Stephen Hawking: God didn't create universe
cnn.com
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Definitely deserves a "well, duh", but so many people seem averse to this line of thought. I can't count the number of times people have argued in my vicinity for God's existence based on how nicely our planet suits us... while in the same breath demonstrating that they understand nothing about what they're arguing against.
That said, the world is trying to kill us. If we didn't fight back with intelligence and reproduction, we'd die off rather quickly. Maybe it's not so suitable for us.
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.'
It's a form of proof by reductio ad absurdum. You assume the counterfactual ("what if the universe couldn't support human life?"), derive a contradiction ("the universe can't support human life, yet here we are discussing it"), and conclude the phenomenon you're trying to explain is obviously true ("therefore we shouldn't be surprised that the universe supports human life"). In mathematics, reductio is a valid proof technique, but one of the least interesting, because it doesn't teach you much about the domain, whereas a proof by construction (for example) may suggest related theorems or techniques to explore.
You can explain gravity by the anthropic principle (without gravity, we wouldn't have stars or planets, so human life as we know it could never have evolved; yet here we are discussing it), but we much prefer an explanation like "matter curves spacetime so that nearby matter feels an acceleration toward it". It gives us tools to visualise and calculate the phenomenon. It also gives us a narrative, albeit a very limited one (we don't know why matter curves spacetime!), and human understanding is very dependent on narratives.
Imagine applying it in a different circumstance. Imagine two people coming upon a computer terminal, upon which was typed an elaborate love letter addressed to one of them.
"What's this? John has written me a love letter!"
"Nonsense, it's just noise. Probably a stack dump or something."
"What? The odds are clearly against that."
"Ah, but if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we? Since the letter is necessary for the discussion, it requires no explanation."
This is clearly wrong. The correct rejoinder is,
"Yes, that's just the point. We shouldn't be having this discussion, but we are. Hence the letter still requires explanation, and the simplest is that John wrote it."
The fact that our universe suits us does require explanation. If it didn't suit us, we couldn't ask the question, true enough. But that's just the point. We shouldn't be here to ask the question and yet here we are. It still requires explanation. Now, you can say, "Well, the universe is one of many, and we're in the one that suits us because we couldn't live anywhere else." Fine. Count the universes, run the probabilities, that's an explanation. Or you can say, "God created it." That's an explanation, too.
What you cannot say is, "If it didn't suit us, we wouldn't be having this conversation, so it requires no explanation." That's a bunch of anti-intellectual sophistry that just annoys the people trying to honestly grapple with the question.
Meanwhile, I believe in a God who has intervened in history in a recoded and well attested way, who leaves behind lots of witnesses to his activities in the present and the past, whose prophecies come true and whose wisdom on human nature closely matches fact. He claims to have created the universe and I believe him.
And the atheists think I'm the one who believes in things without evidence.
I can balance this equation: x = x + 1. The solution is to add God to both sides. Simple!
The quote is primarily meant to point out that we wouldn't likely exist in a location that isn't nigh-ideally suited for us, both because we require it to continue and because we adapt to match it. Using it to prove God exists strikes me as a greater misuse than using it to prove it's possible God doesn't, given any comprehension of large numbers and evolution.
Not at all. It could be used that way by lazy and irresponsible thinkers, but that is not an inherent property of the explanation.
To return to my earlier analogy,
"You know, just because John could have written that letter is no reason to suppose he did. John could have done just about anything to your computer; if you're willing to invoke him as an explanation for whatever you find, you'll never learn anything about how computers work."
"Nonsense, I'm not saying John wrote the letter because I don't have any alternative explanation. I'm saying there's positive evidence he wrote it: Look, he signed it. Plus, he's my boyfriend, and this is how he writes, and this is the sort of thing he would do. Why make it complicated?"
We constantly deal with intelligent agents who have great power -- roommates who could do arbitrary things to our living areas, other human beings who can create nearly arbitrary literary output on our computers. And we are able to intelligently distinguish between what these beings can do and what they did do based on the available evidence: what they claim to do, their habits and tendencies and methods, what we know about natural laws.
