Intelligent Design explains many follies

It may be hard for you to imagine, but evolving circuits via random "chance" (as you referred to it) and selection is an increasingly vibrant area of electronic engineering:

quote:

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`Intrinsic' Hardware Evolution is the use of artificial evolution -- such as a Genetic Algorithm -- to design an electronic circuit automatically, where each fitness evaluation is the measurement of a circuit's performance when physically instantiated in a real reconfigurable VLSI chip. This paper makes a detailed case-study of the first such application of evolution directly to the configuration of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Evolution is allowed to explore beyond the scope of conventional design methods, resulting in a highly efficient circuit with a richer structure and dynamics and a greater respect for the natural properties of the implementation medium than is usual. The application is a simple, but not toy, problem: a tone-discrimination task. Practical details are considered throughout.

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from a paper on the subject. (Sorry, URL too long to post.)This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-04-2006 08:37 PM

No, it didn't. It required a human being to copy what they observed occuring in nature. Humans didn't invent natural selection and random mutation. They observed these processes already occuring and merely imitated them. Now you're just moving the goalposts. Don't you remember your OP? The question wasn't whether or not mutation and evolution needed a designer, but whether or not they were capable of design. It would be far better for you to defend your original points than to try to shift the goalposts to another topic.

Made by copying processes found in nature.Think about what you're saying. Think for a minute about what you're implying. How could laboratory science be legitimate if, everytime you set up an experiment to test a process found in nature, you wound up confirming only your own intelligence?If we can't test natural processes in the lab, if the results can't be carried over to the natural world, then laboratory science has no meaning.Yet, somehow it does. So clearly your objection is false. These studies confirm the effacacy of natural process regardless of having been set up by people in the lab. To argue anything else is to dismiss all of science.

Well, that's certainly not true. A friend of mine rears lizards using a useful D. melanogaster mutant; they're larger (and therefore meatier) and also wingless. An excellent source of food for her lizard colony.

Well, they did, millions of years ago, when plants first began synthesizing these compounds.Almost all of the pesticides in use are purified versions of chemicals plants developed millions of years ago, or chemical analogs of those chemicals.

Except that it doesn't do what we expect it to do. We're specifically programming it so that it can't rely on its programming and our intelligence for the design.Thus, the programmers are not the designers; the algorhythm is the "designer". No intelligence needed.

The matter came about from the energy of the Big Bang. Where did the energy come from, I sense you're about to ask? it may not have come from anywhere because the net energy of the universe may be zero. If I have ten thousand dollars, and I owe you ten thousand dollars, technically I don't have any money at all. I can still use that ten thousand dollars I don't technically have to impress people with a big fat billfold, though.The matter we observe in our portion of the universe may simply be balanced by an equal amount of antimatter somewhere else; if so the net matter/energy of the universe is zero, even though we look around and see a lot of matter. They did not determine that themselves; the laws of physics determine how matter interacts and is organized.

Rarely? Or never?That's two different things. If it's never, then you're right, mutation can't explain the development of one creature to another.But if it's rarely, then selection gives nature a means to hand-pick the rarelys, with the end result that creatures are bettered by mutation.

One example that hits close to home is a mutation in human hemoglobin that, like sickle-cell anemia, confers resistance to malaria; but unlike sickle-cell hemoglobin, doesn't cause symptoms of anemia.Another similar example is a mutation carried by most people of European descent that confers resistance to diseases like bubonic plague.At the smaller end of the scale, a small mutation allowed a normally unicellular blue-green algae to form multicellular colonies, akin to volvox colonies. Various mutations in insects confer resistance to our control measures; for instance a gene for a certain enzyme was first duplicated and then modified in mosquitos by means of two seperate mutations, the resulting protein allowed the mosquitos to metabolize a certain pesticide, rendering it harmless to them. "Mutation partners"? I'm not sure what you're trying to say, here.

Actually mutations are so common we expect every organism to have several mutations of their very own, the precise amount depending on the number of base pairs in their genome.You, for instance, being a human with somewhere along the lines of 5.5 billion base pairs in your genome, can be expected to have between 5 and 500 individual mutations in your genome - genetic changes that originated in the gametes of your parents that were then passed on to every single one of your cells. Each of your cells has a number of mutations you've since acquired, but only the mutations acquired by your gametic cells will be passed on to your offspring. Well, if that's all it takes, we know that evolution is true because they teach it in biology classes. Because a fair number of them cause disease and cancer. Not all of them; not even most of them. But a lot of them do. Mutation is not lagrely beneficial. Mostly, it's neutral. When it isn't it's often harmful. But rarely, it's beneficial, and selection operates on those mutations, increasing the number of individuals in the gene pool that possess that mutation over time. A quick survey of my lab shows that all the scientists here where I am agree with her. You'll find that's true of the scientists who post here, too. And as well they should - tentativity of conclusion is a well-understood and important principle of the scientific method.

Where do you see these words being used?And did you have a reply to the rest of my post? You don't really seem to have touched on many of my points.

So, in other words, you abandon reasonable knowledge for unknowable, unreasonable speculation.John, when have the laws of physics ever been directly observed to change?

I'm sorry, could you try answering my question? When have the laws of physics ever been observed to change?

What do you mean when you say "fully formed"? How would an organism that was alive, and not dead, not be fully-formed? If you mean to say that the vast majority of organisms in the fossil record are "fully formed" in the sense that they are not juveniles or neonates, well, it's hardly surprising that we would find so many organisms die in their adult stage.In regards to the Cambrian - the organisms (some 1500 species that we know of, compared to the 15 million species we know of that are alive today) may be "fully formed", whatever that means, but they are also certainly primitive, and don't represent even a millionth-part of the development and diversity of species we observe today.

If that were true, it would matter. But that statement is, unforunately, a falsehood.