Human Devolution

[brewer]

You're failing here Pulse. Time for re-education camp.

[Crossless2.0]

You're failing here Pulse. Time for re-education camp.

Pol Pot, get out of my poor atheist head! I want to be good. I want to do right.

*Trembles in a state of intense inner conflict*

No, no, no! Must . . . resist . . . the pull of . . . my atheist belief system.

*Cries out in anguish and drops to his knees, collecting his breath*

Whew, I'm glad that's over.

*Sheathes his machete, shoulders his rifle, and heads to 'work' in the fields, whistling a jaunty tune*

[Whateverist]

If evolution is "wrong", I wouldn't care. Makes no difference to me. I don't have to have all the answers. I don't need to gap fill with superstitious nonsense.

I completely agree with everything in this post of yours Rob but I'd like to focus on this bit in particular.

Read this again, Pubes.  Think about it. No matter how much doubt you cast on the theory of evolution I'm sure it pales in comparison to the challenges brought by sincere scientists every day. If you or they ever succeed in discrediting it altogether you will not have moved any right thinking person one step closer to design/creation nonsense. Not having a settled theory for a phenomenon is never justification for invoking magic.

[Aristocatt]

If evolution is "wrong", I wouldn't care. Makes no difference to me. I don't have to have all the answers. I don't need to gap fill with superstitious nonsense.

I completely agree with everything in this post of yours Rob but I'd like to focus on this bit in particular.

Read this again, Pubes.  Think about it.  No matter how much doubt you cast on the theory of evolution I'm sure it pales in comparison to the challenges brought by sincere scientists every day.  If you or they ever succeed in discrediting it altogether you will not have moved any right thinking person one step closer to design/creation nonsense.  Not having a settled theory a phenomenon is never justification for invoking magic.

I'll triple down on this.  
Though I disagree(maybe, maybe not) a little with the "challenges brought by sincere scientists every day" part.
I think science does a good job explaining things that used to be explained with mysticism.  Which can help break the grip theism has on some people.  I don't think scientists have much to say at all about the actual existence of god.  It's non-falsifiable, so it's not really a scientific pursuit.

[I_am_not_mafia]

I am learning fast about GAs

No you are not. You are plagiarising from http://creation.com/genetic-algorithms-a...-evolution and pretending it's your own.

and can see that you are incorrect to suppose they accurately reflect reality with its millions of variables.

Why should the number of variables make any difference to the underlying process? All this tells us is the size of the data set. The genome is far more complex than what is commonly evolved using genetic algorithms.

And from your mistaken notion that pesticide resistance increases information in the genome

Strawman argument. That's not what I said. I said:

If a mutation makes a mosquito more resistant to pesticides then how does this make the organism weaker? It actually improves the evolutionary fitness of an organism. This is why antibiotic resistance is on the rise for example.

Mutation increases information in a genotype.

All too many evolutionary computationists fail to realize the purely formal nature of GA procedures. GAs are not dealing with physicodynamic cause-and-effect chains. First, what is being optimized is a formal representation of meaning and function. A representation of any kind cannot be reduced to inanimate physicality. Second, “potential solutions” are formal, not merely physical entities.

Fourth, a formal fitness function is used to define and measure the fittest solutions thus far to a certain formal problem. The act of defining and measuring, along with just about everything else in the GA procedure, is altogether formal, not physical.

Now in your own words please explain what the author at creation.com actually meant in that first quote and why this matters. Because what you have said sounds impressive but actually means nothing. Regarding physicality, you have heard of simulations haven't you? You can simulate a process and model what happens in the real world.

Third, at each iteration (generation) a certain portion of the population of potential solutions is deliberately selected by the agent experimenter (artificial selection) to “breed” a new generation. The optimized solution was purposefully pursued at each iteration. The overall process was entirely goaldirected (formal). Real evolution has no goal.

You're The author you plagiarised is saying that GAs are not like real evolution because it is 'goal directed', yet I suppose later you'll be arguing that undirected evolution cannot happen therefore intelligent design? You can't have both. Both real evolution and genetic algorithms are undirected except through either natural or artificial selection.

What you are referring to is whether there is an explicit fitness function. It does not matter whether there is an explicit means to encode fitness. The same process works if you use endogenous evolution. By that I mean there is no artificial selection. Just create a population of agents, let them act as they choose and run the risk of the entire population dying out. Evolution will still be seen to occur. My very first evolutionary run was endogenous and they evolved herding behaviour all on their own. I never selected for that. It was interesting to see the various strategies they evolved.

