Intelligent Evolution?

[mijopaalmc]

Southwind17-

I think you're missing the point: the analogy overemphasizies one, single aspect of evolution. No-one here has denied that both biological evolution and technological development are examples of "change over time with retention of 'what works'". However, that is not the only relevant relevant attribute when trying to describe evolution to someone who already thinks that God intervened in evolution much in the same way that engineers intervene in technological development, which, as jimbob has shown, is the belief of at least one prominent intelligent design proponent. Just as saying that engines are all the same because they "provide power to drive other processes" doesn't explain why gasoline engines need an ignition source while diesel engines don't, so too does saying that biological evolution and technological development are the same because they are both examples of "change over time with retention of 'what works'" not explain how biological evolution and intelligent design are different, which ironically was your purpose in your OP. You actually need to address the differences between biological evolution and technological development in order to distinguish biological evolution from intelligent design.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Have you not heard of the Open University, or 'distance learning'? Actually, that's an aside, just to show the shallowness of your depth of thought before retorting, which I think is at least half the problem here in getting you to see alternative points of view.

More to the point, however, I'm certainly not familiar with an education system where one 'passes' classes. As I wrote, I 'passed' exams, but I only 'attended' classes. I seem to remember that many dufuses also 'attended' classes (well, some of the time!), but failed to pass 'exams'. Do you see the distinction now, and appreciate the inference?

No, I don't. If you recieve poor grades in a class, you fail the class. There is a point to grading classes.

I'm puzzled as to what sort of 'miseducation' a university student is likely to have received when they attend 'basic' biology classes. What sort of university are you referring to here? And when you say 'people', do you mean everybody, or only some?

I, quite clearly, mean the people I have tutored. I have tutopred students at a public University in the United States. Where did you go to school that you an unfamiliar with the system of classes used in the United States?

That's interesting. I don't recall being taught evolution at school, but I'm pretty sure I could adequately explain why Jean-Baptiste was wrong. I reckon I could also adequately explain why natural selection doesn't choose, but I could also explain why it could be considered to 'choose' (note the punctuation!), and I'd probably use an analogy to press the point.

Please do. I'd be fascinated to see a good one.

Now, I'm no linguistics expert

Neither am I, but I bet that the elipses and context contain qualifiers you've left olut.

 

[jimbob]

Don't you get it when I explain why technological development in a commercial environment necessarily has to be 'driven by intelligent agents that can plan for the long-term and learn from their mistakes' (to use your words), but that if you remove the commercial driver then it wouldn't have to work that way? Can you not see that random changes could be made by the intelligent agents instead, who could then let the market (environment) dictate whether such changes are better or worse? The only difference is that this approach is uncommercial and impractical, but conceivable nonetheless. It would still, given time, lead to fantastic, functional 'designs' that appear irreducibly complex.

That is an evolutionary algorithm, but not evolution.

How exactly do you let the market "dictate" what is better or worse?

Is it those which sell at a profit-x, or meat sales-y or some other criteria? Whatever criteria, and there will have to be some explicit or implicit criteria, will have to have been chosen.

Having debated this for as long as we have I'm actually struggling to think of a more simple notion of anything. I really don't understand why you're finding it so difficult. Try to visualize it in your mind - an engineer in a white coat putting on a blindfold then sticking a pin into a drawing board to determine what part of the widget he'll change next, then another pin to determine how, and by how much. Then he makes the changes and takes the widget to the local Sunday market to see whether it sells more than last week. If it sells the same or more, he retains the changes and makes some more random changes; if it doesn't he goes back to last week's widget and tries some different random changes. Before he knows it (about 10 million years, in my estimation), he's selling mass-produced motor cars.

Again it sis an evolutionary argument and not evolution.

Someone could decide to copy whichever pattern they wanted to.

I have an idea.

Leave some bacteria alone for a 500 years and the resulting populations will be optimised for their environment.

Leave a number of screwdrivers alone for the same length of time and no optimisation will have occured.

That might seem like a stupid example, but it highlights a fundamental difference. The engineering optimisation needs an external agent to perform the copying, and thus to select what is copied. That is not biological evolution.
I htink we have covered both similarities, are there any more? There are many differences, and thses differences are even more important in understanding evolution.

OK, that might be a simplification, but if you can't see it simplistically then what possible chance is there of convincing you when we look at the real world? I think you might be too smart for your own good!

The differences are important, as that is where the analogyu breaks down.

You are not actually arguing that technological development is actually equivalent to biological evolution, are you, just akin to evolution?

 

[mijopaalmc]

Now, I'm no linguistics expert, but I'd bet $1,000 to a pinch of the proverbial that, at the detailed level, biological evolution and the 'evolution' of language bear absolutely no relationship. By definition, they cannot. That does not, however, prevent Dawkins from not only using the word 'evolution' to describe the development of language, be he absolutely likens the two processes, even without an analogy. Now ID, perhaps you'd care to review this thread, in particular your own posts, and see which of the objections to the biological evolution/design development analogy also don't 'seem' to fit with the language analogy too. You might, then, care to drop Dawkins a line explaining how naive and 'miseducated' he is in adopting the 'E' word for that usage. Alternatively, you might wish to open your mind. Sadly, however, I somehow doubt you'll do either, but resort to a well-worn, irrelevant, futile response on here instead.

