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Author Topic:   IC challenge: Evolve a bicycle into a motorcycle!
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 9 of 157 (193970)
03-24-2005 7:21 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Andya Primanda
06-10-2004 5:26 AM


i wold like to point out that he first motorcycles were motorized bicycles. in fact, some motorcycles today still use a frame very similar to a bicycle frame, although heavier and squatter.
added by edit: that is to say, even in non genetic/organic processes, like a case that's obviously intelligent design (made by us), the principles of common descent still apply. all new designs are based on old ones.
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 03-24-2005 07:23 AM

This message is a reply to:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 81 of 157 (195171)
03-29-2005 10:59 AM
Reply to: Message 78 by Buzsaw
03-29-2005 10:32 AM


Re: Intelligent? Not really.
Regardless of what degree of perfection an intelligent designer has in the beginning, both God and humans are intelligent designers.
yes, and god should be a BETTER designer than humans.
The debate is whether intelligent design brought the things we are observing in the universe and our world to be or whether they came to be without intelligent design by natural and random processes.
well, yes. but bicycles don't reproduce sexually, do they?
although the human design process is close to evolution, actually. because almost nobody ever makes anything from complete scratch. all inventions and improvements are made from existing parts, and usually based on previous designs.
you'll also find something similar to common ancestry. the electric guitar and violin are probably just variations on a mandolin type instrument. a harley davidson, crotch rocket, and moped are all basically motorized bicycles, and they probably all share some elements with even a tour-de-france type bike. this is because different people make different variations on the same theme different ways.
but with technology, the selection and creation process is us. do we like it? will we pay for it? how much money something makes determines how many get made, including variations. with animals, the selection and reproduction process is sexual. is the animal attractive to the other gender? does it do well enough to survive? how long it lives and how many mates it gets determine how many get made, including variations.
see how that kind of removes the intelligent human design from it?
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 03-29-2005 11:00 AM

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 114 of 157 (252860)
10-18-2005 8:32 PM
Reply to: Message 113 by ausar_maat
10-18-2005 7:50 PM


Re: Apples & Oranges for more...apples & oranges
instead of shuffling cards, or building bicycles into hot motor rides, let's try something different. I'll ask you to shuffle 10 buckets of paint. Don't even mix them actually, we'll just use them. Take 1 000 000 page painting sheets. On each sheet, I'll ask you to throw some paint on randomly, just do whatever, splat that bad boy all over the sheet. Try it randomly 1 000 000 times. We'll see if we can evolve, by pure probabilities, on the 986 657th try, a perfect work of art resembling a painting of Michael Angelo? Looking like it's designed, looking as though the precision of the paint and the mixture of colours and the pressure of the arm and hand all coordinated to bring us Mona Lisa's smile only...randomly..
I will bet my bottom dollar it will never happen. Not after 1 billion times.
i bet my bottom dollar i can paint you a pretty good jackson pollock though.
see, if we're gonna compare apples and oranges, let's compare apples that LOOK like oranges to the oranges. if we're dripping paint, let's talk about things that look paint drips.
now, there's a big problem with this whole argument, of course. we're trying to match something up exactly to an already existing work. now, i'm a pretty talented artist (if i can toot my own horn for a sec) and i'm pretty well verse in the technique pollock used. but i couldn't paint you an exact duplication of his work.
how about we pick a more impressive analogy, yet flawed in the same way. if we're checking for a match to a specific painting, let's check for a match. we'll determine that our artificial selection will take place on the basis of similarity to a photograph of michaelangelo's sistine ceiling, say the famous birth of adam picture.
we start off with an empty screen on the computer, and apply pixels completely randomly. each pixel gets a random location and color, and we'll start with a small set. just a few. now, the closer that pixel is in color to the corresponding pixel of the photo, the longer it will last. for the purposes of this example, we'll keep the pixels that are perfect matches. the longer a pixel is around the more likely it is to reproduce.
here's the catch -- reproduction is interpolation. pixel produces an offspring at an empty one of the 8 pixels surrounding it, and the color of that pixel is generated at random, seeded with the average of its parent and others pixel surrounding it.
having messed about with similar algorithms, i'm willing to make two claims.
1. that given a suffient starting set and a photo of large enough dpi, the painting will eventually be reproduced to enough degree that it will be recognizable.
2. the picture will be apparent, though no exact, rather quickly.
flat shaded paintings will do better, stippling will be close to impossible, and alternating pixels would be intelligent design.
(also, i feel the need to point out that michaelangelo, one word, did not paint la giaconda, "the mona lisa.")
This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 10-18-2005 08:33 PM

