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Evolution and the 'Wisdom of Crowds'
An anonymous reader writes "An essay by a developer of recommendation systems makes a case for why so many people have trouble grasping Darwin's theory of evolution. Downplaying its conflict with religion, the essay suggests that evolution is in a specific class of "equilibrium seeking" concepts that tend to be extremely counterintuitive to most people. The hypothesis is supported by the observation that so many people reject the notion that evolution-like systems such as Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems can actually be effective. Particularly fascinating is the description of his surprisingly simple algorithm for competing in the Netflix prize contest."
>why so many *Americans* have trouble grasping Darwin's theory of evolution
There, fixed it for you.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The hypothesis is supported by the observation that so many people reject the notion that evolution-like systems such as Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems can actually be effective.
While there may be many that reject that these systems can be effective at all, I'd suggest that there's many more that would actual argue that while these systems do work, they aren't necessarily the best or only method that is effective.
The "Wisdom Of Crowds" put George W Bush in power, twice. Had Americans believing Saddam caused 9/11 and was a threat. Then of course there is religion..
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Is a great theoretical concept, but unfortunately it only makes sense in the context of assuming that everybody really thinks for themselves. As soon as the media enter into the equation the crowd becomes as manipulatable as the most stupid upper limit that can still be sold a bill of goods. If that's > 50% then the equation no longer holds, no matter how much the rest invests in staying educated. You'd almost have to filter out media bias somehow because otherwise anybody with an agenda and some money to burn will come out on top. Witness politics, marketing of unnecssary goods and services and so on.
MP3 Search Engine
Crowds contain individuals, and some of these individuals know what they are on about. Collect together a sufficiently large crowd and you will find a number of experts on many different subject.
Isn't that the obvious conclusion?
threadeds blog
If people have a problem grasping 'evolution' as a concept, ask them to think about language evolution. Languages more obviously evolve, 'speciations', 'hybridisations' etc of English can easily be identified. The analogy with Darwinism isn't exact, but it is surprisingly close.
If it hasn't reached an equilibrium then it's going to change until it does duhh!
So we will use up all the oil, then have no oil, and then we're at equilibrium.
And runaway greenhouse effect isn't really runaway, it doesn't get hotter and hotter and hotter forever, it just reaches a very hot equilibrium. Venus is at equilibrium, it's just that it's too hot for us to live on it. So stuff changes, and we evolve until we reach an equilibrium with our planet, or we die like the dinosaurs and the equilibrium doesn't include us.
Why did the Tyrannosaurus Rex's God not save them?
> Comparing it to evolution, an edit of Wikipedia might be considered equivalent to a genetic mutation. A
> mutation, of course, is non-directed...that is, "random." It could be bad or good, but most of the time
> it is bad.
IMNSHO this is simply untrue. If this is true Wikipedia is dead for long: it never keeps a large, visible "pool" of "genes" (different version of the same article) that the "nature" (viewing public) can "select", and the "nature" simply is too busy to "select" them anyway. They have many version of the same article, but there are not many who will go into the version and select to revert to one of those. To me, the success of Wikipedia is that those who don't know much about a subject will normally refrain from editing the subject, so most edits are actually of a rather high quality. It is a social behavior, not an evolution behavior.
As the parent mentioned, the "Wisdom of Crowds" put Bush in power. Honestly, it seems to me to be nothing more than overhyped bullshit pushed alongside "Web 2.0" and other over-hyped concepts that are filling the current bubble with hot air. People love to cite Wikipedia as proof of the wisdom of crowds, but let's stop and analyze that for a moment:
Who controls the content of Wikipedia articles? Is it a large crowd of seemingly random contributors each imparting their own bits of wisdom? Or is it a small set of contributors providing the base of an article with a few mostly minor revisions submitted by random people passing by? In my experience, it's the latter. Usually a small set of people, no more than 3 to 5 which make the core of a Wikipedia article.
These same people are also generally the ones that cultivate the article and keep it consistent and well editted. Occasionally these same few people come to disagreements and end up in "edit wars" in which they call in another set of few members interested in judging to judge the issue. There's no "crowd" at work here, it's a lot of small groups of vested individuals who have interest in a particular domain and an efficient way of contributing and collaborating in that domain.
There may be hundreds of such groups, but they typically stick to their domain or they become edit whores and stick to minor revisionary work on a large amount of articles. Either way, I don't see much of a "crowd" once I break it down and look close, much less a wise crowd. Have you ever noticed that different subsections of Wikipedia have their own "feel" or "identity"? Maybe the particular manner of phrasing or the type of consistency shown throughout that sub-section which differs somewhat from another unrelated domain. This is largely a result of edits by the aforementioned small group of vested individuals. Each group leaves their own tint which colors a section and gives it life.
Wisdom of Crowds? No. Small, intelligent groups of people focused on achieving a well defined goal? Yes. If you really want to test this "Wisdom of Crowds" concept, take a look at SomethingAwful.com or any of the various large web forums and learn of the "Wisdom of Crowds". Even there, it's generally a very few amount of people contributing intelligently with the rest just being meaningless drivel. This meme needs to die.
Those who doubt the veracity of 'evolution-like systems' such as "Wikipedia, prediction markets, and recommendation systems" should not be compared to those who argue against evolution. The Theory of Evolution has a great deal of scientific evidence supporting it; indeed, much of the 'theory' is actually considered scientific Fact.
While I support Wikipedia, I don't consider those who doubt its value to be idiots. Those who argue against evolution, on the other hand....
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
1. People -- as a general rule -- process complex ideas granularly. People are also generally lazy thinkers who do not attempt to refine their comprehension with falsifiable methodology. As a result, individual perceptions of value are often biased towards the simplest conclusions at the greatest level of granularity that a person can casually grasp rather than on evidence that intellect and practiced reasoning might produce. In large groups, it is possible to predict behaviors through statistical sampling using assumptions based on this model of granularity and intelligence. The conclusions of such studies are, themselves, subject to individual evaluation under the same model of granular perception. People who don't understand this are stupid religious types. If those same people were smart then they would be compelled to believe in evolution.
:)
2. Most people can't see the forest for the trees. Everybody who is not as smart as the author needs to take remedial education and secular-deprogramming classes.
Now you don't have to read the article.
You're welcome.
It isn't just "average joes" who have trouble with it. It took a number of years for doctors to realize antibiotic resistance was evolving in bacteria and becoming so widespread that some antibiotics were becoming useless. It makes sense -- high reproductive rates, very strong selection pressures. Of course bacteria were going to evolve! The realization that most infectious diseases are a moving target and could make a comeback is a surprise to many people. Most people thought bacteria were "defeated" years ago. Instead it is going to be a never-ending battle, and understanding how evolution works will allow us to maintain as much effectiveness as possible (e.g., realizing that it is really important when taking antibiotics to use the entire prescription rather than stopping as soon as you start to "feel better").
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors. All of the sudden, it's survival of the fittest, as non-ethical tribes tended to be killed off, while religious tribes thrived.
An obvious second example is the notion of being against birth control (or for large families). Tribes that were for large families and passed those beliefs down to their children tended to grow.
So my question is: Even if there is no God, and you are an atheist, is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists? The Earth's people evolved into a world of mixed beliefs (some religious, some not), which could be argued to be the survival of the fittest idea or world. The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples.
If we evolved to be a mixed world of beliefs, as the "fittest", perhaps we should accept that, and quit trying to convert people with arguments for our favorite religious/non-religious belief.
Just a n-dimensional random distribution, with small adjustment steps. The 'n' of the system being chosed by hand, not even automatically computed. It works for Netflix because the domain being modeled is not 'wild' statistically, and have a very simple topology.
The 'presumed' relation with a 'wisdom of the crowds' concept is just coincidence, try to apply such a simple system to a really complex domain (ie: natural language syntax) and it will fail.
On the other hand, it's true that simple statistics can be used for a lot of tasks (ie: language/topic detection), but nothing really new here.
What's in a sig?
I recently had to start a Wiki for 1st year undergraduate students. I found it really hard to make it writable by everybody, since I was sure that it would result in a lot of vandalism. However, if you think about Wikipedia, the vast majority of pages can be edited by anyone and yet you almost never see malicious edits by people just dicking about. In the limit, people who visit Wikipedia prefer order. That's actually quite a comforting idea.
Obviously the more subtle stuff is harder to protect against.
Call me crazy, but I don't see how using systems based on the intelligent operation of individual comes even close to explaining the random chance of evolution. The author has had an epiphany: intelligent design can be used to help religious nuts understand that although evolution is non-intuitive it is clearly correct.
"Conventional wisdom says that the primary reason why so many people do not accept Darwin's theory of evolution is that they find it threatening to their religious beliefs. There is no question that religion is a big part of the reason behind the large number of people who reject evolution. But I am convinced that just as often, the cause and effect is reversed: people hold onto their fundamentalist religious beliefs because evolution by natural selection -- the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator -- is so counter-intuitive to so many."
