And should be forced on Americans for their own good?
At New Scientist (13 February 2012), Ian Stewart tells us about ”Seven equations that rule your world”:
There are thousands of important equations. The seven I focus on here – the wave equation, Maxwell’s four equations, the Fourier transform and Schrödinger’s equation – illustrate how empirical observations have led to equations that we use both in science and in everyday life.
A friend is pestering us to ask Ken Miller which of these equations prove that his view of evolution is correct.
Eh? Why would anyone think that any of the equations chosen by some random journalist for some random pop-science piece would having any bearing on evolution? Which of the equations prove that the Earth goes around the Sun, for that matter? Or that it is 4.5 billion years old? I assume it’s a lame attempt at a joke.
I remember that at the end of a college course in integral calculus (during which we learned all kinds of integration techniques such as integration by parts, integration by trigonometric substitution, etc.) we were told that, statistically, very little in the real world is subject to analytical solutions, and that most problems must integrated numerically (that is, by brute force, which is what computers are for).
I love mathematics, and they are certainly very powerful. In fact, in one my Christian apologetics lectures — which I entitle, I no longer have enough faith to be an atheist — I discuss the mysterious fact that the underlying nature of the physical universe, the laws of physics, can be represented mathematically. This suggests design, to me at least, and that human minds were designed to discover this relationship.
Concerning wave forms and the fact that Fourier demonstrated that, no matter how complex, all wave forms can be reduced to an imposition of sine waves:
During my commute to work each day I listen to classical music in my car. Recently, I’ve been listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. What I hear is a single, linear wave form produced by an entire orchestra, but my mind can pick out all the characteristics of the sounds produced by the individual instruments, all superimposed in that single wave form.
I can individually distinguish the timpani, the flutes, the oboes, the harp, the violins, the French horns, the trumpets! How on earth could my mind differentiate all this stuff and recognize each individual instrument when it is all mixed up in one complex wave form!
Oh, and one more thing: When I was a child there was only one radio station in my small college town. They played almost nothing but classical music. The “bumper music” for a program on that radio station, played every evening just before dinner time, was the theme from the third movement of Scheherazade. When I hear that theme I am immediately transported back to my youth, and I can feel everything I felt at that time.
How can my mind, soul, and brain do this?
Oops, silly me. Darwin explained it all in 1859. These capabilities of my mind and brain came about by natural selection and random mutation. This is the scientific consensus. Who am I to suggest his theory deserves contempt, rather than adulation? I guess I must be an IDiot.
Nick, did you know I was shocked to learn that evolution has no rigorous mathematical foundation as all the other sciences do? It could almost certainly be argued that evolution is not even a science because of that fact!:
As far as foundational equations of the universe, I found this video by Dr. Bradley very informative:
Music and verse:
Also of note to neo-Darwinism’s failure to provide a rational mathematical foundation for itself in science, is that the countervailing position to neo-Darwinism, Genetic Entropy, lends itself very well to mathematical analysis:
Yes Nick Matzke, the “theory” of evolution is a lame joke.
That is the whole point.
Please state the mathematical foundation of geology.
perhaps something more specific?
From s=0 to a big and positive quantity — you can read Kimura’s theoretical work on the fixation probability P(fixation probability given initial frequency p) = (1-e(4nps)/(1-e(4ns) for new mutant this P (i/2n) = (1-e(2s))/(1-e(4ns)) — s is selective coefficient measuring the selective effect. You might also be interested in this
Moreover the evidence we have indicates that mutations are not neutral as Kimura had presupposed in his model:
Which only makes sense;
This study backs up the preceding observation:
Further notes:
What they saw in the Burke et al paper was no evidence for hard sweeps, that is, the great amount of adaptation they saw in these populations was best explained by several dozen regions that were all experiencing soft sweeps.Under a soft selective sweep things are a little different. A new mutation arises, but initially it is neutral and due to “random genetic drift” slowly reaches an allele frequency of perhaps a few percent. Then there is a change in the
environment, that make that mutation that was previously neutral, advantageous, and it is quickly fixed by natural selection. The big difference under the soft sweep model is that the regions flanking the fixed variants can have almost normal levels of variation. That is, there is no great reduction in flanking heterozygosity.