The Truth About Evolution and Religion

If you mean 'can animals realize their desires within the constraints imposed by physics?' then then the answer is often yes, they can exert their 'will' to perform actions. If they want food, they can go hunt.If you mean something else by free will, you'll have to explain what it is.

I'm not sure there are any natural selection pressures for random strings to resemble Shakespearean sonnets. So it would have to be done through artifice. There are any number of ways of doing that, some will produce sonnets quicker than others so it is a bit daft to calculate it. One could create a "Methinks it is like a weasel" type program, which would probably do it very quickly. Or you could create some kind of method of comparing a string to any Shakespeare sonnet and evaluate it on some kind of measure of 'similarity' and then make copies of the ones that score highest etc. That might take a little longer. What an individual person thinks is 'obvious' doesn't mean a great deal though, does it? Some people thought it was obvious that improving sanitation in a hospital would have little to no impact on mortality figures. Fortunately Florence Nightingale begged to differ and she gathered evidence and used her mathematical training to generate reports that clearly demonstrated the efficacy of doing so.So, can you compete with a 19th Century nurse and show us that which is 'obvious'?Complexity is an almost certain result of evolutionary processes. Indeed - we'd be surprised if it didn't emerge!If you don't believe me, read this paper. They used evolutionary algorithms to design an oscillator that did not use capacitors. A number of interesting things resulted, but I think this quote sums it up:

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It has proved difficult to clarify exactly how these circuits work. Probing a typical one with an oscilloscope has shown that it does not use beat frequencies to achieve the target frequency. If the transistors are swapped for nominally identical ones, then the output frequency changes by as much as 30%. A simulation was created that incorporated all the
parasitic capacitance expected to exist within the physical circuit, but the simulated circuits failed to oscillate. The programmable switches almost certainly play an important role in the behaviour of the circuit and it is only possible to probe their input and output connections and not the circuitry in which they are embedded.

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In short: within a short period of time, an extremely complex piece of equipment was designed that could not be understood completely by the researchers performing the work!

We agree. I know, you said this before. I responded to it. That's correct. That is indeed what you were saying earlier. And I asked you some questions about that and responded in general to it. Would you care to address anything I said about this?

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it would have to be done through artifice. There are any number of ways of doing that, some will produce sonnets quicker than others so it is a bit daft to calculate it. One could create a "Methinks it is like a weasel" type program, which would probably do it very quickly. Or you could create some kind of method of comparing a string to any Shakespeare sonnet and evaluate it on some kind of measure of 'similarity' and then make copies of the ones that score highest etc. That might take a little longer.

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Yes, and you are basing that on what you think is 'obvious'. If you want to inform us about their opinions about the explanations for the complexity of life, you'll have to provide a quote that actually gives it. Not assume that because they didn't perform a calculation at a certain point in a book that therefore means they have certain beliefs about complexity and explanation.Nevertheless, their opinion isn't the main contention here since they are not debating. It's your opinion that counts. What has that got to do with complexity? So can I. But since it was nothing to do with anything that I said I fail to see what would be achieved in so doing. Only in that you repeated a bunch of points, didn't address my original responses to those points and then started talking about something else entirely. Perhaps one of us is deceived, maybe both. I addressed this point in my previous part. It was the bit about Florence Nightingale and how she demonstrated without question who was being deceived.

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What an individual person thinks is 'obvious' doesn't mean a great deal though, does it? Some people thought it was obvious that improving sanitation in a hospital would have little to no impact on mortality figures. Fortunately Florence Nightingale begged to differ and she gathered evidence and used her mathematical training to generate reports that clearly demonstrated the efficacy of doing so.

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So, can you compete with a 19th Century nurse and show us that which is 'obvious'?

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Complexity is an almost certain result of evolutionary processes. Indeed - we'd be surprised if it didn't emerge!

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If you don't believe me, read this paper.

