Today’s Class Project

_{Barry Arrington

October 30, 2007

Intelligent Design}

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Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green think they have demonstrated that the “monkeys typing” hypothesis is true here. The class is assigned the task of identifying their blunder.

Comments

These researchers should be praised. They have provided a demonstration of how evolution works through a conscious, purposeful, and directed process of supernature. With Darwinists like these, who needs ID proponents?Clumsy Brute_{October 31, 2007
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Religion Prof. Please prove your assertion that "pretty much every combination of three letters means SOMETHING?" I can assure you that if you go down this alley you will get your lunch eaten on this site!bornagain77_{October 31, 2007
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Could someone please make a FAIR program to simulate this, in which there are only four letters in the alphabet (as is the case with DNA), every word has three letters, and pretty much every combination of three letters means SOMETHING? http://exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/2007/09/monkeys-and-typewriters-on-edge-of.htmlReligionProf_{October 31, 2007
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‘Monkeys with chisels’; Given an infinite number of monkeys, an infinite number chisels and an infinite amount of time, would one eventually carve the Rosetta Stone? I would seriously like to see an accidentalist try to address it.tribune7_{October 31, 2007
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Who designed this program? The program stopped when my pc hibernated. 268379: bho designed this programkbevets_{October 31, 2007
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I vote for changing the target phrase to: "Methinks Dawkins is a Weasle" All in favor say, "aye."mike1962_{October 31, 2007
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As has already been mentioned, I like the fact that a capital letter will send the program to infinity.
Hmm...bad design in a program designed to show how evolution confers complexity without the need for a designer. Oh, and the program's goal phrase is front loaded. Sweet, sweet irony.Apollos_{October 31, 2007
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As has already been mentioned, I like the fact that a capital letter will send the program to infinity.Lurker_{October 30, 2007
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I, too, am off to the Tax Man this afternoon, and with this being through Monash Uni in Australia, I can totally agree regarding MY taxed money going there propping up faultily thought-through projects. But, the rub: where do our tax dollars go to contribute to stopping the fallacies often presented to us as hard science? Obviously not these bastions of hardline dogmatism. But where else is hard science achievable but at such well-funded public universities? (I'm talking Australia, regarding public institutions) They are all made out of the same mold, and it is hard to crack. At least they could have used 'Once a jolly swagman' as the stub for the computer to achieve a generational mutational climb. It's Australian, it's iconic, and doesn't make any sense without the other lines to the song. Perfect. Oh well, must go give the government more of my money to spend as they choose on other worthwhile activities.AussieID_{October 30, 2007
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The fact that they have a target string sequence, a program designed for the purpose of taking in a randomized string of letters of the alphabet, a loop running until it equals the target sequence, and the fact they have any letters of the alphabet to work with in the first place, is anything but a Darwinian evolutionary process. It is interesting to see how the supposed "science" of Darwinian evolution is trying to escape the experimental study of the real-time evidence of biological systems (in support for DE) and instead going into writing programs designed to meet supposed Darwinian goals. It is although simple, they can't provide evidence for they're magic spells theory in real life, so they go into virtual reality and seek wisdom there.godslanguage_{October 30, 2007
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Amateur software engineers like Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green really ought not embarrass themselves with stuff like this. One of my programming specialties is search algorithms. Here's a search algorithm (just a few of more than 65,000 lines of C code) from my checkers program. It has a goal in mind, which is to trounce your butt in the game. Weasel programmers really should search for another vocation. Please tell me I'm not dreaming. How is it possible that the Heng-Green program and the claims made for it are the product of a university computer science department?GilDodgen_{October 30, 2007
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I always find examples of this sort of thing puzzling. I agree that it is puzzling that otherwise seemingly intelligent people could put up something this stupid as evidence. Ironically IMO, this is actually evidence for frontloading and ID not for an undirected darwinian process. I'm not sure they really understand IC either given their model. It bothers me that my tax dollars (currently in mind as they are due tonight) are wasted supporting people this stupid.Jason Rennie_{October 30, 2007
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Anyone else think that it is just lame that they use more than 26 iterations to achieve this? If they just went through the alphabet in order they would be done so much faster... If they converted the whole string to binary and kept the correct bits and then they could be done in 2 iterations!bork_{October 30, 2007
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The evolving story of the monkey's typing always made me think about the process that the pre-typing-monkeys used to create their Shakespearean sonnets. Typewriters were developed in the mid eighteen century. Prior to that, would the 'monkeys with pencils' hypothesis been useful? 'Monkeys with quills'? Or, prior to the Bard himself, some other prose-producing luminary: 'Monkeys with stylus'' (cuneiform script); 'Monkeys with chisels'; The typewriter allows the formation of an already produced set of letters, roughly representing the phonography of the written language. You have to know the symbols prior to being able to read them. The typewriter takes away a formidable task already - producing accurate script. Try and make the Shakespeare sonnet without the programming for the letters, and allow the next monkey in line to be able to decode the first monkey's atttempts (remember, if the second monkey doesn't understand the first monkey's message, eg. Run! Fire!, then second monkey is dead) ... now I'd like to see a monkey with a paint brush do that! http://www.rd.com/images/content/101206/monkeyPaint1.jpgAussieID_{October 30, 2007
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Who designed this program? -- Is at 3100 and counting...bevets_{October 30, 2007
