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Virtual Genetic Evolution
Sleeperservice writes "This story at New Scientist describes how, using cell simulation in computers, evolution can be simulated. How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?"
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They're speeding up evolution via a cell simulator. How long will it be before we get true AI by teaching a virtual human that was just freshly evolved? :)
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
I suppose when you get down to it we're all nothing more than electrical pulses running down organic "wires" anyway. That is, if you can ignore the support systems (cardio, and the like). It seems possible that this could be represented by the extremely logic nature of a computer.
The problem is they're not really simulating life since they pre-program the genome anyway. They are, in effect, telling it how a "complex web of neurons" (aka. brain) should look and operate.
The article claims they've created creatures with very primitive mobility and senses. Going from there to sentience, wants, needs, emotions, reproduction etc. will be very difficult to simulate in an environment where chaos does not exist.
OTOH, sounds like they've found a really clever compression scheme.
What if we are just a simulation running on some computer? I guess that's all just Through the Looking Glass again. "Are we the dreamer, or merely a part of another's dream?"
BlackGriffen
The article reads like all they have done is code a bog standard Genetic Algorithm for moving boxes. Have I read the article wrong or have they discovered nothing new??
I belive dragons are supposed to be fire-breathing, not fire-farting.
I'd written an essay on something similar to this, of using DNA Mapping long ago when I'd just started doing AI. You can find the essay here.
/virtual humans/ and so on.
Ofcourse, once you start working on it, you just realise how damn tough it is, and although it sounds easy on paper, it's just not that simple. Simulated environments are just too complex.
And it's also interesting that David Zindell has written some interesting stuff on this in his series Requiem for Homo Sapiens, on simulated
How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?
If you consider that we already have what is by far the world's largest Beowulf Cluster (tm) working on this problem -- every living organism in the world -- perhaps not so long.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
The Simulation Argument
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?
Nick Bostrom (2002)
Forthcoming in Philosophical Quarterly.
ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
A-38847, First cutaway 4-14-2002
What jump number? Inquiring minds want to know. Also, what's your DZ?
Blue skies!
E
B-34024, First cutaway 1.April.1995, jump #30
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Open your eyes people! I could go on and on.
Please do! I tried to take your lead, and find out more information on Google, but all I came up with was Giant Robots, Giant Squids, and The Jolly Green Giant, who, incidentally, lives in Blue Earth MN, the birthplace of the ice cream sandwich. So if you would be so kind, and provide some links to these giants of which you speak, I would be much obliged.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
The sheer arrogance of the slashdot poster is unbelievable. Just listen to this:
This story at New Scientist describes how, using cell simulation in computers, evolution can be simulated. How long until we can work out what the DNA sequence for a Dragon should be I wonder?
Come on! The simulation is about as closer to reality as the economist assumptions of the rational consumers. You don't know how many corners they can cut in their simulation. It's just a simulation and it is as good as the assumptions made by the people who created the simulation. Real life is messy and difficult to predict. It will be hundreds of years before they get the simulation even close to the true working of a real cell.
Besides, how can you can believe in evolution when it violates basic laws of the universe? There are so many arguments against evolution that it's ridiculous. Even those that ignore the written record of humanity cannot ignore the scientific facts making it impossible.
:)
:P It says that the universe as a whole is moving towards disorder. This doesn't prevent portions of the universe from achieving states of increased order. And to think otherwise is completely absurd - if everything could only move in the direction of disorder, how could anything really get accomplished? This is a rediculous way to try and twist the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it reeks of manipulation.
:P
I very highly suspect this as a troll, but I'll give it a go
Evolutionists claim that universe the earth is billions of years old, but how is that possible when the rotation of the earth slows by 30 seconds every century? If the earth were billions of years old the speed at which it would have been rotating four years ago would have been so fast that it could not have held together.
Er, 30 seconds every century indeed! More like 2.2 seconds every 100,000 years. Here are some references.
There's also the second law of thermodynamics to look at. It states that the universe is constantly heading toward disorder. Evolution violates that law, so which one is right?
