Why Don't I Get It on Evolution?
Matt Steinglass says I just don’t get it when it comes to evolution. Here is the opening of his summary:
The point is this: until the 19th century, the argument for God was that beings as complex and sophisticated as hummingbirds or humans could not possible have come into existence randomly; something had to have shaped them. Darwin showed that wasn’t true.
But a crucial point of my post is that Darwin showed no such thing. Evolution, contrary to frequent claims in the public square, does not act randomly. I won’t repeat my entire original post here, but if Matt rejects my argument for why this is not so, I think he needs to point out the flaw in my logic.
Again, to be clear, I am not claiming that somehow the theological argument from design is correct, only that evolution does not act randomly.
I am a big fan of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, but all it did to the Argument from Design was move it back from biological to the cosmological level.
— Steve Sailer · Sep 8, 03:32 AM · #
“we are still left with the more profound question of the origin of the rules of the physical process themselves.”
“No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins seems always to remain a non-scientific question.”
“The theory of evolution, then, has not eliminated the problems of ultimate origins and ultimate purpose with respect to the development of organisms; it has ignored them. These problems are defined as non-scientific questions, not because we don’t care about the answers, but because attempting to solve them would impede practical progress. Accepting evolution, therefore, requires neither the denial of a Creator nor the loss of the idea of ultimate purpose. It resolves neither issue for us one way or the other. “
Well look Jim, you seem determined to inject God in there somewhere. You’re right, there are things science can’t know, and there are certainly many many areas science hasn’t made headway into for lack of time and resources and technology and good theory. The day that stops being true, science stops.
I don’t see why the question of ultimate origins ought to cause anyone to guess that there might be a creator. The answer is simply unknown at this time, and at some (distant) future point when it is known, do you think this will be the one scientific question in history to be found to have a supernatural explanation?
The reason to believe in a God, especially a particular God, is that you wish that there were one. It’s a huge leap past the simplest explanations.
— Steve C · Sep 8, 03:58 AM · #
While I agree with your general position (evolution neither confirms or denies a universal purpose), the statement “evolution does not act randomly” is not sustainable for most definitions of “random.” Genetic algorithms can produce outcomes without the designer knowing or intending what those outcomes may be, and the process is most certainly infused with what we commonly call randomness. You may want to consider using a different word there, to clarify your meaning.
— Grunthos · Sep 8, 04:03 AM · #
Grunthos:
Have you read my original post on this? I challenege this idea head-on.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/robert-wright-against-jerry-coyne.html
— Jim Manzi · Sep 8, 04:10 AM · #
There is a certain philosophical naivete common among scientists who believe that evolution (along with other scientific discoveries) has demolished the edifice of religion. It can never do such a thing. But evolution’s weaker claim—that a deus ex machina is an unnecessary hypothesis for explaining the existence of the universe and of biological life—is plenty devastating by itself.
If it were somehow known or proven that the ascent of man and civilization was inevitable from the moment of the Big Bang, that would be a far less interesting and significant thing than Robert Wright (and, apparently, Jim Manzi) supposes it would be. All of this silly poeticizing over whether we should call this possibly inexorable process intelligent, or “an” intelligence, or a God, is really beside the point of Darwin (and the cosmologists that trace it all the way back to the hydrogen atom), which is that everything in our existence is constrained by the laws of nature, and no disruptions in those laws, no omnipotent beings, are necessary to explain our existence. “You call this a God?” Robert Wright asks in the last chapter of Nonzero. But I couldn’t care less what he calls it.
— kth · Sep 8, 05:26 AM · #
Why don’t I get it on evolution?
Because, Dr. Manzi, you aren’t talking about evolution.
You have moved the goalposts back to sub-atomic particles.
If you want to talk about evolution, you have to restrict yourself to the smallest units of inheritance…..the genes…..DNA.
You have moved the argument back to divine intervention acting on twistors and electro-tweaks……you are not even making sense anymore.
— matoko_chan · Sep 8, 05:42 AM · #
And….“evolution does not act randomly”?
What on earth are you talking about?
Evolution is the mother of all optimization algorithms.
What Coyne said is that Darwin destroyed the notion that homosapiens sapiens is somehow privileged by a divine creator…….you know very well, Dr. Manzi that we are vectors for swarms of parasitic DNA, and our big social brains, and speech and thought, are merely fitness enhancers that enabled humans to control their environment more efficiently and spam out more reps.
