Questions on "Random" Mutations

Could I first of all say that what follows is an answer to your post, but it'll take me a while to get round to the point. Sit down, take the weight off your feet, be patient. Let me tell you a story.There's a chap called Tom Ray who designed a programming language called TIERRA. He used this language to write a program which copied itself.A self-copying program undergoes reproduction which is one of the key elements of evolution. Another is mutation. Tom Ray built this in by specifying his programming language so that programs written in it would screw up occasionally, which simulates copying errors.The third important element of evolution is selection. He didn't have to do anything in particular to simulate that, because a computer only has a finite memory, so programs trying to copy themselves are de facto in competition for a finite resource.So he started off with one program which copied itself, with occasional copying errors and a selective pressure. The results exceeded his wildest dreams: the various "species" of programs which evolved from this one precursor showed behaviors analogous to predation, parasitism, and even sex. "Sex?", you ask. Yes: two programs co-operating to produce a third.Now, here's the point. (I told you there was a point, didn't I?)The point is that you can't imagine how this "digital sex" evolved. If you're thinking that maybe that's 'cos you don't know much about computer programs, let me tell you that I do, and that if anything that makes it even more baffling. I cannot imagine the specific pathways which led to the development of such a feature, within the confines of TIERRA. But I know for a fact that this happened.Of course, in the case of TIERRA we could find out how it happened by looking in close detail at what happens when the simulation is working. But with evolution in the real world, the nearest we get to this is the fossil record, and by and large this only tells us about the development of bones.Still, we can look at that. Consider, for example, the bones of the mammalian inner ear. This is about my favorite example of evolution, because it is the development of a complex (indeed, irreducibly complex) structure which we can see happening in the fossil record. We don't have to imagine the process, we can look at the bones.When we can check up on evolution in this way, it's clear how it happened and it makes perfect sense. When we can't see all the stages, then I agree that they are difficult to imagine, but that says more about our powers of imagination than it does about evolution. As the example of TIERRA shows, our difficulty in imagining something doesn't make it impossible or even improbable.I hope my comments on this thread have been helpful to you.

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There's a chap called Tom Ray who designed a programming language called TIERRA. He used this language to write a program which copied itself.

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But most programs do not copy themselves nowadays. Most of them have their "creator". Another example is evolution of programming languages. If another civilisation digged up in year 20.000 some big shop's computer network it wouldn't be correct making assumption that language Java running on servers evolved by RM/NS from some outdated host language like Fortran, Algol or PL/1. Even if both language have "If" and "End-if" clause it doesn't mean they have common ancestor or even creator. In fact both languages have independent origin.So extrapolating experience with TIERRA (let say civilization in year 20.000 use only this language) to history of "evolution" of programs and programming languages would be misleading.

	Reproduces	Mutates	Passes Traits via Heredity	Dies via
Programming Languages	No	No	No	Progressivly newer human innovation
Life Forms	Yes	Yes	Yes	Any number of natually occurring events

Edited by Jazzns, : No reason given.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

You probably didn't read the latest Dr.Ad's post. If true I don't see problem that in year 20.000 there will be self-programming and self-replicating artificial systems available. Anyway extrapolating their history from studying their most recent self-development could be misleading because of conclusion that there was no intelligent creator first and process arouse once "by chance".
Edited by MartinV, : No reason given.

You just don't get the point that comparing such to programming languages is ridiculous. Not only do they not act like life forms we KNOW they were created by humans.Life in no way mimics the "evolution" of technology. Except for the fact that in that case we can ask questions about who the designer is since we know exactly who they are. Something that ID is loathed to do.If you question deeply enough you will find that most intelligent people will agree that ID can possibly be scientific. It is just simply that in its current form it IS NOT science.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

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You just don't get the point that comparing such to programming languages is ridiculous. Not only do they not act like life forms we KNOW they were created by humans.

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My example is as ridiculous as Dawkins example of rowers in rowing-boats in Selfish gene. Or example of apes writing on typewriters Shakespeare's play.Programming languages are on my opinion very good example. Of course natural languages would be better example. French academy do not accept treteases on origin of languages since 19 century. No one can with certainity claims how human languages arouse and evolved. Anyway I didn't hear that words in Indo-European languages arouse by random mutation of words of Sanskrit. I mean the problem is little bit more complicated.

