Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Selling Stupid

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Granville Sewell’s sin is pointing out the obvious that anyone can understand. This represents a tremendous threat. As David Berlinski has observed, Darwinists — who have invested their worldview and even their careers in Darwinian storytelling — react with understandable hostility when told that their “theory” is simply not credible.

It’s really easy to figure out that the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection cannot possibly do that with which it is credited. Life is fundamentally based on information and information processing — a software computer program and its associated, highly functionally integrated execution hardware. Computer programs don’t write themselves, and they especially don’t write themselves when random errors are thrown into the code. The fact that biological computer programs can survive random errors with remarkable robustness is evidence of tremendously sophisticated fault-tolerance engineering. The same goes for the hardware machinery of life.

One of my specialties in aerospace R&D engineering is guidance, navigation and control software. The task of designing GN&C algorithms and the associated hardware that would permit an ornithopter to land on a swaying tree branch in gusting wind is so far ahead of our most sophisticated human technology that we can only dream about such a thing. Yet, birds do this with ease.

Darwinists want us to believe that this all came about through a process of throwing monkey wrenches in working machinery and introducing random errors into highly sophisticated computer code.

In addition, they argue that because the sun provides energy available to do work, all the obvious engineering hurdles can be dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion.

This is simply not credible.

In fact, it’s downright stupid.

Selling stupid is a tough assignment.

No wonder Darwinists have their panties in a bunch.

