TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

as both percy and the good doctor pointed out to you, you've totally misunderstood what the weasel program is and what it is showing.the point is to demonstrate that to get from one arbitrary random source to a defined arbitrary result through random mutation and selection is not only possible but ridiculously easy, when you do away with foolish ideas about total randomness.The idea is to prove - through a TOY PROGRAM (i.e. it is not intended to prove anything other than the simplest of mathematical premises) - that you can get to here from there.If you want to get from one random meaningless string to another random meaningless string with this toy program, go ahead, nothing is stopping you.The point isn't that you can't read the start text and can read the end text, the point is that large changes are not only possible but easy, as opposed to the viewpoint that you couldn't get to "METHINKS IT IS A WEASEL" within the age of the universe by blind random chance alone.Unlike the "definitive proof that evolution is a lie" program from the desks of the antievolution lobby (mendels accountant), it doesn't claim to prove anything other than what it displays. If you think it proves nothing, you're welcome to your opinion. I have a different one and I am prepared to say why I think that.

N - A - T - U - R - A - LS - E - L - E - C - T - I - O - N .Duh.Do they not sell biology textbooks on your planet?---Look, this thread is called "TOE and the reasons for doubt". So let us discuss that. It was not called "Complete drooling halfwitted ignorance of the TOE and the reasons for doubt". If you are so swinishly ignorant that you have no idea what the theory of evolution says, then I should advise you to buy a high-school level textbook on biology and read it. Also, you might want to consider not posting again on this forum until you have done so.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Note - This type of message IS NOT admin approved.

...plays a very minor role in molecular evolution, as empirically demonstrated by Motoo Kimura. Far more important is genetic drift, ensuring "survival of the luckiest" (Kimura's words).

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

Dawkins was trying to illustrate that what might be impossible by random mutation alone becomes possible when you apply the principle of natural selection.To do this he had to use a TARGET which was "METHINKS IT IS A WEASEL" and the fact that evolution cannot have a TARGET is the little hidey-hole you bolted down in order to evade the impossibility of evolving a gene. Evolution is random, remember? It isn't trying to build anything. It can't have a TARGET.Unless you are Richard Dawkins, of course.The only difference between Dawkins programme and my example is that one came from an evolutionist, one from a Creationist. Ergo, it is a matter of faith and doctrine for an atheist that you support the former and condemn the latter. Edited by Kaichos Man, : No reason given.Edited by Kaichos Man, : No reason given.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

Hi, Kaichos Man. ...but plays a major role in the evolution of populations of organisms.Do you not understand that deleterious mutations have negative impacts on the organisms that have them?Do you not understand that "negative impacts" means survival and/or fecundity decrease?Do you not understand that a dead organism cannot pass on the deleterious mutations that killed it to its progeny, because it's dead!?Think on this for awhile.Edited by Bluejay, : ellipsis (...) marks

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Since you haven't read Kimura, and I have, your attempts to misrepresent his ideas are doomed to ridiculous failure.Welcome to creationism.

When you wrote that, I'm sure that in your head it meant something other then "WAHHHH!!! I'm frightened of evolution!!! I'll pretend that all the people convinced by the overwhelming evidence are atheists!!! WAHHHH!!!"However, the meaning you had extraneous to that pointless pretense has not quite come over. Clearly you wish to be wrong about something. But what?You wanted to misunderstand Dawkins somehow. His point is so simple that a small child could understand it. So it's going to take all your effort to misunderstand it.Now, on the count of three, take a deep breath and try harder to be wrong.1 ... 2 ... 3 ...Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hi Kaichos Man,I don't know if you saw my Message 418, but if you have then I'm at a loss to understand why you're carrying on in the same vein. Dawkins wasn't trying to model biological evolution, so you can't criticize the program for not being a model of biological evolution when it was never intended to be. Dawkins didn't claim it was a model of biological evolution, so you can't criticize Dawkins for making a claim he didn't make.Dawkins was drawing upon something familiar, the tale about how given enough time a monkey banging away at a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare, to help him explain something unfamiliar, how successive selection can greatly accelerate the process of obtaining a desired result.The desired result of Dawkins weasel program is the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel". No one in their right mind thinks the goal of evolution is the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel", least of all Dawkins. The program is an illustration of how successive selection greatly accelerates the process of arriving at a desired result by building upon random change.If I counted correctly, the phrase has 28 letters and spaces. If our monkey were to type 28 letters and spaces randomly for line after line after line, the odds of any given line having the correct phrase would be one in 27²⁸, which happens to be: Rather short odds by anyone's standards.Dawkins program illustrates that if instead the monkey keeps each correct letter of the previous line and only enters a random letter for those that are incorrect, in other words discarding the wrong letters and keeping the correct ones, that the monkey can produce the correct phrase in much, much less time, probably around 30 lines.Dawkins program of keeping correct letters and discarding incorrect letters is an illustration of the evolutionary principle of keeping good mutations and discarding bad ones.About software models of biological evolution, scores of them exist, probably hundreds and hundreds if you count undergraduate and graduate projects, and a number of them are in the public domain. Good ones are huge programs with thousands and thousands of lines of code, which is far, far more complex than Dawkins simple weasel program.The bigger puzzle is why this has to be explained over and over again to you. I share Dr Adequate's suspicion that you're working very hard to find deception where none exists, and to misunderstand something very simple.--Percy

There are a lot of differences between the two. Close, but no cigar. Dawkins was explaining how cumulative selection can change an improbable event into a probable even inevitable event. There is no predefined target - but there are many many outcomes which are possible by the laws of chemistry, some of which lead to increased reproductive success. Meaning there are many possible 'targets', which are difficult for humans to work out in advance and are certainly not considered by natural processes.Evolution isn't random - remember! It is not directed by an intelligence - but it is directed by contingency and environment.

Before you go too far with that, remember that Dawkin's original program didn't do "locking" (i.e. it didn't specifically keep correct letters from being incorrect again) - it was even more random than that.It simply found which offspring of any particular random sequence was "more correct" - in studying the original output still preserved (and by running the darn program) you can see for yourself that correct letters do become incorrect and fluctuate as the process continues.Still, it is vastly quicker than the random-monkey-bashing odds.

I have no doubt that you've read it. But you obviously didn't understand it:"The Neutral theory asserts that the great majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level, as revealed by comparative studies of Protein and DNA sequences, are caused not by Darwinian selection but by random drift of selectively neutral or nearly neutral mutants."Motoo Kimura, The Neutral Theory of Evolution

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

Obviously one of us doesn't understand it, and since the quote you have just given does not support what you claimed his point was ("genomes being inexorably strafed into nonsense by mutations", forsooth!) obviously it is you.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I feel very, very dubious about this answer, Percey. If you can say "the principle of successive selection is best illustrated with a single specific target", why can't I say "the problem of specificity from randomness is best illustrated with a single specific target"?Would my example have been valid had I used letters and a target phrase, rather than theoretical mutations and a theoretical gene sequence?I appreciate that my example was designed to more closely approximate biological evolution than that of Dawkins. But I don't agree -particularly if we are calculating the probability of a past event- that it is invalid to use a target. The fruitfly got his antenna. The gene does exist. There is a calculable probability to that. It remains unaffected by the idea that the fruitfly may have got something else.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

The fact remains that Kimura showed from observed data that natural selection plays only a minor role in molecular evolution.Edited by Kaichos Man, : No reason given.

Exactly. Whereas my example was designed to prove that you can't get from here to there. But when I put it forward, everyone shouts: "you're not allowed to have a "there!"As I said to Percy, perhaps the trick is to reconstruct the example using letters and a target phrase.

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"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin