Dembski Weasels Out

More to the point, this is a waste of time. By Dawkin's own description the Weasel program is an attempt to show very very roughly how evolution could be minimally plausible. Even if the program had issues (such for example even if it had used locking) that would mean that it might not be the ideal example. That doesn't in any way negate the point or weaken the case for evolution at all.

One minor squabble ... if I'm reading your code correctly, it appears that you select only one child per generation and use it to breed the next 100 children. Is that correct? If so, it's not exactly the best way to demonstrate evolution :)

I'd never heard of Dawkins program before, and it's really got me interested. I'm making a PHP version now, so I was digging through your code to see how you handled breeding in each generation. I'm trying to get them to breed randomly producing twice as many children as parents, and then cull the children so I end up with the same pool size. That's why I found it interesting that you'd decided to select only one per generation - it makes the coding easier, but it feels too much like cheating.

Doesn't matter, Zelinsky. Dawkins did it, so it must be wrong. After all, his programming doesn't have the Light of God behind it.

If you modified the "target" to read "Methinks Dembski is a weasel" do you think the program would converge, or simply don an oversized grey cardigan and shuffle off to an irrelevant Bible college in Texas?

Personally, I'd go for Door number 2.

Joshua Zelinsky said: More to the point, this is a waste of time.

Alex said: One minor squabble ... if I'm reading your code correctly, it appears that you select only one child per generation and use it to breed the next 100 children. Is that correct? If so, it's not exactly the best way to demonstrate evolution :)

It’s not demonstrating evolution (as clearly stated in the introduction) or natural selection, but a simple demonstration of the power of selection over random search

Ian, valid point. Also, given that Dembski claimed in November that he was going to be trying to do research instead of blogging - http://www.uncommondescent.com/adminstrative/change-at-ud/ - and this is the first thing we've gotten as a result, I can't say that I'm too impressed.

I can't see what the issue is. You can have a Weasel program that generates one offspring, with a single mutation each time, and accepts it if the result is closer to the target. That will in effect have "locking" but might sometimes waste its time trying to mutate a correct letter. Or you can have one mutation each time that is always in an incorrect letter. That would lock too. Or you can generate one offspring, with each letter having a small random chance of mutating, and accept the new string if it has more positions matching than the current one. That will not precisely lock. Or you can make a population of (say) 50 offspring, with one of these mutation schemes, and accept the best of these.

All of these will work, at slightly different speeds, and all will make Dawkins' point that the result is convergence to the target string much faster than random changes without any natural selection. (Yes, folks, in spite of what has been said here this is a simulation of a simple form of natural selection). It really doesn't matter which form of these you use. They all make the same point.

To fret about which exact form Dawkins was using is a waste of time, unless you want to try to give the impression that there is some dark and mysterious coverup afoot. Sure Dembski is not intending to give that impression, is he?

Joe Felsenstein said: I can't see what the issue is.

I have been kicking around an idea for the past few weeks based on Dawkins' weasel program.

Rather than have a pre-defined endpoint (as the weasel program does and evolution doesn't) I developed this idea.

1) Start with a 400 x 600 pixel square with each pixel randomly turned on or off.

2) Three offspring are generated with random mutations (pixels changed)

3) The program posts the four "pictures" on a webpage

4) The next user to go there picks one of the four

5) The selected "picture" is used to return to #2

I think it would be interesting to see if a recognizable picture would develop from the selection process....

I never cease to be dumbfounded by how dumb Dembski bumbles and dumbs up everything he touches. He apparently has some sort of anti-Midas touch in which everything he handles turns to feces.

What is even more amazing is the fact that he can do this against a background of computer techniques that go back to the development of computers to carry out just such calculations. Monte Carlo techniques were developed to solve stochastic type problems that had all the major components of evolution in them, only they were called physics problems. The fundamental algorithms have been around for close to a century.

Dawkins simple little program was one of the nicest examples of a simple, easily written program that illustrated a fundamental concept to anyone who could write simple code. How can anyone not understand?

But then Dembski doesn’t even know how to initialize variables in his programs.

and who provides the intelligence and vitality for these software programs to work?

my interest in in the human mind and how it can convince itself that it knows reality.

it is a very subtle step from a paradigm to paradigm paralysis.

scientism like religion claims truths and they both would be better to claim degrees of truths.

religions have made god or source or absolute or cause or vitality in their image on the other side of the coin are the materialists that search no deeper than their existing materialistic paradigm.

the universe has many mysteries yet to discover but yet we teach theories and beliefs as fact. look at the history of science and how many facts have been overturned and found to be false.

the same applies for religious beliefs.

science needs to be about theories and probabilities and few facts. maybe no facts if one is to keep the mind open for discovery.

the greatest fear the human ego has is to be called ignorant so it projects its ignorance on to others.

dave said: and who provides the intelligence and vitality for these software programs to work? my interest in in the human mind and how it can convince itself that it knows reality. it is a very subtle step from a paradigm to paradigm paralysis. scientism like religion claims truths and they both would be better to claim degrees of truths. religions have made god or source or absolute or cause or vitality in their image on the other side of the coin are the materialists that search no deeper than their existing materialistic paradigm. the universe has many mysteries yet to discover but yet we teach theories and beliefs as fact. look at the history of science and how many facts have been overturned and found to be false. the same applies for religious beliefs. science needs to be about theories and probabilities and few facts. maybe no facts if one is to keep the mind open for discovery. the greatest fear the human ego has is to be called ignorant so it projects its ignorance on to others.

Of course the most important thing here is that those of us, who never got around to write our own weasel program 20 years ago, now have a good excuse to finally do so. Here's my attempt in Python (about 40 minutes of programming effort - you have to love that language!):
weasel.py

And output from the final few generations of my first test run (pop size=30). Notice the reversions:

[...]

METHINKS IT IS LIKEUA WTASEL ## Gen: 114 Dif: 2

METHINKS IT IS LIKEUA WYASEL ## Gen: 115 Dif: 2

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WYASEL ## Gen: 116 Dif: 1

METHTNKS IT IS LIKE A WYASEL ## Gen: 117 Dif: 2

METHTNKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL ## Gen: 118 Dif: 1

METHFNKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL ## Gen: 119 Dif: 1

METHXNKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL ## Gen: 120 Dif: 1

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL ## Gen: 121 Dif: 0

Anders said: Of course the most important thing here is that those of us, who never got around to write our own weasel program 20 years ago, now have a good excuse to finally do so. Here's my attempt in Python (about 40 minutes of programming effort - you have to love that language!):

Mike Elzinga said: What is even more amazing is the fact that he can do this against a background of computer techniques that go back to the development of computers to carry out just such calculations. Monte Carlo techniques were developed to solve stochastic type problems that had all the major components of evolution in them, only they were called physics problems. The fundamental algorithms have been around for close to a century.

Ian Musgrave said: What part of "toy program" didn't you understand?

Ian Musgrave said: When Dembski claims that Lenski et al., have "smuggled in information", explaining why they are wrong can get quite technical, but when they claim Dawkins has "smuggled in information", one can simply point to how deeply they have misunderstood Dawkins model, and if they can't get Dawkins right (after being told repeatedly and being shown a video), what hope is there that they got Lenski right.

dave said: and who provides the intelligence and vitality for these software programs to work? my interest in in the human mind and how it can convince itself that it knows reality.

Folks, please don't feed the troll.

Alex said:

Ian Musgrave said: What part of "toy program" didn't you understand?

Hey, I'm just asking a simple question - no need to get bitchy. I got your point just fine the first time around, thanks.

dave said: and who provides the intelligence and vitality for these software programs to work? my interest in in the human mind and how it can convince itself that it knows reality. it is a very subtle step from a paradigm to paradigm paralysis. scientism like religion claims truths and they both would be better to claim degrees of truths. religions have made god or source or absolute or cause or vitality in their image on the other side of the coin are the materialists that search no deeper than their existing materialistic paradigm. the universe has many mysteries yet to discover but yet we teach theories and beliefs as fact. look at the history of science and how many facts have been overturned and found to be false. the same applies for religious beliefs. science needs to be about theories and probabilities and few facts. maybe no facts if one is to keep the mind open for discovery. the greatest fear the human ego has is to be called ignorant so it projects its ignorance on to others.

Rogue, This really amazed me:(HT to PZ or the BA, or somebody)

Mona Lisa

Ian Musgrave said:

Anders said: Of course the most important thing here is that those of us, who never got around to write our own weasel program 20 years ago, now have a good excuse to finally do so. Here's my attempt in Python (about 40 minutes of programming effort - you have to love that language!):

Python! Cool! And yet, over at Uncommon Dissent, after nearly 48 hours with a trained programmer on hand, they STILL haven't reproduced the weasel.

How long does it take someone to write a program that basically takes a string, copies it with mutations, compares it to a target, chooses the best mutant, copies and mutates the new string, and compares again until the target is reached?

For me, 10 minutes in Python. After 20 minutes, I added support for "locking", multiple mutation loci, different population sizes, a lax selection function, and a selection function that doesn't operate in every generation.

Mr. Dembski should hire an actual programmer. I hear it's an employer's market.

Following up on my Red Lynx simulator, we're thinking about a similar widget for a weasel program.

I once wrote an evolution program involving Conway's game of life. A random bit pattern was used as the initial life pattern. Its fitness was determined by how long it would run before entering a loop. And they even reproduced sexually by combining the bits from two different patterns. This isn't exactly rocket science. Dembski is really showing how clueless he is.

and who provides the intelligence and vitality for these software programs to work?

I have been kicking around an idea for the past few weeks based on Dawkins’ weasel program. Rather than have a pre-defined endpoint (as the weasel program does and evolution doesn’t) I developed this idea. 1) Start with a 400 x 600 pixel square with each pixel randomly turned on or off. 2) Three offspring are generated with random mutations (pixels changed) 3) The program posts the four “pictures” on a webpage 4) The next user to go there picks one of the four 5) The selected “picture” is used to return to #2 I think it would be interesting to see if a recognizable picture would develop from the selection process.

Victor Lighthill said: How long does it take someone to write a program that basically takes a string, copies it with mutations, compares it to a target, chooses the best mutant, copies and mutates the new string, and compares again until the target is reached? For me, 10 minutes in Python. [...]

Joe Felsenstein said: Genetic simulations of evolution have been around almost as long as Markov chain Monte Carlo methods have been in physics. The classic MCMC paper of Metropolis et al. is 1953. The first genetic simulation of evolution is Nils Aall Barricelli's paper of 1954.

Prior to digital machines, analog techniques were often used; and that doesn’t just refer to electronic analog computers. Flowing sand and water with seeds of potassium permanganate at various points in the flow were also used.

wow put down after put down.

those are called attacks and they come from the doubts of the human ego not certainty.

that is the way of the atheist. ok and the religious.

expected that.

classic example of paradigm paralysis.

the creation folks have nothing on you folks.

thank you for your feedback.

as they say the proof is in the pudding.

bet you wont post this comment.

ok back to my salad chopper and newspaper. :-)

like attracts like sorry for trolling your love fest.

wow put down after put down.

Typical creotard strategy, dave. 1) Come into the evolution blog yapping a bunch of scientifically-unsupported bible babble until 2) the people there who understand the science you hate get irritated and 3) call you the jerk you are. Then you 4) concern troll about the level of discourse on a site you were only trying to disrupt in the first place. Nobody cares about your religiously-motivated dishonesty and obfuscation. Go away--your worst crime so far is being an unoriginal bore, and we all know it's not getting any better from here.

Rogue74656 said: I have been kicking around an idea for the past few weeks based on Dawkins' weasel program. Rather than have a pre-defined endpoint (as the weasel program does and evolution doesn't) I developed this idea. 1) Start with a 400 x 600 pixel square with each pixel randomly turned on or off. 2) Three offspring are generated with random mutations (pixels changed) 3) The program posts the four "pictures" on a webpage 4) The next user to go there picks one of the four 5) The selected "picture" is used to return to #2 I think it would be interesting to see if a recognizable picture would develop from the selection process....

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, page 50 Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining the distinction between single-step selection and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective 'breeding', the mutant 'progeny' phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a *distant ideal* target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn't like that. Evolution has no long-term goal.

stevaroni said: Soap bubble films were used on elaborate map models to determine minimum paths and node placement for telecommunications trunk networks.

Oh the irony that the “Isaac Newton of information theory” didn’t get the point of this.

Ian Musgrave said: That was mere mild exasperation (if you got my point and knew it was a toy program, why worry about the string duplication method when we are explicitly trying to duplicate Dawkins). If you want to make more realistic weasels, head over to "Very Like a Whale"(yes, it's also my page) and download weasle6.bas for an example where multiple strings breed and offspring are selected probabilistically. There's also a few other weasels there (although some links have died with the passage of time).

Well, over at Uncommon Dissent it's 52 hours after Dembski's article was posted, and still no one has made even one weasel program, and we have 3 already (excluding my elderly QBASIC one). Lets see how many more we can make in differnt languages before the UD crew get around to making theirs.

Oh, and some folks over there are still arguing it's "latching". They really don't get this whole "test your hypothesis thing" do they.

(oh, yeah, and ignore the troll)

I'm continuing to have fun with
my weasel program here: I have now added a plot of the fitness (measured as percent correct letters in the string) as a function of generation number:

Fitness plot

Notice how the fraction of beneficial mutations is high in the beginning (when the string is far from the peak of the fitness landscape) and how beneficial mutations are much less common near the peak (fitness plateau with occasional drops in fitness). Despite all the above-mentioned ways in which this is not meant to be a precise model of evolutionary processes, it actually does give some very nice insights.

Well, another way you could do the whole thing is to do the math, as Wesley Elsberry has done. Read the first post, then scroll down to the Monte Carlo test. Now someone tell me why the "Isaac Newton of information theory" can't do this?

Ian Musgrave said: Well, another way you could do the whole thing is to do the math, as Wesley Elsberry has done. Read the first post, then scroll down to the Monte Carlo test. Now someone tell me why the "Isaac Newton of information theory" can't do this?

Notice how the fraction of beneficial mutations is high in the beginning (when the string is far from the peak of the fitness landscape) and how beneficial mutations are much less common near the peak (fitness plateau with occasional drops in fitness).

— Anders

Anders said: Notice how the fraction of beneficial mutations is high in the beginning (when the string is far from the peak of the fitness landscape) and how beneficial mutations are much less common near the peak (fitness plateau with occasional drops in fitness). Despite all the above-mentioned ways in which this is not meant to be a precise model of evolutionary processes, it actually does give some very nice insights.

Correction: That should have been the log of the number of beneficial mutations vs. the log of the number of trials.

Alternatively one could plot the square-root of the number of beneficial mutations vs. the number of trials.

Ian Musgrave said: Folks, please don't feed the troll.

It occurs to me that there might be a somewhat “higher level” of analysis of the data in Weasel. This would be to look at either the variance or standard deviation in the number of beneficial mutations at each generation. That means running the program many times to get samples of the numbers of beneficial mutations at each generation from which to calculate the variance.

That would capture the fluctuations in the number of beneficial mutations at each generation. Then plot this on a log-log plot vs. number of beneficial mutations.

What is being explored here is whether or not the number of beneficial mutations represents a sort of “potential energy” relative to the stable population. There are some very general properties of such systems that say the fluctuations in “energy” increase as the square-root of the “distance” away from the stability level.

Thus, if the number of “genes” in the “gene pool” that have the potential for “improving” the gene pool in subsequent generations is large, the fluctuations should be large also. So I guess one would want a log-log plot the variance in number of beneficial mutations versus the number of beneficial mutations. One might also try this against the number of generations also. If a straight line emerges, then there are some general features one can think about. There may also be some other fractal powers that emerge.

I’m going to have to reinstall some of my old Visual Basic or Maple software and reeducate myself in order to do this. Maybe those who are already up to speed could pull this off a little more quickly.

A while back, I wrote a program in MS Word VBA (hey! It was all I had! It's still all I've got, come to think of it). The basic idea was to create a "world" consisting of a ten by ten grid, each cell containing a random poker hand.

Then, each generation, each poker hand would have one child (which would usually be an identical copy, but had a small chance of being a mutant), and that child would attempt to invade an adjacent cell. The better poker hand would win the cell, and the process would continue.

The most interesting thing, as far as I was concerned, was that it very, very rarely found the best possible poker hands, something which is trivially predictable to someone who actually understands evolution and poker. The vast majority of trials I ran ended up with some four-of-a-kind dominating the world. This is because there's a clear selection gradient for them. Four-of-a-kind is better than three-of-a-kind is better than a pair which is better than not having a pair (normally). This means that a pair is successful against the early random hands, and a mutation that produces 3-of-a-kind is more successful than it's pair parents...

Flushes and straights simply do not work the same way. 5 cards of the same suit is a flush. Four cards of a suit and a fifth of another is in no way better than three cards of a suit and two others. There is no selection to create a flush or a straight from a non-flush/straight ancestor.

Now, on rare occasions, a flush or straight would appear early on in the random hand generations (You do get dealt good hands sometimes!), and in that case it would usually quickly dominate the world before the pairs had time to develop into anything more impressive. Then the flush/straight would slowly evolve towards a royal flush, but it didn't happen often.

Which annoyed the creationists telling me that the program had the "correct answer" smuggled in, when the "correct answer" changed every time the program ran!

Anders said: I'm continuing to have fun with my weasel program here: I have now added a plot of the fitness (measured as percent correct letters in the string) as a function of generation number: Fitness plot Notice how the fraction of beneficial mutations is high in the beginning (when the string is far from the peak of the fitness landscape) and how beneficial mutations are much less common near the peak (fitness plateau with occasional drops in fitness). Despite all the above-mentioned ways in which this is not meant to be a precise model of evolutionary processes, it actually does give some very nice insights.

I never cease to be dumbfounded by how dumb Dembski bumbles and dumbs up everything he touches. He apparently has some sort of anti-Midas touch in which everything he handles turns to feces. What is even more amazing is the fact that he can do this against a background of computer techniques that go back to the development of computers to carry out just such calculations. Monte Carlo techniques were developed to solve stochastic type problems that had all the major components of evolution in them, only they were called physics problems. The fundamental algorithms have been around for close to a century. Dawkins simple little program was one of the nicest examples of a simple, easily written program that illustrated a fundamental concept to anyone who could write simple code. How can anyone not understand? But then Dembski doesn’t even know how to initialize variables in his programs.

I think that Dembski’s present concern may be the issue of “smuggling”. Dawkins’s program does have a precise target phrase that is supplied by the user. But Dawkins is not concerned with whether the information comes from that phrase or is generated de novo by the selection. As we know, he is really concerned to make a teaching example to show how wrong is the common creationist argument that evolution is like an “explosion in a junkyard”. His example succeeds at this brilliantly. And for that it simply does not matter where the information ends up coming from. This is all presumably part of some argument Dembski will make about the ultimate source of the information. Such arguments are mostly a diversion from the real issue: wherever the information originally comes from, it is natural selection that puts it into the genome.

And by golly, via John Lynch we learn that God hates figs!

Don't forget Dembski's attempt at anti-Weasel research, MESA. MESA is still available from the iscid.org site. http://www.iscid.org/mesa/

While in later years, Dembski railed against smuggling in information, in MESA he was happy to argue that any target string was as good as any other, and therefore MESA was hardcoded to optimize for 0 as the global optimum value. MESA is a MinOnes binary GA.

MESA is the closest I've ever seen to real research being done by the ID community. If someone knows of more sciencey research than this, please share.

As trivial as MESA sounds, you can do interesting research in GAs with similarly simple problems. Dr David Goldberg is a leading GA researcher from UIUC, and much of his wonderful book The Design of Innovaton is about looking for the "edge of evolution" - under what circumstances do GAs fail and why. I once commented to Dembski on UD (before being banned) that this kind of research was exactly what ID should be backing. Alas my suggestion was not taken.

Now, you know this could not turn out well. That site has links to all of Dembski's MESA based peer reviewed publications. All of it.

Demnbski's problems with the weasel program, of course, are that (1) it produces uncongenial results, and (2) it produces them in such a clear and understandable fashion that even nonmathematical nonprogrammer creationists are in danger of seeing the point.

And so Dembski's objections are in no sense technical, methodological or even conceptual. His objections are simply a vehicle to keep his constituency on the reservation. These objections need not be sensible, but they DO need to make all the little Dembski-ites comfortable that Bill's in his heaven, all's right in creationland.

Fortunately for Dembski, what he actually says is largely irrelevant - nobody's going to try to extract anything of value from it, beyond that Good has stood up to Evil, and we can all sleep easier.

As you can see, by using the Courier font,

— William Dembski

In any case, our chief programmer at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (www.evoinfo.org) is expanding our WEASEL WARE software to model both these possibilities. Stay tuned.

— William Dembski

Okay, so now it's 56 hours with no weasel over at Uncommon Dissent. I've gone back and done a head to head comparison between a program with no "locking" (all letters in any given string have a chance to be mutated) and one with "locking" (where the matching letters are preserved against mutation). Trying to implement "locking" al la Dembski proved too hard. You have to keep indices of the letter locations and keep updating them. It is such a pain in the bottom that I cannot imagine Dawkins even wanting to try and program this in GBASIC. Remember, Dawkins weasel was a quick and dirty program bashed out in a short time. To implement "locking" I just kept a copy of the parent string unmutated (after all, in the real world not every offspring has mutations in genes of interest).

So what happened? (I'll link to the graph I generated and the code later) Mostly, they were much the same. "Locked" runs finished earlier, but most of the trajectory of the run was determined by mutation supply. Early on, virtually any mutation is of big benefit, while later on most mutations are of small benefit. It was only in the final stages that there was any significant backing and forthing, and then only in the 30 Offspring case. In the 100 offspring case, the population was so large that the probability was high that even in the final stages a beneficial mutation would be acquired. Only in the 30 offspring case was the last 10 or so generations in an "unlocked" run spent bouncing from 3-1 differences.



Generations to convergence (average of 4 independent runs)

30 Offspring 100 Offspring

Locked 130 59

unlocked 160 80

Sorry, messed that up, see upcoming post where I expand on this and provide graphs.

So, summary. Whether you "lock" your strings, or allow them to mutate at all positions freely, a weasel program will converge on a solution. The for most of the time, mutation supply dominates, and whether you lock your strings or not there is rapid accumulation of beneficial mutations. Only at the very end run does "locking" matter, and then only for small populations where the probability of a beneficial mutation is low.

But even then, "unlocked", freely mutating programs will converge on a solution in less than a minute (and only 20% slower than the "locking" programs), when simple random sampling will take longer than the lifespan of the Universe to converge.

Against all evidence, Dembski believes that Dawkins wrote a overly complicated program in GBASIC, and then reverted to a simple one for a TV show, and can't be bothered to get around to writing the code that would show him wrong (and show that freely mutating programs converge rapidly on the target string). Again, this shows that cdesign proponetists don't understand the "test your hypothesis" part of science.

… he pursued this line (I can’t be arsed to hunt up which one now), essentially arguing that in order for evolution by random mutations and selection to work, the search space of search algorithms has to be somehow constrained. Another way he has put it is in terms of some sort of ‘match’ between the properties of the search space and the search algorithm. In the end, it boils down to yet another version of the fine-tuning argument, as far as I can see.

— RBH

Ian Musgrave said: Okay, so now it's 56 hours with no weasel over at Uncommon Dissent. I've gone back and done a head to head comparison between a program with no "locking" (all letters in any given string have a chance to be mutated) and one with "locking" (where the matching letters are preserved against mutation). [...]

I'm not surprised that Dembski has not responded. I don't think that he can program himself and the minion he uses is just confirming what has been written here. As he is a creationist, he will never admit he is wrong. Dembski will of course fallback on the "information smuggling" idea.

I wouldn't be surprised if his current efforts are aligned to produce a model that doesn't smuggle information. My guess is that the models either still beat the brute force approach (D'OH) or are trivial to dismiss as a random search with no selection.

In troll mode:
I notice that your program targets the word "WEASLE", rather than the correctly spelled "WEASEL". This is why evolution doesn't work: genetic modifications can only destroy information (destroying the correct spelling of a word) rather than improve it (creating a new, improved and fitter spelling of the word "weasel").

This is getting to be my most common complaint to fellow "Darwinists." I see several examples above, so I won't address anyone in particular. The question is: How do we know that a career anti-evolution activist like Dembski doesn't know (or understand) X? Now I must be clear that I don't know that he does know X. But I also know that if he did know X we probably could never tell, because demonstrating it would undermine his goal to promote denial of "Darwinism." The only way we might be confident that he didn't know X is if he either concedes the misunderstanding, or quietly drops the particular anti-evolution argument that implies it. My experience is that career anti-evolution activists almost never do the former, and do the latter only when necessary.

Ian,

I plotted the difference in performance between Dembski's "partitioned search" and an accurate "weasel". There's also an implementation I did in Javascript described and linked to here.

Mike Elzinga said: It occurs to me that there might be a somewhat “higher level” of analysis of the data in Weasel. This would be to look at either the variance or standard deviation in the number of beneficial mutations at each generation. That means running the program many times to get samples of the numbers of beneficial mutations at each generation from which to calculate the variance. [...]

Frank J,

There is a way to justify the use of the word "lying" with respect to what professional antievolution advocates commonly do. Generically, if someone presents themselves as an expert whose opinion on a topic should be considered, but who offers up easily-discovered falsehoods as the content of that opinion, one can conclude that they are lying about either their expert status or the specific false assertion. There is a residual ambiguity about which of those is the thing lied about, but none that lying is going on. This applies to the class of professional antievolution advocates, but not necessarily the chumps who simply fall for it and repeat the arguments that the professionals are pushing. Propagating a provided falsehood could simply be delusion rather than demagoguery. A chump who declares that his own expertise in the topic causes him to concur with the blatantly incorrect professional, though, would seal the conclusion for himself as well.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Ian, I plotted the difference in performance between Dembski's "partitioned search" and an accurate "weasel". There's also an implementation I did in Javascript described and linked to here.

Ian Musgrave said:

Python! Cool! And yet, over at Uncommon Dissent, after nearly 48 hours with a trained programmer on hand, they STILL haven't reproduced the weasel.

Nah. I agree, Dembski's talent lies more towards making animated videos of wind up dolls of federal district judges making bathroom noises. Though he might not have the coding skills, there are enough flunkies with the minimal skills needed to code up the weasel. It is likely that, no matter how hard they tried or fiddled with it, they could not produce a program that would NOT converge! When feed back improves convergence by six or eight orders of magnitude over random search, no matter how badly it is implemented, no matter how small the feedback is, the code will converge.

Nah. I agree, Dembski's talent lies more towards making animated videos of wind up dolls of federal district judges making bathroom noises. Though he might not have the coding skills, there are enough flunkies with the minimal skills needed to code up the weasel. It is likely that, no matter how hard they tried or fiddled with it, they could not produce a program that would NOT converge! When feed back improves convergence by six or eight orders of magnitude over random search, no matter how badly it is implemented, no matter how small the feedback is, the code will converge.

Anders said: Turns out I was actually not thinking entirely correctly about this: the number of beneficial mutations is fairly constant (typically one or zero beneficial mutations are found per generation, although two or three per generation are occasionally found at the start of the run). However, the time between beneficial mutations is small at first (one found in almost every round) and longer near the end (many rounds with zero beneficial mutants found). I know, I know: it's all trivial and well known, but I'm having too much fun rediscovering all of this myself to stop, so bear over with me... (and there is of course always the chance that Dembski et al. might find it enlightening, although I doubt it).

72 hours and still no weasels over at uncommon dissent.

72 hours and still no weasels over at uncommon dissent.

Henry J said: Do you realize the sort of punchlines somebody could come up with for that sentence? ;)

82 hours and still no weasel programs over at uncommon dissent.

Yay! Programming! This whole discussion inspired me to make my own Weasel implementation in C#. This was REALLY, REALLY easy (45 minutes). I can't wrap my head around it how Dembski c.s. don't just DO IT.

Btw: the characters in this implementation are not fixed once correct. They can be 'incorrectly' reverted; this is not shown in the short output sample due to brevity. If the conditions around the Console.WriteLine are removed, this becomes glaringly obvious.

90 hours have passed and no weasel programs have been posted at uncommon dissent.

Here’s a run using my QBASIC program where all strings are freely mutated, with a population size of 100, which converges in 61 generations (similar to Dawkins 64 step run in “The Blind Watchmaker”), like Dawkins I have presented the most fit string of every 10th generation (and yes, my target string was “methinks it is a weasle”).

rfbhxsdn euqnlcr nlgluw

rfthisdn eu nl a wlglnf

nfthinlt ku nq a wcasnf

nfthinls iu it a weasle

mdthinks iu is a weasle

mdthinks it is a weasle

mfthinks it is a weasle

methinks it is a weasle

Presenting it like this is what Dembski claims is evidence for locking. But if you look at the most fit strings of generations 46,47 and 48

mdthinks it is a weasle

mdthjnks it is a weasle

mdthinks it is a weasle

Yep, reversion. As Wesley has elegantly demonstrated mathematically reversion is sufficiently rare in the high offspring cases you won’t see it if you present every 10th string. Of course, if Dembski had implemented a weasel program he would have seen this by now.

Over at uncommon dissent there is an amusing argument that Dawkins must have used a low mutation rate to get “locking”, ignoring the fact that if you do that, you won’t get convergence in around 60 generations.

