Information and Genetics

Hi Fred,I at first didn't pay this message any attention, but then I read a couple of the replies, and that influenced me to go back and read it, and it leads me to wonder why you believe you've said anything of relevance to the discussion. For example: This was addressed to Mammuthus, but I, too, am anonymous, so I'll reply as if it were addressed to me. That you use your real name on the Internet is a credit to your courage, but not necessarily your wisdom. The Internet *does* have a few crazies out there, and I'm not willing to expose myself to them. Here are some threats I can think of to which I might expose myself were I to use my real name, in order of increasing threat and probably decreasing probability:

• Spam to my personal email.
• Spam to my work email.
• Spam email about me to my employer.
• Crank phone calls to my home.
• Crank phone calls to my place of work.
• Crank phone calls about me to my place of work.
• Junk snail-mail.
• Threatening snail-mail.
• Stalking (following me, my car, staking out my house)
• Home invasion.
• Physical violence.
• Murder.

Add to this one more, the concern about possible confusion of my professional reputation with my hobby reputation. If you do a Google of my real name you get several pages of links about my professional work and involvements, and none about evolution and Creationism. I would like it to stay that way. When you do a Google of "Fred Williams" you don't come up with anything professional beyond mention of your degree (Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla), position (Advisory Engineer) and place of work (McData). Everything else is Creation/Evolution. I don't want this to happen to my name.But whether or not someone has legitimate concerns leading them to choose anonymity, the important issue here is that anonymity is irrelevant to validity. Arguments stand or fall on their merits, not on the basis of the name under which they're promoted. To believe otherwise is to fall prey to the fallacy of appeal to authority, the belief that association of a name with an argument lends it validity. You're continually reminded of this fallacy, and yet you remain one of the biggest name droppers on the net I've ever met. Comments like this say far more about you than about anyone else. This is an assertion with no support. Lacking such support, it would appear the only person doing a hack job here is you! Instead of supporting your assertion you follow it with your favorite type of fallacy, appeal to authority: You not only appeal to authority, you appeal to anonymous authority. And you appeal to anonymous authority after just having excoriated Mammuthus for remaining anonymous! Oh, the irony!Please understand I'm not complaining that they're anonymous. I actually think they're being pretty smart, for all the reasons I enumerated above. The complaint is with your use of the fallacy of appeal to authority, and to your gross inconsistency and bias in believing that only Creationists can have legitimate justification for desiring anonymity. Yet more fallacious appeal to authority. No where in this is there any description of the particular reasons and rationale leading him to his position. In other words, you've included nothing of relevance to this discussion. Ah, yes, the old favorite, expressed in many different ways, but harkening back to this: More and more scientists are abandoning the bankrupt theory of evolution as they realize that life could only have come from a divine Creator. As someone else commented in replying to your post, if so many evolutionists are actually closet Creationists, just where is the support for evolution coming from? Your appear to have a cadre of oppositionists who are for the most part ethereal. This is another of your favorite activities, saying something true of yourself rather than your opponents. I know you're big into football, so I guess you just figure the best defense is a good offense, and that whatever your greatest weakness is you should just accuse the other side of the same thing whether it is true or not.The theory of evolution that we accept is supported by evidence, while the religion in which you have faith is not. That's why Creationists spend all their time challenging the evidence for evolution instead of presenting evidence supporting Creationism, because there isn't any. Actually, the final irony is that it is *you* who is the Internet hack with an agenda, to promote religion at the expense of science.And this brings me to comment on perhaps your greatest gift, the ability to divert attention away from the relevant issues. I've written this rather long and critical post to point out to you, quite unsuccessfully I'm sure, the pointlessness of posts like yours and this one. Perhaps we could get back to the thread's topic?--Percy

Yeay, I'm back. Whee As per your 4 points:

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1) unrealistic truncation selection,
2) unrealistic assumption of positive mutations, both in quantity and frequency,
3) extinction is ignored or not permitted,
4) an information source is always required to prune any useful information created by a GA.

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I've already answered each one of these. Getting no response, I must turn to the Socratic method. Please answer the questions *With Specifics*.1) unrealistic truncation selection: How does Avida, as an example, use truncation selection by default? Explain the mechanism involved.2) unrealistic assumption of positive mutations, both in quantity and frequency: How does avida determine, and use, positive and negative mutations? How does mutation in Avida work?3) extinction is ignored or not permitted, How does Avida "ignore" or "not permit" extinction?4) an information source is always required to prune any useful information created by a GA. (you mixed two issues here): 1) What sort of information source is needed for the creatures in avida to evolve? 2) In commercial programs (i.e., ones where someone is trying to evolve a "useful" thing), how do I need to "prune" useful information from an ANN or string matching GA?

