RE: Direction in evolution, from Re: Are there things that don't evolve?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This apocryphal story relates to Isaac Newton's supposed belief in design. Isaac Newton engaged in frequent discussions on the subject of God and design with friends. One atheistic friend disputed the evidence of design in reality.
The story goes that Sir Isaac then built a clockwork model of the Solar System, including all the planets and moons that were known at the time. The moons revolved around the planets and they all in turn revolved around the Sun, while each individual orb turned on its axis. "How were you able to construct such an ingenious device?" asked the friend when he saw it. "I just tossed the pieces at random into a corner, and they accidentally assembled themselves into this model," Newton replied. "That's absurdly impossible," protested the other. "A lot less absurd," countered Sir Isaac, "than your belief that such was the origin of the real Solar System, of which this toy is but a much simplified model."
Though widely cited today, there is little evidence to show the incident ever happened.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parable_of_the_Solar_System_Model"

From: Gregory Arago
Sent: Tue 4/4/2006 5:27 PM
To: David Opderbeck; Bill Hamilton
Cc: Brent Foster; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: Direction in evolution, from Re: Are there things that don't evolve?

The mousetrap analogy is just that, an analogy. It isn't 'real' science and fails (against the ID case) to distinguish between human-made and non-human-made things. Likewise, only for this reason does Dr. Behe continue to re-speak using his Mt. Rushmore example.

Mouse traps are 'designed,' 'concocted,' 'engineered,' 'constructed,' 'created,' 'built,' 'fabricated,' 'made' or what have you...by persons. Biological things, however, are not. (Let's leave the bio-tech issue aside for the moment.)

Yes, I think Bill is "stretching things by saying this is evolution." There have been 'changes' in animal traps and there are certainly 'trial and error' methods employed across the map (even in humanitarian sciences). But calling this example 'evolution,' which continually invokes 'random mutation' (I see little randomness or mutation in trying to catch an animal to eat) or 'natural selection' (this is clearly an example of 'human selection,' if we are not to reduce human beings to merely 'naturalistic determinism') is fallacious. Granted that evolutionary theory is more than it's two most celebrated 'mechanisms' - but please we shouldn't dodge them - then at least biological evolution and (computer) engineering evolution should be properly distinguished.

This (almost) mantra - "Write a simple program and evolve it" - is quite an astonishing thing to me. People choosing to 'evolve' programs?

Regards,

G. Arago

p.s. just (within the last few minutes) had someone try to convince me Amway 'has a great system of making money' - do people 'evolve' into being Amway millionaires?

 
David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
Without getting into a heated debated about the mousetrap analogy -- Bill, I don't think this answers it, since you're assuming an intelligence that arranges the parts of the trap to work a certain way. I don't think the mousetrap analogy is designed to argue that engineered designs never progress through stages of engineering.

On 4/3/06, Bill Hamilton <mailto:williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com> wrote:
The mousetrap isn't even a good example of something that could not have evolved. Imagine a cave man who comes on an animal which has been killed by a falling tree. After enjoying a good meal, he realizes that he can arrange a log to fall on an animal, so he rigs a log with a vine rope and he stands ready to pull the rope, causing the log to fall on an animal walking under the log. Eventually he (or someone else) realizes he can use bait to cause the animal -- in the process of trying to get the bait -- to trip the dead fall. Fast forward a few thousand years and you get a bunch of derived devices: bear traps, mouse traps, etc. Am I stretching things by saying this is evolution? Maybe, but the trap has moved from a primitive dead fall to a spring-loaded modern trap by a number of stages, by trial and error. And all the intermediate stages, though they are missing some of the features of the modern trap, are functional.

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Received on Tue, 4 Apr 2006 17:42:06 -0400