It's snowing again. Pretty hard, actually. So, since it looks like I won't be going anywhere today, how about I tell you about my recent travels?
My adventures started last Thursday. I hopped into the Jasonmobile around noon, and headed out to Baltimore. This entails driving on I-495, better known as “The Beltway.” When you hear folks in Washington DC described as living “inside the beltway,” that's what they mean.
Now, let me tell you something about the Beltway. There is no good time to be driving on it. I've been there at midnight and found myself stuck in traffic. So I expected things to be slow-going on that part of the trip. What I had not counted on was that I-66 and I-95 were backed up as well, making a normally two and a half hour trip take more like four and a half. The accident on I-95, in which a big camper flipped over on its side, did not help. Happily, my choice of audio book was John Grisham's new novel Grey Mountain, which turned out to pretty engaging. It definitely helped pass the time.
Even with the delays I made it to Baltimore in plenty of time for my talk to the Baltimore Ethical Society that night. It was quite a good turnout, especially considering that it was bitter cold, and the talk (which was based on my book) seemed to go over well.
The following day my hosts drove me over to the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where I gave two talks. One was to the local student chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon. The talk was about--surprise!--the Monty Hall problem. I thought it went well, and the students seemed engaged throughout.
I also gave a talk to faculty and graduate students called, “Pseudomathematics in Anti-Evolution Literature.” This was a brand new talk, and I was a little nervous about how it would be received. It went well! Everyone seemed engaged all the way through, and several were explicitly complimentary at the end of it.
An interesting aside is that all of the questions during the Q and A focused on religious aspects of the issue, even though my talk had nothing at all to do with religion. A Catholic faculty member wanted me to mention that the Catholic Church had no problem with evolution, which I duly affirmed. (Though I suppose Jerry Coyne would scold me for not mentioning that the Catholic Church also persists in believing in Adam and Eve.) I then discussed some of the polling data in this area. There was an Orthodox Jew in the audience as well, and I noticed him smiling when I mentioned, with some pride, that among major religious groups, Jews have one of the highest rates of acceptance of evolution. (But let's not be too cocky, for reasons I discussed all the way back in 2005.)
As I have mentioned before, my talk focused on three families of creationist arguments: Those based on calculating the probability of a complex biological structure, those based on the No Free Lunch theorems, and those based on thermodynamics. Of course, these arguments have been thoroughly picked over in the anti-creationist literature, and I doubt if there's anything original left to say on the merits of the arguments themselves. However, I did try to emphasize a point that I have not seen made often enough in the literature. Specifically, there is a common flaw uniting most of the mathematical arguments made against evolution. In each case, the mathematical formalism and jargon that is invoked contributes almost nothing to the argument.
For example, though creationists are happy to use lots of thermo-jargon in making their arguments, the fact remains that the machinery of thermodynamics, as described in textbooks on the subject, plays no role in their argumentation. Really they are just expressing incredulity that complex, functional structures can evolve gradually, and then using thermodynamics to add a patina of scientific nuance to their claims.
Likewise for Dembski's use of the No Free Lunch theorem. The only role the theorem plays in his argument is to point out that the various evolutionary mechanisms biologists study are effective algorithms for searching genotype space only when the fitness landscapes they confront have certain properties. In other words, he is just making the fine-tuning argument with an irrelevant mathematical theorem thrown in as window dressing. Most of us did not need difficult theorems to understand that Darwinian evolution can only work when nature satisfies certain axioms, but working out why nature ultimately has just the properties it does is hardly a problem within biology's domain.
I could say the same for the probability arguments. Once again, the argument is really just that they find it hard to believe that complex structures could evolve gradually. The probability calculations they perform are faulty for all sorts of reasons, but the main point for now is that they are always based on the premise that such structures have to evolve “by chance.” But no one is confused on that point. No one needs elaborate calculations to tell them that a complex, functional structure like an eye cannot simply pop into existence in one generation. Of course, the prolonged action of natural selection is too complex to be captured in a naïve probability calculation. The point, though, is that the machinery of probability theory does not actually add anything to their argument.
Though I didn't discuss it in my talk, I could have said the same about creationist arguments based on information theory. There is plenty of hand waving, and casual references to Shannon and Kolmogorov, but not serious use of the actual machinery of information theory.
Anyway, that was the kind of thing I discussed in my talk. I have a vague idea for a book about math and God, one chapter of which would be occupied with creationist mathematics. I doubt I'll ever write that book, however.
So ended the business part of my trip. And after business comes pleasure! So, I left Baltimore on Friday afternoon, got back onto I-95, crept my way up to the New Jersey Turnpike, then I-287, and finally arrived at the Parsippany Hilton.
Which is where the real fun began...