I completely don’t get what you are even saying at this point.
— matoko_chan · Sep 8, 05:59 AM · #
Also, it’s absurd to say that “the argument for God was that beings as complex and sophisticated as hummingbirds or humans could not possible have come into existence randomly” — that was only ever one of the arguments for the existence of God, and not one of the strongest. And yes, evolution does not disprove the hypothesis of the existence of God. (To a believer like myself it even strengthens it, but that’s another topic altogether.)
— PEG · Sep 8, 08:33 AM · #
kth:
I don’t really think it’s as simple as that. Why could you not have made this statement on the day before Origin of Species was published with the same validity that you do today?
— Jim Manzi · Sep 8, 10:38 AM · #
Could someone, n/e one, please explain why Dr. Manzi’s hypothesis isn’t just another variant on the complexity argument against ToE?
I am not getting it.
:(
— matoko_chan · Sep 8, 12:48 PM · #
“evolution’s weaker claim—that a deus ex machina is an unnecessary hypothesis for explaining the existence of the universe and of biological life . . . .”
I don’t follow this at all. Evolution is not a theory about the origins of the universe or of biological life. It is a theory about the development over time of living organisms once they already existed. So how can evolution make any claim about explanations for the existence of the universe or of living things?
— y81 · Sep 8, 12:59 PM · #
Whoa, I totally misunderstood your original post. I saw the example of the factory as showing that natural selection does not necessarily imply the absence of purpose, But you now seem to be saying that natural selection not only fails to imply purposelessness, but actually implies the existence of a plan, the existence of something intentionally shaping evolution. I just can’t see how you could reach that conclusion.
— Consumatopia · Sep 8, 02:24 PM · #
I second Consumatopia. I can’t figure out whether Jim thinks he made some sort of powerful argument for the existence of a creator, or is saying there could be a creator, or is saying that evolution by natural selection doesn’t disprove the existence of a creator.
More than that I’m interested in what new argument(s) Jim thinks he’s brought to the debate over the existence of God. Jim, could you please provide a quick summary?
— Steve C · Sep 8, 02:33 PM · #
y81, elsewhere in that same comment I reference the flood of cosmological discoveries of the 20th century, the history of the elements, the progression from the hydrogen-dominated universe immediately following the Big Bang to complex molecular forms culminating in DNA and carbon-based life. In the mention of evolution that you cite, I intend the entirety of this cosmological picture. Evolution should not be considered in isolation, but as a part of a complex of discoveries that undermine or make superfluous the argument from design.
>>>Why could you not have made this statement on the day before Origin of Species was published with the same validity that you do today?
Because before then, a plausible naturalistic explanation for the existence of the myriad species of plants and animals didn’t exist. I agree that it is somewhat odd that the argument from design, flawed as it was apart from any empirical considerations, was as decisive as it was for so many people.
— kth · Sep 8, 02:38 PM · #
@matoko: Manzi’s argument is nothing like the complexity argument. In fact, the complexity of life makes Manzi’s argument more difficult! His argument can be thus reduced.
Coyne: The theory of evolution precludes goals, and any agent that can set those goals, in the development of biological life.
Manzi: Sed Contra…
1.) Genetic algorithms in computer modeling are essentially identical to how evolution works.
2.) But genetic algorithms are obviously goal-directed: they are created with a specific goal in mind.
3.) Therefore, because genetic algorithms imply a goal, and because evolution is similar to genetic algorithms, it cannot be said that the theory of evolution precludes goals.
Which is not to say that evolution must imply a goal, merely that evolution cannot answer the question of goals one way or another.
The reason complexity makes this argument more difficult is because complexity is one of the ways evolution and genetic algorithms are different. That is, while genetic algorithms often feature a relatively limited set of variables in service of a particular goal, evolutionary biology has a much wider set of variables, and its goal, if there is one, must be quite complex, given the results. Jim argues, for the former, that an incomprehensibly large number of variables is not the same as an infinite number, and for the latter, that a very complex goal is functionally the same as a simple goal for the purposes of setting a genetic algorithm. Just because we cannot fathom the goal of a genetic algorithm as complex as evolution would be does not mean that no such goal can exist.
@ PEG: I would love to hear you develop that thought sometime.
— Blar · Sep 8, 02:52 PM · #
Consumatopia / Steve C:
There is a distinction between “not acting randomly” and “having a purpose” (in the normal English usage of these terms). The moon does not move “randomly”, but rather (as far as we understand) by orbiting the Earth according to physical laws. It doesn’t follow that the orbit of the moon is evidence of some purpose, never mind some purpose of God.