Say what? How long does it take someone to write a program that basically takes a string, copies it with mutations, compares it to a target, chooses the best mutant, copies and mutates the new string, and compares again until the target is reached?

It is now over a 144 hours since Dembski said “watch this space”, and no one, not Dembski’s Evolutionary informatics team, nor any of the Uncommon Dissent commentators has constructed a weasel program.

It looks like the commentators have accepted, in general, that Dembski's claim is wrong, but now they are describing what Dawkin's program does as "implicit" or "quasi"-locking. All without constructing an actual program to test their ideas. Amazing!

Ian Musgrave,

Funny you ridicule Dembski when the joke's really on you all. No matter what you attempt to demonstrate computationally, its always a designed program, . You can't escape the hilarious irony in it.

Call us when you have discovered a way to 'pressure' the electrons vibrating in your computer to somehow self-organize into a string of commands, which results in the creation of a meaningful instruction, which then produces some functional effect, say an electronic rainbow with a shining pot of gold at the end.

Until then, you are just weaseling out.

steve said: Ian Musgrave, Funny you ridicule Dembski when the joke's really on you all. No matter what you attempt to demonstrate computationally, its always a designed program, . You can't escape the hilarious irony in it. Call us when you have discovered a way to 'pressure' the electrons vibrating in your computer to somehow self-organize into a string of commands, which results in the creation of a meaningful instruction, which then produces some functional effect, say an electronic rainbow with a shining pot of gold at the end. Until then, you are just weaseling out.

Call us when you have discovered a way to ‘pressure’ the electrons vibrating in your computer to somehow self-organize into a string of commands, which results in the creation of a meaningful instruction

steve said: Funny you ridicule Dembski when the joke's really on you all. No matter what you attempt to demonstrate computationally, its always a designed program, . You can't escape the hilarious irony in it.

Call us when you have discovered a way to ‘pressure’ the electrons vibrating in your computer to somehow self-organize into a string of commands, which results in the creation of a meaningful instruction, which then produces some functional effect, say an electronic rainbow with a shining pot of gold at the end.

— steve

Mike Elzinga said: Therefore, not only is your imagination stunted, you have no evidence to work with in making snarky arguments against people who have immersed themselves in finding out how and why things work. In other words, you not only look stupid, you take smug pride in actually being stupid.

mrg said:

Mike Elzinga said: Therefore, not only is your imagination stunted, you have no evidence to work with in making snarky arguments against people who have immersed themselves in finding out how and why things work. In other words, you not only look stupid, you take smug pride in actually being stupid.

Don't hold back, ME, tell us exactly how you feel about it.

I understand the provocations, MrE, but my reaction is more like that of Groucho Marx: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."

While I was looking for the precise quote, I found one even more applicable to this context from Groucho: "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five."

mrg said: I understand the provocations, MrE, but my reaction is more like that of Groucho Marx: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it." While I was looking for the precise quote, I found one even more applicable to this context from Groucho: "A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five."

It is now over a 168 hours since Dembski said “watch this space”. The Dembski’s Evolutionary informatics team has announced that a weasel program has been constructed, and will be available soon (how many have we built and tested in that time?). None of the Uncommon Dissent commentators has constructed a weasel program, but a new commentator, Hazel, has done the maths for them (why did they not do it earlier). In defiance of William of Occam, and the evidence in Dawkins book, they are still insisting that Dawkins book program implements locking.

There has to be an award for the widest miss of the point for the year. Whatever it is, I nominate steve for it, and it's still only March.

Dave Luckett said: There has to be an award for the widest miss of the point for the year. Whatever it is, I nominate steve for it, and it's still only March.

Dave Luckett said: There has to be an award for the widest miss of the point for the year. Whatever it is, I nominate steve for it, and it's still only March.

Mike Elzinga said: The “tornado in a junkyard”, “entropy barriers”, and “genetic entropy” and the like aren’t accidents. They set the stage for a “rational” and “authoritative” structure of misconceptions that has been exploited ever since.

They give some insight into why certain concepts are “counter intuitive” to the point of prompting active resistance to learning.

anyone who doesn’t understand these “obvious concepts” is the one who “just doesn’t get it”; and that includes the entire scientific community.

Henry J said: The irony there is that it's hard to think of anything more absurd than the notion that more than a hundred thousand scientists (of widely different cultures and backgrounds) would miss (or ignore) some basic principle(s), do so continuously over a period of several decades, and manage to do it without annoying their employers, clients, students, or each other. Henry

It is now over a 192 hours since Dembski said “watch this space”. The Dembski’s Evolutionary informatics team has announced that a weasel program has been constructed, but none has ben posted on the Evolutionary Informatics site. None of the Uncommon Dissent commentators has constructed a weasel program. In the face of the video evidence and the mathematical evidence, the latest killer argument form the UD crew that Dawkins program really does lock is that Dawkins didn't mention letters reverting in his book, so therefore the program locks.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Dawkins' "Weasel" does not attempt to prove Natural Selection, but merely demonstrates that the underlying principle is sound. The "Weasel" shows that by adding an element of selection to an otherwise random process, convergence to a final state can happen in a reasonable number of steps, even though a purely random process might never converge. There is no claim that the "Weasel" directly mirrors any natural process. The program is merely a tool to explore the possibilities of the natural processes. You will have seen the discussions about the tuning of the simulation parameters - this is of interest because, when someone comes up with some measurements from the "real world", there is theoretical work to line them up against. Dembski et al seek to discount the "Weasel" because the assertion at the heart of the concept of Intelligent Design (that it is impossible to get all the variables right at the same time) is merely a denial of the power of the process of selection.

So …that means that if I write a simulation of planetary orbits, then it PROVES that ANGELS really ARE pushing them along their tracks!

steve said: Show me the money. What makes them orbit? Force? All right, then. Show me force.

Oh what am I doing ... this has got to be "bobby" in yet another guise.

Steve wrote:

"KevinB, that’s absolutely right. The program can only help someone visualize a principle that exists in the mind. It cannot be demonstrated empirically. Only natural selection’s effects can be observed. All Dawkins and his weasel program can do is try to help students wrap their brain around a philosophical point."

Yea, you guys might have a fancy dancy computer program and all, but no one has ever witnessed predation DIRECTLY! No one has ever actually calculated fitness DIRECTLY!

Me thinks it is a weasel.

Eh, this guy's just saying anything that pops into his head to yank chains.

How do protons and neutrons form out of a quark/gluon plasma? How do atoms form from electrons and nucleons? How do diatomic molecules form from neutral atoms? How do liquids form from neutral atoms or molecules? How do solids form from neutral atoms or molecules? How does matter scattered around in dust clouds in space condense into planets, suns, moons, comets? How do circular orbits come about? Why are orbits examples of mathematical shapes? Why does math have anything to do with the universe? How can an electrically charged comb pick up neutral pieces of paper? What is behind the properties of compounds that are composed of atoms that have none of these properties? Why is salt nothing like sodium or chlorine? Why are metals shiny? Why is graphite shiny? Why is solid sulfur yellow? Why do sheets of organic compounds bend around on themselves and form closed surfaces? Why do carbon atoms form tetrahedrons, hexagons, and “buckyballs”? Why do some hydrocarbon compounds spontaneously form amino acids? Where do the properties of semiconductors and semimetals come from? Why does copper have a different color from gold or silver or lead or tin or iron? How do drops of water suspended in air produce the functional effect of a rainbow? How does light know to traverse these droplets in such a way as to make a rainbow? How does light know to take the path of shortest time between different points when traversing various media? Ever heard of self-organization? Do you know why it happens? Ever heard of self-organized criticality? Do you know why this has anything to do with the behaviors of complex systems of matter? Do you know what any of this has to do with living organisms? When you have spent all your life hyper-analyzing the words in a single holy book, engaging in exegesis, hermeneutics, etymology, and other word games, you have no time to look at what is going on in the universe around you.

If “The Enemy” is all around you, attempting to deceive you, what better proof than to have a bunch of “deluded atheist scientists” demonstrating right before your eyes that they can’t see the “obvious”.

In the face of the video evidence and the mathematical evidence, the latest killer argument form the UD crew that Dawkins program really does lock is that Dawkins didn’t mention letters reverting in his book, so therefore the program locks.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: The UD crew has some of the most micro-syntactic-obsessive word lawyers in the world ...

steve said:

So …that means that if I write a simulation of planetary orbits, then it PROVES that ANGELS really ARE pushing them along their tracks!

It surely doesn't show that planet orbit all by demselves, now does it? Show me the money. What makes them orbit? Force? All right, then. Show me force. Rats, can't do that can you? Can you tell me something about the nature of force? Can't do that either? Hmm. Like I always say, science is good at building things, poor at explaining reality. Let others do that.

Hi Rogue74656,

I'm willing to actually do this. Can we work together and actually put this plan into action? I think it would be really fun to see where it goes. (I know (x)html/css and some basic website setting-up stuff, enough to get a site started, so I'm not wholly without qualification.) I'll be checking back for a reply!

Shoshana

Paul Johnson said: But the problem isn't that people think God caused evolution but the fact that people don't think evolution exists.

it appears that you select only one child per generation and use it to breed the next 100 children. Is that correct? If so, it’s not exactly the best way to demonstrate evolution :)

I wrote the Weasel program as a one (long) line Perl program. It may not show up well here, I also posted it on my blog at http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=127.


perl -e '$|=1;$s="Creationism is nonsense";$e="methinks it is a weasle";$try=11;$let=length($s);@e=split(//,$e);while($s ne $e){$i=-1;while($i++< $try){$new_s[$i]=$s;$chr=int(rand(27))||-64;substr($new_s[$i],int(rand($let)),1,chr(96+$chr));@spl=split(//,$new_s[$i]);$j=0;$new_sc[$i]=0;while($j<@e){$new_sc[$i]++if$e[$j]eq$spl[$j++]}}@sc=sort{$new_sc[$b]<=>$new_sc[$a]}(0..$#new_sc);@new=(shift@sc);while(@sc&&$new_sc[$sc[0]]==$new_sc[$new[0]]){push@new,shift@sc}$s=$new_s[$new[int(rand(@new))]];printf("Generation %5d, %-2dmismatches: $s\r",++$n,$let-$new_sc[$new[0]]);}print"\n";'


"All Dawkins and his weasel program can do is try to help students wrap their brain around a philosophical point."

That's true of this particular program, but make a couple of small changes and such a program can actually solve real problems. There are many researchers, scientists, engineers, and inventors using these techniques to create solutions for which we know of no better method. In fact, these algorithms have even been awarded patents for their solutions.

For example, see Genetic Algorithm and Genetic Programming.

Paul wrote:

"Although for me, evolution is intuitive once you learn about enough organisms."

That's a very good point. It also explains the high correlation between willful ignorance and disbelief in evolution.

I just did the shudderable and did Dawkins original program as an Excel macro. In 30 minutes.

Jim Lund said: I wrote the Weasel program as a one (long) line Perl program. It may not show up well here, I also posted it on my blog at http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=127. perl -e '$|=1;$s="Creationism is nonsense";$e="methinks it is a weasle";$try=11;$let=length($s);@e=split(//,$e);while($s ne $e){$i=-1;while($i++< $try){$new_s[$i]=$s;$chr=int(rand(27))||-64;substr($new_s[$i],int(rand($let)),1,chr(96+$chr));@spl=split(//,$new_s[$i]);$j=0;$new_sc[$i]=0;while($j<@e){$new_sc[$i]++if$e[$j]eq$spl[$j++]}}@sc=sort{$new_sc[$b]<=>$new_sc[$a]}(0..$#new_sc);@new=(shift@sc);while(@sc&&$new_sc[$sc[0]]==$new_sc[$new[0]]){push@new,shift@sc}$s=$new_s[$new[int(rand(@new))]];printf("Generation %5d, %-2dmismatches: $s\r",++$n,$let-$new_sc[$new[0]]);}print"\n";'

Hope this doesn't sound too petty.

You all ought to come to agreement on the spelling of "weasel".

So much good stuff here, why don't we help out the Dembski cdesign proponentsists? :-)

Feel free to submit your code for inclusion on like-a-weasel.blogspot.com to likeaweasel@nullifidian.net.

Just an idle comment to folks still using QBASIC: if you aren't familiar with Visual BASIC for DOS, it's QBASIC with user-interface tools. Nice product, obsolete, easy to get freebie downloads.
I've been trying to find time to get up to speed on Python, but so far no joy, so when I tinker it's with VBDOS.

MrG http://www.vectorsite.net

Did Dermbski delete his original post quoted here? I can't find it anywhere.

i write Perl for a living, but i'm not foolhardy enough to blindly run other people's "harmless" Perl one-liners except in throwaway user accounts with zero privileges. if the Lisp macro is like having a nuclear warhead in your garage, then those indecipherable Perl one-liners are chemical weapons at very least.

OsakaGuy said: Did Dermbski delete his original post quoted here? I can't find it anywhere.

You call for improvements to the Weasel program. You could spell it correctly.

Target$ = "methinks it is a weasle"

Also Dawkins' one was "methinks it is LIKE a weasle"

Rich pickings for quote miners here...

Ok, I just implemented my own Weasel program in Java, and it is converging much faster than the other reports; with 100 generations, somewhere between 30 and 40 generations is typical. I can't replicate the 61 or the 65 generation runs others have reported, no matter how many times I run it. It may seem trivial but the difference is bugging me.

This is my interpretation of the article's version: 100 offspring, each of which is mutated in one randomly selected position; the character set is the 26 lower case alphabetical letters plus the space char; the mutation is one randomly selected letter (so it can be the same letter as the one its replacing), and the measure of fitness is the number of letters that are different from the target string. Have I misinterpreted or am I doing something wrong? Perhaps if I posted the code?

Ok, I just implemented my own Weasel program in Java, and it is converging much faster than the other reports; with 100 offspring per generation, somewhere between 30 and 40 generations is typical. I can’t replicate the 61 or the 65 generation runs others have reported, no matter how many times I run it. It may seem trivial but the difference is bugging me.

This is my interpretation of the article’s version: 100 offspring, each of which is mutated in one randomly selected position; the character set is the 26 lower case alphabetical letters plus the space char; the mutation is one randomly selected letter (so it can be the same letter as the one its replacing), and the measure of fitness is the number of letters that are different from the target string. Have I misinterpreted or am I doing something wrong? Perhaps if I posted the code?

Jason Stokes said: Ok, I just implemented my own Weasel program in Java, and it is converging much faster than the other reports; with 100 offspring per generation, somewhere between 30 and 40 generations is typical. I can’t replicate the 61 or the 65 generation runs others have reported, no matter how many times I run it. It may seem trivial but the difference is bugging me. This is my interpretation of the article’s version: 100 offspring, each of which is mutated in one randomly selected position; the character set is the 26 lower case alphabetical letters plus the space char; the mutation is one randomly selected letter (so it can be the same letter as the one its replacing), and the measure of fitness is the number of letters that are different from the target string. Have I misinterpreted or am I doing something wrong? Perhaps if I posted the code?

am (mildly) surprised that it reliably converges on one or other of the strings.

Henry J said: That result seems to make sense; once a lineage is slightly closer to one than the other, mutations from it would generally be closer to that same one. Even if there are two species for a little while, eventually one of them would take over. Henry

As an alternative to getting down to doing my taxes, I managed to waste my Sunday hacking together my very own Weasel program, in Visual C#. As others have reported, the core logic is not hard, and I implemented locking as an option. Wiring it into a GUI took most of the effort.

Here's a screenshot.

Source code and an installer can be found here.

Rob

Oops, mucked up the screenshot URL. It is here.

Hi. I got inspired by this thread so i wrote my own 'Weasel' in javascript+dhtml.
http://web.comhem.se/~u84508817/Weasel/Weasel.html

Enjoy.

Nice program!!

every position in the string for every child, and decides randomly (with a low probability) whether to mutate that position. Thus a particular child might well have multiple mutations.

I worked one up in vb6, but I have yet to get a 100% match. I used my own method, and then tried to match some of the other sources posted here. I usually stopped the runs when they got into the 10s of thousands of iterations.

However, from the beginning, the strings converge within about 100 iterations to something that most teenagers playing wheel of fortune would be able to guess.

I also ran it with upwards of 500 charachter strings and arrived at very similar results. It converges to the point of anyone recognizing it as recognizable english within about 100 iterations.

This is all fine and good, but are you all forgetting that you are STARTING with the END!? You assume a target, then work toward it. This isn't magic.. you already know where you're going. You pick the X best results along a predetermined path. That's not evolution at all. You also ignore the fact that - at each step - regardless the end result desired, that conditions might be horribly wrong for the intermediate form.

Start with the end in mind, begin 'wherever', and choose the optimized results at each step along a path to that end, while ignoring the environment required for that intermediate result relative to the environment that might exist. In this contrived fantasy world, in many generations order emerges? This 'proves' something?

Come on folks... you must do better than this.

R

How about this to make it a bit more realistic with what is happening with all these life changes…

How about instead of “methinks it is a weasel”, we make it the Declaration of Independence. And, since at some point there are changes so small that they are not beneficial, we only consider sentences that are 100% correct. “Success” would be the “child” with the most 100% correct sentences. Now, you’d obviously have to change your program to do that…..you might now have to mutate randomly, say 50 characters (or you pick the number, I don’t care) instead of one.

Let’s see if you are able to converge on a solution now.

So the arguing point becomes which is simpler, a mutation sufficient to allow natural selection, or a sentence from Jefferson? Ironically, I don’t see much science done there to calculate those probabilities. I hear that we see evolution today in things adjusting to their environment, which is true, but if I won Lotto 5 times in a row, would I be able to make a real case to the investigators that no intelligent intervention was done to help make it happen? Just because we don’t see the stuffing of the Lotto balls doesn’t mean it ain’t happenin’!

Just read it through again and I think I understand Mr. Dawkins original program a little better now.

So, you make the target the text of the Declaration of Independence. The winning "child" that will be reproduced is the one with the most 100% correct sentences.

Obviously you'll never even get one successful child with one successful sentence, unless it is like 2 or 3 words and after a huge number of iterations.

If you don't like how I do this, I would like you (scientifically of course :) ) to tell me what the probability is of a beneficial change. If you really want to test a hypothesis, you need to check the likelihood that it could ever happen, especially if it is something where you are relying on chance over a long amount of time. Remarkably I find very little on this. What I see is Dawkins's lame program. Please show me the experiments where they looked at how likely this was to happen.

Show me the probabilities involved in an animal developing light sensitive cells and a cup around them and the cup getting longer and a lens developing and so on to evolve into eyes. Show me the probability of one step of that which would be naturally selected. Then if you can do that, show me the probability of the next step. If you can't, it's pretty weak science....

I would like you (scientifically of course :) ) to tell me what the probability is of a beneficial change. If you really want to test a hypothesis, you need to check the likelihood that it could ever happen, especially if it is something where you are relying on chance over a long amount of time. Remarkably I find very little on this. What I see is Dawkins’s lame program.

Show me the probabilities involved in an animal developing light sensitive cells and a cup around them and the cup getting longer and a lens developing and so on to evolve into eyes.

Start with the end in mind, begin ‘wherever’, and choose the optimized results at each step along a path to that end, while ignoring the environment required for that intermediate result relative to the environment that might exist. In this contrived fantasy world, in many generations order emerges? This ‘proves’ something?

— Red

Show me the probabilities involved in an animal developing light sensitive cells and a cup around them and the cup getting longer and a lens developing and so on to evolve into eyes. Show me the probability of one step of that which would be naturally selected. Then if you can do that, show me the probability of the next step. If you can’t, it’s pretty weak science.…

— IVFAN

Flint, first of all, Dawkins’s program is not exactly earth shattering. All it takes is 2 minutes of thought to realize that selection will get you to your goal sooner, probably a lot of high school kids could figure that one out. But the way he misleads everyone is in the probability of getting a successful change. Any successful change is going to be WAY more complex than that. I want someone to quantify that complexity. You won’t see the mainstream scientific community doing it because it would show how far fetched random variation/natural selection is. RV/NS is what I’m attacking here.

Your thoughts on any path being valid sounds nice in this post modern world, unfortunately it is far removed from reality. I don’t play bridge, so let’s talk gin rummy…..I could be dealt a hand that I could put down right away, or I could be dealt some other distribution that only was useful once my intelligence was applied to it. Not all hands are equally valid.

Take a line from a computer program: a=b-c; There are 720 ways to arrange these same 6 characters, but only a few (6) have meaning – a=b-c; a=c-b; b=a-c; b=c-a; c=a-b; c=b-a;. The rest would be completely meaningless to a computer program, and would give a compile error. Now, say this line is integrated into a section of code to subtract 2 user inputs. Now, only one of these lines is helpful, the others are all harmful.

Mike, take a look at my response to Flint. You do a great job like most of trying to add lots of words to avoid very important fundamental questions.

Bottom line, a change can only give an advantage if it is "engineered" (Dawkins among others thinks that engineering was done by random variation, I believe differently) correctly. While some helpful changes might be very simple, most are going to be incredibly complex, while appearing simple (Dawkins's example of how an eye might have developed was my example here).

IVFAN said: Bottom line, a change can only give an advantage if it is "engineered" (Dawkins among others thinks that engineering was done by random variation, I believe differently) correctly.

But the way he misleads everyone is in the probability of getting a successful change. Any successful change is going to be WAY more complex than that.

Your thoughts on any path being valid sounds nice in this post modern world, unfortunately it is far removed from reality.

I don’t play bridge, so let’s talk gin rummy…..I could be dealt a hand that I could put down right away, or I could be dealt some other distribution that only was useful once my intelligence was applied to it.

The rest would be completely meaningless to a computer program, and would give a compile error. Now, say this line is integrated into a section of code to subtract 2 user inputs.

Bottom line, a change can only give an advantage if it is “engineered” (Dawkins among others thinks that engineering was done by random variation, I believe differently) correctly. While some helpful changes might be very simple, most are going to be incredibly complex, while appearing simple (Dawkins’s example of how an eye might have developed was my example here).

IVFAN wrote:

"Bottom line, a change can only give an advantage if it is “engineered” (Dawkins among others thinks that engineering was done by random variation, I believe differently) correctly. While some helpful changes might be very simple, most are going to be incredibly complex, while appearing simple (Dawkins’s example of how an eye might have developed was my example here)."

Right, so you can never be dealt a good hand in cards just by random chance? You can never discard cards randomly and get better cards by chance? You have completely ignored the power of cumulative selection. No intelligence or goal is required. In the case of eye evolution, all that is required is that there be a selective advantage for increased visual ability for long periods of time, period. Random genetic variation and selection will take care of the rest. And all of the initermediates can be selected on. We also have examples of what happens when this selection pressure is removed.

Once again, "I can't believe that it could possibly happen" fails completely as an argument.

I'm trying to make this simple for you gentlemen, but I know you want to get lost in the forest instead of seeing the trees.....twas said "Indeed your examples with eyes imply that you consider a single “step” to be what biologists would regard as the accumulation of tens of thousands of selected variations, over millions of years." [ok, first editorial comment, the "step" was developing light sensitive cells, and you are talking millions of years, please remember that we only have 1 or 2 thousand million years (supposedly) to deal with here, so I'm kind of wondering how fast the other stuff had to happen].....anyway....

There are changes that are advantageous and there are changes that are either harmful or have no effect. My contention is simple. While there is some exception, IF ANY CHANGE IS TO ADVANTAGEOUS to a living thing living in some environment, IT IS GOING TO BE SOMEWHAT COMPLEX. You call it tiny, but even what looks tiny is EXTREMELY complicated when you have to try to build it. I hear disagreement, but I don't see the smallest amount of science going toward quantifying it.

Your evolutionary "brute force" method could never shuffle a deck of cards into perfect order (try the math on that one). Are you really trying to tell me that all changes that were ever selected were simpler than a deck of cards?

I'm an engineer, and when I make the tiniest of changes to something, I marvel at how complex it really is.

Let's try this example, I know you'll say it's not applicable to one reason or another, but it's a fun talking point anyway. Let's say GE lays me off and I turn to writing C programs to feed my family. I write a program that takes 2 user inputs and adds them together. Let's say that's the extent of my abilities. But the program is a hit, and I sell trillions and trillions of copies.

Now, let's say after being copied so much, the file changes (use your imagination....maybe just corruptions, maybe I put in some function to add random mutations, you pick it, it just can't have intelligence involved IN THE GENERATION OF THE CHANGE).

Now, I preview every copy of the program, looking ONLY at the user's level, not toying with the code manually. If I find a new function suddenly generates itself that is advantageous, I keep it (maybe it's an upgraded version, maybe I cancel the old, whatever, you pick). I do this for how ever many cycles you wish, with time being no object.

Do you honestly think this program will ever do anything meaningful besides addition of 2 numbers?

You know why it won't? Because even the most simple changes you could think of, if they were an advantage, would involve many characters typed in exactly correctly. You don't get partial credit for 99% typed in correctly - that change would not mean anything, it needs to be complete and work together for some advantage, whatever that advantage may be.

I'm not trying to win an argument here guys. I just want people to scratch their heads a little......to think of the astronomical probabilities involved in randomly doing what seem like simple things (shuffle a deck of cards 100 trillion times per second for 30 billion years and you have a 1 in 850 billion trillion trillion chance of putting them in perfect order). I want it so that the next time you see the exquisite beauty and remarkable engineering that is life, you think twice about how that came about. You don't have to admit it, I won't tell.

When the assertion is that random variation and natural selection make things happen, and no one wants to remotely touch the probabilities associated with the random variation part, I just have to scratch my head.

IVFAN said: I'm trying to make this simple for you gentlemen, but I know you want to get lost in the forest instead of seeing the trees.....

While there is some exception, IF ANY CHANGE IS TO ADVANTAGEOUS to a living thing living in some environment, IT IS GOING TO BE SOMEWHAT COMPLEX.

Your evolutionary “brute force” method could never shuffle a deck of cards into perfect order (try the math on that one).

I’m an engineer, and when I make the tiniest of changes to something, I marvel at how complex it really is.

Do you honestly think this program will ever do anything meaningful besides addition of 2 numbers?

You know why it won’t?

Do you honestly think this program will ever do anything meaningful besides addition of 2 numbers?

HAHA, I’m a numbskull.….meant get lost in the trees instead of seeing the forest.

IVFAN said: Let's try this example, I know you'll say it's not applicable to one reason or another, but it's a fun talking point anyway. Let's say GE lays me off and I turn to writing C programs to feed my family. I write a program that takes 2 user inputs and adds them together. Let's say that's the extent of my abilities. But the program is a hit, and I sell trillions and trillions of copies. Now, let's say after being copied so much, the file changes (use your imagination....maybe just corruptions, maybe I put in some function to add random mutations, you pick it, it just can't have intelligence involved IN THE GENERATION OF THE CHANGE). Now, I preview every copy of the program, looking ONLY at the user's level, not toying with the code manually. If I find a new function suddenly generates itself that is advantageous, I keep it (maybe it's an upgraded version, maybe I cancel the old, whatever, you pick). I do this for how ever many cycles you wish, with time being no object. Do you honestly think this program will ever do anything meaningful besides addition of 2 numbers? You know why it won't? Because even the most simple changes you could think of, if they were an advantage, would involve many characters typed in exactly correctly. You don't get partial credit for 99% typed in correctly - that change would not mean anything, it needs to be complete and work together for some advantage, whatever that advantage may be.

stevaroni said:

Do you honestly think this program will ever do anything meaningful besides addition of 2 numbers?

It's been done already. You can find it at Genetic Evolution of Machine Language Software Ronald L. Crepeau NCCOSC RDTE Division San Diego, CA 92152-5000 July 1999 This paper, originally written in 1995, describes self-selecting, self mutating computer programs that actually accomplish "something meaningful". It always amazes me that ID proponents can't find a precedent that been around for 12 years before spouting off and telling people who actually understand this stuff that it's impossible. Try "The Google" next time. It's really pretty useful.

Flint said: Yes, absolutely. Given enough changes and enough time, it will do something different that someone, somewhere, will find useful.

stevaroni said:

Do you honestly think this program will ever do anything meaningful besides addition of 2 numbers?

It's been done already. You can find it at Genetic Evolution of Machine Language Software Ronald L. Crepeau NCCOSC RDTE Division San Diego, CA 92152-5000 July 1999 This paper, originally written in 1995, describes self-selecting, self mutating computer programs that actually accomplish "something meaningful". It always amazes me that ID proponents can't find a precedent that been around for 12 years before spouting off and telling people who actually understand this stuff that it's impossible. Try "The Google" next time. It's really pretty useful.

IVFAN said: [.......] But hey, the numbers don't lie. BTW, the last time someone smugly pointed me to a program it was to Dawkins's el lamo weasel program, which demonstrates something any HS statistics student could probably figure out if he thought about it for 5 minutes, so I'm not expecting much.

I am just a very simple man demonstrating the lunacy of random variation/natural selection.

You’re still just being silly, I’m sorry.….a broken glass all over the floor is useless, it’s only useful if it’s in one piece or mostly together.

Flint said:

I am just a very simple man demonstrating the lunacy of random variation/natural selection.

