Intelligent Evolution?

ambnp said:
How is it possible in the greatest democracy on Earth to elect such a man with so many faults?.
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Those hung up on the "hows" and "intent" and "confirming the accuracy of the results" and the "exit polls" are missing the forest for the trees. Those are the human words with human centered meanings... the overall process is the same... votes that are successful at getting themselves copied via the touch-screen they find themselves in drive evolution and drove my election. It doesn't matter if the information codes for preventing hand recounts by any means necessary or that Diebold audit logs were hacked by a chimpanzee... the information amasses, gets copied, gets tweaked, gets added to, specializes, recombines, and then is tested via black boxes in the voting booth which then selects which information goes on. The more electronic voting technology succeeds... the more opaque it becomes.
 
Southwind17 said:
BTW jimbob - are we agreed, yet, on what constitutes the trigger for biological reproduction, or rather a trigger? Are we agreed that attainment of sexual maturity can be seen as the trigger just as well as conceivement can; both denoting that the traits of the entity species have survived their environment, whether that be directly or by the conceiving predecessor?
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Not really,

Maybe my position is clearer with bacteria:

Put a single bacterium spore in an appropriate environment and leave it. It will begin the process of self replication, which will involv growing to an appropriate size and then dividing. The actual trigger that starts the division is just the latest in a long line of processes leading to reproduction.

With multicellular life, the same basic tune is still there, only with a lot of complicated riffs also happening.

At inception, the organism begins a series of processes that would, if not interruped by the universe, include some form of self replication of the genetic material within that organism.

Sexual maturity is just part of the system that evolved as an efficient method of reproducing this material. Sometimes neotonous traits evolve, and "juveniles" reproduce, the classic case being the axolotl.

In the lab, when supplied with sufficient (Iodide? IIRC) the axolotl will metomorphose into an adult salamander and reproduce; the axolotl has evolved in Mexican lakes that are deficient in this mineral, so remain as tadpoles in the wild. They reproduce as tadpoles, unlike normal salamanders, which would fail to reproduce in syuch an environment, needing the iodide to metomorphose and reach the adult stage.
 
President Bush said:
Those hung up on the "hows" and "intent" and "confirming the accuracy of the results" and the "exit polls" are missing the forest for the trees. Those are the human words with human centered meanings... the overall process is the same... votes that are successful at getting themselves copied via the touch-screen they find themselves in drive evolution and drove my election. It doesn't matter if the information codes for preventing hand recounts by any means necessary or that Diebold audit logs were hacked by a chimpanzee... the information amasses, gets copied, gets tweaked, gets added to, specializes, recombines, and then is tested via black boxes in the voting booth which then selects which information goes on. The more electronic voting technology succeeds... the more opaque it becomes.
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Like some African dictator states voting systems? :D
 
jimbob said:
Not really,

Maybe my position is clearer with bacteria:

Put a single bacterium spore in an appropriate environment and leave it. It will begin the process of self replication, which will involv growing to an appropriate size and then dividing. The actual trigger that starts the division is just the latest in a long line of processes leading to reproduction.
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And where, exactly, is the 'natural selection' mechanism in this 'long line of processes'?!
 
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The universe interrupting the process of replication.
 
Those pressures as described by Malthus WP; Darwin acknowledged Malthus as an influence on his work.

Predation, disease, insufficent resources, natural disaster... (basically the bacterial equivalents of the four horsemen).

The insuffient resources one is a good distinguishing feature. ETA: between systems with and without self-replication

All organisms needt to acquire the resources to reproduce, if they fail, they can't reproduce. The particular type of resource acquisition and utilisation is an evolved trait. Only those organisms that are successfull in the acquisition of these resources will reproduce, and the traits for this successfull acquisition will be coded in their genes.

This is different to a situation where there is a seperate copying system, as then the resource acquisition does not depemd on the variant, but on the efficiency of the resource acquisition of the copying system. This is not coded within the variant's blueprint. There is no implicit selection for resource utilisation inherent in the non-self replicating system, any selection for resource acquisition would have to be added explicitly.

I would argue that my previous post describes a bacterial example and not a model, as it is simply a case where evolution occurs, as opposed to an analogue.
 
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At the risk of resurrecting this thread, I've thought also that religion would be a good example of "intelligent evolution", like technology.

Just like anything else, the religion that is most appealing spreads more quickly and becomes dominant, at least in certain areas where the circumstances are favourable. It even "mutates" to fit certain circumstances. Look at how Christianity started out, cutting loose some of the less appealing Hebrew teachings to please its target audience. Next thing you know, BAM! No more Zeus.

So again, from an information standpoint, it all works in the same way.
 
Belz... said:
At the risk of resurrecting this thread, I've thought also that religion would be a good example of "intelligent evolution", like technology.

Just like anything else, the religion that is most appealing spreads more quickly and becomes dominant, at least in certain areas where the circumstances are favourable. It even "mutates" to fit certain circumstances. Look at how Christianity started out, cutting loose some of the less appealing Hebrew teachings to please its target audience. Next thing you know, BAM! No more Zeus.

So again, from an information standpoint, it all works in the same way.
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Excellent speech on this by mathematician, John Allen Paulos at Beyond Belief 2.0

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3911445117068926975

Information evolves giving the appearance of amazing complexity and design (the internet, for example). No one needs to be aware of the whole--no overlord needs to have a plan. Humans have quirks in thinking that make it hard for some to intuit the correlation between this and evolving genomes... but the analogy is obvious to most. He reiterates what many here have said quite eloquently.

The inability to understand the analogy is clearly a reflection of ignorance on the end of the receiver-- not a problem with the analogy. Understanding the analogy unlocks the understanding for all complexity we observe around us--
 
Belz... said:
At the risk of resurrecting this thread, I've thought also that religion would be a good example of "intelligent evolution", like technology.

Just like anything else, the religion that is most appealing spreads more quickly and becomes dominant, at least in certain areas where the circumstances are favourable. It even "mutates" to fit certain circumstances. Look at how Christianity started out, cutting loose some of the less appealing Hebrew teachings to please its target audience. Next thing you know, BAM! No more Zeus.

So again, from an information standpoint, it all works in the same way.
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No, they don't. You might want to try actually reding something about the history of Christianity or any other other relgion for that matter. They very often change themselves to prserve themselves (e.g., the Coucil of Trent). The goal may not always beacheived, but the change nonetheless is made with a specific intent, which is completely absent in biological evolution.
 
mijopaalmc said:
No, they don't. You might want to try actually reding something about the history of Christianity or any other other relgion for that matter. They very often change themselves to prserve themselves (e.g., the Coucil of Trent). The goal may not always beacheived, but the change nonetheless is made with a specific intent, which is completely absent in biological evolution.
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To right. When the particular religion finds that membership is falling, they usually start having meetings with the hierarchy to bring in changes to stop any further decline. Evolution by natural selection doesn't work that way.
 
ambnp said:
To right. When the particular religion finds that membership is falling, they usually start having meetings with the hierarchy to bring in changes to stop any further decline. Evolution by natural selection doesn't work that way.
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But, of course, the need for such a distinction is completely "abstracted away" in the analogy in the OP.:rolleyes:
 
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mijopaalmc said:
No, they don't. You might want to try actually reding something about the history of Christianity or any other other relgion for that matter. They very often change themselves to prserve themselves (e.g., the Coucil of Trent). The goal may not always beacheived, but the change nonetheless is made with a specific intent, which is completely absent in biological evolution.
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Thanks for making my point, Mijo. That is exactly what I was saying. From an information standpoint, it is precisely the same.

But, just for laughs, which "intent" would that be ?
 
Belz... said:
Thanks for making my point, Mijo. That is exactly what I was saying. From an information standpoint, it is precisely the same.

But, just for laughs, which "intent" would that be ?
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The intent of an intelligent agent. The Nicene Creed did not "write itself" as you claim your posts did. It was a very specific response to Arianism's denial of Christ's divinity.
 
Information seeks to get replicated via the organism it's in. Religious memes that do so, prosper, encourage their minions to spawn, and insert the memes into their minions... they promise rewards for "spreading the good news" and salvation for "blind faith" along with death to infidels (coupled with eternal damnation)... And those who don't toe the line are shunned and can't survive as well. it's a great way for information to get itself spread...

It's like a little virus... The information doesn't care how it's spread or who intends what anymore than genes care that they are spread by making creatures horny or whatever or that diseases are spread by making their victims cough...

Religious memes evolve virulance because they can... if humans feel like it's through their intelligence and intent--great... the memes don't care-- the just spread where they can and when they can. It IS the same, Belz... just as you said.

Information that is good at getting itself copied leads to the appearance of complexity and design... nobody can doubt that religions seems complex and designed... but no on can doubt that they evolved either. From the bottom up--like everything else. And they spread by hijacking primal instincts not unlike the way a venereal disease spreads itself.
 
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Organic systems intentionally change themselves in order to survive new environmental circumstances?
In a manner of speaking.
But also in a manner of speaking:

"The Tao never does anything,
Yet through it, all things are done."
 
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ambnp said:
Here is one instance where evolution is taking a backward step. [CRT] [ apart from size] TVs have a far better overall image than either plasma or LCD, at the present time. Makes me think, how many times has evolutionary life taken a backward step before more complex life jumped over and became more dominant?
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Sorry for the side-bar, but I have never seen a CRT that equals a plasma and/or LCD (not all of course) in HD.

Evolution just means change, it does not means only a step forward, as most of us I'm sure, know.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
Apathia said:
Organic systems intentionally change themselves in order to survive new environmental circumstances?
In a manner of speaking.
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It always looks like that... because the ones that don't, die out. The ones that survive, carry information that can stay around and become newly shuffled hands in the evolution game.
 
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