Renowned writer and Yale University professor David Gelernter has turned away from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, arguing that it has too many holes and has aged out as a probable scientific theory.
The professor also argued that intelligent design is a serious theory that cannot be shooed away by anti-religious sentiment. Furthermore, he lamented the lack of "free speech" concerning theories outside of Darwinism, which has become a "religion" to many academics spanning the various scientific fields.
As highlighted by Rachel Alexander at The Stream, Gelernter outlined his rejection of Darwinian thought in an essay published in the Claremont Review of Books, aptly titled, "Giving up Darwin."
"Darwin's theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life," the professor says in the paper. "Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly, like a bunch of geysers." He explains, "Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors."
Among many other reasons, Gelernter also points to the near impossibility of creating a functional stable protein. "Immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is so far a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million you fail. The odds bury you. It can't be done."
Though he doesn't personally subscribe to the theory of intelligent design, Gelernter said it is an "absolutely serious argument," noting that it is the "first, and obviously most intuitive [theory] that comes to mind," Alexander noted.
quote:David Hillel Gelernter (born March 5, 1955)[1] is an American artist, writer, and professor of computer science at Yale University. He is a former national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and senior fellow in Jewish thought at the Shalem Center, and sat on the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes widely; his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and elsewhere. His paintings have been exhibited in New Haven and Manhattan.
Computer science is not biology (he even says he is not a biologist in the video), and math cannot change reality.
There are a number of PRATTS (points refuted a thousand times) in the video, and the monitor, Peter Robinson, has no apparent knowledge of biology either. Other participants are David Berlinski and Steven Meyer, both of the Discovery Institute.
What upsets me is when IDologists make IDotic arguments.
Firsts the probability argument. They say it is a 1 in 1070 probability to assemble a protein molecule by molecule.
Let's cut that in half -- each half then has a 1 in 1035 probability to assemble by their argument. Now reassemble them: there is a 1 in 4 chance of making the "right" connection so that's:
(1 x 1035 + 1 x 1035) x 1/4 = 5 x 1034
repeat for each half segment and you get:
{(1 x 1017.5 + 1 x 1017.5) x 1/4} x 1/4 = 3.9528 x 1016
This is a significant reduction in the probability of actually assembling a protein, and quite obviously there are a large number of ways for molecules to assemble rather than one at a time, making the probability a meaningless argument.
Second Gelernter argues that it is impossible to make all the changes at the correct time during the development of a fetus to change a sheep into a horse ... in one generation. This is known as the hopeful monster concept and it is a strawman argument: evolution does not theorize speciation happening this way, and biologists would be quite surprised to see such an event. When arguing against evolution it behooves you to thoroughly understand evolution theory and processes, rather than use misinformation and misrepresentations.
Enjoy
Edited by Admin, : Remove spurious "^"
Edited by RAZD, : Note to admin: I add the "spurious ^" intentionally so that when the numbers are copied they don't look like 1035 or 1070.
I'm not going to waste an entire hour listening to ID BS, especially if it's as brain-dead stiupid as you describe it.
I don't care how "learned" Gelernter's name claims him to be (German: lernen, lernte, gelernt), as a computer scientist he should know better than others the old dictum, GIGO ("Garbage In, Garbage Out") *. The output of your program can only be as good as the program and the data inputs: if your program is fouled up or you input crap data, then the results will be fouled up and crap. Or to a mathematician modeling something in the real world, your calculations depend on your model, so if you build a slap-dash fouled up model, then your results will reflect that.
Building crap models and using them to throw a lot of big numbers at the audience is one of the oldest "creation science" tricks to confuse and deceive its audience, one which IDologists use fully -- it's easy to refute most YEC claims, but ID claims are more difficult because of all the obtuse pseudo-mathematics you have to wade through and counter (not to mention that your countering would also go over most people's heads).
I should give Gelernter a listen before addressing his claims, but it's not worth sitting through an hour of that crap (I've had to sit through Hovind videos to find a specific claim and I have no desire to undergo such torture again). Do you have the timemark for when he makes his claims so that I can respond to what he's actually saying? Barring that, I have to go with your descriptions.
