Intelligent Evolution?

[jimbob]

Articulett,

I can see the similarities, but the differences are more importiant when arguing against intelligent design.

The creationsafaris quote shows that IDers are using this argument.

In classical science and engineering, one can design an experiment to provide information. "At what speed do the wings fall off?" and where are the weak areas? "Where did it break?"

An entirely evoultionary approach would only be able work on the information that the design was a failure, not why.

 

[articulett]

Imaginal Disc-- evolution in species IS change over time... of course some changes can be sudden--albinism or dwarfism... but in the genome level it's a bit more gradual-- in genomes it's more increment and pruning of the information--a cobbling together of directions which can be modified in the future. Different organisms come up with the same solutions in similar environments (the flight of a bat and a bird) and the same tools can build different designs as modified by the environment (wings versus fins). Environmental selection processes decide what information sticks around to be built upon, modified or recombined and what is eliminated. Whether it's conscious or mindless doesn't matter to the information itself.

Your need to see the differences makes it impossible for you to understand the similarities and why they are important for understanding evolution itself--the appearance of seeming design from a mindless algorithm, experiments, and capitalization of the successful results.

 

[jimbob]

Your need to see the differences makes it impossible for you to understand the similarities and why they are important for understanding evolution itself--the appearance of seeming design from a mindless algorithm, experiments, and capitalization of the successful results.

But even when talking about a system with many designers (e.g. the PC) there is seeming design because there really is design.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Imaginal Disc-- evolution in species IS change over time... of course some changes can be sudden--albinism or dwarfism... but in the genome level it's a bit more gradual-- in genomes it's more increment and pruning of the information--a cobbling together of directions which can be modified in the future. Different organisms come up with the same solutions in similar environments (the flight of a bat and a bird) and the same tools can build different designs as modified by the environment (wings versus fins). Environmental selection processes decide what information sticks around to be built upon, modified or recombined and what is eliminated. Whether it's conscious or mindless doesn't matter to the information itself.

Your need to see the differences makes it impossible for you to understand the similarities and why they are important for understanding evolution itself--the appearance of seeming design from a mindless algorithm, experiments, and capitalization of the successful results.

The Theory of Evolution is absolutely not merely "change over time." That is the common usage of evolution, not the definition used in Evolutionary Biology

 

[ImaginalDisc]

But even when talking about a system with many designers (e.g. the PC) there is seeming design because there really is design.

Yes. In a complex technological system we may be unaware of who it is who is making a design choice, but someone is. In Evolution, there are no choices being made.

 

[jimbob]

The Theory of Evolution is absolutely not merely "change over time." That is the common usage of evolution, not the definition used in Evolutionary Biology

Exactly,

That is why I prefer "the development" of the PC.

It implies incremental change, and is not incorrect.

 

[articulett]

I don't often argue against Intelligent Design-- I teach kids and younger people who are actually curious-- most will have heard the intelligent design arguments and the 747/junkyard analogy. I find conjecture such as his useful in showing why the analogy is bad and how, in fact the evolution of technology, is similar to evolution of life. It's a good way to start a discussion and it's exciting because you can understand it without a lot of background and ID proponents have tried to make evolution sound complex and impossible. I think it's important to show how seeming design and complexity can and does come about mindlessly all the time... You can take almost any complex system and ask students to think about what came before...what needed to exist before we had this...and before that and before that...and how did something spread or grow...

Once you give people the confidence that they CAN figure something out, they are often eager to do so-- but if you tell them it's a mystery and too hard to understand then they tend to look to "magic" and "authority figures" and "mystery" to fill in the blanks.

There is nothing that has been shown to work on older creationists as far as I can tell. But I also understand why. As for young people and people not fully indoctrinated-- analogies are very useful and they apply them in multiple solving problem arenas-- Clearly, it "clicked" with him/her when someone else said it, and he/she expanded upon it in his/her mind. That's a good thing. That means that he/she can offer the same to others. Each persons' understanding of evolution also can also evolve if given the right tools and to think about it.

As mentioned before, those claiming to understand creationist logic seem to have less experience with actual creationists than those explaining evolution like Southwind and in similar manners. The analogies that helped you understand evolution and the analogies and words of those who explain it to many are probably the best overall. And Southwind seems to understand and convey the incremental change via selection better than those who have problems with the analogy. I can understand how things can look amazingly designed and yet not be designed from the top down through such analogies-- those who don't understand the use of such analogies don't seem to have a better way of explaining such. Moreover, such analogies convey exponential growth of "successes"-- that's another quality physicist types don't convey well.

I haven't heard better explanations from those who oppose such analogies or who find the dissimilarities too huge. But I've witnessed how very well such analogies can and do work for conveying the basics of evolution and erasing the notion that it all seems "impossible" without a designer.

