Artificial Life Experiments Show How Complex Functions Can Evolve

NSF ^ | May 8, 2003 | Staff

[donh]

It takes energy, food, etc. to keep such useless things alive so there is definitely a fitness cost.

No it doesn't. It takes a tiny fraction of a penny's worth of electricity, just as I just now said. The DNA->RNA->meat-machine cycle, with it's ultra-expensive need to keep renewing the meat-machine by eating other meat machines might be a recent innovation, with no real relevance to the early beginnings of life.

[gore3000]

...and where is your proof that the beginnings of life had a fitness cost profile much different from the current electronic models?

The switch, as usual. We are not talking about fitness cost in the beginning of life, and the article does not deal with the beginning of life either. We are discussing evolution, the time after the beginning of life. The problem with the beginning of life is not fitness cost, it is the absolute impossibility of arranging some millions of molecules into at least half a million DNA pairs in the exact way necessary to produce a living thing.

As to fitness cost, I already gave it to you in the post you are responding to " However, in real life there is a fitness cost of non-useful organs, DNA, etc. It takes energy, food, etc. to keep such useless things alive so there is definitely a fitness cost." Further you already agreed that even a small fitness differential will result in the more fit organisms overcoming the less fit.

[donh]

Well, you have often stated that God did not create life

Show me one stinkin' example where I said that.

and argue for life from non-life.

I could equally argue that one-cells, or unisexuals, or prokariotes, are non-life, because they don't look like us, play bridge, or pay taxes. If life ramped up from basic beginnings in constrained, mildly ordered natural environments akin to Conway's game of Life, then your claims about life-vs-non-life are just spurious word-games. At some point, unlifelike automata turned into lifelike automata. Where that supposed barrier is, differs depending on what criteria for "real" life you have arbitrarily chosen.

And, at any rate, life evolving from non-life, at any point, in no manner refutes the notion that God is ultimately responsible for the existence of life. Science can only address proximate causes, not ultimate causes.

...

This life/non-life barrier is an example of thinking that human lexical conveniences are tangible physical things. An excluded middle fallacy pioneered by the creationists in regards to the fossil record. The life/non-life barrier is a human classification game, not a real thing with tangible natural attributes.

So it seems that if you believe in God, it is a powerless one.

Why can't you ever track this argument? Obviously not powerless; how could a powerless God create polio? - evil, cruelly, sadistically evil -- got it?

Regardless, you are just trying to avoid the atheist label by playing games. Your attitude towards religion is completely the same as that of an atheist.

Well, now, an attitude plus $1.50 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. when it comes to putting labels on people regarding their metaphysical philosophies, it is appropriate to examine their philosophies, not their "attitudes". I obviously am not an athiest, because I obviously don't maintain the fundamental tenate of athiesm--that God categorically does not exist.

[donh]

it is the absolute impossibility of arranging some millions of molecules into at least half a million DNA pairs in the exact way necessary to produce a living thing.

And, again, for perhaps the 100th time, you have failed to produce your proof--or even any particularly suggestive evidence--as to why I should think that the beginnings of life could only have been a prokariote being instantly assembled out of organic spare parts.

[f.Christian]

To: Michael121


m121...


Theory is assumed, it is conjecture. It is therefore UNPROVEN.

g3 ...


Alas, an honest statement by an evolutionist! Seems to me that if evolution is conjecture, an assumption, and unproven, then there is absolutely no reason to believe in such an atheistic/materialistic ideology.


994 posted on 05/09/2003 8:59 PM PDT by gore3000

[f.Christian]

To: balrog666

b666 ...

Yes, so please shut up about your personal mythology on a science thread.

g3 ...


Insults are not science and the evolutionists are only insulting. Perhaps it is you who should stop with YOUR personal mythology, ideology and rhetoric and start discussing the facts.


986 posted on 05/09/2003 8:15 PM PDT by gore3000

[Dimensio]

That means evolutionists won't object when it is posited that God created the universe and God caused life from non-life. You can't object because you just said your theory has nothing to do with those two miracles.

The theory does have nothing to do with universe origins or life from non-life. The only valid objection that I can see is trying to pass off the "God did it" explanation as science, since it is not scientific to assert as much (as it invokes explanations that fall outside of the scope of science). I do not, however, see such an assertion as incompatable with or contradictory to the theory of evolution.

"That evolution is an attempt to remove God from every aspect of human life is a creationist strawman"

That happens to be your straw man argument since I have never seen a creationist put it forth.

Funny, I seem to get that impression from a number of Creationist posters, though some more explicitly than others. Gore3000, for example, seems stronly convinced that it is the case that evolution is just an attempt to justify atheistic materialism.

[Dimensio]

Your incoherent and vapid rambling does not change facts. The roots of atheism are "without" and "belief in a god or gods". That you want to redefine atheism to mean something else only makes you delusional. Of course, we already knew that you were delusional.

[donh]

The switch, as usual.

You mean the switch from an interesting discussion to yet another recitation of the exact same feeble, execrable, canned arguments you recycle endlessly without showing the least sign of even enough rudimentary comprehension and courtesy to prevent your deponents from having to explain the same point again and again and again and again...?

We are not talking about fitness cost in the beginning of life,

We were, in just this previous set of posts, in fact.

and the article does not deal with the beginning of life either.