For example, what does he mean by "to assemble a protein molecule by molecule"? Are we talking about DNA base pairs, triplets of which form codons which translate for amino acids? Or are we talking about amino acids which chain to form proteins? Are we talking about the original proteins or modern proteins, or does he not realize that there's any distinction?
Also, is he talking about only one single attempt to form a (¿modern?) protein in such a single-step selection manner (see Chapter 3 of The Blind Watchmaker)? Or is he allowing for a large number of parallel attempts such that the attempt would succeed if even just one individual attempt succeeds, meaning that the overall attempt would fail only if each and every individual attempt fails.
Refer to my page, MONKEY PROBABILITIES (MPROBS), where I analyzed the probabilities in MONKEY, my implementation of Dawkins' WEASEL program (again from Blind Watchmaker):
First, there is a huge difference between single-step selection and cumulative selection:
Single-step selection is where you make your attempt and, when you fail (which is most probable), then you start all over from scratch, over and over and over again. In my MONKEY, the task is to randomly generate the alphabet in alphabetical order; in Dawkins' WEASEL, the target is a specific line of Shakespeare. Single-step selection could be described as "all or nothing at all."
The probability of single-step selection succeeding is abysmally small. For MONKEY's task to succeed with a super-computer capable of one million attempts per second (modern PCs can only do about 2000 per second) would take about 195 trillion years to earn a one-in-a-million chance of success, more than 10,000 times longer than the universe's estimated age.
All creationist probability arguments that I have encountered all single-step selection. I'm sure that Gelernter's contribution does the same. His second "hopeful monster" argument confirms my suspicion.
Cumulative selection is a step-wise approach which accepts a small change in each step and uses the outcome of the previous step as the new starting point. Basically, you have a population of attempts and you select the one (as in MONKEY or WEASEL) or few (as in life) that come closest to the target and that/those serves as the starting point for the next generation. This does describe and model life far better than single-step selection.
Completely different from the abysmal failure of single-step selection, cumulative selection succeeds readily and quickly. When I read about WEASEL in The Blind Watchmaker, I couldn't believe it so I wrote my own, MONKEY, using Dawkin's description as the specification. WEASEL was written in BASIC, an interpreted language, so it ran so slowly that it took much of their lunch break to succeed. My MONKEY was written in Turbo Pascal, a compiled language, so it ran much faster (even on an XT clone with a Norton Factor of 2) and succeeded in much less than a minute (depending on population size, it normally took about 20 seconds -- on more recent PCs, it's almost instantaneous, which at first made me think that the program hadn't run).
Since I still couldn't believe what I was seeing even with my own program, I started analyzing the probabilities involved, doing the math, which resulted in my paper, MPROBS. Basically, each individual attempt would result in one of three outcomes: advancing (success), slipping back (failure), or no change (also counts as a failure). The probability of advancing is always low and it gets ever lower the closer the systems approaches the target. It turns out that the reason for MONKEY's success is that, while an individual's own success is unlikely, it becomes increasingly unlikely for every single individual in the entire population to all fail in each and every generation. Yes, we see the system backslide often, especially as we get to within a few steps of the target, but the probability of that continuing to happen becomes very small so MONKEY always succeeds in the end.
Creationists (including IDists) are ignurunt of cumulative selection and, even when they hear of it, cannot understand it nor its great power. I have no doubt that the "learned" Gelernter is no different.
Second, any mathematical models for evolution and evolutionary processes must use the correct selection model, which is cumulative selection. The moment that IDists start to use single-step selection, they have destroyed the validity of their model and their argument.
The reasons for this have already been presented above.
Another treatment of this is on my page, THE "RANDOM" PROTEINS ARGUMENT, in which I responded to a typical creationist probability claim about the chances of a modern protein just falling together randomly -- my impression is that this is what Gelernter is also trying to argue. Several problems with that:
That is simply not how it works. That is not how proteins form, so just what are they talking about?
There is no actual abiogenesis scenario, in which we expect any modern proteins to have formed at that time, but rather ancient barely functional proteinoids which later evolved into their modern forms. It's only creationists who think that's how it must work.
The argument demands one-and-only-one highly specific amino acid sequence for that protein. It doesn't work that way! First, the very existence of differences in amino acid sequences for the same protein in different species (included in some creationist arguments, so they do know about that and acknowledge it) kills that assumption immediately.