But what you are actually doing, is demonstrating that you have no idea what you're talking about, to an audience of people who DO know what they're talking about. Imagine if a master plumber with "no education in this [engineering] stuff" trotted out on an engineering form to declare that he had "given this a lot of thought", and decided that the use of math, and the study of materials, was lunacy. Imagine if you and a few dozen engineers explained to him that engineering actually works, that it's practical, effective and proven. And imagine if the plumber simply waved that all aside, because he KNOWS BETTER. Imagine if he continues to insist that no computer program could possibly work (he's never programmed, but he KNOWS BETTER), and that only lunatics think otherwise. Would you be persuaded that your profession was based on fallacy, that your engineering knowledge was in fact foolish nonsense, and that the plumber had succeeded in "making you think" with his repeated assertions? Or would you conclude that not only does this plumber not know anything about engineering, but he isn't going to read, think or learn anything about it, ever?

BTW, the last time someone smugly pointed me to a program it was to Dawkins’s el lamo weasel program, which demonstrates something any HS statistics student could probably figure out if he thought about it for 5 minutes, so I’m not expecting much.

OK, here’s a challenge. You’re given a C program...

You’re still just being silly, I’m sorry.….a broken glass all over the floor is useless, it’s only useful if it’s in one piece or mostly together.

The original point of this thread was, of course, that Dr Dr William Dembski hadn't managed to figure it out 2 decades after Dawkins' book.....

Hadn't heard of the gentleman to tell you the truth, so I can't really talk to it. I do know it is pretty simple really. Pathetic that a program like that would be a highlight on your wiki profile! Maybe my C program adding 2 numbers will get on mine!

To be honest, I scratched my head at how he couldn't come up with better arguments, but I don't plan to do any research into whether this story is exaggerating the simplification. His opinion don't matter much to me....

I am just a very simple man demonstrating the lunacy of random variation/natural selection.

Again, I’m just trying to make people think, not win arguments.

stevaroni said: ... and a goalpost move...

stevaroni said: Newton measured. Newton got it right.

So, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, measure the probability. That’s been my point all along.

So, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, measure the probability. That’s been my point all along.

Actually, I feel more like I am going to a Star Trek forum and telling them it’s not real! Or maybe going to Mexico and telling them that UFO’s aren’t real.

So, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, measure the probability.

Oh, no. Not the "DNA is code" crap again. Didn't someone just mention the puddle of mud where a dead horse used to be?

BTW, the last time someone smugly pointed me to a program it was to Dawkins’s el lamo weasel program, which demonstrates something any HS statistics student could probably figure out if he thought about it for 5 minutes, so I’m not expecting much.

I just want people to scratch their heads a little.…..to think of the astronomical probabilities involved in randomly doing what seem like simple things (shuffle a deck of cards 100 trillion times per second for 30 billion years and you have a 1 in 850 billion trillion trillion chance of putting them in perfect order).

Again, the problem is that an engineer evaluates everything in terms of a specific predetermined goal. It either achieves THAT GOAL, or it is a failure. From an engineer's perspective, the purpose of evolution was to produce the end result we see around us. And emphatically NOT any other result. And evolution, if it occurred at all, has stopped because we ARE the end result.

Now, how likely was it that all these random variations, and all that contingent selection, would result in (ahem) ourselves? Not possible, therefore didn't happen.

I once took a "drunkard's walk" vacation where I flipped a coin at every major route intersection more than 20 miles since the last one. Did I get where I was going? An engineer would say, of course not. A biologist would say, how could I possibly help it?

Haha, the funny thing is that I think my numbers are off by a factor of 100 trillion! I could say I was testing you guys to see if you were paying attention, but in reality that's what happens when I multitask too much. Let me rerun some things and get back to it.

Did I get where I was going? An engineer would say, of course not. A biologist would say, how could I possibly help it?

OK, let's try this again. I hear what some of you are saying, so I will change this around again, but I'm sticking with the computer program example, especially since Flint insists it will eventually evolve into something useful.

This is just one example, maybe it's not a good one. Let's say we mutate with a fixed number of characters each time.....we put them after our existing code, but before the end of the program. Yes, that's too well defined for you Flint, but to tell you the truth, if we just put them randomly wherever, they'd be far less likely to do anything meaningful.

So, let's say 25 random characters out of 68 possible. 6.5 x 10^45 number of possible different combinations. Now, here is the sticky point, a SMALL number of these are meaningful, while the vast majority would do NOTHING USEFUL OR EVEN MEANINGFUL to what the user sees on the program. I'm being VERY generous here when I guess that maybe a thousand trillion (one third the order of magnitude) might be useful. I think that's WAY high. Someone talk to a mathematician and find out. So, you have a 1 in 6.5 x 10^30 chance on any one opportunity of getting a useful change. So, now, run the numbers, 100 trillion tries per second over 2 billion years.....after that you have a 1 in 1.03 chance of having ANY meaningful change (my solution is not fixed, it's ANYTHING MEANINGFUL). That's one meaningful change on just 25 characters. That last sentence is 50 characters by comparison.

So, my challenge is modified somewhat. Take my program, and do whatever you want with iterations of 25 or less characters. Each iteration must be noticeable by the user. And, here's the kicker, make something complex out of it. You may have as many iterations as you wish, and you may develop whatever kind of program you wish, but it must be complex, with the iterations building on each other.

Now, someone please take my challenge. But, yes, I know, I'll hear excuse after excuse. Numbers don't matter when we're trying to figure out if something random but complex could ever happen....

Oh, and btw, differences in hair color, tallness and shortness, etc. come from swapping around of genetic material already in place.....a completely different animal than adding new genetic material......

And I'm starting to read the thing on the program.....might take me a while as I do have a life and a job.....but it looks like it might be intriguing.

IVFAN said: Oh, and btw, differences in hair color, tallness and shortness, etc. come from swapping around of genetic material already in place.....a completely different animal than adding new genetic material......

Oh, and btw, differences in hair color, tallness and shortness, etc. come from swapping around of genetic material already in place.….a completely different animal than adding new genetic material.…..

my solution is not fixed, it’s ANYTHING MEANINGFUL

IVFAN said: Again, I'm just trying to make people think, not win arguments.

But yes, I am proud to believe in Yahweh as the 6 day Creator of the Universe, and his Son as my Savior, and I do that based on faith. I'm intellectually honest enough to say that it is faith.

But at least his religious faith is entirely consistent with his consistent refusal to make any effort to understand, his refusal to learn what he needs to know, and his consistent determination to deny, distort, ignore, and change the subject. These are classic symptoms of the faith he professes, whose followers have them mastered.

IVFAN writes... So, my challenge is modified somewhat. Take my program...

Now, someone please take my challenge. But, yes, I know, I’ll hear excuse after excuse…

Numbers don’t matter when we’re trying to figure out if something random but complex could ever happen.…

Flint said: But at least his religious faith is entirely consistent with his consistent refusal to make any effort to understand, his refusal to learn what he needs to know, and his consistent determination to deny, distort, ignore, and change the subject. These are classic symptoms of the faith he professes, whose followers have them mastered.

Flint said: And I suppose you have appointed yourself the arbiter of meaning? How do you calculate meaning? What units do you use? Really, before anyone can approach your challenge, you MUST define your terms. Give it a shot.

Meaningful = printf(... Not meaningful = bslkjn(...

OK, guys, it's clear we're at an impasse. Maybe I'll decide differently, but I doubt I'll be posting on this particular thread anymore. I'm standing firm in that the probability of some step (or at least ANY ORDERED STEP) of evolution sufficiently big for natural selection is vital to the question of if it is feasible or not, and you guys don't seem to think that it is. So be it. I will say though, I've been EXTREMELY CONSISTENT on that one.....I've jabbed here or there on a couple different points, but my main thrust has always been the same. You guys turned from being all giddy about your weasel programs to suddenly talking about all kinds of other issues when a simple variation on the weasel program was suggested (changing the probability of a "successful" mutation). And you've been all over the map. The thing that troubles me is the flame I can see under you, with all of the personal attacks. I may have called Dawkins's program lame and did jab with the coed naked thing (that was pretty funny you have to admit), but I haven't insulted anyone personally like you guys have. I'd think that you guys would appreciate my approach, would respect it, maybe would think that if I keep searching I'll eventually come to your side. That's because I'm doing what you say I should do......I'm not taking things on faith in my critique of RV/NS. You guys want me to believe....I see your arguments, and see that you are avoiding my point like an enema. So I ask it again. The numbers tell me a story that is very convincing. You don't. But you'd rather I believe you because you are the self-proclaimed experts. The LOST forum has experts too.

My faith in my God is indeed faith. My disbelief of RV/NS is not in the least bit faith, it is completely grounded in numbers.

So, I'm sure you'll crown yourselves the winners, do what you have to do....if that helps you not need that Viagra tonight with the lady, I'm glad I could help. Go on thinking what you do. But the next time you see the absolute brilliant engineering of a life form, remember that you'd shuffle the cards 100 trillion times per second for 30 billion years and have a 1 in 850 billion trillion trillion chance of getting them in perfect order. OK, let's say any "ordered pattern", let's say there are a billion trillion of those (of a deck of cards, you kidding me?), so I guess your odds have improved to one in a trillion.

Another funny thing, I've never read so much evolutionist material since the past few weeks, and interestingly I am more convinced than ever. Dawkins is famous for his weasel program, and I saw the flaw in it after about 2 minutes. I'm reading up on the other work on generating computer programs through "evolution".....it's a slow process with work and 5 kids, but given my examination of the numbers, I'm pretty confident the answer will be pretty simple. You can tell me they generated it and it works, and I can tell you I won lotto the last 5 times because I built a computer program that predicted the numbers....doesn't mean there's not some monkey business there.

OK, thanks folks, enjoyed the discussion (that may be a lie :) ). You all are in my prayers. God Bless.

stevaroni said: How do you know? "printf" may be a C command, but it is a pretty random nemonic. Probably even more so to the millions of C coders who do not speak native english, and have to memorize an entire stack of compiler directives that, to them, are not meaningful words. If I were a betting man, I'd put some money on the idea that there are probably lots of front-ends for C that use languages other than english.

Not surprising from that last post of IVFAN that he is preoccupied with anal and groin phenomena.

IVFAN said: Meaningful = printf("Coed Naked Evolution - Come Watch My Monkey Evolve!"); Not meaningful = bslkjn[vmlwkemflsmpeovcm;lsdmvcs;lmvc;sldp Not meaningful = a;erjkvnipaowerufhksdncvoa;i;dnvckvn;oi;ewri

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @P@@@@G^\QP@@H__ANH@@H__CKH@ EHG_ATG__@__\TG _^DG_PVG__J@@TUO_^FG_]UG_PAP@@NH@@HW_HKH@ ENH @@KH@ ENH@@KH@ ENH@@ KH@ ENH@@KH@ ENH@@KH@ ENH@@KH@ ENH@@P@@@@@@@UG__FW_^IO_GH__SNH@@ H__UKH@ EHG_SQO__HW_WO @@\HG_VQP@@H__XNH@@ H__ZKH@ EHG_XTG_^P@@@HG_[@@@@P@@@O___PG_^T @@@P@@@@@@@P@@@@@@@P@@@@@@@P@@@ @@@@P@@@@@@@P@@@ @@@@P@@@DW^\@@@@@

But the next time you see the absolute brilliant engineering of a life form, remember that you’d shuffle the cards 100 trillion times per second for 30 billion years and have a 1 in 850 billion trillion trillion chance of getting them in perfect order. OK, let’s say any “ordered pattern”, let’s say there are a billion trillion of those (of a deck of cards, you kidding me?), so I guess your odds have improved to one in a trillion.

Haha, the funny thing is that I think my numbers are off by a factor of 100 trillion! I could say I was testing you guys to see if you were paying attention, but in reality that’s what happens when I multitask too much.

I hear what some of you are saying, so I will change this around again, but I’m sticking with the computer program example,

OK, guys, it’s clear we’re at an impasse. Maybe I’ll decide differently, but I doubt I’ll be posting on this particular thread anymore.

I’m standing firm in that the probability of some step

...the next time you see the absolute brilliant engineering of a life form, remember that you’d shuffle the cards 100 trillion times per second for 30 billion years and have a 1 in 850 billion trillion trillion chance of getting them in perfect order.

....I’ve jabbed here or there on a couple different points, but my main thrust has always been the same.

My faith in my God is indeed faith. My disbelief of RV/NS is not in the least bit faith, it is completely grounded in numbers.

— IVFAN

I translated the Ian Musgrave / Richard Dawkin’s “Methinks it is a weasel” program into a 32-bit standalone executable using Powerbasic Command Compiler 5.0 so that anyone can run it without the need for the old and limited 16-bit Quick Basic interpreter. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD. I maintained all of the original procedural constructs (bugs and all) so you can see for yourself how Dawkins’ program is a good of example of why “evolution” cannot and will not happen.

Something of notable interest is Musgrave's program allows an alternate “target”. Instead of choosing “methinks it is a weasel”, let’s try “lazy programmers evolve”. You’ll notice that the program will run endlessly in vain searching for its target because of programmer Ian Musgrave’s fallibility. How much time would be required for evolution to eliminate this bug through “natural selection”? Certainly it shouldn’t be too complicated because all that needs to be fixed is changing “26” to “27” in the following line of code:

Char = CHR$((INT(RND * 26) + 96))

Unfortunately, when the change is made and the program is re-compiled, 30 hex numbers change as evidenced by comparing the old and new program:

fc evolution101.exe evolution101_fix.exe

The time required for these changes to happen randomly is going to be more than the age of the universe. What's more, source code is meaningless unless there is an "interpreter". Thinking that the two evolved independently and simultaneously is sheer madness. Could a simple compiler (simple compared to the human genome) such as Powerbasic 5.0 "evolve" by natural means? The “faith” of evolutionists exceeds that of any Christian I know.

I’ve already accepted Ian Musgrave’s offer to “improve” his program by writing the “Life by Chance” program included in the above download link. This program better approximates evolution’s attribute of “no goal”. Assuming that a protein indeed formed by chance in a primordial soup (or a substrate), how long did it take? This first step is a big leap indeed since the mechanisms of “evolution” are not applicable to non-living things and we must rely on pure chance. Maybe life will form by chance if we get millions of people running the program simultaneously. Good luck!

Alan Clarke said: Assuming that a protein indeed formed by chance in a primordial soup (or a substrate), how long did it take? This first step is a big leap indeed since the mechanisms of “evolution” are not applicable to non-living things and we must rely on pure chance. Maybe life will form by chance if we get millions of people running the program simultaneously. Good luck!

The time required for these changes to happen randomly is going to be more than the age of the universe. What's more, source code is meaningless unless there is an "interpreter". Thinking that the two evolved independently and simultaneously is sheer madness. Could a simple compiler (simple compared to the human genome) such as Powerbasic 5.0 "evolve" by natural means? The “faith” of evolutionists exceeds that of any Christian I know.

They evolve in parallel. The first generation of “interpreter” was simply the unguided laws of chemistry and physical chemistry.

Alan Clarke said:

They evolve in parallel. The first generation of “interpreter” was simply the unguided laws of chemistry and physical chemistry.

Thus far, all my observations have led me to conclude that no law exists without a law-giver. If aliens hovered 10,000 feet above the Earth and wondered why cars traveling on interstate highways seldom exceeded 65 mph and traveled in opposite directions on opposite sides of the median, then they would be lost in their interpretation if they limited themselves to Newton's laws. If through their pride, they rejected any interpretation that alluded to a higher being than themselves, they would be equally lost. Thus, your description of "unguided" laws of chemistry and physical chemistry reeks of the same. Or perhaps you do attribute a "creator" of those laws. Or do you think they simply "popped" into being at some convenient point in time? More than once I've heard materialists (Greek philosophy) describe the beautiful order of ocean beaches or crystals apart from the laws that give rise to the seeming "order". Whether the laws be man-made or God-made, the beautiful order would cease as soon as the enforcement of those laws ceased.

Assuming that a protein indeed formed by chance in a primordial soup (or a substrate), how long did it take? This first step is a big leap indeed since the mechanisms of “evolution” are not applicable to non-living things and we must rely on pure chance.

You’ll notice that the program will run endlessly in vain searching for its target because of programmer Ian Musgrave’s fallibility. How much time would be required for evolution to eliminate this bug through “natural selection”?

Thus far, all my observations have led me to conclude that no law exists without a law-giver.

stevaroni said: Am I wrong, Alan? If so, please enlighten me, but please, only fact, no conjecture or personal incredulity.

You can wait patiently until the sun goes nova, but you will NEVER hear one single fact from Alan Clarke.

Alan Clarke said: Thus far, all my observations have led me to conclude blah, blah, blah.

Guys, please, stay on topic and ignore the troll. I'm going to send all future off topic stuff to the bathroom wall.

Cheers! Ian

phantomreader42 said: And now he's babbling about the need for enforcement of the laws of chemistry, presumably by punishing uppity atoms.

phantomreader42 said: Here's a hint, these laws are not statues requiring enforcement but descritions of how things actually behave in the real world, determined through observation. But then the very idea of observing reality is utterly alien to you.

phantomreader42 said: So, you believe that chemistry operates as it does because your imaginary god punishes molecules that do not behave according to his rules?

Here's an Ada (2005) version of Dawkins' weasel program:

http://home.earthlink.net/~matthewjheaney/weasel.adb

It converges relatively quickly, usually in fewer than 100 generations.

Alan Clarke said: Who is more “scientific”? 1. Theists who consider natural causes. 2. Atheists who consider ONLY natural causes. So, to answer your question, I believe that chemistry operates as it does because of physical laws.

Alan Clarke said: My question was, "Or do you think they [laws] simply 'popped' into being at some convenient point in time?" Most scientists try to determine the source for every phenomenon but in your case, 1) the pursuit of the origin of laws is either distasteful, 2) you have unwittingly avoided the question, or 3) you believe physical laws are eternal and questioning their origin is "not scientific".

Alan Clarke said: Who is more “scientific”? 1. Theists who consider natural causes. 2. Atheists who consider ONLY natural causes.

Alan Clarke said: So, to answer your question, I believe that chemistry operates as it does because of physical laws.

Hey Guys, remember what I said about being on topic? Last warning.

Rogue74656 said: I have been kicking around an idea for the past few weeks based on Dawkins' weasel program. Rather than have a pre-defined endpoint (as the weasel program does and evolution doesn't) I developed this idea. 1) Start with a 400 x 600 pixel square with each pixel randomly turned on or off. 2) Three offspring are generated with random mutations (pixels changed) 3) The program posts the four "pictures" on a webpage 4) The next user to go there picks one of the four 5) The selected "picture" is used to return to #2 I think it would be interesting to see if a recognizable picture would develop from the selection process....

Regardless of the correctness of the arguments against Dembski, Ian Musgrave knows that Dawkins' "Methinks it is like a weasel" algorithm is completely worthless to explain the creative powers of NS.

Yes, I know and Ian points out that Dawkins' never intended to model NS; only to demonstrate the power of a selective process.

So what's the big deal with this algorithm? It doesn't model a selective process that is based on actual function (only on template matching to a pre-established sequence). Since NS is based on selection of beneficial functional differences, what's the point?

The big problem for the mechanism of RM/NS is that the NS part of this mechanism simply doesn't work at all until purely RMs end up finding a new beneficial sequence in sequence space.

This wouldn't be much of a problem except for the fact that the odds of finding new beneficial sequences depends upon the level of functional complexity under consideration. As it turns out, the odds of success decrease, exponentially, as the minimum structural threshold requirements qualitatively novel systems increase in a linear manner.

In other words, if one considers systems that require at least 1000aa with a particular minimum degree of required specificity of arrangement (fsaars), the odds of any type of random mutation discovering any such system within sequence space are exponentially reduced relative to the discovery of a system with a minimum structural threshold of 500 fsaars.

Very quickly, the average time need to achieve the next step up the ladder of functional complexity via RM/NS turns into trillions upon trillions of years (well shy of the 1000 fsaar level).

Sean Pitman

www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean,

The program is a demonstration of the power of cumulative selection. The point is that selection doesn't have to start from scratch every time. Gene duplications provide copies free from functional constraint that can evolve slightly different functions. Even random sequences can mutate to just about anything given enough time. And don't forget that this is happening to trillions of copies in millions of individuals as well.

www.DetectingDesign.com

Yea, hows that working put for you?

In an interview performed at the beginning of last April, Richard Dawkins was asked about his well-known "weasel program", which he described in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER:

IN: Professor Dawkins, your so-called "weasel program" has become a well-known prop of evolutionary science -- even a "paradigm" if that's not too pretentious.
Was the success of the weasel program a surprise?

RD: Well, yes and no. I never thought it was more than a casual exercise, an interesting simple toy to illustrate the power of selection over the silly "random assembly" models favored by critics of evolution. It was easy to write, easy to understand, and fun to play with. I am a bit flattered that it has proven so enduring, which in itself it would hardly seem to merit.

IN: Well, you're saying it was a surprise, but you hinted that it wasn't. What do you mean?

RD: There was a devious agenda behind it. When I was writing the program I honestly wondered if I should say anything about it. After all, it's a very simple and limited example, as I made clear IN THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. However, I was watching it in operation and had a sly idea: This program is so simple and attention-getting that the critics will be irresistibly drawn to it, like moths to a flame, and will expend enormous amounts of futile effort trying to attack it.

IN: Professor Dawkins, you're saying you wrote this as a ... PRANK?

RD: I was sincere in writing the program, it's perfectly straightforward in itself. But I felt that it might be amusing to see what contortions critics could tie themselves into in their attempts to discredit it. It would be about as silly as trying to use a paper airplane to criticise the design of a 747 jetliner, for example.

IN: That was very devious.

RD: Well, you do know the old saying about "enough rope", don't you? I must admit that I am surprised that such a small length of rope has proven so effective. I still find it hard to believe that people could be so focused on a toy example program, as if by criticising it they could overthrow 150 years of serious research in evolutionary science. It is fascinating to see how such a minor effort on my part has provoked such huge volumes of amusing gibberish from the critics.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: The big problem for the mechanism of RM/NS is that the NS part of this mechanism simply doesn't work at all until purely RMs end up finding a new beneficial sequence in sequence space. This wouldn't be much of a problem except for the fact that the odds of finding new beneficial sequences depends upon the level of functional complexity under consideration. As it turns out, the odds of success decrease, exponentially, as the minimum structural threshold requirements qualitatively novel systems increase in a linear manner. In other words, if one considers systems that require at least 1000aa with a particular minimum degree of required specificity of arrangement (fsaars), the odds of any type of random mutation discovering any such system within sequence space are exponentially reduced relative to the discovery of a system with a minimum structural threshold of 500 fsaars. Very quickly, the average time need to achieve the next step up the ladder of functional complexity via RM/NS turns into trillions upon trillions of years (well shy of the 1000 fsaar level). Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

That awful sound you hear is the trillions of individuals of the nylon-eating strain of Flavobacteria, horribly disappointed to find out that they couldn't possibly have evolved the ability to digest nylonase, because some quack MD says it's just too improbable. They've all just realized that they haven't had a thing to eat since 1935, and boy are they cranky.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Regardless of the correctness of the arguments against Dembski, Ian Musgrave knows that Dawkins' "Methinks it is like a weasel" algorithm is completely worthless to explain the creative powers of NS.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: So what's the big deal with this algorithm? It doesn't model a selective process that is based on actual function (only on template matching to a pre-established sequence). Since NS is based on selection of beneficial functional differences, what's the point?

In other words, if one considers systems that require at least 1000aa with a particular minimum degree of required specificity of arrangement (fsaars), the odds of any type of random mutation discovering any such system within sequence space are exponentially reduced relative to the discovery of a system with a minimum structural threshold of 500 fsaars.

Ian Musgrave said: This is rubbish, as you well know Sean. We've gone over this several times in detail. You well know that most protein systems are much smaller than 500 aa's in the first pace, although you keep on trying to conflate aggregates of smaller systems as one big system, and you keep on ignoring the real evidence of these systems evolving.

It is fascinating to see how such a minor effort on my part has provoked such huge volumes of amusing gibberish from the critics.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: So what’s the big deal with this algorithm? It doesn’t model a selective process that is based on actual function (only on template matching to a pre-established sequence). Since NS is based on selection of beneficial functional differences, what’s the point?

The point is that it is a simple, clear demonstration of the role of selection that gets the point across quite graphically.

In other words, if one considers systems that require at least 1000aa with a particular minimum degree of required specificity of arrangement (fsaars), the odds of any type of random mutation discovering any such system within sequence space are exponentially reduced relative to the discovery of a system with a minimum structural threshold of 500 fsaars.

This is rubbish, as you well know Sean. We’ve gone over this several times in detail. You well know that most protein systems are much smaller than 500 aa’s in the first pace, although you keep on trying to conflate aggregates of smaller systems as one big system, and you keep on ignoring the real evidence of these systems evolving.

Well, I guess that wraps it up for evolution. Clearly that A to T mutation in the beta globin gene can't have happened, can it. That's really a shame for those in the malaria-endemic region. Your Nobel's in the mail, Doctor(like anyone cares about titles here). (Cue 'microevolution' canard in 3...2...1...)

Dan said:

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Regardless of the correctness of the arguments against Dembski, Ian Musgrave knows that Dawkins' "Methinks it is like a weasel" algorithm is completely worthless to explain the creative powers of NS.

Dawkins knows it too, and raised this point right there after he introduced the Weasel program in "Blind Watchmaker", 23 years ago. He wrote another program -- Biomorphs -- that does simulate the creative powers of natural selection. I'm sorry to see that you missed this back in 1986. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986

ben said: That awful sound you hear is the trillions of individuals of the nylon-eating strain of Flavobacteria, horribly disappointed to find out that they couldn't possibly have evolved the ability to digest nylonase, because some quack MD says it's just too improbable. They've all just realized that they haven't had a thing to eat since 1935, and boy are they cranky.

Stanton said: The regulars at Pharyngula have also gone over Sean's crackpot nonsense several times in detail, too. Sean, in turn, demonstrates he's immune to reason and evidence, refuses to understand that SETI and forensics do not operate like Intelligent Design Theory, and has made himself to be a fool given as how he's the only person there to be wowed senseless by his refutation of evolution solely through his MD, stubborn ignorance and imaginary units he made up.

Oh, dear.

Number-juggling, incredulity, and "you don't know everything, therefore God".

I was really hoping for something more original.

Shrug.

A cat can't give birth to a dog. Therefore God.

"We're closed."

And you keep ignoring that we keep telling you that SETI researchers do not do science the way that Intelligent Design proponents claim, in that SETI researchers have an idea of what they're searching for (i.e., stars that support Earth-like planets old enough to hold sentient life), whereas Intelligent Design proponents, in stark contrast, conflate searching with appealing to ignorance as evidence for God/Intelligent Designer.

That, and why haven't you submitted any research papers to peer-review? Why haven't you written a scientific report describing how SETI is actually a branch of Intelligent Design Theory?

fnxtr said: Oh, dear. Number-juggling, incredulity, and "you don't know everything, therefore God". I was really hoping for something more original. Shrug.

fnxtr said: A cat can't give birth to a dog. Therefore God. "We're closed."

Stanton said: And you keep ignoring that we keep telling you that SETI researchers do not do science the way that Intelligent Design proponents claim, in that SETI researchers have an idea of what they're searching for (i.e., stars that support Earth-like planets old enough to hold sentient life), whereas Intelligent Design proponents, in stark contrast, conflate searching with appealing to ignorance as evidence for God/Intelligent Designer. That, and why haven't you submitted any research papers to peer-review? Why haven't you written a scientific report describing how SETI is actually a branch of Intelligent Design Theory?

Sean Pitman, M.D. said:

fnxtr said: A cat can't give birth to a dog. Therefore God. "We're closed."

LOL - since when is a very simple 1000aa system remotely comparable to either a cat or a dog? The RM/NS mechanism stalls out on very very low levels of functional complexity - what are the odds? ; ) You have no idea... Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

Stanton said: Well, there are his "fsaar" units, whatever the hell that stands for. He once mentioned it stood for "fairy something," but all he does is wave them around like his MD, without actually explaining what they stand for, beyond for his refusal to accept the evidence in favor of evolution occurring in the natural world.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: That's it. But isn't this a "god of the gaps" argument? Yes, it is - as are all scientific hypotheses regarding the detection of intelligent design behind any type of phenomenon (to include forensics, anthropology, and SETI). Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

Stanton said: And we are also aware that you're essentially copying and pasting your exact same arguments you presented at Pharyngula: the same ones that all of the posters there thrashed to pieces.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Why not actually try to consider the argument instead of resorting to the usual worthless pejoratives? Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: It is easy to baldly claim victory. It is quite another thing to back up that claim...

Stanton said: So explain to us why there is so much research done and published in forensics, anthropology, archaeology, and SETI, yet literally nothing to show for Intelligent Design? What lab work have you been able to use your fsaaar units on?

Stanton said:

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Why not actually try to consider the argument instead of resorting to the usual worthless pejoratives? Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

I'll consider from refraining from the well-earned pejoratives when you demonstrate that you've done lab work and or submitting peer review material validating your use of fsaar units to disprove evolution.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said:

Stanton said: So explain to us why there is so much research done and published in forensics, anthropology, archaeology, and SETI, yet literally nothing to show for Intelligent Design? What lab work have you been able to use your fsaaar units on?

What "lab work" are SETI scientists doing? All they are doing is showing more and more conclusively that their radio signals are well outside of the known range of mindless forces of nature - that's it. The rest of the time they are simply looking for such signals coming from outer space.