Honestly, I find these kinds of statements to be a bit off-base. I really get the feeling that Creationism and Evolution/Darwinism are artificially pitted against each other as if one or the other has to "win."
The interesting thing is that there is absolutely nothing in either of the standpoints that cannot coexist with the other. I would say that the consistant framing of them being exclusive is what causes resistance (from both sides, most likey) when it isn't even needed.
If one wants to get anyone to believe in a scientific theory they are having difficulties with, framing it as, "you should believe this because what you believe is wrong and you are stupid," is not really going to win anyone over. Especially when one could easily take the stance of, "here's why this theory makes sense, and really it doesn't have anything to do with what you may or may not believe."
I've seen no strong theology that would rule out that evolution did not happen. Creationism is about a supernatural force overseeing things--it says nothing specific about how things actually happened. (And, I think, most theologists will agree that Genesis is highly metaphorical.)
So, bottom line is, if science-minded people want others to "see the light" on this one, stick to the facts and leave the religion-bashing alone. Making people defensive generally is not an effective way of getting an idea across.
What's a sig?
If you are interested in evolution in social networks, rather than Darwin, you should be looking and Herbert Spencer (wikipedia.org).
Darwinism is concerned with the biological version.
The success of wikipedia has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution.
1. It is not like a 1000 monkeys typing randomly on a type writer came up with the wikipedia.
2. The content of the wikipedia is controlled more so than most people think. There are editors, there is peer review etc.
3. You don't find a million slightly varying copies on a single topic which are then "naturally selected"
A wikipedia has as much value as shouting out a question in a packed stadium to receive the answers from a million people. Most of those who will bother to answer are those who will know something about the subject and most who won't answer are most likely those who don't know enough about the topic to comment.
How is this in any sense similar to evolution?
What I always find interesting about Darwin's theory of evolution is that the word "evolution" is used in a completely different sense from other, quite common, usage of the same word.
For example, there is the evolution of the motor car, which has a designer (humans), who progressively refine the design intentionally (with occasional progress caused by random events) according to their own changing requirements.
Then there is the evolution of the computer, which similarly has a designer with specific goals in mind where randomness and bolts of lightning into a soup of modems, motherboards and RAM chips generally doesn't have a beneficial effect.
Compare Darwin's evolution, which has absolutely no designer and is completely random. Given the above examples, the word "evolution" seems a poor choice to describe Darwin's theories, perhaps it should instead be called "Darwin's theory of random mutation".
The defenders of the theory of evolution often get as hot under the collar at any challenge to it, as your stereotype fundamentalist gets at having his or her religion challenged. People instinctively see that as more of a sign of **religious** faith in evolution than pure rational, empirical faith in evolution.
Mod me down for calling it as I see it if you want, but don't even try to deny that many of the advocates of evolution aren't as faithfully passionate about it as their creationist counterparts. I know the excuse, that "science is under attack in America." If it is under attack, it is under attack by many things, not just religion. Just take a serious look at how Watson is being treated over his comments about race and genetics. Even most scientists are unwilling to consider the possibility that *gasp* if evolution be true, not all races are created equal, and that some might be statistically inferior to others. We don't live in a perfectly rational world, live with it.
Yikes.
...ion.
Evolution of a system like Wikipedia..... some would argue that wikipedia is of intelligent design and not evolution.
So just where does one place the divide between the concepts of evolution and creation?
Perhaps it just the game of abstraction physics, the changing of meaning of abstract words or the application of abstract words in different and sometime seemingly conflicting ways.
Wikipedia is all about putting together strings or sequences of abstract words.
The physics about it is the hardware it operates from and the actions applied in using it. But the abstractions are only representations of concepts, ideals, etc, ultimately stored in binary form compatable to the hardware and in such form not very meaningful to us humans but accessed by us at the higher level abstraction of "words" that define meaning of words and terms.
So.... there is the God Ape (unlike the ape god) who has evolved to be a God Man... ????
Can us humans separate the abstract from the concrete (physical world) without de-evolving back to ape? Of course not!
There is no divide between god the abstract and evolutions the concrete recording of the results, they are symbotic.
But physically there is also some evidence that our current life form genetics program was manipulated to be what it is today, with intent by a different genetically programmed and intelligent life form. Should such manipulation be so hard to imagine with our now known ability to do so ourselves, or is it the other life form that is hard to accept?
Such Genetic manipulation ability would not be possible to comprehend and communicate, without development of abstractions.
What do other animals think or perceive of man in comparison to themselves (more advanced?) such as dolphins, apes, lions, tiger and bears, etc...
There is a part of me hoping this article gets discussed by Dilbert creator/evolution denier Scott Adams, and another part dreading it. link
And I don't mean it as an offense, this being /. and all ;-)
According to TFA, the "Wisdom of Crowds" WRT Wikipedia is: "If I can't do better than this, I won't touch it". So, the very definition of the "Wisdom of Crowds" (and I agree with you that "Wisdom" is a very innapropriate term) is that "an active minority drives the inactive majority".
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
For pointing out that Europe is THE only intellectual/sane (something like that anyway) place on this planet (somehow the other continents were left out)
/flamebait
Expecting Europeans to know about the public acceptance of evolution or ID in Asia, Africa or Australia is optimistic at best. Just as expecting Americans to know how the rest of the world thinks about it. I personally don't know how ID fares in Asia, but I do hope they in general reject the pile of crap that is ID.
I think the main problem with people's understanding of evolution is the fact that it is not taught very well in schools, and people get the strong idea that evolution is a random process. I also think it is a problem with the timescales involved, which are hard for the human mind to grasp.
How do you think Windows ME was written?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
What is happening today to the common man is that he/she is getting immune to technology, which leads us to the possibly false premise that the lay person understands technology any better than say, evolution. Given this assault of seemingly illogical and complex information (which completely undermines a person's ego, mind you), religion provides a very convenient framework to make life simple, seemingly secure, and less fragile. Religion is hence, more of a survival tool for a society that shields away a person's insecurities. For that matter, that is the reason why societies and families formed in the first place, which is to increase the probability of our survival and proliferation. For the common man, religion and society practically mean the same thing, and hence interchangeably attribute the positive aspects of one with the other. This is also why they are willing to put up with the restrictions and rules of religion, just as we do for society's laws and restrictions!
7% of US adults classify as evangelicals (2004) (see Evangelical category for more information)
38% of US adults classify as born again, but not evangelical. (2004)
37% are self-described Christians but are neither evangelical nor born again
Atheists and agnostics comprise 12% of adults nationwide. (2004)
11% of the US population identify with a faith other than Christianity (2004)
s/Christian/Muslim/g okay, so we know that the 2002 poll polled everyone (americans) while the 2004 poll only polled adults. For those that didn't catch that (2002!=2004), I'll say it again, these are two separate polls.
Now, knowing that they are 2 separate polls, the author implies the breakdown of that 85% (into 7+38+37). This doesn't work because they are 2 polls.
Now that we know line 1 has nothing to do with the lines following, we must assume that the numbers add up to 100, right? Wrong, 7+38+37+12+11=105%. Okay, so now that we know some people fall into 2 categories.
Also, take note of how the original poster doesn't align atheism with the rest of the religions (to imply that there are more atheists than "other").
- Figures don't lie, but liars figure. - Samuel Clemens (alias Mark Twain)
Of course, the above poster had some Bush-bashing, so he gets modded up. Goddamn Slashdot.
I thought the second voting was rigged, wasn't it?
Here in the UK very few people have any trouble at all accepting evolution as a likely theory for the development of species including humans
It scares us that so many Americans do
The UK has less trouble accepting evolution - we also have more trouble accepting religion -
"The comprehensive professional research in 2006 by Tearfund found that two thirds (66% - 32.2 million people) in the UK have no connection with any religion or church". Even those that do have (IMHO) often have little or no belief in the churches ideals and often attend out of social and class trends and peer or family pressure.
Those who do accept their beliefs (my guess is between 1 and 5% ) do so with a zeal that matches any American church, and can be equally unaccepting of any evidence of evolution.
That does not strike me as being a great goal for an encyclopedia, even one which uses WP's rather odd definition of that word.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Does this mean understanding, or being in agreement with? If the latter, the overall argument becomes suspect for possible logic holes due to incorporating the author's personal bias into it, irregardless of the truth or falsity of Darwin's theory.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Awesome reply. I think you got to the heart of what I was attempting to get across. When given a question whose answers can be skewed over a median value the crowd is likely to have some level of success as shown by the "Ask the Audience" lifeline of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. However, when the question at hand comes to something requiring a level of debate or complex thinking the crowd model breaks down completely and leads to biases, defense of an idea, and a variety of other factors that affect human debates.
For the record, I think Wikipedia is an awesome resource. It generally is factual on a given topic and often has insightful concepts which transcend cultures. However, it's not really an indicator to me of the Wisdom of Crowds because it is not a "crowd" that maintains it, but a small group of intelligent and strongly invested editors.