Reasoning about what God did is no different. "God did it" is one of a number of competing explanations for any event, subject to evidence and revision just like any other explanation. There is no a priori reason attributing an event to divine intervention need be evidentially vacuous. The correct statement in the absence of evidence is not "God did it" but "I don't know."
(Note even my line of reasoning above followed this trail -- a God I already believe in claims to have created the universe, he seems to be capable and credible, and the natural evidence seems to back up the claim: the universe begun, and it looks pretty clearly designed. It even looks like his handiwork. So from my perspective, why make it complicated?)
> "we wouldn't likely exist in a location that isn't nigh-ideally suited for us"
Right, but that only answers a weak variant of the argument. The stronger variant is that the universe shouldn't have any locations suited for the evolution of any form of intelligent life. The fact that we're here indicates that there is a location suited for the evolution of intelligent life, which requires an explanation.
There are lots of approaches you can take to provide an explanation. "We wouldn't be asking if we didn't exist" is a weak and unsatisfying approach.
Admittedly very accurate, but not quite the same. To pull from another oft-repeated quote, time + randomness will never create a pocket watch, because there is not a series of changes which leads to it within dumb evolution. God / intelligence can. What evolution+time describes is very much a strict, significantly-smaller subset of a God's capabilities.
The rational numbers are a significantly-smaller subset of the real numbers. Yet adding a countable infinity to both sides of your equation is just as useless as adding an uncountable infinity.
Similarly, "God did it", "there are a lot of universes", "we wouldn't be able to ask if we weren't here so it doesn't need explaining", and "evolution + time" can all be very unsatisfying answers to the stronger variant of the argument I described above. They're all essentially big wildcards, though some are bigger than others. Whichever argument you choose needs a LOT more detail before it becomes better than simply adding infinity to both sides of the equation.
The better argument is concerned with the capacity for the universe itself to hold any life whatsoever. The relationship between the fundamental forces (strong, weak, gravity, etc.) and certain other constants in physics that, were they slightly different, would rending the whole of existence something entirely different.
This leads to one of three conclusions. 1) It's a staggering coincidence that the one universe is such that it supports such nuance as life and consciousness. 2) The universe is cyclic and that this iteration happened to be the one where that occurred. 3) There are many universes.
The problem with 2 is that it seems that our universe is not going to contract. So you'd have to fold in the likelihood that of the infinite cycles needed to get to this arrangement, this one that works for life and intelligence also happens to be the last one.
As for 3, it solves many of the problems, but it's no more empirical than 1. It's favored in philosophical circles because it is naturalistic, but when dealing with questions like this, the idea of a prime mover isn't obviously any less natural than the idea of infinitely many bubble universes.
The compelling argument against #1 has always been, "Well, making a god or God the first mover does nothing but shift the question to 'Who made God?'" The response to that it is only our universe in particular that is subject to the evidence that there was a beginning and will be an end state. We know matter is not infinite. We know it had a start, a finish, and we know pretty well that the universe is going to wind down at some point to a static end. This means that it had a definite beginning (or that we happen to be in the final cycle of infinite cycles which is a strange, maybe intractable metaphysical problem in and of itself).
Anyway, a first-mover outside of our universe doesn't have any of these pressures on it.
I assume that Hawking's work here (I'm not a physicist in the slightest) will seek to establish that there is a gravitational background to existence that is independent of our universe. In short, he's made gravity the first-mover. He's made gravity into god, an eternal entity that is unchanging and requires neither beginning nor end based on our understanding of it.
I know that's a huge block of text, but this is an old, old idea. Hawking is hardly the first person to explore this territory, and he's almost certainly not the smartest, whatever that means. It's primarily a metaphysics problem, not a physics problem, but if one could discover in physics something that is independent of our universe, that would have major bearing on the metaphysical problem.
TL;DR The anthropic argument is much more interesting when applied to the universe as a whole than to us or our planet in particular. It's an open problem in metaphysics. Hawking may shed more light on it through physics, but this isn't just a case of terribly ignorant people vs. civilized educated people. It's a real question.
