Comment by 0xfeba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xfeba | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting, I've never heard this definition before. Seems to combine two common creationist claims against evolution:

1) No new information can be created

2) Sure, microevolution, but we've never seen macroevolution

Where did you get these definitions?

What is your definition of "new information"? New genes? Because that happens all the time. Fox example in humans, Fragile X syndrome causes a gene to be repeated (inserted[1]) too many times. But that's been "seen before" so perhaps it is off topic.

In E. Coli and common yeast we've seen new genes added to be able to process different substances as food[2][3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insertion_(genetics)

[2] http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/8/931.full.pdf+html

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11388.abstract

The common creationist response at this point is that "It's still yeast/bacteria. It's not going to evolve into a cat.", to which our (biologists) response is that it very well could given enough time.

And so since "new information" has been demonstrated, and natural selection ("microevolution") accepted by creationists, it's up to creationists to show us what exactly prevents organisms from evolving past human created naming barriers.

That is, since we know that gene mutations happen and won't stop happening as long as organisms keep reproducing, what keeps a population from evolving passed the species/genus/family/"kind" barrier?

The answer is nothing, except time. Time is why you don't see the bacteria evolve into a cat.

It's a good question, I don't really have a good answer, just a theory:

An analogy I've heard is that if it's possible for (in your example) yeast to evolve into a cat given enough time, then it should also be possible for a room full of monkeys randomly mashing on keys to collectively type a perfect replica of War and Peace (or insert other long book here).

Put another way, imagine there's a computer with a random number generator spitting out letters (1-52 (a-z,A-Z, ignoring punct) in perfect randomness. How long would it take the computer to create 'War and Peace'? I think, while it would be a physical possibility for the Monkey's to create such a book, it would never happen no matter how much time passed because given the parameters of randomness, it would effectively be impossible to form something so linear and guided. And compared to an organism, 'war and peace' wouldn't even account to a single cell's worth of DNA which is insanely complex with so many parts that must exist simultaneously with others for the cell to survive.

Edit: I fully understand the "X Billions of years and at least many chances per second for life for a yeast cell to evolve into a chicken", but i'm of the belief you cannot get high order out of chaos. There are patterns and there are many possibilities but it's never been proven that they happen other than the assumption that "God doesn't exist/made things through evolution and we know they exist and can't prove God exists, therefore we know/believe that such an insanely ordered thing must have formed out of chaos".

> An analogy I've heard is that if it's possible for (in your example) yeast to evolve into a cat given enough time, then it should also be possible for a room full of monkeys randomly mashing on keys to collectively type a perfect replica of War and Peace (or insert other long book here).

Replace the monkeys with a fair random number generator, and not only is it possible, but once you have defined the keys available and the output sought and other parameters, you can mathematically calculate the average number of steps before the RNG generates the work in question. (The answer is not never, though it may be very long.)

But evolution isn't like that anyway. You aren't randomly generating a sequence until you generate the genetic code for a cat, for instance.

> And compared to an organism, 'war and peace' wouldn't even account to a single cell's worth of DNA which is insanely complex with so many parts that must exist simultaneously with others to coexist.

This is the classic creationist argument from irreducible complexity, which is basically an argument from a failure of imagination -- one of the things we keep learning as we understand more about the paths on which things evolved is that features which seem irreducibly complex in living things actually do have incremental evolutionary paths where there is function at steps along the route.

The random number generator generator (or monkeys at typewriters) analogy is deeply flawed. The entire point of natural selection is that it is non-random.

Think instead of a stochastic optimization process that provides feedback at each iteration, and introduces psuedo-random noise that is seeded from the previous iteration.

To extend our metaphor to ridiculous lengths, consider instead of a room full of monkeys typing away randomly, you have a machine that punishes monkeys that type in the "wrong direction," and rewards monkeys type something that is approximately closer to War and Peace. After each reward/punishment round, the monkeys would start their editing on strings that were rewarded in the previous round. This process would be expected to converge much more quickly.

> Put another way, imagine there's a computer with a random number generator spitting out letters (1-52 (a-z,A-Z, ignoring punct) in perfect randomness. How long would it take the computer to create 'War and Peace'?

As others have already stated, this isn't how natural selection or evolution works.

The mutations are, as far as we know, random. The organism they work on isn't recreated each time. That is, it's incremental.

> And compared to an organism, 'war and peace' wouldn't even account to a single cell's worth of DNA which is insanely complex with so many parts that must exist simultaneously with others for the cell to survive.

This is an argument from ignorance. At what level is something 'too complex' to have evolved? Depends on who you ask. Behe, Dembski, et al, attempted to answer this with "irreducible complexity", but it is flawed, and not accepted by any credible scientific community. It ignores exaptation by definition, and then is promoted as proof of intelligent design.

But even still, the bacterial flagellum, eye, and other previous examples of "irreducible complexity" have been shown to have evolutionary paths--from existing organisms. So now, all of a sudden they aren't irreducibly complex.

So it seems irreducible complexity depends on our knowledge ("This part seems like it can't function alone, since I can't find any examples to the contrary"), not any objective property of the organism itself. That's not how science is done.

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