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Rei essentially agreed that commercial GAs use truncation selection, which should have divorced them from the discussion but Rei refused to do so:

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So, if animal breeders could cause macroevolution, would you not consider this evidence that evolution could occur on its own, albeit at a slower rate? Because that is basically what you're arguing with this line of argument. Truncation selection just means a 100% selection probability, when in nature, a "positive" mutation can have any selection probaibility from minisculely better than average to 100%, depending on the trait and the mutation. We're arguing about a rate issue here.As per your mocking comparison, Fred, I want an answer to the Blackjack analogy that I have asked several times about, concerning whether you have to "prune" results from the output of a GA. I'll reiterate:You're playing blackjack. Someone gives you the following option: they have a machine that will take your hand, draw another hand, compare the two, and keep the one that is closer to 21 for the next trial. You can run it for as long as you want. It processes a thousand hands per second. You give your hand to the machine, get up, go to the bathroom, come back, sit down, get comfortable, and then ask the machine for the hand back. Will your hand be:A) 21, or
B) Not 21The answer is, of course, that your hand will essentially *always* be 21. Do you not accept this? Please, answer: YES, or NO.The key is, if you have a genetic algorithm following a nonrandom truncation algorithm, if the selection factor is designed as accurately as possible, taking into account all factors that would be taken into account by hand calculations, then it will produce the best possible result, given the limits of the parallelism** in the GA. Again, IF YOU PUT IN ALL OF THE SELECTION FACTORS. Perhaps in some engineering of physical products, one cannot account for everything (i.e., people couldn't design it by hand either, it requires laboratory testing because we "just can't simulate the results accurately enough". In my field however (software), we know all of the selection factors. As a consequence, the result is the best possible that could be programmed, within the limits of parallelism**.P.S. - as to your posts about anonymity, my name is Karen Rei Pease, of 810 Benton Dr, Iowa City, IA, Ph. 319-358-7060.** - Parallelism: If you have a very non-parallel GA, you may come to an evolutionary dead-end that isn't the maximal dead-end performance. Since commercial GAs (to use the term - again, all GA terms are rather vague, since each one can have its own unique character), which tend to use truncation selection, are more analagous to breeding operations, I will use such an analogy:Lets say you have a zookeeper who is breeding cheetas for speed. The fastest cheetahs are mated together. While speed is definitely a positive selection factor for cheetahs in the wild, it isn't a 100% selection factor. Here, we push cheetahs to their physical limit - lets say, after 100 generations, we have a cheetah that can go 90 mph in sprints. To achieve this, it has lost all of its endurance, has longer hind limbs, is more prone to disease, and whatnot (everything in life is typically a tradeoff). Wow, it's fast. However, it isn't the fastest *possible* creature. If the zookeeper had bred several dozen lines down a truncation route (lets say cheetahs, dolphins, ants, lizards, bacteria, and eagles), it may well find that it gets an eagle that, in a high speed dive, breaks 200 miles per hour - far faster than the cheetah! This is parallelism. A good GA that uses truncation selection (which, I'll state for the Nth time where N approaches infinity, Avida does not - each mini-program simply runs, with the Avida engine merely acting as a virtual machine with an error-prone copy function and a configurable-setting memory block selection algorithm which defaults to "random") will attempt to maintain diverse parallel lines of approach.I'll attempt to reply to the dozens of other threads that I've missed, tomorrow.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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There is a leading scientist on the genome project who privately talked of the huge elephant in the room (intelligent design) that he has to pretend isn’t there so the funding won’t dry up or find himself pounding pavement.

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This one is actually pretty funny. It comes from a newspaper article by some conservative hack from a few years ago. It has made the rounds on the creationist internet circuit, and like a game of 'telephone', it has lost and picked up some attributes. The one constant is the "white elephant" phrase. That was in the original. In the original, the "leading scientist" was a lowly "molecular biologist" that this columnist just happened to meet on a bus (or the subway, I don't remember which). And they just happened to start a conversation, and the conversation just happened to dive immediately into creation/evolution. And this supposed molecular biologist - anonymous and imaginary, most likely - relayed the same "white elephant" story. An anonymous source with credentials just happens to support a typical conspiratorial claim of creationists. I'm sure it happens all the time.And of course, now the game of telephone is kicking in. Now, the anonymous molecular biologist is a LEADING scientist in the genome project. In a few more years, doubtless it will be a Nobel laureate.But I am sure THAT will be true, too. After all, creationists have the TRUTH on their side, and no need to embellish or fabricate stories to make it appear as though everyone else knows how 'right' they are, too.

Not on a bus, in the bed and breakfast establishment he runs with his wife JoAnne[sic].

"I'd be interested in finding a single scientist on the HGP who thinks the information in the genome didn't evolve.You can certainly find people who think it's ultimately the product of a creator, but I've yet to run into anyone who thinks it didn't evolve." Of course it has evolved! 'Evolve = change' and the information in the human genome has certainly changed since it was first created. That's not the issue nor has it ever been.

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Joralex

Sfs was responding to Message 48 where Wounded King wrote: So when you say, "That's not the issue,", perhaps you are right, but in that case your argument is not with Sfs nor even with Wounded King, but rather with the author of the christian courier article.--Percy

Or the mystery geneticist.