Have you ever thought of using larger fonts?
Posted on 03/05/2002 12:52:58 PM PST by Southack
There is a recurring claim among a certain group which goes along the lines of "software programs can self-form on their own if you leave enough computers on long enough" or "DNA will self-form given enough time" or even that a million monkeys typing randomly on a million keyboards for a million years will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare.
This mathematical proof goes a short distance toward showing in math what Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigogine first said in 1987 (see Order Out of Chaos), that the maximum possible "order" self-forming randomly in any system is the most improbable.
This particular math proof deals with the organized data in only the very first sentence of Hamlet self-forming. After one examines this proof, it should be readily apparent that even more complex forms of order, such as a short story, computer program, or DNA for a fox, are vastly more improbable.
So without further adue, here's the math:
That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be Rastifari and Voodoo. The debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.
The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) That sort of logic is less limiting than the ordinary logic which used to be taught in American schools. For instance, I could claim that the fact that the fact that nobody has ever seen me with Tina Turner was all the evidence anybody could want that I was sleeping with her.....2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Wrong. Evolution requires no such thing. Please read the other posts.
Have you ever thought of using larger fonts?
There's no selective pressure in monkeys typing randomly, so there's no reason for them to eventually produce "Hamlet." If we imagine a selective pressure - e.g., we reward monkeys that can produce things a little bit like "Hamlet", and shoot the monkeys that type gibberish, we'd have a selective pressure. And then we up the bar a little bit by rewarding the few monkeys that can produce something somewhat like "Hamlet," and shooting the monkeys that only produce stuff a little bit like "Hamlet." And then we up the bar again by rewarding monkeys that produce stuff that's a lot like "Hamlet" and shooting all the lesser monkeys. Keep that up for a while, and you'll get "Hamlet" out of a monkey soon enough ;)
Total BS - The only thing that you would have suceeded in doing is possibly shooting a monkey that would have produced Hamlet, had you not shot it. The monkey has no idea what it typed the last time, and hence there is no reason for it to leave a couple of letters in the right space. Just like nature.
Who or what provides feedback? and why?
Medved can't read. He can only post.
Not at all. Sure, the example is fanciful, but the principle is quite sound. Imagine that most monkeys, not surprisingly, type nothing but random gibberish. But then we find one special monkey that can occasionally type "thou", and another that can type "wherefore". Now, the monkeys aren't doing it on purpose, but we don't care why they do it, just that they do it. So, we select from among our monkeys - we keep the few that are capable of popping out a word from time to time, and eliminate the rest. We allow our "keepers" to mate, in hopes that they can pass along whatever trait it is that causes them to be able to type a particular word.
And then we rinse, lather, and repeat - always keeping our best and brightest and allowing them to mate, and eliminating the rest. Keep the few that can string together a sentence from Shakespeare, and dump the rest, and then a passage, a scene, an entire act, and finally, the entire play. Essentially, what we'd end up doing is forcing them to evolve in a particular direction - towards a monkey that could pop out "Hamlet" if you gave him a typewriter.
Could it be done? Probably, although it would require lots and lots and lots of time, and lots and lots and lots of monkeys. But hey, this is evolution we're talking about - what's the rush? ;)
Who or what provides feedback? and why?
Not who. It's not "Johnny, you are doing great in arithmetics" type of feedback. It's "the return to the input of a part of the output of a machine, system, or process" type (m-w.com). What provides feedback is the process itself, in the form of whatever intermediate results that are not considered 'final' (DNA). Regards.
If life arose by chance on earth via spontaneous generation from a "pre-biotic soup"*, the probability that life could arise a second time on earth by spontaneous generation from a pre-biotic soup is the square of the probability that it could arise by this means** on earth a single time.The differences in the chances involved between my original statement and this one are such that, in the long-run, it wouldn't make any practical difference at all. Besides, the difficulties involved in the evolution of life from a "simple organism" into the phenotypic diversity that has existed throughout earth history are minuscule compared to those involved in the proposed generation of a replicating cells from so-called "pre-biotic" molecules.
Of course a lot of people are saying otherwise. Only evolutionists say that man was created from pond scum. Besides, arguments of "everybody says" type prove nothing.