Despite the appealing similarities of terms like “chromosomes”, GAs have no relevance whatsoever to molecular evolution or gene emergence. Inanimate nature cannot define a fitness function over measures of the quality of representations of solutions. GAs are no model at all of natural process. GAs are nothing more than multiple layers of abstract conceptual engineering. Like language, we may start with a random phase space of alphabetical symbols. But no meaning or function results without deliberate and purposeful selection of letters out of that random phase space.

GAs are an abstraction of the underlying process. In the same way that we can model what happens in the real world using Maths. Maths is useful. If abstractions were not able to accurately model the real world, then we wouldn't use them.

In addition ‘Genetic algorithms’ use completely unrealistic ‘genome’ sizes (very small), mutation rates (extremely high) and selection coefficients (very high)

So? The underlying process is the same. Why should the genome size, mutation rate or selection coefficients make any difference? The same process can be applied at all scales. Unless you are arguing otherwise in which case I look forward to seeing your peer reviewed paper in a respectable journal.

By the way, I've reported you for plagiarism.

---

And here you are plagiarising from https://www.trueorigin.org/geneticalgorithms1.php and pretending it's your own work.

GAs do not mimic or simulate biological evolution because with a GA:

A ‘trait’ can only be quantitative so that any move towards the objective can be selected for. Many biological traits are qualitative—it either works or it does not, so there is no step-wise means of getting from no function to the function.

Wrong. You can have neutral traits in artificial evolution as well. In fact the neutral gene theory relies on this to let the genotype grow in size over time. Add in a duplication operator and make sure that all duplications have no effect on the fitness of the solution. This duplicated part can then be mutated in future generations. It also allows a population to leave its local maxima on the fitness landscape.

A GA can only select for a very limited number of traits. Even with the simplest bacteria, which are not at all simple, hundreds of traits have to be present for it to be viable (survive); selection has to operate on all traits that affect survival.

A GA does not select for any traits. The person you are copying from does not understand how GAs work. They encode a fitness function. This fitness function may reward explicit traits if that's what you want, and if it is then there's no limit to the number you could select for.

Something always survives to carry on the process. There is no rule in evolution that says that some organism(s) in the evolving population will remain viable no matter what mutations occur. In fact, the GAs that I have looked at artificially preserve the best of the previous generation and protect it from mutations or recombination in case nothing better is produced in the next iteration. This has a ratchet effect that ensures that the GA will generate the desired outcome—any move in the right direction is protected.

Perfect selection (selection coefficient, s = 1.0) is often applied so that in each generation only the best survives to ‘reproduce’ to produce the next generation. In the real world, selection coefficients of 0.01 or less are considered realistic, in which case it would take many generations for an information-adding mutation to permeate through a population. Putting it another way, the cost of substitution is ignored (see ReMine’s The Biotic Message for a thorough run-down of this, which is completely ignored in GAs—see Population genetics, Haldane’s Dilemma, etc.).

Yet the process also works with endogenous evolution where you do not choose how many breed or die but just let things happen.

The flip side to this is that high rates of ‘reproduction’ are used. Bacteria can only double their numbers per generation. Many ‘higher’ organisms can only do a little better, but GAs commonly produce 100s or 1000s of ‘offspring’ per generation. For example, if a population of 1,000 bacteria had only one survivor (999 died), then it would take 10 generations to get back to 1,000.

It doesn't matter. High rates of reproduction don't have to be used. It will still work either way.

Generation time is ignored. A generation can happen in a computer in microseconds whereas even the best bacteria take about 20 minutes. Multicellular organisms have far longer generation times.

This is the most bizarre objection. You could easily add a delay of 20 minutes to each generation and it wouldn't make any difference. Why would it? Why should it matter how long it takes? And if it does, at what point does it matter?

The mutation rate is artificially high (by many orders of magnitude). This is sustainable because the ‘genome’ is small (see next point) and artificial rules are invoked to protect the best ‘organism’ from mutations, for example. Such mutation rates in real organisms would result in all the offspring being non-viable (error catastrophe). This is why living things have exquisitely designed editing machinery to minimize copying errors to a rate of about one in a billion per cell division.

The ‘genome’ is artificially small and only does one thing. The smallest real world genome is over 0.5 million base pairs (and it is an obligate parasite, which depends on its host for many of the substrates needed) with several hundred proteins coded. This is equivalent to over a million bits of information. Even if a GA generated 1800 bits of real information, as one of the commonly-touted ones claims, that is equivalent to maybe one small enzyme—and that was achieved with totally artificial mutation rates, generation times, selection coefficients, etc., etc. In fact, this is also how the body’s immune system develops specific antibodies, with these designed conditions totally different to any whole organism. This is pointed out in more detail by biophysicist Dr Lee Spetner in his refutation of a skeptic.

Size does not matter. Explain why it does (in your own words, not by plagiarising).