Comments
Well, CY, when a smart person believes something that I think is stupid, I want to know why :) In other words, it gives me pause to consider that I might have missed something. In Gil's case, if he thinks that his former thread about believing in evolution had anything to do with believing in evolution, then I think he's missed something :) And conceivably, given that he is a smart person, that might explain why he thinks that evolution is stupid. In my own case, several people have pointed me to Meyer's book. So I'm reading it. I want to know whether I've missed something. If I have, I want to know what it is. Equally, if Meyer has, I want to know what it is.Elizabeth Liddle
June 26, 2011
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Lizzie, People believe stupid things all the time. Believing in stupid things does not necessarily make the believer stupid. I don't think you believe anybody here is stupid, but I gather that you believe that ID is one of those stupid things.CannuckianYankee
June 26, 2011
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And Liz- Darwinian processes do have limits- there isn't any evidence that they can construct new, useful and functional multi-part systems. Why doesn't that count against it?Joseph
June 26, 2011
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Elizabeth:
It doesn’t evolve the code that runs the code, of course, because it’s a simulation, but what evolves is code – algorithms that take input and produces output.
Avida:
The avida system creates an artificial (virtual) environment inside of a computer. The system implements a 2D grid of virtual processors which execute a limited assembly language; programs are stored as sequential strings of instructions in the system memory. Every program (typically termed cell, organism, string or creature) is associated with a processor, or grid point. Therefore, the maximum population of organisms is given by the dimensions of the grid, N× M, and not by the size of the total genome space of the population, as in tierra. For purposes of Artificial Life research, the assembly language used must support self-reproduction; the assembly language instructions available are described in the Virtual CPU section. The virtual environment is initially seeded with a human-designed program that self-replicates. This program and its descendents are then subjected to random mutations of various possible types which change instructions within their memory; resulting in unfavorable, neutral, and favorable program mutations. Mutations are qualified in a strictly Darwinian sense; any mutation which results in an increased ability to reproduce in the given environment is considered favorable. While it is clear that the vast majority of mutations will be unfavorable---typically causing the creature to fail to reproduce entirely---or else neutral, those few that are favorable will cause organisms to reproduce more effectively and thus thrive in the environment. Over time, organisms which are better suited to the environment are generated that are derived from the initial (ancestor) creature. All that remains is the specification of an environment such that tasks not otherwise intrinsically useful to self-reproduction are assimilated. A method of altering the time slice, or amount of time apportioned to each processor, is described in the Time Slicing section. While avida is clearly a genetic algorithm (GA) variation (to which nearly all evolutionary systems with a genetic coding can be reduced), the presence of a computationally (Turing) complete genetic basis differentiates it from traditional genetic algorithms. In addition, selection in avida more closely resembles natural selection than most GA mechanisms; this is a result of the implicit (and dynamic) co-evolutionary fitness landscape automatically created by the reproductive requirement. This co-evolutionary pressure classifies avida as an auto-adaptive system, as opposed to standard genetic algorithms (or adaptive) systems, in which the creatures have no interaction with each other. Finally, avida is an evolutionary system that is easy to study quantitatively yet maintains the hallmark complexity of living systems.
Joseph
June 26, 2011
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Hi Gil! Pleased to meet you finally!
Elizabeth Liddle: You’ve said a number of times in your posts that believing in evolution is stupid.
Actually, I’ve said that I do believe in evolution. Remember?
But that wasn't evolution, Gil! That was development! Evolution is something that happens to populations, not individuals, although of course it affects the way individuals develop.
What I don’t believe in is the near infinite creative power ascribed to the proposed Darwinian mechanism.
But nobody I know ascribes "infinite creative power" to any Darwinian mechanism. Indeed some of the most powerful evidence for Darwinian processes, as opposed to other kinds of processes, is that Darwinian process have limits, and those limits are exactly the limits we see in the nested hierarchies of living things - the almost total restriction of novelty to a single lineage, regardless of how useful that novelty might be in another. I'd say it's the very limitations of Darwinian processes (lack of foresight; inability to transfer solutions from one lineage to another) that make its most powerful differential predictions compared to what you might expect from an Intentional Designer (as exemplified by human designs). If you think what I have written above is "stupid", please explain why :) I may not be brilliant, but I'm not normally considered stupid. Nor am I anti-theist. I was a theist for half a century, and in some ways I still miss it. So I have no dog in that fight.Elizabeth Liddle
June 26, 2011
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Hiya Lizzie, I hope you took up the narrowboat option instead of staying in and battling out here all day!
Hi Chris! Hope the weather stayed fine for the fete! I'm still stuck at my computer, unfortunately. I'm trying to debug some code, but have to run it in real time, (it's code for presenting stimuli during an experiment). I hope we'll get up the Soar for an evening barbecue on the riverbank :)
Meyer deals with Avida in SITC. Once you get to it, I hope you’ll agree that it doesn’t actually offer any evidence for neo-darwinian evolution whatsoever. On the contrary, it’s more like evidence for Intelligent Design.
OK, I'm reading approximately one chapter per night, so I'll get there eventually :)Elizabeth Liddle
June 26, 2011
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paragwinn: When are you going to find something new to post about? My interest in ID is the product of my background in multiple engineering disciplines, so I often emphasize the argument from engineering. Keep in mind that UD has a continuous supply of new visitors who might not be familiar with such argumentation. DrBot: I would disagree with Gil when he says that this is stuff we can only dream about. Actually, I agree that we will probably one day develop the technology required to produce an autonomous, self-contained ornithopter with the capability of landing on a swaying tree branch in gusty wind, but this represents a phenomenally sophisticated and difficult engineering task. Engineers do indeed dream about such things as technology advances through intelligent design. But this technology has already been developed! And it wasn't developed through random mutation and natural selection. Elizabeth Liddle: You’ve said a number of times in your posts that believing in evolution is stupid. Actually, I've said that I do believe in evolution. Remember? What I don't believe in is the near infinite creative power ascribed to the proposed Darwinian mechanism.GilDodgen
June 26, 2011