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 113 by ausar_maat, posted 10-18-2005 7:50 PM ausar_maat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 116 by RAZD, posted 10-18-2005 10:06 PM arachnophilia has replied
 Message 120 by ausar_maat, posted 10-19-2005 7:26 AM arachnophilia has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 115 of 157 (252872)
10-18-2005 9:18 PM


non-living things DO evolve. sort of.
i would like to point out my original post in this thread, back on page one.
quote:
i wold like to point out that [t]he first motorcycles were motorized bicycles. in fact, some motorcycles today still use a frame very similar to a bicycle frame, although heavier and squatter.
added by edit: that is to say, even in non genetic/organic processes, like a case that's obviously intelligent design (made by us), the principles of common descent still apply. all new designs are based on old ones.
all design is somewhat analogous to evolution. remember old school choppers, ala easy rider? where did they come from, do you suppose? did someone create them ex-nihilo?
no. people had motorcycles before that. a chopper was a motorcycle taken apart, chopped up, extended here and there, and rearranged. as the style caught on, choppers get wilder, and show different trends in popularity, much like a breeding community. both factors are factors of taste, and mass-production is similar to reproduction. the things that work better and look sexier get more made, and more new things are influenced by those changes.
things get borrowed from other designs, too, sort of like convergent evolution. sometimes things are outright stolen -- hybridization and inter-species breeding (like mules/hinnies and tigons/ligers).
if anyone is REALLY interested in the analogy, go research the history of motorcycles. although the first motorcycle ever made as not technically a bicycle, its design directly mimicked one. bicycles were of course around for many years prior.
the interesting bit is that the first modern gasoline engine is also in the first motorcycle. the cycle itself was aparently build, like a bicycle, to hold the engine, which was the real advance. before that, the very same people were building steam engines and doing very similar things with them (carriages, etc).
after that. most of the first motorcycle inventors were people who owned bike shops and factories. the first production motorcycles were bicycles with gasoline engines. after that, it's pretty easy to see how the bicycle frame and components gradually change over time into today modern choppers.
i'll post pictures of this part if i have to.
so perhaps behe should be asking us to evolve a steam turbine into a piston. that is, afterall, what he says in his book -- larger systems composed of components cannot be ic, because you just take them apart into their components.

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Replies to this message:
 Message 117 by RAZD, posted 10-18-2005 10:11 PM arachnophilia has replied
 Message 121 by macaroniandcheese, posted 10-19-2005 1:14 PM arachnophilia has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 118 of 157 (252900)
10-18-2005 11:09 PM
Reply to: Message 116 by RAZD
10-18-2005 10:06 PM


Re: Apples & Oranges for more...apples & oranges
but
you keep putting selection back into the picture while auser_maat keeps trying to ignore it to make his (thereby corrupted) point.
problem is that auser_maat is not discussing evolution but a strawman.
mine's actually the strawman, because evolution doesn't have a master plan to check itself against.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 119 of 157 (252902)
10-18-2005 11:10 PM
Reply to: Message 117 by RAZD
10-18-2005 10:11 PM


Re: non-living things DO evolve. sort of. - Design Evolves, and Borrows!
This is the biggest failing of ID - good design would predict this occurring, fossil & genetic evidence says it doesn't.
well, it's sort of like convergent evolution, but not quite. i don't think there's outright theft and assimilation in the animal world --
-- now, if we were borg...