In real organisms, mutations occur throughout the genome, not just in a gene or section that specifies a given trait.

They occur throughout the genotype in a genetic algorithm as well.

There is no problem of irreducible complexity with GAs (see Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box). Many biological traits require many different components to be present, functioning together, for the trait to exist at all (e.g. protein synthesis, DNA replication, reproduction of a cell, blood clotting, every metabolic pathway, etc.).

Irreducible complexity is a flawed concept that does not take into account that systems change over time. For example, you could introduce a foreign species to an eco-system that wipes out other species. A predator species then adapts to that foreign species and becomes dependent upon it. A creationist would not take into account the history of the ecosystem and would just see the predator and the prey and argue that it is irreducibly complex because if you take away the prey then the ecosystem collapses.

It's quite easy to evolve something using a GA that a creationist would argue was irreducibly complex.

Polygeny (where a trait is determined by the combined action of more than one gene) and pleiotropy (where one gene can affect several different traits) are ignored. Furthermore, recessive genes are ignored (recessive genes cannot be selected for unless present as a pair; i.e. homozygous), which multiplies the number of generations needed to get a new trait established in a population. The problem of recessive genes leads to one facet of Haldane’s Dilemma, where the well-known evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane pointed out that, based on the theorems of population genetics, there has not been enough time for the sexual organisms with low reproductive rates and long generation times to evolve. See review of ReMine’s analysis of Haldane’s Dilemma.

Multiple coding genes are ignored. From the human genome project, it appears that, on average, each gene codes for at least three different proteins (see Genome Mania — Deciphering the human genome. In microbes, genes have been discovered that code for one protein when ‘read’ in one direction and a different protein when read backwards, or when the ‘reading’ starts one letter on. Creating a GA to generate such information-dense coding would seem to be out of the question. Such demands an intelligence vastly superior to human beings for its creation.

A GA is an abstraction of the process. Maths works by being an abstraction.

The outcome with a GA is ‘pre-ordained’ (‘formal’).

Totally wrong. One of the challenges of using a GA is that you don't know how what solution it's going to come up with. All you specify in advance is a set of criteria that it has to match however it can.

With a particular GA, we need to ask how much of the ‘information’ generated by the program is actually specified in the program, rather than being generated de novo. A number of modules or subroutines are normally specified in the program, and the ways these can interact is also specified. The GA program finds the best combinations of modules and the best ways of interacting them. The amount of new information generated is usually quite trivial, even with all the artificial constraints designed to make the GA work.

This assumes that GAs and genetic programming are the same thing and shows that the original (plagiarised) author is ignorant of what a GA actually was.

It's also nonsensical. Please explain in your own words.

[Astreja]

Science is always on the move, refining what we used to know and sometimes replacing it with completely new theories that better explain reality.

No matter how many old theories fall, though, it will not get believers even one Planck length closer to proving their execrably stupid not-even-wrong not-even-hypotheses assertions about whatever invisible, intangible, insanely powerful being they happen to believe in.

[Fake Messiah]

I admire your persistence, Mathilda. You really do take time to write and explain this subject that keeps on being repeatedly opened as a "new" topic in atheist subforum, but do you really think that once you disprove their allegations, properly address their criticisms, and show them what the facts really are, that they will embrace reality and leave myths from the Bible?
Schooling system already failed at Pulse, he already refuses to read any science book or listen to any facts so what makes you think he'll listen to you? Maybe this tactic does not work and their problem lies elsewhere.

[LastPoet]

I admire your persistence, Mathilda. You really do take time to write and explain this subject that keeps on being repeatedly opened as a "new" topic in atheist subforum, but do you really think that once you disprove their allegations, properly address their criticisms, and show them what the facts really are, that they will embrace reality and leave myths from the Bible?
Schooling system already failed at Pulse, he already refuses to read any science book or listen to any facts so what makes you think he'll listen to you? Maybe this tactic does not work and their problem lies elsewhere.

Other people might be reading. And its worth every word

[brewer]

[edit]

No you are not. You are plagiarising from http://creation.com/genetic-algorithms-a...-evolution and pretending it's your own.

[edit]

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And here you are plagiarising from https://www.trueorigin.org/geneticalgorithms1.php and pretending it's your own work.

[edit]

I can hear it now.
But this were god inspired words and the authors were gods instruments. god can't be plagiarised.

[Pulse]

I do look to creation dot com for much information, I haven't linked to them because for 30 days am not allowed to link after registration, but yes, I am very open about going to creation 

dot com for information, I have found them very helpful in my pursuit of truth and are they staffed by capable scientists, mostly with Doctorates. I do of course look to other sites as well, I will try to make that more 

clear despite not being allowed to link for another month or so, I apologise for any confusion in not making things clearer.