Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Master of the Games: You vs. Richard Dawkins on human evolution

Denyse O'Leary
July 22, 2007
Intelligent Design
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Who will it be? The Dawkins delusion or you?

Malcolm Chisholm, our Master of the Games, tells me, “We are up to 2170 simulations run so far. I have had no feedback, except about spelling, That is now corrected. And HERE is the link.

He also says, “I will have another game ready in a day or so. I am going to post that on “a private list” first to see if anyone can spot bugs in it.”

Play this one, and tell us what you think.

Comments
Dawkins: Natural selection favors the new version of the gene, because the individuals that carry it leave more offspring than those that do not. And yet, as a different thread has been exploring, more complexity seems to lead to less offspring, not more. So how could baboons ever arise from bacteria, when NS favors those organisms that leave more offspring?Phinehas
July 25, 2007
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It seems to me that a true simulation of evolution would place random characters into a file and then try to run it. Maybe this "program" will eventually run if the right characters fall into the right places. And maybe once it can run itself, it will eventually be able to figure out how to replicate itself, making itself better to the point that it can come up with its own evolutionary algorithms. To me, this would be a REAL WORLD scenario.Phinehas
July 25, 2007
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I posted this response in a previous thread relating to this simulator. It might have been overshadowed by other topics. But here it is again for what it's worth ... Here is the (main) “gotcha” Mr Chisholm is putting into his “game” — at each new generation of the game, the *one* “genome” consisting of two codons gives rise to *one* new “offspring” genome, with a rare but possible mutation. Correct me if I’m wrong, but there aren’t a lot of populations in the real world that have a population size of ONE individual in the whole world, total, generation after generation for millions of years… So Given that scenario, it’s true that evolutionary change will be PAINFULLY SLOW. But this does not look like an accurate model of what happens in the real world. In the real world, populations typically consist of millions, billions, trillions, even quadrillions of individuals. There are a VAST number of any particular kind of bacteria around. In a REAL WORLD scenario, any particular point mutation (even any particular *pair* of point mutations) happen on a very regular basis, *somewhere* in the population consisting of a vast number of individual organisms, each giving rise to multiple offspring, each of which is a new chance for a new mutation to achieve a particular basepair combination. Given the mutation rates used in this “game”, it won’t take “5,952,380 generations” for each new point mutation to occur (as the game asserts near the top when you take the first step), in the *real* world it will occur almost inevitably in *EVERY* single generation in any population of over a few million organisms. How many herrings are there in the ocean ? Of course a lot more than one !SeekAndFind
July 23, 2007
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The first thing that struck me when I went to play the simulation is they keep the population size at 1. I hope that later versions correct such an oversimplification.cdesignproponentsist
July 22, 2007
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"Methinks it looks like a weasel" is quite the fitting quote for Darwinists. As illustrated in "A Meaningful World" by Benjamin Wiker (Author), Jonathan Witt, The quote is from a line in a Shakespeare play in which the characters are musing about the shapes of clouds. And as is fitting for Darwinists they imagine the evidence to fit whatever they want it to look like with no regards to empirical foundations. When I look at Darwinian evidence Methinks it looks like a weasel indeed!bornagain77
July 22, 2007
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I like this Dawkins quote from the game: "CUMULATIVE SELECTION is one of the wonders of nature. Each mutation makes a gene a little better - a little fitter as we Darwinists say. Natural selection favors the new version of the gene, because the individuals that carry it leave more offspring than those that do not. Thus the new version spreads through the population. The happens repeatedly for every possible mutation that strikes the gene!" Sanford totally dismantles this argument. Having a gene be a little better would not make enough difference to be selected out. The entire genome is selected out by an organism living or dying. That include the good gene, in addition to all the bad ones. Since nature can't find the single gene to select (because it makes no demonstrable difference), then selection is just random. There is an equal chance of the organism with the good gene being selected as a less fit organism. Behe focused our attention to the gene level, and Sanford backed it out back to the whole organism level. Both of these guys' work are lethal to Dawkins weasel explanation.ajl
July 22, 2007
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