I'm doing the same thing. Humans can and do produce levels of biosystem complexity beyond the 1000 fsaar threshold level. Humans also produce proprietary sequence tags in DNA that are also clearly the result of ID - based strictly on evaluation of the DNA sequence itself. Such tags and such higher-level functional systems are both well beyond any known non-deliberate force of natural production, while being well within at least human-level intelligent production. Most obvious conclusion? - according to SETI logic?

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: I'm just asking a very simple question. If you can't answer it or even evaluate it with reasonable consideration, move on. Advising me to publish before you can grasp or evaluate an idea is simply not helpful to me or to anyone else.

Stanton said: So in other words, you don't do any lab work and you don't have any drive to experimentally test your navel contemplations, let alone submit anything to peer review.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said:

Stanton said: So in other words, you don't do any lab work and you don't have any drive to experimentally test your navel contemplations, let alone submit anything to peer review.

Can you answer the simple question or not? The lab work is being done every day. The information is already available. The "signal" is in. While it is not a radio signal, it is a signal. All that is left for you to do is to evaluate it for yourself. Can you do that for yourself? Or, do you need peer review to tell you what to think? Would you need peer review to tell you how to interpret the origin of a highly symmetrical polished granite cube? Really? Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Can you answer the simple question or not? The lab work is being done every day.

The information is already available. The "signal" is in. While it is not a radio signal, it is a signal. All that is left for you to do is to evaluate it for yourself.

Can you do that for yourself? Or, do you need peer review to tell you what to think?

Would you need peer review to tell you how to interpret the origin of a highly symmetrical polished granite cube? Really?

Rilke's granddaughter said: In other words, you have done no actual work on your conjecture, and must resort to insult and denigration to avoid dealing with your lack of actual supporting evidence. This makes you both dishonest and hypocritical.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said:

Dan said:

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Regardless of the correctness of the arguments against Dembski, Ian Musgrave knows that Dawkins' "Methinks it is like a weasel" algorithm is completely worthless to explain the creative powers of NS.

Dawkins knows it too, and raised this point right there after he introduced the Weasel program in "Blind Watchmaker", 23 years ago. He wrote another program -- Biomorphs -- that does simulate the creative powers of natural selection. I'm sorry to see that you missed this back in 1986. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986

Biomorphs does no such thing. The biomorphs are not functionally selected. They are selected based only on the subjective desire of the selector regardless of "function". Each mutation results in a minor change in the pattern which goes toward or away from the selector's desired result. Obviously, such a process would quickly go in any direction one wishes. Try doing this same thing with a computer program where the underlying code is randomly mutated, but the functional expression of that code is the only thing observed. Try to evolve from something functional, like a calculator software program, to something else that has a qualitatively unique function, like a Chess Master program (while not being able to see the underlying random mutations to the lines of code - which include individual character mutations). Such a function-based scenario will quickly stall out at very low levels of functional complexity. This is why software programmers aren't likely to be out of a job any time soon. Sean Pitman www.DetectingDesign.com

Dan said: If he wants a program that both explains the creative powers of natural selection AND shows functional selection, the choice would be Redcode.

Stanton said:

Rilke's granddaughter said: In other words, you have done no actual work on your conjecture, and must resort to insult and denigration to avoid dealing with your lack of actual supporting evidence. This makes you both dishonest and hypocritical.

And then there's the fact that, back at Pharyngula, he had to be repeatedly reminded that quoting without attribution is dishonest, and destroys credibility among scholars and scientists.

Given Pitman's repetitive use of vague terminology (fsaar's are, despite his claims, arbitrary gobbledegook) is a definite sign of a crank; someone without any actual theory, experimental results, and pretty much on a par with Larry Fafarman or John Kwok.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: Care to list any particular post or reference that showed any example of evolution via RM/NS producing any qualitatively novel system of function that required at least 1000aa with a fair degree of specificity? - care to list even one example? - just one?

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: I've defined fsaars for you many times as "fairly specified amino acid residues" with a further very detailed description of the importance of this concept to the potential and limitations of RM/NS at: http://www.detectingdesign.com/flagellum.html#specified

Ian Musgrave said: All "fsaars" are is a bit of fancy foot work to conceal the fact that for the majority of proteins, you can substitute different amino acids freely through large parts of the molecule.

Rilke's granddaughter said: Given Pitman's repetitive use of vague terminology (fsaar's are, despite his claims, arbitrary gobbledegook) is a definite sign of a crank; someone without any actual theory, experimental results, and pretty much on a par with [etc].

After reading through the 'doctor's' work here and on Pharyngula, I've concluded from the evidence that the fsaar is actually a type of UPMMS, aka uniquely personal manhood measuring system. It allows the 'doctor' to stand sideways in front of a mirror, stroke his turgidity and say to himself: "Not many guys out there can sport a 12-fsaar rod!"

Dan said: Pitman asks for an algorithm "to explain the creative powers of NS [natural selection]". I supply him with one, in Biomorphs. He then makes a totally new objection: that in Bomorphs the entities are not "functionally selected". The fact that this is a completely new objection -- moving the goal posts -- shows that he agrees that Biomorphs "explain the creative powers of natural selection". If he wants a program that both explains the creative powers of natural selection AND shows functional selection, the choice would be Redcode.

Ian Musgrave said:

Sean Pitman, M.D. said: I've defined fsaars for you many times as "fairly specified amino acid residues" with a further very detailed description of the importance of this concept to the potential and limitations of RM/NS at: http://www.detectingdesign.com/flagellum.html#specified

All "fsaars" are is a bit of fancy foot work to conceal the fact that for the majority of proteins, you can substitute different amino acids freely through large parts of the molecule.

Even then, this measure makes the influenza basic protein the most 'designed" and unevolvable of all the proteins in your Table 1 list (actually, it doesn't mean what they think it means, comparing thousands of local isolates of the avian flu virus is not going to give you the measure you want, this is double cluelessness).

There is no evidence that any of these measures actually maps to a route through sequence space a protein must take to get a new function/binding partner.

An enzyme may have a lot of "required" sequences for its old function and only one to convert it to a new function (think malonate isomerase into a reductive dehalogenase, or the one amino acid change to covert bacterial TIMB into a functional part of the mitochondrial protein import apparatus).

And the 1000 aa thing of yours is made up out of thin air. Look at the bacterial flagellum. You can delete whole chunks of the thing without affecting function.

The flagellum is made up of mostly small subunits (although some subunit variants can be quite large, there's lots of rather small ones), most of which are minor copy versions of each other. I've done the conservation mapping of the flagellar core proteins, and there is nothing like 1000 aa's which must be in place for function (and again, as most of these proteins are duplicates of each other, you get a lot of the interaction site for free).

Oh yes Sean. You need to update your flagellum essay, most of Nick Matzke's predictions have come true in a big way.

Sean Pitman, M.D. said:

Ian Musgrave said: Even then, this measure makes the influenza basic protein the most 'designed" and unevolvable of all the proteins in your Table 1 list (actually, it doesn't mean what they think it means, comparing thousands of local isolates of the avian flu virus is not going to give you the measure you want, this is double cluelessness).

What does this have to do with the concept that every type of beneficially functional system does in fact have flexibility limitations? You know this is true. So, what's your point?

Sean Pitman, M.D. said:

Ian Musgrave said: There is no evidence that any of these measures actually maps to a route through sequence space a protein must take to get a new function/binding partner.

That's correct. There are many many different possible routes that could be taken. That's part of the problem. There are so many different routes that the shortest possible route is very very unlikely to be chosen.

For example, say the shortest distance to success is 10 particular mutational changes. The odds that these 10 particular changes will be realized in a row are extremely remote. This is why the likely number of mutations needed to achieve success grows exponentially as the minimum distance between targets increases linearly.

Hey man, can you post the Game of Life on your website or just email it to me so I can download it? Thanks so much.

Derrek Moore
strikemaker@bellsouth.net

The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters.

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

Err, ource is obviously supposed to be source.

Mike Elzinga said:

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters.

Then something is wrong with your program. I have written one for an HP 50 graphing calculator. Since the program can eat up batteries, I decided to allow variation of the string length, numbers of offspring, as well as the ability to turn on various amounts of “latching.” The program works exactly as it is supposed to.

I'm never been sure why the Weasel Program is though to be either controversial or difficult. (Conversely, I'm not sure that it is highly significant either.)

As a mere humanities graduate, I knocked up an Excel macro which does the job in under 10 minutes this morning. With 100 offspring per generation, and a 5% chance of a character mutating, it converges consistently in under 600 generations.

If anyone cares, the inputs for the VBA macro below are a source string (or "" if you want to generate a random starting point), the number of offspring per generation, the number of generations you want it to run through, and a mutation rate for any one character to be randomly changed. It will return either the 'fittest' offspring at the end of the run, or the number of generations taken to reach the intended destination.

(To repeat: I am a humanities person, so disclaim any good programming techniques, and it is difficult to get the right 'layout' for a macro in this forum!)

Function weasel(ByVal seed As String, ByVal kids As Integer, ByVal generations As Integer, ByVal mutrate As Single) As String

Dim n As Integer, i As Integer, r As Integer, p As Integer, offspring As String, b As Integer, survivor As String, c As Integer

Randomize Timer

n = generations

If seed = "" Then

For i = 1 To 28

r = Int(Rnd * 27)

seed = seed & IIf(r = 26, " ", Chr(r + Asc("A")))

Next

End If

While generations > 0 And b < 28

generations = generations - 1

b = 0

For i = 1 To kids

c = 0: offspring = ""

For p = 1 To 28

r = Int(Rnd * 27)

offspring = offspring & IIf(Rnd > mutrate, Mid(seed, p, 1), IIf(r = 26, " ", Chr(r + Asc("A"))))

If Right(offspring, 1) = Mid("METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL", p, 1) Then c = c + 1

Next

If c > b Then b = c: survivor = offspring

Next

Wend

weasel = IIf(b = 28, Str(n - generations), survivor)

End Function

Intelligent Designer said: The Interactive Weasel Program has a checkbox to allowing matching characters to be locked-in. If that box is checked the program will converge. Also I don't allow the parent to be a choice because that approximates locking. The best choice can only come from offspring.

eddie, your program allows the parent to be a choice so it approximates locking-in matches.

At the bottom of my blog entry there is a link to the source code.

Intelligent Designer said: eddie, your program allows the parent to be a choice so it approximates locking-in matches.

eddie said: Firstly, the parent is only a choice if (by chance) the string is replicated without mutation. It is not a choice otherwise. Therefore, there is no 'locking' only a failure to mutate.

Mike Elzinga said: Technically you don’t want the parent as a choice; but it is not unrealistic because the parent could be one of those that lost its entire set of offspring and gets another chance to produce another batch. All this does is rerun that particular loop again and make the program run longer and count up more generations. It doesn’t substantially change the convergence process.

eddie said: Firstly, the parent is only a choice if (by chance) the string is replicated without mutation. It is not a choice otherwise. Therefore, there is no ‘locking’ only a failure to mutate.

eddie said: I should have said: The parent is never a choice, only a clone of the parent through an unmutated copy which arose only by the same chance as a muated copy. (I have no idea if that makes sense.) My program does not allow the parent itself to be selected for the next generation. Intelligent Designer is wrong on that account. p.s. My macro has no problems coverging on 80 characters in a reasonable time.

I also inspected Ian Musgrave's code. He doesn't allow locking but there are two problems:

1) The maximum input is 40 characters

2) He mutates one and only one character per offspring. This is not the same as giving each character a 5% chance of mutation.

Intelligent Designer said: I also inspected Ian Musgrave's code. He doesn't allow locking but there are two problems: 1) The maximum input is 40 characters 2) He mutates one and only one character per offspring. This is not the same as giving each character a 5% chance of mutation.

Yes I am absolutely sure. One character is selected at random to change for each child string. If you were to give each character a 5% chance to change some children would be unchanged and some would have multiple changes.

I should point out that (2) is not a grave error. It's just not according to what I thought was the specification. I don't think it affects the convergence rate much. Eddies's mistake of allowing the parent to be chosen does have a big impact on the convergence rate.

The biggest problem with Ian's program is that it limits input to 40 characters.

So, Mr Intelligent Designer, how about that source code?

Hi Jesse,

Did you have a chance to try out the program? The source code can be downloaded from:

http://www.prtracker.com/blog/WeaselProgram/InteractiveWeaselProgram.zip

The software was written using Visual Studio 2010 in C#. Most of the source code is for presentation. The code for the actual algorithm is in Evolver.cs and you can view it using any text editor if you don't have Visual Studio 2010.

I need the moonlight (GPL version of silverlight) plugin and >=v2.0 is not in the portage tree. Once I figure out what's wrong with my custom ebuild or find an overlay that has >=2.0 in it, I'll look at it.

Intelligent Designer said: The biggest problem with Ian's program is that it limits input to 40 characters.

Increasing the size of the target string illustrates the limitations of natural selection.

With 100 offspring per generation I ran the program overnight and generated over 22 million generations with no convergence.

I changed the number of offspring to 1000 and the program was able to converge on the 80 character target string in less that 5 seconds (242 generations).

I increased the target string length to 125 using 1000 offspring and it looks like it won't converge.

Intelligent Designer said: Increasing the size of the target string illustrates the limitations of natural selection. With 100 offspring per generation I ran the program overnight and generated over 22 million generations with no convergence. I changed the number of offspring to 1000 and the program was able to converge on the 80 character target string in less that 5 seconds (242 generations). I increased the target string length to 125 using 1000 offspring and it looks like it won't converge.

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

I just got done reading some of the weasel algorithms posted at

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm#C

The code posted for languages C, D and E made the same mistake that Eddie did.

At this moment I am still running the Interactive Weasel Program with 1000 offspring and trying to converge on a 125 character string. 120,000+ generations have gone by so far and still no convergence.

Ian,

Your algorithm does not match the specifications for a weasel program because it does not conform to the 5% mutation rate. Your algorithm always mutates one and only one character in a child string. So by increaing the target string size to 80 you inadvertantly lowered the mutation rate to 1.25%.

Ian Musgrave said: Forget obsessing with the Weasel, go study some real simulations of natural selection instead.

Intelligent Designer said: Ian, Your algorithm does not match the specifications for a weasel program because it does not conform to the 5% mutation rate. Your algorithm always mutates one and only one character in a child string. So by increaing the target string size to 80 you inadvertantly lowered the mutation rate to 1.25%.

Intelligent Designer said:

Ian Musgrave said: Forget obsessing with the Weasel, go study some real simulations of natural selection instead.

Ian, I am just comming down to your level. I have already written a much more advanced program that simulates natural selection.

Intelligent Designer said:

Ian Musgrave said: Forget obsessing with the Weasel, go study some real simulations of natural selection instead.

Ian, I am just comming down to your level. I have already written a much more advanced program that simulates natural selection. See Genomicron.

Intelligent Designer said: Ian, Your algorithm does not match the specifications for a weasel program because it does not conform to the 5% mutation rate. Your algorithm always mutates one and only one character in a child string. So by increaing the target string size to 80 you inadvertantly lowered the mutation rate to 1.25%.

Intelligent Designer said:

Ian Musgrave said: Forget obsessing with the Weasel, go study some real simulations of natural selection instead.

Ian, I am just comming down to your level. I have already written a much more advanced program that simulates natural selection. See Genomicron.

Mike,
I am here not to taunt people. I am here because I enjoy debate. It's just no fun to hangout with a bunch of ditto heads. Some (not you) have been condesending. I just returned the favor to Ian.

I am at work right now and about to go out to lunch. After work I'd like to address some of the points you made.

Ian,
I did not lie about Genomicron on Pharyngula. I made a joke at PZs expense just like others on the same thread did to me. PZ chose to interprete it as a lie. I don't mind if others play rough. Playing rough is the norm for New Angry Atheists. However, they shouldn't cry if I play rough back. So you I will play rough with; Mike I will address as an intellectual and treat with respect; and I will ignore phantomreader42 because phantomreader42 is a dumb shit. Is that ok with you? If you don't want me here just say so and I will respect that. I could easily get around PZ's filter but I have chosen not to except on one occassion (aka Sock Puppet).

Stanton,
I am not trying to disprove natural selection. I am simply pointing out its limitations. I am aware that natural selection plays an important part in nature.

Your friend Randy (aka Intelligent Designer)

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, I am here not to taunt people. I am here because I enjoy debate. It's just no fun to hangout with a bunch of ditto heads. Some (not you) have been condesending. I just returned the favor to Ian. I am at work right now and about to go out to lunch. After work I'd like to address some of the points you made. Ian, I did not lie about Genomicron on Pharyngula. I made a joke at PZs expense just like others on the same thread did to me. PZ chose to interprete it as a lie. I don't mind if others play rough. Playing rough is the norm for New Angry Atheists. However, they shouldn't cry if I play rough back. So you I will play rough with; Mike I will address as an intellectual and treat with respect; and I will ignore phantomreader42 because phantomreader42 is a dumb shit. Is that ok with you? If you don't want me here just say so and I will respect that. I could easily get around PZ's filter but I have chosen not to except on one occassion (aka Sock Puppet). Stanton, I am not trying to disprove natural selection. I am simply pointing out its limitations. I am aware that natural selection plays an important part in nature. Your friend Randy (aka Intelligent Designer)

No, Randy, I do believe you take perverse pleasure at taunting people (And this is an observation from someone who has also reaped PZ's ire over at his blog. A distinction I don't mind and haven't cared less for. Too bad he isn't willing to bestow similar honors on someone who "joked" about raping and killing two prominent Discover Magazine science bloggers in a comment that was posted while PZ was far, far away in Australia attending an atheist convention. Incidentally, I am an "accomodationist" Deist who does recognize that PZ is capable of making some very legitimate points about delusional creo fools like yourself.).

John, are you trying to score brownie points? I will also be ignoring you.

Mike Elzinga said: One way to put in the variation in “latching” or equivalently the well depth is to allow “unlatching” with a specified probability. In other words, once a position is matched, you can specify a probability it will change.

In nature, natural selection has neither an actual specified target nor does it have to come up with some "perfect" result. It only needs something that works. That greatly expands the number of viable solutions. It's like saying that not only is "MI THINKS IT?S A WEASEL" is acceptable because it's close enough, but so will "ME NNOWS IT'S A MUNKEY" and even something like "ROBART PUNCHDD BILL IN THE TISTICLES" might work too.

Wow, that grammar was bad. Anyway, I hope you liked my explanation of the human back, knee and many other parts that a semi-competent engineer could have done a whole helluva lot better.

It's like Robert Heinlein's story of the chimpanzee in the psychology experiment. The researchers were trying to find out which of the four ways they had provided that it would use to get to the banana, and were hoping that the solution it adopted would tell them something about its mental processes.

The chimp found a fifth way that they hadn't thought of.

Evolution is like that. It'll find a way, and most likely one you'd never think of. In the case of evolution, this is because it isn't thinking. It's just doing it.

Dave Luckett said: It's like Robert Heinlein's story of the chimpanzee in the psychology experiment. The researchers were trying to find out which of the four ways they had provided that it would use to get to the banana, and were hoping that the solution it adopted would tell them something about its mental processes. The chimp found a fifth way that they hadn't thought of. Evolution is like that. It'll find a way, and most likely one you'd never think of. In the case of evolution, this is because it isn't thinking. It's just doing it.

Now, the program I’ve written [4] is written to be as close as possible to Dawkins original as described in the book in terms of how it works

Look, the Weasel is a toy program ...

Intelligent Designer said: I have reviewed the code of 8 weasel programs. I detected errors in five of them. That’s not a very good track record for you guys. The error that Eddie made was subtle. A professional developer could make that kind of mistake. Three other weasel programs that I reviewed made the same error. This error causes an approximation to a locking algorithm Ian, the blunder you made was unique. Yet you claim ...

Now, the program I’ve written [4] is written to be as close as possible to Dawkins original as described in the book in terms of how it works

That's funny. You are the only one that didn't apply a specified mutation rate. How many years have gone by and you still didn't discover your error (I am playing rough). As I recall, over on Pharyngula, Alan Clark also pointed out another error in your program that caused it not to converge.

Look, the Weasel is a toy program ...

Yet you still couldn't get it right. Your program makes the mutation rate inversley proportional to the target string length. So a target string of 28 has a mutation rate of about 3.6 percent. Considering that this mistake also guarantees that every child string will mutate, and that makes your algorithm converge slower, it puts your algorithm kind of close to 5% for a 28 character string. But for a 1000 character string your mutation rate is only 0.1 percent. Hence, your code also inadvertently approximates a locking algorithm. Strangely, the error you made is interesting. It shows that by lowering the mutation rate you can use selection to converge on a longer string. I was already aware of that and such experiments can easily be performed using the Interactive Weasel Program (no code change or recompiling necessary). This fact has biological implications. It implies that in order to evolve a life form using random mutation and natural selection, the mutation rate has to be really really really low. So evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't happen on an island to lizards over the course of 50 years like PZ claims in his blog. The selection process had to have been applied to pre-existing information.

Randy -

There's this study that was published a few years ago which showed that a mosquito species diverged from its above ground ancestors in the London Underground subway within the past hundred or so years:

http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v82/n1/full/6884120a.html

It changed its dietary preference from birds to humans, and it seems as though it is undergoing diversification since there are distinctive populations for three of the subway lines.

Since I haven't seen PZ's original reference, I can't comment substantially, but, given sufficient population size, reproductive isolation (including many relatively short generations of breeding populations) and selective pressures, it could be possible to see speciation within fifty years.

So having now resolved this, am eagerly awaiting your most astute analysis via computer simulation of that holy of holies, Bill Dembski's Explanatory Filter. Surely you, as one of his highly skilled computer science acolytes, can "prove" that it isn't some merely useless statistical exercise demonstrating only its Panglossian nature.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, selection lowers the probability that a change to a matched character will propagate to the next generation all by itself. Without realizing it, you have acknowleged that selection is no match for random mutation so you modified your algorithm to help matched characters by making it less likely for them to mutate. Hence, your modification to the weasel aglgorithm let's you closely approximate a locking algorithm.

Intelligent Designer said: [snip] Ian, the blunder you made was unique. Yet you claim ...

Now, the program I’ve written [4] is written to be as close as possible to Dawkins original as described in the book in terms of how it works

That's funny. You are the only one that didn't apply a specified mutation rate. How many years have gone by and you still didn't discover your error (I am playing rough).

As I recall, over on Pharyngula, Alan Clark also pointed out another error in your program that caused it not to converge.

Ian Musgrave said:

As I recall, over on Pharyngula, Alan Clark also pointed out another error in your program that caused it not to converge.

[Looks up above at output of program showing convergence] Yeah, riiiggghhttt.

Intelligent Designer said: [snip] Strangely, the error you made is interesting. It shows that by lowering the mutation rate you can use selection to converge on a longer string.

I was already aware of that and such experiments can easily be performed using the Interactive Weasel Program (no code change or recompiling necessary). This fact has biological implications. It implies that in order to evolve a life form using random mutation and natural selection, the mutation rate has to be really really really low.

For a bacterium that divides about every half hour (which is how quickly S. aureus can grow in optimal conditions), that is a lot of bacteria in less than 12 hours. S. aureus has about 2.8 million nucleotide base pairs in its genome. At a rate of, say, 10^-10 mutations per nucleotide base, that amounts to nearly 300 mutations in that population of bacteria within 10 hours!

So evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't happen on an island to lizards over the course of 50 years like PZ claims in his blog. The selection process had to have been applied to pre-existing information.

Intelligent Designer said: I have reviewed the code of 8 weasel programs. I detected errors in five of them. That’s not a very good track record for you guys. The error that Eddie made was subtle. A professional developer could make that kind of mistake. Three other weasel programs that I reviewed made the same error. This error causes an approximation to a locking algorithm

That's a lot to chew on.

Here’s something for you to try. Using an alphabet of 4 characters, (AGCT) a string length of 267 and a mutation rate 10-5 per base per generation 106 offspring per generation (conservative figures) go from a random string to one of the following sequences. See how long it takes.

Ian,

Thank you for allowing me to continue.

I am not going to dispute evolution of viruses and bacteria by random mutation and natural selection. In those cases we are dealing with smaller genomes, larger populations and shorter reproductive cycles. So conclusions that you could draw from a simulation model of bacteria or viruses would not necessarily apply to eucaryotes.

I should also add that I am not necessarily disputing the idea of evolution. I am disputing the idea that random mutation and natural selection is a plausible mechanism for evolution. One of the things we can learn from programs like the Interactive Weasel Program and Genomicron is that high mutation rates increase entropy faster than natural selection can reduce it. That means for evolution to occur by random mutation and natural selection, mutation rates have to be very very low.

Given that conclusion, how does an Italian Wall Lizard evolve into another species in just 36 years? It does it by selecting from preexisting information already in its genome (or epigenome) – not by selecting from random mutations.

Intelligent Designer said: One of the things we can learn from programs like the Interactive Weasel Program and Genomicron is that high mutation rates increase entropy faster than natural selection can reduce it. That means for evolution to occur by random mutation and natural selection, mutation rates have to be very very low.

Given that conclusion, how does an Italian Wall Lizard evolve into another species in just 36 years? It does it by selecting from preexisting information already in its genome (or epigenome) – not by selecting from random mutations.

Intelligent Designer said: Ian, Thank you for allowing me to continue. I am not going to dispute evolution of viruses and bacteria by random mutation and natural selection. In those cases we are dealing with smaller genomes, larger populations and shorter reproductive cycles. So conclusions that you could draw from a simulation model of bacteria or viruses would not necessarily apply to eucaryotes. I should also add that I am not necessarily disputing the idea of evolution. I am disputing the idea that random mutation and natural selection is a plausible mechanism for evolution. One of the things we can learn from programs like the Interactive Weasel Program and Genomicron is that high mutation rates increase entropy faster than natural selection can reduce it. That means for evolution to occur by random mutation and natural selection, mutation rates have to be very very low. Given that conclusion, how does an Italian Wall Lizard evolve into another species in just 36 years? It does it by selecting from preexisting information already in its genome (or epigenome) – not by selecting from random mutations.

Ian Musgrave said: The problem is that even the fastest folding server is dashed slow. To run 20 potential 100 aa strings on the fastest that I know of would take a day. It would take a year to run a 300 generation plus run. Is there anybody out there who would like to take on the task of spending a year running a weasel version with ab inito modelling?

Jesse,
I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long. You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

No one has found such things. Why, IDer, do you think that is?

Intelligent Designer said: I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy.

Intelligent Designer said: I am disputing the idea that random mutation and natural selection is a plausible mechanism for evolution. One of the things we can learn from programs like the Interactive Weasel Program and Genomicron is that high mutation rates increase entropy faster than natural selection can reduce it. That means for evolution to occur by random mutation and natural selection, mutation rates have to be very very low.

Intelligent Designer said: Jesse, I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long. You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

ID/creationists always get this wrong

See http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Entropy

Intelligent Designer said: See http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Entropy

In the common sense, entropy means disorder or chaos.

Here’s something for you to try. Using an alphabet of 4 characters, (AGCT) a string length of 267 and a mutation rate 10-5 per base per generation 106 offspring per generation (conservative figures) go from a random string to one of the following sequences. See how long it takes.

Intelligent Designer said:

Here’s something for you to try. Using an alphabet of 4 characters, (AGCT) a string length of 267 and a mutation rate 10-5 per base per generation 106 offspring per generation (conservative figures) go from a random string to one of the following sequences. See how long it takes.

The problem is interesting but I don't have time to do it. I think the point that you are trying to make is that it is easier to find one of many needles in a haystack than to find only one needle in a hay stack.

Intelligent Designer said:

ID/creationists always get this wrong

Really? And I suppose atheists never get it wrong. Try and move past your bigotry.

Intelligent Designer said: Jesse, I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long.

You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random.

So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

Intelligent Designer said:

[restoring quote: This is a trivially easy proposition to test. One can compare the daughter genome with the parent genome and see if the sequences which cause the difference (in development) exist in whole form in the parent genome.] No one has found such things. Why, IDer, do you think that is?

Because it very expensive and time consuming to test that proposition.

Jesse said:

Intelligent Designer said: See http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Entropy

Anything that has this:

In the common sense, entropy means disorder or chaos.

regarding entropy has some serious problems.

Intelligent Designer said: See http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Entropy

Intelligent Designer said:

ID/creationists always get this wrong

Really? And I suppose atheists never get it wrong. Try and move past your bigotry.

One of the things we can learn from programs like the Interactive Weasel Program and Genomicron is that high mutation rates increase entropy faster than natural selection can reduce it. That means for evolution to occur by random mutation and natural selection, mutation rates have to be very very low.

So conclusions that you could draw from a simulation model of bacteria or viruses would not necessarily apply to eucaryotes.

You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy.

I think the point that you are trying to make is that it is easier to find one of many needles in a haystack than to find only one needle in a hay stack. But that depends on whether or not you have the coordinates to the one needle, how many other needles are in the hay stack, and how big the haystack is.

Mike,

My link is simply to point out that there is more than one definition of entropy. I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words. I also took two years of physics at the University of Washington and I am guessing that is more physics than half of you here have been through.

Henry thinks there is only one definition of entropy. I guess he did not follow the link.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, My link is simply to point out that there is more than one definition of entropy. I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words. I also took two years of physics at the University of Washington and I am guessing that is more physics than half of you here have been through.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, My link is simply to point out that there is more than one definition of entropy. I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words. I also took two years of physics at the University of Washington and I am guessing that is more physics than half of you here have been through.

