Creationism, Intelligent Design, Evolution or .... what?

[seattlegal]

Among lifeforms that can reproduce both sexually and asexually, asexual reproduction is employed when the environment is favorable, whereas when there is environment stress, sexual reproduction is employed as a means to 'mix up' the DNA. (In the same manner as cyberpi's not learning/learning point.)
The world of bacteria is quite strange, indeed. Check this out:

Sympathy for the life of bacteria

If you were bacteria:

• You have 0.001 times as much DNA as a eukaryotic cell.
  
• You live in a medium which has a viscosity about equal to asphalt.
  
• You have a wonderful "motor" for swimming. Unfortunately, your motor can only run in two directions and at one speed. In forward, you are propelled in one direction at 30 mph. In reverse your motor makes you turn flips or tumble. You can only do one or the other. You cannot stop.
  
• While you can "learn", you divide every twenty minutes and have to restart your education.
  
• You can have sex, with males possessing a sexual apparatus for transferring genetic information to receptive females. However, since you are both going 30 mph it is difficult to find each other. Furthermore, if you are male, nature gave you a severe problem. Every time you mate with a female, she turns into a male. In bacteria, "maleness" is an infective venereal disease.
  
• Also, at fairly high frequencies, spontaneous mutations cause you to turn into a female.
  
• Eukaryotes have enslaved some of your "brethren" to use as energy generating mitochondria and chloroplasts. They are also using you as a tool in a massive effort to understand genetics. The method of recombinant DNA is designed to exploit you for their own good. There is no SPCA to protect you.
  
• The last laugh may be yours. You have spent three and a half billion years practicing chemical warfare. Humans thought that antibiotics would end infectious diseases, but the overuse of drugs has resulted in the selection of drug resistant bacteria. They didn't realize that this was only the first battle, and now the war is ready to begin.
  
• Humans think this is their era. A more truthful statement would be that we all live in the age of bacteria.

-source-

[wil]

Originally Posted by seattlegal

In forward, you are propelled in one direction at 30 mph. In reverse your motor makes you turn flips or tumble. You can only do one or the other. You cannot stop.... However, since you are both going 30 mph it is difficult to find each other.

30 mph?? Must look like a Nascar track in a puddle, or my stomach. 30 mph??

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by cyberpi

As an engineer I can see that evolution is a fact... it is a tool. I see that it can easily be demonstrated on a computer and can also be demonstrated with bacteria and viruses. Bacteria and viruses can build up an immunity to drugs due to their rapid growth rate under different circumstances. The math behind it is simple... you must roll the dice.

For example, those that roll the right number reproduce, those that roll the wrong number don't. Eventually if there is a mechanism to control the dice roll, then that trait will be selected. The trait is selected by the environment that kills off those who roll the wrong number, and enables those who roll the right number. Inside a computer there are a number of algorithms to generate a pseudo-random number, which is essentially an algorithm that produces entropy that is non-correlated with anything. Even better are electronic circuits that produce white noise by passing a current through a resistor, similar to dropping balls down a beg board to produce a random path, and then that random noise can be digitally sampled and used within an algorithm wherein the numbers are thus entirely uncorrelated. There is no evolution without a source of uncorrelated entropy.

For example: our children. How many consecutive kids come out looking exactly the same? Why is that each kid out of the same two parents has a different genetic code? The machinery of the cells are powerful in producing copy after copy of exactly the same code. Identical twins prove that. But somewhere each sperm or each egg or each combination thereof is somehow different every time. Imagine a person wherein every cell had an entirely different code... it is only the case with the sperm and the egg. Somewhere there is a source of entropy causing different outcomes. There is a selection that is always... different. Evolution can not occur without that entropy.