Steve C:
A quick summary of what I think is new in my argument is that it is often said in public disocurse that “evolution acts randomly” (or has random elements or similar formulations) and is inherently undirected which shows that, as opposed to various physcial laws that were believed to be true prior to Darwin’s birth, humans can not be the object of some divine plan. I made the argument that there is nothing in the structure of the evolutionary process that supports this contention, and that it is as consistent with the notion of a divine plan as other physical theories.
— Jim Manzi · Sep 8, 02:58 PM · #
Evolution, contrary to frequent claims from Manzi, does act randomly. That’s why he “doesn’t get it” on evolution. Random mutation is obviously random; natural selection is preferential only in a statistical way (you may be the fittest of your peers, but you can still be hit by a bus.)
Evolution is random in the same way rolling 2d6 is random, and I think that’s where Manzi is getting hung up. Evolution prefers certain outcomes to others, just as the sum of two six-sided dice will be clustered around “7”. But just because the outcomes of 2d6 or evolution are preferential to certain outcomes instead of having a flat histogram doesn’t make them non-random. The key is teleology (and its absence in both dice-rolling and evolution.)
— Chet · Sep 8, 03:13 PM · #
Manzi, I’m also curious why you continue to ignore this argument, put forth by Coyne twice and now by Steinglass:
That is, after all, the other part of how Darwin’s destroyed the concept of man’s supremacy amongst creation. Why do you continue to ignore this argument? I feel like I know it well enough to answer questions about it, if it’s not entirely clear to you.
— Chet · Sep 8, 03:40 PM · #
Except that summary differs significantly from what’s at top of this page. Steinglass isn’t quoted as saying Darwin showed evolution was random, merely that Darwin showed that evolution could be random. You countered “Evolution, contrary to frequent claims in the public square, does not act randomly.” Whatever definition of random you use, I don’t see how you can possibly know that for certain, and nothing in your original post is sufficient to back this up.
— Consumatopia · Sep 8, 03:54 PM · #
It has long seemed to me that the Theory of Evolution, is a poor antagonist for Creationism. As Science goes, it’s Really Easy to understand why Evolution should work. Evolution in a nutshell: Enough monkeys banging on enough keyboards will occasionally produce something meaningful; plus, If your parents didn’t have any children, chances are you won’t either. Naturally there are amazing special cases, unexpected consequences, unpredictable results… everything always turns out to be Way more complicated than one would think, or could ever think. Godel even proved that.
However, Why should there be Something and not Nothing? And why the same complicated something wherever we look? That’s a small nutshell, but plenty of room for Creationism. If you say the answer is “God”, have you said anything? If you don’t like the word ‘God’, what word would you put there? Creation happened, goes on happening: God the Father, the Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient. Perhaps <whatever> has other qualities, perhaps not.
As for a personal, interventionist God such as Jesus, that’s a separable question. Somebody said, the real question isn’t about Existence, it’s about Relationship. Relationship is what humans, even scientific humans, spend the very great bulk of their energy doing. It seems to me that “Religion” is about putting a face on the Out There so as to be able to have a relationship with it. Actually that is also what Science is about; you might say that the Rationalists prefer the Face of No-Face. They prefer to live in a clockwork universe because it helps them feel in control (and they get really stressed if you take that away from them), whereas the Children of God prefer to have somebody they can talk to about the imponderable questions. And the Really Important questions are still imponderable: Is my child safe? Will there be enough rain next year? Even, will my 401K be there when I need it? Knowing that the physical universe is really just a very large billiard table doesn’t actually help, even if you can prove it, which you can’t.
One important thing that the Evangelical Atheists choose not to take seriously is that some religious people are responding to their personal experience of their actual life. Some parishioners no doubt are whistling in the dark or beggaring their neighbor; others have experiences of praying for something beyond human agency and receiving it. Or “miraculous” intervention in their lives, not in the sense of something counter-physical but in the sense of something indescribably apt and fruitful. Rationalists offer non-deistic explanations: “most people underestimate the power of coincidence”; OK, but you aren’t going to make headway by just telling people their lives as experienced aren’t meaningful. And your average rational atheist doesn’t have any direct personal experience of eg nuclear physics, for all he sees himself afloat on a sea of it; he reads books and listens to authority figures which he finds worthy of Faith.
