(November 4, 2017 at 11:12 am)Jehanne Wrote:

(November 4, 2017 at 8:48 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...160756.htm

Antony Flew appears to have "deconverted" too quickly; too bad he's dead, and with him, his once-proud legacy.

He "deconverted" because he was in late stage dementia and the person tasked with minding him was a christian, more interested in his own glory (by bringing a well known atheist back into the fold) than in his moral and professional duty of care to Mr Flew.

Says it all, really.

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(November 4, 2017 at 2:49 pm)RoadRunner79 Wrote:

(November 4, 2017 at 2:29 pm)Cod Wrote: 1.)  Cod is now going to ask you specifically; Do you agree that over millions of years, evolution is responsible for changes in characteristics of biological populations.

2. )  Why do I believe you should you believe that? Because evolution is a fact and a theory.

1.) I think my answer would depend on the type of change that you are talking about.  

I know you're hard of thinking, and thus this is a hard concept for you to grasp; but with life there is one type of channge, evolutionary change.

Yes different things drive the change and it utilises various different mechanisms but it is all evolutionary.

Lol, "hard of thinking." 😂

(November 4, 2017 at 2:08 pm)RoadRunner79 Wrote: Well, I don't have too much issue with the topic of natural selection.  Other than I think that some have a somewhat idealized vision of it, where every slight advantage is selected and magnified. The reality of it is more complicated;

That is actually a valid criticism of how the theory of evolution is taught. There is this tendency to describe how a single beneficial mutation will start to propagate throughout a population. But there are so many other ways that a single agent can die early that a beneficial mutation may not confer enough of a survival advantage for it to start propagating and therefore is lost.

What's not often described though is how a single mutation will confer a survival advantage on average. That is if it does start to propagate throughout a population, then there will be many agents with that mutation, with some still dying off early for other reasons, and others living for longer. And in the same way that there are animal viruses constantly spilling over into the human population with most not be able to survive in the human body and just occasionally one being able to survive and spread, the same mutation may happen independently multiple times and if it has the potential to confer a survival advantage will on average be more likely to propagate.

This was the sole reason I stopped using genetic algorithms and took my understanding of how they worked to develop my own evolutionary algorithm that kept track of how many times a mutation had been tested. It is for this reason that the evolutionary process takes so long, because even a beneficial mutation needs to be tested over the course of many lifetimes as it spreads throughout a population.

Or conversely a deleterious mutation may survive and spread because it has occurred in an agent that has many other survival traits. But eventually that mutation will die out because it does not confer the survival advantage itself, it just struck it lucky. This also suggests that there are also many other beneficial mutations that may have occurred but due to sheer bad luck never actually spread. But then the evolutionary process is not directed, there is an element of chance of which evolutionary strategy will be adopted.

So when we talk about a beneficial mutation propagating, or a deleterious mutation dying off, then we always need to remember that this is a process happening on average over the course of many, many different lifetimes.

(November 5, 2017 at 5:42 am)Wololo Wrote:

(November 4, 2017 at 11:12 am)Jehanne Wrote: Antony Flew appears to have "deconverted" too quickly; too bad he's dead, and with him, his once-proud legacy.

He "deconverted" because he was in late stage dementia and the person tasked with minding him was a christian, more interested in his own glory (by bringing a well known atheist back into the fold) than in his moral and professional duty of care to Mr Flew.

Says it all, really.

---

Quite a bit of medical documentation that when human beings suffer brain damage (which, I suppose, would include cognitive decline), they often "get religion".

(November 5, 2017 at 11:42 am)Jehanne Wrote:

(November 5, 2017 at 5:42 am)Wololo Wrote: He "deconverted" because he was in late stage dementia and the person tasked with minding him was a christian, more interested in his own glory (by bringing a well known atheist back into the fold) than in his moral and professional duty of care to Mr Flew.

Says it all, really.

---

Quite a bit of medical documentation that when human beings suffer brain damage (which, I suppose, would include cognitive decline), they often "get religion".

Cubs fans, for instance. 

(November 5, 2017 at 8:31 am)Mathilda Wrote:

(November 4, 2017 at 2:08 pm)RoadRunner79 Wrote: Well, I don't have too much issue with the topic of natural selection.  Other than I think that some have a somewhat idealized vision of it, where every slight advantage is selected and magnified. The reality of it is more complicated;

That is actually a valid criticism of how the theory of evolution is taught. There is this tendency to describe how a single beneficial mutation will start to propagate throughout a population. But there are so many other ways that a single agent can die early that a beneficial mutation may not confer enough of a survival advantage for it to start propagating and therefore is lost.

What's not often described though is how a single mutation will confer a survival advantage on average. That is if it does start to propagate throughout a population, then there will be many agents with that mutation, with some still dying off early for other reasons, and others living for longer. And in the same way that there are animal viruses constantly spilling over into the human population with most not be able to survive in the human body and just occasionally one being able to survive and spread, the same mutation may happen independently multiple times and if it has the potential to confer a survival advantage will on average be more likely to propagate.

This was the sole reason I stopped using genetic algorithms and took my understanding of how they worked to develop my own evolutionary algorithm that kept track of how many times a mutation had been tested. It is for this reason that the evolutionary process takes so long, because even a beneficial mutation needs to be tested over the course of many lifetimes as it spreads throughout a population.