Except that Dawkins managed to construct the metaphor in such a way that the rower teams would reproduce and the rowers (and their position) were heritable traits. It was intended to show that genes can benefit through selfish cooperation, and it worked.You need to have replication and heritable traits in your example before it can have the same level of validity as this.

However, I was not talking about "most programs", but about one which does copy itself. Of course. In order to know whether a program is the result of a quasi-evolutionary process, or of design, we need to know whether it was in fact produced by design or by reproduction, variation, and selection. And so of course I have not done so, as you would know if you'd actually read my post instead of wittering on about the first thing that popped into your head when you noticed that I'd mentioned evolution and programming languages in the same post.The English language is not a Rorschach inkblot, it actually conveys specific ideas.

You are right, I have never read your posts very carefully. But somehow it happened that one of your sentences reminded me of the evolution of languages. It has nothing to do with your "specific ideas" in your post you know. Actually it has nothing to do with your post full of "specific ideas". Sorry.

First let us remind ourselves what Richard Dawkins said:

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...What will emerge as the overall best crew will be one of the two stable states--pure English or pure German, but not mixed. Superficially, it looks as though the coach is selecting whole language groups as units. This is not what he is doing. He is selecting individual oarsmen for their apparent ability to win races... Selection at the low level of the single gene can give the impression of selection at some higher level. The Selfish Gene, Oxford, 1989, p. 84-5.

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Obviously it is Richard Dawkins not me who forgot on replication and heritable traits. In the next generation "individual oarsman" will be in completely different team of oarsmen. It is hardly imaginable that other oarsmen have (are) only one allele. There are always many oarsmen (alleles). So each allele will be sitting in the next generation in almost completely different set of alleles (crew). Each individual (boat, crew) is unique genotyp. There are not the same genotypes - except true twins. There are always different phenotypes
(speed of the boat). Because of this the effect of each individual allele will be different in each generation and each genotype. The effect of an allele depends predominantly on the mix of other alleles. The influence of an allele sitting in unique set of other different alleles to the phenotype and its fitness is always different.There is no doubt some alleles are detrimental and will be removed by NS. But other alleles and genes influence each other and the outcome depends on their mix which is in each generation different. Obviously there is no Dawkins hypothetical relation between an individual allele and fitness of the phenotype.-----------------

For instance, roughly 85% of the genetic diversity among humans is found within populations...

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heterozygosity of autosomal microsatellites...

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humans 0,776.

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Taylor 31 wrote: Quite understandable - it can definitely be difficult to comprehend. I’ve seen a really nice movie of it, which you can see too on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, Episode #8 (which is on disk #5), titled "Travels in Space & Time", and goes from 48:50 to 54:25. Another (though not exactly identical) set of line art drawings for the flip-movie, also in Sagan’s Cosmos series, can be found on disk #2, episode #2, "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue", between 25:44 and 32:10. You can buy the set on amazon, and It’s well worth it - a huge amount of science (and wonder to go along with it), packed into and intriguing and historic series.How it works is amazing, yet simple when you think about it. To make more “information”, to go from a bacteria on up, even to a whale, just duplicate, mutate, and repeat.First, understand the basic types of mutations:Here are some basic types of mutations and how they work:
Duplication of a stretch of DNA. This is like accidentally copying part of a book twice. Example - when making a copy of a book that has chapters 1, 2, 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, 12, you end up with a book that has chapters 1, 2, 3,4,5,6,7, 3,4,5,6,7, 8,9,10,11, 12
Deletion of a base pair. AATCTGTC becomes ATCTGTC
Addition of base pair AATCTGTC becomes ACATCTGTC
Transposition (like a mirror) AATCTGTC becomes CTGTCTAA
Change of a base pair (perhaps the most common, it’s what is usually talked about) AATCTGTC becomes AATGTGTC
All of these can have no effect, an effect which is selected for, or an affect which is selected against.To add information, first, take a functional gene, and make an extra copy using the duplication mutation. That won’t hurt the organism, since the second copy is simply redundant. Then use any of the other mutation methods so as to make the second copy do something new (such as make the bacteria tend to cluster with others). The organism still has the original copy doing whatever it is supposed to do, but now has the added ability of whatever the new gene does (such as digesting nylon, as in a species of bacteria).
The process can also add entire chromosomes in Eukaryotes.Thus, “additional information” is easy, and in fact inevitable. The process can grow up from a single DNA strand up to the 46 whole chromosomes of a human, containing literally billions of base pairs.Another good resource to start with is this basic book on evolution: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Triumph-Idea-Carl-Zimmerand the Sagan series: http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan-DVD-SetHave a fun day--EquinoxEdited by Equinox, : typo (I said that humans have 4 whole chromosomes!) : DEdited by AdminAsgara, : geez I wish ppl would learn how to shorten long urls....

