Well, if you don't have a theory you don't have a science. You can argue that a bad theory (and bad science) is better than none at all. The social sciences have gotten by with bad theories throughout their history; as did alchemy and astrology before them. Alchemy and astrology were bad science, but they paved the way for chemistry, physics and astronomy.

The analogies are apt.

Note: Norman MacBeth identified this problem back in the 1970's. He called it the 'first in a field of stumblers fallacy' or some such. He also was trained as an attorney.

Bruce:

Yeah, I read MacBeth in college and never looked back:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0876451059/juddsbookreviews

The problem with the example given here is that you are trying to generate a specific target phrase. But if you are trying to simulate evolution, you should not have a target, unless you are then willing to entertain the notion that there is some destination or final form for which evolution is striving.

Another problem with the letter analogies is that they assume that letter frequencies are equal. They aren't. If you take into account that that certain letters are more likely to follow, or not follow, other letters, or more or less likely to occur at the end or beginning of a word, then you can quite quickly generate random text.

Back in the 1970s I wrote a Fortran program that did just this, analyzed a base text using 7 letter sequences (you use multi-way trees) and then used those frequencies to establish the probabilites for generated text. Sometimes you could get whole paragraphs that almost seemed to make sense if you were in the right (read altered) frame of mind.

(My inspiration was an article in Nature, or some such magazine, that did this for 3 or 4 letters deep, but claimed that there wasn't enough memory in computers. to do it any deeper. The guy was using mostly empty matrices to hold the data, and even I could recognize that there were better ways to do that, as I showed. I should revisit the problem, as these days one could easily go a dozen or 16 or even20 levels deep, and there are plenty of books online to serve as base texts. Feed in all the works of Shakespere and see what happens...)

The primary problem with the letter analogy is that it presumes that the intermediate strings are all "viable", i.e. able to mutate and produce modified progeny. This is a reasonable biological assumption only if the strings are non-functional, in which case there can not be any selection pressure and we are back to a random search.

Biologically, even a difference of a few letters is as much a miss as a completely random string, so the assumed "closeness" relation used by Dawkins et. al. has no biological basis. The fact that this false similitude is cited as one of the stronger evolutionary arguments has always puzzled me.

jd:

If they had better arguments that peppered moths and finches they'd use them too.

"The problem....is that you are trying to generate a specific target phrase....if you are trying to simulate evolution, you should not have a target"

One assumes that the target sentence represents a a functioning cell,i.e. life itself, or more specifically life as we know it. If you want to broaden the parameters and make it easier for the program I suppose you could look for any recognizable sentence in any language, but if you don't have a target, you can't very well hit your mark.

"If you take into account that that certain letters are more likely to follow, or not follow, other letters, or more or less likely to occur at the end or beginning of a word, then you can quite quickly generate random text."

Eh? Wouldn't that equate to being "directed toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ,"?

And doesn't that imply a director?

Yeah, that should have said "then you can quite quickly generate random text that appears to be intellegible."

Comparing a sentence to a cell is whole orders of magnitude off. A decent virus would be like a magazine article. Better to compare a cell to a book— how about we start with pages of random text, using the same sort of mutation rules, and see how long it takes to come up with Darwin's "Origin of Species" or one of Dawkins' tracts. It may be faster than the monkeys, but not by any amount that matters. (Reducing the task from, say 100 million Universe lifetimes to only a thousand lifetimes is still way too long. Until that number drops below 1, it's effectively impossible.)

Then there's the quesiton of how many kinds of cell forms there are, and why should we be working toward a particular one form. A better analogy would be one that did the mutations and comes with, on its own, the equivalent to "Methinks it is like a weasel" but in any language expressible with the latin alphabet.

"but if you don't have a target, you can't very well hit your mark".

Sure you can. You define the target as exhibiting certain class of behavior (in this case, being readable) as opposed to definiting as a certain sequence of letters that must be reproduced exactly. The scheme as presented in the original posting is like a magicians card trick, a "force", an illusion where the mark thinks he has a choice, but never does because the outcome is never in doubt. It gets tiresome seeing the same flawed analogy being used over and over.

What it all comes down to is that randomness in evolution is probably, as the mathematicians say, "necessary, but not sufficent". There are other, currently unknown, mechanisms involved in any sort of evolutionary scheme, which alter the odds.

Environmental pressures affect evolution immensely.

No big, BIG asteroids from the Deep Beyond, no humans.

We're assuming that the random events are akin to putting letters together, what if it were more along the line of assembling words? I agree with Raoul that there are other mechanism at work that we don't totally uderstand, but I've read some studies in the area of complexity and self-organizing systems that suggest that matter has a propensity for organizing itself, almost a "grammar" for building complex structures. Call that design if you wish, but I'm not sold.

I don't like the sentence-generating analogy either, but only because language is a convention.

As Orrin says, an intelligence gives it its meaning.

Until the intelligence intervenes, any sequence of letters has the same 'meaning' -- none at all.

Life isn't like that, and by now we have enough direct information that we do not need analogies. We can describe at the atomic (even photonic) level exactly what happens.

Amino acids, which form (in infinite iterations) in space prove that no direct intelligence is necessary to create biologically useful molecules.

Assign amino acids a level of complexity X.

Could there be another, similar development resulting in X+1 complexity?

Yes, obviously.

Then, at what X+x can you say the sequence is interrupted.

Obviously, you cannot.

There's a lawyerly argument for you.

An old New Yorker cartoon shows two boffins in front of a blackboard covered with calculations. One boffin says to another, "And then, a miracle occurred."

I think it would be just as funny if the boffin had said, "And then, shit happened." It would not be very funny if he had said, "And then, I don't know what happened."