Intelligent Designer said:

Ian Musgrave said: The problem is that even the fastest folding server is dashed slow. To run 20 potential 100 aa strings on the fastest that I know of would take a day. It would take a year to run a 300 generation plus run. Is there anybody out there who would like to take on the task of spending a year running a weasel version with ab inito modelling?

That problem is easy to solve with current technology. Most of the computing could be distributed across client computers (my interactive weasel program runs on the client).

When a run is completed the results are just sent to a server which hosts a database of results. I have actually contemplated hooking my weasel program up to such a server to collect the results of runs on clients besides my own. However, it could take me a couple of weeks to write all the parts and hook them together and I don't have that much play time.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, My link is simply to point out that there is more than one definition of entropy. I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words. I also took two years of physics at the University of Washington and I am guessing that is more physics than half of you here have been through.

So Malchus, you have a PhD in physics and you think that every time someone says the word entropy they are talking about thermodynamics? I am not talking about thermodynamics in anyway shape or form.

Staton, I suspect you are projecting. I bet that you have almost no scientific training.

Ian, you have a good point. I should choose to write a program that has more meaning. I think it would be intersting and valuable to write a program that could predict the shape of a protien from its DNA specification. Maybe I'll hook up with people working on something like that someday -- assuming I don't get black listed for defending the idea of intelligent design.

It's 10:30 at night over here in Seattle and I am still at the office. It's time for me to ride my bicycle home. Good night.

Intelligent Designer said: I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words.

Mike Elzinga said:

Intelligent Designer said: I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words.

I have read your blogs of March 03, 2007 and March 12, 2007. You have exactly the same misconceptions and conflations the ID/creationists have; and it was 100% predictable from your arguments here. Just because a concept has the word “entropy” attached to it doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the chemistry and physics of matter in the universe.

Intelligent Designer said: So Malchus, you have a PhD in physics and you think that every time someone says the word entropy they are talking about thermodynamics?

I am not talking about thermodynamics in anyway shape or form.

Staton, I suspect you are projecting. I bet that you have almost no scientific training.

Ian, you have a good point. I should choose to write a program that has more meaning. I think it would be intersting and valuable to write a program that could predict the shape of a protien from its DNA specification. Maybe I'll hook up with people working on something like that someday -- assuming I don't get black listed for defending the idea of intelligent design.

Malchus said: It is not a question of what you choose to defend; but that you actually defend it with logic and reason.

Intelligent Designer said: Jesse, I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long. You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

Intelligent Designer said: I am not talking about thermodynamics in anyway shape or form.

Intelligent Designer said: Staton, I suspect you are projecting. I bet that you have almost no scientific training.

SWT said: First, whether or not it is "very improbable" that a randomly generated 1,000,000 codon sequence contains exactly 500 stop codons ...

First, whether or not it is "very improbable" to find a randomly generated 1,000,000 codon sequence that contains exactly 500 stop codons

Intelligent Designer said: Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

Jesse said Second, since you're tossing about the term entropy in a manner other than that used by thermodynamicists, you should define the term as you're using it here. Since you're making semi-quantitative arguments, your definition should be mathematical.

stevaroni said: Mutation is random, but evolution operates within the feedback loop of natural selection. Natural selection is an iterative process which adds information (as we're colloquially using the term) at each step. Each iteration does an active sort - these solutions work, those don't - and allows (on average) the best solutions to advance to the next loop. It also reliably removes any variations that badly break the system.

stevaroni said: The nonrandom aspect of natural selection is what allows evolution enough system gain to climb Mount Improbable.

Intelligent Designer said:

stevaroni said: The nonrandom aspect of natural selection is what allows evolution enough system gain to climb Mount Improbable.

And I agree with that. It's just that I don't think natural selection lets you climb very high. Genomicron and the Interactive Weasel Program show that.

Intelligent Designer said:

stevaroni said: The nonrandom aspect of natural selection is what allows evolution enough system gain to climb Mount Improbable.

And I agree with that. It's just that I don't think natural selection lets you climb very high. Genomicron and the Interactive Weasel Program show that.

Ian Musgrave said: The problem is that even the fastest folding server is dashed slow.

fnxtr said:

Ian Musgrave said: The problem is that even the fastest folding server is dashed slow.

How about a volunteer online parallel processing system like SETI has?

Sorry, jumped in without reading to the end.
ID guy is polite but just as frustrating as any other ID guy. Byers/IBIG with better grammar and manners.

Malchus said: You appear to be attempting to apply concepts which relate to thermodynamics to situations involving structural arrangements. This is, as I understand it, scientifically meaningless. Certainly there are common, lay-person understandings of these terms, but you cannot apply the laws of thermodynamics which involve heat exchange to the statistical dynamics of molecular formation.

Intelligent Designer said: Jesse, I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long. You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

Henry J said: Entropy has nothing whatever to do with sequences. Entropy has to do with the distribution of energy among particles, not how those particles are arranged relative to each other. Henry J

Intelligent Designer said: Henry thinks there is only one definition of entropy. I guess he did not follow the link.

Intelligent Designer said:

stevaroni said: The nonrandom aspect of natural selection is what allows evolution enough system gain to climb Mount Improbable.

And I agree with that. It's just that I don't think natural selection lets you climb very high. Genomicron and the Interactive Weasel Program show that.

Dornier Pfeil said: Doesn't arrangement determine energy? Wasn't that Boltzmann's whole point? Not that you were incorrect when you wrote "Entropy has nothing whatever to do with sequences.", only that you seem to be saying that "A is not A because it is A!"

Dornier Pfeil said: Malchus, If I may ask a question. Is it not possible that IDer is referencing and using the Boltzman/Gibbs statistical mechanics version of thermodynamics rather than the the Clausius/Carnot heat flow version? It looks very much like statistics and not calories he is talking about. He still has no idea what he is talking about and is still wrong no matter what version but I think you are misreading him. Please continue with the slaughter.

Malchus said: You appear to be attempting to apply concepts which relate to thermodynamics to situations involving structural arrangements. This is, as I understand it, scientifically meaningless. Certainly there are common, lay-person understandings of these terms, but you cannot apply the laws of thermodynamics which involve heat exchange to the statistical dynamics of molecular formation.

Intelligent Designer said: Jesse, I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long. You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

Dornier Pfeil said: Is it not possible that IDer is referencing and using the Boltzman/Gibbs statistical mechanics version of thermodynamics rather than the the Clausius/Carnot heat flow version?

Intelligent Designer said: Jesse, I am not talking about thermodynamic entropy. Let's try thinking out of the box for a moment. Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long. You could say that the sequences it generates has maximum entropy. If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them. Now suppose you examine a sequence 1,000,000 codons long and find only 500 stop codons. This would be very improbable for a random sequence and you would have to conclude that it was not totally random. So if we define maximum entropy to mean total randomness you can say that a codon sequence 1,000,000 long with only 500 stop codons has lower entropy that a totally random sequence.

Ian Musgrave said:

Intelligent Designer said:

stevaroni said: The nonrandom aspect of natural selection is what allows evolution enough system gain to climb Mount Improbable.

And I agree with that. It's just that I don't think natural selection lets you climb very high. Genomicron and the Interactive Weasel Program show that.

No, they don't. What they show is that toy programs irrelevant to biology break in ways irrelevant to actual evolutionary processes. Evolution doesn't work the way you think it does. Seriously, biology is hard, not easy like many (but not all) physical science/ engineering types think. Spend some time reading up on the actual biology of evolution (Futayama's textbook is good), then read some of the actual papers on the molecular biology of speciation (start with Lenski, although that's not actually about speciation per se, but adaptive evolution)

Intelligent Designer said: It's 10:30 at night over here in Seattle and I am still at the office. It's time for me to ride my bicycle home. Good night.

SWT said: As pointed out above, if he's not talking about thermodynamic entropy, he needs to demonstrate the the thermodynamic results apply to whatever it is he means by "entropy."

SWT said: As pointed out above, if he's not talking about thermodynamic entropy, he needs to demonstrate the the thermodynamic results apply to whatever it is he means by "entropy."

Mike Elzinga said: Entropy refers to the number of microscopic energy states consistent with the macroscopic state of a system (its temperature, pressure, volume, magnetization, etc.). It has nothing to do with the spatial order of anything. This misconception about order and decay has been spread by creationists...

eric said: Mike I think this misconception is broader than creationism. Why that is, I have no idea. Perhaps its because a change in the distribution of energy states can be represented as a (change in) spatial distribution on a phase space chart. Maybe students are confusing phase space with actual space. But that's just a pre-coffee wild-ass guess...I could be totally off base with that thought.

fnxtr said: OT: Having mostly just high school science, I was a little put off by Penrose (in The Road to Reality) referring to phase parameters as "dimensions". I dunno, does that make the math easier, or what?

eric said: Mike I think this misconception is broader than creationism. Why that is, I have no idea. Perhaps its because a change in the distribution of energy states can be represented as a (change in) spatial distribution on a phase space chart. Maybe students are confusing phase space with actual space. But that's just a pre-coffee wild-ass guess...I could be totally off base with that thought.

eric said:

fnxtr said: OT: Having mostly just high school science, I was a little put off by Penrose (in The Road to Reality) referring to phase parameters as "dimensions". I dunno, does that make the math easier, or what?

Consider a standard cartesian plot with an x-axis and a y-axis. This is two dimensional. Your dimensions are x and y. If you are making a phase space diagram and the x-axis plots momentum (for example), then it makes sense to refer to momentum as a dimension in your phase space. Plotting things like this can be extremely useful (never mind why), but I suspect the terminology can make it more difficult for laymen to keep in mind that the physicist or chemist is not talking about 3-dimensional space. Your "put off by" comment tentatively confirms my suspicion :)

Sorry about not responding. I am busy with a lot of things.

In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

I am going to modify the Interactve Weasel Program so that it can mimic the coding blunder made by 4 out of 8 weasel programs I reviewed. I call it a blunder because you all have strongly asserted that Dawkins' Weasel Program doesn't lock (and therefore Dembski is stupid and disingenuous). However, if an algorithm allows the parent to be selected instead of one of the offspring, it closely approximates locking.

John Kwok said: Not a valid excuse, Randy, especially if that office of yours is the Dishonesty Institute:

Intelligent Designer said: It's 10:30 at night over here in Seattle and I am still at the office. It's time for me to ride my bicycle home. Good night.

You can't have it both ways, claiming to know more about probability theory, statistics and physics, when a number of us have posed successful challenges to your comments so replete in their breathtaking inanity. Again I await whether you can demonstrate that Dembski's Explanatory Filter is much more than a mere Panglossian exercise in a poor understanding of probability theory and and equally absurd deficient application of basic statistics.

Intelligent Designer said: Sorry about not responding. I am busy with a lot of things. In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy. I am going to modify the Interactve Weasel Program so that it can mimic the coding blunder made by 4 out of 8 weasel programs I reviewed. I call it a blunder because you all have strongly asserted that Dawkins' Weasel Program doesn't lock (and therefore Dembski is stupid and disingenuous). However, if an algorithm allows the parent to be selected instead of one of the offspring, it closely approximates locking.

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

if an algorithm allows the parent to be selected instead of one of the offspring, it closely approximates locking.

Reading Intelligent Designer's comments here reminds me of a great analogy of creationist thought I once saw here (apologies to the original author):

Creationist: All women have read hair.

Scientist: Nonsense, here is my sister, and she doesn't have red hair.

Creationist: That's not your sister.

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

eric said:

if an algorithm allows the parent to be selected instead of one of the offspring, it closely approximates locking.

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what happens in these programs. As long as there is a non-unity chance of a letter change, that means there must be a non-zero chance of one or more offspring being identical to the parent. You cannot have a weasel program which prevents the selection of parent-clones (assuming they are the optimal choice) unless you (a) make the chance of mutation unity, or (b) write a specific rule into the program to prevent the selection of the optimal choice when that optimal choice is identical to the parent.

Malchus said: And interestingly, this does not seem to correspond to what is meant by "locking" in this context - which I presumed was a 'ratchet-type' lock when a given character matched the target string, rather than the parent string. Am I misunderstanding?

eric said:

Malchus said: And interestingly, this does not seem to correspond to what is meant by "locking" in this context - which I presumed was a 'ratchet-type' lock when a given character matched the target string, rather than the parent string. Am I misunderstanding?

I'm not sure. I think DI's problem stems from a bit of wrong intuition. He seems to think that the odds of a daughter string matching a parent string are so low that seeing it happen means there must be locking going on, somewhere, even if he can't figure out where. With typical weasel programs (10-100 length strings, ~100 daughters/generation, 1-5% mutation rate) this just isn't so. The odds of a few clone daughters is quite high, in fact. For example, for a 10-length string, a 5% mutation rate, and 100 children/generation, statistically you'd expect ~60 daughters in each generation to be clones. Even with a 100-length string you'd expect a clone every two generations. Close to the end of a run, when most of the letters already match, the probability of any particular mutation being better than a clone gets lower. So you will see more clones being selected as the optimal daughter. This might give the impression of locking but its just statistics at work. Here's something to think about. This effect - 'the further along in the run you are, the less likely a mutation will help you' - provides some support for Gould and Eldridge's Punc-E theory. A critter which is the first to explore a novel ecological niche (first land critter, first flyer, etc...) is like a new random string; it probably doesn't fit the environment anywhere near as well as it could. You would expect in the first few generations that many different mutated daughters will fit the environment better than the original. But as evolution trundles along and the fits get better, fewer mutations will be better than the previous generation and the clones are more likely to be the most fit. From an outsider's perspective, this would look like an initial explosion of speciation followed by less and less change as time goes on. But there's nothing intelligent or designed about it, its just the statistical equivalent of "when you suck, any change is likely to be an improvement, and when you rock, not many possible changes are going to help you rock better."

eric said:

Malchus said: And interestingly, this does not seem to correspond to what is meant by "locking" in this context - which I presumed was a 'ratchet-type' lock when a given character matched the target string, rather than the parent string. Am I misunderstanding?

I'm not sure. I think DI's problem stems from a bit of wrong intuition. He seems to think that the odds of a daughter string matching a parent string are so low that seeing it happen means there must be locking going on, somewhere, even if he can't figure out where. With typical weasel programs (10-100 length strings, ~100 daughters/generation, 1-5% mutation rate) this just isn't so. The odds of a few clone daughters is quite high, in fact. For example, for a 10-length string, a 5% mutation rate, and 100 children/generation, statistically you'd expect ~60 daughters in each generation to be clones. Even with a 100-length string you'd expect a clone every two generations. Close to the end of a run, when most of the letters already match, the probability of any particular mutation being better than a clone gets lower. So you will see more clones being selected as the optimal daughter. This might give the impression of locking but its just statistics at work. Here's something to think about. This effect - 'the further along in the run you are, the less likely a mutation will help you' - provides some support for Gould and Eldridge's Punc-E theory. A critter which is the first to explore a novel ecological niche (first land critter, first flyer, etc...) is like a new random string; it probably doesn't fit the environment anywhere near as well as it could. You would expect in the first few generations that many different mutated daughters will fit the environment better than the original. But as evolution trundles along and the fits get better, fewer mutations will be better than the previous generation and the clones are more likely to be the most fit. From an outsider's perspective, this would look like an initial explosion of speciation followed by less and less change as time goes on. But there's nothing intelligent or designed about it, its just the statistical equivalent of "when you suck, any change is likely to be an improvement, and when you rock, not many possible changes are going to help you rock better."

Mike Elzinga said: If you decrease the probability of unlocking (this is independent of the probability of mutating), you see exactly what you would expect; namely, there is a decreasing spread in successive generations, and the process converges more and more quickly.

eric said: Before our creationist friend gets too excited over your last statement, we should point out that in the classic weasel the impact of natural selection was a 39-order-of-magnitude reduction in generations required. When "classic weasel + locking" is run, the impact of locking is less than a 1 order-of-magnitude improvement. So yes, locking helps convergence, but its impact is insignificant compared to selection. It is 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000001 times as important. :)

As an aside, I think ‘probability of unlocking’ just confuses the issue since typically there is no such additional operation. Even the creationists who falsely characterize weasel as locking understand that to mean an automatic lock (“if correct, no change”), no some additional probabilistic filter (“if correct, roll for chance it unlocks”). Which is mathematically equivalent to a lower probability of mutation. P(unlock)*P(mutate) is functionally equivalent to a lower P(mutate).

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

OK, since you're talking about Shannon entropy and weasels, here's a "pop" quiz. Assuming both of the following strings are generated by a random source in which the character probabilities are uniformly distributed, which string has the lower Shannon entropy? METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL WSGV AYFN GN FNZ YSNONJSOFSZ

Intelligent Designer said: I can deduce that just by counting the number of spaces in the strings. If the source was random you would expect an average of 26 capital letters between spaces.

Intelligent Designer said: Their Shannon entropy looks approximately the same. However, its highly unlikely that either of these strings came from a completely random source. I can deduce that just by counting the number of spaces in the strings. If the source was random you would expect an average of 26 capital letters between spaces.

Intelligent Designer said: Their Shannon entropy looks approximately the same. However, its highly unlikely that either of these strings came from a completely random source. I can deduce that just by counting the number of spaces in the strings. If the source was random you would expect an average of 26 capital letters between spaces.

Eric, I'll have to take you word about how Dembski defines information. I haven't read anything that he has written except the webpage this blog entry refers to. And as far as I can tell he is right.

I don't concern myself with Shannon information. Actually I don't know what it is. I was talking about Shannon entropy.

I concern myself with information that means something. And there is no correlation between meaning and Shannon entropy. However, I do know that if you start randomly modifying meaningful information it will turn to nonsense and its Shannon entropy will increase. This happens because the probability of meaningful information is infinitesimal.

Mike, note that I haven't said anything about energy or thermodynamics.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, note that I haven't said anything about energy or thermodynamics.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

OK, since you're talking about Shannon entropy and weasels, here's a "pop" quiz. Assuming both of the following strings are generated by a random source in which the character probabilities are uniformly distributed, which string has the lower Shannon entropy? METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL WSGV AYFN GN FNZ YSNONJSOFSZ

Their Shannon entropy looks approximately the same. However, its highly unlikely that either of these strings came from a completely random source. I can deduce that just by counting the number of spaces in the strings. If the source was random you would expect an average of 26 capital letters between spaces.

You are assuming that I think evolution works. I haven't decided what I think about that. What I have decided is that evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't work. Evolution by intelligent design is another story. I believe that can work, its what I do as a software developer (thus my alias).

I regard to chemistry and physics, it properties are munipulated by the information in genomes to assemble life.

Jesse said: You seem to fail to understand the meaning of average - or rather mean. They are useful when there is variation. In other words, the mean tells you what you should expect when you are making a number of observations, but it does not tell you that there will be exactly 26 capitol letters between each space. There is always a finite probability that there will be more or less than 26 letters between spaces. In fact, in that string that is 31 characters long, there is a 30% chance that there will be no spaces at all.

Intelligent Designer said: You are assuming that I think evolution works.

I haven't decided what I think about that. What I have decided is that evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't work.

Evolution by intelligent design is another story. I believe that can work, its what I do as a software developer (thus my alias).

I regard to chemistry and physics, it properties are munipulated by the information in genomes to assemble life.

Intelligent Designer said:

Jesse said: You seem to fail to understand the meaning of average - or rather mean. They are useful when there is variation. In other words, the mean tells you what you should expect when you are making a number of observations, but it does not tell you that there will be exactly 26 capitol letters between each space. There is always a finite probability that there will be more or less than 26 letters between spaces. In fact, in that string that is 31 characters long, there is a 30% chance that there will be no spaces at all.

Apparently you can't multiply, because there is actually about a 31.0382% chance that there will be no spaces in a string 31 characters long.

Intelligent Designer said: I regard to chemistry and physics, it properties are munipulated by the information in genomes to assemble life.

Intelligent Designer said: Eric, I'll have to take you word about how Dembski defines information. I haven't read anything that he has written except the webpage this blog entry refers to. And as far as I can tell he is right. I don't concern myself with Shannon information. Actually I don't know what it is. I was talking about Shannon entropy. I concern myself with information that means something. And there is no correlation between meaning and Shannon entropy. However, I do know that if you start randomly modifying meaningful information it will turn to nonsense and its Shannon entropy will increase. This happens because the probability of meaningful information is infinitesimal. Mike, note that I haven't said anything about energy or thermodynamics.

Intelligent Designer said:

Jesse said: You seem to fail to understand the meaning of average - or rather mean. They are useful when there is variation. In other words, the mean tells you what you should expect when you are making a number of observations, but it does not tell you that there will be exactly 26 capitol letters between each space. There is always a finite probability that there will be more or less than 26 letters between spaces. In fact, in that string that is 31 characters long, there is a 30% chance that there will be no spaces at all.

Apparently you can't multiply, because there is actually about a 31.0382% chance that there will be no spaces in a string 31 characters long.

Stanton said: How does quibbling over a little over 1 percent make up for the fact that you have no understanding of Evolutionary Biology?

Stanton said: From your comments, and your lies ...

Uggh, I hate it when I do that.

SWT said: First, whether or not it is "very improbable" that a randomly generated 1,000,000 codon sequence contains exactly 500 stop codons depends on (1) the number of randomly generated sequences you're generating

Intelligent Designer said:

Stanton said: How does quibbling over a little over 1 percent make up for the fact that you have no understanding of Evolutionary Biology?

It doesn't. I was being facetious.

Stanton said: From your comments, and your lies ...

This is why I will ignore you.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: First, whether or not it is "very improbable" that a randomly generated 1,000,000 codon sequence contains exactly 500 stop codons depends on (1) the number of randomly generated sequences you're generating

Jesse, since you have demonstrated some knowledge of probability ... do you agree with SWT?

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: First, whether or not it is "very improbable" that a randomly generated 1,000,000 codon sequence contains exactly 500 stop codons depends on (1) the number of randomly generated sequences you're generating

Jesse, since you have demonstrated some knowledge of probability ... do you agree with SWT?

Of interest to this debate is the recent publication of the draft Neanderthal genome sequence. Of interest is the gene RUNX2, a few simple mutations in this gene are apparently responsible for a rang of morphological differences between humans and Neanderthals (brow ridges, bell-shaped rib cages, shoulder bone morphology).

"I.D." is a software developer.

Colour me shocked.

Hey, when do we get to the "DNA is like computer code" part? I always like that part.

Intelligent Designer said: However, I do know that if you start randomly modifying meaningful information it will turn to nonsense and its Shannon entropy will increase. This happens because the probability of meaningful information is infinitesimal.

First, whether or not it is "very improbable" to find a randomly generated 1,000,000 codon sequence that contains exactly 500 stop codons depends on (1) the number of randomly generated sequences you’re generating and (2) the probability of obtaining such a sequence.

Intelligent Designer said: Suppose we have a random nucleotide sequence generator that generate sequences 1,000,000 codons long.... If you were to count the number of stop codons in a such you would expect to find approximately (3/64) * 1,000,000 = 46,875 of them.

SWT said: ...you should expect about 99% of your sequences to contain between 46,240 and 47,510 stop codons.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

OK, since you're talking about Shannon entropy and weasels, here's a "pop" quiz. Assuming both of the following strings are generated by a random source in which the character probabilities are uniformly distributed, which string has the lower Shannon entropy? METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL WSGV AYFN GN FNZ YSNONJSOFSZ

Their Shannon entropy looks approximately the same.

However, its highly unlikely that either of these strings came from a completely random source. I can deduce that just by counting the number of spaces in the strings. If the source was random you would expect an average of 26 capital letters between spaces.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL WSGV AYFN GN FNZ YSNONJSOFSZ

its highly unlikely that either of these strings came from a completely random source. I can deduce that just by counting the number of spaces in the strings. If the source was random you would expect an average of 26 capital letters between spaces.

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

OK, since you're talking about Shannon entropy and weasels, here's a "pop" quiz. Assuming both of the following strings are generated by a random source in which the character probabilities are uniformly distributed, which string has the lower Shannon entropy? METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL WSGV AYFN GN FNZ YSNONJSOFSZ

Their Shannon entropy looks approximately the same.

Their Shannon entropy is identical, by construction.

Intelligent Designer said: You are assuming that I think evolution works. I haven't decided what I think about that. What I have decided is that evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't work. Evolution by intelligent design is another story. I believe that can work, its what I do as a software developer (thus my alias). I regard to chemistry and physics, it properties are munipulated by the information in genomes to assemble life.

This is yet another indication that your statistical intuitions are probably not a good judge of whether the the weasel programming is locking. You do not appear to have a good grasp of what nonlocking results of random mutation would look like. Your earlier statements sound like you don't think a clone would have a good chance of being selected in a nonlocking program

I am also cuious about the following statement: "Intelligent Designer said: However, I do know that if you start randomly modifying meaningful information it will turn to nonsense and its Shannon entropy will increase. This happens because the probability of meaningful information is infinitesimal."

Since there exists no correlation between Shannon entropy and information, then your claim about the rationale of decrease in meaning is fundamentally incorrect.

Intelligent Designer said:

This is yet another indication that your statistical intuitions are probably not a good judge of whether the the weasel programming is locking. You do not appear to have a good grasp of what nonlocking results of random mutation would look like. Your earlier statements sound like you don't think a clone would have a good chance of being selected in a nonlocking program

I never said anything about selection of a clone. I was talking about selection of the parent. With Interactive Weasel Program you can turn locking on or off using a checkbox. So I tried 10 runs with no locking and got results ranging from 82-124 generations. I also tried 10 runs with locking turned on and got results ranging from 44-66. So how many generations were in the results reported by Dawkins anyway? That may tell us which type of algorithm he used -- one that locked or one that didn't.

Malchus said: Are you claiming that the information in the genome can manipulate the fundamental physical properties of matter? Can you present any evidence to support this claim?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: Are you claiming that the information in the genome can manipulate the fundamental physical properties of matter? Can you present any evidence to support this claim?

My daughter is expecting my forth grandchild and day now. Does that count?

Intelligent Designer said: With Interactive Weasel Program you can turn locking on or off using a checkbox. So I tried 10 runs with no locking and got results ranging from 82-124 generations. I also tried 10 runs with locking turned on and got results ranging from 44-66.

Malchus said: But the child may be identical to the parent. A clone, in other words.

Malchus said: And Dawkin's Weasel did not use any locking mechanism.

Do you understand why your own results prove that the question of whether weasel locks or not is practically irrelevant?

Intelligent Designer said: Eric, I understand the point you are making. I'll respond to it in my blog when I fill it out. However, this blog questions the intelligence and integrity of Dembski. That is why I want to know how many generations Dawkin's said it took his algorithm to converge.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: In regard to entropy, I am referring to Shannon Entropy.

OK, since you're talking about Shannon entropy and weasels, here's a "pop" quiz. Assuming both of the following strings are generated by a random source in which the character probabilities are uniformly distributed, which string has the lower Shannon entropy? METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL WSGV AYFN GN FNZ YSNONJSOFSZ

Their Shannon entropy looks approximately the same.

Their Shannon entropy is identical, by construction.

Eric, It looks like my intuition was working pretty good. SWT, since you amended your statement with the words "to find" then we are in agreement and Jesse did not detect the error in your first statement.

Intelligent Designer said: [snip] With Interactive Weasel Program you can turn locking on or off using a checkbox. So I tried 10 runs with no locking and got results ranging from 82-124 generations. I also tried 10 runs with locking turned on and got results ranging from 44-66. So how many generations were in the results reported by Dawkins anyway? That may tell us which type of algorithm he used -- one that locked or one that didn't.

Intelligent Designer said: It's relavent in regard to whether Dembski was right or wrong in regard to his analysis of Dawkins Weasel Program. Can someone here tell me how many generations it took for Dawkin's weasel program to converge?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: But the child may be identical to the parent. A clone, in other words.

Malchus ... go read some code. The parent is selected. The evidence is right in front of your face. Is there someone here willing to tell Malchus that I am right about some Weasel algorithms selecting the parent when when no offspring shows improvement and there is no clone offspring.

Malchus said: And Dawkin's Weasel did not use any locking mechanism.

Malchus, how many generations did it take Dawkins' weasel program to converge on a solution?

Malchus said: I HAVE read the code. The various algorithms select among OFFSPRING. They cannot "choose" the parent.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: But the child may be identical to the parent. A clone, in other words.

Malchus ... go read some code. The parent is selected. The evidence is right in front of your face. Is there someone here willing to tell Malchus that I am right about some Weasel algorithms selecting the parent when when no offspring shows improvement and there is no clone offspring.

Malchus said: And Dawkin's Weasel did not use any locking mechanism.

Malchus, how many generations did it take Dawkins' weasel program to converge on a solution?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I HAVE read the code. The various algorithms select among OFFSPRING. They cannot "choose" the parent.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: But the child may be identical to the parent. A clone, in other words.

Malchus ... go read some code. The parent is selected. The evidence is right in front of your face. Is there someone here willing to tell Malchus that I am right about some Weasel algorithms selecting the parent when when no offspring shows improvement and there is no clone offspring.

Malchus said: And Dawkin's Weasel did not use any locking mechanism.

Malchus, how many generations did it take Dawkins' weasel program to converge on a solution?

If a generation goes by and no offspring is selected it is the same thing as selecting the parent.

Malchus said: What is your actual purpose here?