Even Evangelicals build their megachurches according to the disciplines of Engineering.
“God” certainly exists as a concept in intersubjective space, Popper’s “World 3” or Dilthey’s “Mind-affected world”. It is one of the tools that Mankind has used to organize cultures (even personalities). Cultures-with-Religion are a varied lot; some have been much less nice than others. How much of the niceness-or-not is due to Religion, how much to other factors? An interesting question, but right now I don’t think we understand enough about how cultures function and evolve to say anything meaningful. We can’t compare with cultures-without-religion, because those are unknown to Anthropology. Perhaps we should be cautious about removing this part from our little airplane.
As to Teleology or lack thereof, it would again be a question of what kind of relationship you want with the distant future. Anybody who would make an unqualified statement about How it will All Turn Out is far gone in megalomania. Of course many are; it is possibly an unavoidable consequence of human nature. Coffee house speculation is fine, and I have my personal preferences: I would note that we didn’t used to have Structure like we do now, and that is true whether you are talking about 21st Century Global World Order, human consciousness, plants & animals, stars & planets, or what we call Ordinary Matter (protons and neutrons). When I put on my rationalist hat, it still looks like a progression to me; and I just suppose in my simple-minded way that the future will resemble the past in getting more complicated in unimaginable ways. To what point, I suppose will be more clear when we get there. So far, so good, with reservations.
— Marshall · Sep 8, 04:09 PM · #
They prefer to live in a clockwork universe because it helps them feel in control
This seems particularly out of place in the context of this particular argument.
— Consumatopia · Sep 8, 04:17 PM · #
y81 is correct. The Theory of Evolution is about the process of speciation. There is an enormous amount of evidence to support it. People such as Dawkins and Coyne then expand that to a ‘Greater Theory of Evolution’ about the development of life itself in the universe. While interesting, it is really a separate theory and it is a category error to claim that overwhelming evidence to support the original theory is overwhelming evidence in support of the expansive view of that theory. That is to say, the variety of turtles in the Galapagos and the high correlation of DNA between gorillas and humans does not say that much about the Big Bang.
— Andrew Berman · Sep 8, 04:54 PM · #
No, y81 misses the emphasis on unnecessary. It’s not that you can’t insert God into your explanation for our origins, it’s that you no longer need to, and doing so doesn’t really decrease the amount of stuff we have to explain.
— Consumatopia · Sep 8, 05:33 PM · #
Jim,
Quine wrote, “What the empirical under-determination of global science [i.e., there is insufficient possible evidence to clinch the system] shows is that there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world.”
A corollary to this is, only via falsification signals may different defensible ways of conceiving the world be distinguished (as you know). Your point: until the universe sends us a signal falsifying either Design or Undesign, there is no way for us to determine which is the proper way of conceiving the world. Until then, both world-types are literally indistinguishable from our vantage. On this question at least, the truth is underdetermined by the evidence.
Coyne’s point is complementary. Basically, he’s saying that it’s helpful to be honest about the history, that the definition of ‘design’ has been and continues to be revised (rolled back), until the only defense of Design is that it is Indistingushable from Undesign.
Getting to this point has seen Theological Design cry wolf too many times to be trusted without evidence. However, there is no evidence — none — that is unique and exclusive to Design (as you say). In fact, the only thing which recommends Design is its long pedigree as an indefatigable human belief, and (of course) its amenability to strategic retreat and revision.
That’s pretty weak, no?
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Sep 8, 07:02 PM · #
@Cons.: Your post isn’t really responsive to Andrew’s or y81’s. They aren’t talking about necessity of God, but about how you can’t really get from biological evolution to an evolutionary theory of all things without making the jump from science to cosmology, which is to say speculation.
@Kristoffer: Those of course aren’t the only cases for Design, but since you bring it up, it strikes me that theism’s “long pedigree as an indefatigable human belief” is underappreciated as an argument in favor of the existence of the divine (when supported by other arguments, of course). That is, detractors often glibly dismiss the existence of some concept of the divine in virtually every culture on earth as a sociological quirk without adequately reckoning why such beliefs are so widespread.
— Blar · Sep 8, 08:54 PM · #
Because “divine” can mean literally anything at all. That’s the adequate reckoning. With so expansive a definition, it’s no surprise that those inclined to seek it find it everywhere they look. It’s akin to the Discordians’ Law of Fives in that regard.