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Hiya Lizzie, I hope you took up the narrowboat option instead of staying in and battling out here all day! Meyer deals with Avida in SITC. Once you get to it, I hope you'll agree that it doesn't actually offer any evidence for neo-darwinian evolution whatsoever. On the contrary, it's more like evidence for Intelligent Design.Chris Doyle
June 26, 2011
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Yes, Avida. It doesn't evolve the code that runs the code, of course, because it's a simulation, but what evolves is code - algorithms that take input and produces output. That code is not provided by the Avida designers, but evolves within the Avida environment.Elizabeth Liddle
June 26, 2011
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Elizabth:
That’s exactly what evolutionary algorithms do – evolve their own code.
Any examples of that?Joseph
June 26, 2011
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Gil:
It’s really easy to figure out that the Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection cannot possibly do that with which it is credited. Life is fundamentally based on information and information processing — a software computer program and its associated, highly functionally integrated execution hardware. Computer programs don’t write themselves,
Well, yes, they do. Or can. That's exactly what evolutionary algorithms do - evolve their own code.
and they especially don’t write themselves when random errors are thrown into the code.
But they do - that's how they work. If you don't set the thing up to give "random errors" i.e. you set it up so that replication happens with 100% fidelity, your code won't evolve.
The fact that biological computer programs can survive random errors with remarkable robustness is evidence of tremendously sophisticated fault-tolerance engineering. The same goes for the hardware machinery of life.
Well, it is evidence that only robust code is able to evolve, which would rule out a lot of human-written code. In other words, evolution can only occur in a self-replication system in which a large subset replication variants are viable. You've said a number of times in your posts that believing in evolution is stupid. Obviously I disagree, but does it never occur to you that if a lot of apparently intelligent people seem to think it makes sense, that it is not as "obviously" stupid as you seem to think? Remember that DNA "code" is a single vector. Your own code is not. A code that consists of a single vector, in which any three consecutive items potentially codes for a viable output, is clearly much more robust than a code in which the slightest misplaced bracket or mangled bit of syntax will cause the code to fail.Elizabeth Liddle
June 26, 2011
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Dr Bot: Do your parallel processing algorithms write themselves, if so, how? GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 26, 2011
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Gil: You nailed it. Well done. I can imagine someone going into a board-room and proposing to write software by putting monkeys at keyboards, filtered through trial and error,t hen when one works, it is fed into a hill-climber algorithm. No-one in his right mind would walk into a boardroom with such a proposal. Unless he or she wanted to be fired. And, of course the ornithopter software being discussed was sure not written by monkeys at keyboards, fileted by trial and error and fed into hill climber algors. No ifs, ands or buts about it. What have we been collectively smoking? Whatever it is, it makes the strongest sensi I have seen pale beside it. I think we have been in a cave full of laced incense and fed on clever stories that the bewitching mind-drugs have made seem real. Time to wake up, folks. (Detractors: cf the problem of filter psychology [cf here and here (this last on emotional blocks)], for messages apt to be filtered out, they do need to be said, in slightly different ways with diverse examples, over and over and over again to begin to get through.) GEM of TKIkairosfocus
June 26, 2011
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Gil, The second law is the "common sense law of physics", see my video beginning at the 17:45 mark. But people like Daniel Styer (see video beginning at 3:45, also here ) have perverted it beyond recognition, into something very counterintuitive. Common sense is not always good science, but in this case it is, and the mathematics (video beginning at 8:45 mark) actually supports the common sense interpretation, not the perverted one.Granville Sewell
June 26, 2011
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The task of designing GN&C algorithms and the associated hardware that would permit an ornithopter to land on a swaying tree branch in gusting wind is so far ahead of our most sophisticated human technology that we can only dream about such a thing. Yet, birds do this with ease.
Some of the latest research is quite impressive. The control software for that kind of precise flying is good enough to perform those kinds of maneuvers, the problems that remain are more about the computation required for visually guided behavior like this. Here is a video of a flying robot performing some very precise stunts. The flight stability, and general control are all done on board, but the visual navigation is done off board because it is so computationally demanding. It's worth noting though that by computationally demanding I don't mean it is beyond our capabilities, it is actually more to do with the nature of the computers we use. Vision is an inherently parallel task but we tend to do it with sequential machines. I believe some research groups are working on vision sensors that perform some of the vision processing in situ - each pixel is a simple processing unit that communicates with near neighbors so the 'computer' is actually an array of thousands of identical processing units working at a relatively low speed. In other words you have thousands of simple computers working at a few Khz instead of a single complex core that has to work at many Ghz. The fly eye is a good example that some robotics researchers are drawing inspiration from. I would disagree with Gil when he says that this is stuff we can only dream about.DrBot
June 26, 2011
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You make lots of unsubstantiated claims, paragwinn. When challenged to support them, you disappear. It's like you know you can't justify what you're saying, but feel the need to say it anyway. Is that what it is?Chris Doyle
June 26, 2011
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Chris Doyle: you mean the claims of repetition and lack of new information?paragwinn
June 26, 2011
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Great post GilDodgen, I loved the point about designing something to land on a branch. We take it for granted, but we shouldn't. Paragwinn: when are you going to start substantiating your claims?Chris Doyle
June 25, 2011
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B1paragwinn
June 25, 2011
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GilDodgen, When are you going to find something new to post about? Quite literally, the repetition is providing no new information.paragwinn
June 25, 2011
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Better link: God Is God http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_GQsVQikXEbornagain77
June 25, 2011
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But alas Gil, the alternative is 'unthinkable'; :) GOD is GOD - Steven Curtis Chapman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCrBczelMwM&NR=1bornagain77
June 25, 2011
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