Second, it is a well-known fact that only some loci in a protein are specified for one specific protein. I review this on my page, which is a reprint of an email with a creationist (to which he did not reply, as I recall) plus some of my posts on CompuServe.
In the class notes for their classic two-model class at SDSU (closed down by strident protests from campus Christian clubs), Thwaites and Awbrey take the example of an active site on a protein and show the variety of amino acids that could occupy each locus:
quote:Rather than brandying about a hypothetical protein, let's look at a specific case. In the class notes of Frank Awbrey & William Thwaites' creation/evolution class at UCSD (the Institute for Creation Research conducted half the lectures and Awbrey & Thwaites the other half), they give the example of a calcium binding site with 29 amino acid positions: only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids.
The sequence of the 15 specified positions is: L* L*L* L*D D* D*G* I*D* EL* L*L* L*
Where: L* = hydrophobic - Leu, Val, Ilu, Phe, or Met Prob = (5/20)^8
D* = (a) Asp, Glu, Ser, or Asn Prob = (4/20)^3 OR (b) theoretically also Gls or Thr Prob = (6/20)^3
D = Asp Prob = (1/20)
E = Glu Prob = (1/20)
G* = Gly or Asp Prob = (2/20)
I* = Ilu or Val Prob = (2/20)
Remaining positions = any of 20 Prob = (20/20)^14 = 1^14 = 1
Total Prob = Prob(L*) * Prob(D*) * Prob(D) * Prob(E) * Prob(G*) * Prob(I*) = (a) 3.05 x 10^(-12) OR (b) 10.2 x 10^(-12)
Your own calculation of the probability of a functional order coming up (ie, the standard creation science method) would be: (1/20)^29 = 1.86 x 10^(-38).
Comparing the lower probability to yours shows it to be 1.64 x 10^26 times greater.
This invalidates your colored-box-car analogy as it stands (to correct it, you would need to allow for a variety of different combinations) and it invalidates your probability calculations.
In addition to such active sites, the rest of the protein is primarily structural, which to me means that any of the 20 protein-building amino acids would do. Of course, that would by far further kill creationist ideas of amino-acid specificity in proteins.
Did I misunderstand Gelernter's arguments? If so, then please give us the timemarks so I can get the straight skinny.
{FOOTNOTE *: We DSes (US Navy Data Systems Technicians, disestablished in the 1998) saw GIGO, "Garbage In, Garbage Out", as being depicted in our rating symbol:
The helium atom is used in the rating symbols for all electronics ratings (not technically correct, but far easier to embroider than a copper, silicon, or germanium atom). The three arrows pointing in represent inputs and the arrow pointing out represents output. This image is of a metal pin. When embroidered on a rate badge, the input arrows are solid and the output is just an outline (empty). We would interpret that to mean that the input arrows were the unprocessed "garbage in" and the output arrow was the processed "garbage out."
TRIVIA: The rating symbol for Electrician's mate is a globe of the earth. Here is why that is.
The creation of rating symbols happened around 1921. The Navy team went to each rating community and asked about equipment or tools or anything else that would symbolize what that rating did. At that time, many light bulbs were spherical and were called "globes" (as opposed to our current talk of an oniony shape, "bulb", or the German "Glhbirne", "glowing pear"). So when the team spoke with the Electrician's Mate the response was "a globe", which the team misinterpreted. By the time the mistake was discovered, it was too late to correct it. }
What upsets me is when IDologists make IDotic arguments. Firsts the probability argument. They say it is a 1 in 10^70 probability to assemble a protein molecule by molecule.
What upsets me is when anti-IDologists make strawman arguments.
The 1 in 10^70* probability has nothing to do with assembling a protein. It is not relating to any molecule by molecule assembly issue. Go read Gelernter's article. Even in his layman's terms, he explains what the probability is referring to quite well.
Gelernter argues that it is impossible to make all the changes at the correct time during the development of a fetus to change a sheep into a horse ... in one generation.
No, that is not what his argument was. He was just commenting on, again in fairly layman's terms, how early in the developmental cycle that any changes (mutations) would have to be done to express any major change in an organism, and invariably when we see those changes done they are fatal.
What upsets me is when anti-IDologists make strawman arguments.
Curiously, I am happy to be corrected, but you have not really done that yet.
