A Mathematician's View of Evolution

The Mathematical Intelligencer ^ | Granville Sewell

[Virginia-American]

... . In any event, the taxonomical categories are artificial and man-made. ...

No, I have to disagree. One of the "holy grails" of biology is to unambiguously determine the true tree of life. Cladistic analysis, especially that using DNA, is getting us there. In fact, large parts of the tree are already known. It's no more man-made than the periodic table.

For example, we know, way beyond any reasonable doubt, that chimps and people form a clade (all descendants of some species), that chimps-people-gorillas are another, and so on and so on: primates, artiodactyls, carnivora, a lot of the familiar Linnean orders, classes and genera of mammals, birds, reptiles, plants, fungi, etc etc.

It is known, with no reasonable doubt whatsoever, that mammals are a clade, and that birds are.

I have to restrict the discussion to eukaryotes, because bacteria and archaea trade genes in funny ways, and the definitions af ancestor and descendant aren't nearly as obvious, and also because I don't know much about them. But the scheme seems to work very well indeed for eukaryotes.

Assuming common descent, there is a clade defined by any two organisms. For example, I've seen mammals defined as the group of things descended from the last common ancestor of people and platypuses, or bilaterally-symmetric animals as the descendants of the last common ancestor of "Antlia the ant and Attila the Hun".

But there are a few surprises:

Reptiles, as commonly defined, aren't a naturally-defined grouping. The clade defined by crocodiles and snakes includes birds and dinosaurs, and, IIRC, reptiles as well. The clade defined by any green plant and any fungus includes all, again IIRC, multicellular life.

Insisting on using only taxonomical categorizations is "begging the question" (e.g. whales are mammals, and therefore evolved from land-mammals), since we are discussing the natural (not man-made) origin of species.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Whales are mammals, and "proto-mammal" was pretty obviously a land dweller.

Taxonomical categories describe species, but do not tell us whether one came from another. ( whales could have theoretically developed from fish without leaving the water leaving the water, while the other mammals happened to get their systems independent of what was going on with the whales.)

This hypothesis (about whales) is disproved by genetic analysis: cetaceans are clearly most closely related to artiodactyls (cattle, deer, hippo, giraffe, etc). In fact, there is a clade called the cetartiodactyls that covers these exactly.

The analysis doesn't say what came from what; it shows which thngs are more closely related to each other than to anything else; their common ancestor may or may not be found as a fossil, and it isn't always obvious which fossil correspnds to the common ancestor.

If this cladistic taxonomy were to prove impossible, it would be a serious blow to the biological theory of common descent, if not to evolution itself. Conceivably, there are some things that just refuse to be classified; so far these have not been found.

The greatest unknowns are the relationships at the phylum level: are flatworms more closely related to roundworms, or hair worms, or bearded worms, or what? are starfish more closely related to chordates than anything else? what are the relations between insects, spiders, trilobites and crustacean? are they a clade or not? This stuff is being researched, and answers are being found.

[Quark2005]

Coulter is not an authority on science, and her sections about evolution in "Godless" are notably idiotic.

I believe that modern science, notably evolution, is perfectly compatible with my belief in a Creator. I do not worship science, but I am scientifically literate enough to realize that our evolution from apelike ancestors is evidenced beyond any lingering, reasonable doubt.

Read a science book or two and find out what we really know. Denying evolution in this day in age is like denying the earth orbits the sun.

[TASMANIANRED]

1)Wolf packs usually don't waste their time on rabbits when there is bigger prey around....One rabbit will not feed a pack.
Solitary hunters like weasals,puma, and foxes go after rabbits.

Wolf packs pull down deer and elk.

2)No hands...can only rinse off in water. Won't get rid of scent. No soap...no hands to make it.

3)Dear don't have hands. Can't carry a dead wolf..Mouths and necks are not built for pulling weight.

4)Tripping a fellow deer might work.

[Last Visible Dog]

the predators aren't?

The hawk does not have an aim, reason, or purpose other than to eat. The hawk eats what it can, it is not implementing Natural Selection since Natural Selection is an observation after the fact.

Natural Selection is random because it has no (before the fact) aim, reason, or purpose - it just is.

Natural Selection is not a force or power - it is an observation in the past tense.

[Dimensio]

Natural Selection is random because it has no (before the fact) aim, reason, or purpose - it just is.

There is no discernable aim, reason or purpose to gravity. Would you suggest that gravity is random?

[FreedomProtector]

I'm sure you must be on the something here....executing a designed heuristic search algorithm that includes designed mathematical abstractions and a designed ("really really complicated") selection operator and a designed ("really really complicated") variation operator on a pre-exisiting designed computer must indeed prove that the world was not designed.

