Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

So Much For Random Searches

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There’s an article in Discover Magazine about how gamers have been able to solve a problem in HIV research in only three weeks (!) that had remained outside of researcher’s powerful computer tools for years.

This, until now, unsolvable problem gets solved because:

They used a wide range of strategies, they could pick the best places to begin, and they were better at long-term planning. Human intuition trumped mechanical number-crunching.

Oh,my! Teleology raises its ugly head!

But, now, let’s hear it for Intelligent Design. Here’s what intelligent agents were able to do within the search space of possible solutions:

. . . until now, scientists have only been able to discern the structure of the two halves together. They have spent more than ten years trying to solve structure of a single isolated half, without any success.

The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs.

Random search: 10 years + and No Success
Intelligent Agents: 3 weeks and Success.

Is there a lesson to be learned here Darwinist onlookers?

Comments
Elizabeth, If a smaller world effect is observed, it does not necessarily mean it can be extrapolated into the bigger picture, esp. taking into account strong evidence against it. Your reasoning has a flaw of the type: (1) All bullies in this school are boys; (2) Mike is a boy, so he is a bully. If you can't see this, I am afraid I can't help it any more than by this comment.Eugene S
September 20, 2011
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No, I was not "typing quickly" - what do you mean by "microevolution"? It's not a word with a well-defined technical meaning. However, whenever observable evolution is mentioned, people here say "oh, that's micro-evolution, not macro-evolution" so presumably people accept that evolution occurs on observable time-scales As for evolution not being a random search - no, it isn't. I think part of the problem here is the "search" metaphor, but it's used on the NFL theorems so we are sort of stuck with it. A "random search" for a solution would be one in which the "searcher" searches the entire search space at random, the previous "pick" having no relationship to the next. An evolutionary search doesn't do this - each pick is constrained by the previous one. This won't do any better than random search if the solutions are randomly scattered through search space. But if the solutions are clustered in search space, it will. And, in biology, they are. Which is why microevolution works.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Elizabeth: "evolutionary search works far better than random search." What does this even mean? Are you saying that the event of change is not random, i.e., it is following some law-like process or is directed in some way? If by evolution not being random, you mean simply that once the random event changes the organism, the result of that event may be that the organism experiences a fitness advantage, then you haven't shown anything about evolution being more effective than random search in finding the change in the first place. The question about the random search applies with equal force to a pure blind search, as it does to the front half (i.e., the change part) of what you are calling "evolutionary search." You are dealing with a blind search in either instance. Now, if you what you mean is that getting to point Z directly by a random search is less likely than getting to point Z, through points A-Y, *each of which requires a much smaller search space than Z and each of which confers some kind of fitness advantage*, then sure, we all agree that it might be less daunting than getting to Z directly by random. But that climb up mount improbable must be tempered by several facts, among others: (i) you are still dealing with a random search at each step of the way, (ii) the multiple probabilities of the various random searches at points A-Y have to be taken into account, (iii) points A-Y have to confer some kind of fitness advantage, (iv) the fitness advantage has to be sufficient to overshadow competing changes, or to some other way get fixed in the population. That such a fitness landscape actually exists (which Darwin certainly hoped, in terms of his ever "plastic" organisms), is conjecture, not fact. Sure, we can get a finch beak to oscillate around a norm, but there is zero evidence that we have an available climb up mount improbable to the finch itself. BTW, I hope you were typing quickly and that your definition of microevolution is not simply "evolution on an observable time-scale". That would be an example of equivocating two different meanings of the word evolution. Rhetorically convenient, of course, because if we see small scale, even cyclical changes, we can imagine that we have found evidence for more significant changes. But unfortunately it doesn't hold.Eric Anderson
September 19, 2011
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Why are you trying to shoehorn evolution into this? There's no mention of it in the original article and evolutionary methods were *never" used or mentioned. It's strictly chemistry and molecular biology. A bunch of intelligent amateurs using some neat game-style programming did a better job than a smaller number of intelligent experts using conventional messages. And in the real world, proteins fold due to electrostatic attractions. You have evolution on the brain.dmullenix
September 19, 2011
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Greg Chaitin's Life as Evolving Software video 1:18:48 Lecture given at UFRGS in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Few people remember Turing's work on pattern formation in biology (morphogenesis), but Turing's famous 1936 paper On Computable Numbers exerted an immense influence on the birth of molecular biology indirectly, through the work of John von Neumann on self-reproducing automata, which influenced Sydney Brenner who in turn influenced Francis Crick, the Crick of Watson and Crick, the discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA. Furthermore, von Neumann's application of Turing's ideas to biology is beautifully supported by recent work on evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology). The crucial idea: DNA is multi-billion year old software, but we could not recognize it as such before Turing's 1936 paper, which according to von Neumann creates the idea of computer hardware and software. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlYS_GiAnK8Enezio E. De Almeida Filho
