The Sex Life of 747 Aircraft

Right, they reproduce asexually! One of the most puzzling things about the "tornado in a junkyard" analogy is that it was first offered by Fred Hoyle, who more than knew better a thousand times over. What was he thinking? Bothers me every time I think about it.The proper analogy to evolution would be tornados that tear through thousands of junkyards, and then those resulting scrap heaps which most resemble a 747, no matter how incipiently, are kept and placed in new junkyards for tornados to tear through. This process is repeated thousands of times. You still wouldn't end up with an actual 747, seems wildly unlikely especially since a tornado is totally unlike natural selection, but it's a better analogy.--Percy

It's a little hard to tell, but it's my guess that you and Dwise1 are in agreement. Dwise1 is pointing out the Hoyle's "guess" that the first life developed suddenly and spontaneously is not an idea given any chance of being correct by evolutionary biologists, not today and not at the time Hoyle was writing.You're not disagreeing with Dwise1, just saying something a little different, that we know so little about any of the hypothesized processes that might have led to life that calculating probabilities would be a meaningless exercise.Just trying to figure out if there's really a disagreement...--Percy

Well, whatever Grizz believes, we agree you're telling him the right thing. The 747 analogy is meant not to explain scientific views of the origin of life but to ridicule it. If evolution actually believed in a sudden origin of life then it would be rightful ridicule, but evolution doesn't believe that. The analogy is intended only for those who don't know what possibilities science is currently considering for life's origins. Anyone who thinks that a sudden origin a la Hoyle might one day become a viable possibility is very uninformed.Hoyle didn't go through his probability calculations in order to show that scientists are wrong. He went through them to make people think that origins scientists believed ridiculously wrong things. I have no idea why Hoyle did this - my own theory is that he had a mental illness through the last 20-30 years of his life.Hoyle had earlier tried something similar with the then new theory of cosmological origins by giving it the derisive label "Big Bang". However, just as the Big Bang was not an explosion but growth and expansion, the origin of life was not sudden but gradual over many millions of years. I agree that there are large components of dishonesty in both the 747 analogy and the probability calculations.--Percy

Sounds promising, but I think you might be confusing science with materialism and/or naturalism, because you go on to say: Materialism is the philosophy that everything can be explained in terms of physical phenomena. Unlike materialism, science doesn't rule out the non-physical, it's just that the non-physical is not the focus of science. Science doesn't say that the extra-natural or the supernatural doesn't exist, only that it isn't something that science can study. Science is the study of phenomena that manifest themselves in the real world. Matter and energy following the physical laws of nature is not an accident. Evolution explains how these physical laws bring about the changing array of life over the course of time. The lengthy process of trial, error, design, analysis, experiment and refinement that brought about the 747 is somewhat analogous to the lengthy process of descent with modification and natural selection, but that's as far as it goes. An analogy is just a useful explanatory tool, not evidence. Snowflakes look intelligently designed, too, but that's not evidence that they are.If analogies were actually evidence of anything, then the argument that an atom is like a miniature solar system would carry some weight, but actual evidence and analysis tells us that electrons can't orbit the nucleus because the revolving electrons would give off energy (that's what moving charges do), and their diminishing energy would quickly cause them to spiral into the nucleus.So of course an atom isn't like a miniature solar system, and that's because an analogy is not evidence. Like almost all analogies the analog is not the actual thing, and so the claim that the analog and the actual thing are similar in ways beyond the analogy is almost always false. "My love is like a red, red rose," is a beautiful metaphor, but your love does not have thorns or petals, and you wouldn't interpret this analogy as evidence that your love does have thorns and petals.In the same way, many people feel the same sense of wonder at the design of both living organisms and 747's, but that doesn't constitute evidence that life had an intelligent designer.In other words, analogies and metaphors aren't evidence of anything. The evidence we do have says that the same physical laws that govern our universe today have governed it for billions of years, and none of that evidence points to an intelligence. All the evidence we have shows that everything we observe happening or that we gather evidence of having happened obeys the same physical laws throughout all time throughout the universe. If there's an intelligence guiding the process, its actions are indistinguishable from the results of physical laws.--Percy

