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Richard Dawkins speaking on 'The God Delusion'
EricL:
I have met Richard Dawkins. He is not a jerk. He is in fact, very personable and about as unjerk like as I can imagine someone being. You can argue that beating one's head against the ID wall of ignorance is fruitless, but doing so does not make you a jerk.
I may not see your point regarding non-selection of non-fittest but I think I disagree. Sometimes selection favors something. Sometimes it disfavors something. Both are types of directional selection. But favoring something is not the same as disfavoring it's opposite. There are many more ways to not have something than there are to have it.
Contrary to popular beleif, Giraffes long necks are the result of sexual selection, not foraging ability. Male giraffes use their necks in competition for herds of females. Males with larger necks tend to fair better in such contests and win and breed. Those without tend not to. You can say that is selection *against* short necks but what it really is is selection *for* winning male-male contests.
Your novelty point escapes me completly. Are you arguing for punctuated equalibrium?
Numsgil:
Very much so. I would say 99% of successful mutations I've seen either turn a gene on all the time or turn a gene off all the time. The number of really neat and new behaviors I've seen are very scarce. In my experience evolution is very good at destroying non optimal solutions but much less better at rewarding good solutions.
For instance, lets say that a mutation lets you have 10% more successful kids. That gives you a 10% advantage more or less over another critter. There's a strong chance that that 10% won't even matter until several generations down the road. That nice mutation can easily be lost when you die from an accident. This nice mutation is already extremely rare (the number of useful mutations is very small when compared with neutral or harmful mutations). Even when it shows up the odds aren't that great that it will make it to the next generation.
On the other hand, a bad mutation that renders you sterile gives you an infinite percentage disadvantage. Your bad mutation has 0 chance of making it into the next generation.
I'm probably fudging numbers a bit, but yes, in my mind evolution is far better at lancing off unnecessary or harmful things than it is adding new things. Novelty is a rare and beautiful thing.
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Saying Dawkins is a jerk is probably too strong. He's like a kid that pokes the hornet's nest because it's fun. Naming your book "The God Delusion" isn't going to be mending any fences. Too much effort is wasted from both the religous right and the intellectual left fighting each other. In the end it poisons both the religous and scientific wells. Religions come to despise science, ostracising any potentially controversial free thinkers, and science refuses to give money, time, or attention to anything that might be contrived as having a religous agenda.
If God would just come down and tell us that He uses Lamarckian evolution, everyone would just be better off
Jez:
--- Quote from: EricL ---Um, I don't think you understand the difference between mutations - a random process - and natural selection - a non-random process.
--- End quote ---
There is a very good chance I understand a lot less then you realise, I'm just an uneducated person with a big mouth.
So thank you for taking the time to explain it a little more clearly.
The reason I posted that is because what I see Dbots doing is fighting a generally losing battle against the mutations. 'Intelligently designed' bots devolving into lazy and inefficient parodys of their ancestors. I have to say that the results coming back from the evosimmers are, seemingly, producing better results than they used to but the fact remains; if I try to evolve a top bot that I have written it devolves.
So what am I doing wrong? Is the eviroment not tough enough or to small? Are the mutations set to high? Is the sample size to small? Am I expecting to much?
I like your pre-Cambrian model btw.
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When it comes to Dawkins wasting his time butting his head against the big brick wall of religion, good on the guy I say. I used to argue with religious people and used to be able to get them to retreat back to the meta physical standpipe of faith and at that point I just used to give up.
I don't think we should leave religion alone, it has spent it's history fighting scientific advancement, it is, generally, morally wrong, it has caused pain and suffering, wars and death across the ages. (One of the three biggest causes of human death is religion I believe).
One of the greatest things, IMO, to happen in England was the creation of the C of E. The removal of the Catholic church, that organisation that is still known to actively cover up priest pedophilia.
Being Christian does not make you good, it means you can appologise on your death bed for your sins, be forgiven and go to heaven. What other 'get out of jail free card' do you need?
I'm gonna shut up in a minute! My standpoint is that many religions are morally reprehensible and the fact that someone has taken on the 'great blinkers in the sky', the fact that science is, at last, trying to correct these age old self replicating organisations should be lauded not booed.
