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Richard Dawkins speaking on 'The God Delusion'

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EricL:
Richard Dawkins site

Richard Dawkins reads excerpts from The God Delusion and anwsers questions at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. This Q&A features many questions from Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University" students. In Richard's tour journal he says:

"Many of the questioners announced themselves as either students or faculty from Liberty, rather than from Randolph Macon which was my host institution. One by one they tried to trip me up, and one by one their failure to do so was applauded by the audience. Finally, I said that my advice to all Liberty students was to resign immediately and apply to a proper university instead. That received thunderous applause, so that I almost began to feel slightly sorry for the Liberty people. Only almost and only slightly, however."

shvarz:
Thanks for the link!  A bit long, but quite interesting

Jez:
Ah well, oh wow!   Thanks for the link, that site goes on my favourites list.

To quote; (Chance and natural selection and intelligent design (Part 2 - Q & A - 65+ min))

"One of the biggest fallacies in popular understanding of darwinian evolution by natural selection is that it is a theory of random chance, it is not, it is the very opposite and this is one of the most important things to understand about it. there is a certain chance element in it. Mutation is a process of random chance, it's random with respect to improvement, things don't tend to get better as a result of mutation, the important step in the darwinian theory of evolution is natural selection, natural selection is a non random process, natural selection is the non random survival of randomly varing genetic codes, the reason why some genetic codes survive better than others is their phenotypic effects via the process's of embryogenisis on phenotypes, on bodies, which make them survive or not survive, reproduce or not survive and the ones that do survive and reproduce pass on the genetic coded instructions that built them, and equiped them, and made them good at surviving and reproducing. That's the idea, that is the explanation for the apparent adaptive design, the illusion of design, which all living things show, it is a non random process, it does not involve design of any sort, it produces an illusion of design. It is hard for people to grasp for various reasons and one reason the questioner has pinpointed is the sheer length of time involved."

So DB has it wrong by relying so much on mutation to replicate natural selection?

"Geological time is larger than most human minds are capable of grasping, one of the various metaphors that have been used to convey the sheer magnitude of geological time, one that I like that I didn't invent is that you hold out your hand to represent the length of geological time and if the middle of my tie is the origin of life and the tip of my finger is the present; then the dinosaurs, which went extinct 65 million years ago lived about there (points at wrist) most of this is bacteria (shoulder to wrist) you have multicellular life evolving about here (points a little below wrist) dinosaurs about there, humans at my fingernail, and the whole of recorded human history, everything from the Egyptians in biblical times, the Romans, the Assyrians, the Greeks, all of human history, disapears in the dust from one stroke of a nail file."

MB's are going to perhaps take longer than a few million cycles to evolve then.  

EricL:

--- Quote from: Jez ---So DB has it wrong by relying so much on mutation to replicate natural selection?
--- End quote ---
Um, I don't think you understand the difference between mutations - a random process - and natural selection - a non-random process.  Random mutations create diversity within a population.  Selection operates on this diversity.  Mutations are random (although as an aside, there is some recent evidence that many mutations may not be quite so random.  Hot spots for mutations in the genome may be directed by the genome itself.  That is, a genome that is better at coding itself such that mutations are more frequent in places where having more frequent mutations is benificial - such as sequences for coding for specific bio-toxins in poisonious species co-evolving with preditiors which produce anti-toxins - and coding itself such that mutations are less frequent in places where mutations would be deleterious can be said to be fitter than one which has an equal probability of mutation across it's entire genome.  But I digress.)  

Natural selection is non-random in that a non-random subset of the popuatlion survies to reproduce I.e. those which are fittest for their environment.  Thus, the two things go hand in hand, mutations and natural selection.  If there were no mutations, there would be no diversity within a population and selection woudl have nothing to operate upon.   Mutations create diversity and thus that random process is essential to the non-random process of evolution by natural selection.


--- Quote from: Jez ---MB's are going to perhaps take longer than a few million cycles to evolve then.  
--- End quote ---

More than a few million cycles yes, but not as many as you might think.  DB isn't starting from scratch.  We are bootstrapping evolution by builidng into every bot the potential for various capabilities such as eyes, ties, shots, etc.  We aren't waiting for those things to evolve, we have just decreed 'There exist ties.  There exist shots. There exist eyes.  There exist means to share nrg via ties.  There exist means for bots to cooperate.'  All we have to do is wait for bots to evolve the means to use these mechanisms.  We don't have to wait for the mechanisms themselves to evolve.

My mental model of DB has it set right in the pre-Cambrian period - lots of one-celled animals on the brink of cooperating.  All we need to do is provide the right consistant set of physics and an environement such that selection favors the evolution of mutlibots and I predict we will see our own a Cambrian multibot explosion.

Numsgil:
 Dawkins is a jerk.  So much wasted energy battling the IDers.

In my experience, natural selection isn't so much survival of the fittest as non survival of the non fittest.  Giraffes didn't have selection for long necks as much as selection against small necks.  In general evolution seems great at breaking things.  Any limitations coded into the genome get removed pretty quickly.  Novelty is orders of magnitude slower to develop.

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