September 19, 2011
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Where is my "logic flaw" Eugene? "No Free Lunch" is a perfectly respectable theorem that says something like evolutionary searches are no more successful than random searches when averaged over all possible fitness landscapes. But we know, from our observations of "microevolution" (by which I mean, evolution on an observable time-scale, I'm not sure what you mean) that over the kinds of fitness landscapes that populations adapt to, evolutionary search works far better than random search. And nobody in the ID movement seems to deny this. So we immediately have, in front of us, a fitness landscape that can be climbed faster by evolutionary processes than by random search. The "Free Lunch" is provided by the simple fact that a random change to a genotype that already works doesn't take the phenotype very far in terms of fitness. "NFL" would only apply if a random change to a genotype is no more likely to move the phenotype a small distance than a large one, and that is simply not the case with populations of biological organisms - if it were the case, not even microevolution could occur, and yet it does.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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There is a consistent pattern of conflating hill-climbing within an island of function with the challenge of getting to the island of function. Until small changes can get small gains or losses in an existing function, moving about a little bit is of no advantage. And the ID challenge is to get to the islands of function. As has been repeatedly pointed out.
And I am seeing a consistent pattern of failing to demonstrate that the functional domains populated by living things are, in fact "islands". The evidence strongly suggests that far from being "islands" they form a connected tree - that islands are not "colonised", precisely because they can't be by an incremental process - an intelligent designer, of course could do so. It's because the pattern of living things, over the ages, form a connected tree (Darwin's "tree of life") that his theory, which we know works on human time scales, can be extrapolated to biological time, and it's because we don't find "islands" that a designer is a less persuasive hypothesis. No centaurs, gryphons or crocoducks, and, pace Behe, no Irreducible Complexity, at least none that seems persuasive enough to offset the overwhelming pattern of connectedness. Unless you are talking about the "island" of life itself. But then we wouldn't be talking about Darwinism.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Joseph, That statement by Dr Liddle is a striking example of confusion between the necessary and sufficient. I did not expect to see this much of a logic flaw. Dr Liddle, Trouble is macroevolution has not been observed. "No free lunch" has been proposed as a theorem irrespective of ID, to my knowledge. Also, could you be more precise to indicate which arguments of ID fail as a result of microevolution being observable. Thanks.Eugene S
September 19, 2011
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But the scientists weren't engaging in "blind search". Quite the opposite. They seemed to be hampered by their preconceptions. And even if they were (which they weren't) - what is the point of the OP wrt to evolution? Evolution isn't a blind search.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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kairosfocus, RE: (4.2.1.1.4)
Until small changes can get small gains or losses in an existing function, moving about a little bit is of no advantage.
This is too vague a statement to be helpful. More importantly, it seems to contradict this statement:
ID doesn't claim that neo-Darwinism mechanisms cannot cause small-scale changes in organisms that might represent small changes in specified complexity. But the observation that neo-Darwinism can do some things does not imply that neo-Darwinism can do all things.
Finally, the paper that I linked to shows the math and the Meyer-Ritchie LOOP programming that supports his work. Chaitin's website has more that can be freely downloaded: http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/rhampton7
September 19, 2011
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How so, Joseph? How would microevolution occur if it were true that evolutionary processes were no better than blind search?Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Well, apart from preconceptions we have common sense, haven't we?Eugene S
September 19, 2011
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Elizabeth Liddle:
If “microevolution” is possible, and of course it is, and has been observed, then a great many ID arguments simply fail, including the “No Free Lunch” argument.
Unfortunately for you just baldly declaring it doesn't make it so. And also unfortunately for you there isn't any part of microevolution that refutes any part of ID.Joseph
September 19, 2011
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The message is quite obvious, on the superiority of intuitive, intelligently nudged search over blind search.kairosfocus
September 19, 2011
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There is a consistent pattern of conflating hill-climbing within an island of function with the challenge of getting to the island of function. Until small changes can get small gains or losses in an existing function, moving about a little bit is of no advantage. And the ID challenge is to get to the islands of function. As has been repeatedly pointed out.kairosfocus
September 19, 2011