The idea that, because some distant tribe has some concept that you can loosely translate into English as “God”, therefore that’s any kind of evidence for the specific God of Biblical Christianity, is pretty stupid. People have long believed that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen after he died. Is that “indefagitable human belief” evidence that he ever was?
— Chet · Sep 8, 09:53 PM · #
Randomness in Evolution:
1. Evolution proceeeds through variation followed by natural selection. The variations do not have to be random. Manzi illustrated that in the Genetic Algorithm example. That, in fact, mutations happen to be mostly random is the way nature works, but randomness is not necessary for the process to proceed.
2. The direction of Evolution is not random. In a given environment it proceeds in the direction of local fitness maxima. Variations test the local fitness landscape to find the direction towards the local maxima.
3. The issue at hand is whether there is a single (or few) Universal fitness maxima toward which Evolution is proceeding. If so, evolutionary history is the same everywhere and our own evolutionary history is not contingent but represents all potential evolutionary histories. The fact that Evolution occurs does not by itself resolve this question. Only an understanding of the full fitness landscape and all potential evolutionary paths can answer this question.
4. In principle, this question is amenable to scientific inquiry. Just don’t bet on it happening soon.
— Harry · Sep 9, 12:53 AM · #
No, y81 wasn’t responsive to kth, because the necessity/unnecessity of God is really the heart of the matter. Prior to the the discovery of natural selection, one could be forgiven for thinking that God was required to explain the existence of life—it just wouldn’t be apparent how complexity could arise from anything but conscious, intelligent direction.
There is, of course, other stuff that the rise of biological life depends on, such as the existence of the universe. But assuming the existence of a universe, even a life-capable universe, is no harder to assume than the existence of an infinite, intelligent deity.
— Consumatopia · Sep 9, 01:21 AM · #
“Prior to the the discovery of natural selection, one could be forgiven for thinking that God was required to explain the existence of life”
Will you stop? Evolution is not a theory about the existence of life. It is a theory about the development of life forms, i.e., speciation. Hence the title of the book, which is not called “On the Origin of Life.”
The cause of the existence of life is still somewhat mysterious.
— y81 · Sep 9, 02:52 AM · #
The TOE showed pretty convincingly that religious explainations for the development of life on this planet were wrong. Adam was not the first man and Ymir did not grow frost ogres under his left arm (nor did his left leg concive a son with his right). Explainaitons for the universe (which include creation myths) are a central function of all religions. TOE voided a big chunk of religious explainations of the universe. After you either had to disbelieve the religious texts, read them in a different light or deny the validity of TOE (which is pretty hard to do when you it up against your basic creation myth). So the old gods (or our conceptions of them) are dead and new gods (or conceptions) are being proposed. Gods that—perhaps—created some super complicated algorythm that resulted in the development of life on this planet.
— cw · Sep 9, 04:12 AM · #
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— supra shoes · Sep 9, 07:16 AM · #
@Chet:
Off the top of my head: Divine: of a powerful entity or entities that transcend the natural world. So no, not anything at all, and that is precisely the glib dismissal I was talking about.
Of course not, but I can recognize that the concepts are similar. And of course it’s not just one tribe; it’s nearly every tribe and people on earth, ever.
No, but that misunderstands my argument. Lots of people think Britney Spears is a talented performer. That doesn’t mean she is a talented performer, but it does mean that a critic has to deal with the phenomenon if he is to be honest. “It’s completely inexplicable!” is another way of saying “I have no idea and am incapable and unwilling to find out.”
@cw:
That’s pretty much true, if you are to narrow in on creation myths, but
is too broad. Creation myths are more marginal to religious experience than you seem to imagine and have always been so. A skimming of Augustine or Aquinas will show that religious thinkers always had a much bigger picture in mind.
— Blar · Sep 9, 01:13 PM · #
The divine Buddha, who certainly transcends the natural world, is not considered “powerful” – the Buddha doesn’t grant wishes or answer prayers, but teaches. That’s one example where the usage of the term “divine” is more expansive than your attempt at a narrow definition.
Of course, a chocolate cake was once described as “divine” as well, and is certainly not in any way a “powerful being that transcends the natural world.” There’s another example, as well.
The term, unfortunately for you, can mean anything at all. Not just the things you’d prefer it to mean.