(Edited because I wrote "week force" which, while I could try to play it off as a novel way to refer to time, was clearly a stupid mistake.)
As we know it, and are you sure it's possible for them to be different? Given that evidence grows that they're all related, they may simply be a single force, which is why they all seem to be "finely tuned".
I've heard the first-mover argument, and I think it's the best anti-atheist argument. It neatly turns the whole argument into "God just exists" or "the Universe just exists", and as we have no conclusive proof for either, it comes down to your choice / belief.
It still leaves an existential question, of course, but it changes the metaphysics conversation in the same way that the discovery of other suns and worlds did for the initial argument.
Well, it's more like, "something eternal exists outside of the universe," or "there are infinite universes," but in general, yeah. Of course, that argument doesn't happen in a vacuum. There are relevant arguments about ethics, evil, personhood, etc. that come to bear on the discussion as well.
Which would be nice to see in everyday reporting, but it seems the risk of offending people is the only way to garner true neutrality.
1. Quotes hypothetical-Hawking's statement. In the interests of balance, also quotes a theologian who claims that the existence and well-suited-to-us-ness of the universe really do demand that there be a creator.
2. Quotes hypothetical-Hawking, as in #1. In the interests of balance, also quotes someone who maintains that present-day science is not neutral on the God question but offers strong evidence for the nonexistence of God.
The first would give the impression that the real debate is between those who think modern science gives evidence for God and those who think it's neutral. The second would give the impression that the real debate is between those who think modern science gives evidence against God and those who think it's neutral.
Someone puts out a report saying that anthropogenic global warming is going to be twice as bad as currently forecast. Newspaper 1 quotes the report and gets some "balance" from a climate scientist who defends the current consensus figure. Newspaper 2 quotes the report and gets some "balance" from someone who doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming at all.
Someone puts out a report saying that 20% of Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Newspaper 1 gives this "balanced" coverage by quoting the report and talking to one person who believes Obama is a Muslim and one who doesn't. Newspaper 2 gives it "balanced" coverage by quoting the report and talking to one person who believes it and one who thinks the whole idea is so ridiculous that the report must the the result of push-polling, sampling screwups or something.
During the recent US healthcare reform debate, Newspaper 1 reports on the proposals before Congress and provides "balance" by quoting someone who thinks those proposals will mean "death panels" and nationial bankruptcy. Newspaper 2 provides "balance" by quoting someone who thinks they don't go nearly far enough and what the US needs is a robust single-payer system.
Giving equal time to both sides is only unbiased in so far as there's no question what "both sides" are.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window .
So for me, I'd much rather that the writer and editor wear their bias on their sleeves. It saves me the work of having to reverse-engineer it all.
That said, I agree, it's not bad. But it is amusing how incredibly non-offensive news networks get when anything religious / anti-religious comes up.
Causality is such a fundamental concept that it is nearly impossible to consider a universe without a cause. Consequently, some funky research has been done on it in physics, but I haven't read any of it.
For all we know the big bang never happened and the reason the galaxies seem to be moving "away" is because we are in a current of moving galaxies. (And the universe is truly infinite not only space but in mass.)
I understand that. I just don't understand why he feels the need to start making these unscientific speculations about whether God does or does exist or whether aliens do or don't exist.
I personally think it's unfortunate that the publicity about his book is almost entirely focused on 'Hawking doesn't believe in god' instead of areas such as his improved thought process on the unified field theory.
Wiser theologians should take a step back, bring out that age old trick, and inquire "ah... but who created gravity?"
The problem with an infinite regress is that it's, um, infinite.
It sounds like Hawking is trying to refute the claim that everything that exists must have a creator. That's the claim which allows the snooty "who created gravity" response, and also leads to the self-defeating infinite regress. Whether you believe in a creator or not, you're better off without that argument.
Nobody claims that a proto-bird one day woke up in a treetop, thought "oh heck, how am I going to get down?", and sprouted wings. Rather, over millions of generations of proto-birds, random variation and natural selection made winged birds more numerous and successful than wingless birds.
