In the matter of life I totally understand extinctions. That’s fully explained by entropy. What I don’t understand is how some cell lines manage to slow it down enough that they’ve persisted for billions of years.

In computer design we’ve developed highly protected core software that reset what evolution hath wrought back to a known good state. Typically this is implemented by a read-only memory chip that instructs the hardware to load a protected image of the factory-original software configuration. The factory original is, because of its size, usually supplied as a protected portion of a hard disk drive and/or on removable media such as a DVD disk.

To insure even greater chance of catastrophe recovery we store redundant copies in different locations such that if a fire destroys one copy others will still be available.

Since human design more often than not is eventually found to be an analog of something in the design of life my best guess as to how some cell lines manage to slow down entropy enough to survive for millions or even billions of years is by employing protected core code and triggers which serve to restore the organism to a known working state.

This is an important question. I’ll write a separate article today to address it.

My take on the original post:
Mathemeticians, engineers, and computer scientists all work in fields dominated by the type of thinking that goes into a formal system. Mathematics is a full-fledged formal system, while the other two are highly rule-driven with an objective to create. They are essentially fields where you use deductive thinking, working from the top down.

Yes, I think that one of the reasons why many of us went into those fields (I am a mechanical engineer) was that the laws and fixed rules in those fields gave us feelings of security, order, certainty, and predictability. That is not to say that those fields are not challenging — it is often a challenge to figure out ways to apply the laws and fixed rules.

Science is the process of building from the bottom up, using inductive thinking. The prupose is not so much to create but to uncover.

It’s very natural that the people who were attracted to fields that relied on deductive thinking in the first place are more likely to see the top-down version of reality, with an outside force providing guidance and rules, as a more acceptable vision of the world.

I’m perfectly amenable to being convinced that the complexity, information content, and machinery of living systems can not be explained by stochastic processes filtered by natural selection, and I would not even demand hard evidence, just some rigorous argumentation based on the following:

1) An analysis of the unlikelness of evolution that accounts for all 10+ known processes by which the genome accumulates variances, the 3 methods by which that variance is selected, and demonstrates true independence for each facrot before multiplying the factors’ probabilities together.
2) A reason that scaffolding and similar methods would not be able to create irreducilbe complexity naturally.
3) A way to measure CSI that is internal to the information contained in the string itself. For example, it should be able to determine with 95% accuracy whether a given four-letter code in a string of 3000 characters either comes from a coding section of DNA or was randomly generated.
4) A precise limitation on the features that can or can not appear in a living organism over a trillion generations.
5) A list of the precise interventions that were made in the history and the time frame in which they were made. Appeals to “some time in the past” are irrelevant.

Once an allele becomes fixed, yes there is no fitness benefit so the fitness becomes 1. And yes, this makes perfect sense.

My somment about the fitness being re-set was wrong. The situation Haldane imagines is where a change in the environment reduced juvenile survival, and this is restored though selection. His argument boils down to saying that if the reduction is large enough, the growth rate goes below 1, so the population will decline, and may go extinct.

Nunney’s model is almost exactly the same in this regard, except that he has a continuously changing environment (it’s also different in that it has better ecological dynamics, but that’s not critical for the general point).

Bob

I cited Nunney to clarify the point that Haldane’s dilemma only works in a deteriorating environment. It’s something that isn’t obvious from Haldane’s paper. If most environments are stable (at least with regards to the fitness surface), the dilemma goes away because beneficial mutations increase fitness – in Haldanes model (IIRC) the fitness gets re-set when an allele becomes fixed. That’s an odd feature of the model, but is best interpreted as being equivalent to a decline in the environment.

Bob,

Let me know if I misunderstand your point. Are you saying that in Haldane’s model once an allele reaches fixation its fitness becomes 0 (ceases to confer a fitness benefit) and that Nunney’s model disagrees with this assumption?

If not, then disregard the rest of this and please clarify.

If so, I think Haldane’s assumption makes perfect sense, since a trait increases fitness over that of your competitors (other organisms in your population.) If everyone has the same allele (fixation), then there is no more fitness advantage.

Please correct me if I misunderstood you.

I think you’re quite right that this is a major factor in why prehistoric evolutionary biology is so vociferously defended by those with a vested interest in it or similarly useless intellectual pursuits.

I wouldn’t call paleontology — which to some people is synonymous or nearly synonymous with “prehistoric evolutionary biology” — a “useless intellectual pursuit.” Knowledge is good for its own sake. However, the Darwinists have been claiming that the US is going to lose its international technological competitiveness if Darwinism is not taught dogmatically in schools. Paul R. Gross, co-author — with Barbara Forrest — of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and lead author of the Fordham Institute (no connection to Fordham U.) report on state science standards, threatened to drop Ohio’s overall science grade from a B to an F because of Ohio’s evolution lesson plan, even though evolution counts for only 3 points out of 69 in the Fordham grading system — see

http://im-from-missouri.blogsp.....is-co.html

Good point. Science and engineering that produces practical benefits easily seen by laypersons is not really subject to threat when allocation of finite public funding is prioritized and distributed as compared to science and engineering that does not produce easily discernable practical benefit.

One program that comes immediately to mind in this regard is the Superconducting Super Collider. Congress critters couldn’t see the cost/benefit of the big atom smasher as superior to that of the International Space Station, couldn’t afford to fund both, so the SSC lost out.

Historic biology is of far less practical import than high energy physics. The public would refuse to grant much funding to historic biology if they realized how useless it is.

I think you’re quite right that this is a major factor in why prehistoric evolutionary biology is so vociferously defended by those with a vested interest in it or similarly useless intellectual pursuits.

Two people are looking at a finely-tuned, highly sophistocated machine that produces massive amounts of complex, functioning items.

1: “It’s remarkable what purposelessness can do.”

2: “You think this machine came about and operates without purpose?”

1: “Yup.”

2: “That’s incredible. What makes you think that?”

1: “Come on. Everyone knows that everything in life is purposeless.”

2: “Why do you say that? All machines I know of have been designed and built for a purpose, by intelligent beings.”

1: “Yeah, but the intelligent beings came about through a process that’s purposeless.”

2: “How do you know?”

1: “Come on. Everyone knows that.”

2: “Let me take another approach. Can you show me a working model of a purposeless machine that generates any type of functioning thing?”

1: “Here. Here they are.” [Pointing to Avida, etc.]

2: “But these all have active information and an overarching purpose built-in! How can you claim that these are models for this machine?!”

1: “Well, for a living, I study the output and the few visible portions of this machine. All the books and all the important people in the field say that the machine is entirely purposeless. So there. Who are you to question that?”

2: “I design and build machines every day. When we have an idea for a machine, before committing large amounts of money to its development for production, we always need to prove that it will work by designing and building a working model. You want me to commit to the idea that this thing operates completely purposelessly, yet you haven’t shown a proof-of-concept working model for your idea of how it works. Sorry, no can do.”

* With a few minor but clarifying fixes in the wording of my little story at comment 5 above.