When ignorance applies scientific vacuity

Now, let me get this straight.

Is Sal arguing that the efficiency of a framastat is inversely proportional to the Finagle factor squared?

I find that hard to believe theoretically or empirically! Obviously, Sal has forgotten to factor in the cosine of the angle of the dangle and the effect that has on a framastat when the Moon is in the Second House and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Sal, Sal, Sal, what are we to do with you? If you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding. How can you have pudding if you don't eat your meat?

I came to realize a while ago that many UD moderators are "rubbermaid critics". You can nail them down and prove a point to them, but give them a few days, they'll forget the whole thing, and they'll just "pop" right back to spouting the same nonsense you actually proved to be false. (Someone else said it was like punching water - no matter how hard you drive your point home, it will leave no lasting impression.) Anyway, I proved that random mutations can produce information a while back on one of the UD threads. Am I surprised that they so quickly forget it? Of course not.

I remember hearing about evolutionary algorithms a long time ago, but it seems strange that it never seems to have really come to people's homes and workplaces.

There may be lots of ways how simple computer programmes using these algorithms might make life easier for people, from planning shopping days, to making duty rosters, or even, according to the talk origins page, playing the stock market.

I long for the day that evolutionary algorithms become more widely used - because then people could see for themselves how RM&NS in their dumb machines can beat their own intelligent designs.

Who knows, they might even see the parallels with theistic evolution - " I used mutation and selection to make something useful, a convenient method used by the Lord since 4 Billion B.C."

The link to the source is incorrect. (It points back to this blog entry.) It should point to:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/1781

Thanks, fixed the link

(yawn)

ID is dead. Sal can bloviate all he wants --- he won't resurrect it.

(shrug)

Have you lost your mind? You're not welcome on Uncommon Descent, Pim. Stay on your own blog.

I remember hearing about evolutionary algorithms a long time ago, but it seems strange that it never seems to have really come to people's homes and workplaces.

There you have the answer.

— PvM

"Teach the controversy! But don't teach what we're being... contrary... to... um, something like that."

Speaking of GA's and natural selection, here are some links I posted on UD that show a simple experiment for GAs searching over the english language for valid words. They appear to provide a several order of magnitude speed up over blind search...

http://www.duke.edu/~pat7/public/htm/sample.html
http://www.duke.edu/~pat7/public/htm/gaWordPt2.html

"I remember hearing about evolutionary algorithms a long time ago, but it seems strange that it never seems to have really come to people's homes and workplaces."

Routine evolutionary computation is definitely coming. Not only is the technology maturing, but computers are getting fast enough to really make it practical.

In ten years the automated generation of programs using GP and other similar evolutionary computation techniques will be a common part of software engineering. What else are you going to do with your 32-core 64-bit microprocessor with 32gb of RAM?

This "CSI cannot be created by evolutionary processes" stuff is going to sound awfully silly and quaint. It already sounds silly and quaint to me, as I work in this area myself and am presently in the process of launching a company around EC technology.

I remember hearing about evolutionary algorithms a long time ago, but it seems strange that it never seems to have really come to people's homes and workplaces.

Your post title is wordier than needed; a simple "Sal Speaks" would cover it.

There may be lots of ways how simple computer programmes using these algorithms might make life easier for people, from planning shopping days, to making duty rosters, or even, according to the talk origins page, playing the stock market.

"Sal Gapes Vacuously"?

ID slogan was not supposed to be "teach the controversy." That was a mistake at the printers. It was supposed to be "Contrary to teaching...". However due to limited funding (because all of the evolutionist are getting the all of the big fat government grants) they were unable to afford to make the correction. So all this hoolpa over them spreading misinformation and ignorance is a mute point, since their original goal was to be a source contrary to the process of enlightening.

Oh man!!!! just when you thought they cannot sink any lower.....
Sal's statement reminds me of the assertion that bumble bees should not be able to fly, they are aerodynamically not suited for flying. And that was proved mathematically!!!!!

Well, I guess that life just like bumble bees doesn't know anything about either mathematics and/or thermodynamics!!!

Why don't you evolutionists put a realistic mutation rate and genome length in Dr Schneider's ev model and see how many generations it takes for the the binding sites to evolve. The rate of accumulation of information is far too slow to explain macroevolution by random point mutations and natural selection.

Dr Schneider's model also contradicts Gould's hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium.

Why don't you evolutionists put a realistic mutation rate and genome length in Dr Schneider's ev model and see how many generations it takes for the the binding sites to evolve. The rate of accumulation of information is far too slow to explain macroevolution by random point mutations and natural selection. Dr Schneider's model also contradicts Gould's hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium.

PvM Posted
*These are non-sensical objections. First of all, the program is available for anyone to put to use, so if there are some problems with mutation rates etc, how come that other than making such claims, creationists seem to be unable to do the analysis. Second of all, what Schneider has shown is that Dembski's CSI can evolve naturally and thus CSI is not a good indicator of design.