Well the second law of thermodynamics only makes sense when you understand what it's actually saying
Another problem with evolution is that certain nucleic acids cannot form without the help of certain proteins, but those proteins cannot form without certain nucleic acids. That makes it impossible to occur naturally.
Admittedly, I know nothing about nucleic acids and proteins, so I cannot comment on this.
Oh well, so I got 2 out of 3. Perhaps somebody with a biology tilt can comment in on the proteins and acids.
It is called GOLEM and is found at http://golem03.cs-i.brandeis.edu/. It's not a bad little program and fun to watch as a screensaver (personally more fun than the SETI@Home fast Fourier transforms flying by).
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Whether or not this is a joke or not, we need a moderation that roughly sums up this: "these exact arguements, and the common rebuttals of them, have been posted on slashdot a million times before, and the discussions that inevitably come from them are both predictable and pointless."
I mean seriously, "Dr." Putting aside ENTIRELY the issue of who's right in this case, you are either extremely ignorant of the wealth of debate on these subjects, or are just being grossly dishonest in simply glossing over it all in order to win cheap converts that you hope wont read or think any further.
If you have any experience with creationist/evolution debates, you would know that all of these arguements have very good rebutals. Regardless of your opinion of these rebutals, the least you could do is address THEM, adding something new and intelligent to the actual living debate, instead of posting the same dumb starting challenges that almost everyone, even most creationists, agree are dishonest and misleading, and at the very least have hashed through a million times before. Or you could link to the hundreds of sites on the web that respond to things like the rotation question, or the question on entropy, and then criticize THEM.
Instead, all you've done here is copy and paste (out of a recent reading of some tract, if not litterally via computer) some of the most well known creationist arguements. You are not surprising anyone with them. They are not new, damning charges against the theory of evolution: most of them were exposed a CENTURY ago, and well refuted even back then. All anyone does by posting them yet again is make modern creationism look stupid. Anyone who can state that evolution violates the second law is completely clueless about the second law (do endothermic chemical reactions violate the second law, going from simple atoms to complex molecules)? There are creationists out there who are at least willing to be honest and reasonable about their critiques: I suggest you join their ranks instead of preaching Hovind.
I want the specifications so I can sell them on slashdot for 50 mod points a pop.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The same could be said of slashdot editor bashers...
---What a joke, yet all the evolutionary theory based on this and the above debacles is still around. Why?---
There is no why: you're a liar. The "Nebraska man," for instance, was never a widely accepted idea, not even as the tooth of an ape. That creationists continue to run around claiming that it was some sort of central lynchpin in evolutionary theory (an entirely laughable claim to anyone that bothers to read any sort of history of the subject, or the publications at the time) demonstrates only how desperate creationists are to discredit legitimate science: which, incidentally, works best BY discrediting things (like the Nebraska Man was discredited, by evolutionary scientists, not heroic creationists), not by building up frauds.
This simulation is on par (maybe a *little* more in-depth than) the GOLEM project that's been running out of Brandeis for quite a while now (you can download your own evolution simulation). Basic blocks which when recombined with each other "develop" into more complex things that can be rated on their ability to function in a certain role and be recombined to hopefully produce something even more efficient.
More impressive forced-evolution science is the DNA shuffling work of labs and companies like Maxygen. This is truly evolution in a tube and deals directly with the genetic sequence as opposed to higher-level vague cell-type simulations.
But the great thing about science is that there's room enough in it for pretty much any research.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Just to point out how dishonest this story is... check out the real story here.
To summarize, there never was any life size replica, farmer, or any such nonsense. That story is entirely invented (and implausible to begin with: pig's teeth and primate teeth are so similar that experts often have a hard time telling them apart: and everyone at the time already knew this)
What there was was a single drawing that appeared in a popular magazine, that itself never claimed to be any sort of "reconstruction from a tooth" but rather just a fanciful illustration. Here's the text that came with the sketch: "Mr. Forestier has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius. But if, as the peculiarities of the tooth suggest, Hesperopithecus was a primitive forerunner of Pithecanthropus, he may have been a creature such as Mr. Forestier has depicted." (Smith 1922, emphasis added)
And that was about the MOST laudable thing ever said about the picture: again, not even in a scientific publication, but rather in a popular article. The scientific community never took it seriously that the teeth even came from an ape, much less a human ancestor.