In fact even saved yourself a lot of work....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. Given enough time and enough characters, I'm sure that random characters will eventually compile. In fact not only will they compile, they will of coarse create a meaningful program. In addition you should take the existing meaningful programs the computers you are running your heuristic search method on and apply random changes to them. I'm sure this will save you some work as well…..surely you won't introduce any bugs, and of coarse not ones that will crash the system. In fact, I am really confident that you could make multiple beneficial positive random changes in a row by typing random characters, and certainly won't produce any software that will crash from memory corruption or a stray pointer. It will also be beneficial to make random changes to the hardware the software is executing on via static electricity. This will provide external energy so the computer is not a closed system so the hardware can achieve less entropy or disorder. The new software with random changes will of coarse be more better then the existing. The software you design by generating random characters over a large search space will be so good and so fit that it will you are sure to earn an "A". Your professor will be so happy to get a gigantic pile of paper with random characters, or a gigantic stack of burned CDs full of random characters, you will surely get an A.

[BlackElk]

The usual gang of stubborn damn fools, liberals and "progressives" and other atheists or non-lineal thinkers endlessly repeating their mantras of praise of an idjit like Darwin and his crackpot theories, backed by the utterly corrupt (and taxpayer funded thanks to the usual gang, etc.), gummint edjumakashun establishment, and by "scientific" community convinced that that its members are gods and that God is not (they hope, they hope, they hope), those self-imagined simians who prefer to worship themselves and to ignore the word of God, thereby freeing themselves to do what they damn well please to do regardless of consequences to others and to practice a faux pragmatism released from the bounds imposed by their Creator (whether they acknowledge Him or not).

You can post continued inquiries for the refutation of the Darwinian frankly ridiculous until the cows come home but the most you will get from me is the somewhat disingenuous suggestion that I can accept (for you and others of similar delusion) that you imagine yourselves descended from monkeys, apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, primordial soup suddenly energized by lightning, alien space invaders of limited imagination (most likely as to Darwinists) or from granite rock piles or prehistoric salamanders and to concede that you and your ilk may be right (but only for you and your ilk). If you find this separation of you from us as to origins to be somehow irrational, remember that I do not actually believe that you and your soulmates are actually descended from baboons or whatever regardless of objective evidence, but if I did believe that, it would be at least competitive with Darwinian delusions in terms of believability.

These delusions of yours, when quarantined or properly ridiculed or even examined, are as harmless as the dopey nephew in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace who keeps on charging up the stairs and blowing his trumpet as though he were Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. Its a little hard on the ears of the innocent Brooklyn neighbors and the elderly aunts but not as sinister or harmful as the elderly aunts' little hobby of poisoning the elderberry wine served to the strangers who are their elderly men victims who wind up buried in nephew Teddy's Panama Canal Zone dig in the basement.

Of course, Arsenic and Old Lace is an hysterically funny film whereas the "I am an ape man, I am an ape ape man" obsessives are simply tragic.

If science is still regarded as the "search for truth,", the best science books are the Bible and the Baltimore Catechism and Pascendi Domenici Gregis and Lamentabile Sane none of which suggest that man was created by or descended from Bonzo or the organ grinder's little pal or Mighty Joe Young or King Kong or Clint Eastwood's cinematic orangutan pal or from Darwin for that matter. Nor from the moonbat anti-God Kansas federal judge referenced in the statement of Darwinist "faith" represented by your link, which, unlike Darwin's does not remain missing. Another bully funded by our tax money making American gummint skewels safe for godlessness.

The late 19th century was a special time of left self-worship and enthusiastic delusion: Marxism, spiritualism, seances, phrenology, eugenics, and, of course, people actually so naive as to be impressed with Darwin's delusions in their eagerness to reject God. Nonetheless, there were others.

An old man, carelessly and frumpily dressed and praying his rosary (you can just imagine the type) was seated on a train in the vicinity of oh sooooo sophisticated Paris when he was joined in his cabin by a young stranger who immediately set about an impossibly modernistic rant against that rosary and against any belief in God whatsoever. After all, this late 19th century was THE AGE OF SCIENCE when bold, noble Promethean scientists would give mankind the faux intellectual fire which would free man from silly superstitions like a dependence upon or a need to obey that pie in the sky, bye and bye God, (worshiped only by those with unlaundered grey matter), to say nothing of the traditional personal humiliation of acknowledging that God knows better than the clever "science"/philosophers of one's late night college dorm BS session pals much less oneself. The young man was merciless and pitiless in his championing of science over the "discredited" old superstitions and humiliating "old ways" but the old man stayed the course and continued to pray his rosary. We don't know who that young champion of science unshackled was but eventually the elderly man, when he finished his rosary, introduced himself as Louis Pasteur. Rumor has it that this Pasteur fellow had something to do with actual science.

It is also truly remarkable that the metroandohsoooosophisticati (MAOSS) find it so horribly humiliating to genuflect before God and His Truth but not to imagine themselves "evolved" from mere beasts or whatever.

