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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 18, 2009 6:46:34 GMT
I suppose in terms of physics, God programmes what the combination will be, and natural selction is like a search programme that locates the combination? The term the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris uses is that evolution is like a 'search engine'. Paul Davies describes the universe as a vast computer which has been set up to write its own programmes. These are present day analogies and bound to be inadequate but I find them helpful for thinking about things. Its very different to the 'clockwork' universe.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 18, 2009 7:17:35 GMT
Great series here: www.templeton.org/evolution/Martin Nowak says for example: There is a fascinating additional problem concerning our present understanding of evolution. Evolution is a search process. Populations of reproducing individuals "search" for short-term solutions, such as adaptations to a new environment or modifications of a social system. But the search process has to operate within a given space of possibilities. This "search space" ultimately determines what can evolve. For example, evolution can find intelligent life, if it is part of the search space, but it cannot construct the possibility of intelligent life. For science to fully "explain" intelligent life (or other fundamental properties of living systems), we need not only a theory of evolutionary dynamics but also a theory describing how the fundamental laws of nature span the search space.
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Post by hawkinthesnow on Apr 18, 2009 9:47:07 GMT
Thanks for the link Humphrey. Quite a lot of stuff there, worth some revisits. Nowak, Conway Morris and Collins make some good points, as does Sloane Wilson. Reading Sloane's article reminds me of a novel I recently finished in which the main character was musing on the fact that our DNA is 99% identical to that of a chimp's, but 50% identical to that of a banana!
A child of 3 makes a picture with the same colours as Rembrandt or Constable, but the results are very different indeed!
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Post by atheist on Apr 19, 2009 12:41:16 GMT
I have never witnessed such ridiculous wishful thinking... it is obvious you all 'need' your beliefs to make you feel less 'alone' in this life.. A proper understanding of evolution and natural selection (the most beautiful process in life) would cause you all to laugh at this childlike and insecure babble..
i hope there is a god; as it would be awesome to live forever with my family and mates: but all reason, logic and information thus far on earth all added up together provide not one ounce of evidence..
earth 10000 years old... no dinosaurs... omnipotent man in the sky... indoctrinated children....no 'marrying out' to other relgions..all other religions (with each thinking there own religion is the correct one!).... give me a break!!
LIFE Is great and its rarity and diversity is what makes me appreciate it...
seeing the connectedness of myself with the other organisms on earth... what could be better... wondering about the wide universe... realising i cannot fathom its size and power.. priceless..
l8r
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 19, 2009 13:47:29 GMT
I have never witnessed such ridiculous wishful thinking... it is obvious you all 'need' your beliefs to make you feel less 'alone' in this life.. A proper understanding of evolution and natural selection (the most beautiful process in life) would cause you all to laugh at this childlike and insecure babble.. i hope there is a god; as it would be awesome to live forever with my family and mates: but all reason, logic and information thus far on earth all added up together provide not one ounce of evidence.. earth 10000 years old... no dinosaurs... omnipotent man in the sky... indoctrinated children....no 'marrying out' to other relgions..all other religions (with each thinking there own religion is the correct one!).... give me a break!! LIFE Is great and its rarity and diversity is what makes me appreciate it... seeing the connectedness of myself with the other organisms on earth... what could be better... wondering about the wide universe... realising i cannot fathom its size and power.. priceless.. l8r You know, sometimes we on this forum are inclined to become a little jaded. 'Surely', we find ourselves saying, 'surely there must be more to the new atheist movement than the same old tired arguments mixed in with schoolboy insults and unquestioning scientism'. Thankfully, just when I'm at my most cynical, a post like this comes along. What stunning reasoning and clarity of argument. Your case for the non existence of God is simply irrefutable. I suggest we all pack this forum up or dedicate it to Ayn Rand instead.
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Post by bernard on Apr 19, 2009 15:37:33 GMT
How disappointing. I enjoy a diverse range of views, but all we get is trolls. Please stick around 'atheist', if you want genuine debate you will be welcome here.
You might want to take a look at your 'full stop' button, it seems to be faulty.
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Post by Al Moritz on Apr 19, 2009 17:44:41 GMT
Thankfully, just when I'm at my most cynical, a post like this comes along. What stunning reasoning and clarity of argument. Your case for the non existence of God is simply irrefutable. I suggest we all pack this forum up or dedicate it to Ayn Rand instead. Yeah, absolutely brilliant post. I am in awe of 'atheist'. It seems almost as if s/he is a theist who just posted this to make a joke. A proper understanding of evolution and natural selection (the most beautiful process in life) would cause you all to laugh at this childlike and insecure babble.. I properly understand those things, alright. I also understand the origin of life, as much as current knowledge allows, see my essay on Talkorigins.org, a leading evolution website: www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 19, 2009 20:00:45 GMT
Yeah, absolutely brilliant post. I am in awe of 'atheist'. It seems almost as if s/he is a theist who just posted this to make a joke. That's the trouble these days. Every snotty nosed little oik has read 'The Selfish Gene' and think they are a genius. Go on any site these days and you get told 'you don't understand evolution and how simple elegant and beautiful it is'. Bit patronising. The best was when the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris wrote a piece for the Guardian and you had all these new atheists commenting on it to say 'who is this guy, he doesn't understand evolution', 'this bloke is nuts' etc... I had to step in and say 'This is the guy who did all the work on the Burgess Shale'. Mind you, half of them probably don't know what the Burgess Shale is. This is the dumbest mass movement in history.