As far as Gould's hypothesis is concerned, I fail to see how it contradicts Schneider's work, unless it is based on the flawed comprehensions of Gould's work, so typical amongst evolution deniers.*

I know the program is available on-line. I was invited by Dr Schneider to examine the program. I have done extensive parametric studies with the model and I am discussing these results with evolutionists on the following two forums:

h t t p ://www.evolutionisdead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=348&sid=6500b8fa5637dbb471d6faa18a4d843f
and
h t t p ://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2055554

Unlike Dembski, I believe that ev is a plausible model of random point mutations and natural selection. What my contention is that in order to get acceptable results from ev, you have to use realistic input parameters (such as mutation rates and genome lengths.)

I know that IDers have long criticized Dr Schneider's published results from ev for his use of an unrealistically small genome length and unrealistically large mutation rate, however I don't know why nobody plugged realistic values in the model to see what the results would show.

Dr Schneider is not willing to discuss these results from his model publicly but Paul Anagnostopoulos, Dr Schneider's java programmer is discussing these results.I am not interested in starting a third discussion on this topic but if you want to try and understand you can visit the above two urls.

I know the program is available on-line. I was invited by Dr Schneider to examine the program. I have done extensive parametric studies with the model and I am discussing these results with evolutionists on the following two forums: h t t p ://www.evolutionisdead.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=348&sid=6500b8fa5637dbb471d6faa18a4d843f and h t t p ://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2055554

Unlike Dembski, I believe that ev is a plausible model of random point mutations and natural selection. What my contention is that in order to get acceptable results from ev, you have to use realistic input parameters (such as mutation rates and genome lengths.)

I know that IDers have long criticized Dr Schneider's published results from ev for his use of an unrealistically small genome length and unrealistically large mutation rate, however I don't know why nobody plugged realistic values in the model to see what the results would show.

Dr Schneider is not willing to discuss these results from his model publicly but Paul Anagnostopoulos, Dr Schneider's java programmer is discussing these results.I am not interested in starting a third discussion on this topic but if you want to try and understand you can visit the above two urls.

PvM complains "In other words, a drive-by shooting unwilling and/or unable to support his claims. Next time, if you have to make some additional comments, please have the decency to defend them?"

Since you know how to access Dr Schneider's ev model, do the following: Take his baseline case using the default input values and check either the Perfect Creature or Rs>=Rf check box. Then run his case until it converges. Record the number of generations. Then increase the genome length from 256 to 512 and run that case and record the generations required for convergence. Continue to increase the genome length to 1024, 2048, 4096 and so on and observe what happens to the generations required for convergence.

Dr Schneider drew his conclusions on the evolution of a human genome based on a nonexistent genome length and mutation rate.

You can do a similar set of cases to investigate what happens with the generations for convergence when you use a realistic mutation rate. Dr Schneider used a mutation rate of 1 mutation per 256 bases per generation which is not seen in any living thing. Try using a mutation rate of 1 mutation per 1,000,000 bases per generation. This is in the observed, measured range of mutation rates seen in prokaryotes and see how this affects the generations for convergence.

Did you know that Rsequence would evolve to Rfrequency when you first ran the program? No, I ran the program to see if this would happen or not. I was testing my PhD thesis. If the program had failed, my thesis would have been in jeopardy!

Won't a slower evolution take too long in nature? No. For practical reasons we usually use a tiny population in Ev, generally only 16 organisms. In nature there are usually populations of millions. For example, in the lab a single cubic centimeter (ml, a milliliter) of E. coli culture can easily contain 10^8 bacteria. (That's 100 million.) With an error rate of one in 10^6 (i.e., one in a million) at each genetic location, there will be plenty of variation to drive evolution. Notice that we have 6 billion people on the planet, so there is lots of opportunity for us to continue evolving. (Have you been wearing your seatbelt? People who don't wear seatbelts are being selected against ...)

In my examination of the behavior of the evj program, the following data was obtained using 1 mutation per generation and a population of 64: Genome Length / Binding Sites / Generations to Complete 256 / 16 / 1000 512 / 32 / 3100 1024 / 64 / 7000 2048 / 128 / 17,000 4096 / 256 / 42,000 8192 / 512 / 170,000

A previous simulation study examined how long it would be expected to take for new binding sites to arise in a regulatory sequence via point mutations (Stone and Wray 2001). Here the authors considered a sequence of DNA evolving in a random neutral walk by point mutation, and observed how long it would take to find a particular binding site for a transcription factor. They showed, for example, for Drosophila, that to find two 6-bp transcription factor binding sites in a 200-bp sequence would take around 54,000 years, which seems reasonable given the rate at which Drosophila may evolve its gene expression patterns. However, the corresponding time for humans, with their longer generation times, was over 13 million years, which seems too slow a rate to be likely to be useful in evolutionary change.

Although the evolution of protein-coding sequences within genomes is well understood, the same cannot be said of the cis-regulatory regions that control transcription. Yet, changes in gene expression are likely to constitute an important component of phenotypic evolution. We simulated the evolution of new transcription factor binding sites via local point mutations. The results indicate that new binding sites appear and become fixed within populations on microevolutionary timescales under an assumption of neutral evolution. Even combinations of two new binding sites evolve very quickly. We predict that local point mutations continually generate considerable genetic variation that is capable of altering gene expression.

Check out this link

Which addresses many of the objections raised by Kleinman thanks to the work of Schneider's programmer who spent significant time doing the experiments.