Hi Wes,
If you'd like to do an article on this topic for
Origins & Design, jump right in. (Contact me
off-list about length, et cetera.)
I've got to cut out of this discussion because of
upcoming lecture commitments. A few comments,
however.
When I spoke at the University of Colorado a couple
of weeks ago, a bright undergraduate came up after
the talk and said, "Dr. Nelson, you've just GOT to
go on the net and play Conway's 'Game of Life' --
that will answer all the questions you have about
natural selection!" I listened as this young man
described the remarkable, organismal-appearing
patterns that arise from what he called "a few
simple rules."
Interesting, I replied. But then there's Conway.
Right?
The undergraduate was silent for a moment, and looked
down at his feet. So I went on:
All evolutionary algorithms that we know have at least
one author, or intelligent designer. In the case of
the Game of Life, for instance, that would be Conway.
In many (all?) cases, the authors work hard writing
code, and debugging that code, to ensure that their
programs run and actually produce results.
It's instructive to look at the history of evolutionary
computation (EC) and genetic algorithms (GAs). Wagner
and Altenberg (1996, p. 968) observe:
Among the earliest experiments in evolutionary
computation, Friedberg (1959) attempted to
evolve functioning computer programs by mutating
and selecting the code, but found that the
mutations effectively randomized the behavior
of the programs, and adaptive evolution was
impossible. There is no way to improve the
performance of a conventional computer program
by randomly altering letters in the source
code. It became understood that the mutation/
selection process is not universally effective
in producing adaptation if favorable mutations
cannot be produced....In contrast to Friedberg's
results, Koza (1992) succeeded in evolving
computer programs that perform well on complex
tasks (such as prediction of protein structure
or random number generation) by recombining
branches of parse trees for the programs.
Ray (1992) succeeded in designing computer
programs that exhibit evolution as an
emergent property by careful design of the
data structures.
Note: "by careful design of the data structures."
Wagner and Altenberg (1996, p. 968) continue:
Hence, the Darwinian solution of optimization
problems is possible if and only if the problem
is "coded" in a way that makes the mutation-
recombination-selection procedure an effective
one.
All known EC and GAs implicate at least one intelligent
designer. Thus they cannot possibly provide sound
counterexamples to the claim that CSI requires a
designer, whether immediately or remotely.
[Side comment. Unlike Wes, I find the issue of the
designer's "distance" from CSI to be a non-starter.
The central ID argument is that CSI requires a designer.
If that's established, then we can look at the evidence
to see (if possible) at what point, or by what means,
the designer acted. Opinions differ in the ID
community on this, as should be expected for any
difficult empirical question.]
Now, as a mechanism, natural selection can do nothing
without the prior existence of organisms. As Wagner
and Altenberg (1996, pp. 967-968) express the point:
The "representation problem" is how to code a
problem such that random variation and selection
can lead to a solution. The representation
problem underlies the issue of whether selection,
mutation, and/or recombination can produce
adaptation.
For biology, the "representation problem" has
some unsettling implications. If, as evolutionary
biology asserts, all adaptations are the result
of mutation and selection, organisms have to be
evolvable. But once one calls into question the
inevitability of organisms being evolvable, one
can ask, how and why did an evolvable genome
originate in the first place?
Minimal complexity considerations (see, e.g., Hutchison
et al. 1999) suggest that entities capable of heritable
variation require a lot of specified complexity (CSI).
But of course, we've already discovered that by our
own design of GAs, et cetera. You're going to have to
work very hard, and debug a lot of code, before the
programs run. I can't think of a poorer analogue for
the action of a blind watchmaker (Dawkins 1986)
than the deliberate human design of EC and GAs.
Back to work. One last comment, for those who
want me to do CSI calculations for them:
Sorry, life is short. I've already provided citations
(Scherer 1983, 1996; Rust 1992) where such calculations
have been done to my satisfaction. Pardon me if this
sounds ad hominem, but I suspect it isn't CSI estimates,
really, that you want.
Paul Nelson
Senior Fellow
The Discovery Institute
www.discovery.org/crsc
Dawkins, Richard. 1986. _The Blind Watchmaker_.
New York: W.W. Norton.
Hutchison, Clyde A. 1999. Global Transposon Mutagenesis
and a Minimal Mycoplasma Genome. _Science_ 286:2165-
2169.
Rust, Peter. 1992. How Has Life and Its Diversity Been
Produced? _Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith_
44:80-94.
Scherer, S. 1983. Basic Functional States in the Evolution
of Light-driven Cyclic Electron Transport. _Journal
of Theoretical Biology_ 104:289-299.
Scherer, S. 1996. _Entstehung der Photosynthese: Grenzen
molekularer Evolution bei Bakterien? Berlin: Pascal
Verlag, 96 pp.
Wagner, Gunther and Altenberg, Lee. 1996. Complex
Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability.
_Evolution_ 50:967-976.
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