PBS Offers Intelligent Design Documentary

According to Illustra Media, the Public Broadcasting System uploaded the film Unlocking the Mystery of Life to its satellite this past Sunday. For the next three years, it will be available for member stations to download and broadcast. In addition, PBS is offering the film on their Shop PBS website under Science/Biology videos (page 4).

The film, released a little over a year ago, has been called a definitive presentation of the Intelligent Design movement. With interviews and evidences from eight PhD scientists, it presents strictly scientific (not religious) arguments that challenge Darwinian evolution, and show instead that intelligent design is a superior explanation for the complexity of life, particularly of DNA and molecular machines. The film has been well received not only across America but in Russia and other countries. Many public school teachers are using the material in science classrooms without fear of controversies over creationism or religion in the science classroom, because the material is scientific, not religious, in all its arguments and evidences, and presents reputable scientists who are well qualified in their fields: Dean Kenyon, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, Scott Minnich, Jed Macosko, and Paul Nelson, with a couple of brief appearances by Phillip E. Johnson, the "founder" of the Intelligent Design movement.

Check with your local PBS Station to find out when they plan to air it. If it is not on their schedule, call or write and encourage them to show the film. Why should television partly supported by public tax funds present only a one-sided view on this subject, so foundational to all people believe and think? We applaud PBS's move, but it is only partial penance for the Evolution series and decades of biased reporting on evolution.

This is a wonderful film, beautifully edited and shot on many locations, including the Galápagos Islands, and scored to original music by Mark Lewis. People are not only buying it for themselves, but buying extra copies to show to friends and co-workers. Unlocking the Mystery of Life available here on our Products page in VHS and DVD formats. The film is about an hour long and includes vivid computer graphics of DNA in action. The DVD version includes an extra half-hour of bonus features, including answers to 14 frequently-asked questions about intelligent design, answered by the scientists who appear in the film.

Intelligent Design Gets a Powerful New Media Boost 03/09/2002
Exclusive Over 600 guests gave a standing ovation Saturday March 9 at the premiere of a new film by Illustra Media, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. This 67-minute documentary is in many ways a definitive portrayal of the Intelligent Design movement that is sweeping the country. Intelligent Design is a non-religious, non-sectarian, strictly scientific view of origins with both negative and positive arguments: negative, that Darwinism is insufficient to explain the complexity of life, and positive, that intelligent design, or information, is a fundamental entity that must be taken into consideration in explanations of the origin of complex, specified structures like DNA. The film features interviews with a Who's Who of the Intelligent Design movement: Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson, Stephen Meyer, Dean Kenyon, William Dembski, and others, who explain the issues and arguments for intelligent design as the key to unlocking the mystery of life. The film also features nearly 20 minutes of award-quality computer animation of molecular machines, manufacturing plants, and storage libraries of elaborate information - DNA and proteins at work in the cell, climaxing with a dazzling view of DNA transcription and translation.
In his keynote address, Dr. Paul Nelson (who appears in the film), gave reasons for optimism. He said that Time Magazine, usually solidly Darwinian, admitted just last week that these Intelligent Design scientists may be onto something. U.S. News and World Report is also coming out with a piece on I.D. And Stephen Meyer, who also appears in the film, could not be at the premiere because he was on his way to Ohio (see next headline), armed with copies of the film to give to the school board members. Nelson said that scientists should not arbitrarily rule design off the table. "Keeping science from discovering something that might be true is like having a pair of spectacles that distorts your vision," he said. "It does profound harm to science." He described how Ronald Numbers, evolutionist, once told him that design might be true, but science is a game, with the rule that scientists cannot even consider the possibility of design; "that's just the way it is," he said. (See this quote by Richard Lewontin for comparison.) Yet design is already commonly considered in archaeology, cryptography, forensics, and SETI, so why not in biology? Apparently this arbitrary rule has become a national controversy. Intelligent Design, says Nelson, is finally removing a "rule of the game" that is hindering science. If the reaction of the crowd at the premiere luncheon was any indication, Unlocking the Mystery of Life has launched a well-aimed smart weapon at the citadels of Darwinism.

Sorry guys, when my boss asks me how my project is doing, I don't tell him the "genetic algorithm" is "evolving" a solution and should be done in a few teraflops.

You should consider it, lots of people are getting stunning results that way.

Your flip responses in no way refute that fact, and in fact look like mere evasions intended to avoid having to actually deal with the points raised.

Here, try to specifically refute this:

The top circuit is the best human-designed cubic signal generator ever made, patented in 2000 by Stefano Cipriani and Anthony A. Takeshian of Conexant Systems, Newport Beach, California.

The bottom circuit was purely evolved. It works better. It outperforms the best efforts of all electronic engineers, ever. It's sophisticated enough that no one understands how it works yet. In fact, it has bizarre features that are unlike any that a human designer would ever think to employ.

"Blind" random evolution outperformed all human professionals. And this is hardly a unique example. Hell, it wasn't even unique in the very same study. The same researchers, again using evolution, also produced *two* distinct patentable improvements in PID controllers (used in a myriad applications): 1) a new set of PID tuning rules which outperform the 1995 human=designed standards, and 2) Not one but *three* different controller circuit topologies which outperform existing PID controllers. They've already filed a patent application.

Another team using evolution as a creative force derived a suite of algorithms for quantum computers, several of which solve problems better than any previously published (i.e. human-designed) algorithm.

Evolution *works*. Deal with it. Or continue to live in denial if you wish.

How long do you think it would take to randomly generate the string "echo 'Hello World'"?