Please supply your supporting material. Especially if you have it in print. I found the video a real snooze-fest of PRATTS and misinformation, so I may have mixed some of it up. Videos are not the best conveyors of information, and I prefer print versions.
The 1 in 10^70* probability has nothing to do with assembling a protein. It is not relating to any molecule by molecule assembly issue. Go read Gelernter's article. Even in his layman's terms, he explains what the probability is referring to quite well.
Curiously I searched through the video to the part in question, and I was slightly incorrect. Starting at 12:25 is they are talking about assembling a protein, not molecule by molecule but with 1 of 20 amino acids adding them one by one, and the number they give is 1 in 1 x 10^77 (not 1 in 1 x 10^70). Gelernter at 13:20+ talks of building a string of beads one by one adding an emerald, a ruby and an opal ... using the DNA code to make the protein. So now we in essence have the probability of assembling the DNA with that code, and still in the molecule by molecule calculation mode, given the context of the discussion.
So I believe the critique I made of the improbability calculation is still valid.
The 1 in 10^70* probability has nothing to do with assembling a protein.
Gelernter was citing Douglas Axe’s work
quote:"on how many 150-long nucleotide chains are capable of stable foldsof reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful." --Giving Up Darwin David Gelernter May 1, 2019
Axe put his bogus number machinations at 1077.
Of course Gelernter not being a strong mathematician and having seen Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt where Axe’s work was quoted just regurgitated Meyer’s treatment of Axe’s work. Gelernter was not aware, apparently, of the errors in Axe’s work, or, more likely, didn’t care any more then Meyer’s did.
Gelernter’s article celebrating his conversion to a cdesign proponentsists is a love note for Stephen Meyer’s rejected views. This grand display of creationism bringing an illustrious scientist, who was already predisposed toward religious supernaturalism, to their side is more of a desperate plea for attention than a celebration of an intellectual victory.
Shades of James Watson and Fred Hoyle going off the deep end late in their careers.
With regards to the probability argument, the primer to it starts under the heading "Mutations" where he talks about creating a protein from a modest-sized, 150 long amino acid chain.
Then the argument falls under the heading "Building a Better Protein" where he lays out the beginning mathematics:
quote:The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20^150. In other words, many. 20^150 roughly equals 10^195, and there are only 10^80 atoms in the universe.
What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? The estimate is 1 in 10^77 -----
Curiously I searched through the video to the part in question, and I was slightly incorrect. Starting at 12:25 is they are talking about assembling a protein, not molecule by molecule but with 1 of 20 amino acids adding them one by one, and the number they give is 1 in 1 x 10^77 (not 1 in 1 x 10^70).
Sorry, I'm kinda not buying it. Your search is proceeding in a weird fashion or you are just not paying attention.
Yes, at 12:25 Galernter starts talking about the "math" problem laid out in the code of DNA->Amino Acids->Protein process, but the 1 in 10^77 probability number doesn't come up until 17:17. Before that point, Galernter waxes poetic about the "number of ways you can arrange" his 'beads', but he doesn't mentioned any calculation yet.
Meyer takes over discussing the metaphor at 15:12. Peter Robinson (host) then asks the pertinent question at 15:38 -
quote:...in this huge, unimaginably vast universe of possible combinations, the number of combinations that would produce a useful protein is what?
To which Meyer responds:
quote:Exceedingly rare.
Meyer then goes on to expound on the numbers and finally at 17:17 lays out the probability: 1 in 10^77
Galernter then picks up again at 18:00 and ties it to his beads metaphor again.
TL : DR - just watch 12:02 - 19:22 of the video for the specifically relevant content or up to 22:20 if you want the full discussion on this topic. Can you stomach 10 minutes of it?
With regards to the probability argument, the primer to it starts under the heading "Mutations" where he talks about creating a protein from a modest-sized, 150 long amino acid chain.
Technically you should be providing quotes instead of just link references. I get tired of old PRATTs rehashed in emperor's new cloths, and misinformation.
Note this misinformation:
quote:Demolishing a Worldview
... Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picturenot the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones. The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.
The problem is that we have observed new species developed by the standard evolutionary model, so this statement is false.
