A Mathematician's View of Evolution

The Mathematical Intelligencer ^ | Granville Sewell

[grey_whiskers]

Perhaps but the short sprint can be pretty critical. It doesn't seem like it would matter if the human could outlast the wolf in the long run if in the short run, the wolf catches and eats him.

"I don't have to outrun the bear; I only have to outrun you" ping!

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

There is no way a human can outrun these animals unless there was a reality TV show where races were staged - then maybe you could have a point although making up the difference on the sprint speeds seems highly unlikely

How about a group of humans? One gets eaten, the others get away.

Or, a human with a torch...? Fire scares off predators.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Send me a Freepmail so this point doesn't get lost, please.

It will be put on my "in" reading box and occasionally sighed over during the next six months :-)

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Once again, no evidence of this, it's outside the realm of the observable. You assume something does exist "out there," and you're taking it on faith that it is God as you think of him and not something or someone else.

Yet you call other people "brainwashed."

It's time, once again, to play "Pin the tail on the strawman!"

With new, improved Flame Retardant^TM.

Actually, a lot of it comes down to methodology as well as to presuppositions.

Garden-variety scientific empiricism is designed to minimize mistakes in the form of (if you will) false positives. "We will sell no metaphysics before its time" or "ECREE".

The problem is, in its effort to exclude everything which cannot be demonstrated to within some level of confidence (see also the oft-repeated "non-falsifiable"), there are a lot of things which are rejected -- not, as popularly claimed, because there is *NO* evidence, but because the evidence is either not of a form which science can test. Examples being argument from authority, hearsay, "old wives' tales", etc.

This is NOT to say that all old wives' tales are *TRUE*, but that by the scientific method, they are *assumed* to be false unless or until their claims can be rigorously tested. However, many things in common experience cannot be systematically tested; and therefore they are not given scientific credence.

In other words, TRUST "need not" be the same as "being brainwashed." But there is such a thing as "being taken for a ride" as well. There are just some things out there which the methods of formal scientific inquiry are inadequate to differentiate.

Full Disclosure: The other misunderstanding is the hobgoblin about absolute logical consistency and "uniformity of treatment" -- that is, if someone agrees (for whatever odd reason) to accept supernatural or miraculous claims on behalf of *ONE* religion, the skeptic somehow feels triumphantly vindicated by pointing out that the believer is "inconsistent" (and therefore presumably, if not presumptively, WRONG) if the believer does not also blindly accept ALL OTHER religions.

There are three issues at work:

1) Religion / the supernatural claim to be at the behest of a personal, purposeful agent--and therefore not necessarily strictly mechanistically reproducible

2) Religion is based on trust--and trust is an *individual* thing -- even if you trust one salesman, you need not trust any of the others

3) Since religion claims to deal with "personal" agents, rather than entities which are *necessarily* subject to fixed laws, falsifying a particular claim does not invalidate the whole structure, since it was never claimed there was an unyielding framework to which the supernatural agents' behaviour *must* conform. No "conservation principles" if you will ;-)
But since the scientists are SO used to dealing with these elements as the very framework of their thought and treatment of things, it is quite difficult for them to conceive of stepping outside of this framework as anything other that "sloppy thinking" to "special pleading" to "lies".

Cheers!

[VadeRetro]

I can't imagine where you're going with that. Let me review where this conversation has gone thus far lest anyone have trouble believing it.

1. Posts 220 and 276 detail hideous levels of untruth, illogic, and hyperbole in Ann Coulter's evolution chapters of Godless.
2. Tribune7 "refutes" the dissections thus: "This pretty much shoots down any reason as to why you should take it seriously: Coulter claims several times that the fossil record in no way supports Darwin's theory of evolution." That is, we all know that the fossil record refutes evolution so forget criticisms of Ann which get that elementary "fact" wrong.
3. I defend the fossil record as matching our expectations very well.
4. You attempt some wave-away of a particular fossil series, as if that were all the problem someone being an anti-E faces.

I should rather have noted the sheer inanity of the alleged refutation against the content of the web page in question.

Here's the link given in 220 . It contains the sentence you quote.

It goes on as follows.

