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Intelligent Evolution?

Foster Zygote said:
And maybe (and I'm just tossin' out an idea here) one can think of technology as an emergent property of biology that evolves as a meme?
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Personally, I'd go with the "emergent property" but drop the "meme".

"Emergent property" is a truism since here we are, biological as all get-out, and surrounded by technology which sure as heck didn't emerge from anywhere else. Make what excuses you like, it's all down to us in the end. We did it. Most of it we meant to do.

Nobody ever got clubbed with a meme, but plenty have been clubbed with a club, and a better club clubs better. That was a very early sales-pitch, and has had a dominant influence on technological progress ever since. "Defence-related" is the prissy modernism, but it's still the "better club" principle at work.
 
Yes... Complexity can grow exponentially once it gets a toe hold--

ID-- when humans breed crops or animals, we are in essence "building" or evolving life in a fast forward kind of way--we are still the environment that shapes what survives and what doesn't based on characteristics we like-- so we are still "the environment" doing the choosing--either consciously or unconsciously-- it's not so different than products-- yes humans build the products...but, when we breed crops and livestock, we are "sort of" building a species-- we are refining the genomes based not on the genomes, but on traits expressed... it's not so different with design... humans make products based on designs that work and modify that through time... certainly technology "evolves"-- it's not exactly analogous to evolution, but it's clearly based on what came before....and things can evolved via humans without human intent... If you build a new house in a town, you are part of the creation of that evolving town, even if your intent was just to get a home close to your line of work. Our currency system is very complex and has evolved... much money is transferred via electronic transter... there's no actual money... just data transfer. It's an evolving information system as well... and no one could have predicted it a hundred years ago, much less back in the days of our bartering ancestors.

To understand anything complex, it helps to work your way backwards and not imagine something more complex coming up with a plan, because that is how complexity, in general, evolves. I swear, technology evolving is a pretty good metaphor for understanding human evolution. It's a much smaller time frame. And evolution at it's simplest is just "change through time". Technology captures both the incremental and exponential aspects of evolution even if "things" don't reproduce. Ideas do.
 
Complexity said:
I'm trying to eat better.

Now I'm hungry for a burger.
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Damn... must learn to be more careful with the shift key... I didn't mean Complexity with a capital C (though I'm sure you are experiencing major inner growth as well as ever branching synaptic connections...)

You have a cool screen name; perhaps you were on my mind.

Or maybe it was a typo.

In any case, enjoy your burger.
 
Hello ID. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm the time traveller from the history museum. I've been reading your posts. I'm sorry, I haven't got a clue what you're talking about. I do, however, know what I've seen at the museum, and I can understand how the shark came to be from looking at the shiny motorcars. That's good enough for me! Oh, BTW - I'm gonna buy the Blind Watchmaker book. I understand Dawkins essentially uses the same analogy, so maybe my host's, Southwind, idea isn't quite as original as he first thought. Oh well!
 
Now you're trying to obfuscate the faulty analogy in vague generalities.
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No. I've always been consistent ID. And yes, I am being general - that's the whole damn point of abstraction!

Now, let's go slow.

If I have no knowledge about the mechanics of the universe how do I, as a supposedly intelligent actor, design a flying machine?
 
I think this is the way to go cyborg - incremental change 'by numbers'. Hopefully ID will come along for the ride, before resorting to his evolutionary theory text books for inspiration!
 
cyborg; said:
No. I've always been consistent ID. And yes, I am being general - that's the whole damn point of abstraction!

Now, let's go slow.

If I have no knowledge about the mechanics of the universe how do I, as a supposedly intelligent actor, design a flying machine?
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You can be inventive, study mechanics, and come up with new designs from whole cloth with the intention of making an airplane. Natural selection deliberates, or makes changes with a goal in mind.
 
You can be inventive,
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Oh yes, let's just be magically inventive.

study mechanics,
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Oh yes, let's just magically study mechanics.

and come up with new designs from whole cloth with the intention of making an airplane.
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Oh yes, let's just magically come up with new designs with the intention of making an airplane.

You just don't get it.
 
cyborg; said:
Oh yes, let's just be magically inventive.



Oh yes, let's just magically study mechanics.



Oh yes, let's just magically come up with new designs with the intention of making an airplane.

You just don't get it.
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No, I do not get why you continue to erroneously compare deliberate designs by an intelligent actor to the undirected drunkard's walk of evolution.
 
Namely because I don't think intelligence is some magical thing that 'just exists'.

If anyone here is giving credence to Intelligent Design it's you with your god-like descriptions of what an intelligent design entails.
 
cyborg; said:
Namely because I don't think intelligence is some magical thing that 'just exists'.

