must...keep....kids....from...learning...stuff like the following:
“Analysis of the problem of the origin of biological information, therefore, exposes a deficiency in the causal powers of natural selection that corresponds precisely to powers that agents are uniquely known to possess. Intelligent agents have foresight. Such agents can select functional goals before they exist. They can devise or select material means to accomplish those ends from among an array of possibilities and then actualize those goals in accord with a preconceived design plan or set of functional requirements. Rational agents can constrain combinatorial space with distant outcomes in mind. The causal powers that natural selection lacks—almost by definition—are associated with the attributes of consciousness and rationality—with purposive intelligence. Thus, by invoking design to explain the origin of new biological information, contemporary design theorists are not positing an arbitrary explanatory element unmotivated by a consideration of the evidence. Instead, they are positing an entity possessing precisely the attributes and causal powers that the phenomenon in question requires as a condition of its production and explanation.”
http://www.discovery.org/a/2177
Natural selection can NOT account for metainformation- nor can it account for the absolutely necessary 5 heirarchal points of devlopement required for life- but by golly, let’s keep telling our kids “Nature-did-it” anyways!
You know, strictly speaking, that's *incorrect*.
The thing that is required for a genetic algorithm and/or evolutionary approach to work is:
A well defined "optimization" -- some choices must be clearly better than others.
Fairly stable conditions compared to the time over which adaptations would occur.
A large number of trials.
For the moment, treat it purely mathematically. Let us say you are trying to map out the lowest location on a golf course.
The "God's eye" view would *know* the answer, intuitively.
A person might know from studying the landscaping diagrams.
Another enterprising person might remember, "Oh, that's right. Golfballs roll downhill." And then they'd walk to some spot on the course, drop the ball, and see where it rolls.
They'd find the lowest spot, of course. But only the lowest spot -- near them -- that *didn't* have a hill in the way.
To accelerate the process, you could do one of two things.
Intelligent selection: Look at maps of the golf course to get the lay of the land, and pick likely spots to drop the golf balls at.
Evolutionary selection: start with a bunch of golf balls in a certain area of the course and drop them. For each time you drop a set of balls, keep track of the best results from the set. Slightly change the locations of the best results in the next trial. Apply, lather, rinse, repeat.
IF the topographic features of the golf course fulfill certain conditions: no sudden small holes surrounded by hills, fairly flat, etc., then the evolutionary approach will work.
A "simulated evolutionary" approach will not start in one area of the golf course, but instead will "rain golf balls" all *over* the place. In this way it can sample areas which are inaccessible to small random changes to prior steps.
The murky parts of current evolutionary theory (to this abject layperson) have to do with how quickly environmental changes happen in comparsion to the time for new generations to produce mutations; the "intrinsic" rate of mutations, and its influence on the conservation of some features(*), and the fact that some mutations appear to happen much more quickly than others; why certain features appear to have developed independently, but others which would *seem* to be useful never got the chance; and the crucical sizes of populations to keep going, whether genetic diversity, or simply overwhelmed by ordinary disease or predation.
One of the problems is that evolution seems to be the intersection of biology (a science) and history (a discipline) -- just as we can't go back and re-create the Battle of Waterloo, we can't go back to when the first fish developed lungs and see what it specifically was about the environment that so favored lungs *then*, but not other times...
Anyhow, the upshot is that if you take enough random shots, and throw away the failures (like Hillary's Cattle Futures), the end results can look darn good -- just *as if* things had been planned.
(...as God says, "NO! Get your *own* divot!")
Cheers! (*) why the hell doesn't the coccyx just *go away*? Ditto for nearsightedness.