If you're doing science, you don't draw conclusions about things you don't know. You create hypotheses for which you then devise experiments and/or observations to test them.And you're not even drawing conclusions about things we don't know. You're using the 747 metaphor to draw conclusions opposite to what we already do know. You're letting metaphor trump evidence. In fact, if you recall your message that I originally replied to, you claimed that the metaphor trumps materialism, quite a feat for a poetic device.--Percy

If you view a picture of human and aircraft evolution together, the progression of change has a somewhat similar feel: But that's all it is, a similarity, and a small one at that. The differences overwhelm this tiny similarity. Aircraft are built, not born. They are constructed, they do not grow. They are designed, they do not reproduce. The blueprint for the entire design is not contained within every module. They are inorganic, not organic. There is no such thing as a breeding program for aircraft. They have no capacity for sending favorable characteristics on to the next generation.The fact that is it common to use the same word evolution for changing design and changing life forms is an accident of nomenclature. They use two different definitions of the same word. To interpret this accident as some kind of evidence that design evolution is at heart the same thing as biological evolution is a significant mistake. These are empty rhetorical arguments just one rung above, "That's evolution with an 'e' and that rhymes with 'c' and that stands for creation." Your rhetorical argument is without substance because it rests upon games with words rather than upon evidence. You mean "why" in the sense of, "What caused this particular mutation?" Or "why" in the sense of, "Why are we here?" If the former then scientists know quite a bit of the "why". If the latter then that's the realm of religion, isn't it. And if you do draw such conclusions, then you'll be doing so without supporting evidence and your conclusions won't possess any scientific validity. Nosy covered this already, so I'll just say that I concur with him. Evolution is a theory based upon mountains of experimental and observational data, so this isn't faith. The process we believe created all the species present today on our planet has been observed countless times in the here and now, and projected back in time it not only accounts for the record of life's history we find in the ground, but also the degrees of genetic relatedness we find amongst life today. This is not faith but well established theory.On the other hand, no evidence for a cause of species diversity outside the realm of the natural world has ever been found, and to attribute the progression of life to the actions of a never-observed intelligence is based upon faith, just as you say.--Percy

Yes, of course, but panspermia just pushes the problem of life's origins off to another place and time. Had Hoyle been thinking rationally he would have addressed the question of why he felt conditions on earth were insufficient for the origin of life, and why they would be more conducive elsewhere. The reality is that he wasn't thinking rationally, and he had little evidence for his own ideas other than that he liked them better.Hoyle's preference for panspermia probably sprang from becoming over-enamored of his work on stellar evolution. He was the guy who figured out how elements are cooked in the cores of stars, and that nova and supernova create even heavier elements that are dispersed into space to become the dust from which the next generation of stars form. The scattering of elements throughout space is what probably made panspermia so appealing to him, but unlike his work with elements whose origins he had deciphered, Hoyle had no evidence for a non-Earth origin of life.Complex organic molecules routinely turn up in meteorites, and most scientists accept that this rain of organic material from space could have played a role in life's origins. But the wide range of conditions present on the early Earth makes it very difficult to exclude it as a possible site for the origin life.So if Hoyle truly believed that it was ridiculous to think that life could have originated on earth, then he was equally ridiculous in believing it could have originated anywhere else. And if he had ever gone to the trouble of calculating how life might have originated at his preferred setting elsewhere in the universe, you can bet your bippie he wouldn't have assumed the first cell came together all at once.Given this, and given Hoyle's history of casting ridicule at ideas he didn't like, the conclusion is inescapable that he advanced his 747 analogy and his probability calculations not out of a desire to make genuine scientific contributions, but simply to cast ridicule. This is why I find Hoyle such a puzzle. At one point in his life he was considered a shoe-in for a Nobel, but soon after WW-II he sank into a pseudoscientific morass from which he never escaped. He became widely disliked and there were attempts to shunt him aside from many of his longstanding involvements.It wasn't so much because of his weird beliefs. It was more because he was so much in the habit of energetically promoting ideas that had little to no evidential support. For example, at one point he was making claims that archaeopteryx fossils were fake. Like Johnny Cochran in a court room, he would bring up one irrelevant fact after another to exhaust the opposition in a whirlwind of detail. The irony is that Hoyle the great promoter of science (his radio science lectures are considered classics) did so much to provide some of the most effective ammunition for creationism the great enemy of science, at least in the public arena where science is terra incognito.--Percy