The point about evolutionary theory isn't that it explains everything, but that it gives us a framework to produce and evaluate explanations (for, potentially, everything). The general pattern is to imagine a series of incremental changes between generations from (say) no-wings to viable wings, where each change could occur by random genetic variation or mutation, and where in order to be selected for, each change must confer a net reproductive advantage on its generation over the previous.
From Wikipedia [1] it looks like we don't have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of flight yet (any more than we have a fully satisfactory evolutionary explanation of True Blood), but there are several theories all of which are more plausible than waking up one day with wings.
But I'm afraid this doesn't help us understand avian and mammalian evolution of flight. The example of the flying squirrel (that can't fly, but can direct his glide) may be a little instructive...
The idea you're advocating has a name, "Irreducible complexity"[1], and has been debunked time and time again as pseudoscience. I won't go into debunking specific assertions you made (such as the impossibility of the evolution of lungs), but I really encourage you to read the current literature of evolutionary theory. Once you see the mountain of evidence for it you'll probably be convinced.
1. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Irreducible_c...
Yes, millions of years make difficult for us to think about things. There are only speculations.
> Why specifically can't you believe that it evolves.
Because: 1) "natural selection" - as I understand it - narrows down variations, it does not expand them. If one specimen happens to develop a random variation, for such a variation to persist and develop further, that specimen should mate with another specimen sharing such a variation. We have many breed of dogs which are strikingly different, however if the breeders weren't there, we would have ended with a "breed soup" (think about dingoes). 2) I would expect to see more of a continuum of species, instead of such separate animal kingdoms. The argument that each species wins because it takes up an ecological niche does not hold, because there are already different species sharing the same niche. 3) Variations don't need to be exclusive. For instance, being able to breath oxygen from both water and air would be very advantageous. Still, I don't know of any species which does that. 4) Species should be much more inter-breed-able, whilst specimens are very selective on who to mate with. Inter-breed among species is known to get you sterile prole (think tigers mating with lions).
I do not advocate intelligent design, but I do not reject it either (albeit as I've said already, intelligent design just moves the question about the origin of everything somewhere else).
Sometimes that's because they evolved some novel new thing (like birds learning to fly). Sometimes it's because they didn't do that, e.g. in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event the boring mammals that were small and had a tendency to burrow to escape trouble survived.
A variation that happens through a mutation doesn't need to be present in both breeding partners for it to survive. This is obvious if you look at common dominant[1] and non-dominant genes, like the tendency towards a certain haircolor. That trait might be passed on to the offspring, and would permeate if it was advantageous enough.
A lot of variation also doesn't happen through mutation at all, but simply selection within a species. E.g. this happened to humanity [3] relatively recently. We lost a lot of biodiversity within Homo Sapiens simply because a lot of us died out.
Most of the biomass on this planet never "expanded" in any significant sense. Multicellular life is still relatively rare, most of the biomass on earth is bacteria.
2) The notion that each species has an ecological niche is false. We live on a large planet, so there's a big opportunity for species that "do the same thing" (to simplify). Of course that's only true up to a point, consider the example of the Eastern Gray Squirrel displacing the Red Squirrel in the UK.
3) There's a lot of things that species could do but aren't doing. Not because that thing would be a "bad idea" as such, but simply because it hasn't evolved yet.
E.g. insects could probably take up a lot more space than they do now if they grew larger, but that would require evolving a whole new breathing apparatus. Maybe monkeys would be better suited to trees if they had four hands, but two is all they (and the whole vertebrate line) had to work with.
4) I don't get this. Why do you think species should be much more inter-breed-able. They are to an extent, but once speciation occurs they aren't anymore.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(genetics)
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Gray_Squirrel#Displacem...
> A variation that happens through a mutation doesn't need to be present in both breeding partners for it to survive.