The digg commenting system would be probably the best example of the wisdom of crowds.
I have to add, I was taught evolution and Darwin's theorey while attending a Catholic school. Later on in life I found that most people who had a problem with religion and evolution were those who weren't religious. In fact it almost seems as if certain parts of the evolution crowd want a conflict where none exist. Anything which does not totally bow down to their view is only because of religious objection.
I was getting lots of laughs watching the issue over the wording of the textbook warning that was implemented in Cobb County, it was so damn neutral it offended both sides. To me there was nothing wrong with because I am safe in my beliefs.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The idea that 5 million dumb people guessing is better than 5 smart people planning.
The only reason people do not accept Evolution is because they cannot believe that apes are our brothers. Partly because of mis-placed egotism, and mostly because of religion. After-all if we were made in "god's image" to "rule over all beasts", then it Evolution is an unacceptable concept.
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
If I'm reading this correctly, the reason that religious folks reject evolution is the exact same reason why leftists reject free markets and are champions of central planning. One side is a God figure and on the other, that figure is subsumed by an all-wise, all-knowing State that will run things. Both have no faith, to use a loaded term, in the wisdom of the masses. Iiiiiinteresting!
/// Not a super-genius . . . yet. ///
> 2. The content of the wikipedia is controlled more so than most people think. There are editors, there is peer review etc.
Every person who hits the edit button is an 'editor' in Wikipedia lingo. 'You edit, so you're an editor'. Ditto for peer review.
Your statement is highly misleading.
> 3. You don't find a million slightly varying copies on a single topic which are then "naturally selected"
Not in parallel but sequentially.
> How is this in any sense similar to evolution?
Because it hill-climbs.
Take this paper:
Fogel, L.J., Owens, A.J., Walsh, M.J. (1966), Artificial Intelligence through Simulated Evolution, John Wiley.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Disregarding your incorrect assertion that Darwin's theory says "meaningful information emerges from randomness", have you stopped to think about the timescales involved? We are talkng about BILLIONS of years vs 50 years of computer programming. Invent a computer that can last for a billion years, switch it on and let cosmic rays change its memory state occaisionally, build in some "selection" mechanism that retains viable bit patterns and sit back...
Art is the mathematics of emotion
Are you kidding me? Calling Darwin's theory a theory of random mutation show how little you understand of it, because you emphasize the wrong half of his theory. There's basically two parts about Darwin's theory: (1) mutation and (2) selection. Most people consider the first one as most important, but nothing could be further from the truth than that. It's SELECTION that is the keyword here. The mutation part is merely the "fuel" that feeds the selection "engine". In fact, the mutation doesn't even need to be random at all. Let me say that again:
... to have a Darwinian evolution at work. It doesn't have to reflect the biological method of evolution at all. At its core you only need (1) mutation (2) selection. Once you have that, you have Darwinian evolution. I believe it was Richard Dawkins who coined the term MEME to apply Darwin's theory to cultural evolution! Though it is has entirely different mechanism than biological evolution, it still consists of mutation and selection. Not all variants work equally well though: sexual mutation seem to work better than asexual mutations , cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution, because the latter can only pass information between generations what is very slow. The evolution of mankind in the last few thousands of years are mostly cultural driven.
The mutation in Darwin's theory does NOT have to be random!
Although random mutation is perhaps the most effective way compared to its complexity. It surely is the most simple way for nature to "implement" it. And most of the time it results in very good "fuel". About your example: although the mutations are made by intelligent designers, some designs are rejected and some accepted (to be built further upon). The mutations are not random, but the selection is still in place. That's good enough.
So if you don't want to call Darwin's theory a theory of evolution, call it a THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION instead.
Keep in mind: you do not need DNA, big gene pools, parallel mutations, sexual mutations,
How can something "evolve" from having a water breathing system into an air breathing system? Did it just grow the extra parts needed in one go (improbable), or did it learn from the other creatures that tried and died (impossible to do, and why can't lemmings fly by now)? If it grow the parts over several generations, then how did it counter-act Darwin's law of natural selection (Oh look, I have these extra parts that I don't need, and it makes swimming hard, but please don't kill me because my son will walk on land!)?
That is the biggest problem, which is always over-looked by the Darwin crowd.
Posted AC as I know I'm going to die from the negative karma overload.
The concept of the crowd thinking what the media tell it to think is one of the most insightful and important in this discussion, IMHO. Too bad I don't have mod points today!
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Actually, there's ample evidence that the universe really does work that way. As long as there's a situation where more energy is pumped into a system than leaks out, such as occurs in the Sun-Earth model, spontaneous organization into complex systems occurs frequently. You can illustrate this yourself with a grid of lights and a few very simple on/off rules. The rules on the grid are analogous to naturally-occurring limitations to environmental processes.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
There, I fixed the Subject for you (was "wisdom of crowds"). I don't think there are too many crowds in other countries that think Saddam was connected to 9/11.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
I don't consider religion per se to be "the problem." Millenarianism, dispensationalism, and the other rapture-centered -isms are the problem. If the religion of most Americans was of the 'love your neighbor, be humble, be nice' variety, I'd have no problem. I'd still think they were a wee bit loopy for thinking that Jesus talked to them, but I'd keep it to myself and just go along to get along.
But the "The End is coming and ain't it grand!" crowd is a pain in the neck. They're arrogant, self-righteous, cruel, pushy, and ignorant. The Rapture would beam a lot of our social problems right up with all of the believers. I hope it happens soon, because we can't take too much more of this kind of Christianity.
You seem to incorrectly assume you need multiple mutations at once to apply natural selection on. This however is not true. All you need is mutation (that even doesn't need to be random) and selection. There are no further conditions, although of course some "variants" work better than others, depending on the application. For example, in biology sexual mutations result in faster evolution than asexual mutations. For the last couple of millennia, mankind's evolution is largely cultural driven instead of being a biological evolution. Simply, because cultural evolution is much much faster. Let me rephrase that mutations in Darwin's theory don't even need to be random. If you can "aim" your mutations in a beneficial direction, your success rate of finding a such one will be much higher than if you "uniformly distribute" your mutations. Compare it to Monte Carlo integration: if you can draw your samples from a distribution that roughly resembles the integrated function, you will have a much better result with less samples than by using a uniform distribution. So about wikipedia. Are there mutations? Yes, although not exactly random, most of them are "intelligent" mutations, by which I mean that most edits will be "aimed" at being a good mutation. This way, we need less mutations to make real progress. Is there selection? Of course, not all edits are good edits and that's where selection kicks in. All edits are evaluated, and if they are good, they have a much bigger chance to be accepted.
Wow. That's incredible. You sound like the guy wondering where his life-forms are in his peanut butter.
Evolution is a cumulative construction derived from the most successful, or least harmful, traits of the progenitors. Single-celled lifeforms had offspring that vary slightly. If those new offspring are even slightly more successful than their counterparts (who are also varied, but differently), then their traits go through to the next generation, as they reproduce more successfully. Repeat for a few billion years, and you end up with us. It's not difficult to understand.
Evolution is nothing BUT tremendous labour. It didn't happen overnight. A chimp didn't give birth to a walking, talking, human being any more than an amoeba produced an allosaur.
We've demonstrated in the lab that a species can seperate and cease to be able to inter-breed, based solely on thier environment changing. The same species of fruit fly, split into two groups, one fed on starch and the other glucose, after many generations become two different species. They can't breed together, they both act and look differently.
So to sum up, it's not difficult. I grasped the concept when I was a kid.
First, I could happily take my positions on my faith and say that Darwinian evolution is how God accomplished what God accomplished.
But as I examined things, as best I could, it became apparent that Darwinian evolution rests not on observation and experiments. It rests on philosophy. There has to be a naturalistic cause, therefore there is a naturalistic cause.
So when people from the ID or creationist camps, say things like X cannot be produced by a step-by-step naturalistic process the response is an appeal to structures that are lost to time or just-so stories.
That's when I realized Darwinism is unfalsifiable. Any data can be incorporated into the paradigm. There is nothing that could be discovered in a biological organism which would make a Darwinist say "random mutation and natural selection can't explain that."
So before convincing me it is true, tell me how it can be falsified. And don't confuse evidence for common descent with evidence for rm+ns.
Also, I have to say the lack of any plausible Origin of Life scenario should be troubling to a Darwinist. The comeback that "evolution only deals with pre-existing life" is silly, because naturalism is what is at issue. If naturalism falls, the foundation of dogmatic Darwinism falls as well. Which brings me back to the main problem with Darwinism, it rests on philosophy and question-begging.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
... with living things you twit! Not inert material.
Is a byte a living, developing thing?
Will it somehow profit from being a different set of bits?
Will it profit from interaction with other bytes?
What will cause it to mutate?