" Rather, they are the cumulative effect of thousands of tiny improvements - tiny improvements which you yourself freely admit occur. "
You are just restating what I have refuted above. A change in beak size, a change in coloring, does not require a new gene. It can be accomplished with just a random mutational change to one single part of the DNA of an already existing gene. However the creation of an entirely new gene is a completely different thing. This takes the miraculous appearance of something completely new by totally random chance. The odds of one such gene being created at random are as shown in the article. The odds of tens of thousands of new genes arising by random chance in millions and millions of species is in one word impossible.
And then you said:
Of course a lot of people are saying otherwise. Only evolutionists say that man was created from pond scum.
Naturally enough, abiogenesis is not the same as evolution. And trying to conflate the two is nothing more than misdirection. Can you point me to an evolutionary biologist who claims that fully formed traits just pop out of nowhere - a link, or a citation will do nicely, thanks. If "lots of people" are claiming that, it should be easy enough for you to find one.
However the creation of an entirely new gene is a completely different thing. This takes the miraculous appearance of something completely new by totally random chance. The odds of one such gene being created at random are as shown in the article. The odds of tens of thousands of new genes arising by random chance in millions and millions of species is in one word impossible.
Not at all. The existence of introns on your DNA strand provides a ready and accessible source of new and used genes - 95% of your DNA is made up of introns, after all.
Is this supposed to be a refutation of something he said or just character assassination?
The language and its development is quite irrelevant here. It is purely a mathematical problem. The monkey does not have any language base, knows not what he is typing, and the keys could be random numbers. The problem would not change. A string of DNA has many times more information in its structure than does an alphabet.
1. The point of the article was to assess the odds of "information" being created at "random". What is the "Information content" of the Hamlet string? Does "to be or not to be" contain more or less information than "jsk jier33hl k9?" If it does, that extra information arises from the cultural and linguistic context that the string is embedded in.
2. Are you sure that only one outcome is possible? DNA (or, more importantly, RNA) is not the only possible molecule on which life could be based. It just happens to be the one that succeeded. If there are other molecules, that would reduce the probabilties of success.
3. You ignored my distinction that the original compund does not need to be DNA. JennyP has pointed out that a very short string of RNA can form naturally, and that that string is itself longer than a other known self-replicating strings. After a string starts to self-replicate, the selection pressures (which were already acting in a limited fashion as has been previously described) increase substantially, further accelerating the development of complex strands.
The above is ridiculous. In case you have not caught on by now, I am saying that evolution is bunk. That evolution has been disproven. Someone who is making a living out of Darwin's lie is not going to admit such a thing. What I am giving is what science has found in recent years about the complexity of genes. In essence what I am saying (and the article explains mathematically) is that genes are just too complex to have arisen by random chance.
The article at the top of the thread, in case you did not realize it, is a refutation of evolution, it is not about having monkeys write plays.
Try reading my post (221) all the way through. It's not just there for comic relief. The problem with trying to produce new kinds of animals via random mutations and selections is even worse than the question of high-order infinitessimals would suggest. There is also the problem that natural selection cannot select on the basis of hoped-for functinoality, such as being able to fly, and there is an even worse problem sitting there: any new kind of animal is going to require more than one new kind of organ; assuming you were to ever evolve the first such requirement for a new kind of animal, while the second such was evolving, the first would DE-EVOLVE and become vestigial, since all such parts would be useless until the new design was in place. You'd never get there. Think about it.
That's not what you said before. I said:
"Let's talk about traits for a moment. Fully developed traits like your cat has, but an amoeba doesn't, don't just spring forth, sui generis, fully-formed and ready to roll, and nobody but you is asserting otherwise.
And you said:
Of course a lot of people are saying otherwise.
So when you made this claim in your post #231, you were...what? Just kidding? Making it up?
The article at the top of the thread, in case you did not realize it, is a refutation of evolution, it is not about having monkeys write plays.
It is certainly an attempt at such. Unfortunately, it fails miserably because it misrepresents how evolution is thought to work. The only things it refutes are A) an imaginary theory of evolution that nobody really believes, and; B) the proposition that the author of the piece has any common sense. ;)
People have been refuting Medved since 1985 in a bunch of different places. In 1994 he was added to the USENET net.legends(look under Ted Holden) list (along with such distingushed luminaries such as the guy who sent out the first spam, Robert McElwaine, Alexander Abian, and Archimedes Plutonium) for pretty much the same boorish behaviour that he exhibits here (he regurgiposts to every evo thread exactly the same words, discussions with him are met with insults by him).
In other words, we've tried, but he's not interested in discussion. He just posts to add thost 4 massive posts to every crevo thread in existance.
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