Indeed I didn't think about dominant genes... Thanks for pointing that out. However, I was more along a way of thinking which seems to have been disproved recently, as Wikipedia suggests: "Until recently, there has a been a dearth of hard evidence that supports this form of speciation, _with a general feeling that interbreeding would soon eliminate any genetic differences that might appear._ [example follows]" [1]
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation
> 2) The notion that each species has an ecological niche is false.
Exactly. I wonder why we have missing links among species. That is: why we don't have more half-bird-half-reptile around? They should have got along quite well with each other. IMO, if evolution were to bring speciation, I would have expected more of "a mess" of species around us.
> 3) There's a lot of things that species could do but aren't doing.
I was arguing that since - AFAIK - scientists think that life originated in water, why would animal lose the ability to get oxygen from water? Thas looks like losing an evolutionary advantage to me, and out of line with my understanding of evolution, which is deemed to be gradual: it would have had more sense becoming able to breath air while still being able to breath water. Were are species able to do both (the missing links)?
Thank you very much again for having spent your time in making me more knowdlegeable.
The simple answer is that natural selection often reduces variability, but that does not mean it will reduce a species all the way to a single variation. Sometimes natural selection actually increases variability by favoring outliers (specialists) over the average (generalists).
Consider a population with two food sources that require slightly different characteristics to access, for example, food sources at different water depths. They'll be most easily accessed by creatures whose neutral buoyancy puts them at that depth of water. Natural selection may favor individuals who are most able to generalize (that is, those who float right in between) or those who are most specialized (those who float right at the level of one food source or the other), depending on various details of the system.
If you have the relevant mathematical background, you may want to look up some of the recent models of "adaptive speciation" (Ulf Dieckmann and Michael Doebeli have done some great work in this area; their book [0] has some great examples.)
[0] http://books.google.com/books?id=Z-gCf7TD9-MC&lpg=PP1...
Hawking is doing a really bad job to atheists here: he's becoming as anti-scientific as one can get...
Science has its very defined principles, as they are: they don't have to contradict all of: philosophy, mathematics, physics, (and so on...).
This is a really sad story: he simply seems to be a really sad and angry person (personally, I would be worse, in his actual state...), and this seems to influence all of his excogitations...
[citation needed]
I hope that remains true, even with the demise of digg (and therefore, by extension, reddit).
This is circular reasoning.
I know it's unpopular to question evolution, and this might lose me all the points I gathered in the past three weeks, but,
But this kind of argument assumes that life can and will inevitably evolve spontaneously some where, some how.
It's a tautology.
Sure, there could be a completely different form of intelligent life, in a completely different kind of environment, but that just means that God can and will create any form of life in any kind of environment.
The core question is, can life really evolve spontaneously? I'm sure many will scream "of course yes, duh".
Natural selection doesn't explain anything about how something might evolve, it just says: if you can produce many many good options, the best will survive, and therefore you get optimal design.
Sure, if there are forces that produce new ideas and things, and you can choose the best every step of the way, you'll get something really good. Like if, say, people submit patches to Linux, and they get reviewed and tested, you'll get something that Linus himself couldn't have come up with on his own.
NS is useless if there's nothing that can produce these patches. If you have a really good team of tester and code reviewers, but no one submits any patch (or, no one makes any change), then the software will not evolve on its own. It will not get better just because there are a lot of people to test it. It needs other people to make changes/submit patches.
It's the "mutation" part that tries to explain how new things actually get produced, and I find it ridiculous. Not only does it not fly with me conceptually, I'd say - at the risk of being stoned - that there's no real evidence for it. It's usually just a lot of hand waving as if, "of course mutation can produce many useful things for NS to select from, how dare you object to that?".
Yes, you can observe variations, and you can observe certain variations being selected. Like skin color, or hair type. This is, however, entirely different from observing useful patches being produced by mutations.
All cited instances of observed NS operate on variations that are already there. This is where hand waving about mutations come in.
Video games can be designed to use a high resolution or low resolution depending on the system specs. It's therefor not surprising when users on low end machines will "select" the low-resolution configuration. There are options to select from, but these options weren't produced by anything remotely resembling a mutation; it's a built-in option that's already available -- nothing new.
