Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True? Part Two

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Give an influenza virus a trillion years and it will not become a lotus flower.
 
The ol’ give the monkey on a typewriter enough time and he will type Shakespeare. Ok,…
 
buffalo said:
The ol’ give the monkey on a typewriter enough time and he will type Shakespeare. Ok,…
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I can make a small change in your analogy to make it more accurately like evolution, since your analogy does not include selection. So I will include selection like this:

Instead of waiting for the monkey to type a complete Shakespeare play by chance, wait until the monkey types the first word of a Shakespeare play (Two), and set that piece of paper aside. It has been “selected.” Then wait for the monkey to type the second word of that play (households). That may take a bit longer. You might have to wait for “house” and select it and put it aside, and wait for “holds.” Then wait for the next word (both) to appear and set it aside. Eventually you will get “Two households, both alike in dignity…” You will get all of Romeo and Juliet much faster this way than waiting for the monkey to type the whole thing in one go. That is more like evolution. But use trillions of monkeys. And millions of years.
 
LeafByNiggle said:
Therefore 20 heads in a row will come up eventually.
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No, it does not have to.
You are attempting to make a statement of probability a statement of fact.

Unless the odds of something happening are 100%, you cannot claim the event to be fact.

This is something I have seen many proponents of evolution try to do…
Something could happen, and we have plenty of time, therefore it did happen.

Logic does not work that way.
 
vz71 said:
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LeafByNiggle:
Therefore 20 heads in a row will come up eventually.
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No, it does not have to.
You are attempting to make a statement of probability a statement of fact.

Unless the odds of something happening are 100%, you cannot claim the event to be fact.
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Study the Law of Large Numbers until you really understand it. It implies exactly what I said.

If that does not convince you, how about an intuitive explanation. Suppose I said that given enough time, if you toss a fair coin, it will eventually turn up heads. Just one heads is all I am asking for. Wouldn’t you agree that it is inevitable that heads will come up eventually? Then consider two heads in a row. Isn’t that inevitable too? Etc.
 
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Mental experiments and computer simulations do not necessarily reflect what happens in real life.
A group of faculty and students in the university’s media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.

At first, said researcher Mike Phillips, “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

“Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,” added Phillips, who runs the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in — not quite literature.

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance. . .
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http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/monkeysandtypewriters051103.htm
 
LeafByNiggle said:
Instead of waiting for the monkey to type a complete Shakespeare play by chance, wait until the monkey types the first word of a Shakespeare play (Two), and set that piece of paper aside. It has been “selected.” Then wait for the monkey to type the second word of that play (households). That may take a bit longer. You might have to wait for “house” and select it and put it aside, and wait for “holds.” Then wait for the next word (both) to appear and set it aside. Eventually you will get “Two households, both alike in dignity…” You will get all of Romeo and Juliet much faster this way than waiting for the monkey to type the whole thing in one go. That is more like evolution. But use trillions of monkeys. And millions of years.
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This approach requires someone to “select” what word comes next. That is, it is entirely non-random. It requires both a script and a copy writer. Natural selection is not directed so you can’t propose a directed solution to demonstrate how a non-directed process could work.
 
Ender said:
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LeafByNiggle:
Instead of waiting for the monkey to type a complete Shakespeare play by chance, wait until the monkey types the first word of a Shakespeare play (Two), and set that piece of paper aside. It has been “selected.” Then wait for the monkey to type the second word of that play (households). That may take a bit longer. You might have to wait for “house” and select it and put it aside, and wait for “holds.” Then wait for the next word (both) to appear and set it aside. Eventually you will get “Two households, both alike in dignity…” You will get all of Romeo and Juliet much faster this way than waiting for the monkey to type the whole thing in one go. That is more like evolution. But use trillions of monkeys. And millions of years.
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This approach requires someone to “select” what word comes next. That is, it is entirely non-random. It requires both a script and a copy writer. Natural selection is not directed so you can’t propose a directed solution to demonstrate how a non-directed process could work.
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Natural selection does for evolution exactly what the intelligent selector does for the monkeys typing Shakespeare. It is directed in that it favors (selects for) beneficial mutations.
 
That’s not true? I… I… find that to be so sensible.
 
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What letter to type is neither beneficial or not beneficial, unless an outside being with intelligence determines it to be so.
 
edwest211 said:
What letter to type is neither beneficial or not beneficial, unless an outside being with intelligence determines it to be so.
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In the analogy, “conformance to Shakespeare” is the analog to “beneficial mutation.” It was not my analogy, so if you have complaints about it, take it up with buffalo who proposed the analogy.
 
The entire Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Who do you think wrote the Biblical accounts of creation?
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I think “inspiration” means that someone is moved to express the inexpressible, but with the limitations of his faculties and education. So I think people wrote the Bible as best they could, under inspiration, but I would not expect literary or scientific perfection. If that were the case, the Bible would be full of details about the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and so on. Things have a purpose when a thinking agent decides they do, right?
As far as evolution, I ask that all reading consider a few things.

Does it have any practical use? If not, what is or can it be used for?

When a living thing acquires a novel organ, that organ needs to be integrated into its body. It needs a blood supply, a nervous system that connects to the brain of the animal to regulate its function, and it can’t interfere with anything else.
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I don’t think evolution has a purpose. It’s a description of how reproduction and traits of organisms interact with time. It could really only have a purpose if it was established by God, because it’s strange to say that material systems have a “purpose” any more than a rock on the beach has one.

There is some academic use for evolution. It helps us understand why we have vestigial organs, how humans came to have the physical features they do now, why there are black and white people, and why there are so many genetic similarities between people and animals. It helps us understand why some people are born with genetic defects. It helps us understand what kind of people lived in different regions in history and prehistory. It can even, by reverse engineering, help us understand things about the climate on Earth based on what kind of animals disappeared and appeared at different times.
 
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Regarding the last paragraph, there is no evidence evolution provides any guidance. Genetic similarities with land animals like having a head, upper and lower torso, and four limbs? The instructions for building the basics would be similar but that doesn’t involve evolution. Studying the human genome does not require evolution, just identifying which switching mechanisms are working properly and which are not. Archaeology does not involve evolution, just excavation. Climate is based on observation. Nothing else.
 
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