What is entropy? In science and engineering, the word entropy took a twist when Claud E. Shannon wrote a paper called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". It is a little different than the word entropy taught in chemistry and physics; however, it is also very similar. Basically the Shannon entropy is a measure of information, and Shannon identified that to maximize a communications channel you have to encode the data to maximize its entropy. Make the information look like pure noise. Entropy on our side of the fence involves probability. An unknown. To maximize the entropy the events or outcomes need to be equiprobable and uncertain. For example if the dice are loaded or biased then each roll presents less information. This understanding has been implemented in communication systems and computer algorithms in the last century to maximize the transfer of information, by taking information and compacting it down into unrecognizable trash. Then on the other side of the communication channel the unrecognizable trash is uncompacted, unfolded back into its original state by an algorithm that is perfectly symmetric to the algorithm that made it. While there is hopefully little rolling of the dice in the process since it can potentially corrupt the communication, the data is made to look as if someone had rolled the dice. The algorithms are deterministic, but the encoder is designed to produce data that appears stochastic and the decoder is designed to take the data that appeared stochastic and put it back into its original form.

"The data was made to look as if someone had rolled the dice." Read that again. I was not talking about evolution, I was talking about a communications channel... but my oh my. A communications channel from who? Who hides their communication so that it looks as if it could have been due to a roll of the dice? Well, we do... inside cell phones, computer communications, satellite communications... but a person doesn't see it because hopefully the receiver has turned the entropy back into a legible <cough> language. The brain has further learned to encode and decode the language into legible <cough> concepts.

Back to evolution... the seed of evolution is a roll of the dice. It is possible to feedback entropy that is non-correlated to seed the changes into a system to test the strength of the change within an environment. It works, but it is slow and painful. It is one way of cracking a code so to speak. It is one way for a mouse to find its way through the maze to locate the cheese. Just kill off every mouse that doesn't succeed, and eventually the mouse will allegedly develop a method of finding the cheese. It is like trying to crack a password by trying random permutations until one is found.

There is a limit to what evolution can do... there is a limit to what can be accomplished by feeding back uncorrelated stochastic information into trial and error. The limit is this: evolution requires that the information of what can succeed, of what will live, already exists in the environment and is available to test. If a genetic code can not be put to the test then evolution is dead. For example when growing bacteria or viruses, if they can not be put to the test against a drug in a host then the little buggers can NOT evolve to overcome the drug. Denied of the ability to try millions of attempts at a secret code to allow for coexistance in the face of a toxic drug, the little buggers can't learn anything about the secret code through trial and error. Evolution is like a hacker, bent on breaking a code that will enable it power. The doctor wants no survivors... either take the full dose of a drug to kill off the whole lot of hackers so that the bacteria will not survive and thus evolve, or don't take the drug and deny them the ability to learn. Similarly if a computer hacker enters the wrong code several times then the gates can be closed to deny the ability to evolve (evolute) an answer.

Anyone disagree?

An interesting read. Thank you!

What you're saying would certainly apply to an AI world where bias has to be artificially scrubbed to maintain the stochastic effect. But don't forget that this is done to artificially approximate entropic processes which occur naturally in the non artificial world. Evolution doesn't need a randomness generator, that occurs naturally.

Chris

[gp1628]

I have a problem here. Has "Intelligent Design" thru this whole conversation been in line with the original posters definition that God directed Evolution? Im afraid that is not correct. Intelligent Design is simply that. Design by Intelligence. It includes a number of (fairly equally extreme) theories which do not include God at all. To put it in terms that evolutionists can relate to... if Intelligent Design were Mammals, then theories involving God would be herbivores, theories involving Creationists would be Equids (horses and such), and the new earth literal word of the bible creationists would be mules. Please dont focus on a smaller group as being representative of the much larger groups.

Disclaimer: Im all for evolution. But Im also for clarity, especially when arguing against something.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by seattlegal

Humans think this is their era. A more truthful statement would be that we all live in the age of bacteria.

Stephen J. Gould would be proud, he was quite adamant about this last point.

[Tao_Equus]

So am I, if there is life there is bacteria, there never has been and never will be an age when bacteria are not the most fundamentally important organisms.

[Snoopy]

Seen the news about RNA and DNA being delivered to Earth 4 billion years ago by meteor? Now there's a postal service. God would only use the best.

s.

[seattlegal]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

Seen the news about RNA and DNA being delivered to Earth 4 billiont years ago by meteor? Now there's a postal service. God would only use the best.

s.

Panspermia.