I can see the problem now. You're injecting a religious question into a science thread. You later say you have no problem with the implications of the scientific evidence, so if you would like to tackle evolution on religious grounds then there are other threads for that.--Percy

The 747 analogy isn't a "Why are we here?" argument, and it isn't a religious argument. Remember, the analogy was formulated by Hoyle, whose motivation was scientific, not religious.Today the 747 analogy is used to argue for the intelligent design perspective. By placing the possibility of a natural origin for life into a ridiculous light it promotes the conclusion that life could only result from an intelligence. The analogy falsely represents scientific ideas about origins, but even worse, ID theory explicitly states that it is impossible to know anything about how the designer acted or about the designer himself, including his motivation. Clearly ID doesn't address the "why" question.ID places these limits upon itself for good reason, because it wants to limit its exposure to the possibility of being detected as religion. But placing self-imposed limits on what can be scientifically investigated is inherently unscientific, and ID is obviously religion anyway. It's not like an idea promoted almost solely for fundamentalist Christians can hide its origins. You may as well argue that the Pope's not Catholic.Ironically, almost every IDist who comes to this board seems completely unaware that ID replaced Creation Science in order to not be so obviously religious in order to appear more like legitimate science, and they seem blissfully unaware that once they begin introducing God and Bible into the discussion that they've already abandoned their contention that ID is really science.--Percy

Yeah, it is amazing, but not at all mysterious if you understand the physical principles that make this possible.Look at it this way. Say you took a multiple choice test written in Swahili and received a score between 0 and 100. The score doesn't say which questions were right or wrong, it's just a total score. Assuming you don't understand Swahili and that there are five answers to choose from for each question, your score will probably be around 20%.But you're allowed to take the test again! And again and again and again! And you're given the results of each test. And when you get a higher score you'll use that test result as a model to try variations upon to get your grade even higher.What's most amazing about this is you're increasing your grade on a test in Swahili without understanding a word of Swahili. And as you try variations around tests with good scores, you really have no idea which variation is going to prove to be the one that increases your grade. And when you finally raise your score to 100, while you'll know that all your answers are correct, you still won't have any idea what the questions or answers were.Nature works the same way. It doesn't have any understanding of what's needed, it doesn't have any idea what the effect of any change might be, it just goes about trial-and-erroring its way through solutions, keeping those that work better than prior solutions, just as you did with the tests.Just as tiny changes to your answers caused tiny changes in your score up or down, tiny changes in organisms cause tiny changes in adaptation up or down. Just as you built upon good test results to achieve better test results, organisms build upon good changes to achieve even better changes.But this doesn't work through any conscious means. It's just that organisms with not so good changes don't get to produce as many offspring, or they may not get to produce any offspring at all. In other words, in nature bad answers don't get to have as many or even any children.It's the same as what you did when you got back a test result that was worse than the one before - you crumpled it up and threw it away. Of course, in reality you'd do better to keep bad test results around for reference, because together with all the other tests you've taken so far they provide information helpful to determining how you should change your answers on the next test, but the analogy doesn't work as well if that's part of your process since nature doesn't have any recollection about past failed trials. Nature could easily try a mutation that had already been tried in the past and that failed miserably, while you would never return to an answer that you had already determined through trial and error was wrong.When you modify your choices from one test to the next, this is analogous to the introduction of mutations. If you're changing answers on tests with low scores, then the odds of increasing your score on some of them isn't too bad. When most of the answers are wrong, then changing some of the answers is more likely to help than hurt. And if you're changing answers on tests with high scores, then the odds of increasing your score on some of them isn't so good. For example, if you change an answer on a test that already had a score of 100, you can only go down.In the natural world, creatures have no control over the mutations that pop up. It's as if God said, "Hey, organism, here's a mutation for you to try out, best of luck! Oops, that mutation made you run slow and now you've become food for some predator. Sorry about that, you just lost the evolutionary lottery. Oh well, maybe one of your siblings got a better mutation."--Percy