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 117 by RAZD, posted 10-18-2005 10:11 PM RAZD has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 125 by RAZD, posted 10-19-2005 5:26 PM arachnophilia has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 127 of 157 (253189)
10-19-2005 7:24 PM
Reply to: Message 120 by ausar_maat
10-19-2005 7:26 AM


Re: Apples & Oranges for more...apples & oranges
I think I should become a fortune teller. How did I know someone was going to come up with yet another set of "apples & oranges", then argue the set taste better then the others?
I even know the reason actually, since arach was honest enough to admit that his set have just as many problems as mine, jacinto or behe's, but yet, he couldn't help himself. Because, he is trying to prove his point.
well, no. i was demonstrating that your analogy has a second flaw, actually. you're comparing apples and oranges, yourself. but this is where the apples and "oranges" issue is huge. because you're doing the equivalent of comparing apples and digital alarm clocks shaped like oranges. like the cockney saying goes, clockwork oranges are queer indeed. i'm suggesting we stick to fruit. afterall, apples and oranges do have some things in common: they're both fruit, the both grow on tress, both are good for you, and both are bright, warm colors.
i was also demonstrating a third flaw in your analogy. you neither picked a method that accurately reproduces the evolutionary process, nor did you choose an output that could be made precisely similar easily -- as i pointed out. i can't even intelligently paint the same painting leonardo did.
the point that i was trying to demonstrate is that if we remove these two obvious flaws, we can make apples look like oranges and vice versa. but, preferable, we should be comparing red apples and green apples, right?
i bet if we take a similar process and check against preference instead of michaelangelo, we'd still a get a painting. i suggest they'd look like the abstract paintings of say, rothko (which were intelligently painted).
but if you don't like that analogy, that's fine. the essential problem is that we're picking things that are essentially id and evolution. there's the apples and oranges of it. intelligent design, often looks like an evolutionary process (see, well, the history of motorcycles) but there is still the ability of the designer to create something truly new -- in evolution (ie: the animal kingdom) everything has a parent. new species do not poof into existance.
we're not comparing apples and oranges, we're comparing mousetraps and venus flytraps. one's designed, one's evolved, and it's pretty clear what the differences are to most everyone, i think. although, if you really wanted to me evolve a mousetrap, i can do that too.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 120 by ausar_maat, posted 10-19-2005 7:26 AM ausar_maat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 131 by ausar_maat, posted 10-20-2005 10:26 AM arachnophilia has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 128 of 157 (253190)
10-19-2005 7:28 PM
Reply to: Message 125 by RAZD
10-19-2005 5:26 PM


Re: non-living things DO evolve. sort of. - Design Evolves, and Borrows!
And that is the difference between {natural systems adapting to changing environments and incorporating mutations in the process} and what we should see if {ID} were in any evidence.
just to be clear for the others here, convergent evolution is when similar environments produce similar evolutionary results.
what we're talking about is some set of features being completely absent in a creature, but present in another one, and then the next generation of the first species acquiring that set of structures as a whole, closely reproducing the second species.
that's basically what irreducible complexity predicts: that whole systems will pop into existance.

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 129 of 157 (253191)
10-19-2005 7:37 PM
Reply to: Message 121 by macaroniandcheese
10-19-2005 1:14 PM


Re: non-living things DO evolve. sort of.
i should post some pictures. after the introducion of the engine to bicycles (think hybridaztion) the changes the motorcycle went through are remarkably evolutionary.
the first motorcycles were powered bicycles, first single and then double cylinder, then v-2's. frame shape, tank size and shape. wheel adaptation, etc, all changed rather gradually, as trends. the engine's history is rather similar. although the first gasoline engine was in the first motorcycle, many similar engines functioning off other fuels predated it.

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 Message 121 by macaroniandcheese, posted 10-19-2005 1:14 PM macaroniandcheese has replied

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 132 of 157 (253930)
10-22-2005 12:39 AM
Reply to: Message 131 by ausar_maat
10-20-2005 10:26 AM


Re: Apples & Oranges for more...apples & oranges
you mean "...should NOT be comparing..." right?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 131 by ausar_maat, posted 10-20-2005 10:26 AM ausar_maat has replied

Replies to this message:
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