[cyberpi]

Originally Posted by China Cat Sunflower

An interesting read. Thank you!

What you're saying would certainly apply to an AI world where bias has to be artificially scrubbed to maintain the stochastic effect. But don't forget that this is done to artificially approximate entropic processes which occur naturally in the non artificial world. Evolution doesn't need a randomness generator, that occurs naturally.

Chris

Randomness is in the mind of the beholder.

[seattlegal]

Originally Posted by cyberpi

Randomness is in the mind of the beholder.

Rorschach Inkblot Test
{Please pardon my ridiculously short posts.}

[17th Angel]

Originally Posted by gp1628

I have a problem here. Has "Intelligent Design" thru this whole conversation been in line with the original posters definition that God directed Evolution?

No... As I am not for evolution.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by gp1628

I have a problem here. Has "Intelligent Design" thru this whole conversation been in line with the original posters definition that God directed Evolution? ... Im also for clarity, especially when arguing against something.

I'm all for the idea of clarity, Gandalf, but I think that is part of the problem whenever this subject is raised. There is a great deal of assumption by both sides as to what the other actually means. Rather than exploring the depth and detail to flesh out any meaningful dialogue, the subject typically digresses into stereotypes and biases.

What is meant by the term "G-d?"

What is meant by the term "Intelligent?"

What is meant by the term "Design?"

What is meant by the term "Creation?"

What is meant by the term "Evolution?"

Like the proverbial clutch of Rabbis, ask any 6 and get 7 different answers.

[gp1628]

What I mean is....
Intelligent Design covers more than just creation by God. I hate it when an Intelligent Design discussion is argued as if it was a Creationists argument. Thats like arguing a subject of "fruit" using "apples" as your basis.

Personally Im all for Evolution. "Fight the Design! Join the Evolution!"
Join the Evolution! : Odd Thotz : CafePress.com
but I do prefer the arguments to be specific.
Sheesh. The believers of science are sometimes hard to separate from the believers of a young earth from the way they preach their side of things.

[juantoo3]

Originally Posted by gp1628

What I mean is....
Intelligent Design covers more than just creation by God. I hate it when an Intelligent Design discussion is argued as if it was a Creationists argument. Thats like arguing a subject of "fruit" using "apples" as your basis.

You have a valid point though, and that is why I tried to highlight it in the manner I did.

If something I read recently holds any merit, it seems "intelligent design" was invented as a legal ploy to insert creationist thinking into school texts, attempting to put an air of scientific validity to the creationist POV. That I feel is not forthright, if this story I read is true.

Having said that, I agree with you in concept, but then we must return to how exactly "G-d" is defined. In some sense acknowledgement of a universal intelligence provides a de facto grounds for the proof of G-d...depending how G-d is defined. Which is why I suspect atheists are generally so dismissive of the concept...but then people (atheists and believers alike) by and large have a cartoonish anthropomorph caricature in mind to define G-d, so there seems to be a knee-jerk response either way, both grounded in misconception. In my opinion.

Originally Posted by gp1628

Personally Im all for Evolution. "Fight the Design! Join the Evolution!"
but I do prefer the arguments to be specific.

I actually do entertain a modified sort of intelligent design in my mind, quite unlike the typical picture drawn by, oh, say a young earth creationist. I think evolution is a part of the mechanism of creation, but I also think that evolution is poorly understood and not adequately explained or examined. I think there is more to it, much more, because there are too many exceptions to the "rules." And too many leaps of scientific faith required.

I prefer arguments to be specific as well, but it takes time and skill and knowledge to formulate specific and adequate arguments. Most people are quite happy to argue knee-jerk from their visceral emotions. It's so much easier to choose up sides, start the wave and chant "we're number one, we're number one..."

Originally Posted by gp1628

Sheesh. The believers of science are sometimes hard to separate from the believers of a young earth from the way they preach their side of things.

AMEN! You're preachin' to the choir now!

[soma]

String Theory 1968—the idea that everything is made of tiny, vibrating strands of energy. This energy, a vibration holds the unifying world of the very large and the world of the very small together in pure consciousness.