Even if you implement a mutation system - how will a spontaneous "Hello world!" program profit from being a "Hello world!" program compared to the sea of random bytes it is surrounded by?
At best, your explanation is like complaining that a pile of sand does not "evolve" into a sand castle. Or a pile of glass bottles. Or microprocessors.
Programs are not some magical creatures made out ob bytes living in a computer.
They are just algorithms presented and implemented through a electrical device. They would work just fine on paper if correctly written.
And there would be the key to the fallacy of your idea.
If you are going to give the inanimate (and incorporeal) thing like a algorithm attributes of a living matter - you can plainly see it evolve.
From a simple algorithm, to a more complex one, losing the parts it does not need and acquiring new parts that it does need for survival and procreation.
And how does it procreate?
By using human minds (or any other inteligent and thinking minds).
Its a parasite, like all ideas. It needs to be shared for it to live on.
So, if it is a good algorithm, you will implement it, show it and teach it to others. And it will live on and continue to develop.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It seems to me that without knowing beforehand what the program is going to be (in which case this becomes an extremely slow method of writing programs), the only way to select is to keep attempting to run the "program"
So God created Wikipedia!
Pat Robertson said what he said, and was condemned by many Christians. How many prominent Muslims have openly condemned the contract on Salman Rushdie's life?
Yes, the Bible contains a lot of violence, and yes, many Christians say they believe "every word," but in reality they aren't going to kill their kid for reading a book on Wicca. Well, there might be one nutjob out there who would, but every other Christian would consider the thought horrific. You don't see Christians in Colorado City stoning people to death for adultery or for breaking the Sabbath. How many are stoned to death in Muslim nations?
There are Christian nutjobs, and some have been caught with nerve gas, bombs, whatever, but the fringe of the fringe of the fringe of Christian zealotry is not comparable, size-wise, to the support the suicide bombers find in the Muslim world. I'm an atheist and I'll argue all day that faith undermines rational thinking, that Christianity doesn't make you moral, and that we should keep US society secular, but it is just vastly wrong to conflate the scale of violence perpetrated by the faithful of each of these communities qua their faith. Violent rhetoric isn't violence.
I'm not saying Christianity is violence-free. There IS violence (Matthew Sheppard getting stomped to death, etc) but it isn't as prevalent, sanctioned, or, well, normal as it is in Muslim nations. I'd say that religious killing in the Muslim world is probably as frequent, if not worse, as race lynchings were at the ugliest point in US history. No, I don't have the numbers to support that, but I think the scales are similar.
It's not easy to understand how random mutations are not more detrimental over the long haul than they are beneficial. Changing bits at random in computer programs -- which are much more simple than DNA (something Darwin didn't know about) -- is rarely going to evolve a good feature like a spell checker. Even if it did, changing things at random in the spell checker would more likely destroy it than it would evolve support for new words. Evolution also doesn't seem to take into account layered subsystems. The subsystems are introduced to meet a need, but must exist completely before they meet the need (like a complete disk I/O interface in the kernel). It's not that easy to understand how evolution could move back and forth from low-level subsystems to high-level ones across boundaries. For example, the Structured Interpretation of Computer Programs videos have a strong emphasis on this layering -- why don't they teach evolution, where there are no clear boundaries? There is a lot of design labor expended to create even the simplest implementation of CAR and CDR.
Read this.
Next!
Definitely not intended as flame bait -- just an observation of how evolution doesn't seem to work when applied to computers. Even "genetic algorithms" are not evolution in the strict Darwinian sense, because people intentionally design algorithms and then let them compete. For this to be truly genetic, the algorithms themselves would have to evolve.
Genetic algorithms are designed and implemented by intelligent programmers who intend to apply them to a given problem, and then allowed to compete. The name is misleading since they do not evolve using the mechanism of evolution (random mutation), although once they are viable and working they compete with natural selection.
Let's ignore for now the fact that you seem to have a serious conceptual misunderstanding of what evolution is and just deal with your computer example. The computer game of life is a very good example of starting with a random pattern, applying a few simple rules, and ending up with objects that behave in non-random ways. so, yes, order can emerge from disorder in computers, just like it does in biological systems.
http://mrsquid.blogspot.com/
"Wisdom of Crowds" systems produce good results because there is a feedback loop, and elections don't have that feedback.
To sift the wisdom from the noise, there has to be some method of determining which are 'good' inputs and which are 'bad'. With Evolution, the feedback is easy to understand, bad mutations die/fail to breed/whatever, good ones get more food/sex/whatever and are more likely to reproduce.
An election has no such feedback. There is no good method of looking at the individual inputs from the results and pruning out the bad ones or promoting the good ones. Nobody gets to change their mind and alter their vote when they see the results, because for each election, the candidates change. The crowd isn't able to look at Bush v Gore and apply the results to Bush v Kerry, because Gore != Kerry. Only once in the last hundred years have the candidates been rematched (Eisenhower vs Stevenson in 1952 and 1956), so only one has meaningful feedback been applied... and even then it's not very good feedback as the first election was Eisenhower vs Stevenson and the second was President Eisenhower vs Stevenson, which is a different case even if you don't look at increased age, policy shifts, running mate changes, etc.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
(Agent K - MIB)
I often think about this quote and find it to be quite true...
cat
And in one way or another, we're all atheists. Is the world worse off because people don't believe in Thor anymore?
Wait, back up. People have attempted to give religious justifications for ethics, but that doesn't mean that ethics depends upon religion or anything like that. See, e.g., here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Detrimental random mutations, such as making a bug glow a colour its predators can see more easily, are picked off by nature itself ("survival of the fittest", with "fittest" meaning "most suited", as in "fit for a purpose"). Using the analogy of bits and bytes is not good for one thing, as DNA is not a blueprint, but a recipe. Richard Dawkins also explained that - the level of abstraction between our genotype and phenotype is far more substantial than DNA itself. Evolution in biology doesn't deal with entire features appearing at once, but gradually, with each gradual step having some benefit, no matter how slight, to the organism. We're not talking about suddenly having a kid who's 8-feet-tall and can fly, but one who's slightly stronger which gives him the edge when hunting something needed for survival, or who has a slightly improved immune system. DNA is essentially a feedback loop, with one gene changing how others work, where one switched gene can affect hundreds more. It's trial and error, but not in a random sense. Once a bad mutation has appeared, it's quickly removed, and the good ones are spread more widely than the benign ones, so you have a system where good genes are spread more than benign ones, and benign ones are spread more than malign ones.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God
That's simply not true. This charge has been parroted by the anti-religious people, and it completely ignores the historical record.
Let's compare the post Roman world to the pre-Roman world. Prior to Christianity, the world believed in conquest without justification. IF someone had more stuff than you, you sent in an army and took it. Then you brought home a bunch of loot, and were rewarded for it. Look at all the Roman celebrations of conquest - called "triumphs." In the ancient world - if the people were not of your country, it was desirable to kill them and take all of their stuff.
Julius Caesar was no bible thumper, but under him, the Romans practiced a particularly vile form of ethnic cleansing in Gaul. Imagine the outcry today if someone wrote a book bragging that they killed over a million people. That is what Caesar did, and it made him MORE popular, not less. And then there all the lesser cultures that have been wiped our destroyed. Read about emperors of various ancient empires having all of the children killed, burning cities to the ground, and so forth. It was the advent of religion and the idea that people had souls which ultimately drove the idea that everyone had some sort of natural rights.
Similarly, Islam spread as quickly as it did in the middle east because of its promises of fairness and lower taxes to the people.
Both religions, carrying with it a divine proposition against killing, act as a natural brake against social forces that otherwise glorify it.
The last time we had an organized group of people that held the ancient view of empire, we called them the most evil people that had ever lived. The NAZIs didn't kill out of a belief in God - rather, they just felt that conquest and ethnic cleansing were part of the natural order of things, and they fused ancient roman values with modern ideas about evolution to back them up. Even today, extreme racists reject christianity (particularly in American prisons), precisely because of its moral condemnation against genocide and other racial killings.
This is my sig.
Personally, I think Biblican inerrancy is totally untenable since the Bible isn't even internally consistent. But, if you are a Biblical innerantist, then Creationism is an obvious consequence.
Here is another evolution-like wisdom of crowds system, called Picbreeder. It is an Interactive Evolutionary Computing (IEC) system, where users choose the images that they like to spawn the next generation. When the user is satisfied with the image, he or she publishes it to the site. Then, any other user can continue to evolve the image. Many of the images, after passing through a few hundred generations, and a dozen or so users' hands, end up looking like real things (e.g. faces, cars, animals).
...not to mention human jawbones and teeth, are all undergoing measurable change in our lifetimes. Hell, the germs are changing measurably in just a few years. Hybrid plants plants used to be developed by the intelligent guidance of natural selection. Things change. What's so hard to understand about that?
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
"What do other animals think or perceive of man in comparison to themselves (more advanced?) such as dolphins"
on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
Simply put, most of the world is filled with dumb asses of some flavor or another. America in particular? Howso?