I am sorry to say that Dembski's reputation is poor - even without this particular issue of his inability to understand either the intention or the algorithm of Weasel. He is, as I understand it, an indifferent mathematician, a very poor theologian, and an abominable write. He is known to be arrogant, petty, vindictive, and childish, with a fondness for the kind of bathroom humor that is common amongst six year-olds. He has produced no research in his own field of any value, and his contribution to the

Continued: theology of Christianity has been negligible.

• Target string = "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL!"
• Mutation rate = 0.05/character/generation
• Number of children = 100
• Maximum number of generations = 250

• Minimum: 40
• Maximum: 187
• Mean: 88.7
• Median: 84
• Standard Deviation: 29.1
• Skew: 0.85

SWT said: One of the take aways from this is that, not surprisingly, there's a lot of variability in the outcome from trial to trial. Thus, if one really wants to compare, for instance, "latching" to "non-latching" versions, a fairly large number of trials is needed.

• Minimum: 41
• Maximum: 245
• Mean: 86.5
• Median: 81
• Standard Deviation: 27.7
• Skew: 1.47

Mike Elzinga said: There are alternative approaches to studying the fluctuations. One can place the program within outer loops that run the program over and over while collecting the statistics of each run and then plotting them. One can also collect the statistics for each generation as the program progresses (this is one of the methods I have used). Another technique is to carefully go through all the probabilities in the program and make a "meta-program" that allows one to change the probabilities and other parameters. Then the program can make plots of the expectation values of various outcomes along with their variances and plot these. This is another approach I have used. Being able to have a program that captures statistics as it goes and then being able to compare these with the results of the "meta-program" is extremely enlightening.

SWT said: Also, I forgot to mention that I assumed 29 characters, A-Z, space, !, and ?.

Mike Elzinga said:

SWT said: Also, I forgot to mention that I assumed 29 characters, A-Z, space, !, and ?.

Another thing that becomes obvious after playing around with these little programs is that it ID/creationists who have been critiquing these programs are just making up crap. They haven’t written a working program let alone studied its behavior.

Intelligent Designer said:

Mike Elzinga said:

SWT said: Also, I forgot to mention that I assumed 29 characters, A-Z, space, !, and ?.

Another thing that becomes obvious after playing around with these little programs is that it ID/creationists who have been critiquing these programs are just making up crap. They haven’t written a working program let alone studied its behavior.

I am an ID/Creationist I have written a program http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2010/04/interactive-weasel-program.html

Intelligent Designer said:

Mike Elzinga said:

SWT said: Also, I forgot to mention that I assumed 29 characters, A-Z, space, !, and ?.

Another thing that becomes obvious after playing around with these little programs is that it ID/creationists who have been critiquing these programs are just making up crap. They haven’t written a working program let alone studied its behavior.

I am an ID/Creationist I have written a program http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2010/04/interactive-weasel-program.html

Intelligent Designer said: I am an ID/Creationist I have written a program http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2010/04/interactive-weasel-program.html

I contrasted the Dawkins mode program against the Dembski mode (locking) version.

Using 26 characters and a space, with one mutation per string (mutation random within the string, and all characters allowed, 26 runs in each case), 100 offspring case Dawkins version, median of 46.00 generations - Dembski mode, Median 45.00 generations. Not much difference (and not statistically significant). For the 30 offspring case Dawkins Median 352.0 generations - Dembski Median 81.00 generations (this is statistically significantly different. To see real differences between the two versions at 100 offspring, you will need a large run set because of the large variation.

Dembski is still wrong.

There is an interesting, more generalized perspective that gets introduced the moment you think of the string of characters as a vector whose elements are labeled by alphabetic characters or ASCII code instead of numbers.

Seen as a vector, the target string simply represents a point in n-dimensional space. Nothing would change if one simply translated the origin of this space to that point.

That point in n-dimensional space can be seen as a potential well at that location or a peak or whatever natural phenomenon the program represents. Either mathematically or from a physics perspective the point in space can be seen as an attractor.

So, for Dembski or any of his followers to pooh-pooh what they call “the injection of intelligence” into the program is simply to reveal that they don’t understand any computer models or applications.

You guys want me to whip up a Weasel-engine in Java that is highly modular which is also is ready for Swing components?

I could add another perspective when viewing the string as a vector. Seen as a mathematics problem, one could ask for the matrix that maps a given randomly selected point in n-dimensional space to a given “target point” in that space.

Mathematically one could simply solve for the matrix elements by “brute force” or one could use the stochastic method of this Weasel program.

Ian Musgrave said: Dembski is still wrong.

Jesse said: You guys want me to whip up a Weasel-engine in Java that is highly modular which is also is ready for Swing components?

eric said:

Jesse said: You guys want me to whip up a Weasel-engine in Java that is highly modular which is also is ready for Swing components?

One already exists. Link. The description doesn't seem to match 'basic weasel' though, so you might have to modify it. More helpful than yet another program would be for Designer to identify his main substantive issue with weasel. Yes, some programs can be written with latching or where parents can be selected. But programs can also be written without those 'cheats', and these non-cheating versions also show the incredible power of cumulative selection.

SWT said: I do have a question about your code, since I don't program in C. It looks like your "evolver" code forces a change at positions selected for mutation -- that is, if in this generation, character i is "C", then in the next generation, character i will be anything but "C". Am I reading this correctly?

eric said: More helpful than yet another program would be for Designer to identify his main substantive issue with weasel.

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: More helpful than yet another program would be for Designer to identify his main substantive issue with weasel.

I don't really have a problem with the Weasel Program. I think it actually provides evidence for intelligent design by showing that natural selection has limited power over random mutation. Using the Interactive Weasel Program choose the Dawkins' settings but then modify the target string to be 100 characters long. You won't get converge. A 100 character string is quite small even when compared to prokaryote genomes. Some Weasel Programs don't actually implement random mutation. If there is any kind of locking/latching involved its no longer random mutation. Selecting the parent is a type of locking.

Intelligent Designer said: Using the Interactive Weasel Program choose the Dawkins' settings but then modify the target string to be 100 characters long. You won't get converge. A 100 character string is quite small even when compared to prokaryote genomes.

Some Weasel Programs don't actually implement random mutation. If there is any kind of locking/latching involved its no longer random mutation. Selecting the parent is a type of locking.

Intelligent Designer said: Using the Interactive Weasel Program choose the Dawkins' settings but then modify the target string to be 100 characters long. You won't get converge. A 100 character string is quite small even when compared to prokaryote genomes.

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: More helpful than yet another program would be for Designer to identify his main substantive issue with weasel.

I don't really have a problem with the Weasel Program. I think it actually provides evidence for intelligent design by showing that natural selection has limited power over random mutation. Using the Interactive Weasel Program choose the Dawkins' settings but then modify the target string to be 100 characters long. You won't get converge. A 100 character string is quite small even when compared to prokaryote genomes. Some Weasel Programs don't actually implement random mutation. If there is any kind of locking/latching involved its no longer random mutation. Selecting the parent is a type of locking.

I remain puzzled by the obsession of creationists of various faiths with Weasel. Evolutionary theory does not stand or fall according to the behavior of Weasel in any way.

Why the peculiar focus and concern?

Intelligent Designer said: Some Weasel Programs don't actually implement random mutation. If there is any kind of locking/latching involved its no longer random mutation. Selecting the parent is a type of locking.

Malchus said: I remain puzzled by the obsession of creationists of various faiths with Weasel.

Malchus said: I remain puzzled by the obsession of creationists of various faiths with Weasel. Evolutionary theory does not stand or fall according to the behavior of Weasel in any way. Why the peculiar focus and concern?

eric said: Weasel shows that selection can, in principle, account for the (relatively) rapid development of fairly complex structures.

SWT said: Oops, forgot to address this:

Intelligent Designer said: Some Weasel Programs don't actually implement random mutation. If there is any kind of locking/latching involved its no longer random mutation. Selecting the parent is a type of locking.

Perhaps. However, selecting a child that is a clone of the parent is not selecting the parent.

Intelligent Designer said: Wrong. I would hardly call a 28 character string a complex structure.

One thing is absolutely clear, however; ID/creationists simply cannot grasp scientific concepts. They never have and they never will. It would kill them if they did; so they don’t even try.

26²⁸ = 4.16 x 10³⁹, approximately.

What would you consider complex, ID?

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: Weasel shows that selection can, in principle, account for the (relatively) rapid development of fairly complex structures.

Wrong. I would hardly call a 28 character string a complex structure.

I agree with that completely. I am only at odds with algorithms that always have the option to select the parent whether there is a clone or not. 4 of 8 weasel programs whose code I reviewed did that.

The actual length of the string under consideration is not relevant.

Malchus said: I believe this statement demonstrates the actual nature of your misunderstanding of Weasel. What Weasel shows - and this is, so far as I know ALL that it was intended to show - is the difference selection makes in the number of generations it takes to reach a specific target. The actual length of the string under consideration is not relevant. Is that clear?

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: Weasel shows that selection can, in principle, account for the (relatively) rapid development of fairly complex structures.

Wrong. I would hardly call a 28 character string a complex structure.

And as SWT just pointed out, your OWN code is capable of generating 100 character strings without difficulty.

It is simply the radical difference in the number of generations required by chance vs. selection.

Henry J said:

I agree with that completely. I am only at odds with algorithms that always have the option to select the parent whether there is a clone or not. 4 of 8 weasel programs whose code I reviewed did that.

Any version of the program that does not specifically check for an exact match of all characters has a nonzero probability of producing an exact clone. In that case a clone has about the same probability as an offspring with 1 or 2 characters changed. This is in no way erroneous. Claiming that it is erroneous is erroneous, however.

fnxtr said: 26²⁸ = 4.16 x 10³⁹, approximately. What would you consider complex, ID?

SWT said: In fairness, I think Intelligent Designer is asserting that some of the weasel programs will select the parent string if it's fitter than any of the children.

SWT said: In fairness, I think Intelligent Designer is asserting that some of the weasel programs will select the parent string if it's fitter than any of the children. I don't know if this claim is correct, since I haven't looked at any of the source code other than my own code (of course!), the source for the core of my code, and the "evolve" routine from Intelligent Designer's code. Perhaps he would be kind enough to point us to an example, although it's really a diversion from the main point of the exercise.

SWT said: I can top that. Try running Intelligent Designer's program with 84 randomly selected characters, a 64 character set, 1% mutation rate, and 200 offspring. It converged for me in under 600 generations. Why 84 characters and a 64 character set? 1/64⁸⁴ is less than 10^-150, so the weasel program crashes right through the universal probability bound ... run that through your Explanatory Filter ...

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: I can top that. Try running Intelligent Designer's program with 84 randomly selected characters, a 64 character set, 1% mutation rate, and 200 offspring. It converged for me in under 600 generations. Why 84 characters and a 64 character set? 1/64⁸⁴ is less than 10^-150, so the weasel program crashes right through the universal probability bound ... run that through your Explanatory Filter ...

A 1% mutation rate on a string only 84 characters long approximates locking because it is highly probable that there will be multiple clones.

SWT said: So the population is stable as long as the mutation rate isn't too high -- do you see that as a problem or in any way contrary to the point Dawkins was making?

Intelligent Designer said: A 1% mutation rate on a string only 84 characters long approximates locking because it is highly probable that there will be multiple clones.

Intelligent Designer said: A human genome is more that 3 billion bp in length. The age of the earth isn't great enough to allow for conversion on information that long.

Mike Elzinga said: Forget “information.”

What's funny is that you think it's funny.

You have not, and cannot, usefully define what you mean by "information". You partially conflate whatever it is with something that you call "meaning". But "meaning" is completely subjective, and there is no measurement.

When this is pointed out, and the actual conditions of the physical universe are explained to you by someone who has studied them for forty years, you dismiss the knowledge freely offered you with indifference and contempt.

Your ignorance is palpable. So is mine, but I am willing to learn, even at my time of life.

Intelligent Designer said: If Dawkins' only point is that random mutation + cummulative selection is vastly superior to random chance then I don't have a problem with it.

The Interactive Weasel Program shows us that the longer the string we want to converge on the lower the mutation rate must be.

A human genome is more that 3 billion bp in length. The age of the earth isn't great enough to allow for conversion on information that long.

I have modified the weasel program to count the number of times a matching letter changes to an unmatched one and to count the number of times a clone is selected. Try it 0.2% mutation rate on a string with length 1000.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: So the population is stable as long as the mutation rate isn't too high -- do you see that as a problem or in any way contrary to the point Dawkins was making?

If Dawkins' only point is that random mutation + cummulative selection is vastly superior to random chance then I don't have a problem with it. It he uses that point to infer more I might. I'll have to go read that section of the Blind Watchmaker to give you a good answer and I plan to do that before filling out my blog entry. The Interactive Weasel Program shows us that the longer the string we want to converge on the lower the mutation rate must be. A human genome is more that 3 billion bp in length. The age of the earth isn't great enough to allow for conversion on information that long. I have modified the weasel program to count the number of times a matching letter changes to an unmatched one and to count the number of times a clone is selected. Try it 0.2% mutation rate on a string with length 1000. http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2010/04/interactive-weasel-program.html

eric said: For all that weasel is a toy model,

ID wrote:

"The Interactive Weasel Program shows us that the longer the string we want to converge on the lower the mutation rate must be. A human genome is more that 3 billion bp in length. The age of the earth isn’t great enough to allow for conversion on information that long."

You were correct the first time. The only point that Dawkins was trying to make was that random mutation plus natural selection is much more powerful at producing results by cumulative selection than any random process alone, period. That can in no way be interpreted as meaning that the human genome came about through a random string of nucleotides mutating until an exact match for three billion bases was achieved. First of all, humans did not evolve from nothing or from a random string ancestor. Second, there is no such thing as the one human genome. There are literally trillions upon trillions of possible human genomes.

So, there is no way theoretically possible that evolution can be disproven using any sort of computer simulation such as this. The very best that anyone can hope for is to determine some important parameters and their relative importance. Empirical evidence will always be needed in order to determine biologically plausible values for any model. For example, plausible mutation rates are one in one million per generation and plausible population sizes range form thousands to billions.

Regardless of the lessons learned form such simulations, the fact will remain that all of the evidence shows that evolution did indeed occur and that descent with modification is definitely responsible for producing the diversity of life on earth. Maybe this is why creationists refuse to concede that the weasel program is perfect for demonstrating the power of cumulative selection. It also demonstrates that no intelligence is required in order for the process to operate.

Kevin B said:

eric said: For all that weasel is a toy model,

It would be better to characterise the Weasel program as an "experiment"; specifically, the extraction of a part of the hypothesised model of a complex whole into an arbitrary framwework, to allow the exploration of an underlying principle. Much of the criticism of the Weasel in certain circles is merely a demonstration of a total failure (and, probably, a total refusal to try) to understand how science is done.

DS said: That can in no way be interpreted as meaning that the human genome came about through a random string of nucleotides mutating until an exact match for three billion bases was achieved. First of all, humans did not evolve from nothing or from a random string ancestor. Second, there is no such thing as the one human genome. There are literally trillions upon trillions of possible human genomes.

It also demonstrates that no intelligence is required in order for the process to operate.

ID wrote: "The Interactive Weasel Program shows us that the longer the string we want to converge on the lower the mutation rate must be. A human genome is more that 3 billion bp in length. The age of the earth isn’t great enough to allow for conversion on information that long."

stevaroni said: If you and I play a random hand of 5 cards, the odds that you'll get the exact hand that you wind up with are bout 8x10^67. But the odds that you'll get some winning hand are 50-50.

stevaroni said:

ID wrote: Likewise, the important number is not the odds that this genome will evolve, but the odds that some genome will eventually evolve, which , near as we can tell, is very close to 1. This is something that it seems is always very difficult for creationists to grasp, that, as far as mother nature is concerned, there is nothing special about our exact solution any more than there was something special about that one-in-10 million sperm that resulted in each of us being here.

That gets to the very core of why many creationists do not and will not understand evolution. They start with the assumption that we are special (i.e. created in God's image) and ignore the possibility of anything else. To them, there actually is a target instead of simply going with what works better regardless of what it is. And by better, I do not mean perfect. Not quite as bad as the next organism is good enough.

I love it when I screw up blockquotes.

Intelligent Designer said:

Mike Elzinga said: Forget “information.”

That's pretty funny.

What’s funny is that you think it’s funny. You have not, and cannot, usefully define what you mean by “information”. You partially conflate whatever it is with something that you call “meaning”. But “meaning” is completely subjective, and there is no measurement. When this is pointed out, and the actual conditions of the physical universe are explained to you by someone who has studied them for forty years, you dismiss the knowledge freely offered you with indifference and contempt. Your ignorance is palpable. So is mine, but I am willing to learn, even at my time of life.

Dave Luckett said: You have not, and cannot, usefully define what you mean by "information".

Jesse said: And by better, I do not mean perfect. Not quite as bad as the next organism is good enough.

eric said:

Dave Luckett said: You have not, and cannot, usefully define what you mean by "information".

This particular poster has stated he's concerned with shannon entropy. Hey, that's at least very well defined. Sadly for design proponents, its not at all related to meaning. Plus its fairly easy to see how unintelligent processes could increase or decrease the shannon entropy - no designer needed for either.

Dave Luckett said: He is still wedded to a definition of "information" that somehow includes the concept of "meaning", whatever that might mean to him, and it is that notion of what "information" means - whatever that might be - that he wants to use, rather than any rigorous one.

Mike Elzinga said: There seems to be a more dogmatic assertion of not allowing scientists to define science or what concepts mean in science. This caricature by Thomas Kindell, about 1 minute into his talk, is one of the more brazen assertions I’ve come across recently.

• Modular: Any operations that are done on the strings are to be done by external objects implementing specific interfaces. For example, there is a Mutagen (yes, I watched TMNT as a kid) interface that can easily be implemented for multiple mutation schemes. There is a CharacterGenerator interface for using different sets of characters. Scoring can be done using multiple schemes, though I doubt that'll be necessary. I plan on implementing some sort of Bed/Fornication interface for full blown GA capability.
• Statistics: It'll have the ability to monitor many aspects of the run and do whatever with the results. I might use something like jFreeChart in order to make plotting all of that stuff automatic.
• Multi-Threaded: Threading is already built in and it'll be set up to run either in a single thread or in as many threads as your computer has available cores, your choice. ReentrantLocks plus loops are currently what is being used to cut down on the thread creation/deletion overhead. That may change if it doesn't work as well as I'd like.

eric said: A larger number of acceptable targets improves the chance of convergence.

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: A larger number of acceptable targets improves the chance of convergence.

What evidence do you have to backup that claim? It isn't necessarily true. The Weasel can converge because it is fed the answer as input. You can have a target set containing an infinite set of members and still not be able to find one without being given an answer. Consider this biological example. A human genome contains thousands of coding sequences with an average length of 3000bp or 1000 codons (nucleotide triplets). Consider the set of coding sequences 1000 codons in length or longer. There are an infinite number of members in that set. Yet I have written a Codon Sequence Generator that can make more than a million random coding sequences in 10 seconds. You could run it all day and not find a codon sequence longer than 500 codons long. You could run the program for your entire life and it will never find a coding sequence 1000 codons long. You can run the application and see for yourself. See http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2009/05/probabilityof-information-part-2.html

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: A larger number of acceptable targets improves the chance of convergence.

What evidence do you have to backup that claim? It isn't necessarily true. The Weasel can converge because it is fed the answer as input. You can have a target set containing an infinite set of members and still not be able to find one without being given an answer. Consider this biological example. A human genome contains thousands of coding sequences with an average length of 3000bp or 1000 codons (nucleotide triplets). Consider the set of coding sequences 1000 codons in length or longer. There are an infinite number of members in that set. Yet I have written a Codon Sequence Generator that can make more than a million random coding sequences in 10 seconds. You could run it all day and not find a codon sequence longer than 500 codons long. You could run the program for your entire life and it will never find a coding sequence 1000 codons long. You can run the application and see for yourself. See http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2009/05/probabilityof-information-part-2.html

The only way I can think of offhand that multiple targets would slow down convergence would be if the offspring wind up hovering between two or more of those targets. I'm not sure if that would prevent reaching one of the targets or just slow it down.

Henry J

SWT said: Again, you are assuming that all codons are equally probable. In reality, only about 0.43% of the codons in human DNA code for "STOP".

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: Again, you are assuming that all codons are equally probable. In reality, only about 0.43% of the codons in human DNA code for "STOP".

Actually I am assuming that all codons generated from a random source are equal probable. The fact that there are such a low percentage of stop codons in DNA means the source is not random.

Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

Another example: If I roll four fair dice, each die will provide a random number between 1 and 6. If I add the results from all four dice, I'll get a randomly generated sum between 4 and 24 for each roll. There are 6x6x6x6 = 1,296 possible rolls of the dice, but exactly one of these gives me an outcome of 4. Thus, the probability of getting a 4 will be 1/1,296 = 0.077% from this random process; one would be badly mistaken to estimate the probability of rolling a sum of 4 as 1/21 = 4.76%.

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: A larger number of acceptable targets improves the chance of convergence.

What evidence do you have to backup that claim?

The Weasel can converge because it is fed the answer as input.

eric said: This mirrors the physical world, where our environment provides 'the answer.' Actually many many possible answers, which is like saying both 'weasel' and 'weasem' are targets. If you want to model a world where there are no targets, then what you are modeling is a world where there is no feedback at all between organism and environment. You might find that an interesting problem, but its not analogous to the real world.

eric said:

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: A larger number of acceptable targets improves the chance of convergence.

What evidence do you have to backup that claim?

Common sense? If both 'weasel' and 'weasem' are considered targets, then a mutation in the last letter has a 2/27 chance of leading to convergence rather than a 1/27.

Jesse said: You'll get into semantics and equivocation with the word target here. You mean one thing by target. ID most likely means a very similar, but different thing by target. An intelligence selecting the target is implicit in IDs version of target, and "end result that works" is what is implicit in yours.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: Again, you are assuming that all codons are equally probable. In reality, only about 0.43% of the codons in human DNA code for "STOP".

Actually I am assuming that all codons generated from a random source are equal probable. The fact that there are such a low percentage of stop codons in DNA means the source is not random. Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

You have zero evidence of this other than your personal incredulity and flawed statistical arguments. These doesn't stand up well against the actual evidence supporting common descent.

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel can converge because it is fed the answer as input. You can have a target set containing an infinite set of members and still not be able to find one without being given an answer.

Malchus said: Your last claim is patently false. And do you understand that you have completely changed the subject? This has nothing to do with Weaselm

Intelligent Designer said: Actually, I do have evidence. I wrote a program to simulate random mutation and natural selection of coding sequences. I know quite a few of you guys have been there to look at it and I don't see any refutations.

Intelligent Designer said:

eric said: A larger number of acceptable targets improves the chance of convergence.

What evidence do you have to backup that claim? It isn't necessarily true. The Weasel can converge because it is fed the answer as input. You can have a target set containing an infinite set of members and still not be able to find one without being given an answer. Consider this biological example. A human genome contains thousands of coding sequences with an average length of 3000bp or 1000 codons (nucleotide triplets). Consider the set of coding sequences 1000 codons in length or longer. There are an infinite number of members in that set. Yet I have written a Codon Sequence Generator that can make more than a million random coding sequences in 10 seconds. You could run it all day and not find a codon sequence longer than 500 codons long. You could run the program for your entire life and it will never find a coding sequence 1000 codons long. You can run the application and see for yourself. See http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2009/05/probabilityof-information-part-2.html

I followed that with runs of 2000bp, 5000bp, and 10,000bp. All converged.

Apparently your code does not support your actual contention. Moreover, your code is not a simulation of the actual evolution of DNA, so it is valueless as a demonstration that RM/NS cannot produce longer codons.

When trying to investigate an issue such as evolutionary biology and the efficacy of natural selection as a mechanism, it helps to have a solid grounding in biology. I can draw your attention to a number of excellent texts on the subject, if you are interested. But you appear to still be confused about what programs such as Weasel (and your rather simplistic code) actually demonstrate.

Of course, I did modify the mutation rate.... Your actual code makes a number of apparently arbitrary assumptions that Kezdro outlined quite clearly.

Therefore for you to make comments about the efficacy of biological evolution on the basis of a simplistic statistical generator that does not in any way model actual biological evolution is both premature and irrational.

Malcus, I think you are confusing what I said about Genomicron with the Weasel Program.

See http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2009/09/genomicron-simulates-mutation-and.html

Intelligent Designer said: Malcus, I think you are confusing what I said about Genomicron with the Weasel Program. See http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2009/09/genomicron-simulates-mutation-and.html

More importantly, I think this entire exercise points to a troubling aspect of your argument.

Intelligent Designer, you are making a claim that is absolutely contrary to all the available scientific evidence in the field of genetics over the past fifty years. You are making this claim on the basis of a simplistic mathematical model which does not even begin to accurately model the actual evolutionary process - as you yourself admit.

What is the rationale on your part for making such a strong statement on the basis of what you admit is not a realistic model of the system you are discussing?

You might try to think this through - would you accept a statement I would make about the viability of a computer such as "Deep Blue" to play chess on the basis of a multiplication test on an abacus? You would not, I think.

Therefore, what reasons can you give for us to accept your statements about genetic evolution based on your simplistic and admittedly incomplete models?

I also note that your comments to Paul reveal that you did not understand his comments: you tried to change your code to allow for a larger number of descendants, but you failed to account for a larger population. The larger population essentially lets you run multiple mutation runs in parallel. In addition, your target selection does not mimic actual evolution.

Again, why are we to take your comments seriously, when you are using a simplistic, incorrect model of a biological process to make comments about that biological process?

Malchus said: Again, why are we to take your comments seriously, when you are using a simplistic, incorrect model of a biological process to make comments about that biological process?

Stanton said:

Malchus said: Again, why are we to take your comments seriously, when you are using a simplistic, incorrect model of a biological process to make comments about that biological process?

Because his faith in God and incredulity in Biology give him the 2-pronged authority to say so, that's why.

Malchus said: I also note that your comments to Paul reveal that you did not understand his comments: you tried to change your code to allow for a larger number of descendants, but you failed to account for a larger population. The larger population essentially lets you run multiple mutation runs in parallel. In addition, your target selection does not mimic actual evolution.

Again, why are we to take your comments seriously, when you are using a simplistic, incorrect model of a biological process to make comments about that biological process?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I also note that your comments to Paul reveal that you did not understand his comments: you tried to change your code to allow for a larger number of descendants, but you failed to account for a larger population. The larger population essentially lets you run multiple mutation runs in parallel. In addition, your target selection does not mimic actual evolution.

I understood Pauls comments perfectly. It was just more work than I wanted to do to modify the program to match his specifications. Allowing for a larger number of descendents approximates the change Paul wanted made. The source code for Genomicron is public. If you want to do the work to modify the code to match Pauls specifications go ahead.

Again, why are we to take your comments seriously, when you are using a simplistic, incorrect model of a biological process to make comments about that biological process?

"All models are wrong but some are useful"

Malchus you can convince me that you are right by making the suggested changes and running the simulation. Until you do that you are just bullshiting.

Intelligent Designer said: Malchus you can convince me that you are right by making the suggested changes and running the simulation. Until you do that you are just bullshiting.

Intelligent Designer said: Malchus you can convince me that you are right by making the suggested changes and running the simulation. Until you do that you are just bullshiting.

"All models are wrong but some are useful"

Bahhh, I made a post addressing the whole model vs real world thing (entertaining anecdote included) a while ago, but PT held it up for approval.

Malchus said: So your point is that unless someone modifies your code to better match biological evolution, you will not accept any statements they make?

Interesting. Highly unchristian, but interesting.

Malchus said: And here we have Randy Stimpson simultaneously setting up a totally impossible challenge, and projecting.

Malchus said: Oh, and one last point:

"All models are wrong but some are useful"

How do we know that yours is? You have not offered us any evidence to support your claim that it is. Do you have some evidence that you have not yet presented?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: So your point is that unless someone modifies your code to better match biological evolution, you will not accept any statements they make?

Malchus, I wrote the original simulation and that gives me some inside information about what would happen if it was modified. You are guessing.

Interesting. Highly unchristian, but interesting.

Well I am not a Christian.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: And here we have Randy Stimpson simultaneously setting up a totally impossible challenge, and projecting.

The challenge is hardly impossible. I am sure there a couple of people here that could do it in a few hours. If you think it's an impossible challenge you shouldn't even be in this debate.

Malchus said: Oh, and one last point:

"All models are wrong but some are useful"

How do we know that yours is? You have not offered us any evidence to support your claim that it is. Do you have some evidence that you have not yet presented?

I presented the source code. Is there something else you would like?

Intelligent Designer said: The challenge is hardly impossible. I am sure there a couple of people here that could do it in a few hours. If you think it's an impossible challenge you shouldn't even be in this debate.

Intelligent Designer said: Actually I am assuming that all codons generated from a random source are equal probable. The fact that there are such a low percentage of stop codons in DNA means the source is not random. Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

Mike Elzinga said:

Intelligent Designer said: The challenge is hardly impossible. I am sure there a couple of people here that could do it in a few hours. If you think it's an impossible challenge you shouldn't even be in this debate.

There it is; he is here just to argue and piss people off.

Malchus said: You said that you were a creationist. Was I mistaken? Are you Muslim? Hindu?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: You said that you were a creationist. Was I mistaken? Are you Muslim? Hindu?

I am non-religious. Religions are stories made up by people for various reasons. Some noble some not. Once upon a time I was a Christian but that was almost 20 years ago. I believe that life is the result of intelligent design -- that makes me a creationist -- it doesn't make me religious.