It's not the only way to convey understanding. But I think it clarifies far more than it confuses. And I'm not sure anything would work better for one who doesn't "get it".

Also, selection is a continuum... mindless, natural, artificial, semi-conscious, goal directed, conscious, and top down... it's still about the environment deciding what sticks around to have it's information built upon, modified, or recombined in the future--

 

[ImaginalDisc]

I don't often argue against Intelligent Design-- I teach kids and younger people who are actually curious-- most will have heard the intelligent design arguments and the 747/junkyard analogy. I find conjecture such as his useful in showing why the analogy is bad and how, in fact the evolution of technology, is similar to evolution of life. It's a good way to start a discussion and it's exciting because you can understand it without a lot of background and ID proponents have tried to make evolution sound complex and impossible. I think it's important to show how seeming design and complexity can and does come about mindlessly all the time... You can take almost any complex system and ask students to think about what came before...what needed to exist before we had this...and before that and before that...and how did something spread or grow...

I've never taught a class, but I have tutored, mostly sophomore biology-level material. My experience has taught me something important about teaching science: I find that it's almost always better to teach without misleading analogies, because if I do the student will make inferences that are untrue based on the analogy I've used. When they do, it's not their fault. It is my fault for teaching them poorly.

 

[articulett]

Yes. In a complex technological system we may be unaware of who it is who is making a design choice, but someone is. In Evolution, there are no choices being made.

Yes choices are made-- some info. is passed on exponentially... most is not.

In the evolution of the internet, choices are made... but not in regards to the whole or the design of the internet... those who design a newer model of a jet, refine and hone what worked in the past... they're not starting from scratch. Choices about which designs are expressed in future design vectors (organisms or airplanes) are chosen by the environment and what has worked best so far. Life and technology is cobbled together by what works best so far and what is not so detrimental that selection hasn't totally gotten rid of it. Lots of junk info. goes along for the ride in genomes that are overall useful just as lots of junk ideas and design artifacts go along for the ride until pared away.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

In the evolution of the internet, choices are made.

Really? Who makes those choices?

 

[articulett]

I've never taught a class, but I have tutored, mostly sophomore biology-level material. My experience has taught me something important about teaching science: I find that it's almost always better to teach without misleading analogies, because then the student will make inferences that are untrue based on the analogy I've used. When they do, it's not their fault. It is my fault for teaching them poorly.

So what sort of analogy do you use to illustrate an evolutionary arms race--where one trait drives another? What about exponential growth of a single success such as in this article? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19733274/ How do you convey the way it seems as if the butterfly knew how to evolve, but that is because the ones that didn't have the mutation died out? Do you think it's confusing to say that todays airplanes have a common ancestor in the first airplane "so to speak"-- that it's more confusing than clarifying? All dogs have a common wolf ancestor, correct? Aren't there enough similarities between the two analogies that it could be useful. What exists today are the varying "breeds" of both based both on mindless and conscious degrees of human selection... But the wolf was a product of blind natural selection and the builder of the first airplane could have no ideas about airports or jets or Stealth bombers. The goal was just to use the info. he had and to take it a little further-- that's the blind algorithm of nature. If you take it a little further--make a little tweak--add a little bit--modify just the right thing-- the info. survives and multiplies and can be built upon some more. Nature's always building airplanes or escape vehicles or and the like via genomes just by imperfect copying--we only see the information vectors of the long lines of successes. We see the birds that can get off the ground a little better through the generations... the dinosaurs that got smaller with relatively larger brains--because those are the genomes that survived to be built upon in the future.

 

[articulett]

Really? Who makes those choices?

This was in response to your quote: "In a complex technological system we may be unaware of who it is who is making a design choice, but someone is."

Every time you write or click or put a search term in Google, you are taking part of shaping what the internet evolves into-- so everyone is making a choice or acting as environmental inputs--either consciously or not. When you go to a site and it logs your presence, it may or may not have to do with your conscious choice to affect the number of visits--but the algorithm is in place-- and it affects all the other algorithms attached to it... where it appears in google or Digg etc. a multitude of environmental inputs hone the output--whether it's the internet... life forms... technology... Google... dog breeds... etc.

Evolution is about environmental inputs honing outputs through time.

It's not worth arguing about--if the analogy doesn't work for you, don't use it on others. It does work for many people-- Southwind can probably convey a general understanding of evolution to more people than you can using his analogy and just because it doesn't translate well to you doesn't mean that it's poor or that you understand that which would be better for changing the mind of those espousing intelligent design ideas. I'd encourage Southwind to develop his own instincts in the area because they work--and I'm sure Dawkins, et. al. would agree. They might not work for you. But they do work... and from my perspective, Southwind, Cyborg, Dawkins, Jones, and the majority of people on this forum would find such analogies useful.