Scientists have compiled a well-documented case demonstrating "large-scale, progressive, continuous, gradual, and geochronologically successive morphologic change" between reptiles and mammals. Coulter argues, on Page 228, that scientists "have no idea if the reptiles are even related to the mammal-like reptiles, much less to the mammals." However, contrary to Coulter's claim, science has observed links between reptiles and mammals through an existing succession of transitional fossils. Skeletal features are used to distinguish between reptilian fossils and mammalian fossils. While many characteristics differ between reptiles and mammals, scientists have observed reptilian fossils that over time took on characteristics of mammals, such as the construction of the lower jaw. Reptiles' lower jaw consists of multiple bones, while mammals' lower jaw is a single large bone. Additionally, most bones in reptiles and mammals are homologous, which suggests that the bones are of common origin. The most important homologous bones between reptiles and mammals are several skull and jaw bones of reptiles and middle ear bones of mammals. Furthermore, synapsids (a particular group of reptiles) share an additional homologous structure with mammals -- an opening behind the eye socket in the skull. This is very characteristic of mammals, which is why synapsids are referred to as mammal-like reptiles.

Note that the first sentence of the above contains a link to the Cuffey article well known to crevo thread participants who don't suffer from creationist amnesia. I can't believe you think you rebut real evidence by unfounded assertions, amnesia, and inability to read.

As for where you're going trying to nitpick one particular series to death: don't know, don't care. Try nitpicking the reptile-mammal series while you're at it.

[grey_whiskers]

If the brain has been programmed only by chance, by random nature, why trust it?

"Composition fallacy."

Better composing than decomposing ;-)

Seriously, I've never heard the term.

Could you elaborate--and possibly come up with a "corrected" construct?

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

What started the causality loop? Did the starter of the loop spontaneously generate?

A causality loop has no "start". It is not "created", it is a self-sustaining event.

Please relate the space-time (Lorentzian view...) diagram of this to the cosmology expressed in this thread.

Perspiring minds want to know!

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

It is often impractical and dopey to insist on taxonomical

But not in a discussion about evolution.

Time for another of my patented Bonehead^TM questions.

Apparently in the earlier days of evolution, many of the "family trees" etc. were created on the basis of taxonomic evidence.

But, as one of the earlier posts on the thread pointed out, the eye in the fruit fly, and in the octopus, have very different structures though a common purpose...they are both "eyes". Similarly, since whales came from land animals, the fins developed independently from those of fish.

So what methods or safeguards are put in place to prevent misclassification based upon structural similarities which may turn out to be of completely independent origin?

(Or is it a moot point since that type of thing happens so seldom...?)

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Only the fitness function (which, as you know, is implicitly built into the s() function and, in this case, is completely environment dependent) can give you a sense of "good" and "bad" adaptation

I call BS!

To quote from the Hugo-award-winning Science Made Stupid:

"As research has conclusively shown, animals that bore their young dead generally got nowhere."

Anancephaly for example is deleterious for more reasons than "not fitting the environment" -- at least in a layman's sense.

Full Disclosure: Of course, it might've helped if you had given a link, or some source to define the s, and v, and t.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

.on your next programming assignment, (I enjoyed graduate school as well) when you design coded instructions for specific actions... ....Obtain the use of as many computers as you can (make the search space as big as you want) to randomly type characters....... and then evaluate the random characters via a (designed) fitness algorithm on a pre-existing (designed) computer. If you get computers to generate enough random characters over and over and over again, and keep evaluating them with a "really really complicated" fitness algorithm, over and over again on a machine with pre-existing design and order.. I'm sure that you will eventually have a meaningful program.

Anti-Gates Sarcasm Torpedo ARMED. FIRE!!

How do you think they developed the Windows operating system anyway?

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Even if this is true, an 'agenda' does not falsify scientific data.

No, but it means the scientists *with* an agenda might have falsified data.

See also C.P. Snow's The Search; or Google John Darsee.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

That's what I hear. That's why I support hard scientific facts, not this PC dreck called "creationism" and "intelligent design".

Apparently a slight confusion of terms on your part, Quark.

I consider--and I believe all on this thread would agree--that DU constitutes an example of PC par excellence.

From that, and the oberservation that they are rather rabidly anti-Christian as a whole, I don't think "PC" is the best term for "intelligent design".

Maybe "TC" for "theologically correct"--but that misses out on the Marxist provenance of the original term.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

That’s very nice and sounds reasonable, but as a statistician I know I can manipulate numbers to mean just about anything I want them to mean. It’s all how you play the game.

Mark Twain said it first: "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics."

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

I am curious: if you believe that a collection of undifferentiated cells is a single human being, then what do you believe happens to that individual human being should the embryo split and the two halves form identical twins?

Child's play:

Genetically identical, physically distinct.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Science does have a definition of "life", though the definition is not concrete.

????

Can you give the definition then?

For the nonce, I like Dave Barry's take:

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

Cheers!

[UndauntedR]

I've had orientation in my department all day and it's taken a while to settle down and catch up.

First, it's quite presumptuous of you to tell me I don't believe in God.