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Maybe, after you've addressed the points I raised originally we could return to this hypothesis and test it.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.Edited by Modulous, : quoted some of things I said in the previous post - just in case that helps

I looked up the passage and it turns out what I said previously basically sums it up. Here is what they are saying in the Section "Novelty, Time and Random Mutation":First, they raise the criticism some put forward against evolution: There wasn't enough time. (paragraph 1)Then they say that with just chance, even with something as fast a computer it would take millions of years to randomly generate even a small phrase. (paragraph 2)Then they say this would be different if variants were undergoing selection (and they even describe a 'Methinks it is like a weasel' type example, just as I did!). (paragraph 3a)Then they say that another way of doing it would be by replacing complete chance variation with 'biased' variation. Their example is instead of randomly selecting letters, randomly selecting words would accelerate the process. (paragraph 3b)They go on to suggest that if we use biased variation AND selection the two effects would have a cumulative impact resulting in vary short times for solutions to be arrived at. (paragraph 3c)Then they say that skeptics don't think this process, even with the time allowed, can result in complexity. (paragraph 4)Finally they suggest that to get a complete picture, a better understanding regarding the mapping between genotype and phenotype is required (paragraph 5).This is all fairly standard fare when scientists introduce their hypothesis to the world. You start by defining the problem 'There isn't time', then you discuss some of the solutions already proposed to the problem. Then you point out where you think the present solutions aren't complete, you introduce your idea to change that state of affairs and then you go into more detail of your actual theory.Glad to be of service.

Would you like to consider my counterpoint that there is absolutely no reason for them to do what you have suggested in the book you were referencing.Would you also like to consider the counterpoint that the calculation is highly contingent on the precise method of selection chosen. You could create a program now and calculate the time it takes if you want. I suspect it wouldn't be very long if we choose strict selection mechanisms ala Methinks it is like a Weasel.But if we grant that in the section you refer, they are not trying to demonstrate that {whatever} explains complexity...what does that matter?It is their view that:

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Nor is it correct to say that the greater the complexity of the organism, the harder it is to explain its evolution. Just the opposite. The special nature of the complexity is at the heart of the capacity to generate variation

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If you actually have the book, why don't you look up where they talk about where complexity comes from (how it is explained)? That would seem to me to be a more relevant quote to find. (You might be surprised at what they say).

Hello Dr Roemer,
I've really attempted to engage with you on this topic, but you seem more keen on discussing it with other members, which is fine.I will make this final attempt to get to the bottom of what you are trying to say here, if you wish to continue exploring it with others instead that is perfectly fair and I will leave you alone to do that.So let's look at your video to see if that gives me any further insight into what you are trying to say:

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Free will is under 'Fundamental Theology' because it is not an observation.

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That strikes me as odd. I thought it was an observation. How are you defining observation here?

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We know we have free will because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge.

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This seems to me to be highly controversial. You seem to be suggesting that because we think we have free will we do, even if we don't know what free will is.I will point out that it is an observation that human beings report a sensation of being able to 'freely decide' between alternatives. I will also point out that subjective reports on internal states are evidence, but there is no reason to inherently trust them.Plenty of experiments in psychology have shown that what a person says they are experiencing when it comes to making a decision is quite different than what is going on. If you are hooked up correctly, a neuroscientist can predict when you are going to press a button before you yourself have had a conscious experience of 'willing' your finger to press the button.So I think relying on self-reports on this issue is doomed to catastrophic failure.I think taking a Heterophenomenological point of view is better in this arena: It is contrasted with the Cartesian phenomenology which takes a subjects reports as being authoritative. Using Heterophenomenology, we take those reports as being authoritative only in so far as understanding what it 'seems to be like' as far as the subject is concerned. You go on to discuss NOMA and suggest that evolution is only concerned with the change in phenotypes and not souls. I agree with this.Then you provide a quote from Hawking the context of which I do not know. In it he says, to paraphrase "as far as we are concerned we should disregard ideas of 'before the big bang' as not being addressable to science". And you conclude from that that this means there is no scientific explanation for what 'started' the big bang.This is clearly premature. Hawking was talking to a lay audience and seems to be saying that for the purposes of his discussion, we can simply ignore before the big bang. Hawking's most famous model is one where there is no abrupt start of time, but a gradual emergence of time - which if true, would render it potentially meaningless to talk about origins in that context.There are many physicists out there who would be perfectly content to tell you about scientific hypotheses for a pre-big bang universe. Laurence Krauss, in this video, gives one such model.And others have yet more.Then you go on some strange discussion about finite beings and infinite beings but you don't really give us the argument, just the conclusions.

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After billions of years, stars formed

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That doesn't seem to be the consensus scientific opinion, which suggests 30-200 million years. It's not really vital to the argument, just thought I'd throw that out there for you.Then you take a quote that says there is nothing certain about evolution of pre-bacterial life and concluded that Kirshner/Gerhart were saying that there is 'no scientific explanation for the origin of life'. That isn't what they were saying in that quote which wasn't actually about the origin of life. You do tend to go a bit mad interpreting little snippets of quotes, have you noticed that?Then you start making some more spurious timing claims. Chimpanzees appeared 8 million years ago? Are you not getting confused with the purported time that the human and chimpanzee common ancestor lived?

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The least complex organisms are bacteria and the most complex are homo sapiens

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I assume you've done the maths for this. Please show me, I'd like to see this very much!

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1)The birth of more individuals than the environment can support leads to a struggle for survival.
2) Individuals whose inherited characteristics fit them best to the environment are likely to leave more offspring than less fit individuals.
3) This unequal ability of individuals to survive and reproduce will lead to a gradual change in a population, with favorable characteristics accumulating over the generations.

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You say this is from Campbell and Reece. Which edition? The edition I am looking at says things a bit more precisely: And that's the 8th edition. And it stresses that this is the Darwinian view. It also gives a brief summary of Natural selection: Which you seem to disagree with.Then you quote Reece's probability discussion. Here is what the 8th edition says: For some reason, you neglected to include that bit at the end. I wonder why?Your conclusion is essentially you repeating three of the many assertions you made during the video.1. Evolution does not apply to souls: Agreed.
2. Darwinian evolution (or as Darwin called it - "Descent with Modification") only explains adaptation, not common descent. - Disagreed.
3. There is no scientific explanation for the origin of life or the big bang: Half disagreed - there is no explanation which has received sufficient evidential support to be regarded as being true beyond reasonable doubt for those things, but there are plenty of explanations which are scientific...

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Your video lacks any coherent structure, with no real point being made. Just a sequence of points dotted around the place. This seems consistent with the information on your website regarding the termination of your teaching position. If the video is remotely indicative of your alleged teaching style, I'm not surprised they terminated you for incompetence. I realize that was a cheapshot - I read through some of the documents and realize it's more complex than that. That said, with a small edit here and there, one comment in that stood out:

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It lacked a plan and a focus and a clear sense of direction. Posters questions were not answered. Posters left the thread still not sure of what your point was.

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That's basically my conclusion here, if I do not receive a response that is all I can leave this thread thinking. I'm bewildered as to your point. You start talking about Free Will, Theology, and infinite beings as if your position was obviously true and provide no background or argument about it. But before telling us why you mentioned all of that, you talk about cosmology and take a quote of Hawking's and go a little nuts with it. But without really explaining your point there you give us a brief history of the universe (with a few errors), make an assertion about relative complexity without backing it up, quote something about Darwinian evolution - say that someone wasn't trying to explain complexity before launching into a discussion about thermodynamics and some quote mining from Reece.But top marks for getting a professional voice artist to do the video - much more tolerable than listening to someone with a crappy mic breathing for ten minutes.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

David Roemer:New York UniversityPh. D. , Physics , 1964 1971Thesis title: Correction to the Fine-Structure of PositroniumHe started his BS in 1960.

Hello Dr Roemer,
You ignored most of what I said. I take that as a concession that you are an incompetent communicator, a dishonest quote miner, a bad faith debater and like a certain court once observed about you - stubborn.Well, since you think repeating yourself is advancing the discussion allow me to reply in kind.

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Free will is under 'Fundamental Theology' because it is not an observation.

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That strikes me as odd. I thought it was an observation. How are you defining observation here?

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We know we have free will because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge.

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This seems to me to be highly controversial. You seem to be suggesting that because we think we have free will we do, even if we don't know what free will is.I will point out that it is an observation that human beings report a sensation of being able to 'freely decide' between alternatives. I will also point out that subjective reports on internal states are evidence, but there is no reason to inherently trust them.Plenty of experiments in psychology have shown that what a person says they are experiencing when it comes to making a decision is quite different than what is going on. If you are hooked up correctly, a neuroscientist can predict when you are going to press a button before you yourself have had a conscious experience of 'willing' your finger to press the button.So I think relying on self-reports on this issue is doomed to catastrophic failure.I think taking a Heterophenomenological point of view is better in this arena: It is contrasted with the Cartesian phenomenology which takes a subjects reports as being authoritative. Using Heterophenomenology, we take those reports as being authoritative only in so far as understanding what it 'seems to be like' as far as the subject is concerned. You go on to discuss NOMA and suggest that evolution is only concerned with the change in phenotypes and not souls. I agree with this.Then you provide a quote from Hawking the context of which I do not know. In it he says, to paraphrase "as far as we are concerned we should disregard ideas of 'before the big bang' as not being addressable to science". And you conclude from that that this means there is no scientific explanation for what 'started' the big bang.This is clearly premature. Hawking was talking to a lay audience and seems to be saying that for the purposes of his discussion, we can simply ignore before the big bang. Hawking's most famous model is one where there is no abrupt start of time, but a gradual emergence of time - which if true, would render it potentially meaningless to talk about origins in that context.There are many physicists out there who would be perfectly content to tell you about scientific hypotheses for a pre-big bang universe. Laurence Krauss, in the previously embedded video, gives one such model. And others have yet more.Then you go on some strange discussion about finite beings and infinite beings but you don't really give us the argument, just the conclusions.