It most certainly does. As does any Alife experiment. The game of life, like the experiment of this article, ramps us up to Turing machines, from, essentially, a silicon substrate embedded with a regularly ordered matrix of charged transistor storage devices. If you can get to a turing machine, you can get to self-reproducing automata, as the Game of Life demonstrates right in front of your eyes, if you bother to look. If you can do it in silicon, you can certainly do it in sulpher bubbles, or clay silicates, or any of the dozen or so candidates for beginnnings that have been floating around. Once you have enduring self-reproducing automata, it is just a matter of mutating your brains out for millions of years to replace the silicon substrate with something else, just like the early amphibians gave up the ocean for the land, just like the early aerobics gave up on nitrogen for oxygen, just like the bisexual multicellulars gave up sucking nutrients from pond scum for hunting down and killing huge mobile packages of nutrients.

[Nataku X]

These are not references. These are "More to Explore".

From the same authors... I don't think it's the same amazing circuit talked about here on FR, but nonetheless working circuits resulting from a genetic algorithms. Evolution using genetic programming of a low-distortion, 96 decibel operational amplifier

You said that they had nothing, you basically said that GAs were all untrue. Those results are not nothing. I've not done any actual research with GAs, but I can tell you that they're pretty amazing in their capabilities... when you want to know about NNs and PR stuff, gimme a call.

Since I know that you'll (1) want the original 9-transistor circuit next, (2) after that, you'll want a genetic algorithm besting Xeons, I'll end my discussion here. It's fairly easy to do an university-library search on the authors' names (which is what I did on one author's name), track down their university websites and e-mail them, et cetera if you want to.

[Nataku X]

Point being, evolutionary processes applied to computer science can and do create all sort of improvements and such by random processes... which was the original point you were trying to defeat in the first place.

However, I'll grant you this. It's impossible to properly re-create biological evolution in its entirity. However, certain details can be disproven/proven with the help of GAs... such as structures that supposedly have irreducible complexity.

And in certain ways, creating models help us to understand biological processes better. Orientation maps, for example, are neurons within V1 that have specific orientations. We can calculate orientation maps with good accuracy in monkeys, ferrets, etc., now--but they could not do so in the 70s. A computer program modelling the orientation map exhibited certain features of orientation maps that had not even been discovered yet!

[donh]

Further you already agreed that even a small fitness differential will result in the more fit organisms overcoming the less fit.

I haven't any idea how this point supports the rest of your argument, but, hey, what's new?

The point, if I might be so bold as to suggest sticking to it, was that it isn't necessary to punish failure to have evolutionary changes take place. It is only necessary to reward success. If evolution's beginnings were not a time of heavy dependance on hunting down your food to survive; if failure does not result in your genome losing the meat machinery in your possession to some other genome that's eaten you; then failure is not significant to evolution at this stage of the game.

What's important, I boldly aver, having just thought of it, is the ability to evolve as fast as possible, without stretching yourself so thin you discorporate.

[Ten Megaton Solution]

Theory is assumed, it is conjecture. It is therefore UNPROVEN. Learn before you citisize.

Read, before you criticize. If you'd done that, you'd note the many times I stated that theories are NOT PROVEN, rather the opponent provides evidence of the theory's falsity.

That being said, yet once again, no one has falsified the following theory;

There is no God.

The falsification is simple, yet never has it been done. Haul your god out of his hiding place and put him on display.

[Nataku X]

Sigh... too late at night to be debating.

V1 = part of the visual cortex in the brain (present in all mammals, I think). V1 has neurons which react best to lines of a specific orientation, and it is possible to make an "orientation map" by mapping each neuron to a specific angle of orientation.

A computer model in the 1970s tried to emulate the process of the development of un-specific neurons to orientation-specific neurons, and in doing so, certain features in the end result were found that had not yet been discovered in genuine, biological orientation maps. That is a perfect example of how computer models help us to understand biological processes

[donh]

Further, as I mentioned, the problem for evolution is to slowly, gradually, in small steps create a totally new organ, function, etc. with each single step making the organism more fit. This is the part of my argument you do not wish to discuss.

Right. I do not wish to discuss it, because it is only relevant to meat machines that have organs and functions to evolve, and a fixed DNA matrix in which to take these single steps to which you refer. If the thesis is that the process of evolution preceeded DNA and meat machines, than arguments apropos to the requirements and behaviors of DNA and meat machines, are--try to follow me now--utterly irrelevant.

[Ten Megaton Solution]

Re: found that weekly synagogue- or churchgoers experienced a 28% lower mortality rate than those attending less regularly

Another thought occured to me. I seem to recall that persons having pets live longer than those that do not. It must have been a dyslexic God owner that conducted that study.

[donh]

.Reasoning is just a small part of the having-an-advanced-technical-culture game.

Matter cannot reason and not even the most ardent materialists argue that living things can will themselves into a new species so this argument is absolute nonsense.

In what manner is this a relevant response to the extract quoted?

[Ten Megaton Solution]

It has no possible material explanation and serves to destroy your petty, simple minded materialistic/atheistic beliefs.

Why, of course it has simple material explanations. One church goer says to another "You look peaked, Bob, you should cut back on the free drinks at the casino", or "Our priest has been caught sneaking a little boy again, so the church moved him to stop a lynching", or "The TB Joe caught from the random bum he slept with last summer is amenable to anti-biotics after all, could someone volunteer to help him go shopping?"

All such expression of the social instinct man has evolved tend to prolong the lives of the group that practices them, hence re-inforcing the gregarious instinct in future generations.

[Ten Megaton Solution]

One should walk carefully through a room of elephants.

One should blow a loud trumpet and carry a wind up mouse at all times.

[CobaltBlue]

Do you find it useful to believe that God created life on earth that has never ever evolved and never will?

What do you find useful to believe about the geological record and the fossil record?

Do you find it useful to pretend that it doesn't exist, or do you prefer to believe that it was created by the Devil, or do you prefer to believe that it was created by God to tempt man into non-belief, or what?