Second, your sarcastic post made little sense. I study computational math, and I'm interested in physical modeling. All those games and movies you watch which use CGI, most of those are based on physics engines. The simple facts that the algorithms we create to approximate nature are designed and the computers we use to integrate these algorithms are designed make no statement as to the "design-edness" of the system being modeled - we attempt to recreate natural events from initial conditions as closely as possible using the fundamental principles and forces of nature... without intervention.

Your analogy is wrought with falacies. I'll name a few:
1. the "Fitness function" of biological evolution is not designed, it is completely circumstatial and arbitrary.
2. nature provides a very effective means of determining which "programs won't compile" - death. In the analogy, the decision algorithm required is actually undecidable - Halting problem reduction.
3. The rest is even more absurd jibbering, which I won't address. I'm not partial to analogies... way too easy to fall into falacies.

Which brings me to my last point. Interestingly, the one thing I find missing most from these threads is... biology. Being an applied mathenatician, I prefer to apply theories to toy examples and get used to how they function, what are some common pitfalls, and how they may be overcome. One of my favorite links is a list of these specimins:

http://www.freewebs.com/oolon/SMOGGM.htm

Now, the knee-jerk reactions to the Blind Cavefish:

Creationist: Why are you questioning god's... I mean the creator's... judgement?

Biologist: This fish is likely the descendent of a freshwater fish which had eyes. A population of these fish likely broke off and found a niche - a place where they could live with little competition - in a cave. A good place to start would be to try and find "cousins" of these fish. We do this genetically and morhpologically.

[UndauntedR]

So what methods or safeguards are put in place to prevent misclassification based upon structural similarities which may turn out to be of completely independent origin?

Mis-classification has certainly happened before... in both directions.

Check out convergent evolution. Mimic species are populations of animals which have evolved to "mimic" morphologically those characteristics of a successfull species. IIRC, two species of a horned lizard were classified as the same for a good period of time (decades?) until someone found small DNA discrepancies that should be impossible on the sub-species scale. Further study showed they're were tiny, but reliable, differences in morphology (like leg and body length) as well but were so small (< 5%) they had been overlooked.

Interestingly, it can happen in the opposite direction as well. The female angler fish is the popular large, menacing deep sea fish with a huge mouth and a light bulb on it's head. The male kinda looks like a guppy. They were classified as two separate species for a time because morphologically they were so different and practically they were so hard to observe and study (we still don't have a complete, comprehensive taxonimic classification for this clade).

Scientists are not infallable and it can be quite exciting and surprising when an oops is uncovered. But by no means does this taint science or evolution as a whole. Evolutionary Theory itself felt no tremors when these (legitimate) mistakes were corrected because the theory is not dependent on the male Angler fish or "one" species of horned lizard.

[FreedomProtector]

Since this is the thread to discuss the "The Mathematician's View of Evolution" by Sewell

and there was an updated version of the paper posted here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1704943/posts?page=329#329

'thought it would be prudent [at this juncture : ) ] to highlight a few quotes from the updated article.



Quotes from updated Sewell article:

"....to understand the real problem with Darwinism: it is simply that it is extremely improbable."

"Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it. The second law is all about probability. The reason natural forces may turn a spaceship into a pile of rubble but not vice-versa is probability: of all the possible arrangements atoms could take, only a very small percentage could fly to the moon and back.”

“So I wrote a reply, ‘Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?’”….interesting discussion here w/ equations in appendix

“…..I offered the tautology that ‘if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes the increase not extremely improbable.’ The fact that order is disappearing in the next room does not make it any easier for computers to appear in our room—unless this order is disappearing *into* our room, and then only if it is a type of order that makes the appearance of computers not extremely improbable, for example, computers…..”

“But there is no other phenomenon anywhere that gives such an extreme impression of violating the second law; the development of life on Earth is completely unique. I believe the development of life has indeed violated the “supreme” law of Nature, in a most spectacular way, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it only seems extremely improbable, but really isn’t, that, under the right conditions, the influx of stellar energy could cause atoms to arrange themselves into computers and nuclear power plants and spaceships. But one would think that at least this would be considered an open question, and people who argue that it really is extremely improbable, and thus contrary to the basic principle underlying the second law, would be given a measure of respect……”


These are quotes.
Any quote is by definition "quote-mining".
All "quote-mining" is by definition false.

Therefore all quotes must certainly be false.
There is never a quote which could ever be true.


Pardon the sarcasm, however the absurdity and improbability of a purely chance universe having life that spontaneously generates has put me in a sarcastic mood:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1704943/posts?page=246#246

[HarleyD]

Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses." Addendum: "Theories do not grow up to be laws. Theories explain laws." (Courtesy of VadeRetro.)

