You may not feel like you are playing the victim, but you are.
It is not discussion to say "your arguments did not get much better". You cannot make that point and think it actually counts for something. If you think my arguments are bad, explain why my arguments are bad. You are not helping anyone here.
As for making a valid point, 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.
Now respond, either tell me why my arguments are bad, or just discuss them generally. I do not mind. What I do mind is you simply discarding everything I said for another chance to play the victim.
It is not discussion to say "your arguments did not get much better". You cannot make that point and think it actually counts for something. If you think my arguments are bad, explain why my arguments are bad. You are not helping anyone here.
As for making a valid point, 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.
Now respond, either tell me why my arguments are bad, or just discuss them generally. I do not mind. What I do mind is you simply discarding everything I said for another chance to play the victim.