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Tim, In defense of Dawkins' weasel program,,,You forgot to call us dishonest, evil, quote-mining, plagiarizing, creationist, IDiots who wouldn't know true science if it bit us in the rear end. Oh yeah,... Evidence Smevidence... Did you look at my double speak rhetoric in my peer reviewed paper, you morons???!!!! As a sidelight to this weasel program, in the book "A Meaningful World--How Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature---by Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, http://www.ameaningfulworld.com/ The authors go through this very sentence "Methinks it is like a weasel" to illustrate that the line is not a stand alone line...The line only makes sense in the greater context of the entire play of Hamlet... Particularly this part of the play: Pol. My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently. Ham. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? 268 Pol. By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed. Ham. Methinks it is like a weasel. Pol. It is backed like a weasel. Ham. Or like a whale? Pol. Very like a whale. Hamlet uses the line, in self amusement, to show what a weak spine Polonius has, The Line ONLY makes sense in the greater context of the play. The authors go on to show how so many things in this world and universe are interrelated in astonishing complexity that only make sense in relation to life having purpose..Astonishing complexity that we truly only catch minor glimpses of. The book was very enjoyable if just from what I learned about the Hamlet play although it is a lot deeper than that.bornagain77_{October 30, 2007
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OK Tim, it wasn't a competition, but you win the award for best impression of a darwinbot!BarryA_{October 30, 2007
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I also "love" Dawkins's statement in the last pages of "The Blind Watchmaker" where he says chance can be tamed "only if there is a mechanism for guiding each step in some particular direction, otherwise the sequence of steps will career off in an endless random walk." So undguided evolution does require some guidance afterall.Doublee66_{October 30, 2007
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No, no, no, you are all way off! See, it's like this: Monkeys and weasels share some of the same structures through punctuated homologues and lateral gene bus transfers (talk to the population geneticists, no I mean the paleontologists.) Oh, and it's all very complicated and you probably wouldn't understand, you ignorant creeps. Oh, and billions of years, too. Time heals all wounds; that's true, you know. Furthermore, the typewriter "predates" the Cambrian explosion, er, expansion, and just 'cause you can't see it, I can't help it if you argue from ignorance! Its a computer simulation so it must BE REAL. Get that sticker off my book! Get that sticker off my book! ROFT (rolling on the floor -- tantrumming) Ok, I wasn't the first to answer, but I was the best.Tim_{October 30, 2007
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This thread reminds me of David Berlinski's story of how novels come to be. It's a bit long, but worth the read. Here it is. --- I imagine this story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe. His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote." I raise my eyebrows. Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer. "The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo." Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket. "As you know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576." I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed. "Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined." I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your understanding, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?" "Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."Gerry Rzeppa_{October 30, 2007
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Where do the child monkeys come from? Where do the typewriters come from? Why should "me thinks it is like a weasel" have more utility/meaning than lxwljelklljkljkljlkjd jlkdjlkjsaklj? If "me thinks it is like a weasel" is the goal, why would transitional letter orderings have any utility/surviability than lxwljelklljkljkljlkjd jlkdjlkjsaklj? Why should mutations be fixed as assumed?tribune7_{October 30, 2007
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If we went back to Dawkins' original weasel program, running speedily on much more modern hardware, what we would find is the following: a program that instantaneously prints out "Methinks it is like a weasel". If we then looked at the source code we'd find in it the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel". What else could an intelligent person do at that point but shrug, and say, "Uh, yeah. Okay. Whatever." And yet the Darwinist mind, completely unschooled in design-related fields like software engineering, still finds the result a fascinating proof of...well I don't know, since I no longer have a Darwinist mind. When such folks assure me that they are capable of establishing the absence of design in biology, what else can I do, but shrug, and say, "Uh, yeah. Okay. Whatever."Matteo_{October 30, 2007
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Dawkins later claimed that he did not mean the weasel example to be part of his explaining of evolution. How come he didn't have it excised from later editions? In subsequent books Dawkins still depended on a weasel type approach. Read "Climbing Mount Improbable" and you will see that Dawkins still explains the Darwinian process in terms of preset targets and distant goals that are strived for. The very title of the book is nonsense in a Darwinain sense. He says a useful feature of a living system, say, an eye, comes about in a way analogous to climbing a mountain. Climbing some predefined "Mt. Improbable" where each step has it's eye on the distant peak many steps ahead in the future is certainly not Darwinian. I suspect though that much of the public views Darwinian evolution in this way. It's amazing to me that Dawkins himself falls into the same intellectual hole.StuartHarris_{October 30, 2007
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I went to the wikipedia site and found this under "Weasel program". "Dawkins has responded to these criticisms (that the program requires a target phrase) by pointing out that the program was never intended to model evolution accurately, but only to demonstrate the power of cumulative selection as compared to random selection." And selecting a letter that matches a letter in the target phrase is random?Doublee66_{October 30, 2007
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There's also the problem that characters exist at all. Who made them?Douglas Moran_{October 30, 2007
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In addition to the more obvious blunder pointed out by several commenters, a more realistic simulation would not introduce random errors only to the character we are trying to "improve", but also to the characters that are already "correct". Further, as Gil Dodgen pointed out in a brilliant Sept 28, 2006 post, we should also introduce random errors to the underlying software and hardware running the simulation, and see how fast the phrase improves then.Granville Sewell_{October 30, 2007
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I like the idea of assigning thought experiments to the "class". For the next assignment, how about having them take on the "Irreducible Complexity" link on the same web site: http://vlab.infotech.monash.edu.au/simulations/evolution/irreducible-complex/Douglas Moran_{October 30, 2007
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hilarious....that does not even remotely resemble what evolution claims. if they really believe that everything is predetermined and DNA is just a game that is looking for predetermined designs....they might as well call themselves intelligent design supporters. this would fit nicely within the realm of intelligent design.interested_{October 30, 2007
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No C Bass; you are not blundering. You are repeating the previous comments in a different way.BarryA_{October 30, 2007
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They cheat by replicating things that are partially correct, and keep on replicating until other things are correct. Evolution isn't postulated to work that way. It needs to work by getting it all correct at once. Count on the Darwinistas to cheat.Nochange_{October 30, 2007
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