----- Original Message -----
From: "Tedd Hadley" <hadley@reliant.yxi.com>
To: "Evolution Reflector" <evolution@calvin.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2000 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: ID
> "Ami Chopine" writes
> in message <000f01bfc19e$2369e800$3f8df4d0@vh2>:
> > There is one little problem with this analogy.
> >
> > All the participants in the economy are intellegent.
>
Tedd Hadley:
> Could you expand on why this is a problem for the analogy? From
> what I can see, economic complexity occurs *in spite* of
> intelligence -- meaning that less global planning still means
> that more complexity comes out.
Ami:
That is not in spite of intellegence, just in spite of macro management.
Micromanagement goes on all the time with knowledge of what is happening in
the whole system. But the purpose of the individuals may be different.
>
Tedd:
> Cliff's point, it seems to me, is that our economy evolved into
> an unfathomably elaborate thing precisely because it wasn't
> intelligently conceived. It was the result of tiny, usually
> obvious steps over time taken by individuals in order to keep
> the economy working. No person ever planned anything completely
> like it, nor would they have the intelligence to predict it.
> Our economy is now vastly greater than the sum of its original
> parts.
Ami:
Wasn't intellegently concieved? Every single tiny step seems obvious only
to intellegence. A person saw a lack, and solved that particular problem.
It was by no means random. With random mutation and natural selection,
there is no such perception of a problem or a solution to it. The bearer
of a great new mutation could very likely be killed off by something else.
There is no purpose.
Tedd:
> Think about asking the question "who designed our economy?".
> The answer obviously isn't a single person or intelligence;
> however, answering "human beings" has some problems. How can
> we be said to have designed something that large when all we
> did was individually add small steps to a process with solving
> only simple, short-term goals in mind?
Ami:
But it was intellegence which moved here, and there is no such thing in the
traditional view of RM and NS.
> > This is the thing that leads me to ID. I just see too much
> > purpose. Sure, I can see simple changes, such as antibiotic
> > resistance occuring all the time, and within a design paradigm
> > occuring without intervention.
>
Tedd:
> What purpose specifically? If we can see purpose in antibiotic
> resistance (and I can, superficially), doesn't that suggest that
> our idea of purpose is flawed?
Ami:
I don't see purpose in antibiotic resistance. It was a simple mutation, and
it worked because it only took one step to achieve it. I expect to see
millions of such examples in nature.
> >
> > Consider the wing. I still think there is far too much of a hump to
> > overcome for natural selection to be the only way it happened. There
would
> > be two possibilities: a hopeful monster, or a clumsy intermediary.
>
Tedd:
> Actually, with feathers accounted for (warmth), the idea of
> running creatures using the aerodynamic features of feathers
> (strong but lightweight extensions) for leaping or short glides
> seems to make any hopeful monster unnecessary.
And where are the feathers placed, and how is the limb they used to glide
shaped? How did they happen to be aerodynamic? The only natural selection
for flight is either escape from predators, or capture of prey. It would be
far quicker to just develop speed. So either both animals are taking the
same evolutionary path: flight which is more difficult, or one of them gets
faster and the race is lost. You need a lot of chance happenings falling
into place at just the right time. Remember, there is no purpose. The
leaping animal does not intend its children to fly, nor does it imagine how
it came to leap or how it can leap better or make better use of its
insulating coat. Even if it can imagine how to leap better, it can do
nothing about it.
(BTW, do we have fossils of primative feathers? That is just a curious
question, not a point of argument)
And that is only one example. Insects, bats, pterosaurs are all examples of
this same thing happening in different ways. Convergent evolution, I think
they call it. Big coincidences are occuring many times over or some
selection specifically for flight is occuring.
> > But what if there was intellegent selection? What if that is
> > the form that ID takes?
>
Tedd:
> Seems unncessary.
Ami:
Only to those who have faith in chance. It is an underlying philosophical
assumption, not a tested fact or theory.
There is an interesting example of evolution in Discover Magazine, June
1998, page 73.
Put briefly, Adrian Thompson of University of Sussex used a chip (Field
Programmable Gate Array) which can be recofigured by its users hooked up
with a genetic algorithim designed by Hugo de Garis. They gave it the task
of distinguishing between two tones. They started 50 random strings of
artificial DNA to describe the configuration of the chip, tested them at how
well they performed the task, then recombined the strings with some built in
prefernece for those that did well as well as a clone of the best one.
After 5,000 generations, it is incredibly efficient, using only 32 of the
100 cells it was allowed to configure in the chip. And they do not even
know how it is working. It just does.
How incredible this is! It shows how innovative nature can be. There is
one glaring difference between this and RM and NS. The selection isn't
natural. It is intellegently contrived. Indeed, this evolution would never
have happened at all without the original equipment designed.
Nothing in evolution is going to happen without selection. I suspect it
gets more specific than mere survival. What would happen with this "Darwin
Chip", as it was named in the magazine, if the process went on for the
equivalent of the number of generations as have existed on the earth? Would
we get suprising new developments, new abilities? The only selection
process was how well they performed the task compared to other
configurations.
The only task natural selection takes into account is survival long enough
to reproduce. Obviously single celled creatures do that very well. How did
they gain new abilities?
Ami Chopine
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 23 2000 - 11:43:38 EDT