Some combination of “popular delusion” and “the Emperor’s New Clothes” effect explains the endurance of the Walt Disney myth, Britney’s popularity, and widespread belief in supernatural powers, all at once. These phenomenon are hardly “inexplicable”; indeed, Harris, Dennet, and Dawkins have each adequately explained them (largely in the way I just said.) The only reason that people like you find this explanation insufficient is because it leads to a conclusion you don’t like – there’s no such thing as God.
— Chet · Sep 9, 04:37 PM · #
This is a mess. Will someone who disagrees with Jim please present an argument, in premise and conclusion form, that shows (using premises that Darwin provided us with) that there is no Christian God? Alternatively, with and argument that shows that it is unreasonable to believe in such a God? If only we had such an argument before us, we could debate its merits.
In any case, since there is no such argument, I’ll just throw one more stick on the fire. Chet writes that “Darwin’s destroyed the concept of man’s supremacy amongst creation.” Well no, he didn’t do that. Of course he didn’t – it obvious that we’re the supreme creatures on this planet. That’s why the other creatures are in zoos we built. The basic things that count towards supremacy are power, knowledge, and moral worth. It’s undeniable that we’re the most powerful and knowledgeable creatures on the planet, by several orders of magnitude. And with moral worth, well, we’re in certain ways more evil than other animals, and in other ways more good. But we’re certainly more moral – we have vastly greater capacity for good and evil than other animals.
Hence, the idea that we’re not supreme amongst creation is blatantly false. I myself don’t think Darwin’s Theory entails any such thing, but if it does then it’s false too.
— John · Sep 9, 05:56 PM · #
Only someone who has never owned a cat could make such a statement.
— Chet · Sep 9, 08:27 PM · #
Blar…the giant flaw in YOUR argument is that while genetic algorithms CAN be goal directed, they don’t HAVE to be.
Manzi’s argument is still complexity…. teh eyeball! … its too complex!
He has just moved the goalposts back from the complexity of the product to the complexity of the goal.
C’mon guys…..EGT, emergent properties, self-organizing systems?
— matoko_chan · Sep 9, 11:22 PM · #
Look….the selfish genes code for three things.
Survival, reproduction, and death.
I suppose you can say those are the “goals” of evolution, but optimizing those goals is achieved by RANDOM combination of gametes.
Of course, the animal vectors hosting the gametes are influenced by a countably infinite superset of environmental, phenotypic and genotypic co-dependent variables and interaction parameters.
;)
— matoko_chan · Sep 9, 11:36 PM · #
And, of course, it’s important to remember that the goal — survival until reproduction — is not actually encoded in DNA. Rather, it is an accurate linguistic compression of the process from many levels up and over time.
What changes during evolution is the average logical depth of survival strategies. Successful replication remains the sole determiner.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Sep 10, 12:13 AM · #
The moment you admit that GAs can be goal directed, you’ve eviscerated the lion’s share of the popular conception of evolution re: religion/God. There goes evolution as evidence that God doesn’t exist, or really, was even inactive in directing nature. Oh, it CAN be unguided? Wonderful. But not only do we know they can be guided, we mere humans actually employ such things for purposes. Is nature itself ultimately completely unguided? Whatever the answer, science has not provided it (and likely is incapable of providing it). And Manzi has done a great job of pointing out how the “RANDOM” hoots are utterly misleading.
Sorry, but as great as evolution may be – as much as it clearly irritates some creationists, etc – it ultimately doesn’t contribute all that much to the God debate. Saying “well I can imagine that the whole universe and evolution and all the products and everything else happened totally by unguided chance!” is nice, but you could have imagined that before Darwin too. Just as theists can say “I can imagine that the whole universe and evolution and all the products and everything else is an intended part of a plan!” after Darwin, even accepting evolution across the board.
Science: Know its limits. It’s important.
— Crude · Sep 10, 01:34 AM · #
They can be, but they can’t be directed with hidden goals. You’ve got to load the goal into the fitness function, and fairly explicitly.
So, sure, we can suggest that evolution is goal-directed; that goal can only be the proliferation and survival of bacteria. No other goal is consistent with evolution. Certainly no goal involving human beings.
Then why does it irritate the creationists so much? Who do nearly half of Americans refuse to accept it for religious reasons? To pretend that there’s no tension there is ludicrous.