Or conversely a deleterious mutation may survive and spread because it has occurred in an agent that has many other survival traits. But eventually that mutation will die out because it does not confer the survival advantage itself, it just struck it lucky. This also suggests that there are also many other beneficial mutations that may have occurred but due to sheer bad luck never actually spread. But then the evolutionary process is not directed, there is an element of chance of which evolutionary strategy will be adopted.

So when we talk about a beneficial mutation propagating, or a deleterious mutation dying off, then we always need to remember that this is a process happening on average over the course of many, many different lifetimes.

That really puts the onion in the religious ointment. Evolution happens to populations over time, not to individuals in an instant.

(November 5, 2017 at 1:31 pm)Abaddon_ire Wrote:

(November 5, 2017 at 8:31 am)Mathilda Wrote: That is actually a valid criticism of how the theory of evolution is taught. There is this tendency to describe how a single beneficial mutation will start to propagate throughout a population. But there are so many other ways that a single agent can die early that a beneficial mutation may not confer enough of a survival advantage for it to start propagating and therefore is lost.

What's not often described though is how a single mutation will confer a survival advantage on average. That is if it does start to propagate throughout a population, then there will be many agents with that mutation, with some still dying off early for other reasons, and others living for longer. And in the same way that there are animal viruses constantly spilling over into the human population with most not be able to survive in the human body and just occasionally one being able to survive and spread, the same mutation may happen independently multiple times and if it has the potential to confer a survival advantage will on average be more likely to propagate.

This was the sole reason I stopped using genetic algorithms and took my understanding of how they worked to develop my own evolutionary algorithm that kept track of how many times a mutation had been tested. It is for this reason that the evolutionary process takes so long, because even a beneficial mutation needs to be tested over the course of many lifetimes as it spreads throughout a population.

Or conversely a deleterious mutation may survive and spread because it has occurred in an agent that has many other survival traits. But eventually that mutation will die out because it does not confer the survival advantage itself, it just struck it lucky. This also suggests that there are also many other beneficial mutations that may have occurred but due to sheer bad luck never actually spread. But then the evolutionary process is not directed, there is an element of chance of which evolutionary strategy will be adopted.

So when we talk about a beneficial mutation propagating, or a deleterious mutation dying off, then we always need to remember that this is a process happening on average over the course of many, many different lifetimes.

That really puts the onion in the religious ointment. Evolution happens to populations over time, not to individuals in an instant.

It's kind of like global warming deniers who confuses temperature ("only a 0.5 rise") with heat ("what a 0.5 increase in the oceans amounts to").

(November 3, 2017 at 11:20 am)Succubus Wrote:

(November 3, 2017 at 8:49 am)SteveII Wrote: There are several things wrong with that sentence, but let's stick to the one point. You would need a massive increase in complexity in the processing center to go from the binary light/no light to recognizing shapes and doing something about it that would be a survival benefit. What survival benefit preserved the increasingly complex (but useless) eye until the organism developed the vastly improved processing center?

You don't need a Cray computer to perform basic arithmetic functions, and you don't need a massively complex neural system to invoke a reflex action to a stimulus. No doubt you will now ask 'how could they evolve together'?
The answer is; they almost certainly didn't. It is highly likely the first hundred trillion of these creatures with their proto eyes and proto nervous systems did not have the two synchronized, not to the benefit of the creatures survival that is.

It's highly likely this primitive arrangement at first resulted in the creature freezing when light hit its proto eye and gained no evolutionary advantage. Now fast forward a ~million? years. A handful of UV photons hits the light sensitive patch and whatever passes for a muscular system goes 'kick' and the thing darts off to one side.
What happened to the recalcitrants, the first group? They were eaten!
Evolution in action.

First, recognizing shapes and reacting to them is way way way more complicated then "moving toward the light". It would involve some sort of memory, some sort of if-then-else logic, and some way effect enough movement to make a difference. 

You are positing two beneficial mutations that developed brand new functions simultaneously happening...eventually. Then when the organism moved from just light sensing to shape sensing, two new beneficial mutations simultaneously happened as well (one in the "eye" and the other in the nervous system)--because neither the ability to "see" shapes nor the ability to process shapes had any survival benefit until the other was functioning. But we still have a problem. Just sensing the light and processing the sensory information is not enough to confer a survival benefit. The organism must be able to do something about it. So, a third function would have at least been part of the first two steps--simultaneously so the organisms mutation could be selected. 

Your description could be right. The point I have made 20 times already in this thread is that we really don't know how these things happened. If we don't know how, it cannot be a scientific fact. If it's not a scientific fact, it is a philosophical claim that it happened.

It's a continuum from light sensing to shape sensing. It could start off light on / off, and then light at different intensities. There will be multiple cells sensing sensing this, not just one cell because there needs to be redundancy in the system and you never have a complex organism relying on a single cell. So you already then have some giving different strength signals which give you a direction to the light. This means that you already have the machinery in place to react to shapes because the cells will give different patterns of output signals so it's a single step to learning to recognise and adapt to different patterns.

(November 6, 2017 at 1:45 pm)SteveII Wrote:  

Your description could be right. The point I have made 20 times already in this thread is that we really don't know how these things happened. If we don't know how, it cannot be a scientific fact. If it's not a scientific fact, it is a philosophical claim that it happened.

Nope. It's a scientific theory. A theory supported by evidence. Still haven't boned up on grade school science yet?