Hi there, I’m Colm, a 39 year old father of 4 from Ireland with an interest in lots of things. I’ve had a blog (of sorts) going in H2G2 since 1999, but time has moved on and I’m looking for something different now.
Likes: Carl Sagan, Snow Patrol, Thinking up something original, Robert Harris, Astronomy, A good laugh, East Cork, Kaiser Chiefs, Trees, Hurling, Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, IT, Debates about religion and science, Monty Python, Prague, Sincerity, Walking by the seashore, Taking Back Sunday, West Cork, Dava Sobel, Father Ted, Mozart, Geology, James Randi, Billy Connolly, A pint in a nice pub, Co. Kerry, Toastmasters, The Ice Age, Supply Chain Management…
Dislikes: Cold callers, Bullying, Vacuuming.
Contact me directly: 
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November 26, 2006 at 5:01 pm
Joe
Colm,
when you have a chance, please take a look at this article.
Somebody on the evolutionist side of the debate is finally trying to be honest - this is new and very refreshing opinion on the conflict.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
http://www.godlesshouston.com/library/darwin.htm
November 26, 2006 at 6:13 pm
woodpigeon
I’ve just read the article Joe. Quite a broadside against post-modernism, something I would broadly agree with. If “cultural reality” is to be treated with the same respect as “objective-reality”, then I guess female circumcision is ok then, isn’t it? Science, to me, is not just one of many courses on offer from a large á la carte menu. The scientific world view has solid evidence to back up each of its assertions, and the other world views don’t. Post-modernism in this sense is like some sort of half-witted conspiracy theory. They should stick to UFOs.
On the point where he questions the statement that evolution is “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process”, then the question must be, if it is not unsupervised and impersonal”, then how did this “personal supervisor” come about? Scientists can create simple evolutionary models on a personal computer that develop complex forms and complex behaviour with no need for a personal supervisor to exist at all. A personal supervisor, if such a persona did exist, would need to be extraordinary complex and the origin of such as super-being could be legitimately questioned. To say that the process is unsupervised and impersonal is simply to work on the side of (much) greater probability.
My feeling on reading the article is that the author is a Christian and a scientist who is trying to reconcile these two world-views that make some sense to him and actually would have made a lot of sense to me for a long time. On one hand he agrees fully with scientific thesis - why wouldn’t he? It has all the evidence after all. But on the other hand, he sees something divine in nature - that God perhaps guided evolution to where it is today and that somehow, human evolution was inevitable. The author, in the obvious absence of any real opportunity to test this, wants to believe that somehow it was. But an understanding of the processes of evolution suggests that this is more probably not the case.
It’s ironic, but I think there is a certain post-modernism in him equally weighting the reality he would like to see exist (i.e. a guided evolution) with a much more probable reality (i.e. non guided). By agreeing that the words “unsupervised and impersonal” should be removed, he is effectively siding with the left-wing post-modernist thinkers that he quite rightly derides.
November 29, 2006 at 2:24 am
Joe
Woodpigeon,
I see three problems with your analysis:
November 29, 2006 at 2:27 am
Joe
The headers of the blocks should like this:
Quote:Scientists can create simple evolutionary models on a personal computer that develop complex forms and complex behaviour with no need for a personal supervisor to exist at all.
Quote: The scientific world view has solid evidence to back up each of its assertions.
Quote: But on the other hand, he sees something divine in nature - that God perhaps guided evolution to where it is today and that somehow, human evolution was inevitable.
Sorry - trying to add some decent formatting to the message in this “editor” is really shot in the dark
November 30, 2006 at 12:23 am
woodpigeon
Joe,
Dawkins freely admitted in the Blind Watchmaker the limitations of his programs. He developed them for illustrative purposes only and freely admitted this. However, even with something as simple as the Shakespeare text he was able to show convincingly enough that randomness combined with iteration and selection could yield results much more quickly than just randomness and iteration on its own. That was the only point he was making. I was thinking more of more complex ecosystem based program along with the use genetic algorithms to solve complex real-world problems. Check out this example of a paper published in Nature. This is not saying that scientists have figured out all the mechanisms of biology - of course not - but it shows that the simple mechanisms of mutation, iteration and selection can be applied successfully in a computer setting to solve real world problems.
The bit about random changes in code resulting in a better program seems illogical, as you and I know that normally a random change in code would produce, at best, a neutral result or at worst, an error, resulting, if you like, in the “death” of that piece of code. However, what if there were millions and millions of pieces of code around each with small random mutations, where 99.9999% of all the examples ended in failure or neutrality? What if, out of this, just 1 or 2 out of those millions resulted in a marginally improved result - almost neutral but just a tiny bit better than what went before? The probability is tiny, but if the population is big enough, then even small probability events become possible. That point seemed to be overlooked in the link that you sent me.
No - an accepted scientific theory needs evidence. Every single time. And the evidence needs to be solid, or else it remains a hypotheses. Evolution, for example, is backed up by solid evidence as contained in the fossil record, analysis of DNA, biogeography etc. Enough for the vast majority of scientist to be convinced of its worth. Opponents of evolution attack the theory without ever coming up with an evidence based alternative. I wonder why?
God, super-power, alien looking at us in a fish-bowl: whatever. I think the point being made is that an external agent is out there guiding evolution along. The problem for science is that such a hypothesis raises far more troubling questions than it solves. What is the origin of this external agent? Where is its location? How does something like this manipulate the world of the physical? How does it survive? Does it reproduce? If not how does it live for so long? Years ago, external agents (or The External Agent, depending on your philosophical bent) were used to explain lots of things in the past: why the moon doesn’t fall to earth, or why lightning occurs, or earthquakes, or how rainbows are made. Every time, a scientific theory emerged that made such an agent superfluous. Now, with the advent of computers, we are beginning to see that vast numbers of individual agents following simple rules can work together in ways that begin to explain complex behaviour and complex forms to us. The external agent is not needed - once again.
November 30, 2006 at 11:24 am
Dan Goodman
As well as the point you made about this, there is another point which is that the ‘code’ of DNA is more stable in this regard than computer code. You can knock out bits of DNA at will and the creature will still grow and survive. Indeed, this is a key tool in for example molecular biology because you can delete an individual protein from say, a mouse’s DNA, and the mouse will grow but will not be able to manufacture that protein. Occasionally this will result in a catastrophic failure, but often it doesn’t. There’s also quite a lot of redundancy and backup systems in biological organisms to cope with random errors.
December 4, 2006 at 12:23 am
Joe
Gentlemen,
rather than carrying here this high level, basically meaningless exchange of “barks”, I’d suggest checking what experts have to say on the subject.
Please visit: for some serious discussions.
By the way, don’t let the name of the forum fool you - once you learn to filter out the usual noise, you’ll find true treasures, such as the discussion here:
This one goes directly to computer modeling of genome gain in information: that is the REAL meat if you’re really interested in the subject…
Best regards,
Joe
December 4, 2006 at 12:25 am
Joe
The addresses as follows:
http://www.evolutionisdead.com/forum/index.php
and
http://www.evolutionisdead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=348
Although I surely know my HTML, this editor somehow fails to understand it.
No editing of posted messages, either…