I appologise for having such a bee in my bonnet about the whole issuse but I believe in science.
P.S. Religion always despised science, science for a long time tried to be religously acceptable. It never worked so I don't see a problem challenging religion, they are hardly going to start hating scientists more than they already do.
EricL:
I think we are agreeing for the most part. It is true that deleterious mutations are orders of magnitude more common than benificial ones. To quote Dawkins, (though he was making a different point) "there are many more ways of being dead then of being alive." Most mutations result in lower fitness, which tends to kill you relative to those without the mutation, if not in that generation than in the next and thus most mutations don't get passed along to future generations.
But every once in a while, a mutation is incrementially benificial. It still may not stop that specific individual from dying in an accident or something, but over time, lots of time, probability will rule, benificial mutations will covey increased survivial probability, the mutation will fixate in the population and the species will have evolved.
DB is pushing the envelope with respect to trying to get results by speeding up time. The mutation rates are too high for one thing (and the populations too low). If everyone is mutating, complexity will suffer. It's equivalent to trying to evolve bots inside a nuclear reactor. It is not surprise that complexity gets destroyed in a high mutation rate environment.
But personally, I think we are still missing a key evolvability mechanism in the program and that is the means for the mutation rate attached to variable sized sequences of base pairs to itself mutate. We need a way for the genome to evolve stable sections at various levles of granulatiry which can remain stable even in the face of high mutation rates. Nature has evovled this mechanism over the eons but we are missing it. I think it is crucial for letting complexity survive and flourish.
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I admire Dawkins for taking a stand on the ID debate. It may be an age thing. I've had more time to get frustrated with the willfull ignorance of the masses and witness the exploitation of the faithful by people in power.
Numsgil:
I think the primary missing function is sexual reproduction. Eukaryotes, multicellularity, sexual reproduction, and chromosomes all appear at almost the exact same moment in the evolutionary record.
That can't entirely be on accident. They must all be entertwined in some way. I think if we implement a working sex system, we'll start to see some improved stability in our bots over time.
I also disagree on the idea that evolution will continously find incremental improvements. From my experience it tends to be an asymptotic approach to a stable point. This stable point might be less fit than where it's coming from. The population dynamics tend to be alot less clear cut than "better" and "worse". However, if the organism is actually reacting to changing stimuli, this won't hold true anymore. Then the stable point will be moving, and the organism will constantly be changing. In this situation, though, "better" and "worse" are impossible to define, since the rules of the game are changing as the game is being played. If the organisms changes move the stable point of another species, you might be able to create a constantly changing feedback arms race between the two.
However, I haven't actually seen this occur, and I'm assuming that there doesn't exist a mutually stable point for both of them to exist in at the same time.
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I would say equally horrendous attrocities have been perpetrated in the name of science as religion. Remember the Holocaust and eugenics? The robber barons defending their positions of power as "Social Darwinism". Surely these aren't somehow less attrocious than clerical hypocracy and inquisition.
Ultimately people are going to be unethical and willfully ignorant wether they're religous or not. I've seen plenty of close minded bigots who also happened to be atheist. They toted science as the penultimate Truth, yet it didn't make them nice people. People are people.
Religion and science are orthogonal. Religion allows us to understand and accept our position in life, our relationship with the rest of the universe, and our relationship with the rest of humanity. Religioin is ultimately a symptom of the greatest gift man has: sentience. Science seeks to understand the nature of reality, the rules by which we all play. Science tells us nothing about the reality of human existance, and religion tells us nothing about the workings of the universe. It's only when people think they do that there's problems.
Traditionally, science and religion have been inseperable intertwined. The witchdoctors of our tribal past were as much doctors as priests. It's only been in the last 500 years that the pace of science has exceeded the ability of the staunchier religions to adapt, and this has fueled the majority of problems between the two ever since.
I'd like to see a world where Religion recognizes that it doesn't hold the answers to the universe, only the human awareness, and science recognizes that religion has more validity to the human existance than science ever can.
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