions without all of that messy and tiresome examination of the evidence. You’ve got that going for you too.
Nonlin
“What is the property of the population but not of the individual in this case?”
Percent C of individuals with a given trait.
Nonlin
‘that is not “fitness”.’
I don’t really mind what you call it. A population responds to the environmental impetus by adjusting itself to produce maximum amount of offspring. That is all there is to it at a high level. Whatever the other disadvantages of the model, it is not circular. I do not understand why you are having a such an issue with it.
evolution:
Support it with what? What does that even mean?
Natural selection has never been observed to produce anything more than a change in allele frequency over time within a population. And given that we don’t understand the true nature of genetic change we can’t even be sure about that.
They can’t even convince themselves that natural selection can do any more than that.
Eugene S @ 113 114
You missed: “Any gene variant is a property of the individual and only then of the population, right?”
You say: “A population responds to the environmental impetus by adjusting itself to produce maximum amount of offspring” yet that is directly contradicted by dying populations that DO NOT “respond to the environmental impetus…”
Not a matter of “what you call it”. The problem is that Darwinism invents all kind of crazy concepts with no basis in reality. This includes “natural selection” and “fitness” and you not being able to answer the simple questions asked is a direct proof of that.