You quoted the conclusion not the setup - did you think I wouldn't notice or something. The set up is as follows:

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Suppose it is important in a really successful crew that the rowers should coordinate their activities by means of speech. Suppose further that, in the pool of oarsmen at the coach's disposal, some speak only English and some speak only German. The English are not consistently better or worse rowers than the Germans. But because of the importance of communication, a mixed crew will tend to win fewer races than either a pure English crew or a pure German crew.

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The coach does not realize this. All he does is shuffle his men around, giving credit points to individuals in winning boats, marking down individuals in losing boats...What will emerge as the overall best crew will be one of the two stable states--pure English or pure German, but not mixed. Superficially, it looks as though the coach is selecting whole language groups as units. This is not what he is doing. He is selecting individual oarsmen for their apparent ability to win races... Selection at the low level of the single gene can give the impression of selection at some higher level.

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So do we have replication? Yes. The 'genes' replicate in that the rowers are moved on into the next generation of boats. They are also shuffled (genetic recombination). The boats inherit the genes from the last race. The coach selects consistently winning individuals to be 'passed on' (he is natural selection in this analogy) and consistently losing individuals to not be passed on. By doing this he can construct a solid team without ever knowing that he is selecting based on language. Yes - the shuffling of genes is more extreme than in nature, but the analogy is to show how the genes are being selected for their ability to work well with the other genes in the pool to produce a good team on average. At first - but since the coach is selecting his team some alleles will be on less teams and some will be on more teams as time goes on. Gene frequency, in the sense conveyed in the analogy, is shifting. Precisely! So an allele needs to be on a consistently winning team. If there are 10 English men and 4 Germans in the pool, the Germans will often be on teams with English men and so will often lose and get marked down, making them less likely to be picked for other teams in the future. Dawkins puts forward the view point that genes that work together well to build better 'boats' or phenotypes will be selected for and increase in frequency.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

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So do we have replication? Yes. The 'genes' replicate in that the rowers are moved on into the next generation of boats. They are also shuffled (genetic recombination). The boats inherit the genes from the last race. The coach selects consistently winning individuals to be 'passed on' (he is natural selection in this analogy) and consistently losing individuals to not be passed on. By doing this he can construct a solid team without ever knowing that he is selecting based on language.

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I don't see a point. Let say we have at the beginning 1.000 Englismen and 500 German. If individuals are not passed on the number of individuals would decrease each race. After some rounds we would have 50 sportsmen, Englismen and German separated to their own boats. We would have homozygous groups - all German or all English. Any mix would be detrimental. It is something we do not observe in the Nature - heterozygosity is great as my previous post mentioned: 0,77 in humans.

Don't worry about the boats dude. The problem is simply that you CANNOT have a valid analogy to evolution if you do not include parts that are equivalently analogous to reproduction, modification, and heredity.If you cannot point to those items in your analogy, then your anaology is false. I don't care who is making it Dawkins or otherwise.The reason we can claim that programming languages are from Intelligent Design is because we know that we designed them. There need not be any "design" principles invoked at all. It is a simple observation.We have no such luxury for nature.

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Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)

Yes, the point is that any mix would be detrimental. It was a quick example to show how ESSs concept allows us to see how a compatible combination of genes can appear to be selected for as a unit. If you had read the book you'd know that this is a simple example and real life examples drawing on the simple principles developed in the analogies are produced. His conclusion was that "well-integrated bodies exist because they are the product of an evolutionarily stable set of selfish genes". It is a furtherance of the idea he was building up to in the previous chapter and that he touched on his butterfly example in the earlier Chapter 3 (p31-32).Either way - the example meets the requirements whereas your concept of programming languages doesn't.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.