I've always been interested in this, because if this is possible, it would seriously increase the chances of life being elsewhere, since the odds of an "Earth-like" planet are supposedly not that great.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Um ... we know perfectly well what they do: make copies of themselves. Now, the circumstances under which they make copies of themselves, and close analogues of themselves in RNA, is in most cases still an open question -- but simulations like this are an important step on the road to figuring that out. Of course it's trial and error; that's how science works.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Before I reply to this article, I would like to say that I am an Evangelical Christian. I believe in God, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that the Bible is the revealed work of the Holy Spirit. ... and I believe that we are here as the result of many years of evolution.
I am aware that this thread is not about the evolution/creation debate, so I am not going to try to counter the poster's comments point for point. I would just like /.ers to know that there are Christians who can still think straight (at least in Germany).
I believe in God because I find the evidence overwhelming. I believe in evolution because I find the evidence overwhelming.
It belittles God and makes Christians look stupid when Christians say that evolution runs counter to the second law of thermodynamics, or when they point to mistakes that scientists have made in the past while trying to formulate the theory of evolution. If evolution could be so easily disproved, then I think the thousands of scientists who have studied evolution over the years would have worked this out by now.
I am sure I will be flamed for this, but I am prepared to take the risk. However, I have written this for all the Cristians in the world who have not had their brains removed, who can worship God and marvel at the amazing things evolution has made. For these Christian (I know of many who hold this view, several educated to Doctorate level) there is no tension.
I had a population of simulated organisms competing in a shared 2d grid for food, which appeared in a pile at a random location when the old food was depleted. While the organism had basic looking/moving operations to rely on, invariably some would discover that with enough organisms, the food moves enough that you can survive by just looking around until the food is in your line of sight, and then jumping on it. My arbitrary decision to place the food randomly formed the basis for an *entire species* of organisms (which didn't fare too well when some got smarter).
These same organisms used a stack to do their thinking. Looking and eating produced values, which could be used for simple branching. Out of sheer laziness, I designed the stack to allow infinite pops off an empty stack which would return false, and infinite pushes on a full stack which would discard the values. One memorable run produced a dominant species which relied on this stack behavior to implement COUNTING! It intentionally (well, purposefully) left crud on the stack in a main loop, relying on the filled-stack behavior to detect a certain number of iterations. The stacksize and the arena size happened to be comparable, and this is how it determined when to turn.
which will plummet to earth as soon as he let's fly a good long shot of hot fire breath.
*Rooooaaaasssssstttt....... WHUMP!!!*
I highly suspect that it is a troll too, but misguided trolls exist who just don't believe or understand or don't want to understand.
The third component that you passed on is also known as the interlocking component conundrum, or the chicken-and-egg problem ('which came first...'), or the idea that when you have a complex system composed of multiple interdependent parts (e.g. the coagulation cascade of clotting factors in the blood, the DNA -> RNA -> protein -> multiple protein activities and A,T,C,G creating enzymes -> nuclear bases -> DNA system, etc.) then there must have been NO reason for the individual elements to have evolved on their own because they serve no purpose without their interdependent parts.
This anti evolution argument has been expounded most strongly by Michael Behe, a chemist or biochemist, in his book Darwin's Black Box. The strongest counterargument is that proteins and other molecules do not simply play a single role. A protein that is known as Coagulation Factor X does not simply play a role in coagulating. It may also have other activites. And these other activities may have been selected for after they had arisen out of random mutation. Philip Johnson, a lawyer, is another anti-evolution creationist who has also published a few books on this topic. Rather than list any specific book that argues against Behe or Johnson, I recommend looking at general biology and biochemistry books.
Evolution may be called a theory, but it is a well accepted theory that is buttressed by a strong scientific and evidentiary basis. Creationism is not.
