Many christians continue to ignore the clear evidence of evolution being
used to design things in this world, preferring to believe that random
mutation has no place in a well designed system. Well, the company I am
using for an internet provider here is Scotland has designed their network
by using random mutation, and sex. Duncan Grahame-Rowe writes:
“Information sent over the Internet is broken up into discrete packets
which are stored in a ‘buffer’ memory before being forwarded to the next leg
of their journey. Ideally, buffers are long, but the more information the
packets hold, the slower they move. “If a packet arrives at the buffer and
it is full, then it tends to get thrown away,’ says Marhsall. This means
some information will be lost.
“What is needed is the ability for buffers to know what kind of information
they are passing and adapt their length according to the need. To do this
using traditional techniques will become impossible as the Internet grows.
So BT turned to nature in the form of ‘genetic algoriths’. These are
biologically inspired programs commonly used to help design—or evolve—things
that people find difficult.
Gas mimic natural selection by treating strings of data like genetic
material. These strings can be combined and mutated to produce offspring
whose fitness is then evaluated. The best are ‘bred’ to produce more
offspring. This is repeated until the best design has evolved. The problem
BT found was that Gas are too slow for real-time applications, since they
require the evaluation to take place over many generations. So Marshall and
his colleagues proposed a different biologically inspired solution.
“Bacteria don’t have sex in the traditional sense, they reproduce using a
technique known as plasmid migration. ‘They wander around and bump into each
other and say ‘hi, do you want some of my genetic material’,” Explains Inman
Harvey, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Sussex.
By exchanging plasmids (rings of genetic information) through their cell
membranes with neighbouring cells, successful genes can pass quickly through
a colony and allow it to adapt rapidly to its environment. Random mutations
produce new genes, with successful genes flourishing and ineffective ones
quickly dying off."
If human engineers can use evolution and random mutation to design man made
items, which are clearly intentionally designed, why on earth do we make God
less than us and restrict his creative acts to those of a 19th century,
Newtonian designer? If man can use evolution as a design tool then surely
God can also.
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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