This does not square with what other scientists believe:

It is extremely important to distinguish between facts and theories in science, and in every other subject also, because facts usually remain the same and theories often change. They are not always easy to differentiate, and even scientists forget to do it. And the people who write science text books nearly always forget to do it. So I'll try to give you some guidelines so you can do it yourself, because twenty years from now the facts will be the same, but the theories may have changed a lot. I know because I've had to relearn some theories since I taught this class 25 years ago, but the facts are the same. For example, the universe has doubled in age since I was a boy,which gives you an idea of just how old I am. In this class, we will try to spend about 2/3 of the time on facts, so that you won't need to relearn the entire class when the theories change. Of course, we can't ignore the theories altogether, because they are our best explanations of the facts; it's just that we shouldn't consider them to be absolute truth. When some people see a scientific theory disproven and replaced by another, they lose confidence in all of science, which is a big mistake. That is how science progresses, and it is a wonderful way to learn about our world. So let's begin by reviewing the scientific method, to see just how facts and theories interact. - John Pratt, Fact or Theory

[Quix]

I'm curious . . . what is the current . . . EVO . . . doctrine of faith about PANSPERMIA? Seems to me that the mathematician's calculations are muchmore in sympathy with Panspermia conjectures than with evolution. I've also read recently somewhere that even some former evolutionists who are still hostile to ID are saying that evolution's days are numbered as an explanation.

Here's an article from Linda Moulton Howe's site re a protoge of Astronomer Fred Holye and the red rain organisms in India which do not seem to have earthly DNA but which replicate. Excerpts follow from:

http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=1129&category=Science HERE

EXCERPTS

Red Rain Cells of Kerala, India - Still No Definite DNA

© 2006 by Linda Moulton Howe

August 19, 2006 Cardiff, Wales - Nearly half a century ago in 1960, a mathematics graduate student from Colombo, Sri Lanka, set off on his first international trip to Cambridge, England. His name is Chandra Wickramasinghe. He was fascinated by stars in the night skies, wondered about other life Out There, and his Cambridge University advanced degree was in Astronomy. His faculty supervisor was the famous Cambridge astronomer, Fred Hoyle. The two men had the curiosity and courage to look for other life in the universe by studying cosmic dust. Their controversial panspermia hypothesis was that the universe is teeming with at least microbial life, which can be transported from one cosmic location to another. In their collaboration, the two astronomers felt strongly that the double helix DNA found in all Earth life had been seeded here by comets or other cosmic bodies and that same DNA would be found in all life forms throughout the cosmos.

. . .

Dr. Louis reported as many as 15 “daughter cells” budded within one “mother cell” and then broke out of the adult cell. That was clearly a process of replication. In normal Earth biology, replication requires the presence of DNA. But Dr. Louis could not find evidence of DNA in the multiplying cells in his test tubes.

. . .

Eight months ago, in January of 2006, Dr. Louis contacted astrobiologist, Chandra Wickramasinghe, now at Cardiff University in Wales. Soon Prof. Wickramasinghe had some vials of the red rainwater to study and sent some to biologists at Sheffield University in England. America’s Cornell University also received some red rain samples to analyze isotopic ratios. Elements confirmed so far are hydrogen, silicon, oxygen, carbon, and aluminum. But, there still is no definitive confirmation of DNA, or what makes the cell walls red.

This month on August 7 to 8, I was in the Microbiology Lab at Cardiff University to see the red rainwater for myself and to talk with Prof. Wickramasinghe and his graduate student, Nori Miyake. Nori has tried to break open the cells to amplify whatever DNA might be there. Nori showed me the pale pink rainwater in test tubes. You can see photographs at my news website, www.Earthfiles.com. At the top of the Headlines page is a hot link to this red rain report with photographs and microscopic images.

Nori told me he has never seen such thick, hard cell walls, which he could only partially penetrate. He is concerned about contamination in the fluorescent techniques he tried, which indicate there might be DNA. But in his fluorescent research, there have been variables, which might be false positives. He does not even know if he ever extracted anything from the red cells because the walls were so thick and hard to break.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

I think it will be interesting to see how quickly, slowly, with what levels of resistence different spheres of the Unholy See of evolution surrenders to some of the alternative explanations without tolerating any support of ID.

Certainly the change is coming. The globalists will shift the 'science,' if nothing else. The impersonal evolutionary explanation fits their goals only up to a point. At some point, they will most likely have to shift the explanation to something like panspermia etc. I figure doing so will be necessary to fit their arising scenarios and contentions "requiring" the world to submit to a global government.

It seems to me that the mathematician's calculations in support of ID or some such are much more solid; simple, clean, much more in keeping with Occam's Razor etc. than any other explanation.