Actually, here is the entire quote:

On the face of it, we might expect the classification of languages to exhibit the property of perfect nesting. Languages, as we saw in Chapter 8, evolve in a rather animal-like way. Languages that have diverged more recently from a common ancestor, like Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are much more similar to each other than they are to languages that diverged longer ago, like Icelandic. But languages don't only diverge, they also merge. Modern English is a hybrid between Germanic and Romance language that diverged much earlier, and English would therefore not fit neatly into a hierarchical nesting diagram the rings that contained English would be found to intersect, to overlap partially. Biological classificatory rings never overlap in this way, because biological evolution above the species level is always divergent.

In other words, Dawkins recognizes a fundamental difference between the evolution of living things and the "evolution" of languages. The analogy between languages and life only holds in so far as both change over time and differ in so far as a language can be identified as both Romance and Germanic but an organism cannot be indentified as both lion and tiger.

 

[Paulhoff]

Geee, any Intelligent Evolution around here.

Paul

 

[mijopaalmc]

Geee, any Intelligent Evolution around here.

Paul

Do you have an example, Paul?

 

[articulett]

Oh, cool study,-- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071024083652.htm

it says: "But this research once again demonstrates how selection -- whether natural or, in this case, artificially influenced by man -- is the fundamental driving force behind the evolution of life on the planet."

And what is it that allows the information to accumulate so that we can create jet planes we could not create a century ago?

Same thing. Selection. Selection is not only the driving force behind the evolution of life on this planet (per this Science Daily article written for the lay reader) it is also the driving force behind the evolution of language, technology, scientific understanding, etc. Selection ensures that something sticks to incrementally be built upon.

Nobody was specifically aiming for a change in the Saint Bernard's skull, but humans helped ensure that dogs having such a trait were bred preferentially. And thus they created the change. Their input modified the information in the genomes over the eons...just as human input modifies technological designs over the eons. Nature just selects the best reproducers of genetic info. Humans influence the selection purposefully or not... and that is the same with technology. The steps are all small and incremental--there is no big overall bottom up design for anything. It's all built gradually on what has come about so far! Climbing Mount improbable. If you want to know how the airplane came to be--trace the bumpy path downwards back in time.

All human culture is built from the information that humans have accumulated through time via designs, recipes, gadgets, inventions, language, etc. How? Selection via the environment. Until information is used to create something, it cannot be selected for.

How can this article not be evidence of the continuum between design via a billion environmental inputs and entities doing selecting over time.and a billion environmental inputs and humans doing the selecting over time.

Computer people can usually understand the analogy really well. Physicists not so much...older men can have problems too. But in general it works very well for the majority attempting to understand how complexity can come about--how things can look so very designed without any real designer.

 

[jimbob]

Articulett, the St Bernard was a product of selective breeding, which is an evolutionary algorithm.

It was simultaneously still subject to evolution, but selective breeding only works if it reduces the evolutionary pressures (i.e. makes a benign environment where the intelligent agent(s), and not the rest of the global environment has the overwhelming role in deciding which organisms are to breed).

Selection is fundamentally important for evolution and evolutionary algorithms. But when deciding what processes are actually identical to biological evolution, what type of selection process is also important.

Mankind has a an evolutionary impact on virtually all organisms on this planet. As well as that there are many domesticated organisms, where is artificial selection too, where the agents involved change the organism over generations in a direction that they wish.

Evolution is driven by natural selection without any guiding intelligence.

Selective breeding requires selection according to the wishes of intelligent agencies. Because the organisms have imperfect self replication, they are also subject to evolution.

Evolutionary algorithms in in engineering rely on "intelligent selection". Because nobody has built Von Neumann machines yet, there is no evolution. All the selection is the result of intelligent agencies. Once a design has been finalised, the blueprints are availible, and the design can be fixed. This is not possible in evolution.​

The three above cases rely on selection of some type and random changes.

Classical product development without evolutionary algorithms is iterative, but the changes are the result of fortethought, and analysis of both successes and failures. Inelegant designs can be weeded out, in evolution they often can't (c.f. the mamalian eye).

Evolutionary algorithms are just a tool for engineering, a successful "design" will meet the same requirements as a design produced without evolutionary algorithms. The form is likely to be different as evoolutionary algorithms do not rely on anlysis, so can solve problems in ways that are hard to model.


If the selection is intelligent, then it is not evolution (although William Dembski would argue that it is).


ETA:

Nobody was aiming for a change in the St Bernard's skull, but they were aiming for dogs that were useful in partiular ways. It met the implicit requirement specifications, and the skull change was as a result of meeting those specifications.

