I was a little annoyed since I asked you to wait till I got back to this thread. You kept right on posting before I came back. Remember, you’re here at our invitation.

In any case, I do apologize to you for the rough treatment.

Now, let’s do this in pieces, I don’t want long responses where you fill up your posts with so many falsehoods and where I’ll have to spend 10 pages cleaning them up. In otherwords I don’t want you to do a Gish Gallop. If you do that, automatic delection. Ok?

Your questions might be valuable to the readers, but if sense you going into a Chewbacca Defense of Avida or doing a Gish Gallop are argumentum ad nauseam, I’m sorry your questions and objections will just be deleted.

So for starters, state your objection again about the fact that the host computer running the simulation effectively models a replication process. And then I’ll respond. Keep your assertion about the length of this comment please.

Finally if I pose a question to you, and you don’t ignore it, I will delete any subesequent participation on this thread until you answer. Got it? Your here at my invitation, remember that.

In any case, I’m sorry my treat of you was a little brusk…

Salvador

Why?

I don’t have time to address the sophistry of your posts today, so more posts from you on this thread until I get back. Ok?

What you are doing is what is known as Chewbacca Defense

But briefly:

Zapatero wrote:

The source code is available at http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/versions.shtml . Could you post the code that you believe is responsible for “heavily constraining” the mutations?

The reason the for the mutations being constraind is that there IS NO CODE modelling the replication process (like the RNAs and Proteins in transcription and translation).

You demand that I show in the Avida code where mutations are constrained, and I full well pointed out it doesn’t exist and that’s why the mutations are constrained. Avida relies on the CPU running the simulation to effect what RNAs and proteins do in real life. Hence, replication functions are totally immune to any damage from radiation induced mutation, hence the mutation is perfectly constrained because it is not even coded, much less modelled! It effectively models replication through POOF mechanisms immune from mutation.

Zapatero:

Ironically, you are the one advancing a tautology…. You object that EQU can’t really be IC since it is “trivially reachable”….. So Avida can’t reach something that it can’t reach — a perfect tautology.

I put ellipses where you made some false statements. IC cannot by definition be reached by deterministic process. It being specifed means by definition stochastic process can’t reach it. This is as straight forward as the fact square circles don’t exist.

“Square cirlces don’t exist” is a tautology but it’s one that’s consistent with accepted and practiced definitions. IC is consistent with accepted and practiced conceptions of complexity and irreducibility. If one is going to try to use conceptions of deterministic and stochastic process they better be consistent with accepted conceptions of if just like we have accepted conceptions of “square” and “circle”.

See:
Stochastic Processes, Deterministic Processes, and Square Circles

Avida, circumvents these problems through Orewllian double speak. Selection in Avida is anything but natural, it’s a POOF! If NS needed to form complexity, the user just inputs a parameter, and NS is there. POOF! No measure of NS’s complexity is calculated. It could well be thousands of bits in the real world, but Avida effectively gives it cost free. It effectively gives free lunches right there! No mention of this sleight of hand. Avida promoters are suggesting Avidain selection is “natural” or “Darwinian” when in fact it is artificial, and probably not even feasible in the natural world. Is that ethical?

The sleight of hand little removes complexity that would otherwise be in the natural world. It allows “artificial” selection to be perceived as “natural” selection. Orwellian double speak. It is unethical. In the natural world, these co-optive complexities come at cost. Is that factored in Avida? No.

Come to think of it Zaptero, why don’t you address the ethics of Avidian double speak in your next post, after I get back to this thread.

Finally, the displacement theorem shows combinations of deterministic and stochastic processes will not reach IC systems, unless the boundary conditions are more information rich than the artifact itself (i.e. a computer manufacturing pipeline is more complex than a computer). The displacement theorem basically again shows looking for simple solutions for IC is looking for square circles.

Salvador

Salvador, where does Behe give an objective definition of “well-matched”, and how does the Avida EQU function fail to meet it?

Second, what justifies your assertion that well-matched parts are rare? The world is full of well-matched parts.

“Mutations don’t get dead organisms to reporduce in the real world. Dead organism shouldn’t even be mutating because they are dead, but they mutate in Avida, and then these critters reproduce.”

At the ARN page, Evan Dorn explains what is happening in these cases, concluding thus:
“While yes, this process will slowly fill the grid cells, it is in no way analogous to life: nothing is replicated with fidelity, and no information is conserved.”

Your complaint of “resurrection” in Avida is dependent on your own false idea of what “alive” means in the Avida world.

scordova:
“As I pointed out through my radiation experiments in Avida, it is apparent the mutations were being heavilty constrainted, that’s why dead creatures were still giving birth!!!!”

The source code is available at http://dllab.caltech.edu/avida/versions.shtml . Could you post the code that you believe is responsible for “heavily constraining” the mutations?

RM+NS are producing useful, non-trivial, non-designed, irreducibly complex systems for our use.

This is highly disingenuous, as the framework is anything but pure RM+NS.

RM = the mutations are intelligently constrained. As I pointed out through my radiation experiments in Avida, it is apparent the mutations were being heavilty constrainted, that’s why dead creatures were still giving birth!!!!

Is this fair?

If I design a shot gun shell, I could argue the pattern with respect to the centroid of flight of the pellets is “random”. Thus if I shot someone’s cat with a shotgun, would I say that it’s a result of randomness because of the random pattern of shotgun pellets?

If the RM were not intelligently unconstrained in the simulation, Avidian creatures would not live.

NS – that is also disingenuous because the selective force in evolutionary algorithms is designed as part of a strategy to solve a problem. If the description of the selective forces were not designed, the evolutionary algorithm would go nowhere.

I will be posting on Dave Thomas’s article hopefully next week. He programmed a selection strategy that would find the target. What is the probabilty that a non-programmed set of code (let’s say through a random text generator) would create a selection strategy to hit the target? Practically zero.

Thomas was resorting to double speak: “oh, I didn’t specify the target.” Picture this, some kid with a paintball gun goes up to another and shoots his victim, and says to his vicitm, “don’t be mad, I wasn’t aiming at you, I was aiming at the shirt you were wearing.” Thomas’s double speak was hardly better.

What we have here is a case of Orwellian Double speak, where disingenous labels are affixed which are misleading. For example, let us say I created a novel and useful medicine. I could later call it “poison”. I could then argue “poison” is healthy. The arguments in favor of Avida are merely double speak.

Salvador
PS
I will try to get away from cyberspace for the weekend. I’ll try to get back to this thread later, or simply join the discussion in part 2.

Avida is not a simulation of life per se, but of reproduction, mutation and selection. The program demonstrates that complex and irreducubly complex systems can arise easily once the three preconditions are fulfilled.

To complain that it is not a biological simulation is to misunderstand fundamentally that it is a simulation of very specific ideas; mutation and selection over generations.

However, you do not have to look just to Avida to see that IC system evolve from mutation, reproduction and selection, look at any of the results of genetic algorithms, from PCB designs to auditorium designs.

These may not be biological systems, but if mutation and selection are useless, victorian age concepts, it is interesting that they are used to make thoroughly modern things like cell phone networks.

It strikes me that complaining Avida is not biological is a smoke screen. RM+NS are producing useful, non-trivial, non-designed, irreducibly complex systems for our use.

To truly deal with the issue you must demonstrate that genetic algorithms do not work in general.

look at any of the results of genetic algorithms, from PCB designs

Oh goody. PCB auto-routing software is something I have mucho experience with dating back decades. They work through simple trial and error, with the programmer throwing every bit of his expertise into the software so that it makes educated guesses about what might succeed. And it’s *still* guided by an intelligent agent through each PCB design. Avida is a toy. It models nothing that can be independently verified. It produces nothing useful or complex. -ds

I don’t think your characterization is accurate.

I really didn’t want to have to drag in all the ugly details of this nonsense program, but you’re forcing my hand.

In a real cell you have the genome and then things like proteins, RNAs, a collossal network of machinery to carry out the process of duplication.

In Avida, what simulates this duplication machinery? Answer: NOTHING! Genes, if they are in an appropriate semantic form just POOF another creature into existence. There is no simulation of the life process of being nourished and then carrying out all of the steps of duplication.

In a high radiation environment, the duplication machinery (RNA’s, proteins, etc.) would be cooked, toasted, fried….In Avida, this machinery is 100% invisible to radiation since it really doesn’t exist. Life forms poof offspring without going through the steps real organisms.

scordova makes the error of thinking that all activity = life, where as it just shows a reaction occurred (this was brought up earlier but termed ‘brownian motion’).

Oh, well in that case, I’m watching dead creatures have offspring, and thus Avida proves living-dead Zombies can have kids. We can add that to Avida’s list of amazing scientific discoveries.

If something as irreducibly complex as life can be poofed into existence by a randomizing process like brownian motion, why should any other of its solutions to IC be trusted?