I have a very large jukebox (a regular anti-Darwin Wurlitzer) and if you keep on looking for refutations of the Darwinian ridiculous, I will interpret that as: "Please, mister, please, please play B-17" and all the others one by one.

Oh, and asserting that Darwinism is true does not make it so. Darwinism is NOT the standard and the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Roman Catholic Church owe Darwinists absolutely nothing but ridicule. I'll take Pasteur and Pope St. Pius X and Ann Coulter (a determined Christian who I understand to be one who attends Catholic and reformed churches but certainly has Darwin's number. You get Darwin and his tax-funded religion of pseudo-science which needs defense at all costs lest anyone have the opportunity in taxpayer funded brain laundries to consider the obvious alternative that God created the universe, you, me and everything else in it and did so without the assistance of Darwin or or of apes (except in the creation of other apes).

I tend to specialize in the Catholic point of view. I have pinged some Catholics and invite them to abuse Darwinian deviancy as they wish. For balance and for what are another entire chapter of valid anti-Darwinianism, I have pinged a number of Sola Scriptura Christians to contribute here.

[BlackElk]

And d***ed proud of it!

[BlackElk]

A stag with the intelligence of Einstein can use rear hooves to propel the delusionists through the tree branches and into the next county, especially the specially trained patrol elks.

[BlackElk]

See also #247. Sorry. I should have pinged you.

[BlackElk]

Submission to the expressed will of God is always better. Whatever your plans or mine may be, God's just have to be better.

[BlackElk]

FSM???????

[Alter Kaker]

The fossil record, even from 3,000 years ago is far from complete,

I suggest you find a subject you know something about, and argue that. Your posts are inane in the extreme. For one, there really aren't fossils from 3kya -- there are intact and nearly intact human and animal remains. To pretend that we don't know anything about what large mammals were alive within the recent realm of recorded history suggests you're talking out of your ass. Equines weren't rare 3kya, and we know a heck of a lot about their development from a huge variety of sources. Those include skeletons, yokes, bits, chariots, written records, artistic depictions, saddles, and probably about a thousand other kinds of sources I'm forgetting to include. Horses were domesticated in just that part of the world where we do have excellent historical information. If you still think that anatomically modern horses evolved 2mya, you're just being deliberately obtuse.

The root of the peanut is edible, while the fruit of other legumes are edible.

Huh? Peanut roots aren't edible. The edible part of the peanut is the fruit (which does grow underground). If you want to try to eat peanut roots, you can try to prove me wrong, but I doubt they taste very good. In any event, edibility has nothing to do with the plant and everything to do with human digestion.

Peas are green and grow in soft pods. Peanuts are light brown and grow in harder shells.

I'm sorry, do you have a point? Is your time best served by explaining to me that peas are, in fact, green? Or are you still insisting that peanuts are meat?

[Dimensio]

The usual gang of stubborn damn fools, liberals and "progressives" and other atheists or non-lineal thinkers

You have yet to demonstrate that all who accept the theory of evolution are members of the above categories.

endlessly repeating their mantras of praise of an idjit like Darwin and his crackpot theories,

You have yet to demonstrate that Charles Darwin was an "idjit", not have you demonstrated that his theories are "crackpot". Insulting people will not demonstrate that your assertions are correct.

acked by the utterly corrupt (and taxpayer funded thanks to the usual gang, etc.), gummint edjumakashun establishment,

Please provide evidence to support this claim.

and by "scientific" community convinced that that its members are gods and that God is not (they hope, they hope, they hope),

Please provide evidence to support your claim that members of the scientific community believe themselves to be "gods". Your claim that they "believe that God is not" is demonstratably false, as there exist theist scientists who accept the theory of evolution.

those self-imagined simians who prefer to worship themselves and to ignore the word of God, thereby freeing themselves to do what they damn well please to do regardless of consequences to others and to practice a faux pragmatism released from the bounds imposed by their Creator (whether they acknowledge Him or not).

Your insults and false claims about scientists does not falsify the theory of evolution.

ou can post continued inquiries for the refutation of the Darwinian frankly ridiculous until the cows come home but the most you will get from me is the somewhat disingenuous suggestion that I can accept (for you and others of similar delusion) that you imagine yourselves descended from monkeys, apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, primordial soup suddenly energized by lightning, alien space invaders of limited imagination (most likely as to Darwinists) or from granite rock piles or prehistoric salamanders and to concede that you and your ilk may be right (but only for you and your ilk).

So you admit, then, that you are willfully falsely misrepresenting what I believe and also that you will utterly refuse to provide evidence for your unsubstantiated claimse. If you refuse to provide any reason to show that your assertions are credible and willfully misrepresent the positions of others, why then should anyone believe what you say?

