Oh come on now! You are so good at playing the victim! True, I made one (minor) attack on what I perceived was your unwillingness to read the article (as it did indeed answer all your points), and the rest of my argument was clean. Literally 6 paragraphs of pure argument, answering your points, no insults or jabs, and you completely ignore it, instead trying to use a barrage of insults yourself!
Ok, so let's try this again:
You say you find "the experiment to be strange and almost senseless" when admitting that Dawkins said it was not meant to be an accurate portrayal of evolution, rather an artificial selector. The aim of the experiment was:
Still senseless? Still strange? Somehow I don't think so. Dawkins was only showing that evolution wasn't a pure "random" method, and that selection had to be a part if it was going to get anywhere. The mechanism by which evolution selects is called "natural selection", and Dawkins program, whilst artificial, was alluring to the fact that natural selection would be doing all the selecting.
As for your assertion that the program was "fixed", you are half-right. Of course, the aim of the program was to get from a random set of letters to a sentence (which was pre-chosen). The point of the program was it was showing a possible path of evolution from a retrospective angle. In other words, it was not trying to show evolution of a random set of letters, but was taking a fixed set of letters, and saying "ok, can we get to this from a random set?". The answer is yes. By selecting the best mutations (which is what natural selection does in essence), new organisms are formed.
If you think about it for more than a few seconds, you will realise that if Dawkins hadn't set a fixed end-point, the program would be (as you said earlier) "strange and senseless". The program wouldn't be able to tell what was a "good" mutation (since it had no environment to adapt to), and so you would simply get a load of random strings. Each one would be a valid product of natural selection, but without an environment to compare them to, you cannot tell which strings are successful organisms and which are not. An environment must be used, and in this case the environment was the string "Methinks it is like a weasel".
Evolution always aims to adapt species to their environment in the best way possible. With the species "salfjbadjgbadgajgbaj" and the environment "Methinks it is like a weasel", the best adaptations will invariably produce the end result of "Methinks it is like a weasel".
In real life, there are a multitude of environments of course, which is why we have such diversity of life; however this program was very simple, with one environment; one "aim" for evolution to get to.
Can you try and actually answer my point this time please?
if you cannot, just walk away. Nobody will think any less of you for it, but please don't just make up blatant lies like "[Adrian] said only 'I think pippy is a big idiot' over and over". I didn't. I said you evidently hadn't read the article since the answers to your questions were there...in it! I then proceeded to present the refutations to your arguments!
Now either be a good sport and write an actual post that responds, or go away. People who do not discuss things and simply lie to try and get out of an argument are not welcome on what is (after all) a discussion forum.
Ok, so let's try this again:
You say you find "the experiment to be strange and almost senseless" when admitting that Dawkins said it was not meant to be an accurate portrayal of evolution, rather an artificial selector. The aim of the experiment was:
Wikipedia Wrote:Dawkins intends this example to illustrate a common misunderstanding of evolutionary change, i.e. that DNA sequences or organic compounds such as proteins are the result of atoms "randomly" combining to form more complex structures. In these types of computations, any sequence of amino acids in a protein will be extraordinarily improbable (this is known as Hoyle's fallacy). Rather, evolution proceeds by hill climbing.(emphasis mine)
Dawkins then goes on to show that a process of cumulative selection can take far fewer steps to reach any given target
Still senseless? Still strange? Somehow I don't think so. Dawkins was only showing that evolution wasn't a pure "random" method, and that selection had to be a part if it was going to get anywhere. The mechanism by which evolution selects is called "natural selection", and Dawkins program, whilst artificial, was alluring to the fact that natural selection would be doing all the selecting.
As for your assertion that the program was "fixed", you are half-right. Of course, the aim of the program was to get from a random set of letters to a sentence (which was pre-chosen). The point of the program was it was showing a possible path of evolution from a retrospective angle. In other words, it was not trying to show evolution of a random set of letters, but was taking a fixed set of letters, and saying "ok, can we get to this from a random set?". The answer is yes. By selecting the best mutations (which is what natural selection does in essence), new organisms are formed.
If you think about it for more than a few seconds, you will realise that if Dawkins hadn't set a fixed end-point, the program would be (as you said earlier) "strange and senseless". The program wouldn't be able to tell what was a "good" mutation (since it had no environment to adapt to), and so you would simply get a load of random strings. Each one would be a valid product of natural selection, but without an environment to compare them to, you cannot tell which strings are successful organisms and which are not. An environment must be used, and in this case the environment was the string "Methinks it is like a weasel".
Evolution always aims to adapt species to their environment in the best way possible. With the species "salfjbadjgbadgajgbaj" and the environment "Methinks it is like a weasel", the best adaptations will invariably produce the end result of "Methinks it is like a weasel".
In real life, there are a multitude of environments of course, which is why we have such diversity of life; however this program was very simple, with one environment; one "aim" for evolution to get to.
Can you try and actually answer my point this time please?
if you cannot, just walk away. Nobody will think any less of you for it, but please don't just make up blatant lies like "[Adrian] said only 'I think pippy is a big idiot' over and over". I didn't. I said you evidently hadn't read the article since the answers to your questions were there...in it! I then proceeded to present the refutations to your arguments!
Now either be a good sport and write an actual post that responds, or go away. People who do not discuss things and simply lie to try and get out of an argument are not welcome on what is (after all) a discussion forum.