— Chet · Sep 10, 02:34 AM · #
Plenty of goals are “consistent with evolution”, Chet – including the introduction of human beings. The mistakes that are commonly made on this front tend to be numerous. Like “The entire point of all creation is humanity!” – even in a wildly literal reading of Genesis this is impossible to justify, since even there humanity is just one (even a special ‘one’) of a number of intended outcomes. Or “well there are more beetles/bacteria than humans, therefore if evolution is purposeful, beetles have a greater purpose!” Which makes as much sense as arguing that any gardener loves plants more than his family, because look – 300 flowers. 3 kids. Do the math!
And how can you take it that I think there’s “no tension there” when I’m the one who brought up how irritated the subject makes creationists? Of course there’s tension! But that tension has little to do with the existence, much less general activity and capability of God – it’s about a very narrow, doctrinal question specific to Judaeo-Christianity. But the existence and activity of God is larger than that, which is why Coyne is stumbling around, trying feebly to use the same arguments against Wright, Manzi and others that are used against YECs, and clearly not grasping why people are rolling their eyes at him. He seems unaware, even unwilling to accept, that people can accept evolution and reject his metaphysics and philosophy. Hell, he may be unaware that he has metaphysical and philosophical, rather than purely scientific, views on the matter. Frankly, that should worry people more than YEC tantrums.
— Crude · Sep 10, 03:34 AM · #
No crude….the RANDOM part of evolution happens at the level of genes, the smallest units of inheritance, with gamete combination and guess and test. The way the gamete hosts are brought together is goal directed optimization of fitness functions.
DNA is the unification theorem for biology. Just because we haven’t YET modelled the whole process, or reverse engineered it, doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t. Saying we cant/wont is the anti-ToE argument of unsolveable complexity. Coyne is talking about BIOLOGICAL evolution of homosapiens sapiens when he says the god that “created” humans as the supreme/privileged dominant species on earth doesn’t exist. Now I have only read excerpts of Wrights book, and so I don’t get Coyne’s objections, but it is pretty indisputable that we are just animal vectors with swarms of parasitic DNA running the goal show.
Manzi’s defense is flawed because he is relying the the hoary old complexity argument.
So then Dr. Manzi drops back and speaks of sub-atomic spin.
Now that is where some sort of god might operate, on the border between the classical world and the quantum world, like Hamerhoff’s orchestrated objective model of quantum consciousness, or Susskind’s cosmic landscape.
Coyne is just arguing that god(w/e god is) is not a biological tweaker.
Manzi’s counter is not that we can’t prove that, but that we can NEVER prove that.
I have to agree with Coyne.
— matoko_chan · Sep 10, 03:28 PM · #
Um, no, it’s not. For one thing – if human beings were the goal, why are human beings so rare? Why so many other, superfluous species? Why has natural selection rewarded so many species for being un-human-like if humanity is the built-in goal of the fitness function? Now that humans exist, why is evolution continuing to occur? Why is our evolution continuing to occur?
You’re offering precisely the argument Coyne refuted and Manzi was unable to defend. Evolution by random mutation and natural selection is completely inconsistent with being goal-directed towards humans, specifically. It simply can’t be reconciled; there’s no space within random mutation and natural selection for hidden fitness functions. If there were, we would expect to see many, many other species of human – instead of just the one. We would, in fact, expect to see something like “marsupial humans” – convergent evolution driving some distantly related species towards the same function and niche as humanity, like the wolf and Tasmanian “wolf”.
We don’t see any of that, because evolution is not goal-directed except towards a function of local fitness. It simply can’t be. There’s no place to program in the goal.
Coyne is very much aware that people can accept both evolution and Christianity. They just can’t do so honestly, just like you can’t both honestly accept marriage and be adulterous. Look, you’re a prime example. You have to lie about what evolution implies, and how GA algorithms work, in order to make room for your religious ideology.
— Chet · Sep 10, 04:15 PM · #
Please note that is comment #42. ^^^
How pathetic that the GOP has descended to heckling the president and the only argument Dr. Manzi can muster against Coyne is a weak rehash of “I AM NOT A MONKEY!”.
— matoko_chan · Sep 10, 04:17 PM · #
Matoko-chan,
You are a rube. Be quiet – adults are talking.
Chet,
I already answered the “if humans are the goal, why are they so rare?” question before you posed it, so I’m wondering why you’re stating it here instead of responding to my point. A gardener has 300 flowers, and 3 children. Is it therefore clear that he cares vastly more about flowers than his children? Compared to the flowers, his children are so rare! What’s more, even by the most strict crazy literal reading of Genesis, humans are not ‘the’ goal. They are ‘a’ goal. Even a special one – but animals, plants, insects, birds, oceans, etc were also goals. Christian critics (and I admit, even some YECs) make it sound as if God created humanity and everything else was some kind of weird superfluous afterthought. Sorry – it just ain’t the case.