If you find this separation of you from us as to origins to be somehow irrational, remember that I do not actually believe that you and your soulmates are actually descended from baboons or whatever regardless of objective evidence, but if I did believe that, it would be at least competitive with Darwinian delusions in terms of believability.

This does not justify your beligerant refusal to support your claims with evidence, nor does it excuse your insults and misrepresentations.

These delusions of yours, when quarantined or properly ridiculed or even examined, are as harmless as the dopey nephew in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace who keeps on charging up the stairs and blowing his trumpet as though he were Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill.

Please provide evidence that I am delusional. If you cannot, I can only conclude that you are making unwarranted personal attacks against my person.

Oh, and asserting that Darwinism is true does not make it so.

I have never claimed othewise. You are attacking a strawman.

You get Darwin and his tax-funded religion of pseudo-science which needs defense at all costs lest anyone have the opportunity in taxpayer funded brain laundries to consider the obvious alternative that God created the universe, you, me and everything else in it and did so without the assistance of Darwin or or of apes (except in the creation of other apes).

The theory of evolution is not a religion, and it is not honest to claim that it is.

Your long-worded post provides makes a number of personal attacks, but thus far you have provided absolutely no evidence to support your claims. It fact, you have even admitted that you will not provide evidence to support your claims. Based upon the energy that you have expended specifically to refuse to support your unsubstantiated assertions, it seems highly likely that your purpose is to willfully spread falsehoods, such as your continued efforts to falsely equate acceptance of the theory of evolution as valid science with atheism. Your behaviour is clearly irrational and it is not honest. If you are an example of your faith, then I must confess that I have far too much integrity and ethical concerns to allow myself to become as dishonest as your faith apparently requires of its adherents.

[Jaguarbhzrd]

Irrational Placemarker

[Quark2005]

Dimensio, how dare you assault a creationist with relentless logic, reason, evidence, and demands for honesty?!

[HarleyD]

I don't put much store in what the "scientific" community has to say. Many have their own agenda. Are kids overweight? Our scientific community says it's due to soda pop. Is global warming happening? Data dating back 50 years (out of a 6 billion year history) confirms this to be so and the scientific community attribute the cause to pollutants. Is the fetus alive? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what the mother says. How scientific is that?

The "scientific community" can't agree on some of the simple things and they want to tell me how the earth was created? Please. It was the scientific community more than the Church that tried to prove Galileo's theory the earth revolved around the sun was wrong. I wouldn't put my faith in the scientific community.

[sittnick]

Taxonomical categories describe species, but do not tell us whether one came from another. ( whales could have theoretically developed from fish without leaving the water leaving the water, while the other mammals happened to get their systems independent of what was going on with the whales.)

This hypothesis (about whales) is disproved by genetic analysis: cetaceans are clearly most closely related to artiodactyls (cattle, deer, hippo, giraffe, etc). In fact, there is a clade called the cetartiodactyls that covers these exactly.

The hypothesis may appear unlikely, but is by no means "disproved." It may simply mean that even more genetic variations happened in the water before the modern whale came along. Observing similarity in genes is not proof that one came from another, no more than finding certain elements in disparate creatures means ones comes from another. You might say that these are long odds, and indeed they are, but all of these mutations would require extremely long odds. No harm in making them longer.

[colorado tanker]

"not random" isn't the same as "(IE, designed or something)"

I think I said that.

OTOH, just because scientists haven't come up with a change agent other than random genetic mutation, doesn't mean that's the answer.

[Dimensio]

I don't put much store in what the "scientific" community has to say. Many have their own agenda.

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

Are kids overweight? Our scientific community says it's due to soda pop.

I was not aware that the recent increase in child obesity has been attributed to one single cause. Do you have a reference?

Our scientific community says it's due to soda pop. Is global warming happening? Data dating back 50 years (out of a 6 billion year history) confirms this to be so and the scientific community attribute the cause to pollutants.

Some scientists believe that the trend is the result of pollutants. Others believe that the current trend is part of a normal cycle. Research continues into investigating the cause, thogh that average global temperatures are rising is not disputed.

Is the fetus alive? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what the mother says.

"What the mother says" is not used as scientific justification for the life of a fetus. The ambiguity is based upon defining when a human "life" begins, which is not a scientific question. It is indisputable that the cells of a developing fetus, and the zygote before that, are 'alive'. The dispute over the point at which the collection of living cells is a 'living human' -- whether it is at the moment of conception or the moment of birth -- is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.

The "scientific community" can't agree on some of the simple things and they want to tell me how the earth was created?

There is little dispute as to the means by which the earth came to exist, though that subject is not related to the theory of evolution.

It was the scientific community more than the Church that tried to prove Galileo's theory the earth revolved around the sun was wrong. I

Please provide references to support this claim.

I wouldn't put my faith in the scientific community.

This does not falsify the extensive research and uncovered data in support of the theory of evolution.