Edward O. Wilson holds that human's nature is innate. Like a photographic negative, the latent image is there; how it turns out depends upon how it is developed. This photographic model apparently predisposes us to follow chains of cause and effect to their beginning. Oblivious to Kant's insight that sometimes we just can't, humans seem to tend either to look for a Divine cause, a naturalistic one, or some combination of the two when it comes to ultimate things.

When confronted with the not-yet-known or the outright unknowable, belief comes into play. Theists believe God is the Ultimate Cause. Darwinians believe in Darwin as a kind of latter-day, secular Moses, laying down the law of causation. Others resort to a bit of both. In any case, lacking objective evidence, all resort to faith for justification, and all employ the same rhetorical tools.

Few people are capable of following Dirty Harry's dictum that one should know one's limits. The rest employ more hubris than anything else when they argue about Where We Came From and Why We Are Here. But they're fun to watch, and from time to time something valuable comes from it all.

Let the parlor games continue.

Ed:

Well said. The key difference fro m that point on is that Darwinists claim to be rationalists, yet their faith fails the test of reason. Theists believe reason to be nothing but a tool of the faithful, sometimes useful, often not.

Michael:

Note that you haven't described pressure but catastrophic intervention.

Dear oj,

Thanks. That's why I am a Deist of the Catholic variety.

It's hard not to see the rhetorical appeals in the work of Darwin's latest bulldog, Richard Dawkins. He is supremely rational; it is his premises that give me pause.

Rationalism is a device. Augustine used it as did Darwin. Begin from the premise that nothing exists if it is not physically evident. If you accept that, Darwin is your boy, despite the gaps that may crop up. If you can be that a Higher Power exists, you can follow arguments in that direction. Any scientist or theologian uses rationality in their arguments. It is the premises that make the difference. I doubt that the tension between the two will ever be resolved.

All best.

Ed:

Hopefully it never will be--where, as here in the states, there's a lively tensiuon between faith and reason we've an especially lively and healthy society. Where, as in Europe, Reason has prevailed, and where, as in parts of the Islamic world, Reason is utterly ignored, they've deadly and unpleasant societies.

oj,

Amen, bro. To be American is to argue. It can be cacaphonous, but it is vital.

When the most famous phrase associated with your theory is "The Missing Link", you may need another eon or so to weed out the weak parts of your argument.

Ed-Americans are drawn to sects through family tradition more than anything else. The American idea has a theistic foundation which is ignored or discarded at our peril. Ordered liberty is a funtion of individual responsibility which is ecouraged by the belief in authority higher than man's. The original American consensus was such while in more recent time, as the power of the federal government has grown beyond it's competence and the ancient traits of all central authority begin to reappear, those instittutions seen as competing with the civil powers need to be devalued and diluted so that the individuals former reliance on those institutions becomes focussed on the state. There is nothing mysterious or particularly malevolent about it' only the natural course of things. The founders were perfectly aware that the tendency was to be expected and be guarded against. The concern I have regarding the proponents of atheism is their failure to offer anything which replaces those institutions which function as socializing agents in preparing men to be free and responsible citizens whileminimizing the heavy hand of the state and the coercive power. A generally accepted cult of reason among an elite in power has always lead to disaster and tyranny. The weaker and dissenters among us need protection from such tyranny but it has invariably come only from those who believe in God as the creator of all men regardless of their race or class or belief. Rationalists are always able to find reasons why this protection may be unjustified through appeals to utility, the genral will or science. History shows that those of European culture are, sorry to say, simply too stupid to hold power over others in isolation from the basic moral absolutes supplied through the belief in the Judeo-Christian God. Reason is not the problem but the hubris of those who would hold power over others who believe it sufficient.

Tom,

What I and, I suspect, most people object to about the theory of evolution is not the theory per se, but the non-scientific ends it has been used to promote. From Huxley down to Dawkins and Dennett, evolution has been enthusiastically embraced because it provides a means to argue for atheism. In the process it has hijacked rationalism for secular ends. My desk dictionary, published in 1974 before pomos started their linguistic revisionism, defines rationalism firstly as "reliance on reason as the basis for establishment of religious truth." The supposed conflict between Faith and Reason is now and has been a con job ever since Voltaire. In the West an age of reason began with the establishment of the medieval Church. It was reason's principal champion. Its very promotion of reason, however, let to its use untethered to the first principles upon which it rests. And so here we are.

Those for whom evolution represents a crisis of Faith are people who need something to base a crisis on. They use it to transfer the awe of God to the awe of nothing.

You're right that this viewpoint has manifold ramifications for society. The idea that men through the state are the source of moral truth rather than Divine Providence makes my blood run cold. At the risk of sounding like an old-school Christian, it's heretical.

Are you old-school enough to kill over it, Ed, or has secularism weakened your moral fiber?

Tom's claim about protection of the weak and friendless must ring hollow with, among others, Jews.

Harry:

Who protects the Jews if not the Christoian United States?

Harry, what a Darwinian thing to say! Are you proposing a survival of the fittest morality? I suppose that once evolution has been eliminated, we can return to the good old days of sectarian strife.

Sheesh.

Being Christian means making another man's blood run hot, Ed.

Darwinism may be used to justify murder, if that's your bent. It does not require it, the way religion does.

Orrin, of course, misunderstands completely where the protection of Jews arose. Not from Christianity but from secularism, which fought a lengthy battle to give Jews civil rights, which Christianity never allowed them.

Once they had civil rights, other advantages flowed.

Harry:

In fact Darwinism, as Darwin says, requires murder if its ideas are applied. Religion does not.