A nation of poorly educated dumb asses does not put a man on the moon. They don't unleash the power of the atom. They don't lead the world in developing software and computer hardware. They don't have F22s and robots running around Mars.
Just saying we accomplish a lot of cool shit for being as stupid as you would suggest.
Who really knows how religion came to be? The theory cited by the poster above is an old, old one that has been losing credibility since William James's day. Anyone who's curious about this would do well to check out the chapter in The Varieties of Religious Experience on mystical experience. Given research showing that certain types of mental disorders, most notably seizures of various types, can lead to experiences of the divine and that these experiences now can be induced, it might well be that the human frame is simply predisposed to this type of experience and that religion is an after-the-fact attempt to explain what is a powerful and puzzling experience. Further studies of so-called altruistic behavior in humans and animals suggests that there well may be evolutionary benefits in what we call moral or ethical behaviors. My apologies for not providing links and references.
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... that's why it works. In addition, improvement through random events, driven by survival of the fittest, provides no explanation for how DNA first formed. Based on the evidence, a "scientifically minded" person must conclude that the current "scientific" explanation is lacking. BTW, comparing Wikipedia with random mutations has three drawbacks. First, very few edits are "random". The posters intend, at least, to add intelligent content. Second, a bad edit can be corrected without killing the article. Third, "good" additions and corrections are made by people who are both intelligent and informed.
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You can't take the sky from me...
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
When will people start understanding the difference between evolution and creation of life?
Ah yes! Silly me...
They first need to understand both individually so that they can notice the differences.
Sorry... sometimes I just forget that I am talking with humans.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
"Wisdom of Crowds" is a catchy but misleading name for a particular kind of generalized darwinian selection, and I would argue that elections do fall within it and that they do have a very strong feedback mechanism, such that variations in the options offered in subsequent elections are largely based around mild shifts from the successful variants in previous elections.
Sure, it may not produce optimal results in terms of the policy outcomes that many people deem "desirable", but then, biological evolution doesn't tend to produce a natural utopia, either. Each system evolves according to what is rewarded and punished in the environment in which it operates.
What distinguishes systems in which the "Wisdom of Crowds" is praised as useful from elections is not the presence of a feedback mechanism in the latter (as that is present in both), but the close tie between the feedback mechanism and some narrowly-defined, specific, objective utility measure. Its not that that elections don't strongly select for certain features -- they strongly select for the ability to win elections in the particular political system in which they are conduct. Its just that what they select for isn't the kind of thing people are looking for when they are discussing the "Wisdom of Crowds" most of the time.
Granular, of course.
What religion DOES seem to do is to delimit and integrate extended groups and help members recognize each other. During periods of environmental and social stress it offers a degree of coherence that encourages "wise" generosity within the group. It may reduce conflict between group members. In smaller, traditional cultures, religion and culture were effectively coterminous. Small city states and village level societies had individual sects or secret societies that the members participated in. The modern Pueblo tribes are good examples of this. Once empires and multicultural nations begin to appear so does "revealed" religion. The modern major religions all have their origins here. You can argue reasonably that the spread of revealed religion is an attempt to integrate smaller societies into larger ones by forcing or persuading them to "convert." You will note that during recent declamations, our glorious leader GWB has employed terms like "crusade" to the detriment of our national interests overseas. At the same time, medievalists among the Muslims have been employing parallel language. It can be argued that religious missionaries conduct "warfare" at a level short of outright conflict [to paraphrase Keith Laumer]. It is probably no coincidence that the "six" accused of spreading HIV in North Africa were religious medical missionaries. They were almost casualties in an ongoing conflict that doesn't quite burst into flame most of the time.
It's an interesting issue.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I think the reason is simply that many people cannot intuitively comprehend the vastness of time, or at least they don't dedicate the time to really try. My own personal opinion is that for many people the concept for God is simply a placeholder for this line of thinking. Viewed from a typical human's perspective, the time that evolution has taken to produce life as we know it today, is functionally the same as pure infinity. To them infinity is associated with God. Talking to them about "change over time" doesn't make sense, because in their intuitive understanding of time, the time of kings and knights in Europe was extremely long ago. And everyone knows that animals and people were basically the same back then.
To stretch this line of thinking--I sometimes wonder if the United States is not hampered by its relative youth. The entire history of the white culture of this nation fits into about 500 years. Whereas for the rest of the world, 500 years is not that long ago in their history. In places, people are still fighting over things that happened more than 500 years ago.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
We do. Its called Genetic Programming. Its not the typical way to program, but it can be useful in situations where you have an optimization problem that you'd like solved without needing to involve the program's designer in the annoying grut work of manually tuning the program to do it.
Does this mean you just proved evolution correct to your own satisfaction? Good job! Go tell the others.
An often-overlooked aspect of the "selection" part of the theory is that the only mutations which will matter are expressly those which will "mean the difference between life and death". Immaterial mutations don't count.
One big problem with the theory of evolution via natural selection of randomly-generated mutations is how to explain the persistence of supposedly deleterious mutations in a population. If air pollution in England caused peppered moths to rise to 98% of the population at some point, one would presume that there would be a very slow return to light-colored moths now that the air is not so polluted. After all, we've only got 2% of the population from which to "select" light-colored moths.
This, however, has not been the case. The frequency of the peppered moth has declined to 35% just since the 1960s, with a similar rise in the frequency of light-colored moths.
In some respects, then, the predictive powers of natural selection have been proven: moths do adapt to their environment. But the rapidity of the changes create quite a difficulty about random mutations as the source of raw material for selection. I am no biologist, but nothing I've heard our read about the frequency of random mutations indicates that 40 years is enough time for mutations to account for the timing. It seems more likely that the ability of the light-colored moths to increase was already inherent in the population.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
My post was actually an allusion (visible only to me, I admit) to an argument I read once along the lines of "I don't believe in all the same Gods you don't believe in, only I add one more."
"That's pretty much what I tell people when they start preferring religion to science - they are the same thing!"
More precisely, they are both attempts by people to make sense of the world around them.
But they do not work the same way, nor were they meant to.
"Do you really believe God was too stupid to create a universe that didn't have to be held together with magic? Studying science is studying God's work, and thus you are in fact learning about God."
I read a rather eloquent way of saying the same as the above, though I forgot who I'm quoting: "Religion tells us about what God did. Science tells us about how He did it."
The problem with the above is that religion and science should and were intended to offer different answers to different questions. They fulfill different needs and expectations in the way that reason and faith do or the way philosophy and spirituality do. None of the aforementioned pairs are truly opposites any more than science and religion because they too are human endeavors to extend limits of ideas that aren't always so tangible or approachable to everyone.
Unfortunately, there are those on both the faith/religious side and on the reason/rational side who either can't or won't tolerate other world-views that well. These are the folks who have good intentions, but they end up applying answers found in their faith to questions better left to science (think "creation museums").
The other side of this paradigm is more common on Slashdot where we find really good "reasons" not to believe in God and "proof" to back it up.
It's not as if Wikipedia somehow suddenly appeared on the internet without an Intelligent Design. It actually has a very Intelligent Design, that of allowing multiple intelligent creators to create the same articles together.
What, exactly, is evolutionary (as in formed by random chance processes) about Wikipedia? Do the bytes randomly change and form new words and then people decide which ones to keep? No. There are new creations which other people decide which ones to keep.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
"Macro"-evolution is micro-evolution plus speciation.
Wikileaks, no DNS
You forgot mice.
And we already know the dolphins are just grateful for the fish.
It *doesn't* seem counter-intuitive at all to me (none of the given examples do). Why does this affliction disproportionately affect Americans, and not, say Europeans? I don't buy the argument that people believe Crazy Thing X because they don't understand Scientific Fact Y. There's lots of physics that I don't understand but it doesn't lead me to believe in smurfs or unicorns. If anything this affliction is not due to the "counter-intuitiveness" of the fact, it's due to some predilection to fantasy. How much more "intuitive" are the fantastical notions of religion? Since most of them are entirely unsupported by empirical observation I find them all "counter-intuitive".
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
See here.
That said, there's plenty of evidence for "microevolution" over short spaces of time. There's also evidence for speciation (two groups diverge so that they can no longer produce fertile offspring with one another); these two together make for "macroevolution".
Calling evolution "random mutation evolution" is actually a misdirection, for it is selection that is the essence of evolution, in just the same way as breeders select for traits in animals; random mutation simply gives the opportunity for evolution; it is not the driving force.
Wikileaks, no DNS
The point of the article seems to be that religious belief makes acceptance of evolution more difficult. I agree that the need to fabricate gods to explain unknown phenomina is hardwired into humanity. This probably has something to do with our love of a good story. As far as not intuiting evolution, most people just don't think at all. The best example of sysem evolution in my memory was the old Napster. You could see the poor quality or incomplete files diminish.
