More "miscellany" (General)

by David Turell @, Tuesday, May 17, 2022, 18:31 (682 days ago) @ David Turell

Subject: Science vs. Religion: (Chapter 4); math vs. Darwin
That chapter presented the negative findings of the mathematicians who showed the Darwin theory was mathematically impossible, Wistar Institute 1966. This article shows experimental proof:

https://salvomag.com/article/salvo60/lost-in-sequence-space

"In April 1966, some leading mathematicians and biologists met in Philadelphia to debate the subject of evolutionary theory. The mathematicians were skeptical of the theory.

"One of them, MIT professor Murray Eden, compared genetic information to computer software. When you randomly alter lines of computer code over and over, you don't get a flowering of new and better computer programs, he noted. You get a degraded or broken program. "No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences," he said. "Meaning is almost invariably destroyed."1 He suggested that the DNA software in our cells faces the same constraints. It's a matter of low probabilities. The problem is that there are vastly more ways to arrange genetic sequences into nonfunctional gibberish than into functional genetic text.

Matt: So I'm not at all sure why the link I clicked didn't take me to the message in the email, but I'm responding specifically to this argument.

The study you're referencing here in 1966 is superseded entirely by a field called "Genetic Programming" where quite literally, randomly generated computer programs are used to solve real-world problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

Note that I'm not talking about a *paper,* but an entire field of research.

"GP has been successfully used as an automatic programming tool, a machine learning tool and an automatic problem-solving engine.[18] GP is especially useful in the domains where the exact form of the solution is not known in advance or an approximate solution is acceptable (possibly because finding the exact solution is very difficult). Some of the applications of GP are curve fitting, data modeling, symbolic regression, feature selection, classification, etc. John R. Koza mentions 76 instances where Genetic Programming has been able to produce results that are competitive with human-produced results (called Human-competitive results).[41] Since 2004, the annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) holds Human Competitive Awards (called Humies) competition,[42] where cash awards are presented to human-competitive results produced by any form of genetic and evolutionary computation. GP has won many awards in this competition over the years. "

Matt: So random generation combined with selection for fitness most certainly CAN create complex and useful results--that compete with human intelligence.

You can fall back on a watchmaker's argument but there's no "here" in this particular argument.


Delighted to see you are following. I do not accept your Wiki-supported article as proof of your view. It is simply more human intelligence playing within a computer program. You still must answer the problem of chance mutations creating the complexity of evolutionary biochemistry. I have produced many pointed examples here. The biochemical complexity is real and difficult to explain by chance events. I'm sure you have looked at it.

I've downloaded the site again hoping you can get to it. It is filled with math concepts of the problem from expert thinkers:

https://salvomag.com/article/salvo60/lost-in-sequence-space

Works easily on my computer. Google Salvo magazine and it will be part of the current issue.


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