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Back in my Navy days, when I was stationed at Bethesda, and if I couldn’t sleep (usually after a swing-shift) I’d jump on the Beltway and drive all the way around it. Maybe more than once. Of course I had an MGB back then, and I was young and stupid. Now I’m not young any more (!) and it sounds like the Beltway wouldn’t be much fun to drive anyway. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be —
sean s.
Any talk in Baltimore on abiogenesis?
Any chance you would share the text of your talk, if you have it written up?
"Really they are just expressing incredulity that complex, functional structures can evolve gradually”
The problems still warrant incredulity. If you are talking about functional structures that are phenotypical expressions, there is still nothing to drive evolution towards complexity…nothing that wants or needs to develop.
Nor are there any statistical reasons to expect random DNA damage events to result in increased functionality. Our objections are based on the actual realities about mutations, and we, for scientific reasons, exclude the fantasia.
But to really pile on the problems, things like eyes could not be linear productions. Huge numbers of genes are involved, and these, without question, would have to accidentally develop independently of many, many other systems. Eyes cannot see unless their is specific neurology to process the signals into images. No optic nerve between the two means no sight. No hole in the skull for the optic nerve…and so on. There are numerous undeniable points of irreducible complexity in systems like this.
Behind all this though, is the grotesque problem of incredibly complex, functional elements that would have to ‘evolve’ on a completely accidental basis. Things like ribosome and replication enzymes could not be the result of mutations or natural selection.
Phil, is there anything that you won't distort reality for to support your mythology? (same for sn).
Your comment is not evidence against what scientists have discovered: your comment is a statement of personal non-belief. If you want to provide evidence against it you have to, you know, provide evidence, not simply words. After all, this is not simply religion where belief supports imaginary creators.
dean,
"Your comment is not evidence against what scientists have discovered"
It has nothing to do with discovery Dean. Evolution had become a fashionable faith long before the molecular level details started trickling in. Nobody discovered that mutations could increase gene complexity or build complex organs and bio-systems. That's just something people had to start believing in spite of the dismal facts. Mutations screw things up.
The problem with your point of view, of course, (other than your objections are simply "I don't think it is possible") is that they imply scientists from all over the world, from many disciplines, are either incredibly untalented or are cooperating in a long-running scam. Neither stands up to intelligent thought.
" Mutations screw things up."
As others have pointed out to you multiple times, that is nothing but a load of bull crap.
Phil, I've seen you say this kind of thing before. I know that nobody will convince you, but you're already begging the question by insisting that something needs to be "driving" evolution. One response would be to say simply that the structure of the environment is the "driving force" for complexity, the environment being already exceedingly complex both in its manifest properties and its potential ones.
Your dispute is kind of like someone complaining that gravity is not sufficient to explain the way the Ganges winds through South Asia -- because gravity just pulls down, it can't be what is driving the river's tortuosity.
To dean #7:
“The problem with your [Phil’s] point of view, of course, … is that they imply scientists from all over the world, from many disciplines, are either incredibly untalented or are cooperating in a long-running scam.”
A reasonable view. It applies perhaps more urgently to the conspirators of the Climate Change community.
My layman's understanding of the No Free Lunch theorems boils down to: averaged over all possible landscapes, no specialized algorithm can out-perform a blind (random) search. This seems intuitive to me (considering the infinite number of infinite-sawtooth curves that could be search landscapes in 2D space), and also another argument against, not for, creationism.
The fact is random, blind searches work. They are what I used to create some computer graphics for a game today - just kept trying things in Gimp without knowing what would happen until I say something I liked. If creationists really observed and studied how they go about solving problems in their daily lives and did so honestly, they would find that they have two basic methods: 1) memory (either internal or external, e.g. Google) of what has worked in similar situations; and 2) random trial and error.
That's exactly how evolution works. Quadrillions of chemicals trying different combinations of reactions until something works a little better than the rest and spreads. Do that over enough billions of years and since things can only get more complex when they start simple, complexity will result. How could that not work? The NFLT implies it will work as well as any genius's best algorithm (including a god's, if one existed).
Type alert: "say something I liked" = "saw something I liked". Some blogs allow one to edit a comment after it is submitted - just sayin'.
dean,
“The problem with your point of view, of course, (other than your objections are simply “I don’t think it is possible”) is that they imply scientists from all over the world, from many disciplines, are either incredibly untalented or are cooperating in a long-running scam.”
No, they are just committed to something that doesn’t work for religious reasons. It is not at all difficult to demonstrate this.
Back in 1972, a guy named Susumu Ohno came up with some new ideas. They weren’t facts, just ideas. One was about the role of gene duplication. Where new genes came from was an obvious problem, and the idea that whole genes could be accidentally copied by replication errors, and then altered by mutations to perform exciting new roles had obvious appeal, and still does.
The other big notion Ohno captivated the community with was that most of the human genome was just junk DNA, and this really caught on. Everyone just loved the idea of the genome being sort of a trash can of failed evolutionary tinkering, because it seemed to support the theory, so they believed it.