Wouldn't future computers have precision limitations that would cause artifacts in the simulated world? Relativity and the passage of time, randomness of subatomic particles.
Also, the authors of the universe would have to cheat from time to time to deal with the limitations of whatever hardware they're using. Not wanting to simulate an entire universe, they just crudely simulate distant worlds as point sources of information and place them far enough so the approximation will never be realized.
Also, adjustments would be made from time to time as the simulation evolved. After all, such a universe would be a product of curiousity and it would be difficult to not want to tweak certain things and see how the system is affected.
But then you get into the murky business of whether or not the simulators are simulated. If simulation=reality, it becomes illogical to continue pondering the question.
... 5000 years (rougly the age of the earth).
...
If what you say is true, then the Genesis is RIGHT. The guys that wrote it must have just been able to see earth forming with their own eyes!!! (Genesis is about 3000 BC)
I believe in evolution, but not in hazardous evolution. It just doesn't make sense. The aceptance of the evolution theory can attest that you need some good hypotesis to make people believe in the most incredible improbabilities (like the elefants lifting the earth "plane" or evolution itself).
unfinished: (adj.)
I understand the argument about as a whole, but there is a whole bunch of math you can do based on the 2nd law, that makes evolution look impossible. I know it's not as simple as "the 2nd law equals disorder therefore evolution is not true", there is a whole bunch of complex math involved, but you should investigate it before shooting your mouth off.
That's not actually how artificial life works. They don't tell them that they need eyes or bigger muscles or whatever, they just eliminate the ones that are unsuccessful. This process leads to the development of things like eyes and muscles because the ones that developed those by the process of mutation tend to be culled less than those that didn't. Tom Ray's Tierra simulation has absolutely NO global rules and no specifications about what sort of things are expected to develop, and he gets complex ecological interactions such as parasites and hyperparasites.
You have, however, hit on an important point. We know how to objectively judge box-pushing behavior, speed, and other physical measurements, so we can develop rule sets to encourage the development of traits to maximize those things. Quantifying intelligent behavior is much more difficult, making the evolution of intelligent behavior problematic. That doesn't mean it's impossible, it just means that we need to think more on the difference between simple problem solving and true intelligence, and most importantly how to judge what intelligent behavior is without trying to figure out how to create it.
No, actually you belittle God and make Christians look stupid when you say His Bible is a lie. Go back, read Genesis one, and tell me again how Christianity is compatible with a world view that says we evolved from monkeys. And if you feel that having scientists on your side is necessary, check out Institute for Creation Research. There are quite a few Phd's who disagree strongly with you, and there's a lot of evidence that they're right.
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
While still surviving in it ;) On a side note- How did everybody else go about developing spears and blades fo hunting and combat while the aboriginies came up with a revolving, self return airfoil as a weapon? Simulate that.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Dr. Dan Ashlock at Iowa State University has been evolving robots that push blocks around a 2-D world for some time now. Check out the BotWorld link on his research page for info. On a side note, I did a research project for one of his courses during Spring 2002, where I evolved robots for Robocode that were effective in destroying human-programmed robots.
How about a Usenet rating?
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Are Creationists going to build a God simulation in order to compete?
Table-ized A.I.
The creation story in Genesis has NO elements of a parable. Whether you agree with it or not, you have to agree that whoever wrote it, wrote it as literal truth.
And herein lies the rub: If the Bible cannot be trusted in the creation account, then why should it be trusted in John 3:16? How do we know that Jesus wasn't just another guy who said some interesting things? My original post was directed at a Christian -- if you don't believe the Bible at all, then all this is irrelevant. But if you claim to be a Christian, you'd better understand the difference between truth and fiction -- and you'd better understand that to deny Genesis 1 is also to deny Christ's death and resurrection. The two are linked -- if God allowed man to evolve through a process of millions of years of death and destruction, why do we need Jesus? Sin is just another name for natural selection, right? On the other hand, if you believe the Bible, that God created man perfect, in his image, without sin, the rest of the Bible makes sense. Without sin, we don't need a Saviour -- that's the real purpose of the myth of evolution: to deny God and his redemption plan. Like I said earlier -- if you don't believe in the Bible, this is unimportant to you. But if you're a Christian, you need to understand that this is why Genesis is so important.