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After billions of years, stars formed

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That doesn't seem to be the consensus scientific opinion, which suggests 30-200 million years. It's not really vital to the argument, just thought I'd throw that out there for you.Then you take a quote that says there is nothing certain about evolution of pre-bacterial life and concluded that Kirshner/Gerhart were saying that there is 'no scientific explanation for the origin of life'. That isn't what they were saying in that quote which wasn't actually about the origin of life. You do tend to go a bit mad interpreting little snippets of quotes, have you noticed that?Then you start making some more spurious timing claims. Chimpanzees appeared 8 million years ago? Are you not getting confused with the purported time that the human and chimpanzee common ancestor lived?

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The least complex organisms are bacteria and the most complex are homo sapiens

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I assume you've done the maths for this. Please show me, I'd like to see this very much!

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1)The birth of more individuals than the environment can support leads to a struggle for survival.
2) Individuals whose inherited characteristics fit them best to the environment are likely to leave more offspring than less fit individuals.
3) This unequal ability of individuals to survive and reproduce will lead to a gradual change in a population, with favorable characteristics accumulating over the generations.

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You say this is from Campbell and Reece. Which edition? The edition I am looking at says things a bit more precisely: And that's the 8th edition. And it stresses that this is the Darwinian view. It also gives a brief summary of Natural selection: Which you seem to disagree with.Then you quote Reece's probability discussion. Here is what the 8th edition says: For some reason, you neglected to include that bit at the end. I wonder why?Your conclusion is essentially you repeating three of the many assertions you made during the video.1. Evolution does not apply to souls: Agreed.
2. Darwinian evolution (or as Darwin called it - "Descent with Modification") only explains adaptation, not common descent. - Disagreed.
3. There is no scientific explanation for the origin of life or the big bang: Half disagreed - there is no explanation which has received sufficient evidential support to be regarded as being true beyond reasonable doubt for those things, but there are plenty of explanations which are scientific...

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Your video lacks any coherent structure, with no real point being made. Just a sequence of points dotted around the place. This seems consistent with the information on your website regarding the termination of your teaching position. If the video is remotely indicative of your alleged teaching style, I'm not surprised they terminated you for incompetence. I realize that was a cheapshot - I read through some of the documents and realize it's more complex than that. That said, with a small edit here and there, one comment in that stood out:

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It lacked a plan and a focus and a clear sense of direction. Posters questions were not answered. Posters left the thread still not sure of what your point was.

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That's basically my conclusion here, if I do not receive a response that is all I can leave this thread thinking. I'm bewildered as to your point. You start talking about Free Will, Theology, and infinite beings as if your position was obviously true and provide no background or argument about it. But before telling us why you mentioned all of that, you talk about cosmology and take a quote of Hawking's and go a little nuts with it. But without really explaining your point there you give us a brief history of the universe (with a few errors), make an assertion about relative complexity without backing it up, quote something about Darwinian evolution - say that someone wasn't trying to explain complexity before launching into a discussion about thermodynamics and some quote mining from Reece.But top marks for getting a professional voice artist to do the video - much more tolerable than listening to someone with a crappy mic breathing for ten minutes.

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Since we have free will and conscious knowledge, we are unified with respect to ourselves and different from other beings. Hence, we are finite beings. But a finite being needs a cause. If all beings in the universe needed a cause the universe would not be intelligible. Hence, and infinite being exists.

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Allow me to agree that an uncaused cause exists, though I see no reason to conclude it is necessarily infinite.

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QED

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You didn't demonstrate anything, just repeated it. Repeating does not lead to clarification. I'm sure you are growing used to bewildered looks on people's faces - could you try to learn from that?