His netflix is very similar to a standard methodology called Self Organizing Maps (SOM). It's cool to implement because it is automatic. You can use it to map 3 or more dimensions onto 2 dimensions and look at it. The output also changes depending on how you start it. Map the same data set in reverse or some other order and you end up with different clustering. You can use it to solve a problem as the author described. Or, you can use it to simplify complex input before you feed it into a further model, neural net, or whatever.
Please, please, please do not go around stating that game theory and the Nash Equilibrium are even remotely related to evolution, given that neither game theory or the Nash Equilibrium are about evolutionary processes in any way. And don't even get me started on how both game theory and especially the Nash Equilibrium have been shown as wildly mismatching the behaviour of actual humans, much to the disappointment of those that repeatedly try to apply game theory to all sorts of inappropriate problems, failing every single time.
Which couldn't possibly be explained by the fact that most Muslims live in poor communities & authoritarian countries, at least one of which (Saudi Arabia) encourages (through its schools) this kind of thinking, in an effort to keep the royal family in power?
In my experience as a citizen of the USA, Muslims that I know are no more likely to support violence against "unbelievers" than are the Christians that I know. In any culture, it's the poor and powerless males that tend to commit the violent crimes, be they terrorist in nature or not.
And, if you think the USA hasn't had it's share of religious-based terrorism, just look at how the Mormons were treated in Missouri, for example. Killing, raping, and driving several thousand people out of the country because of their religion doesn't sound like peaceful Christian behavior to me. But, now that the USA is a richer country with more opportunity, that kind of thing doesn't seem to happen anymore.
Unfortunately, he does not let us edit the text so we're all forced to read his use of "fairs" instead of "fares". His ideas are left tarnished rather than our being able to polish them.
"What people think in India is largely irrelevant to me."
Then you're a moron. They aren't irrelevant, even though you like to pretend they are.
It's clear from your post you're just a "Europe is great, fuck the rest of the savages on this planet" troll.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
There is a book written in 1841 by Charles Mackay titled "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". It describes some "bubble" markets, such as the Dutch Tulip Craze (when people would invest their life savings in a tulip bulb, only to see the market eventually crash) and then goes on to describe other non-market crazes.
The book is frequently referenced in discussions of investment strategy, especially so-called "contrarian investing", which often makes money for its followers. The contrarian investing principle can be summarized as being that when the crowd overwhelmingly agrees on something, go the other way.
The book describes market behavior at least as well as Adam Smith's "unseen hand", and may also well describe other aspects of crowd behavior. I had never heard of the "wisdom of crowds" before this posting, but I have heard of the "madness of crowds" for many years.
You're a poor liar. Even in your opening statement, you couldn't resist mentioning that you ultimately hold your God to be the driving force behind the evolution of life. In other words, you never truly accepted evolution in the first place, as a natural process and not as something needing a God of the Gaps to fill in the details. Your "Darwinian" adjective was also a dead giveaway as to your true position.
Again you are lying. You haven't examined anything at all, except perhaps your own prejudices. Even a cursory glance at the most basic of evolutionary texts would show that the entire field is widely supported by both observational and experimental evidence. Empirical data can be had in bucketloads, experimental data can be gathered from sequences and by observing actual evolution in action in the lab. With evolution, there is no philosophy, there is only data. Great mountains of data, all pointing inexorably towards a "naturalistic" conclusion.
Lost to time? The intermediary structures required by evolutionary theory are almost all present in creatures that exist today. Even your precious eye can be seen in forms ranging from primitive to sophisticated in creatures throughout the world. Far from being lost to us, these structure are on display for any who cares to go looking for them.
Why do you lie? You never accepted evolution in the first place. Your dressing up your objection with words like "unfalsifiable", but you really have no idea of what they mean, or why you are incorrect in applying them to evolutionary theory. You have no idea of the history of the theory and how for many years scientists had no explanation, and in many cases, still have no explanation for how certain organs and system evolved.
Falsifying evolution is easy. You just have to go out there and find a lifeform that is totally unlike any other on the planet, and which has no ancestral record in fossil structure or otherwise. No DNA similarities to other lifeforms, no prior evidence for the creatures existence, and sufficiently complicated strictures or systems that could never have evolved by a secular migration process. Found any yet?
Darwinist, "naturalist", "philosophy". You make it sound like the guys come from a humanities department. They don't. Evolution is researched and tested by scientists, who apply the scientific method to better understand the world we live in. In the words of XKCD, It Works, Bitches. You don't have to
May the Maths Be with you!
"You realize that "most" people aren't in "western" nations don't you? That chart ignores the Middle East, South America, Canada, Africa, Australia, and that little scrap of land called Asia."
I don't see how that's a problem as that is exactly the same thing that the OP did when he talked about "most" of the world.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Karin Wolff, the minister of education in Hessen, a German state, is a creationist. She succeeded in pushing the lessons about the theory of evolution to a later point. Biology lessons are optional at this later point. Most Germans are not even aware that this happened. I only happen to know it because a friend of mine is a teacher.
A more appropriate term for (1) is "variation" (implied by selection). Mutation is simply one (drastic) way of increasing variability; genetic crossover, for instance, is another.
This isn't right. While there's no issue with abiogenesis (for which there really is no conflict), there is an issue with the idea that God created humans with no precursor (i.e., in His form). It's the idea that humans evolved as a continuation of the ape family that sticks in the craw of most creationists. The two are mutually exclusive.
Often, no such distinction (that is, between "abiogenesis" and "evolution") is made in these arguments.
" Well, no . Japan, Holland, Canada, and a slew of other nations have a lower instance of religious belief, and a lower rate of crime, lower infant mortality, etc."
...and higher suicide rates. ...Japan and Canada anyway.
"Even within the USA, the Bible Belt states (actually the Red States in general) have higher infant mortality rates, lower productivity rates, higher crime rates, worse education systems, along with being worse-off in a range of other criteria."
Congratulations to NYC, Chicago and Los Angeles! You are now "Red, Bible Belt states". ;-)
"It isn't a stark difference--I'm not saying they're in the dark ages--but the difference is easy to spot if you look at the data."
Just for a moment, imagine that we live in a world where numbers don't tell the whole story.
...and then snap out of it. We're already there.
"And in one way or another, we're all atheists."
...as is each and every tree, rock, and banana slug are all atheists too. One significant difference is that they have no doubts about their atheism. ...even when they near the end of
their respective existences.
People are supposed to be different because of what we believe and the small matter of being capable of believing at all.
...not because of what we do not believe.
"Is the world worse off because people don't believe in Thor anymore?"
Not that many people believed in Thor to begin with. It's a rather smaller number today, but they might even have a website.
Apollo on the other hand... There was a thunder god.
"Apollo on the other hand... There was a thunder god."
I'm always getting Apollo confused with Haikili for some reason.
Actually, genetic algorithms generally do evolve using random mutation.
Their initial state isn't created by random mutation, but (even ignoring the error in characterizing biological mutation as necessarily random), neither is the initial state of life in evolutionary theory; evolutionary theory explains the divergence from the first life to the present diversity, not the emergence of the first life.
The name isn't "misleading" if you understand evolution.
You can campaign for Sharia Law in the UK, you are about as likely to be successful as I am at campaigning to the next President of the United States, maybe less if that is actually even possible.
The fact is that in Europe, Europeans are a majority and most of us a not the most devout muslims you are likely to meet. We like being decadent. We like drinking alcohol. We like doing so many things that Sharia law forbids that there would have to be such a huge a cultural shift that I cannot even imagine what this country would look like afterwards.
Speaking as Brit, even if the rest of Europe adopted Sharia Law, we would probably opt out all European institutions completely and re-target all our nuclear capabilities at Paris, Germany and Brussels.
A few of British people would probably support this already we are rather stubborn when it comes to home rule. (For evidence of stubborn attitude, see "Second World War" or "Battle of Britain" in a reference book or something, you should be able to find it)
Aside - I hope your post was flamebait, (I bit) otherwise you are one deluded individual. Judging by your website it probably is but I always enjoy a good rant about religion and I have karma to burn.
I dont read
Evolution by natural selecton isn't the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator. The story of Creation as given by the Old Testament follows the form of Hebrew poetry. And the author of it clearly could not have been at the point of Creation. Those who say that the author was somehow inspired to write the exact sequence of events of the creation of the world by God such that they would be exact are... well, putting things into the Bible that aren't there. Trying to apply scientific logic to fails even in the absence of evolutionary theory, given that there is day and night as early as the first day, but no sun until later. Only the dim-witted would consider the Creation myth a literal retelling of the story of Creation.