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
The thing about being created in God's image is a bit difficult for me to understand -- it's not clear if it means that we were created to physically look like God, or if he meant that we were created without sin. Either way, it does say that man was originally without sin -- it further explains how man came to do wrong against God later on in Genesis. This is one of the most important tenets of the Christian faith -- if God allowed the earth to simply evolve, using sin and death and destruction to create man (as the theory of evolution would have us believe), then why would he see the need to send his Son to earth to die for our sins(John 3:16)? If sin is just a natural process used by God to "create" the earth, then the rest of the Bible makes no sense, and has no real authority.
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
Genetic algorithms are interesting and useful in some cases. But attempting to recreate evolution in a useful amount of time using these techniques.
Let's see.... assume we start with single celled organisms in the ocean.
We have 3 billion years - that.s 9x10^16 seconds.
And how many organisms... well, assume the biological part of the ocean is a foot deep and that the ocean covers 2/3rds of the earth's surface... that is about 1*10^15 cubic meters or 10^21 cubic centimeters. And lets say there are a billion cells per CC (not unreasonable)...
That's 10^24 cells for about 10^16 seconds or
10^40 cell-seconds. Lets assume an evolutionary event (cell fission, DNA absorption, whatever) takes place once an hour per cell. That's about 3*10^37 evolutionary events. And that's just to get to the first multicellular creature!
I think it would take a lot faster computers to get 10^37 events in a genetic algorithm!
Of course, one can guide and tweak and limit... but I don't think a dragon is going to be forthcoming!!
The only good weather is bad weather.
Because it says that God created the heavens, the earth, the animals, and man -- all in six days. If you believe in creation, then evolution, what exactly did God create in the first six days?
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
---It's funny how scientists can study life,earth,universe,etc. and then come to a grand conclusions that God doesn't exist, changes in species are due to random errors in reproduction, and therefore Darwin is right and everyone else is wrong.---
Which scientists? Where do they present these supposed arguements? The conclusions of evolution explain the diversity of and development of life on earth. This isn't "funny" or "ironic" it's interesting. As to God, that's something one either believes or doesn't. But far from thinking that evolution disproves the existence of God, the vast majority of evolutionary scientists believe in God.
---I know I'll be thrown as flamebait or a Troll, but that's what I get for 'thinking different'.---
Every bit of your post, from the slander to the tired arguements, even down to the VERY convienient martyr complex complaint "oh, woe is I, no one will listen to my wisdom" is wholly unoriginal to you. You aren't thinking: you are regurgitating.
---And how come everything is just so perfect in this world for us: we have air to breath, water to drink, food to eat, sunlight to perform bring the bread home, darkness to sleep.---
As Douglas Adams noted, a puddle in a hole, were it intelligent, could claim the same thing: look at it's environment! The hole it lives in is _perfectly_ contoured to hold it (the puddle). It MUST be specially designed just for the life of this special, special puddle.
Been going for years
Creature Labs
And for Linux...
Tux Games. Your complete source for native Linux games.
Cute: so you, and this quote, make no substantive refutation to the any of the claims at hand. And anyway a guy MUST not have an agenda, because he lambastes both "sides." And to top it all off, Mr. "I hate these people who think they know what they're talking about" was dead wrong about a key accusation, which he almost certainly picked up from a creationist screed: perhaps in trying to get a evenhanded survey of the material. What you forgot is that one side lies, and instead of correcting lies as time goes on, inflates them. I guess it's all the same to you: everything's politics, right?
Actually, the "Nebraska Man" (better referred to as Hesperopithecus) was widely trumpeted by the scientific community as the final proof of evolution during the monkey trials in the thirties.
Widely? You mean: Osborn? Again, read the scientific literature at the time. Read what the scientific community thought of Osborn's find (hint: less than impressed, and unconvinced). Then come back and tell me if your statement here is anything other than simply misleading.