You've confused a single example of 'biased variation' using English Words with the 'facilitated variation' of biological phenotypes that they were talking about. You can just look it up, I think they wrote a book about it. I think you might have referenced it once or twice actually. Anyway, wikipedia should give you a brief rundown that'll give you as close to a layman's understanding as one can get.

I have no doubt you'll ignore me, but just in case there is some part of you that is still possesses the capacity for understanding I'll say it anyway.Could you tell me how much work life does?The second law tells us that we cannot take the workable energy from the sun, perform 100% efficient work with it to evolve a population, recapture the energy with 100% success and use it to perform work with which to evolve a population.Evolution does not claim to be an efficient process.So what's the problem here?I'll put it simply: Is it impossible for 2 x 10²³ Joules of energy to be applied to generate complexity? That's how much energy life has (conservatively) to work with...per year. No. It states that things will tend towards thermal equilibrium. It doesn't mention Bridge. Nor is Bridge a system that does work.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Unless work is done to sort them. You agree that work can be done to sort them, right? So given life receives as much energy as I indicated before, how is it impossible for work to be done in creating complex life forms?by the way: as you successfully demonstrated the second law of thermodynamics does not state that a perfect bridge game is impossible. You demonstrated that with an insufficient number of trials it is improbable. Likewise with sufficient trials it is highly probable. Whatever you mean by 'Darwinist' let us agree that should such an entity exist - they are wrong, as everybody has been agreeing over and over again in this thread all along. Trained biologists know that thermodynamics is not an impediment to biological evolution. This guy, for instance:

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Most evolutionary biologists cherish Darwin's theory of natural selection (NS) as the process of adaptive evolution more than 140 years after publication of his first book on the subject. However, in the past few decades the study of self-organization (SO) in complex dynamical systems has suggested that adaptation may occur through intrinsic reorganization without NS. In this study, we attempt to describe the logical framework that relates the general process of SO to the specific process of NS. We describe NS as a mechanism that coordinates the coevolution of species in an ecosystem to effectively capture, process and dissipate solar energy into the earth's shadow. Finally, we conclude that NS is an emergent process founded on the same thermodynamic imperatives that are thought to underlie all SO. This perspective suggests that the theory of self-organizing systems offers a broader physical context in which to understand the process of NS, rather than contesting it. It even suggests the possibility that there may be a physical basis for understanding the origin of the process of NS. Rather than being merely a fluke of nature, the origin of NS that may be driven by energy flows across gradients.

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the abstract from the paper, On the logical relationship between natural selection and self-organization.Or as he said in an interview:

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I see it as physics my own point of view is that chemistry is a subset of physics, and biology a subset of chemistry, so these scales of organization of matter are all aspects of self-organization and driven by physics. What are the drivers? From a thermodynamic perspective, if you have a dynamical system composed of lots parts, it seems to rather generically have this tendency to self-organization.
That builds higher levels of organizations, from (perhaps) strings to subatomic particles up to macromolecules, to biomolcules, cells, multicellular organisms, species, ecosystems and so on.

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Source.

So you agree that complexity and diversity is a certainty borne out of the same principles at play in thermodynamics and that therefore a spontaneous increase in complexity does not pose a problem for thermodynamics at all. I'm glad we're on the same page.So why are you bringing complexity and thermodynamics up? As far as I can tell, when he talks about 'organisation' he is talking about a concept akin to your 'complexity' which seems to imply some kind of specific arrangement of parts.Darwinism is 'descent with modification', not 'randomly juggled amino acids'. You can not find a single quote from a serious biologist that describes Darwinism as "The idea that evolution comes about because of chemicals jumping around chemically. Just like a deck of cards." You won't find any biologists that hold this strange view who aren't IDists, creationists or crazy in some fashion or another.(In the spirit that you meant it).Clearly, pure classic Darwinism is not a position that anybody I've ever come across who has spent a few hours reading about what Darwinism actually is and what neo-Darwinism is and whatever we want to call the present synthesis, 'The theory of evolution'. IF you are trying to show problems with Darwinism there are much better ways than trying to make some silly thermodynamic argument.But this topic is about evolution, surely? Am I right that you think that the increase in complexity is a normal and expected outcome for life? That an increase in complexity would constitute 'evolution'? You're only concern is that we can't explain that complexity merely referring to 'Darwinism', by which you mean 'randomly shuffling amino acids around'. But you are content that there are some biological/physics explanations for complexity out there, yes?I am hesitant to adopt the stance of attempting to seek agreement since you seem to respond more readily to hostility, but in for a penny, in for a pound.