No one denies the design; no one, none at all. Neo-Darwinism just says that design can be automated by mutation and natural selection.
It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it; but that doesn't make it any less impressive. I'm often impressed by some of my own programs, despite the fact that, not only do I know exactly how they work, but I even built them myself. Usually when you discover the internals of a system, it gets even more impressive.
The design is obvious. It doesn't need any proof. No one even denies it. Even the most hard-core atheists I've come across use the word "design" a lot when talking about the human body or even any biological structure.
They just propose that it can be automated in such a simple way that even the deaf and blind nature can do it. I'm pointing out a fatal flaw in a key element of this supposed automatic mechanism.
"We'll find another way" is not really a good answer; not a very scientific one, anyway.
It is easy to describe how a complex system works once you discover it
The same can equally be said of the intelligent design theory.
> The problem is you are not considering the timescale - which is over millions of years.
This is exactly what I mean by hand waving. So there's a humongous timescale involved, so what? That doesn't constitute any form of evidence.
Unless you're saying it's not really testable because we can't simulate millions of years in a lab. In that case, well, you'd be confirming my point.
Again, the design is quite obvious, while the "mutation" proposition is not plausible, and remains unproven.
And no, I don't identify myself as a proponent of "The Intelligent Design Theory". I don't claim to have the definitive answer and I don't feel the need to propose an alternative to neo-darwinism.
Saying "design is obvious" is all very well but I see lots of flaws with that? Who's right?
:)
Having a long time is only useful if mutations can produce good "patches". If you can't prove that they can, then all the time in the world won't do you any good.
It's like you're saying:
A & B & C & D, therefor Z
I'm pointing out that A is false. You're objecting by pointing out that B is true. I'm saying "who cares"?
When one of your basic premises doesn't hold, it doesn't matter if all the other ones hold.
Basically there is a wide misconception that mutation and NS is Evolution. This is something of a well taught fallacy.
Evolution consists of three parts - Variation, Mechanism and Outcome. The first of these, Variation, relates to the physical phenomena that cause changes in organisms. One of these is mutation; which is a random action at the gene level causing something different to occur in the organism. There are several other things that can cause variation in an organism.
The second is Mechanism; which is the process by which individual variations take effect across a "population". This is, in effect, the guts of evolution - and one of the main parts of that is Natural selection (which is an easy theory to comprehend). The thing to remember about NS is that this is a very very slow process; if one variation is favoured this is not a process that occurs from one generation to the next. NS works best in larger populations - so the progress of multiple variations through the population can take hundreds, or thousands, of generations.
The final part of Evolution is the outcome of the progress of variations across a species; this is more about the phenomena we observe (i.e. that we are adapted to our environment, or that two species "co-operate" at a very basic level). This is the guts of your particular problem. Mutation is a pretty provable phenomena because, well, we see mutation all the time!
Your original post made this note:
If you have a really good team of tester and code reviewers, but no one submits any patch (or, no one makes any change), then the software will not evolve on its own. It will not get better just because there are a lot of people to test it. It needs other people to make changes/submit patches.
Consider a more "true to life" version of your example; a program exists that can compile and produce a version of itself as well as doing some other specific task. People download V1 of this program that, say, flashes a pixel on your screen. As the program compiles itself a random "mutation" may occur in the code - adding, removing or changing something. Programs that don't work are discarded (naturally) and those that do something extra or cool are favoured. Over the course of millions of generations you will end up with a number of highly evolved programs - for example a network scanner, a web browser and a word pad.
Your mistake is in assuming a system that requires an intelligent input.
You seem to be suggesting that it is unlikely for mutation to create useful variations; this is also a fallacy because mutation is random. So despite being unlikely it is not impossible; please remember we are not talking about a mutation that suddenly means the offspring grows a lung - that is a common misconception. We are already highly evolved over millions of generations - so it is a lot harder to observe directly in current organisms. But we can observe it in bacteria who adapt to new situations through mutation. That is the basis of the whole shebang.