Testimony regarding hesperopithecus was introduced into the Scopes trial.
Maybe it's just "politics" talking: but I think you're a liar. Not only wasn't it in the end, but the only one who called for it was Bryan. But of course, noting that would take most of the wind out of the accusation... so why note it? Politics?
Similar things were done using the Piltdown skulls, which have also since proven to be outright fabrications.
Let's get this straight. The Nebraska Man, unlike the Piltdown, was a not a "fabrication." To insinuate that it was is simply dishonest. It was, instead, perfectly conventional science: a scientist made a claim based on what he thought was new evidence, the scientific community was skeptical of it, then via further exploration it got ruled out as a mistake. But to call it a "fabrication" is simply to lie.
A good start would be books by some of the true scientists out there who've spoken up on natural selection, such as Michael Behe.
Oh, good grief. So you've read some Intelligent Designer books (which are pitched as being evenhanded, surely where you got this silly "above-it-all" pose you're striking), and now you think you're an expert. You're exactly the mark that people like Behe and Dembski went after by appealing not to any sort of peer review with their ideas, but rather to the public. And the result is wildly silly ideas that are nevertheless compelling to those that otherwise have no idea what they are talking about, and have no ability to check their claims against the facts.
but that purely random Natural Selection does not appear to be a sufficient explanation for speciazation.
Red flag: again "purely random" natural selection? Buzz: down the crapper goes your credibility...
However, you are certainly out of line to claim that Piltdown was not an out and out fraud - Hesperopithecus is debatable.
Read my post again: notice the "unlike"? You want to apologize, again?
Being mistaken does not make someone a liar
I think I'm well advised to doubt your sincerity, considering that your OP made you out to be some sort of disgruntled expert on this subject, despite the fact that the things you've said have often been verbatim recitations of standard creationist literature.
But if it was an honest mistake, I retract that statement insofar as it pertains to you. I'm even sorry that you got taken in. The fact remains that the NM is almost always described as a fabrication or a fraud by creationists, even insinuating that the entire scientific community fabracated it to fool the public, and that IS dishonest, whether it's your fault or not.
As best as I understand Neo-Darwinism (a la Dawkins) it appears to posit some kind of weird force, the mechanisms of which are so unclear as to be invisible, that somehow makes formation of more complex life forms more probable.
Please, by all means send this discovery to Dawkins: I'm sure he will be quite exicted to discover a "weird force" at work. It will certainly surprise him to find that he's argued that more complex forms are simply "more probable" as opposed to describing mechanisms by which they develop. So I can't imagine where you've gotten this idea, except perhaps from some of Gould's more loony critiques, or perhaps an intelligent design theorist. But if you can't even bother to fairly represent people's arguements, why should I consider you honest? How is this sort of sloppy straw man slander consistent with honest approach to the subject?
And, of course, this entire response is non-sequitur. It doesn't fix the fact that you seem to think that natural selection is "purely random," and so far I haven't present an evolutionary "arguement" for you to refute with neo-darwinism or anything else.
First, this is a substantial departure from Darwinian Natural Selection, and second I wonder when you 19th century naturalistic types give up and just say "God" again?
I'm not a "naturalist." Are you channeling Johnson now?
"God" is not a default hypothesis. There is no default hypothesis. There is, however, a pretty solid line of explanation for life on earth based on so far observable laws. If you wish to fill any ignorance with "God did it," that's your bussiness, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that (indeed, most evolutionary scientists do so). But it's certainly not necessary in theory, and it certainly doesn't really explain anything.
Death did not occur until *after* the fall of Adam and Eve.
This is assuming we're talking about physical death. A good point could be made that:
1) God told Adam that on the day he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he would die
2) Adam and Eve ate, and did not (physically) die
3) Jesus was promised to defeat death by his own death and resurrection
4) Jesus has completed this work (he said "it is finished" upon the Cross) and yet, physical death still occurs
5) Therefore, the "death" brought about by Adam's sin must mean not physical death, but a severing of the perfect relationship with God that we would have without sin. Jesus's sacrifice has enabled us to escape this "death" but not the physical one. Of course, since our souls are immortal anyway, the physical death is of no concern.