And he goes religious ...
quote:... But this view assumes a childishly primitive reading of Scripture. Anyone can see that there are two different creation stories in Genesis, one based on seven days, the other on the Garden of Eden. When the Bible gives us two different versions of one story, it stands to reason that the facts on which they disagree are without basic religious significance. The facts on which they agree are the ones that matter: God created the universe, and put man there for a reason. Darwin has nothing to say on these or any other key religious issues.
More misinformation:
quote:... Darwin’s theory predicts that new life forms evolve gradually from old ones in a constantly branching, spreading tree of life. Those brave new Cambrian creatures must therefore have had Precambrian predecessors, similar but not quite as fancy and sophisticated. They could not have all blown out suddenly, like a bunch of geysers. Each must have had a closely related predecessor, which must have had its own predecessors: Darwinian evolution is gradual, step-by-step. ...
... but also that evolution would occur rapidly when there was a void in habitat that could be occupied; selection would be diminished and more varieties would survive and evolve. What that new habitat was, occurred when the ocean pH changed (due to oxygen being produced by algae iirc) and it became possible to make calcite shells. The Cambrian fossils are almost all shelled creatures, the pre-Cambrian fossils do not have shells. Having shells provides an obvious survival advantage, and those that had shells had an open habitat to inhabit: rapid evolution. Standard. Darwinian.
quote:But those predecessors of the Cambrian creatures are missing. Darwin himself was disturbed by their absence from the fossil record. ...
Except they are no longer missing and more are being found every year. Way to keep up with the times.
Getting to your referred section:
quote:Mutations
How to make proteins is our first question. Proteins are chains: linear sequences of atom-groups, each bonded to the next. A protein molecule is based on a chain of amino acids; 150 elements is a modest-sized chain; the average is 250. Each link is chosen, ordinarily, from one of 20 amino acids. A chain of amino acids is a polypeptidepeptide being the type of chemical bond that joins one amino acid to the next. But this chain is only the starting point: chemical forces among the links make parts of the chain twist themselves into helices; others straighten out, and then, sometimes, jackknife repeatedly, like a carpenter’s rule, into flat sheets. Then the whole assemblage folds itself up like a complex sheet of origami paper. And the actual 3-D shape of the resulting molecule is (as I have said) important.
Imagine a 150-element protein as a chain of 150 beads, each bead chosen from 20 varieties. But: only certain chains will work. Only certain bead combinations will form themselves into stable, useful, well-shaped proteins.
So how hard is it to build a useful, well-shaped protein? Can you throw a bunch of amino acids together and assume that you will get something good? Or must you choose each element of the chain with painstaking care? It happens to be very hard to choose the right beads.
Building a Better Protein
Now at last we are ready to take Darwin out for a test drive. Starting with 150 links of gibberish, what are the chances that we can mutate our way to a useful new shape of protein? We can ask basically the same question in a more manageable way: what are the chances that a random 150-link sequence will create such a protein? Nonsense sequences are essentially random. Mutations are random. Make random changes to a random sequence and you get another random sequence. So, close your eyes, make 150 random choices from your 20 bead boxes and string up your beads in the order in which you chose them. What are the odds that you will come up with a useful new protein?
One by one. As he further explicates on the video ...
quote:The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20^150. In other words, many. 20 roughly equals 10^195, and there are only 10^80 atoms in the universe.
What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable foldsof reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. ... He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10^74 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10^74 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10^77.
In other words: immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution isso fara dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a millionyou fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.
And of course the problem with this argument (from incredulity after fabricating immense numbers -- a typical creationist/IDologist ploy) is that biology doesn't operate this way; mutations occur in a number of ways of many different length segments from whole gene copying to single inserts.
The numbers prove nothing, and never will, because the model is wrong.
One example of how biology actually works is polyploidy which results in new species in one generation. Mostly found in plants, though it does occur in animals.
Other more standard examples of speciation are also known. It seems that nature has no problem contradicting the mathematical model ...
I always find it funny when these no experts posit some sort of grand take down of TOE and all it takes is one random person of an internet forum to totally blow their arguments out of the water. Great job, but people like WookieB and Galernter are way to full of themselves and their religious beliefs to even conced the possibility that they are wrong and have no idea what they are talking about.
It is also quite telling where this article was published. Claremont Review of Books is the journal of the Claremont Institute a very radical right wing propaganda outfit.
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?
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