Mathematics and the Creative Powers of the Blind Watchmaker
| May 16, 2010 | Posted by GilDodgen under Intelligent Design |
The burden of proof rests with BW proponents, not ID proponents.
For those with inquisitive minds, I suggest checking out David Berlinski’s comments here, starting at 41 minutes. As everyone with any sense knows, David Berlinski — a mindless, born-again, Christian religious fanatic — is masquerading as a secular Jewish mathematician while attempting to impose a theocracy and destroy the entire foundation of modern science.
I have, on several occasions at UD, proposed that simple mathematical analysis of the available probabilistic resources — even making unrealistically optimistic probabilistic assumptions at every turn — renders totally absurd the claim that the mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection can account for what we find in living systems beyond the utterly trivial.
It took 10^20 reproductive events for malaria to evolve resistance to chloroquine with two randomly produced genetic variations (check out Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution). This is the empirical evidence concerning the creative powers of the Blind Watchmaker. Assuming that humans evolved from a primitive simian-like ancestor three million years ago, and assuming an unrealistically optimistic generation period of 10 years, and assuming an unrealistically optimistic average number of individuals at 10^7, we have 3×10^12 reproductive events for analogous Darwinian mechanisms to turn Lucy into Lucille Ball. That means that with 33 million times fewer random opportunities than malaria had to come up with two point mutations (that produced no new biological machinery or information), Darwinian mechanisms supposedly miraculously engineered modern humans from a pre-chimpanzee ancestor.
This is simply an absurd proposition on its face, completely unsupported by evidence or even the most trivial analytical or probabilistic scrutiny.
This is why, as David Berlinski comments, he and his mathematician friends consider Darwinism to be “nutty.”
38 Responses to Mathematics and the Creative Powers of the Blind Watchmaker
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bornagain77 (28),
If you ever decide to address the actual errors in Behe’s calculations, do let me know. Until you or someone else does so, his conclusions are unsupported.
Cassandra:
Behe has addressed all challenges to his book that have appeared in peer review:
“The Old Enigma,” Part 1 of 3
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/.....1XSIDBHP01
Do you suppose that Nick Matzke would mind so much as to have his groundbreaking insights published in peer review so as to stop this heresy of Behe’s or do you think he is gun shy of Behe since he got burnt so bad last time he challenged him??
Cassandra you may get Nick to write the Journal of Clinical Investigation also to correct their error, since that is where the 1 in 10^20 number is derived from in the first place:
Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth Shies Away from Intelligent Design but Unwittingly Vindicates Michael Behe – Oct. 2009
Excerpt: The rarity of chloroquine resistance is not in question. In fact, Behe’s statistic that it occurs only once in every 10^20 cases was derived from public health statistical data, published by an authority in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The extreme rareness of chloroquine resistance is not a negotiable data point; it is an observed fact.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....est_s.html
bornagain77 @33:
Your excerpt from evolutionnews is not a quotation from R Dawkins, but an opinion of Casey Luskin.
Please address Cassandra’s challenge, from which you have run away transparently.
Adel,,, and she can quote an “opinion” by Matzke and I can’t quote Luskin to a source? Frankly your double standard is bleeding through Adel,,, you must try harder to conceal such hypocrisy of standard.
bornagain77,
Accusing someone of hypocrisy does not get you off the hook.
Characterizing Matzke’s analysis as opinion does not get you off the hook.
You can get off the hook by providing a step-by-step refutation of Matzke’s analysis.
Gil Dodgen,
Program a static board evaluator for checkers that performs as well as the evolved evaluator of Blondie24, i.e., with no increase in the depth of search in the game tree.
The fact is that Blondie24 evolved to play a much stronger game of checkers than did its creators, ultimately rating higher than 99% of human competitors. (Another researcher repeated the study, but let the evolutionary program run longer, and obtained a higher rated player.) Furthermore, Blondie24 did so looking no further ahead in the game than humans commonly do.
The fact is that, no matter your expertise in programming of checkers-playing programs, you have never managed to produce a static board evaluator that assesses game situations as “intelligently” as Blondie24 did. Why are you holding forth on the limits of what can be accomplished by iteration of reproduction-with-variation and selection in biological evolution, which you obviously understand poorly, when you have no answer to a challenge you do understand?
Something Dembski and Marks do not begin to address is that there are different kinds of knowledge, and that some kinds are harder to come by, and thus are more valuable, than others. David Fogel moved from checkers to chess, and started out with a public-domain program that humans had been tweaking for years. After a couple days of computational evolution (again, evolution of the static board evaluator), the program had gone from master to grandmaster rating (370+ gain in rating, IIRC).
Now, no one would say that Fogel didn’t use any sort of knowledge in structuring the static board evaluator. But the knowledge he used was generic, and easily obtained. It was relatively “dumb” knowledge. The evolutionary process yielded, in a sense that has a precise operational definition, “smart” knowledge. Knowledge that makes a chess player a grandmaster rather than a master is something very special, at least in the estimation of humans.
“Dumb input, smart output” is not a phenomenon that will be explained away by counting bits of “active” information.