Meanwhile, the biologists, based on general knowledge about bio-processes estimated the number of genes in humans to be as high as 100,000, or more. But after the genome project, the actual number was much lower, apparently around 23,000. Again, the beliefs of the scientists were grossly wrong.
But now, the junk DNA idea and the wrong estimates are meeting each other. It turns out that genes are immensely more complex and capable than the biologists believed, and the supposed junk actually looks to be a region of amazingly sophisticated expression and control mechanisms.
So, it isn’t that the scientists are untalented or conspirators. They are just capable of believing stupid things because they like what they heard, the same way you do.
Perhaps if you were to do more reading, and think in terms of actual discovery instead of appealing ideas, you could get out of the materialist box. You’re simply not grasping the complexity involved.
Try these:
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-02-human-epigenome.html
http://www.nature.com/news/epigenome-the-symphony-in-your-cells-1.16955
You might even enjoy this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpXs8uShFMo
Oh, and Dean, you might notice repeated references to diseases in the two articles. The only thing that could be responsible for aberrations in high-performance epigenomics, is mutations. They really do just screw things up. You're worshipping at a pitiful altar.
Oh, that video with the small orchestra is embarrassingly bad. The funniest thing is the inclusion of a euphonium in the ensemble -- I hope that is just the musicians' way of mocking the whole thing. I wish people would quit using music as a metaphor for things -- in this case it's not even a very good metaphor.
There's a fallacy in there if you meant this as an actual argument. Even if every aberration in performance is caused by a mutation, it does not follow that every mutation causes an aberration or that mutations can only cause aberrations. You're switching quantification scope.
According to Dr. Larry Moran, who has lived and studied through the time when "junk DNA" became a thing, the people who objected most strenuously to its introduction were ... evolutionary biologists who insisted that natural selection was too powerful a force to allow unnecessary junk to accumulate in genomes and take up reproductive energy ("strict selectionists"); and of course he has the citations to back that up - as bias-motivated propaganda does not, relying as it does on assertion rather than evidence. Dr. Moran's story is one of "neutral evolution" becoming accepted as another significant factor in the thinking of evolutionary biologists - since, according to his citations, the majority of all biological mutations are neutral, rather than strongly positive or negative.
The fact that scientific theories evolve and become more useful as more facts are observed is itself evidence that evolution via random search explains every sort of progress we see. ("Progress" of course being subjectively defined in terms of the selection criteria which drive the random searches.) Nowhere do we see finished, perfect products poof into existence by wishful will. Everywhere we see evolution - in biology, in automobiles, in phones, ... even in thought - provided the selection criteria look for reality rather than confirmation of presuppositions.
I have been thinking about how in many ways these differences have to do with conservative versus progressive mindsets. Conservatives believe that there was a time in the past when everything was better than it is now. If we could just go back to that place and time, we would be better off. It could be Eden, it could be hunter-gatherer society, it could be pre-enlightenment Europe. It could be 1780s or 1950s in the US. Evolution is anathema and especially natural selection; it allows for populations to change for the better.
Another Matt,
“Even if every aberration in performance is caused by a mutation”
What might be another disrupting influence?
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"it does not follow that every mutation causes an aberration or that mutations can only cause aberrations.”
As a very reliable general rule, if there are noticeable effects, they will be deleterious. But the bigger point and problem, is that mutations are the sole source of evolutionary grist for the selection mill, which includes some amazing mechanisms to prevent and compensate for mutations.
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Michael Fugate,
“I have been thinking about how in many ways these differences have to do with conservative versus progressive mindsets.”
Well, you now have one of your own serving as Chief Executive Officer of AAAS and Executive Publisher of Science. You must be delirious.
#10, Jim, you are right in your layman's statement but it is worth emphasizing that real fitness landscapes do not at all look like what your "typical" randomly chosen search landscape.
The intuition behind the NFL theorems is that knowing the value in a subset of a function will not improve your guess for the values of the function in the complement of the subset, when you average of all possible random functions.
For biologically realistic fitness functions that is not true, knowing that a certain gene sequence gives high fitness makes it vastly more likely that a similar DNA sequence will have high fitness than that a randomly chosen DNA sequence will have it.
Jason Rosenhouse: “…effective algorithms for searching genotype space only when the fitness landscapes they confront have…”
Jr Sveridge: “… it is worth emphasizing that real fitness landscapes do not at all look like…For biologically realistic fitness functions that is not true, knowing that a certain gene sequence gives high fitness makes it…”
“Fitness landscape” may be a new evo buzz phrase. But “fitness landscape” and just, well, “fitness”, are merely other words for “natural selection”. And “natural selection” is just a term for “stuff happens” (i.e. mutations occur and some survive and some don’t and we can never predict perfectly why – e.g. Dinosaurs, once kings of the gym and the earth, no more.).