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Post by eckadimmock on Apr 20, 2009 1:10:48 GMT
earth 10000 years old... no dinosaurs... omnipotent man in the sky... indoctrinated children....no 'marrying out' to other relgions..all other religions (with each thinking there own religion is the correct one!).... give me a break!! Yes, well I hope our resident genius read The Selfish Gene more carefully than he appears to have read this site. But don't let that stop you sneering at other people's speculations!
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Post by wraggy on Apr 20, 2009 9:06:08 GMT
This reminds me of when I was visiting a web site that was discussing matters of Science and Religion when a guest's post was slammed by a Fundie Atheist who suggested the the guest new nothing about science. The guest simply left his initials at the end of the post. The host of the site suggested that the critic knew nothing about science as the guest was Professor Robert Winston.
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Post by jamierobertson on Apr 20, 2009 10:33:05 GMT
"pwned", as they say.
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Post by knowingthomas on Apr 20, 2009 19:33:58 GMT
Wouldn't Morris' conclusions be threatened by Richard Lenski's bacteria research in regarding randomness in evolution and refuting his search engine concept?
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Post by bernard on Apr 20, 2009 20:10:15 GMT
I sort of understand it like this - All life on earth can be imagined as occupying a position in phase-space. If you picture this space as a surface, it would look like a landscape - with a few mountains and large low-lying areas. The higher the surface, the more complex the organism. As we know, the vast majority of life on earth is microbial, even single cellular. There is plenty of space for them in the lowlands of this landscape.
But as the surface rises there is less space: fewer ecological niches. Organisms at the same height face similar challenges, and develop similar mechanisms for survival. Examples of convergent evolution, like the eye and wings, are universally the best solutions to certain problems.
All these mechanisms are randomly driven. But the more complex the organism, the more complex the demands, the fewer the solutions. Bacterial evolution will appear more random, because the randomness is expressed more readily at their complexity. More complex creatures have most of their random mutations weeded out through natural selection.
Interestingly, I have the idea that this phase-space landscape has space for a bipedal, large brained animal. Something similar to humans may have evolved from dinosaurs, given time. Of course, this is just speculation.
This is my current understanding - I'd welcome correction.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 20, 2009 21:14:48 GMT
Wouldn't Morris' conclusions be threatened by Richard Lenski's bacteria research in regarding randomness in evolution and refuting his search engine concept? Yes and No. The Lenski experiment showed that both chance and necessity play an important role in evolution. The overwhelming trend at the phenotypic level was to emphasize the power of necessity to produce parallel changes across independent lineages under the same selective regime, although some subtle chance difference occurred. At the genetic level the adaptive substitutions were concentrated in a few genes, empahsising again the power of necessity to produce parallel changes. All twelve populations have increased in fitness and followed similar trajectories and all have become glucose specialists. The striking exception was that one population developed the ability to use citrate due to a contingent set of changes. What I drew out from the experiment is that both Conway Morris and Gould have a point; chance and necessity have had a rich and complex interplay throughout life’s history. Its not an ‘either’-'or’ thing. I think Conway Morris does recognise the role of chance but seeks to put it into a wider context and show that pervasive biases occur (which they do). He necessarily has to argue strongly against contingency because such a lot of emphasis has been put on it in the past (and here he is singing from the same hymn sheet as Dawkins). I would agree with Lenski when he says that ‘Conway Morris ‘wins’ based on the number of changes that fit his pattern, but Gould might prevail if weighted by the profundity of change’. Recall that even Stephen Jay Gould allowed for some kind of progress simulation. He argued that life’s history is like a drunken man on a sidewalk, bounded on one side by a wall and the other by a ditch. Eventually, the man will fall into the ditch because he cannot go through the wall and his random path will take him to and over the other edge. So similarly simple organisms cannot get simpler, but they can get more complex. Interesting there was an issue of Nature earlier this year which had a series of articles on evolution. The introduction said that the current understanding of evolutionary biology suggests that evolution is not as stochastic as people like Steven Jay Gould thought. I think that's the way things are moving.
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Post by knowingthomas on Apr 21, 2009 4:21:29 GMT
So essentially both Morris and Gould are equally right?
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