If physical death is not of any importance in the biblical story, then there is no theological reason for us to believe animals (even proto-humans) didn't die before the Garden of Eden incident. Besides, if God's plan didn't include death, how were the animals going to eat (even if they were all herbivores, plants would have to die), and what would happen when the earth filled up with immortal animals being fruitful and multiplying?
The universe was created in six days.
According to Genesis 1, which is almost a carbon copy of other creation stories which predate the Jewish faith. Surely you didn't fail to notice the entirely different literary style and the lack of continuity between chapters 1 and 2? Anyway, the entirety of chapter 1 can be taken as a metaphorical description of creation without having the slightest impact on your faith. The important fact is that God is primarily responsible for our existence, how and when he did it and how long it took should be irrelevant.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Look: just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them a liar.
I didn't say that you were a liar because you disagreed with me: I said you were a liar because you said several demonstrably false things (including several about me and what I said). Perhaps this was, after all, unintentional on your part, in which case, I said, I apologize for the accusation.
Now, please explain to me - if evolution (or rather Darwinian natural selection) is not "purely random", then what is it?
You know, it's not my job to explain this to you. It's explained countless times all over the place. Your account of what "evolution" and "natural selection" are, is simply fanciful. How can you possibly judge the applicability of evolutionary theory, and the honesty of defenders of evolutionary theory, if you have a parody vision of what evolution is (and, I have to say, a vision that, despite your protestations, is easily identifiable as a creationist account).
Mutation is simply ONE factor that builds up variation in a population. But mutation, even "good" mutation, is not how evolution or natural selection works. If all evolution was was the hope that good mutations would arise occasionally to adapt a species, then evolution would be highly implausible. But that's not it at all. In fact, population genetics studies have shown that, far from natural selection being limited by the rate of mutation, in practice natural selection actually serves to slow the rate of mutation down.
Natural selection, first of all, works on interbreeding populations, not individuals (the advances of singular mutants wouldn't last very long in any given pool). Environmental conditions select ranges from a diverse population, and the next generation is then also diverse, but representively slanted in a particular direction of variation. That's how adpation generally works. It's not a process of simply waiting around for a mutation to break a logjam in development. It's not a process that waits for the right roll of the dice.
However, the pro-evolution types are just as bad.
Nonsense. Certianly, there are impatient and insulting people out there who shill for evolution, and some are unecessarily insulting to people's religious beliefs. But nowhere in scientific circles do you find toleration for lying, and resucitating even disproven lies. Nowhere do you find people like Hovind of course. But you also wont find people like Robert Johnson or like Dembski, who wildly misrepresent the positions of others, make wide use of rhetorical and logical fallacy and simply lie about the evidence to cast doubt on the applicability of evolutionary theory. Even Behe, who's arguement is baseless (and already raised and refuted nearly a hundred years ago) but at least fairly honest, makes huge factual misteps that he refuses to correct (like his claim that there is no literature on molecular evolution, when indeed there is lots).
I have heard Dawkins, on NPR's Connection, claim that no theologian is supernaturalist. Considering that I know quite a few theologians, almost all of which believe more or less in a number of supernatural events, I have to wonder whether Dawkins is deluded or just lying?
Knowing a little bit about how you think, I have to wonder: do you have any idea what Dawkins was saying? I certainly have no idea exactly what he's talking about from that short (mis?)quote. I certainly very much doubt that he was saying that no theologian _believes_ in the supernatural, since that's not even something he thinks in the first place. But regardless, what does this have to do with Dawkin's account of evolution? How does it demonstrate that he is positing a "weird force" that is "invisible" to explain the building power of the evolutionary process?
I suggest you try the "The Tower of Babel" and then, perhaps "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."
Geez, guy, take a chill-pill. The answer is even simpler than you thought.
God CREATED the process of Evolution, along with the rest of the MULTIverse.
Criminys, some people...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies