Writing Computer Programs by Random Mutation and Natural Selection
| June 10, 2006 | Posted by GilDodgen under Intelligent Design |
The first computer program every student writes is called a “Hello World” program. It is a simple program that prints “Hello World!” on the screen when executed. In the course of writing this bit of code one learns about using the text editor, and compiling, linking and executing a program in a given programming environment.
Here’s a Hello World program in the C programming language:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
printf(“Hello World!\n”);
return(0);
}
This program includes 66 non-white-space text characters. The C language uses almost every character on the keyboard, but to be generous in my calculations I’ll only assume that we need the 26 lower-case alpha characters. How many 66-character combinations are there? The answer is 26 raised to the 66th power, or 26^66. That’s roughly 2.4 x 10^93 (10^93 is 1 followed by 93 zeros).
To get a feel for this number, it is estimated that there are about 10^80 subatomic particles in the known universe, so there are as many 66-character combinations in our example as there are subatomic particles in 10 trillion universes. There are about 4 x 10^17 seconds in the history of the universe, assuming that the universe is 13 billion years old.
What is the probability of arriving at our Hello World program by random mutation and natural selection? How many simpler precursors are functional, what gaps must be crossed to arrive at those islands of function, and how many simultaneous random changes must be made to cross those gaps? How many random variants of these 66 characters will compile? How many will link and execute at all, or execute without fatal errors? Assuming that our program has already been written, what is the chance of evolving it into another, more complex program that will compile, link, execute and produce meaningful output?
I can’t answer these questions, but this example should give you a feel for the unfathomable probabilistic hurdles that must be overcome to produce the simplest of all computer programs by Darwinian mechanisms.
Now one might ask, What is the chance of producing, by random mutation and natural selection, the digital computer program that is the DNA molecule, not to mention the protein synthesis machinery and information-processing mechanism, all of which is mutually interdependent for function and survival?
The only thing that baffles me is the fact that Darwinists are baffled by the fact that most people don’t buy their blind-watchmaker storytelling.
66 Responses to Writing Computer Programs by Random Mutation and Natural Selection
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Maybe you think of ‘function’ as a sum of small functions (print, for, etc), whereas biological function is primarily determined by structure, that is the ‘message’ itself, in which ‘print’ and ‘prind’ would be equal — because of redundancy, chemical equivalence between amino acids, and stuff like that. I’m afraid your algorythm/genetic material comparison is way too simple.
That would be the one argument against your point of view…
@DaveScot
I’ve already read such papers. This one (http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=a.....t=14390342) talks about interaction-induced speciation. Just send me an email if you want a PDF. Also, I have experimental/modelling papers on similar systems (I’m afraid trrll is at least partially correct in his affirmations), I’ll gladly give you PDF if you feel like reading (maths are pretty hard, though).
finchy
There are lots of examples of speciation in the lab that could be given. Drosophila is relatively easy to coax into voluntary reproductive isolation. However, under the biological definition of species they must be involuntarily isolated – ie; not cross fertile producing at best sterile hybrids. As I recall there’s at least one example of that too in drosophila although it’s difficult to tell if cross infertility is absolute or merely greatly reduced.
trrrl should have been able to give a well documented & widely published example that we could look at specifically.
DaveScot
This species concept is widely challenged, because it is… not widely appliable. It doesn’t work for bacteria, hermaphrodites, and so on.
Good exemples exists in the wild, at world scale, regarding amphibians and their parasites (involuntary reproductive isolation via geographical isolation — it is not yet published, I only see this one is conferences), and in seabirds at a local scale (http://scholar.google.fr/schol.....9310585283). Some papers dealing with mosquito species complex in africa are talking about reproductive isolation in sympatry. Also, you could find examples of sympatric speciation in parasites (There is a paper by McCoy in Trends in Parasitol named “what is sympatry” that you should definitely read)