The human mind.
Posted on 03/05/2002 12:52:58 PM PST by Southack
There is a recurring claim among a certain group which goes along the lines of "software programs can self-form on their own if you leave enough computers on long enough" or "DNA will self-form given enough time" or even that a million monkeys typing randomly on a million keyboards for a million years will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare.
This mathematical proof goes a short distance toward showing in math what Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigogine first said in 1987 (see Order Out of Chaos), that the maximum possible "order" self-forming randomly in any system is the most improbable.
This particular math proof deals with the organized data in only the very first sentence of Hamlet self-forming. After one examines this proof, it should be readily apparent that even more complex forms of order, such as a short story, computer program, or DNA for a fox, are vastly more improbable.
So without further adue, here's the math:
You're right. They probably just made all that up. (The other links provided in the same post make similar if not identical statements.)
What does that then say about the ancestry of the Pakicetus and the sequencing of the evolution.
I don't like the way creationists always show up dumb as a stump, demanding to be dragged through the same thing over and over again. A sign of real intellectual dialogue (two intelligences exchanging information and analysis) would be a willingness to pick up the trail where it was left off the day before, instead of starting back at the beginning each day. That sign is lacking in your posts.
Actually, it's still vague. I'm accepting (as not everyone does--the overall picture is ambiguous) that hippos are meaningfully more related to cetaceans than the rest of the artiodactyls. Thus the placement of Pakicetus before the branching of toothed and balleen but after the split from hippos. I suppose it's possible Pakicetus could appear on the tree before the hippos come off, but I don't feel like checking up front whether the fossil and other data support the idea.
What's your point?
The micro-/macro- distinction is not itself a physical barrier out there in the world. A clue to this would be the different uses of the terms involved. Some of you turkeys say that macroevolution = speciation, if anyone can agree what that is. Some of you say it's only when a fruit fly becomes or gives birth to a bat, something not particularly predicted by evolution in the first place.
A child becomes a man. Societies disagree on when this is. Traditional Judaism gives a boy his Bar Mitzvah IIRC when he is twelve. Most states of the good ol' USA say the minor/adult barrier is at the 21st birthday. But there's no real barrier out there that's hard to cross. Stay alive long enough and you cross the barrier.
What jennyp is calling for, and you don't have because it doesn't exist, is the demonstration of any real-world barrier to an accumulation of gradual changes taking non-interbreeding populations ever farther and farther apart until they not only couldn't interbreed even if reintroduced, but they don't look at all the same and are adapted to their environments very, very differently.
Truly a miracle ;)
I meant to say, Andrew, that I accept this for the sake of argument. As you recall, there's the Hippo (Heidi) hypothesis and the Artiodactyls-as-a-group hypothesis (Arlene), per the Sciam "Whence Whales?" article of a thread or two ago, reflecting the recent state of affairs and fully incorporationg the studies you're citing here. That's an un-settled issue.
I also like it because Gore said that the DNA studies have absolutely eliminated Hippos, which was news to me and which he has yet to back up or retract. It's been quite a campaign to get an anwer out of that boy and I'm glad you've revived the issue on this thread.
Well, then your previous statement could be interpreted as hyperbole, consequently a weakened argument. Other arguments militate against the random "construction" process of the genetic sentence. As it is often pointed out, mutations do not always occur serially, are for the most part neutral, and evidently, of those not neutral, most are antagonistic to the survival of the organism containing them. Consequently, it is not to my mind far-fetched to surmise that the benefit of a "good" mutation is swamped by the detriment of (a) "bad" mutation(s) in the case of a random origination process. The selection process selects the organism not the gene.
The bones don't fit. They don't fit the relationships of the tree and they don't fit the timing inherent in the tree. That is, the tree established by the DNA.
Finally. Molecular "clocks" are good for building trees, but you can get different trees depending on whether you use mtDNA, Y-chromosome DNA, or whatever. The actual time estimates have a lot of slop. But then, so do the time estimates from paleontology. With paleontology, you also have the problem that populations don't necessarily go extinct just because they may have speciated off a more modern-looking critter somewhere back there.
So you're right, all you have is the same thing with birds. You have a logical progression of dinos turning into birds before your very eyes in the fossil record but Archaeopteryx for one is out of order.
Big deal. Conditions for fossilization vary from place to place and time to time. The "primitive" versions don't always know to go extinct when they should, like those opossums on my hillside. It's a complicated world.
"Why, it's all turtles, all the way down!" ;)
Of course they can, precisely because the natural world is designed.
More importantly, an experiment with so much design built in can never tell us that something could happen without that design. Dawkins was attempting to show that there was no need for a designer. But he could not show that with his experiment because his experiment relied so much on careful design.
Shalom.
I'm a bit troubled by this one. I see that I only answered you on timing and not relationships. What do you know about the fossil history of artiodactyls that Scientific American, National Geographic et. al. aren't telling us?
So carefully designed experiments in fusion, requiring millions of dollars in equipment, tell us nothing about the natural processes in the sun.
Or perhaps you would care to disclose exactly what kind of experiment would, in principle, change your mind.
Better hurry, because the actual experiments will be coming thick and fast over the next 20 years.
And the relationships don't matter? in essence this is the sequence.
The parent of camels was the parent of the parent of pigs and Group A.
The parent of group A was the parent of the parent of ruminants and the parent of the parent of hippos and whales.
The parent of the parent of hippos and whales was therefore also the parent of pakicetus.(which could be pakicetus itself, but that relationship is not asserted by the bone crunchers.)
Pakicetus is 54 million years old.
The parent of pakicetus is therefore older than 54 million years and younger than the parent of the parent of ruminants. I understand that ruminants are fairly young in the artiodactyl family.
The human mind.
My point on progression is that one can arbitrarily define termini of the micro evolutionary process, thereby affecting the "success" or "failure" of the analysis according to the selected slice of the process. As has been remarked in other posts on this thread, much of the argument over macro evolution centers on (1) the original state of the system (i.e.: who set up the initial components) and (2) the confines of valid evolutionary paths (i.e.: is there a barrier that prevents an organization from changing sufficiently over time to be classified as a whole new category of organism - a cat from a lizard, if you will).
The process of evolving (at least on the micro level) is not much in dispute - there is ample evidence of adaptation and natural selection. Therefore, from my perspective, an analytical view of the origin of the experiment is more informative than examining a slice of the overall continuum.
To further refine the issues that are most interesting and revealing (IMO), I would also say that there are two aspects of the origin of evolution that are distinct and important: First, the transmogrification of inert chemicals into living tissue needs to be explored. This is a wide ranging topic in and of itself, including the distribution of chemicals and elements in a young Earth's primordial soup and the definition of "life" (as in: is "life" a characteristic of a formation of materials, or is it an independent animatory force acting upon a certain formation of materials?).
The second major issue IMO is the ability for genetic material to self-transform through evolutionary means to convert an original life form into the plethora of forms seen throughout history.
Does that better explain the context of my point regarding the progressive nature of evolution?
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