The theory of Evolution, our growing understanding of our universe and how we apply it are, if anything, fulfillment of Genesis 1, verses 27-28: "(27) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (28) God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'"
So it's hardly accurate to call Evolution a strong argument against an OT-type Creator. The text of Genesis 1 itself is the strongest argument against Creationism, but hardly any argument at all against the existence of a Creator as the Bible describes.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Young Earth Creationists can claim that their interpretation is derived from neither a literal nor an educated interpretation of the Bible. Creationism is ultimately anti-Biblical. But it's taking that silliness to an extreme to then say that Evolution somehow is an argument against the existence of a God.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
it should have been.
believe it or not, the average macro-evolutionist supporter and the average christian suffer from the same problem - a total lack of being able to think critically about what they are being taught.
this is why the average macro-evolutionist and christian are both wrong.
christian theology doesn't even remotely resemble the teachings of the bible. eternal death is the fate of those who KNOWINGLY reject god, not eternal life in hellfire. read the bible, it couldn't be more clear. heaven is not the reward of the saved, rather, jesus returns to earth and resides on mt zion.* read the bible and see for yourself. third, this is not the only age where salvation can be offered. read the ezekiel 37 that depicts a physical resurrection and offer of salvation for people currently dead.
traditional christian theology is wrong, wrong, wrong on these three issues and many more. you see, the taught never critically think and evaluate what they are taught against the EVIDENCE. "hey, these smart theologians study this stuff, so they must know what they are talking about, right?" the pharisees studied more and got the main points all wrong, so that paradigm is totally false.
the average macro-evolutionist supporter has done the same thing. i should say, failed to to do the same thing - think critically.
the issue with macro-evolution is that there is a totally unexpected dearth of evidence to support it, when there should be a mountain of evidence to support it.
look, there are over a million species, yet not a single "down chain" transitionary species can be identified as living today.
that's "ofer over one million." why the 100% extinction rate of down chain transitionary species? cats and dogs don't have the exact same "survivability index" and survive fine together. why couldn't a "one off" (distinct enough to be viewed as different) species survive alongside the current "end point" species? for example, if a person evolves a third eye in the back of his head, why would all two eyed people have to go extinct? that's is what macro-evolution DEMANDS given ZERO living transitionary species.
IT. MAKES. NO. SENSE.
now, you've probably never thought of this before - which proves my point. you, just like the christians you bash with such fervor, have shut down your critical thinking abilities just as many of them have. as my kid would say, "like, like."
why is a 100% extinction rate reasonable considering the REQUIRED billions of transitionary species that led to the millions of current "end point" species we see today.
maybe there is an explanation for it, but i want to hear it because it is entirely counterintuitive, IF such and explanation even exists. if it doesn't, well... that's a big problem that ought to be addressed with the same vigor as the macro-evolutionist ad hominem attacks. well, if one actually thought that thinking and analyzing are important endeavors, anyway.
there isn't a single transitionary fossil that couldn't reasonably be a distinct species. NOT ONE. maybe, maybe not. we don't know is the honest answer that the arrogant can't grasp.
note, i'm NOT saying transitionary fossils don't exist. i'm saying they can't be reasonably proven.
for example, archaeopteryx is always one of the first fossil "proofs" given for a transitional species. i enjoy quoting macro-evolutionist honest peop
Sexual selection is a very important pressure. Ostriches are a good example of an organism whose evolution has been driven more by sexual selection than by predation. So, the first point is that a mutation that is not deleterious can still be selected for or against by the mating process. And conversely, a harmful mutation can persist in the gene pool so long as it is not too harmful to prevent mating and reproduction.
Another aspect of this is that a mutation that is initially neutral or even positive can end up being harmful, or vice versa. This can occur due to changing external conditions, but it can also happen because of other changes to the genome over time. These types of traits might be called exaptations, cooptions, etc. But the rapidity of the changes create quite a difficulty about random mutations as the source of raw material for selection. I am no biologist, but nothing I've heard our read about the frequency of random mutations indicates that 40 years is enough time for mutations to account for the timing. It seems more likely that the ability of the light-colored moths to increase was already inherent in the population. The second key point is that genetics is far more complex than a series of yes/no gene instances. The potential interactions between genes can mean that some are more rarely expressed than others (you may have heard of dominant and recessive genes). Thus what can happen is that a wide variety of physical variations are present from generation to generation. Changes in the genome result in differing rates of occurrence, and then on top of that differing external conditions produce different adult populations. It's certain that over the last 40 years each generation of moths has produced both white and dark moths. But because of differing external conditions, more of the dark ones made it to adulthood 30 years ago than do today.
Of course it's even more complex than that, because those changes in adult populations will of course lead to changes in the gene pool. But the key point is that evolution is not a yes/no process at the gene level. Just because a gene is selected against, does not mean it will disappear and then have to be re-created by a fresh mutation. More often it is a question of varying rates of expression.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I find this article laughable, as the author inadvertently makes a great case against his own arguments. The problem is that in each example, there is design behind each success. Whether its the design of the wiki of wikipedia, or whether its the PhD working on the Netflix problem, either way there is a designer at the core of the solution.
Sure they are using are vast variety of input, but the input isn't random, its also from "intelligent" sources, we aren't talking about a bizillion monkeys creating the wikipedia, or accurate NetFlix predictions made by random input. So, these arguments are not arguments for evolution if you believe in Intelligent Design, but rather quite the opposite.
An atheist obviously will accept the evolution argument more readily because he's not allowing himself the simple solution.h
That's one crucial difference between science and religion: everything the Pope says is religiously significant, whereas a scientist's statements only matter to the degree to which they can be tested and supported. Even most scientists are unwilling to consider the possibility that *gasp* if evolution be true, not all races are created equal, and that some might be statistically inferior to others. Scientists are quite willing to believe all sorts of things, provided they can be objectively proven. They're just not willing to take someone's word for it.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Evolution is inclusive. That is, all living things evolve together. This link between all living things can be strong, as in classic examples of e. coli and our gut, or weak, such as environmental affects such as oxygen organisms, or other organism which have an affect on our habitat. But you can't really say one living thing is "more" evolved than another living thing. My point is this, comparison of Wikipedia to evolution should be more like, comparing wikipedia to some species, compare information to evolution. First, evolution is the survival of information. There is only one test. If the information (DNA/RNA) becomes corrupted or if an environmental change makes the information non-applicable, than that information can cease to survive. Simple, if the information doesn't describe a path to survival, development, and reproduction of itself, then there no use in keeping the information around, and in fact, there is no mechanism to keep it around. There is no choice involved, it simply disappears. That's not to say all of the information in DNA/RNA is applicable to development and survival. There are many examples in human development of "useless", or perhaps, "unknown uses" such as gill slits, tail, appendix, etc. Evolution is about the survival of information. This information is how to develop and from a single cell, survive into an adult which can pass the same information on to their offspring. And what a collection of information when we consider there aren't that many basic blocks, easy less than a hundred varieties of usable atoms. And so called bad information can be, and is pass to the offspring. But the important point is that he "thing" which is surviving is the information. Diversification is really just another mechanism of survival. But survival is the test which is final, no reproduction, no more information is saved, end of story. Its difficult to understand just what drives evolution. Mutations happen, but they are not the force behind evolution. What about crossover, symbiosis, or even the fact we are diploid. If we accept modern information theory, then in order to move information through time, as evolution suggest, then a energy must be involved. Wikipedia has no test. It might hang around for a long time, or it might not. But I know of no test which fatally deletes inaccurate information in Wikipedia. Wikipedia represents knowledge, and just one little collection of knowledge and it is not unique. If wikipedia disappears, there are still other sources of same knowledge, just as if a species disappears, there are still other species with most (99.9%) of the lost information. The question on how does knowledge survives is an interesting question applied to Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is a small mechanism for knowledge flow, information and survival. There is no requirement to accept a species and there is no requirement to accept wikipedia.
It is well known that combining weak classifiers makes a good one. The prediction markets maybe if we stretch Wikipedia goes in that direction. I am not sure about evolution part though.
Just my 2 cents.
Except teapots don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they're disbelieved.
Play Command HQ online
As Carl Sagan pointed out "Human beings are like butterflies who live for a day and think it's forever."
What people really have trouble grasping, is a number like 1 billion years. Change in nature happens so slowly that we don't notice it at all.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Near the end of the article, the author states the following:
OK, so he's a Continuous Evolution (CE) man is he? Well... no.
Let's have a look at the model he created for the Netflix prize.
Ah, so a change in the environment results in several iterations of rapid adaptation, followed by a period of stability, followed by further rapid adaptation when another change is introduced. So he's not a CE man, he's a PE man: Punctuated Equilibrium.
Inconsistency 2: Wikipedia vs meme theoryIf memes exist, then fundamentalism is a family of memes, ocurring in a number of religions. If we take the standpoint that Darwinian evolution exists, then in fundamentalists we have a crowd that holds a falsity to be true. If the crowd can hold a falsity to be true then a truly open-edit policy should result in the democratic "truth" being an actual falsehood.
Furthermore, all other evolution is divergent -- how does the author feel that he can turn this on his head and create a convergent evolution? No, evolution adapts to an environment, and Wikipedia's environment is people, not truth.
