NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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| Quote (cryptoguru @ Feb. 20 2015,08:59) | | NoName: you seem to keep conflating the 2 distinct concepts |
No, that would be you. Random mutation introduces changes. Natural selection is the descriptive term for the success/failure of those changes to be preserved in the population, generation by generation.
| Quote | | purely random mutation - nobody believes this is capable of producing information |
That, sir, is a lie. Random mutation is capable of producing information in any relevant sense of the term. That is, in all cases except those where a relevant term has been prejudicially excluded a priori. Or where information is conflated with meaning; they are distinct concepts. It is known that there are 'meaningless' genetic changes. There are two codons which are interchangeable in some/most/all cases, and thus changing from one to the other is effectively a no-op. And thus meaningless from an evolutionary perspective.
| Quote | | 2) random mutation plus natural selection - you believe this can create information, I don't |
And you are demonstrably wrong. Random noise plus a finely tuned filter can pick out single tones. Random noise plus a bank of finely tuned filters, which is precisely analogous to a single step in the series that constitutes evolution over time, can pick out harmonics.
Or consider the Oklo reactors -- random assortment and arrangement of minerals and liquids resulting in natural nuclear reactors that turn on and off until eventually, over long periods of time, they extinguished for a last time. The information of the residue allows us to know this, and all of it produced by random processes operating under natural law.
| Quote | | Monkeys typing on typewriters will not produce the works of Shakespeare as Dawkins has attested to, he contests that cumulative natural selection is able to guide the purely random process and create information. |
There's that 'guide' notion again. What guides mutations are the laws of physics and chemistry and the circumstances, the entirely specific context, in which they operate. Nothing guides random mutation in the sense you keep using. Natural selection gives the appearance of guiding because it preserves some of the random changes and not others. Over successive generations, this results in a changed population. The random changes are still random changes. The result is selected from the set of all random changes, over time. And that's where the appearance of 'guided' comes in. It is guided in a purely naturalistic, historical sense. And the guide is the slowly changing environment.
| Quote | | I want to see that demonstrated ... you keep jumping around your definitions. This is a simple issue ... find "new information" that couldn't arise purely randomly by using random mutation and natural selection. |
Stop assuming your conclusion.
Prove that random mutations and natural selection cannot generate new information. You can't. We have the proof that it can. Look at life. Look at Lenski's experiment. Look at astrophysics.
| Quote | | Find a solution that defies simple probability e.g. rolling a die 36 times will likely get you 2 sixes in a row at some point ... this is not what we're talking about, |
Yes it is. If you have a system that continues to preserve the sixes that come up, you wind up with as many sixes in a row a you have dice. Or to better simulate nature, you preserve whichever number shows up twice in the set of dice. You will soon wind up with nothing but that number in the set, no matter how large the set is.
Do you not know the game Yahtzee? This is precisely what it accomplishes, the task you claim is impossible.
| Quote | | you need to demonstrate complex information that could not occur probabilistically arising because natural selection is doing something that pure dumb-luck can't. |
No, you have to demonstrate that 'complex information' cannot arise probabilistically.
You keep asserting it as if it were known, and proven to be the case.
It isn't and it hasn't.
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