By pure hit-and-miss? Quite a while. But since that's *not* how evolutionary results are produced, you have a straw man on your hands there.

A more interesting (and relevant) question is how long would it take an arbitrary computer program to evolve into one that produced a "Hello World" output, if it were iteratively reproduced (with occasional mutations, i.e. copy errors), and during each "generation" the odds of an individual program variation's likelihood of being copied were dependent upon how closely its output (if any) managed to match a "Hello World" string.

By *that* method (which is truly meets the requirements of an evolutionary process), you'd most likely get a successful result before you finished your coffee break.

How do I know this? Because unlike you, I base my views on actual hands-on experiment and testing, not unsupported armchair declarations.

I have used evolutionary algorithms to achieve success in more applications than I can recall to count, including a number where program code itself was the "genetic code" being evolutionarily altered.

Perhaps the most relevant one to the scenario you raise is the time the "environment" was a virtual machine memory space in which independent programs would all reside and run simultaneously (today this would be called "multithreading"). The memory space was initially seeded with a single simplistic program which did nothing more than pick a random memory block and copy its own code bytes to that block and initiate execution of the copy as a new program thread. This was such a simple program that it took only about 12 machine instructions.

So the initial program would copy itself into two copies, and those two copies would each copy themselves again so there would be 4, etc. etc. Before long the copies would start stomping on other copies, causing a bunch to crash, but no matter, as more "original" copies were always being spawned.

Pretty boring, eh?

But there was a catch. The virtual machine the program(s) were running on wasn't perfect. Each machine instruction had a small chance of screwing up. A test-and-branch operation had a tiny chance of failing to branch when it should, or branching when it shouldn't. A copy-byte operation had a tiny chance of randomly mangling the byte it was copying (or not copying at all). And so on. So each program had a decent chance of running properly, but also had a small chance of fumbling, and many of the fumbles would inevitably produce a self-copy that was, all together now, "mutated".

Now, it's perfectly true that most of the mutated copies crashed and burned. But because they did, it wasn't long before they were "removed from the gene pool", since they failed to copy themselves, and eventually they got overwritten by some other more successful program version writing a copy of itself over that memory location.

Successful copies, though, or copies that had a "mutation" that were either neutral (didn't affect the overall results of the program) or by luck beneficial (improved the overall results of the program) would continue to reproduce themselves.

And it should be easy to predict that the ones which had the lucky improvements, no matter how rare those were, would quickly spread across the memory space making even more copies of themselves, at a faster rate than the less "evolved" programs. They would eventually shoulder out the less efficient programs. And the next time a lucky improvement occurred, it would build upon the earlier one(s).

And, just as one would expect (at least, if one weren't so blindly dogmatic as to keep declaring against all evidence and common sense that evolution "can't" actually work), that's exactly what happened.

But the results were even more interesting than that.

I let the "population" run overnight. I forget how many "generations" that was, but it wasn't a truly huge number -- this was back on an *original* IBM PC, at 4.77MhZ. And the memory space was only 640K (total), so there wasn't a lot of room for a huge "population" anyway.

And yet, you'd be amazed at what happened:

1. Multiple "species" evolved -- different "styles" of programs which ended up doing their "reproduce myself" job in radically different ways from each other. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that they were different "phyla".

2. "Predator/prey" relationships had evolved, whereby some of the programs had transitioned from just minding their own business and copying themselves to actively seeking out "competing" programs and "killing" them by copying data into their source code.

3. "Viruses" had evolved. Some programs had streamlined themselves (for speed advantage) and relied on using the copy loop code of *other* programs in order to copy their *own* program code.

4. "Symbiosis" had evolved. Some programs had developed the strategy of "piggybacking" themselves on the front of other programs and causing them to copy the "symbiote" (or would that be "parasite"?) along with that program's own program code.

5. Even the programs that were still taking the direct route and just copying themselves had several types of interesting improvements, including loop streamlining (i.e., more efficient coding than original), overlapping code function (where a sequence of code instructions was executed more than once, for two (or more) different purposes), and so on.

6. The code in some of the "species" bore absolutely no resemblance to the original "seed". They had somehow managed to totally replace the original program with something quite different, in a step-wise fashion, without ever having lost the ability to "reproduce" along their evolutionary path. Hey, I thought the creationists said that was wildly implausible?

7. Most of the programs had varying amounts of "junk DNA" -- random bytes of unexecuted garbage that, by virtue of position or program function, didn't harm (or affect in any way) the results of the program. And, which "species" shared which random "junk" sequences was a clear clue as to which had evolved from recent "common ancestors". Hmm, just like biological DNA...

8. All of this resulted without any human (or other intelligent) interaction at all. The program space had simply a) an initial simple replicator, b) variation through random error, and c) reproductive competition. Period. And yet, those three seemingly trivial factors were all that was required to produce a dazzling array of novel working programs and strategies, and much increased complexity and information content. Through evolution.

So when you express doubt that evolution could ever produce even a "Hello World" output, excuse me for pointing out that you really have no idea what you're talking about.

If it was easy, then passwords would be worthless.

Password entry interfaces are purposely designed to prevent "partial" solutions from achieving "partial" success, specifically so that evolutionary methods (either automatic, or manual) can not be employed to crack the password.

Leave creation to the professionals guys.

I *am* a professional, so I appreciate the vote of confidence.

Even God has to say: "Let there be..."

If you believe that, then you're declaring that he's more limited in the ways that he can bring things about than even human programmers are. Are you sure you want to go there?

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