Not one to miss a dig at Dawkins, me, so I'll finish by saying I find it quite funny the number of people who've been convinced by Dawkins' words, but internally reject his science as the tripe it is.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
... Thus spoke the creator: "Truth will triumph. It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we're right back where we started from."
* Galloway Gallegher, in "The Proud Robot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)
found finally at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Truth
CC.
FYI: "A writer who seems to have fallen into obscurity these days is Henry Kuttner. He died young and his reputation has been eclipsed by the writers who came after him. But both on his own and in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore he produced some of the funniest stories I have ever read. Some have been collected -- though long out of print Robots Have No Tails occasionally surfaces in second hand bookshops. Make it your business to seek it out. It contains all the stories about Galloway Gallagher, a man whose subconscious is a brilliant scientist. When he is sober he is just an ordinary person, but when roaring drunk his subconscious takes over and makes the most incredible inventions. The stories concern the efforts of a hungover and very repentant Gallagher trying to figure out just what he's built this time. Why, for example, could he possibly have built a robot with a transparent body? And having done that, why did he make it so vain that all it wants to do is stand in front of a mirror watching its cogs go round? To find the answer to that conundrum, read The Proud Robot." (c.f)
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
> 2. The claim is not "some people who happened to be theists also did bad things", but rather that "people did bad things in the name of their religious belief". If you want to counter that, you need to show how someone's lack of belief caused them to do bad things.
I think that the Stalinist purges and repression in China both qualify. They both see theism in general as something to be wiped out and it's not hard to find out that religious folks were a significant contingent of those "undesirables" they purged.
If you need more documentation, there's plenty available on who all was getting purged under Stalin and why. There's also plenty of information about what's going on right now in China. I believe the US State Department has reports on it which should be available via a bit of Googling.
Someone else pointed out that Stalin once studied to become a priest, but he sure as hell abandoned that later on. Hitler I wouldn't use as an example of an atheist, sorting out his real beliefs from his politics is a mess, but in at least one citation I'm aware of, he claimed to be using religious prejudices to advance his cause and hoped that Christianity would later die off naturally, even though he didn't want to kill it actively (he was too busy playing people off against one another). More than anything, Hitler was into eugenics and the alleged supremacy of his 'race'.
If it somthing people know about, and they are given a multiple choice, simple arithemetic shows you a crowd will be correct
If is something influenced by the question - like an election - the prophecy is self fufilling
IF it is somehting people don't know, on avg, like how to find answers to multidimensional spinor equations, or if it is somehting unknowable, like the stock market, peoples opinions are worhtless, or worht then worseless.
as for the evolution thing, no one ever lost money underestimating the american voter (mark twain or mencken)
That is, it is quite universal (and, humane thereby) that people look for strong parent figures; whether from individual leaders, or orgnizations (churches, socialistic governments etc).
I must say that's been a while I didn't read a so typical "argumentation" from a creationist. So typical, with anachronisms, lies, misunderstandings, reference to the bible but certainly not any scientific paper or book ... so refreshing !
I really thank you for the laugh !
Evolution has only demonstrated minor incremental changes under "live" observation. It would help the cause if something complex walked out of a test-tube. True, evolution is too slow for that, but there's nothing like demonstrating a process from cradle-to-grave if you really want to convince people.
Table-ized A.I.
People aren't too bright in general. Questions that can't be answered with a 'yes' or 'no', up or down, good or bad ... such questions befuddle people. The great mass of people are binary beings. One or zero. The concept of evolution offers them no benefit and may well cause them a headache. There are institutions- religion, military and prison which serve to make decisions easier for these people.
I used to rent rooms to college students. All through the house I installed dimmer switches for the lights. I find that I need different amounts of light at different times and in different situations. The students however, one and all, were uncomfortable with anything other than on or off. Even intelligent people are often uncomfortable with anything involving shades of grey. No political candidate is going to say "I will evaluate all sides of the issue and get the best advice I can, and then I'll respond with reasonable speed and caution." Can you imagine Schwarzenegger or Reagan or Bush making a statement like that? Only Carter- and people still despise him for it.
I would guess that Slashdotters live and work among more intelligent people. You may have little if any exposure to the masses in the USA such as you find in small towns in Arkansas, South Dakota or Missouri. You probably have even less exposure to people in Latin America, rural China, or equatorial Africa. You and everyone you know, are among the top 1% of intelligent/aware people in the world.
The examples in Rob's essay all involve more evolved people. Few of the masses I speak of frequent the 'wisdom of crowds' circles that he mentioned. Those wise people are among the elite- yes even the idle movie-goers who need a review before going to the theater. The simple act of going to a theater, or participating in a public spirited group activity expands their awareness and distinguishes them from the masses. These people weigh and consider many factors before making a decision, even a movie choice. While it is good that they are able to do this, it is unfortunate that they sometimes weigh the wrong decisions. For example they may consider carefully their bet on the World Series game and not spend much time considering the upcoming election issues or whether they are drinking too many soft drinks.
As we have seen with the economy, I think there is an increasing gap between the intelligence of the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. Even as Slashdot readers enthusiastically feed off ideas like Rob's, the ignorant are more deeply entrenched in their superstitions. Science & nutrition allow some of us to be smarter than our genes would predict while the human law of survival-of-the-least-fit drags the average IQ even lower than that of the last century.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Another way of looking at it is that there is a set of all people. Some of those people believe in God--they are theists. Everyone else is an atheist. Some of those atheists posit that there is no God, some consider the idea unknowable and call themselves agnostics, and some have never enountered the idea, but they all lack theism, and so are atheistic.
I don't like the word agnostic, because I think it's silly. Are you agnostic about The Flying Spaghetti Monster? Agnostic about Thor? The invisible magical elf under my bed? No, you just don't believe, because there's no reason to believe. I'm as agnostic about God as I am about the Easter Bunny.
If you want to posit that religion has nothing at all to do with the criteria tracked by the study, then I'll agree with you. But to admit that religion has nothing to do with morality undermines the position that believers take every day, and that I have to listen to ad nauseum. Is that the position you're taking? You (and many others who object to the implications of this study) seem to want it both ways--when you think the data is on your side then you think that religion has an awful lot to do with morality, but when the actual data undermines your conclusion, you become a born-again skeptic with a curiously strong fixation on discrediting the very correlation that you previously had such confidence in.
Dictionaries are all over the place on this issue. I'm not saying language is so elastic that we should nod knowingly when someone uses the word dandelion to refer to a tricycle, but the word atheism is so fraught with controversy that we should really be trying to figure out what a particular person is saying, rather than trying to force them into using the definitions we're most comfortable with. Being a medic and using the word apnea to mean "not breathing," and knowing that theism refers to a belief in God, I figure that atheism is a lack of theism, as apnea is a lack of breathing. I'm not calling myself agnostic, because to me it's just a word meant to make people feel better.
"The Earth's people evolved into a world of mixed beliefs... The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples."
For this discussion, note that I use the word "evolve" in the (abused) context of "gradient descent" and in the biological context of "selection pressure acting on random mutations".
You say "evolved" in past tense, as if the process of moving toward some state is finished and acyclical. Using your examples: what if the system were still moving toward "all Christian" or toward "all atheist" or toward (*GHASP*)an intermediate state? It would be just as easy to make a claim that our state of beliefs is in flux, but there is actually reason to believe it.
Even though the case above looks like two equally unjustifiable claims, let's be kind and imagine that your hypothesis is true, and we are at a steady state of mixed-belief. There's still a better explanation that its optimality: the same mechanism that drives "biological" evolution. Even if there is enormous selection pressure toward a certain state, that selection pressure needs something on which to act. That's the random change, the background noise; the turbulence that's left even in a "steady" state. It's the very reason life forms evolve at all. Even if society reaches a steady state of belief (not claiming it can/will or can't/won't), we know for a fact that there is dissent because that's how it reached steady state in the first place.
The notion that a mixed system of beliefs is optimal is absurd because
1) that model does not successfully predict the direct observations we have (society is becoming more secular)
2) our direct observations are turbulent enough that convergent models are tenuous anyway (does society, in general and not just in specific, become more secular as time goes by?)
3) we would expect a mixed system of beliefs even if selection pressure were very strong toward a monoculture.
No, the mixed-belief world does not appear to be "fittest" at all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I cannot comment on the other areas of comparison from this article, but how is Wikipedia an analogy for Darwinism? Wikipedia is the result of a creator who, along with a team of others, regulate the beast. If Wikipedia started out by accident with absolutely no help from the outside, then I would agree with the article. But, if anything, such analogies give credence to a Creationist viewpoint more than Darwinian. Of course, if you don't believe in a God, then it can't point to any such thing. But the least we must admit is that the analogy fails on so many points that comparing it to any aspect of Darwinism is a stretch to say the least.
My opinion is my opinion. Since my comment was not disagreeing (nor, indeed, agreeing) with your post, I don't need to re-read anything, thanks all the same.
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.