Creationist has a very specific meaning and usage in America; it refers to the various breeds of Christian fundamentalists who believe the world is a direct creation of God - usually, though not exclusively - in a 6-10k year timeframe. Though their claims are contradicted by the available facts, they persist in their belief.

The official propaganda put forward by the Discovery Institute is completely neutral on the identity of the designer, though virtually all proponents of ID seem to be Christians.

Are you a Deist or Pantheist? I note that you carefully avoid the words "atheist" or "agnostic" - you appear to be a theist without a formal belief structure?

Malchus said: That is very interesting. Who, in your opinion, would be the intelligent designer?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: You said that you were a creationist. Was I mistaken? Are you Muslim? Hindu?

I am non-religious. Religions are stories made up by people for various reasons. Some noble some not. Once upon a time I was a Christian but that was almost 20 years ago. I believe that life is the result of intelligent design -- that makes me a creationist -- it doesn't make me religious.

Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

Malchus said: I would also like to draw your attention once more to this particular claim of yours,

Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

This is absolutely false. You might wish to correct your assertion.

Jesse said: Very interesting and very rare, considering where ID came from and the fact that it is Creation Science.

Malchus said: That is very interesting. Who, in your opinion, would be the intelligent designer?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: You said that you were a creationist. Was I mistaken? Are you Muslim? Hindu?

I am non-religious. Religions are stories made up by people for various reasons. Some noble some not. Once upon a time I was a Christian but that was almost 20 years ago. I believe that life is the result of intelligent design -- that makes me a creationist -- it doesn't make me religious.

Malchus said: It may be unique - although I believe a David Berlinski (sp?) also claims atheism and ID.

Malchus said: That is very interesting. Who, in your opinion, would be the intelligent designer?

Are you a Deist or Pantheist?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: That is very interesting. Who, in your opinion, would be the intelligent designer?

Answering that question would be purely speculative. Also your question assumes that an intelligent designer is a person and that there would only be one.

Are you a Deist or Pantheist?

I haven't decided. Perhaps there is a middle ground somewhere. Any answer to that question would be speculative.

Malchus said: You are making highly unwarranted assumptions; I said nothing about whether the designer was personal, impersonal, single, multiple, material, or otherwise.

Malchus said: Who, in your opinion, would be the intelligent designer?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: You are making highly unwarranted assumptions; I said nothing about whether the designer was personal, impersonal, single, multiple, material, or otherwise.

Malchus said: Who, in your opinion, would be the intelligent designer?

I lean toward the Deist camp but I don't think it is defendable and I don't think the choices are between Deist and Pantheist. I thought you were an atheist. I am not at all unique in my thinking. Its just that most people like me don't care to discuss or investigate the issue.

Malchus said: I know the designer of the universe to be God; I find ID to be unsupported and self-serving conjecture and remarkably poor theology.

Intelligent Designer said: I have adopted the label creationist simply because many insist on labeling me that way. I am not a self proclaimed creationist.

Malchus said: I know the designer of the universe to be God; I find ID to be unsupported and self-serving conjecture and remarkably poor theology.

That was the last thing I expected you to say. It just goes to show that you can hardly know who you are talking to on these blogs. Where are you comming from and what exactly is your educational background?

Malchus said: I don't know what you mean by "comming from", perhaps you could clarify? I have several degrees - both doctoral and otherwise. Why is this relevant?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I don't know what you mean by "comming from", perhaps you could clarify? I have several degrees - both doctoral and otherwise. Why is this relevant?

Because reading back through your comments I can find anything that you've said that indicates you are educated except your claim to be.

Intelligent Designer said: I have adopted the label creationist simply because many insist on labeling me that way. I am not a self proclaimed creationist.

Malchus said: I know the designer of the universe to be God; I find ID to be unsupported and self-serving conjecture and remarkably poor theology.

That was the last thing I expected you to say. It just goes to show that you can hardly know who you are talking to on these blogs. Where are you comming from and what exactly is your educational background?

Stanton said:

Intelligent Designer said: I have adopted the label creationist simply because many insist on labeling me that way. I am not a self proclaimed creationist.

Yet, you insist on using many creationist arguments.

Malchus said: I know the designer of the universe to be God; I find ID to be unsupported and self-serving conjecture and remarkably poor theology.

That was the last thing I expected you to say. It just goes to show that you can hardly know who you are talking to on these blogs. Where are you comming from and what exactly is your educational background?

Saying GODDESIGNERDIDIT over and over is not science. Attempting to get GODDESIGNERDIDIT to become the mantra of the Scientific Community solely to appease Jesus, like what the Discovery Institute plots to do, is indeed bad theology.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I don't know what you mean by "comming from", perhaps you could clarify? I have several degrees - both doctoral and otherwise. Why is this relevant?

Because reading back through your comments I can find anything that you've said that indicates you are educated except your claim to be.

I apologize for the double post.

I apologize for the double post.

Randy, I asked you what you meant by "comming from". You have nit answered. I implicitly asked why you wished to know about my education; you have not yet answered.

"Coming from" is American 60's slang for the source of one's beliefs, attitudes, or emotions.

I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

"NObody expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

Why don't you stick to the topic, Randy?

Why are Malchus', or anyone else's, credentials or "where they're coming from" relevant to the discussion?

fnxtr said: "NObody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" Why don't you stick to the topic, Randy? Why are Malchus', or anyone else's, credentials or "where they're coming from" relevant to the discussion?

SWT said: Another example: If I roll four fair dice, each die will provide a random number between 1 and 6. If I add the results from all four dice, I'll get a randomly generated sum between 4 and 24 for each roll. There are 6x6x6x6 = 1,296 possible rolls of the dice, but exactly one of these gives me an outcome of 4. Thus, the probability of getting a 4 will be 1/1,296 = 0.077% from this random process; one would be badly mistaken to estimate the probability of rolling a sum of 4 as 1/21 = 4.76%.

Malchus said: I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said: Another example: If I roll four fair dice, each die will provide a random number between 1 and 6. If I add the results from all four dice, I'll get a randomly generated sum between 4 and 24 for each roll. There are 6x6x6x6 = 1,296 possible rolls of the dice, but exactly one of these gives me an outcome of 4. Thus, the probability of getting a 4 will be 1/1,296 = 0.077% from this random process; one would be badly mistaken to estimate the probability of rolling a sum of 4 as 1/21 = 4.76%.

That example is irrelevant

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it's in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it's in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

Malchus said: My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

Randy's turning into Joe G. Interesting transformation.

fnxtr said: Randy's turning into Joe G. Interesting transformation.

Of course, disappointed, not dissapointed. Occasionally, I write faster than I can spell-check.

Joe G occasionally visits the forum here, where he is known for arrogance, homophobia, and refusal to discuss evidence with anyone he considers beneath him, which is just about everyone. His defense of ID boils down to "I know you are but what am I?" Sad, really.

fnxtr said: Joe G occasionally visits the forum here, where he is known for arrogance, homophobia, and refusal to discuss evidence with anyone he considers beneath him, which is just about everyone. His defense of ID boils down to "I know you are but what am I?" Sad, really.

Intelligent Designer said:

SWT said:

Intelligent Designer said: Nor are genes (coding sequences) the result of random mutation + natural selection.

You have zero evidence of this other than your personal incredulity and flawed statistical arguments. These doesn't stand up well against the actual evidence supporting common descent.

Actually, I do have evidence. I wrote a program to simulate random mutation and natural selection of coding sequences. I know quite a few of you guys have been there to look at it and I don't see any refutations. http://randystimpson.blogspot.com/2009/09/genomicron-simulates-mutation-and.html

• Set up a genome,
• Initialized your genome randomly assuming the four bases are uniformly distributed,
• Hunted for valid coding sequences by (a) finding the first ATG, scanning downstream for the first TAA, TAG, or TGA, (b) finding the next ATG, scanning for a subsequent TAA, TAG, or TGA, and (c) Continued until you're out of genome,
• Generated a number of children, some of whom are mutants,
• Hunted for valid coding sequences in the children and calculate the average length of the valid coding sequences found in each child,
• Made the child with the longest average sequence the next parent,
• Continued until you're tired of playing this game.

• Overall mutation rate: 0.5%/base pair/generation
• 90% of the mutations were changes in base
• 5% of the mutations were deletion of a base
• 3.5% of the mutations were insertion of a single randomly selected base
• 1.5% of the mutations were insertion of two randomly selected bases

Locking corresponds to a particular change in the equations describing the behavior of "weasel". I've explained that over at AtBC here.

I've also done runs of "weasel" to infer ranges for the parameters originally used by Dawkins. See here, here, here, and here.

That last demonstrates graphically that Dawkins' runs were not well-tuned for where one would expect the highest likelihood of avoiding a visible loss of a correct character in a summary output of a run. There is no evidence that Dawkins ever used "locking" in any "weasel" program. The fact that Dawkins has disclaimed any such thing, that he also noted that "locking" devalues any exercise as an analogy to the biology, and that given the expectation that a set of three runs in a broad range of parameter space will show no visible sign of change of a correct character in summary results such as used by Dawkins, all indicate that the antievolutionist obsession with claims of "locking" are simply indicators that they haven't understood what's being modeled.

SWT said: The first problem is that if your goal is to see if a particular coding sequence length can be generated using mutation + selection, you should be selecting on the basis of the longest coding sequence, not on average coding sequence length.

The second -- and I think by far the greater -- problem is that you're not handling frame shifts properly. In an actual genome, the start codon is the first start codon after the promoter. A frame shift mutation in a particular gene in a real organism does not break every gene downstream of the gene with the frame shift. I think your code simply frame shifts the entire genome downstream of a frame shift mutation, probably messing start and stop codons along the way (breaking the existing ones and generating new ones at essentially random positions).

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Locking corresponds to a particular change in the equations describing the behavior of "weasel". I've explained that over at AtBC here. I've also done runs of "weasel" to infer ranges for the parameters originally used by Dawkins. See here, here, here, and here.

SWT said: To get around the major issues and one of the minor issues, I wrote a simple GNU Octave program to generate a single valid coding sequence with a desired minimum length. My mutation options weren't as fancy as yours, but I think the results probably make the point:

• Overall mutation rate: 0.5%/base pair/generation
• 90% of the mutations were changes in base
• 5% of the mutations were deletion of a base
• 3.5% of the mutations were insertion of a single randomly selected base
• 1.5% of the mutations were insertion of two randomly selected bases

Intelligent Designer said: SWT, I wonder whose program is more realistic, yours or mine?

SWT said: To get around the major issues and one of the minor issues, I wrote a simple GNU Octave program to generate a single valid coding sequence with a desired minimum length. My mutation options weren't as fancy as yours, but I think the results probably make the point:

• Overall mutation rate: 0.5%/base pair/generation
• 90% of the mutations were changes in base
• 5% of the mutations were deletion of a base
• 3.5% of the mutations were insertion of a single randomly selected base
• 1.5% of the mutations were insertion of two randomly selected bases

Your mutations are less than random. 90% of your mutations are changes in base. This is like having a coin that flips heads 90% of the time. I wonder if you are subconsciencely chosing mutations that are likely to work. What happens if only 50% of mutations are changes in base?

By the way, Randy, I would still like to know what your actual science background in this field is. You have indicated that someone without a science degree is not competent to discuss this. What is your science degree?

Intelligent Designer said: SWT, I wonder whose program is more realistic, yours or mine?

SWT said: To get around the major issues and one of the minor issues, I wrote a simple GNU Octave program to generate a single valid coding sequence with a desired minimum length. My mutation options weren't as fancy as yours, but I think the results probably make the point:

• Overall mutation rate: 0.5%/base pair/generation
• 90% of the mutations were changes in base
• 5% of the mutations were deletion of a base
• 3.5% of the mutations were insertion of a single randomly selected base
• 1.5% of the mutations were insertion of two randomly selected bases

Your mutations are less than random. 90% of your mutations are changes in base. This is like having a coin that flips heads 90% of the time. I wonder if you are subconsciencely chosing mutations that are likely to work. What happens if only 50% of mutations are changes in base?

Malchus said: It's considerably less than the eight years I went through. My point was clear: you are trying to make use of classical thermodynamic considerations of entropy in situations to which they do not apply. This is inappropriate to your attempt to discuss difficulties in evolutionary biology. From the various examples you have put forward, I suspect you did not have an extensive education in biology, either. Again, this will make it difficult to make your point with any degree of rigor or conviction.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, My link is simply to point out that there is more than one definition of entropy. I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words. I also took two years of physics at the University of Washington and I am guessing that is more physics than half of you here have been through.

Intelligent Designer said: SWT, I wonder whose program is more realistic, yours or mine?

SWT said: To get around the major issues and one of the minor issues, I wrote a simple GNU Octave program to generate a single valid coding sequence with a desired minimum length. My mutation options weren't as fancy as yours, but I think the results probably make the point:

• Overall mutation rate: 0.5%/base pair/generation
• 90% of the mutations were changes in base
• 5% of the mutations were deletion of a base
• 3.5% of the mutations were insertion of a single randomly selected base
• 1.5% of the mutations were insertion of two randomly selected bases

Your mutations are less than random. 90% of your mutations are changes in base. This is like having a coin that flips heads 90% of the time. I wonder if you are subconsciencely chosing mutations that are likely to work. What happens if only 50% of mutations are changes in base?

Malchus,

I took four years of science in highschool even though I didn't have plans for college. I did that because I have always been curious about science especially biology. In addition I took an independent study class on evolution which explored arguments for and against evolution. It's amazing how open minded my school was. They would never let kids do that in a public now. My cousellor was non-Christian.

I didn't take biology at the university because I was obsessed with math. The University of Washington only requires 56 credits in math for a B.S. I took 83 mostly at the 400 level. In spite of all that math I only took one course in probability but from what I can tell thats more than most people here. I also took a number of math related courses including two years of physics, computer science and engineering. I also have a Masters degree in applied math with computer science as my application field. My goal was to be a university professor until I realized that I would have to move away from family to get a job.

Education doesn't stop when school does. For fun I read science -- right now mostly biology. Since I have to do a lot of heavy technical reading to keep up with my career as a software developer I usually read something light for fun. Right now I am reading Stem Cells for Dummies and a fair amount of related miscellaneous stuff on the internet.

Since I am interested in math and biology, and I develop software, and was formerly a devote Christian its only natural that the topic of intelligent design would be interesting to me.

Jesse said: No. A random distribution does not have to be evenly distributed. Take two die. Roll them both at the same time. Then record the sum. That sum will be random, yet you will end up with a sum of 6 more often than you will will end up with a sum of 2. There is no physical or mathematical law that says that mutation types cannot be random with one type more common than the other. The analogy that mutation is like coin tosses ends exactly at the point where you say that they are both random. The distributions are not the same.

So, apparently, Randy Stimpson's primary purpose here is to boast about how his toy programs will disprove evolution, and then project his own dishonesty and inadequate qualifications onto his critics in order to disqualify them from criticizing him.

Intelligent Designer said:

Jesse said: No. A random distribution does not have to be evenly distributed...There is no physical or mathematical law that says that mutation types cannot be random with one type more common than the other...

Jesse, can you provide evidence that SWT's parameters are realistic or are you just bullshiting.

Intelligent Designer said:

Jesse said: No. A random distribution does not have to be evenly distributed. Take two die. Roll them both at the same time. Then record the sum. That sum will be random, yet you will end up with a sum of 6 more often than you will will end up with a sum of 2. There is no physical or mathematical law that says that mutation types cannot be random with one type more common than the other. The analogy that mutation is like coin tosses ends exactly at the point where you say that they are both random. The distributions are not the same.

Jesse, can you provide evidence that SWT's parameters are realistic or are you just bullshiting.

Jesse said: I never made any claim about SWT's parameters specifically. You, however, made a claim that because his distribution was not even, it was not really random and compared it to flipping heads 90% of the time. It was erroneous. I was pointing out your error with regards to what is random and what is not. So, I'll repeat it again, random does not have to be evenly distributed.

Intelligent Designer said: SWT, I wonder whose program is more realistic, yours or mine?

SWT said: [snip]

• Overall mutation rate: 0.5%/base pair/generation
• 90% of the mutations were changes in base
• 5% of the mutations were deletion of a base
• 3.5% of the mutations were insertion of a single randomly selected base
• 1.5% of the mutations were insertion of two randomly selected bases

Your mutations are less than random. 90% of your mutations are changes in base. This is like having a coin that flips heads 90% of the time. I wonder if you are subconsciencely chosing mutations that are likely to work. What happens if only 50% of mutations are changes in base?

Ian Musgrave said: This is almost exactly the proportion of single base changes to insertion/deletions in the human genome (see Genetics, 156:297, 2000). The measured rates in humans are 92% single base changes (strictly speaking he should also have more transitions than transversions, but it's good enough for now) 8% indels with most of those single base indels, 5% are deletions. The reason for this is the chemistry underlying the mutations themselves makes single base mutations more likely than insertions or deletions. The mutations are still random with respect to function etc. The problem Randy is that you don't understand the biology involved.

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

Who is Joe G? I admit that I am dissapointed; surely we, as civilized adults can discuss any topic? Nor was I aware that either my theology or my education was blocking any reasonable conversation. I have done statistcal modeling of evolutionary processes in the past - though not in the last few years; I teach a history of science course; I wrote a fair amount of code myself while working for an unfinished doctorate in high-energy physics. I fail to see how ANY of that disqualifies me from discussing the various issues with Randy’s attempt to extrapolate real-world behavior from a simplistic, and non real-world model. (Emphasis added)

Malchus, I am under the impression that you have been dishonest and have pretended to know things you don’t. What you said above implies you have had eight years of physics. How much physics did you really take? When I asked you straight forward questions about your educational background you evaded the question even after you asked me about my religious background. I don’t have a problem with you because you are a Christian. I myself was once a devote and studious Christian. I have a problem with you because you are dishonest – not to mention that you are constantly putting words in my mouth and it is tiresome to correct you.

In that case you believe in nonsense.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: It's considerably less than the eight years I went through. My point was clear: you are trying to make use of classical thermodynamic considerations of entropy in situations to which they do not apply. This is inappropriate to your attempt to discuss difficulties in evolutionary biology. From the various examples you have put forward, I suspect you did not have an extensive education in biology, either. Again, this will make it difficult to make your point with any degree of rigor or conviction.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, My link is simply to point out that there is more than one definition of entropy. I have several blog entries about entropy written in my own words. I also took two years of physics at the University of Washington and I am guessing that is more physics than half of you here have been through.

Malchus, I am under the impression that you have been dishonest and have pretended to know things you don't. What you said above implies you have had eight years of physics. How much physics did you really take? When I asked you straight forward questions about your educational background you evaded the question even after you asked me about my religious background. I don't have a problem with you because you are a Christian. I myself was once a devote and studious Christian. I have a problem with you because you are dishonest -- not to mention that you are constantly putting words in my mouth and it is tiresome to correct you.

Intelligent Designer said: Luckily you can run Genomicron with those parameters.

Malchus said: I am not particularly evasive about either my faith or my background - both of which seem considerably more extensive than yours - but I continue to ask why you think it's relevant. Surely your arguments stand or fall on their own merits? Surely anyone with a logical mind can discuss your simplistic models with confidence? I note you have not asked anyone else their educational background; why is that?

IIRC, some years ago an antievolutionist asserted that "weasel" would not work at longer string lengths. I ran a version then with strings up to several hundred characters long without difficulty. But, yes, (again IIRC) the mutation rate I used was adjusted to deliver an expectation of about 1 character mutated per string per generation.

My later analysis provides the tools to generically determine the likelihood that an offspring will preserve all the "correct" characters in the parent string, and how that leads to a likelihood that one such offspring exists in a population (see here). Simply set C=L to obtain the result for the case where all the characters are correct. There's no reason I see there to suppose that "weasel" is incapable of convergence at longer string lengths, nor has it been my experience that this is an issue.

Another comment of mine on the interaction of mutation rate and expectation of convergence is here. And here I note that Dawkins in "The Blind Watchmaker" commented that a mutation rate that produces one altered gene per offspring was "very high" and "unbiological".

kakapo said:

Malchus said: I am not particularly evasive about either my faith or my background - both of which seem considerably more extensive than yours - but I continue to ask why you think it's relevant. Surely your arguments stand or fall on their own merits? Surely anyone with a logical mind can discuss your simplistic models with confidence? I note you have not asked anyone else their educational background; why is that?

Malchus, I'm afraid that Intelligent Designer got you here. He might not know much about biology or probability, but he's a consummate internet "arguer." He knows exactly the right questions not to answer or the right questions to ask or the right statements/put-downs to rile people up and keep the "discussion" going. If someone asks him a question he can't answer or makes a point that threatens his argument, he skips those and instead answers an irrelevant question, letting everyone know he's still in and infuriating those who received no response. If avoidance is no longer possible, he deftly changes the subject, e.g. When everyone had him on the ropes with the weasel program, he deftly changed the topic to the necronomicon program. Then, it was on to his religious beliefs, your education, back to genes and anywhere except the "Dembski Weasels Out" topic of the thread. It must be a huge ego boost for him to keep a (virtual) room full of intelligent, accomplished people focused on him, esp when he's so good at manipulating everyone. While I appreciate your writing, Malchus, because I learn from it and from what other contributors here on PT write, I wouldn't worry about whether IDer "gets it" or not.

I don't have time to answer everyone. I have to choose which comments are most interesting to respond to. If you guys can't take shit don't dish it out.

Malchus said: Randy said:

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

My response was, I thought, quite clear:

I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

phantomreader42 said:

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

So, what you're saying is that you're so incompetent at programming that you can't even correctly implement a toy example, and you're so incredibly stupid that you think your failure somehow invalidates a century and a half of science. Where do you get the gall to call yourself "Intelligent Designer"?

Malchus said, to kakapo: (snip) But you attribute what appears to be a great deal of malice to Randy; a willingness to behave rudely for no particular reason save the salving of his ego. Do you think this is really the case?

Randy says:Here Malchus rewrites history. It serves as an example of his intellectual integrity.

Intelligent Designer said:

phantomreader42 said:

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

So, what you're saying is that you're so incompetent at programming that you can't even correctly implement a toy example, and you're so incredibly stupid that you think your failure somehow invalidates a century and a half of science. Where do you get the gall to call yourself "Intelligent Designer"?

Ian, It's kind of hypocritical of you to demand an apology from me. Turn about is fair play. The only thing you are going to get from me is an admission that I've learned something about mutation distributions.

Malchus said: But you attribute what appears to be a great deal of malice to Randy; a willingness to behave rudely for no particular reason save the salving of his ego. Do you think this is really the case?

Why is the comment here, accurately quoted, supposedly "rewriting history"?

So far as I can see, Malchus' intellectual integrity is intact. The "example" seems to deliver a message that redounds on its author instead. Am I missing anything?

kakapo said:

Malchus said: But you attribute what appears to be a great deal of malice to Randy; a willingness to behave rudely for no particular reason save the salving of his ego. Do you think this is really the case?

in a way, he's enabling he responders to have fun as well. The human brain loves to solve problems, which in this case, is getting this guy to understand.

Intelligent Designer said:

phantomreader42 said:

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

So, what you're saying is that you're so incompetent at programming that you can't even correctly implement a toy example, and you're so incredibly stupid that you think your failure somehow invalidates a century and a half of science. Where do you get the gall to call yourself "Intelligent Designer"?

Ian, It's kind of hypocritical of you to demand an apology from me. Turn about is fair play. The only thing you are going to get from me is an admission that I've learned something about mutation distributions.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it's in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

phantomreader42 said:

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it's in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

That's a laugh coming from the brainless asshat who thinks a program even he admits isn't accurate somehow makes a century and a half of evidence magically disappear. And then you follow up by whining about Malchus supposedly being dishonest, when you yourself have been caught shamelessly lying about this precious program of yours. Seriously, have you ever been in the same building as a mirror? Here's the difference between Malchus and you, Stimpy. You both believe in a conveniently invisible man in the sky with magical powers, without a scrap of evidence. But Malchus is honest about it, where you are not. Malchus is willing to clearly state his ridiculous beliefs, while you hide behind vague weaseling. Malchus doesn't use his delusions as an excuse to deny everything we know about biology, but you do. Malchus is willing to tell the truth even when it's inconvenient for his cult, whereas you will lie through your teeth even when it provides you no benefit at all. In short, Malchus is a generally honest person who believes some ridiculous bullshit, while you are a lying moron who believes some ridiculous bullshit.

Ian Musgrave said:

Intelligent Designer said:

phantomreader42 said:

Intelligent Designer said: The Weasel Program fails to converge on strings as short as 80 characters. Google "Interactive Weasel Program". You will find a link to the program where you can try the experiment yourself.

So, what you're saying is that you're so incompetent at programming that you can't even correctly implement a toy example, and you're so incredibly stupid that you think your failure somehow invalidates a century and a half of science. Where do you get the gall to call yourself "Intelligent Designer"?

Ian, It's kind of hypocritical of you to demand an apology from me. Turn about is fair play. The only thing you are going to get from me is an admission that I've learned something about mutation distributions.

Citation fail. You owe an apology to SWT and Jesse and Malchus for your treatment of them. Phantomreader42 is big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Address the issues, don't go haring after nonsequiters.

Intelligent Designer said: Here Malchus rewrites history. It serves as an example of his intellectual integrity.

Malchus said: Randy said:

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

My response was, I thought, quite clear:

I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

phantomreader42 said:

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it's in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

That's a laugh coming from the brainless asshat who thinks a program even he admits isn't accurate somehow makes a century and a half of evidence magically disappear. And then you follow up by whining about Malchus supposedly being dishonest, when you yourself have been caught shamelessly lying about this precious program of yours. Seriously, have you ever been in the same building as a mirror? Here's the difference between Malchus and you, Stimpy. You both believe in a conveniently invisible man in the sky with magical powers, without a scrap of evidence. But Malchus is honest about it, where you are not. Malchus is willing to clearly state his ridiculous beliefs, while you hide behind vague weaseling. Malchus doesn't use his delusions as an excuse to deny everything we know about biology, but you do. Malchus is willing to tell the truth even when it's inconvenient for his cult, whereas you will lie through your teeth even when it provides you no benefit at all. In short, Malchus is a generally honest person who believes some ridiculous bullshit, while you are a lying moron who believes some ridiculous bullshit.

Intelligent Designer said: I don't have time to answer everyone. I have to choose which comments are most interesting to respond to. If you guys can't take shit don't dish it out.

One final note, Randy - someone earlier referenced your behavior on a blog called Pharyngula ( now THAT is a charming den of lions!)

It appears you were banned from that blog for lying. Though you have abandoned your Christian faith, may I commend to you the instructive concept of the mote and the beam?

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said: Citation fail. You owe an apology to SWT and Jesse and Malchus for your treatment of them. Phantomreader42 is big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Address the issues, don't go haring after nonsequiters.

I'm kind of big and ugly too.

Malchus said: Actually, I prefer the term "errant nonsense."

MrG said:

Malchus said: Actually, I prefer the term "errant nonsense."

And what about "pure baloney"? Actually, I won't argue religion. I'm not particularly sympathetic to religion -- I just avoid arguments over unprovables.

Malchus said: I dislike baloney - all filler. I agree that arguments over faith are unusually unprofitable; but I was not being entirely serious.

Ian Musgrave said:

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said: Citation fail. You owe an apology to SWT and Jesse and Malchus for your treatment of them. Phantomreader42 is big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Address the issues, don't go haring after nonsequiters.

I'm kind of big and ugly too.

But are you big and ugly enough?

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said:

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said: Citation fail. You owe an apology to SWT and Jesse and Malchus for your treatment of them. Phantomreader42 is big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Address the issues, don't go haring after nonsequiters.

I'm kind of big and ugly too.

But are you big and ugly enough?

My skin is so thick that I can stand to watch Sarah Palin talk in person.

Malchus said: I sit in awe.

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said:

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said: Citation fail. You owe an apology to SWT and Jesse and Malchus for your treatment of them. Phantomreader42 is big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Address the issues, don't go haring after nonsequiters.

I'm kind of big and ugly too.

But are you big and ugly enough?

My skin is so thick that I can stand to watch Sarah Palin talk in person.

Malchus said: Admirably phrased. Shall we talk theology

Malchus said: I'm sorry, Randy, but this really makes no sense. Exactly how am I rewriting history?

Wesley, when I have time I am going to come back and address your comments. Right now I need to get some work done.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I'm sorry, Randy, but this really makes no sense. Exactly how am I rewriting history?

You reversed the order in which your comments appeared in the blog to present your argument.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I'm sorry, Randy, but this really makes no sense. Exactly how am I rewriting history?

You reversed the order in which your comments appeared in the blog to present your argument.

Intelligent Designer said: Wesley, when I have time I am going to come back and address your comments. Right now I need to get some work done.

W. Kevin Vicklund said:

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I'm sorry, Randy, but this really makes no sense. Exactly how am I rewriting history?

You reversed the order in which your comments appeared in the blog to present your argument.

No, he didn't. As pages 19 & 20 clearly show, he presented the exchange in chronological order. Perhaps you need to re-read the comment for better comprehension?

I'm not sure what comment could be made.

I cross-checked my math using runs of my "weasel" as a Monte Carlo approach to independent confirmation. I'm pretty confident in the equations I've presented. I just today tried out some runs at 290 characters for L in my more recent Python version, and it converged fine with an appropriate mutation rate. At this point, I am confident in saying that if one claims to have a "weasel" with a convergence problem, then the problem lies either in inappropriate selection of parameters (especially for u, mutation rate), or an actual bug in the code. Other implementations of "weasel", including my own, don't have that problem.