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Yup. I don't think it especially supports either, although I do think it's very interesting - it's a kind of exploitation of "hive mind".Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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There was certainly selection - the stable configurations were rewarded. But certainly the variance wasn't random. However, neither was it far-sighted, unlike the scientists, who, apparently, failed at the same task.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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So what was not distributed, competitive or proximally rewarding about the Foldit operation?Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Well, that's good, because evolution is a fairly intelligent system.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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I'm still not getting the message you are apparently drawing from this.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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If "microevolution" is possible, and of course it is, and has been observed, then a great many ID arguments simply fail, including the "No Free Lunch" argument. Microevolution happens precisely because evolutionary processes work better than random search when the search is a population adapting to its environment.Elizabeth Liddle
September 19, 2011
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Based upon the comments I've read so far, the experiment's "results" appear to be more like a Rorsach test than anything else. Sure, the 3-D protein formations are real enough, but whether the experiment demonstrates concepts of ID or TOE appears to be as much a product of the individual's preconceptions as anything else.ciphertext
September 19, 2011
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RHampton7, Let him try and demonstrate this. I have enough reason to doubt it can be demonstrated, unfortunately. The no free lunch principle is ubiquitous: in mechanics, in physics, in biology: to get something beneficial you have to pay, and pay significantly more than the amount of gain you want to get. That;s the way this fallen world operates, unfortunately...Eugene S
September 19, 2011
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Which is the reason for my previous post (2.1.2). Gregory Chaitin is beginning to demonstrate that a "fine-tuned" search space can be a completely natural phenomena. If his ideas are credible, then Intelligent Design theory will have to adapt.rhampton7
September 19, 2011
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For the quasi-willfully blind:
"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," Firas Khatib of the university's biochemistry lab said in a press release. "The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems." One of Foldit's creators, Seth Cooper, explained why gamers had succeeded where computers had failed. "People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," he said.
LinkPaV
September 19, 2011
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Elizabeth: Here are a couple of key quotes: "Last year, Cooper showed that Foldit’s gamers were better than the Rosetta programme at solving many protein structures. They used a wide range of strategies, they could pick the best places to begin, and they were better at long-term planning. Human intuition trumped mechanical number-crunching." and "[Those who didn't do as well] focused too heavily on tweaking already imperfect solutions that other teams achieved better results by making large-scale changes." The objective lessons from this are clearly: (i) intelligent agents are better than number-crunching brute force approaches (i.e., throwing lots of probabilistic resources at it doesn't really help much when there is a huge search space), and (ii) "tweaking" imperfect solutions (wow, that is practically a definition of how evolution is supposed to work, progressing from one point to the next) is not as good of an approach as looking at the problem more broadly and making large-scale changes. Kudos, though, if you can somehow twist this into "evidence" for the efficacy of evolution.Eric Anderson
September 19, 2011
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Hello, I have no problem with this explanation. This is indeed part of what ID asserts. ID claims that to get to those isolated islands of biological meaning it is impossible without deliberate fine-tuning (intelligent intervention). After the system is put in that favourable state in its phase space, provided the system has enough capability to adapt to environmental change, microevolution is possible.Eugene S
September 19, 2011
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I think it is not disputed that we are comparing different patterns of intelligent intervention. The experiment itself was designed as well, no doubt. In either scenario, there is what we call a decision maker (something or somebody that compares different outcomes in view of the final goal, to varying degrees of success) and a non-trivial starting point. It is so to say a higher level of intelligence that drove and directed lower level intelligent input. In any case, we have a known optimisation function. With blind search, nothing like this really holds. So I believe it is an example of careful design.Eugene S
September 19, 2011
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Did you read this part:
Foldit takes a different approach, using the collective efforts of causal gamers to do the hard work. And its best players can outperform software designed to do the same job.
And, did you read what you just finished writing?
. . . distributed intelligence beat isolated intelligences.
I don't see any mention of random processes or natural selection. The selecting that took place was that done by intelligent agents. This is, of course, an ID sine qua non.PaV
September 19, 2011
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Eugene, contra ID, evolution only changes a very small part of the genome at a time - typically only one or two bases. This means that 99.99999+ percent of the new genome is identical to the parental genome. This means that instead of doing a random search, evolution searches a very small area very close to a known workable part of the search space. To do a Dembski/ID style random search, an organism would have to change every base in its genome randomly all at once every time it reproduced. And everybody agrees with ID here - that would never work.dmullenix
September 19, 2011
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