We can be assured that the best ways for explaining evolution will evolve based on what works and what silly things the creationists use to confuse.

I think the analogy of someone calling an old piece of equipment such as an old computer a "dinosaur" shows how readily the analogy can work. I don't think it would work for literal minded people or maybe not people with autism and such. But, it really, truly , is helpful in conveying understanding to many even if you are not able to understand how.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

So what sort of analogy do you use to illustrate an evolutionary arms race--where one trait drives another?

You just used one, "arms race." I always take paints to point out that cheetahs don't choose to be faster, and nither no impalas, but because the slow impala get eaten, and the slow cheetahs starve, the effect of the situation looks like an arms race. The key difference being that Evolution is operating in a way that resembles choice. Once we understand why is resembles design, we understand what a terrible analogy it really is.

What about exponential growth of a single success such as in this article? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id// How do you convey the way it seems as if the butterfly knew how to evolve, but that is because the ones that didn't have the mutation died out?

Hindsight bias.

Do you think it's confusing to say that todays airplanes have a common ancestor in the first airplane "so to speak"-- that it's more confusing than clarifying?

It's immensely confusing, because planes don't reproduce, and because the design of airplanes has been informed by developments in other fields, rather than being restricted to only previous airplanes, and airplanes are made by intelligent designers who can avoid cul de sacs, dead ends, and make decisions about the design of the plane that have nothing to do with fitness, because fitness isn't a meaningful quality to an airplane.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Every time you write or click or put a search term in Google, you are taking part of shaping what the internet evolves into-- so everyone is making a choice or acting as environmental inputs--either consciously or not. When you go to a site and it logs your presence, it may or may not have to do with your conscious choice to affect the number of visits--but the algorithm is in place-- and it affects all the other algorithms attached to it... where it appears in google or Digg etc. a multitude of environmental inputs hone the output--whether it's the internet... life forms... technology... Google... dog breeds... etc.

Sorry, I was unclear. In the Evolution of living things, who makes the choice?

 

[mijopaalmc]

So what sort of analogy do you use to illustrate an evolutionary arms race--where one trait drives another? What about exponential growth of a single success such as in this article? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19733274/ How do you convey the way it seems as if the butterfly knew how to evolve, but that is because the ones that didn't have the mutation died out?

I think that this has been covered at great length in What evidence is there of evolution being non-random?. The butterfly didn't "choose" to have mutated gene at least in any sense of "choose" that is commonly used, especially since the individual only survive after its genome is "assigned". The almost complete fixation of the mutant allele in males can be accounted for by the differential survival rates of males: males with the mutant allele were much more likely to survive and reproduce than males without it. This in turn caused a dramatic shift in the frequency of the mutant allele in the population to almost complete fixation.

This is fundamentally different than the process that occurs in technological development because the process of technological development does not actually occur at the population level. If a specific component of set of components fail or are not as efficient in an earlier design, those components can be excised from the "blueprint" and replaced with something else, creating a new monocultural "species" of technology (e.g., the movement from vacuum tubes to silicon transistor in computing). In biological, evolution on the other hand, the elimination of a disadvantageous trait from a population is achieved only by slowly picking off its possessors using an "algorithm" that both misses advantageous alleles and lets disadvantageous alleles pass.

 

[articulett]

Not quite. In Evolution, only the organisms who get unlucky, or whose net traits are maladaptive fail to reproduce. In the case of machines, individual traits which lead to failure can be neatly excised or modified, while retaining the rest of the machine intact. In Evolution, an organisms which achieves a high fitness reproduces all of its traits indiscriminately. This is a major cause of the retention of otherwise maladaptive traits, they're not bad enough to cause the organisms which bear them to lose appreciable fitness.

This isn't entirely accurate... yes, genes are passed on in genomes--and lots of junk or "not to deleterious genes" and recessive traits can ride along in otherwise successful genomes... some stuff might be beneficial to survival in a heterozygote, but not a homozygote, etc. But Darwin didn't know anything about what built the physical traits... only that they are inherited and the next generation is selected by their interaction with the environment. If they survive and get their info. copied in whatever environment they happen to find themselves in, then the info. that made them has a chance to build future vectors and be modified and expanded upon accordingly. The more the info. helped, the more copies there are likely to be of it. The more the information hindered, the less there is likely to be. There are tons of inputs and an averaging out towards improved reproductive fitness... the better something is at making copies--the more copies of itself they should be in the future to be have a chance to have their information also in the future.