If anyone here is giving credence to Intelligent Design it's you with your god-like descriptions of what an intelligent design entails.
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Don't insult me by comparing me to an ID proponent. I'm well aware that intelligence is a trait that has arisen through natural selection. I'm well aware that the sciences and technological knowledges have advanced through time, but the advances made in science are wholly, and completely unlike evolution, because evolution is an unguided process, where only randomness and selective forces operate. No machine made by humans has ever been made solely by random traits being sorted by impersonal, selective forces. Intelligence is a tool for circumventing the slow and meandering course of selection processes.

Once again, design and evolution are fundamentally different.
 
Don't insult me by comparing me to an ID proponent.
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Then stop being irrational.

I'm well aware that intelligence is a trait that has arisen through natural selection.
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Missing the point again.

I'm well aware that the sciences and technological knowledges have advanced through time, but the advances made in science are wholly, and completely unlike evolution, because evolution is an unguided process, where only randomness and selective forces operate.
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I see.

Who guided the first man to make a knife from flint? Was it a god?

No machine made by humans has ever been made solely by random traits being sorted by impersonal, selective forces.
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I see.

So... are you saying intelligence was or wasn't something made solely by random traits being sorted by impersonal, selective forces?

Intelligence is a tool for circumventing the slow and meandering course of selection processes.
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And by what magical force do you imbue this tool with the ability to CORRECTLY circumvent this 'slow and meandering course of selection processes'?

(Because, as you have been told before but refuse to listen with increasing system complexity the ability for intelligence to provide performance gains over pure trial and error is reduced. And you will continue to refuse to understand this whilst you continue to insist that the evolutionary algorithm cannot be abstracted away from the biological context in which it was realised. And you still haven't told me whether or not a simulation of evolution is evolution.)

Once again, design and evolution are fundamentally different.
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No they are not. You are only saying this because of your irrational reactions surrounding ID. This is because ID proponents do not understand how design is done. It appears you do not either.
 
cyborg; said:
Then stop being irrational.
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Just because I object to your unscientific comparsion, that does not make me irrational.


Who guided the first man to make a knife from flint? Was it a god?
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Don't be facetious. Clearly, the first person to make a flint knife was a human. What's the point of that strawman?



[QUOTE[So... are you saying intelligence was or wasn't something made solely by random traits being sorted by impersonal, selective forces?[/QUOTE]

For the last time, intelligence evolved through selective forces, what we do with our intelligence is not just at the whim of natural selection. Our machines are not the products of natural selection, they are the product of deliberate deign by intelligent actors.



And by what magical force do you imbue this tool with the ability to CORRECTLY circumvent this 'slow and meandering course of selection processes'?
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Design, a completely different creation mechanism than evolution.

(Because, as you have been told before but refuse to listen with increasing system complexity the ability for intelligence to provide performance gains over pure trial and error is reduced. And you will continue to refuse to understand this whilst you continue to insist that the evolutionary algorithm cannot be abstracted away from the biological context in which it was realised. And you still haven't told me whether or not a simulation of evolution is evolution.)



No they are not. You are only saying this because of your irrational reactions surrounding ID. This is because ID proponents do not understand how design is done. It appears you do not either.
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Trial and error is not an evolutionary process in the context of the deliberate creation of machines.

I am well aware of how design is done. What I am not aware of is why you persist on prattling on about non-existent comparisons to evolution.
 
Cyborg, I have no idea why you persist in comparing top-down, intelligently guided design to bottom-up, unguided evolution. The two processes are so different, that they produce things with very different qualities, because of the implications of the way they were made. The best way to understand evolution is to study life, not machines, because living things bear the imprints of an evolutionary process, machines do not, because that is not how they were made.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Cyborg, I have no idea why you persist in comparing top-down, intelligently guided design to bottom-up, unguided evolution. The two processes are so different, that they produce things with very different qualities, because of the implications of the way they were made. The best way to understand evolution is to study life, not machines, because living things bear the imprints of an evolutionary process, machines do not, because that is not how they were made.
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ID, can you not see that what I've been trying to focus on, and I think cyborg too, is NOT the processes of design and evolution, but the incremental changes that both concepts exhibit in creating increasingly complex products? Yes, we fully understand and appreciate that the processes are different and cannot be likened, but please try to disregard the processes just for a minute and focus purely on the products, just like the time traveller in the museum who hasn't been informed of the processes. Do you think you can do that? It's not too difficult, surely. If you can, then we can quickly move to reinforce the analogy that I started off trying to draw in the OP.
 
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