So I'm open to someone demonstrating that I got my math wrong, in which case I will correct it. Given the way I went about doing that, though, I am not expecting such.

Mike Elzinga said:

Malchus said: I sit in awe.

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said:

Jesse said:

Ian Musgrave said: Citation fail. You owe an apology to SWT and Jesse and Malchus for your treatment of them. Phantomreader42 is big enough and ugly enough to look after himself. Address the issues, don't go haring after nonsequiters.

I'm kind of big and ugly too.

But are you big and ugly enough?

My skin is so thick that I can stand to watch Sarah Palin talk in person.

But not of Sarah Palin, I hope!

Malchus said: I hope I don't come across as mysoginistic, but the very thought that someone like Sarah Palin might become president makes me fear that God has abandoned the universe.

Malchus said: I hope I don't come across as mysoginistic, but the very thought that someone like Sarah Palin might become president makes me fear that God has abandoned the universe.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: I'm not sure what comment could be made. I cross-checked my math using runs of my "weasel" as a Monte Carlo approach to independent confirmation. I'm pretty confident in the equations I've presented. I just today tried out some runs at 290 characters for L in my more recent Python version, and it converged fine with an appropriate mutation rate. At this point, I am confident in saying that if one claims to have a "weasel" with a convergence problem, then the problem lies either in inappropriate selection of parameters (especially for u, mutation rate), or an actual bug in the code. Other implementations of "weasel", including my own, don't have that problem. So I'm open to someone demonstrating that I got my math wrong, in which case I will correct it. Given the way I went about doing that, though, I am not expecting such.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I'm sorry, Randy, but this really makes no sense. Exactly how am I rewriting history?

You reversed the order in which your comments appeared in the blog to present your argument.

Malchus I am tempted to provide a better explanation for my accusation but I don't want to spend any more time in the gutter. Read back through the comments and you'll see that I've endured a lot more than you and haven't asked for an apology. If there is one thing I learned on Pharyngula its that it doesn't pay to whine about others being rude. Perhaps I misunderstood you, perhaps not. I don't think I did, so it would be disingenuous of me to apologize. However, for now I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if that's any consollation. If that isn't good enough consider yourself persecuted for righteousness sake.

I have some important stuff to do now. I'll probably be back tomorrow for Wesley's response.

Intelligent Designer said: Malchus I am tempted to provide a better explanation for my accusation but I don't want to spend any more time in the gutter. Read back through the comments and you'll see that I've endured a lot more than you and haven't asked for an apology. If there is one thing I learned on Pharyngula its that it doesn't pay to whine about others being rude. Perhaps I misunderstood you, perhaps not. I don't think I did, so it would be disingenuous of me to apologize. However, for now I'll give you the benefit of the doubt if that's any consollation. If that isn't good enough consider yourself persecuted for righteousness sake.

I don’t think I did, so it would be disingenuous of me to apologize.

Intelligent Designer said:

Wesley R. Elsberry said: I'm not sure what comment could be made. I cross-checked my math using runs of my "weasel" as a Monte Carlo approach to independent confirmation. I'm pretty confident in the equations I've presented. I just today tried out some runs at 290 characters for L in my more recent Python version, and it converged fine with an appropriate mutation rate. At this point, I am confident in saying that if one claims to have a "weasel" with a convergence problem, then the problem lies either in inappropriate selection of parameters (especially for u, mutation rate), or an actual bug in the code. Other implementations of "weasel", including my own, don't have that problem. So I'm open to someone demonstrating that I got my math wrong, in which case I will correct it. Given the way I went about doing that, though, I am not expecting such.

Wesley, I didn't see anything wrong with your math but I didn't inspect it too closely. I am going to assume that is right for now. I was going to incorporate your math into my Interactive Weasel Program but then why duplicate someone elses effort. I decided instead to collect statistics on how closely an algoritm approximates a locking algorithm. Like your weasel program, the Interactive Weasel Program that I wrote converges just fine for very long strings given the right mutation rate. I have used my program to converge on strings as long 1000 characters. I have read the code of several weasel programs and they don't all implement the same algorithm. Some of them inadvertantly approximate a locking algorithm. This can be done in at least two ways: (1) allow selection of the parent or (2) adjust the mutation rate so that it works for the length of the target string. I think you have done (2). Do you agree?

Malchus, you deserve a medal for the way you've been flensing Randy Stimpson in these last three comments.

Unfortunately, he's probably going to deliberately misinterpret your taking him to task as hostility or some other anti-social behavior, and then pretend to ignore you while simultaneously prattling on about how his non-realistic, toy programs disprove evolution, AND how he's miraculously too busy to actually answer any serious questions.

So we see that the most interesting results come about when 0.0 < u << 1.0, that is, a small non-zero mutation rate far away from the behavior one gets with complete randomness. Unsurprisingly enough, this is also the situation that we see in biology, where mutation rates are small, non-zero values. While Richard Dawkins did not discuss mutation rate specifically with respect to his "weasel" program, he did discuss it in the context of his "biomorphs" program, where a mutation rate high enough to cause one mutation in each daughter was said to be "very high" and "unbiological". With a small mutation rate, most of the time a daughter candidate or organism will be pretty much like the parent, with a somewhat higher chance that something will go wrong with what already works than that something will go right in what isn't working currently. Increasing the mutation rate substantially will, at least from the standpoint of an individual daughter candidate, quickly add to the risk of lots more going wrong than going right.

if you can’t live with real facts

that does indeed to be Stimpy's big problem.

Sadly, I see little progress being made by him in dealing with this issue over the last 2 years.

Not unexpected, though. His house of cards must be defended at all costs, including reality.

Stanton said: Malchus, you deserve a medal for the way you've been flensing Randy Stimpson in these last three comments. Unfortunately, he's probably going to deliberately misinterpret your taking him to task as hostility or some other anti-social behavior, and then pretend to ignore you while simultaneously prattling on about how his non-realistic, toy programs disprove evolution, AND how he's miraculously too busy to actually answer any serious questions.

Wesley, your skill with explanation is admirable.

Malchus, I plead guilty. I lied three times on Pharyngula:

1) PZ was on the road and after a heated discussion I signed out by telling the participants that PZ had asked me to take over his blog and keep everyone entertained while he was away and I asked everyone to send PZ some email to let him know if I did a good job or not. Obviously I was joking. The only person there that I thought was dumb enough to think I was serious was Ichthyic.

2) I few months later PZ was on the road again. I told the same lie (joke). Much to my suprise PZ found my comment (Ichthyic probably tattled on me) and accused me of lying and warned me that I was in danger of being expelled. So I was wrong -- PZ was also dumb enough to take me seriously. I should add that that was the only time I was ever wrong on Pharyngula except for the time I asked Ichthyic to be my facebook friend.

3) I lied (joked) that PZ was preparing a rebuttle to Genomicron and encouraged others look at it and make their own analysis before reading PZs. Thus I was banned for lying.

The only person there that I thought was dumb enough to think I was serious was Ichthyic.

not only isn't that what happened, you're lying about what I said about it too.

AGAIN

Ichthyic probably tattled on me

Nope, PZ discovered your idiocy all on his own, which is why he was so pissed, probably. So not only are you delusional, and a liar, you're paranoid too.

have you been checked for schizophrenia? seriously, you DO have a lot of the symptoms.

Thus I was banned for lying.

yes, but not for the twisted tale you just told, which would have probably gotten you banned for lying in and of itself.

you're one pathetic meatsack there, Stimpy.

I also plead guilty to lying on my blog here and here.

Ichthyic said: have you been checked for schizophrenia? seriously, you DO have a lot of the symptoms.

What other syptoms do I have?

the wonderful thing about the web, is you can actually research things yourself:

http://www.schizophrenia.com/diag.php

Intelligent Designer said: I have read the code of several weasel programs and they don't all implement the same algorithm. Some of them inadvertantly approximate a locking algorithm. This can be done in at least two ways: (1) allow selection of the parent or (2) adjust the mutation rate so that it works for the length of the target string. I think you have done (2). Do you agree?

eric wrote:

"Could you explain what “approximates a locking program” means to you and why you think this somehow invalidates selection?"

No he can't. As I already pointed out, no weasel program can ever invalidate selection. All such programs can do is to illustrate the power of cumulative selection.

If one uses biologically plausible parameters, then it becomes obvious that the system quickly converges to a target sequence, this will happen much more quickly if multiple targets are allowed. The closer to the target, the more differential mortality is required in order to make further improvements, but convergence will still occur. Now if you have no idea what biologically plausible parameters are, then the best that you can hope for is to show that in some implausible scenarios that selection will operate more slowly.

See eric, you just don't have enough degrees to talk to this guy. When he can't answer your questions he will try to sidetrack the conversation with personal questions and avoid the substance of your argument. The "locking" routine is just a ploy, he keeps accusing people of this without ever demonstrating it. The string length nonsense is just a ploy as well, that has been dealt with. I don't see why it is so important to this guy to try to dismiss the power of cumulative selection, but fortunately he has not been able to do so. Maybe if he had more degrees in the relevant fields someone would care.

eric said:

Intelligent Designer said: I have read the code of several weasel programs and they don't all implement the same algorithm. Some of them inadvertantly approximate a locking algorithm.

.....you seem to completely misunderstand the definition of 'locking.'

Dave Lovell said:

eric said:

Intelligent Designer said: I have read the code of several weasel programs and they don't all implement the same algorithm. Some of them inadvertantly approximate a locking algorithm.

.....you seem to completely misunderstand the definition of 'locking.'

It's even more fundamental than that. Whatever the definition, any argument against an algorithm deemed to "approximate to locking" is only significant if the biological system being discredited can be deemed never to "approximate to locking" by the same definition.

DS said: The "locking" routine is just a ploy, he keeps accusing people of this without ever demonstrating it.

D'oh! My last post, line 5, should reead "assigns a different probability of mutation to..."

eric wrote:

But he’s implying that a program that assigns the same (meaning a different) mutation rate to correct and incorrect letters approximates locking. So I want to know how he defines locking.

Well "locking" would be defined as a correctly matching letter having a zero probability of changing. "Approximately locking" would probably be if a correctly matching letter had a lower probability of changing than a incorrect letter. However, if mutations are random, then the probability of any letter changing to any other letter should be equal, whether it is already a correct match or not. Now I am certain that there are some programs that have this stipulation, if not then they are probably not biological relevant. And I am sure that selection will still cause convergence on the correct character string, although more slowly if there is no locking.

So what exactly is this guys problem? Does he think that because selection causes an overrepresentation of more closely matching strings in subsequent generations that this somehow represents locking? Once again, in order to demonstrate the power of selection, you must in fact allow for the program to have selection. Differential mortality and differential reproductive success are all that is required if random mutations occur.

P.S.

Adjusting the mutation rate according to string length definitely does not count as "locking".

As somebody already pointed out above, locking would consist of having a different probability of mutation for a correct letter than for an incorrect one. Changing the overall mutation rate isn't going to do that.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: I also cheerfully agree that approximating the outcome of a locking mechanism is done by any correctly-programmed "weasel".

DS said: "Approximately locking" would probably be if a correctly matching letter had a lower probability of changing than a incorrect letter. However, if mutations are random, then the probability of any letter changing to any other letter should be equal, whether it is already a correct match or not.

So what exactly is this guys problem?

DS said: Well "locking" would be defined as a correctly matching letter having a zero probability of changing. "Approximately locking" would probably be if a correctly matching letter had a lower probability of changing than a incorrect letter. However, if mutations are random, then the probability of any letter changing to any other letter should be equal, whether it is already a correct match or not. Now I am certain that there are some programs that have this stipulation, if not then they are probably not biological relevant. And I am sure that selection will still cause convergence on the correct character string, although more slowly if there is no locking.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: the mutation rate I used was adjusted to deliver an expectation of about 1 character mutated per string per generation.

Intelligent Designer said:

Wesley R. Elsberry said: the mutation rate I used was adjusted to deliver an expectation of about 1 character mutated per string per generation.

Such a mutation rate could be high or low depending on the life form. For prokaryotes this would be a high mutation rate. Also prokayotes only have 2 offspring not 100.

Humans on the other hand have a much higher mutation rate that what is equivalent to one per string.

Of course, only a small fraction of mutations in a human genome will be in functional DNA. As I recall, the average mutation rate in functional DNA is between 1 and 2.

Henry

Stanton said: Obviously, you are unaware that several kinds of bacteria, such as Bdellovibrio and many filamentous cyanobacteria, produce more than two daughter cells at a time, either by elongating, or fragmenting.

It's also quite obvious that you don't know anything about how fast bacteria can mutate, or that bacteria can have several hundred generations within a few days.

Stanton said: Or, can you explain where your 2 years of physics grants you the power to speak as an authority on Population Biology to biologists and students of Biology?

Henry J said: Of course, only a small fraction of mutations in a human genome will be in functional DNA. As I recall, the average mutation rate in functional DNA is between 1 and 2. Henry

Intelligent Designer said:

Stanton said: Obviously, you are unaware that several kinds of bacteria, such as Bdellovibrio and many filamentous cyanobacteria, produce more than two daughter cells at a time, either by elongating, or fragmenting.

You are right. I didn't know that but your point is irrelavent.

It's also quite obvious that you don't know anything about how fast bacteria can mutate, or that bacteria can have several hundred generations within a few days.

How is that obvious? Did I say something that implied that I don't know how fast bacteria can replicate or are you just automatically assuming that I don't know anything at all.

Mike,

You've done a lot of talking about potential wells. I don't see how that applies to DNA.

Intelligent Designer said:

Henry J said: Of course, only a small fraction of mutations in a human genome will be in functional DNA. As I recall, the average mutation rate in functional DNA is between 1 and 2. Henry

That would only be true if you accept the premise that all noncoding DNA is not functional. I don't except that premise. Just because you can't figure out what something does doesn't mean it does nothing.

Intelligent Designer said: Mike, You've done a lot of talking about potential wells. I don't see how that applies to DNA.

Or, why would you argue that humans mutate at a faster rate than bacteria?

Stanton said: Are you really going to drag out the Intelligent Design nonsense about how "Evolution is wrong because Junk DNA isn't really junk even though Intelligent Design has no ability to predict the possible functions of Junk DNA"?

Mike,

Try to explain to me the conditions underwhich a string of DNA would be in a potential well and therefore not subject to the same mutation rate as other DNA.

I am under the impression that what Mike is saying about potential wells applying to DNA is complete nonsense. Maybe I am wrong. Would anyone else care to support or deny that notion?

Intelligent Designer said:

Stanton said: Are you really going to drag out the Intelligent Design nonsense about how "Evolution is wrong because Junk DNA isn't really junk even though Intelligent Design has no ability to predict the possible functions of Junk DNA"?

That would be another topic. However, I am on record for dismissing the idea that 97 percent of DNA is junk here, here, here, and here.

Intelligent Designer said: I am under the impression that what Mike is saying about potential wells applying to DNA is complete nonsense. Maybe I am wrong. Would anyone else care to support or deny that notion?

Tiresome intelligent design advocate who repeatedly spammed some half-assed simulation he wrote that he claimed would show evolution can't work; really crossed the line when he lied in a comment and told other readers to visit his site because I was writing a rebuttal to his claims.

Intelligent Designer said: I am under the impression that what Mike is saying about potential wells applying to DNA is complete nonsense. Maybe I am wrong. Would anyone else care to support or deny that notion?

Malchus said: Unfortunately, you are completely wrong on this point. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000371

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: Unfortunately, you are completely wrong on this point. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000371

You are assuming that DNA is only functional if it is transcribed.

The bottom line, though, is the genome is mostly dead, transcriptionally. The junk is still junk.

Intelligent Designer said:

The bottom line, though, is the genome is mostly dead, transcriptionally. The junk is still junk.

This statement assumes that DNA is only functional if it is transcribed.

Opps. I added this comment to the wrong thread.

If it's not transcribed and it is functional, you have to find some real effect that does not involve it being transcribed. Since you are so smart, why don't you tell us what that real effect is.

Intelligent Designer said:

The bottom line, though, is the genome is mostly dead, transcriptionally. The junk is still junk.

This statement assumes that DNA is only functional if it is transcribed.

Randy,

Larry Moran will be so proud. But you really ought to provide a citation when you crib your notes. The fact that you are reading Larry Moran's pages means that you should also be aware of another pertinent issue. Wait, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Are you reading Larry, or was this cribbed from a secondary quote-mine someplace else?

Anyway, I see a few possible premises, but no argument and no conclusion. Did you hit "Submit" prematurely?

Intelligent Designer said:

Stanton said: Are you really going to drag out the Intelligent Design nonsense about how "Evolution is wrong because Junk DNA isn't really junk even though Intelligent Design has no ability to predict the possible functions of Junk DNA"?

That would be another topic. However, I am on record for dismissing the idea that 97 percent of DNA is junk *cut spam*

So now that this guy has lost the argument, he tries to weasel out of it by deflecting the conversation to junk DNA. Well I guess he doesn't have enough degrees to talk to me so he loses again.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Randy, Larry Moran will be so proud. But you really ought to provide a citation when you crib your notes. The fact that you are reading Larry Moran's pages means that you should also be aware of another pertinent issue. Wait, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Are you reading Larry, or was this cribbed from a secondary quote-mine someplace else? Anyway, I see a few possible premises, but no argument and no conclusion. Did you hit "Submit" prematurely?

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Randy, Larry Moran will be so proud. But you really ought to provide a citation when you crib your notes. The fact that you are reading Larry Moran's pages means that you should also be aware of another pertinent issue. Wait, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Are you reading Larry, or was this cribbed from a secondary quote-mine someplace else? Anyway, I see a few possible premises, but no argument and no conclusion. Did you hit "Submit" prematurely?

Intelligent Designer said:

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Randy, Larry Moran will be so proud. But you really ought to provide a citation when you crib your notes. The fact that you are reading Larry Moran's pages means that you should also be aware of another pertinent issue. Wait, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Are you reading Larry, or was this cribbed from a secondary quote-mine someplace else? Anyway, I see a few possible premises, but no argument and no conclusion. Did you hit "Submit" prematurely?

From time to time I read Larry Moran's pages -- not a lot. I intentionally left out the sitation because my alias seems to generate a knee jerk reaction to anything I say. I was anticipating such a reaction and planned to site Larry after recieving one. Unfortunately my evil plan failed.

Intelligent Designer said: I intentionally left out the sitation [sic] because my alias seems to generate a knee jerk reaction to anything I say. I was anticipating such a reaction and planned to site [sic] Larry after recieving one. Unfortunately my evil plan failed.

eric said:

Intelligent Designer said: I intentionally left out the sitation [sic] because my alias seems to generate a knee jerk reaction to anything I say. I was anticipating such a reaction and planned to site [sic] Larry after recieving one. Unfortunately my evil plan failed.

So, it wasn't plaigerism, it was an attempt at rhetorical entrapment gone wrong? Honestly officer, I wasn't stealing, I was just checking their security protocols? I don't think you really understand the reason for academic citation. If you use Larry's work, you don't cite him because you owe it to us to do so. You cite him because you owe it to him.

Malchus, I realize your feelings are hurt get over it and start acting like a Christian.

Intelligent Designer said: Malchus, I realize your feelings are hurt get over it and start acting like a Christian.

Acceptance of Christ enables me to feel compassion even for the lost souls of the internet. You are one such lost soul. You are clearly bright, and you are passionate about your subject. But you show highly unethical behavior which taints your ideas in the marketplace of science. Oddly enough, I am probably more charitably inclined towards you than most of the other posters: they simply regard you as a fool. I am trying to help.

Malchus said: I am a Christian. I am praying for you, since I am averse to your eventual damnation.

DS said: So now that this guy has lost the argument, he tries to weasel out of it by deflecting the conversation to junk DNA.

kakapo said:

DS said: So now that this guy has lost the argument, he tries to weasel out of it by deflecting the conversation to junk DNA.

"weasels"... nice. I'm happy to see someone else is intrigued by the meta-narrative as well. I have to say that my hat's off to Intelligent Designer. He resurrected this thread and has kept it going for 14 pages(!) all the while being wrong about the initial premise. His thread management skill is in the top 2 or 3 that I've encountered in internet forums. Perhaps only the immortal Rob Bennett of investment boards is/was more skilled.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am a Christian. I am praying for you, since I am averse to your eventual damnation.

Malchus this is way off topic but I am curious to know why you think I would be damned? Also what exactly does it mean to be damned? Will I be thrown into the lake of fire and tormented for all eternity or what?

Malchus said: I am trying to help.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am trying to help.

In that case send me an email so I can contact you privately.

There seems to be some confusion about the definitions of “junk DNA” and “non-coding DNA”, and it’s persisted even after PZ’s response. Please, people. Junk DNA is DNA in which particular sequences have no function (though I would allow bulk functions, like the possible selection for cell size mentioned above). We can distinguish junk DNA not because it has no known function but because it evolves at the mutation rate, i.e. neutrally. Non-coding DNA is just that: DNA that isn’t translated into protein using the genetic code. A fair amount of non-coding DNA has a function: functional RNAs, regulatory sequences, and a few other conserved regions whose functions are unknown (but we know they have functions because they evolve more slowly than the mutation rate). All junk DNA is non-coding, but not all non-coding DNA is junk, and it would be foolish to dispose of either term, since they have useful and separate meanings.

Intelligent Designer said:

If it's not transcribed and it is functional, you have to find some real effect that does not involve it being transcribed. Since you are so smart, why don't you tell us what that real effect is.

Examples of functional DNA sequences that are not transcribed are promoters, enhancers and telomeres. Also some deseases are known to be associated with mutations in non-coding regions of DNA.

Malchus said: Why?

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: I am trying to help.

In that case send me an email so I can contact you privately.

Malchus said: Randy said:

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

My response was, I thought, quite clear:

I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

I said Where are you comming from and what exactly is your educational background?

You said I don’t know what you mean by “comming from”, perhaps you could clarify? I have several degrees - both doctoral and otherwise. Why is this relevant?

You also said I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

I yanked your chain with In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

Then you said I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

You reversed the order in which your comments appeared in the blog to present your argument.

Intelligent Designer said: you've been whinning like a vindictive brat ever since.

Intelligent Designer said:

Malchus said: Randy said:

In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

My response was, I thought, quite clear:

I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

My interpretation of the events is different than yours. What you said implies that when I asked you what your education background was you answered me. You didn't, at least not until I yanked your chain. This is how it went:

I said Where are you comming from and what exactly is your educational background?

You said I don’t know what you mean by “comming from”, perhaps you could clarify? I have several degrees - both doctoral and otherwise. Why is this relevant?

You also said I am a devout Christian who accepts the unprovable reality of the Divine as manifested through his Works and his Incarnation in the Risen Lamb.

I yanked your chain with In that case you believe in nonsense. You may have a doctorate but I doubt it’s in a science related field so I am not interested in talking to you anymore.

Then you said I have a doctorate in biology, and another in history. I have a masters of education degree as well. My faith and religion are irrelevant to any discussion of your errors - why do you even think they would be?

So by yanking your chain I was able to get an answer from you but you've been whinning like a vindictive brat ever since.

eric said:

Intelligent Designer said: you've been whinning like a vindictive brat ever since.

If you actually responded to the substantive posts there'd be less time or inclination to complain about your behavior. But you don't. Instead of going tit-for-tat with Malchus about who said what, why don't you respond to Ian's post about junk DNA, or Jesse & Mike's posts about potential wells, or the multiple posts saying why your program is not a good biological analog. You get to choose which posts you respond to. Seems a bit facetious to choose to respond to the character attacks, ignore the substantive posts, and then complain about how all you get are character attacks.

Randy, I am curious as to your hypocrisy: it took numerous request for you to admit your own somewhat limited education. Why is it inappropriate for someone else to not immediately off their own qualifications, when you were far more recalcitrant?

And Eric is right: you have made no substantive answer now in dozens of posts - except for your plagiarism.

Intelligent Designer said: So by yanking your chain I was able to get an answer from you but you've been whinning like a vindictive brat ever since.

phantomreader42 said: In other words, you're an admitted troll.

Intelligent Designer said: So by yanking your chain I was able to get an answer from you but you've been whinning like a vindictive brat ever since.

I guess I should go on to say that a pertinent issue that a reader of Larry Moran's blog should note about mutation rates is that Larry doesn't think much evolution happens via selection. Some, but not a lot. So something that someone who has chosen Larry as their authority on raw mutation rates should ask is to see what proportion of those Larry calculates are conserved under selection.

If you wish to engage in this discussion, these are qualities you should bring to the table; otherwise this entire exercise is an amusement in futility.

does the phrase:

"You're wasting your time."

Come to mind yet?

trust me, you are.

Stimpy is not worth your time.

Ichthyic said: If you wish to engage in this discussion, these are qualities you should bring to the table; otherwise this entire exercise is an amusement in futility. does the phrase: "You're wasting your time." Come to mind yet? trust me, you are. Stimpy is not worth your time.

Your point is well made.

*shrug*

I don't mean to poison the well, as it were, but it's not like there hasn't been a long history of Stimpy's activity to gander at, and it has little changed in that time.

That's all I'll say on the matter. Stimpy DOES need an audience, after all. I just wanted to put up a warning flag, just in case you really were thinking that progress would be made via debate.

Ichthyic said: Your point is well made. *shrug* I don't mean to poison the well, as it were, but it's not like there hasn't been a long history of Stimpy's activity to gander at, and it has little changed in that time. That's all I'll say on the matter. Stimpy DOES need an audience, after all. I just wanted to put up a warning flag, just in case you really were thinking that progress would be made via debate.

Which would Jesus choose?

"Let's ask Mr. Owl..."

:)

Ask an owl? Would it help ferret out an answer about a weasel, or would it eat the weasel? Or the ferret?

Is the ferret feral? Is the weasel wild? Would a wild weasel ferret out an omnipotent owl? Or would the feral ferret ferret out a wise, wild, winsome weasel without a whiff of latching?

It would if it gives a hoot!

Wesley R. Elsberry said: I guess I should go on to say that a pertinent issue that a reader of Larry Moran's blog should note about mutation rates is that Larry doesn't think much evolution happens via selection. Some, but not a lot. So something that someone who has chosen Larry as their authority on raw mutation rates should ask is to see what proportion of those Larry calculates are conserved under selection.

Randy,

I thought that I was reasonably clear in my last comment.

My viewpoint is no secret, but is hardly relevant to anything being discussed here.

Wesley,

There's been plenty of irrelevant discussion. I am asking a friendly question. If you are both a creationist and an evolutionist do you agree that that falls under the umbrella of intelligent design?

Wesley R. Elsberry said: Randy, I thought that I was reasonably clear in my last comment. My viewpoint is no secret, but is hardly relevant to anything being discussed here.

Malchus,

By any chance, did you play with the Interactive Weasel Program that I wrote?

Randy,

Since "intelligent design" creationism is simply a subset of the ensemble of tired old religious antievolution argumentation, the answer to your question is a straightforward, "No." Antievolution and evolution don't mix. I really, really dislike bogus attempts to equivocate about what "intelligent design" signifies. We aren't talking some generic phrasing without referents here; we are talking about a concerted socio-political campaign to derail a chunk of science education under that label.

Wesley,

I am not religious nor am I part of a concerted socio-political campaign to derail science education. Intelligent Design isn't necessarily opposed to evolution. For some people it is and for some people it isn't. By occupation, I am an intelligent designer. I develope software for a living and software development is an evolutionary process.

If you are indeed a theistic evolutionist, isn't it a fact that you believe life was designed by God as Christians understand it? If that is not the case explain it to me.

Randy, you have made anothet flat out incorrect statement:

software developement is NOTHING like an evolutionary process. Absolutely nothing.

Malchus,

There is probably some narrowly defined definition of the word evolution that would make you right.

Intelligent Designer said: Malchus, There is probably some narrowly defined definition of the word evolution that would make you right.

I don't give a flip that some individuals would like to wipe the slate clean of meaning for "intelligent design" and start over. It's damaged goods, and I for one oppose any effort at post hoc cleanup. If you are part of trying to rehabilitate "intelligent design" as a label, then you are part of the anti-science socio-political movement, even if only in the role of "useful idiot".

Religious antievolutionists have been consistently and persistently lying to us since 1968, even about whether they are religious or not. I'm not giving the benefit of doubt anymore.

I've patiently explained problems in understanding "weasel". I think that is sufficient.

Wesley R. Elsberry said: I don't give a flip that some individuals would like to wipe the slate clean of meaning for "intelligent design" and start over. It's damaged goods, and I for one oppose any effort at post hoc cleanup. If you are part of trying to rehabilitate "intelligent design" as a label, then you are part of the anti-science socio-political movement, even if only in the role of "useful idiot". Religious antievolutionists have been consistently and persistently lying to us since 1968, even about whether they are religious or not. I'm not giving the benefit of doubt anymore. I've patiently explained problems in understanding "weasel". I think that is sufficient.

Intelligent Designer said: Malchus, There is probably some narrowly defined definition of the word evolution that would make you right.

Randy, if you are not going to post substantive replies to to real issues,

Wait, Wes, let him get to the "space aliens did it" part first.... :-)

Ok Ian, I'll consider the thread closed. Whatever else I have to say will be added to my blog.