The more humans want and can afford a given product, the more other humans want to make money by providing those products...inputs like human desire, cost, feasibility, capital, risk, etc. are all environmental inputs that affect what todays airplanes give rise to in the future.... just as such were environmental inputs that gave rise to the first airplane until what exists today. And the first airplane was built on an accumulation of knowledge and experiments that didn't work and other inputs...

In any case, environmental inputs alters the output over time by choosing what information sticks around to be built upon and eliminating the least successful experiments while capitalizing on the most.

 

[articulett]

Sorry, I was unclear. In the Evolution of living things, who makes the choice?

In domestication and agriculture, humans ensure the preferential survival of those they find more useful... but nature does the same... Some stuff lives and replicates massively, most stuff doesn't. The nozzle example had a blind algorithm. Nature has a blind algorithm too-- make more of the best copiers. The traits that evolve in a species do so because they enhance their survival and reproductive success--even at the cost of their own lives in the males of many insect species. What DNA is best at getting itself copied in whatever environment it finds itself in?-- that's the algorhithm. The information doesn't care if it makes it's vector look scary or taste awful or too hard to eat or easy to hitch a ride or resistant to antibiotics... if it can survive and copy itself wherever it happens to be, it gets to be in future genomes which have a chance at evolving--

It's not a "who" that is making a choice... it's the environment. The environment chooses which genomes survive and copy themselves. As long as there is preferential survival of one information vector (organism) over another the information will evolve accordingly. If the first airplane or keyboard would have been a different prototype... airplanes and keyboards would be based on them...

Mate selection is also an environmental choice--females evolved strategies which on average give them the most success at having offspring that have the most success... the same for males of assorted species. But most choices are only small and based on what came before and not mindful of what is to become. It's not much more blind than the evolution of the internet. I think that you are seeing human "choice" as being bigger or more direct that it is... and not seeing how similar it is to the other ways the environment chooses what is expanded upon and what is eliminated in regards to life.

There is a most recent common ancestor who is responsible for all humans alive to day and thus all technology around today-- he could not have known...he could not have chosen or designed this world--but he spawned it none-the-less. There's a continuum here that you aren't understanding...

But, I'm not sure you can or want to understand. It's not really that important. I just wanted to tell Southwind that I can confirm his/her analogies are valid and useful to many.
I don't think I'll be able to convey to you why many people find this type of analogy helpful, and I don't think it's a good use of my time to try. Clearly, for some people it's a poor analogy-- but I'm not sure if anything different would work for convey "natural selection" to such people. I have yet to see an explanation that works better or any that changes the mind of an "intelligent design proponent" over the age of 40.

 

[mijopaalmc]

I found this in the "Junior Skeptic" section of Skeptic and thought that is pertinent to our discussion of how to describe and analogize evolution:

Words of Caution

Language can be misleading. When scientists say that living thing "want" to pass on their genes or have "strategies" for "competing," these words are just handy short-cuts for understanding what really happens in nature by comparing it to familiar human activities.

It's useful to imagine all living things, from plants to animals to bacteria, are like player in a vast, complicated game. The goal of the game is to pass on as many of your genes as possible to the next generation. (Winners leave offspring. Losers go extinct.)

But it's helpful to remember this is just a way to help us imagine what is really going on. Plant don't really "want" anything-they grow simply because they are made that way. Not even the smarter animals really "want" to pass on their genes (or even know what genes are). Animals just want to be warm and fed and find a mate. But, by simply doing what comes naturally, living things act as though they are scheming and striving at the gene-passing contest.

Any species that happens to act in a way that passes on genes tends to leave descendants that act the same way. Living thing are good at competing because they inherited qualities from their ancestors.

 

[Southwind17]

I've never taught a class, but I have tutored, mostly sophomore biology-level material. My experience has taught me something important about teaching science: I find that it's almost always better to teach without misleading analogies, because if I do the student will make inferences that are untrue based on the analogy I've used. When they do, it's not their fault. It is my fault for teaching them poorly.

It's great to see that your teaching methods have 'evolved' ID, obviously for the better, the change agent being the environment in which you have operated. Congratulations!

 

[Southwind17]

Well, I think Southwind's analogy is a pretty good one.

No, machines don't reproduce like living things do. So what? Southwind (whom I hope doesn't mind my paraphrasing) didn't say, "Modern machines are a good analogy for evolution because the two are exactly alike in every way." He said, "Modern machines are a good analogy for evolution because the two have some very specific characteristics in common." Of course they differ in other ways, outside of these specific characteristics. But those differences aren't relevant to the particular point Southwind was attempting to make.

You paraphrase all you like cafink. You can clearly see and appreciate my point from a logical perspective, and that's good enought for me.