The theory of evolution has survived this challenge a number of times without being proven fallacious.
NS is a process for selecting changes. It doesn't introduce any change. NS does not produce variations. If NS produced variations then it would be sufficient on its own, and no one would go looking for other causes of variation, such as mutations. NS is not the guts of evolution, it's only a part of it, and by itself it is useless.
This is actually a testable statement.
If NS by itself is sufficient for producing variations and selecting them, no one would go looking for some other source of variation.
From what I understand, Darwin himself didn't think too much of explaining where variations come from; they seemed to occur naturally, so it doesn't matter where they come from. This doesn't work anymore, so people had to actually think and fill this gap.
The guts of evolution, really, is producing variations. For evolution is nothing but the progression of species by having small variations accumulate over a long time.
NS without variations to choose from will do absolutely nothing to advance the cause of evolving any species.
The patching/test analogy works great, I don't know why it didn't make sense to you.
NS by itself doesn't do anything, for the same reason that testing by itself doesn't actually develop anything.
Suppose you have two teams, team A and team B. Team B does nothing but testing. They test and test and test, and they only accept something of good quality, and no code makes it into production unless it's passed the testing by team B. Team A do the actual development, they use a decentralized version control system, and every change is made into its own branch, and it's then sent to team B to be tested.
Team B doesn't by itself make anything; they only accept or reject changes done by team A. If team A doesn't send any changes to team B, the software will not evolve.
Similarly, NS can only select variations, it doesn't produce them.
Is that analogy really hard to understand?
There has to be some other forces that create these variations, and the proposed idea is that these variations are caused by random mutations.
What tends to happen in evolutionary literature is, the role of NS is magnified, and the role of mutations is marginalized, as if it's the selection process that matters, not the variation-producing process.
The mere occurrence of mutations is not the subject of my argument.
The part that is often overlooked, even though it is so crucial, is the lack of evidence for whether mutations have the ability to actually produce any useful set of variations for NS to act on.
It's assumed that eventually mutations will always produce something useful, but this is a claim that lacks evidence.
This is the heart of evolution; the mechanism that produce these small changes that eventually accumulate.
This is ten times more significant that NS.
Darwin focused on NS so much, but that's because he assumed that NS is the force that drives the variations. It's as if competition would motivate individual animals to better adapt themselves to their environment, by extending their necks, and things like that. He even talks a lot about the competition! If you really think about it, he's making an analogy with market competition: market competition drives people to provide better services/products. The fact that people will make better product is not so important, because they always can, but who's to force them? If a crappy product sells, you won't be motivated to improve it. Competition forces you to improve your products.
Darwin must have thought the same about natural selection: it doesn't matter where variations come from, they just naturally occur.
This is where neo-darwinism comes in. It says, no no, that doesn't really work. Variations come from mutations.
Once you say that, NS stops becoming so important, and the mechanism that produces the variations becomes much more important.
Natural variations in the gene pool (like hair color) cannot contribute to evolution, because they always revolve around a closed circle.
Suppose I have 3 options for hair, each option having 5 possible choices:
* color: white, black, red, yellow, blue * type: straight1, straight2, curly1, curly2, curly3 * length: really-short, short, medium, long, really-long
That's 5^3 possible variations right there. It's really easy to imagine having more such options. You can have 20 trivial options, each having 2 choices. That would be about a million possible variation (2^20). You can try to mix and match any number of configuration for these options, but it would never result in a new species even after a billion years.
The only mechanism for actually creating new kinds of variations that can lead to the evolution of new species is mutation.
As for your self-replicating pixel-drawing program that can evolve to a web browser -- you are more than welcome to have a go at it. I can tell you from now that it will fail. There's a simpler experiment, that will also fail: http://www.randommutation.com/darwinianevolution.htm
> You seem to be suggesting that it is unlikely for mutation to create useful variations; this is also a fallacy because mutation is random. So despite being unlikely it is not impossible
Yet another instance of hand waving. You might think it is possible, but until you prove it, I will claim that this is an unscientific claim.