So I can’t be offering ‘exactly the same argument’, since I’m rejecting the argument you’re attributing to me (Indeed, I think Coyne’s blather fails to address Manzi’s points, much less Wright’s, much as I disagree with the latter on some things. And Coyne can’t swallow the point Manzi is making about randomness.) I’m not arguing that ‘evolution has humans as THE goal!’ I’m pointing out that humans as THE goal – as in the exclusive goal, the final destination, the decisive end of evolution – is a ludicrous demand that is incompatible even with a literal crazy Genesis reading. The goals of creation were multiple – this is pretty damn explicit.
What’s more, listen: Just because you disagree with me, doesn’t make me a liar. So cut the crap. I haven’t lied once here – you’ve simply lobbed questions like ‘If humans were the goal, why are they so rare?’ and taken that as a refutation (and therefore my argument must be based on lies!), despite my pointing out humans were not THE exclusive goal, and that the ‘rarity’ measure is bunk, without reply from you. Further, humans being a goal of evolution does not require that evolution suddenly stop when humans arrive on the scene – not even the evolution of humans. Are you seriously telling me that the existence of humanity as a goal is refuted by the fact that sexual reproduction and mutation still takes place? Because if so, Good Lord, you really don’t have much.
Look, I know how important evolution is to atheists psychologically. And I’m sure it’s a lot of cheap fun to bother YECs with evolution. But it’s time to accept that evolution, from the perspective of God, would be just one more tool (to put it in crude terms). Indeed, it’s time to accept that there are going to be Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and more who see in evolution validation of their beliefs in creation. This may drive Coyne crazy, since it seems a large part of his love of evolution is connected to what sociopolitical effect he wants it to have, but that’s life. Indeed, he’s only going to get driven crazier as the years go by and more tech-literate people naturally associate evolution with algorithms, and algorithms with programmers. The result is going to be evolution being a much tighter fit in a theistic worldview than atheistic (Notice how Coyne won’t even question the validity of a basic deism/theism? Ask yourself why the Big Bad Atheist won’t do that.)
— Crude · Sep 10, 11:16 PM · #
Who deleted my post?
— Chet · Sep 11, 03:20 AM · #
Ah, I love the old phantom “deleted posts” shtick.
— Kate Marie · Sep 11, 05:15 AM · #
Pardon, crude, I am an observant sufi and a math/physics student.
OTOH you exhibit the adhom defense so typical of conservative inability to refute argument.
Your defense, like Dr. Manzi’s apparently, is just to shout I AM NOT A MONKEY.
Well, that is traditional at least.
Why is is so hard for conservatives to give up on memes that are waaaaaaay past their sell-by date?
— matoko_chan · Sep 11, 01:26 PM · #
And crude…..genetic algorithms aren’t sacred …..they are just another variant of the class of optimization algs, like simulated annealing and hill-climbing.
evolution is goal-directed only in the sense I stated….survival, reproduction, and death.
the goal optimization is achieved by RANDOM recombination of heavily parameterized (thru the organic vectors) genetic material, and what we call guess-and-test in sadistics(statistics).
Your adhom attacks against Coyne and yourstruly are just more evidence of the deep conservative FAIL on intellectual argument.
We are two codons away from test tube-life, in the middle of the Two Week Revolution of nanotech, and Social Brain Hypothesis is going devastate the foundations of conservative ideology.
We should be exploring the frontier between the classical and quantum worlds with our swell new toolsets, and instead you conservatives want to stand athwart History yelling i-am-not-a-monkey?
Why?
— matoko_chan · Sep 11, 01:54 PM · #
I’ll give you one more piece of advice…….from my beloved Neal Stephenson.
When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
Science is the handle of the sword.
Conservatives are just grasping at the blade.
Watch your fingers, Riddick!
— matoko_chan · Sep 11, 02:25 PM · #
But the repeatedly stated point that you’re not getting is that while God served as a reasonable explanation for speciation (prior to Darwin it was hard to see how complex things could arise without intention), He adds absolutely nothing to the “existence of life” explanation—He just replaces a need to explain the Universe with a need to explain God.
— Consumatopia · Sep 12, 01:09 AM · #