On Wed, 24 May 1995 11:37:25 -0500 (EST) you wrote:
>Murray Hogg asks if Richard Dawkins is making a very obvious mistake by
>claiming that evolution can produce enormously improbable complex changes
>by proceeding through a large number of intermediate stages, each of
>which is far more likely to obtain compared to making the end product all
>in one step.
It seems to me that Dawkins overlooks the obvious problem of all
these small steps have to be in exactly the right sequence for the
end result to work. It would be no good if a mutation to improve
the eye's light sensitivity occurred before the optic nerve and
brain reception/decoding area had been improved. Such an out of order
improvement would have no selective advantage and would not be
selected into the next generation.
>Murray, I think that Dawkins would accept your dice example
>with one caveat. He would argue that one is more likely to obtain one
>hundred sixes by rolling a single die one hundred times IF one can keep
>the sucessful results when you obtain them. That is, every time you get a
>six, you set that die aside and roll another die until you get another
>six and so forth. You should obtain one hundred sixes on one hundred dice
>in a relatively short time by this method.
This is the catch. Keeping the sixes implies some teleological end
is known by the evolutionary process. But this contradicts Dawkins
claim that it is a truly Blind Watchmaker:
"All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the
blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A
true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and
plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye.
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which
Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the
existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose
in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the
future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can
be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind
watchmaker." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker", 1991, Penguin, p5)
>Dawkins is good at using everyday analogies to explain
>evolutionary concepts. However, I think that this example is highly
>oversimplified. The necessary caveat (that you can keep the successful
>result) is a questionable premise. In order for Dawkins' scenario to
>obtain, all of the intermediates produced in the process of effecting a
>large scale change must be functional and better adapted than the
>previous one.
Yes. And this continuum of improving functional intermediates in a
complex system is impossible in practice, even for intelligent design,
much less blind nature.
>I still fail to see how this can happen with complex,
>interdependent biological systems. I don't see how 2% of an eye is more
>beneficial than 1% of an eye (what is 1% of an eye anyway?) if you need
>something like 99% of an eye (at least) in order to have a functional
>organ at all.
As I pointed out in a previous post, there are three things wrong
with Dawkin's gradual eye series:
1. A 1% increment in vision would surely be a saltation? For
Darwinist gradualism, the question should be: "What good is 0.0000005
per cent of an eye?" And the answer is, I would have thought, is no
good at all!
2. There is the assumption that the tiniest increment is significant
in sensory perception When I studied Psychology many moons ago, we
were taught a thing called JND's for Just Noticeable Differences. The
fact is that living organisms do *not* perceive in a smoothly
continuous series, but in a series of discrete steps. In the case of
the eye, it cannot tell the difference between very fine shades of
light or colour, until a certain JND threshold is reached.
3. There is another problem of the "signal-to-noise" ratio,
which Hoyle points out:
"Darwinism's unsolved problem. Darwin's own words highlight the
mathematical problem with variations, the great majority of which are
small in their effect. If he had confined himself to large-scale
variations he would have been correct, whereas for slight variations
Darwin's statement is open to a serious question. A human child born
a
100,000 years ago with a hole in-the heart defect would not have
survived to maturity, but a child born 100,000 years ago with a
variation of the heart that conveyed only an 0.1 percent disadvantage
in
the struggle for survival would scarcely have been affected in its
chance of attaining maturity. The disability of running one hundred
yards slower than the norm by a mere six inches would hardly have been
noticeable, and would have been of less consequence than chance events
like spraining an ankle, or some other comparatively minor injury
producing a slight lack of pace. As a physicist would put it, the
"signal" carried by small variations is so insignificant that it is
almost certain to become swallowed in the "noise" of everyday events."
(Hoyle F., "The Intelligent Universe", 1983, Michael Joseph,
London, pp39,41).
Michael Denton raises some good objections is his book
>'Evolution: A Theory in Crisis' which highlight the difficulty of even
>imagining (let alone obtaining evidence for) such large scale changes
>(e.g. the avian wing and lung).
Yes Mike. I agree. But never mind the "wing". Darwinists can't even
explain a feather!
Denton is a not a creationist nor a Darwinist. IMHO he subjects
Darwinism to a series of rigourous reality checks and finds it
seriously wanting, comparing it to astrology:
"The hold of the evolutionary paradigm is so powerful that an idea
which is more like a principle of medieval astrology than a serious
twentieth-century scientific theory has become a reality for
evolutionary biologists." (Denton M., "Evolution: A Theory in
Crisis",1985, Burnett Books, p306)
But that does not worry those to whom "evolution is a fact"! <g>
Stephen