> remember we are not talking about a mutation that suddenly means the offspring grows a lung - that is a common misconception.
I never suggested that a single mutation must produce a lung.
This is a common technique. I might call it "The argument from you don't really understand".
I think you're the one who's not understanding my argument.
Suppose complex feature X requires 100 steps to come about. Each step is a tiny change in something that already exists, but after a 100 steps, it will be basically transformed into X. Each such step must be producible by a mutation. Not only that, but each step must be advantageous enough to be selected by NS.
(Notice how NS here actually makes things more difficult).
A small example: the word "yellow" can be transformed to "hello" by two steps:
yellow -> hellow -> hello
The problem here is, "hellow" is not a valid word, and therefore NS would fail it, and this chain of variations will not work.
Of course this example doesn't exactly apply to genes, but it clearly illustrates two points:
- Each "tiny step" must be producible by a random mutation - Each such step must pass NS.
Now, from reading the brain-simulation thread the other day, I sort of conclude that no one really knows what these steps might even look like, because genetic engineering is really hard, and the way genes translate to features is still largely a mystery.
> The theory of evolution has survived this challenge a number of times without being proven fallacious.
Not really.
Of course, you will ignore everything I'm saying, because instead of focusing on evidence and logic, you're fixated on the notion that I'm an idiot (or misinformed) and therefore my argument is obviously false. I mean, how dare I question evolution? Right?
That's a flawed example for several reasons. The main one is that the selection is based on a target (the new word) or is considered over too short a timespan. Even worse is that you are getting random variation in every generation, which is actually against the principle of evolution. In your cited example the whole chain would die out very quickly - favouring chains that mutated more slowly.
My example is better because the end product is irrelevant; the code becomes a program. Programs that are "better" in some ambiguous way will be used more frequently. Over time the most useful programs will evolve; but only over millions of generations. The end product is uncertain; but according to Darwinian theory it would fit the environment (so, if we had no internet there would be no network scanner to evolve).
> Yet another instance of hand waving. You might think it is possible, but until you prove it, I will claim that this is an unscientific claim.
I'm sorry but what is unprovable about mutation; this is one of the aspects we have observed! Both at a cellular and DNA level.
> The part that is often overlooked, even though it is so crucial, is the lack of evidence for whether mutations have the ability to actually produce any useful set of variations for NS to act on.
Most of your argument seems based on the idea that a mutation can produce a change/feature - but that it cannot be shown empirically that good changes/features have or can occur. This does not seem logical at all; you are basically arguing that it is impossible to a random mutation to have a positive effect on the offspring. This is incorrect; the mutation inarguably, as you agree, can produce a change - so at some point a positive change must occur (even if it is entirely unlikely).
As I am sure you appreciate; subtle improvements take a long time to take effect. That we exist in this form is highly improbable - but that is not dis-proof of the theory.
Please bear in mind I am just trying to be helpful here - not making any criticism of how informed you are. However you do not appear to be schooled in Darwinian theory because:
> Darwin focused on NS so much, but that's because he assumed that NS is the force that drives the variations.
Is 100% counter to what Evolution says.
> If you really think about it, he's making an analogy with market competition
He's not. In the slightest. He is making an empirical observation that animal survival is related to competing with others. NS is the process by which organisms with inheritable mutations that favour them survive longer and slowly mix their genes into the species.
The process of stacking mutations in sequence to achieve what we are today is complex and highly unlikely; but not impossible. That is the point Evolution makes. I don't see a counter explanation with such solid theory, that is all.
Rather than call it bunk why not suggest an alternate theory and try to match that with empirical evidence.
According to the theory, millions of years ago Chimps evolved into humans. Why then are there no chimps in a stage of evolving that would signify a progression to a different species? They've had millions of years to do so...
1. There are many examples of speciation that are documented in the time we've been watching rigorously.
2. If you think that the theory of evolution says that chimps evolved into humans, than you have no understanding of evolution.
My point is, evolution is a theory, which cannot be proved even by its most hardened supporters. There is more gray here than you would seem to admit.
Wrong.