 

[Southwind17]

Evolutionary algorithms are just a tool for engineering, a successful "design" will meet the same requirements as a design produced without evolutionary algorithms. The form is likely to be different as evoolutionary algorithms do not rely on anlysis, so can solve problems in ways that are hard to model. (emphasis added)

So, you're acknowledging, at last, that a successful design could arise without use of the said 'tool' if we were to simply allow random design changes (mutations) and environmental 'selection' to take their course (and, of course, allowing sufficient time!)?

 

[cyborg]

If the selection is intelligent, then it is not evolution

Words.

Nature does not care for your notions of intelligence. Nature does not care for your notions of what constitutes a selection mechanism that is 'goal-based' and one that is not 'goal-based'.

Arguing that there is no analogy by demanding that the same process is called by a different name when paramerterised differently is, to my mind, like demanding that I program a different function to add 3 to a number than I would to add 4 and then calling one, "bongo" and the other "blippy" and then everything is good because nobody could possibly mistake the very real difference that adding 3 as opposed to adding 4 has upon the resultant value as being the same thing at all and that there is no analogy between these things at all.

 

[Paulhoff]

Do you have an example, Paul?

Any, was the question.

Paul

 

[mijopaalmc]

Any, was the question.

Paul

Are you going to way in on the discussion?

 

[articulett]

Words.

Nature does not care for your notions of intelligence. Nature does not care for your notions of what constitutes a selection mechanism that is 'goal-based' and one that is not 'goal-based'.

Arguing that there is no analogy by demanding that the same process is called by a different name when paramerterised differently is, to my mind, like demanding that I program a different function to add 3 to a number than I would to add 4 and then calling one, "bongo" and the other "blippy" and then everything is good because nobody could possibly mistake the very real difference that adding 3 as opposed to adding 4 has upon the resultant value as being the same thing at all and that there is no analogy between these things at all.

Exactly. Adding is the same process no matter what numbers you add!

And evolution is the same process no matter what does the selecting to ensure the "best" information sticks around to be built upon.

This is true whether it's wolves, Saint Bernards, language, Linux, or the Stealth Bomber...

 

[Southwind17]

Are you going to way in on the discussion?

I think Paul seems happy just to thumb his nose intermittently and unfoundedly when he gets bored, presumably with other threads. I've not taken the time to review his other posts to see whether he ever seems to have any meaningful contributions to make.

Incidentally, I think 'weigh' is the word that eluded you, unless I've misunderstood your meaning.

 

[Paulhoff]

So you saying that someone has come up with a good definition of Intelligent Evolution, that we can debate on?

Paul

 

[mijopaalmc]

Exactly. Adding is the same process no matter what numbers you add!

And evolution is the same process no matter what does the selecting to ensure the "best" information sticks around to be built upon.

This is true whether it's wolves, Saint Bernards, language, Linux, or the Stealth Bomber...

And you guys are still missing the point: we may not be able to define intelligence precisely but we can tell that it is at work by the differences between how the processes operate. Most importantly, biological evolution is incapable of correcting its "mistakes" once is has "made" them. It functions by removing the "defective" copies from the population as whole because the "defective" copies do not reproduce as frequently as others do. If there is a mistake in a blueprint of a technological design, the designer can go back a correct the mistake and the blue prints of future copies and iterations of that design will no longer contain that mistake, at from that instance in which it was made and then corrected. This is akin to natural selection going back and mutating a deleterious allele back to its original form, which simply does not and cannot happen in biological evolution. In other words, the correction of a mistake at its point of origin is an empirically observable quality unique to systems that involve intelligence, which biological evolution obviously does not.

 

[mijopaalmc]

So you saying that someone has come up with a good definition of Intelligent Evolution, that we can debate on?

Paul

You could at least comment on Southwind17's analogy in the OP.

 

[mijopaalmc]

I think Paul seems happy just to thumb his nose intermittently and unfoundedly when he gets bored, presumably with other threads. I've not taken the time to review his other posts to see whether he ever seems to have any meaningful contributions to make.

Incidentally, I think 'weigh' is the word that eluded you, unless I've misunderstood your meaning.

Simple homophone mistake

 

[Paulhoff]

The bottom line of Intelligent Evloution is that you need a so-called god first, and if you can't prove a so-called god there is no point to the rest.

Paul

 

[mijopaalmc]

The bottom line of Intelligent Evloution is that you need a so-called god first, and if you can't prove a so-called god there is no point to the rest.

Paul

But that's not the premise of the OP, which articulett, cyborg, and Souothwind17 have been supporting.

The premise of the OP is that biological evolution can be adequately and convincingly explained to an intelligent design proponent by its analogy to technological development. In other words, you can refute intelligent design and demonstrate biological evolution by analogizing biological evolution with technological development.

No-one here, at least to my knowledge, is saying that evolution was guided by a supernatural being.