I once offered to donate $100 to Darwinist Dave Thomas’ favorite Darwinist organization if he could write an genetic algorithm to solve a password. I wrote a 40-character password on paper and stored it in safe place. To get the $100, his genetic algorithm would have to figure out what the password was. I was even willing to let him have more than a few shots at it. That is, he could write an algorithm which would propose a password, it would connect to my computer, and my computer that had a copy of the password would simply say “pass or fail”. My computer wouldn’t say “you’re getting closer or farther” from the solution it would merely say “pass or fail”. But he wasn’t willing even to go that far. He declined my generous offer. 🙂
Dave Thomas, like Richard Dawkins, advertise the supposed mighty power of genetic algorithms, but when pressed to solve the sort of problems that are relevant to evolution, they are no where to be seen.
Complex functional proteins for a system are notoriously difficult to construct. They are like passwords that must be matched to the right login.
Evolving a functional protein in one context to become functional in another context is not so easy. This is akin to taking a functional password for one account and presuming we could evolve it in steps to become a functional password for another account. Thankfully this doesn’t happen, otherwise thieves could be evolving their bank account passwords to be able to compromise your bank account passwords!
In general, transitionals from one functional protein to another are not selectively favored so as to coax evolution toward a new functional target. If each attempt to evolve a new protein is met with “pass or fail” versus “you’re getting closer or farther”, the search is effectively blind as a random search. The evolutionary search for new functional proteins fails for the same reasons thieves cannot evolve their functional passwords into your functional passwords.
The fact that Dave Thomas declined my offer indicates deep down he understands the fallacious claims of Darwinism and that Dawkins Weasel is a misleading picture of how natural selection in the wild really works when trying to solve problems like protein evolution. He knew he couldn’t take his passwords and evolve them into mine.
Despite this, we hear evolutionists proudly proclaim “evolution doesn’t evolve proteins from scratch, it evolves them from existing ones”. This claim may look promising on the surface, but let me pose this rhetorical question to the readers. You have a functioning password that works for your account, it may even share extreme similarities to other passwords that people have for their accounts. Does that fact give you a better chance of solving their passwords over blind luck? No. But evolutionary biologist are effectively saying that when then say “evolution evolves one protein from another.” So if Darwinian evolution will not evolve proteins what will? Surprise, there is a New mechanism of evolution — POOF….
But these considerations do not hinder Dawkins from advertising Weasel as the way evolution works. In contrast, as reported at UD, real evolution destroys complexity over time. The average of all reported real-time or near-real time lab and field observations is that most adaptive evolution is loss of function, not acquisition of function — Behe’s rule. In fact real evolution is worse than blind search, it can’t even hold on to the complexity that already exists, much less create it. The Blindwatchmaker would dispose of lunches even if they were free.
No Free Lunch theorems are the formalization that shows that Darwinian search is no better than blind search for cases like solving passwords. No Free Lunch would assert that if Dave Thomas’ genetic algorithm solved my password, he likely was privy to specialized information which a random search algorithm didn’t have. By way of analogy, in the case of Dawkins Weasel, if we viewed the phrase: “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” as the target password, then Dawkins pretty much front loaded the desired password to begin with. But Dawkins and Thomas will have no such luck if they don’t have the desired password up front.
But I didn’t give Dave the target answer, hence there was no free lunch ($100 worth) for Dave Thomas.