Summations Only

An honest observation of thousands of years of animal and plant breeding suggests that Darwins' Tree of Common Descent is a Tree of Fantasy.

Glenn R. Morton once taught me something very important. When I started studying "creation science" in 1981 and even when I had started discussing it on CompuServe in the late 1980's, I thought that creationists just didn't know what they were talking about and that once they learned what their mistakes were then they'd correct themselves since, well, Christians are all about truth, right? Instead, it turns out that "true Christians" absolutely hate truth, especially when it contradicts their contrary-to-fact religious beliefs.At the 1986 International Conference on Creationism, he reported how he, an ICR-trained "geologist" had gone to work for an oil exploration company and had hired other young-earth creationists trained by the ICR. That training included learning what geological facts did not exist and could not exist for Scripture to have any meaning. He reported that, as they all had to work day after day with exactly those "impossible" rock-hard geological facts, they all suffered severe crises of faith.That was the first indication I had that "creation science" posed the most risk to the faith of its followers.Just the other day I did a search on Dembski "deer in headlights" in an attempt to find Glenn R. Morton's account of Dembski versus genetic algorithms at a conference, The Nature of Nature, Waco, TX, 2000.
grmorton, 03 Jun 2005, https://www.christianforums.com/...-evolution-useful.1703143:

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JohnR7 said:
A common arguement on this board is that if you reject evolution, then you also have to reject science and computers. There is really no comparison though. Science and computers have a function and a use for me, evolution does not.

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Today I was loading a new program onto the computer. I went through the menu to figure out how to use the program and to configure it for what I intended to use it for. Just as I was finished working on this new program, my wife asked me about another program that people use on the computer. I told her I did not know anything about that program because I did not use it. IT does not have enough usefulness to me, for me to bother with it to learn how to use it. It is the same thing with evolution. I do not reject computers because there are programs I have no use for. Nor do I reject science, just because I have no use for the theory of evolution.

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Of course for someone else, the theory maybe useful for them. Or they may think it is useful enough so that they try to learn it and apply it in some way. So, if they feel they benifit from it in some way, then I suppose it is worth while to them, to study and learn the theory to try and apply it.

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Well, JohnR7, you seem ignorant of how evolution is used to better your life. THere is a thing called a genetic algorithm. In such a computer program, things are designed via an evolutionary mechanism. A trial device is mutated, then tested. If the new device is better than the old, it is kept and then mutated again and tested again. Over and over this process can be carried out eventually leading to new and novel designs for mechanical objects.

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"Randomly stringing together a handful of resistors, capacitors, and transistors seems hardly the way to design and build a radio, but a random configuration is the starting point for a group of computer-based methods known as genetic algorithms. Whereas the simulated-annealing approach was suggested by statistical mechanics, genetic algorithms are rooted in the mechanics of natural selection and evolution. They represent a sophisticated kind of search that combines blind groping with precise bookkeeping.

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"The idea is to start with several random arrangements of componenets that each prepresent a complete but unorganized system. Most of these chance designs would fare very poorly, but some are bound to be better than others. The superior designs are then 'mated' by combining parts of different arrangements to produce 'offspring' with characteristics derived from both their 'parents' From this second generation, the computer again selects the best or most efficient designs for further breeding, and rejects the rest. The process continues in this fashion until an acceptable design or solution to a specific problem emerges. Once the goal is clearly defined and the criteria for success are in hand, the computer itself picks its way in a trial-and-error fashion, recording and building on its best guesses and eventually producing a good answer.

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"Pioneered more than 25 years ago by computer scientist John Holland, genetic algorithms consititute a field of computer science inspired by biological models and strewn with biological terms. In essence, Holland links the question of how biological systems adapt to their environnments with the problem of programming computers so they can learn and solve prpoblems.

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"The genetic-algorithm approach to problem solving has developed slowly. ONly in recent years have researchers begun to appreciate and exploit the method's flexibility and versatility, especially for designing complex systems or finding near-optimal solutions to problems. Engineers are beginning to use genetic algorithms for such applications as designing integrated-circuit chips, scheduling work in a busy machine shop, operating gas-pipeline pumping stations, and recognizing patterns."Ivars Peterson, Islands of Truth, (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1990), p. 209-211

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Scientists have used evolutionary processes to find chemicals which will remove dyes from your clothes. This will help keep your shirts starchy white.

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Andrew Ellington and Jack W. Szostak "used small organic dyes as the target. They screened 10 13 random-sequence RNAs and found molecules that bound tightly and specifically to each of the dyes.

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"Recently they repeated this experiment using random-sequence DNAs and arrived at an entirely different set of dye-binding molecules.

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"That observation reveals an important truth about directed evolution (and indeed, about evolution in general): the forms selected are not necessarily the best answers to a problem in some ideal sense, only the best answers to arise in the evolutionary history of a particular macromolecule." Gerald F. Joyce, "Directed Evolution," Scientific America, Dec. 1992, p. 94-95.

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And this is a partial account of a talk Bill Dembski gave at the Nature of Nature Conference in Baylor in 2000. Dembski had given a talk which denigrated genetic algorithms. He said you couldn't use them to design anything. This is extracted from my web page http://home.entouch.net/dmd/wacoday3.htm {DWise1: link broken} :

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In the Q&A I raised the issue of biomolecular companies who use genetic
algorithms to search for novel functionality. He claimed that it wasn't
important and that such programs could
never be used to design anything. Then much to my amazement, John
Baumgardner said "'Glenn's point was exactly correct.' I nearly fell on the
floor. He told Dembski that they were using genetic algorithms at Los Alamos
to design lots of things. Two or three other people said the same thing.
[One of these, a man named Eide Trotter, I later learned is a well
connected Southern Baptist who goes to First Baptist in Dallas. He sat next
to me and the next table on Thursday morning when I had breakfast with Paul
Nelson, Mark Kalthoff and Tom Judson(?). After breakfast he said that he
liked much of what I had said. Gerald Eichoefer, of Greenville College
(don't know where that is) tried to come to Dembski's defense. He said that
genetic algorithms were terrible inefficient search methods. He was shot
down by a guy in the back who said that genetic algorithms vastly outperform
a random search. and indeed a genetic algorithm isn't a random search.
Later that day in the last session, Frank turned to me and said that
Eichoefer claims to be a prophet of God. I must admit he looked like one
which may explain why I took his name down off of his name tag.--grm]Hands
were upraised all over the room. Dembski had the deer in headlights look.
He turned it over to the next speaker.

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I will add one final thing. We use mutational algorithms to perform seismic inversion, which allows us to find more oil to fuel your hummer. We mutate an acoustic impedance (AI) trace, convert it to seismic, then compare it with the real seismic. If it matches better, we keep the AI trace. If it doesn't we drop it and mutate the AI and try again.

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So, JohnR7 while you may be ignorant of what evolutionary processes are used for and how they help your life, your statement that evolution is irrelevant to your life is simply wrong and displays an ignorance of what is being done by evolutionary processes to help your lifestyle .

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Agreed. Way off topic.

That's too long for a bumper sticker.

No, it's not dependent on life sharing a common ancestor. But, at the risk of sounding tedious repetitive, that's a conclusion of evolutionary theory, not a premise. It's like how the age of the universe is a conclusion of relativity; but using relativistic equations to predict the orbit of Mercury is not dependent on the age of the observable universe.

It doesn't matter what you say to him or how many others explain it, he'll still say it again in a week's time. He won't think about it, he won't consider why you might be right or even wrong - he'll just chant it back out again like an amen in his church; totally brainlessly.

Humans have been using "evolutionary processes" to develop and improve their inventions ever since Adam was a boy. To cite this process as a "use" of Darwinism is laughable.

What? ... You're comparing Darwinists' extrapolative fantasies to mathematics and physics? LOL! What an insult to true science.The more I talk to evolutionists, the more they remind me of Jehovah's Witnesses. Congratulations. This admission is the first step on the road to discovering that Darwin's Tree of Common Descent is an irrelevance to science.Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.

I'm sure that everyone has noticed that you really are not trying to debate anymore. You've fallen back into just trying to ridicule your opponent without any real arguments.Maybe it is time to ask for the check.

Then why do you pretend that they don't work?Or, as Glenn R. Morton pointed out, "... while you may be ignorant of what evolutionary processes are used for and how they help your life, your statement that evolution is irrelevant to your life is simply wrong and displays an ignorance of what is being done by evolutionary processes to help your lifestyle ."

Humans have been selectively breeding animals for thousands of years and they have discovered that they always produce offspring within the same kind. Despite the huge variation in domestic dogs they are all the same species. To cite this as evidence for evolution is to expose the edge of evolution.

Please define "kinds". Oh yeah, you are never able to do so.What does evolution predict? What does evolution predict? Branching within established kinds. So what difference are you trying to offer here?

Kind - A group of creatures that were able to interbreed immediately after Creation.

A breeding population.One or several daughter population?Enjoy

And when was this act of creation?I'm afraid I get very confused about all this because you creationists all believe different things and we never know which version we're arguing against.Are these 'kinds' the same post and pre-Fall? Faith tells us that prior to this fall thing, all animals were vegetarians is that in your book too?Creatures only? No plants, fungii etc?