NoName
Posts: 2729
Joined: Mar. 2013
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| Quote (cryptoguru @ Jan. 16 2015,11:33) | | Quote | | if not entirely incorrect, to assert that DNA is a 'computer code' |
I've been over this ground on the other site.
DNA is a computer code ... a living cell is a computer, not analogous to a computer, but IS a computer. |
Prove it. Don't assert it, prove it.
You can't because there simply are no significant respects in which it is true.
The entire realms of thermodynamic effects and of self-assembly, with constrained errors, and self-repair, with constrained errors, simply have no equivalent in computers. At all.
This metaphor is wildly less accurate and wildly less appropriate to the cases at hand than 'natural selection'.
So, once again, prove it. Don't assert it, don't point me to garbage sites where you've also asserted it.
It's a simple proposition, it should be simple to prove, without abstracting away all the differences that make a difference.
| Quote | | This is a true statement because it fulfils the definition of a computer as a Turing machine. |
A computer is a Turing machine. Are all Turing machines computers? Proof please.
| Quote | This is also proved by the fact that we use the living cell as a computer ourselves now
DNA computing - Wikipedia
There are LOTS of evolutionists who attest to this fact. |
Irrelevant and absurd. We can use strings and beads as calculating machines, this does not mean that strings and beads are calculators.
| Quote | | The reason you're avoiding this definition is because you want to keep it mysterious and difficult to pin down. |
No. And offensive.
We're 'avoiding' this definition because it is not a definition and because it is incorrect. It is analogy run amuck.
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| Quote | | OK, but this obscures the fact that function is tied to specific DNA arrangements. Note, too, that those arrangements include physical folding and proximity to other DNA fragments. |
I don't see how what I said contradicts that? I'm just speaking in generic terms. |
And the genericity is where you go wrong. The same set of DNA patterns operate, or fail to operate, depending on the physical arrangement of other DNA patterns, which are dynamic over time.
That you don't understand this fundamental fact demonstrates that you are unprepared to make the claims you are in fact making.
Do you even know what the folding problem is? Or why it matters, and matters particularly in this problem space?
| Quote | | Quote | | You appear to be taking an anthropomorphic, physicalist (i.e., embodied) approach to intelligence such that 'natural selection', not having a body (or a soul?) cannot be 'intelligent'. |
I think you're jumping the gun here, I'm not claiming Natural Selection is powerless to do anything, I'm just asserting that it is not like a god ... it can't measure and evaluate, it's not magic. |
Disagreement without basis. No one is claiming it is, or 'is like' a god (for one thing, it is not fictional or mythical, it does not operate by miracles, and it can be seen in action in controlled and well-defined tests, none of which can be done with any god ever proposed). It is, in the sense it which you are using it here, a description of a process of evaluation, of measurement. It measures, it evaluates, reproductive failure. That's all it has to do.
We have operational definitions. It appears you do not.
| Quote | It is simply the process of filtering organisms that don't work in their environment. It's not the Grim Reaper going around choosing who to kill. Therefore modelling processes that attempt to model natural selection as though it is intelligent are incorrect.
| Quote | | Correct but misleading |
Again, I complete agree with your definition there ... I am not trying to be sneaky. Nothing I said disagrees with your understanding of natural selection, unless you think it IS magic.
| Quote | | Lenski et al have performed this over tens of thousands of generations in the lab and verified the process |
Lenski has demonstrated E. Coli doing exactly what E Coli is programmed to do, it adapts (this is true of all viruses and bacteria) |
Can you say 'begging the question'? You appear to be arguing that cells/organisms are programmed by asserting as one of your premises that cells/organisms are programmed.
You are also making recourse to a particularly problematic undefined metric -- what and how do you determine which organism is 'more advanced' than some other? What is the metric of advancement? It is, in fact, a holdover from superstition that saw all life as a glorious unfolding of lower creatures to higher creatures, culminating in mankind. Which is indefensibly stupid not least because it is entirely unsupported by facts of any sort.
Either all creatures are equally advanced, or bacteria are far more advanced than humans because they've been evolving for more generations.
Either drop this 'more advanced' crap or provide facts, evidence, logic, and operational definitions to make it clear and unequivocal for all to see.
| Quote | | ... this does not demonstrate new features. They've performed an equivalent of millions of years of evolution ... where's the more complex life-forms? They're still bacteria! |
They are 'more advanced' bacteria in that they demonstrate features strictly absent from the parent population.
How does this not meet your challenge? You're refusing to accept it because it leaves you without a foundation for your creationism.
| Quote | | Again ... a computer model should be able to at least prove the theory is possible. |
See responses from others.
| Quote | | Quote | | The problem, in part, is that the random changes are inherently constrained by the laws of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics |
You're grasping at straws ... random mutations are random. |
No, they are only random with respect to certain factors, such as future needs of the organism. They are highly constrained. You are handwaving away the hard problem, essentially by ignoring it. The results of that act of ignorance are errors which permeate your argument from the point of deciding these critical factors don't matter. It's as if you were arguing that the SR-71 could not be supersonic because your plastic model would melt at the friction imposed at mach speeds.
| Quote | Natural selection is purely the ability for the organism to keep on reproducing. It can fail to do that for many reasons e.g. competition for food, disease etc
But the process is simple
| Quote | | If it's done in a computer model, measurement will happen, albeit properly the measurement does indeed need to be of survival(reproduction)/failure(to survive and to reproduce). How else do you propose to determine the whether selection occurred at all in a computer model? Randomly? |
I completely agree ... but we should be doing as you suggest measuring survival and not measuring for example how fast something goes. If we want to measure speed competition, we need to let the organisms have speed and see which survive, not calculate speeds and set an arbitrary threshold ... does that make sense to what I'm saying now? |
And we're back to the critical issue of exactly what do you mean by 'intelligent'. As you use it here, you appear to mean that intelligence is inherently purposive, that it operates with 'purpose aforethought'. That is a peculiarly anthropomorphic, and ultimately too tightly restrictive, a definition of 'intelligence'.
It's clear you throw the word around as a magic wand because you do not, and likely cannot, provide an operational definition that will suit in all cases of your use of the term.
NO ONE is asserting that 'natural selection' is any sort of Grim Reaper going around and thinking about which individuals out of which groups are going to live or die at any given time. Why would anyone assert that when it is so clearly incorrect?
What 'natural selection' is is simply a description of the failure of certain contained-random changes in the genome to persist in a population across time in a given constrained-random environment. It requires no purpose, no planning, no intention or intentionality. It's how the world works. No one has ever shown otherwise.
Nor has anyone shown that changes to the genome do not occur, randomly with respect to their environment and constrained by the laws of physics, chemistry, and thermodynamics.
Nor has anyone shown that information cannot increase due to simply chemical and physical processes, constrained in various natural ways including thermodynamically and by containment.
You've ignored the examples that demonstrate this.
Why is that?
Is 'information' another magic word that you throw around without being able to provide a consistent coherent operational definition for?
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