In a 5th year AI class I actually did experiments with evolutionary computation, looking at genetic changes which had no affect on the fitness of the individuals.
This sounds interesting but I don't get what you did:
would not the genetic changes that have no affect on the fitness of the individuals depend on how you define the fitness?
While I am unfamiliar with the arguments that most scientific theories are unfalsifiable, I don't have any problem imagining reasonable tests of evolution that are quite falsifiable (but perhaps I am missing the point).
The concept of falsification of a theory along Popper's line is like this:
scientist(s) believing in a theory should put it to a test: make a claim based on
the theory that is not clear to be correct and then test it. Like: Popper was
impressed by the critical approach of Einstein towards his belief that light gets
bent by the gravitation in a very precise way according to his theory, and
an experiment was proposed to test whether this can be seen. The point, to use your
expression, was that Einstein himself was ready to drop the whole general relativity
if the experiment would not find the effect he predicted.
Experiment turned out to work just fine, but that does not mean that it proved that the
general relativity is true. The idea here is that one can keep on with making up
theories, and show that they are wrong with respect to experiments, but never
show that they are true. If one's theory cannot be tested for being wrong, well
maybe that person is just fooling him/herself and others.
Now let's see what happens with evolution. You say:
Here is widely agreed upon tenet of evolution that I think is easily falsifiable: "all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor. There is considerable evidence supporting this hypothesis today[...]"
Let's say that it turns out that all life on Earth evolved from several ancestors. Would that really disprove the evolution? I do not think so. So there is another "point" about falsifiability: it kind of asks from the practitioner to come up with very elaborate tests.
This might be the ultimate spying device: hook up a tiny camera or mike to a pigeon and command it to fly to the window of an embassy, the Pentagon, etc.
Of course, political assassinations via C4 bombs delivered by pigeons might be a possibility, too. Or, biological/chemical agent delivery to otherwise protected areas...
I am having some tiny chills running down my spine.
But how do you generate "the database of invalidated keys"? I mean, "invalidated key" sounds a bit strange: to invalidate a key, company must decide whether the valid key has been generated in an invalid way (i.e became somehow invalid).
How can the database be created? At the beginning, the database is empty, then it gets filled in with some keys (so it is dynamically updated as new pieces of software come out to the market, or over the internet). Sooner of later there will be a key that is both valid and invalid: imagine somebody sharing the key with somebody else or a hacker writing the key generation program without ever unlocking a single piece of software with it. So company now can do some hacking on their own, i.e use the hacker's software to figure out which keys it can generate. They get some list of keys: are these keys invalid? There is no way of telling, because the generated keys can be exactly the same as some of the keys printed on the labels that come with computers from the store. Activation business makes all this even more complicated, because if between the first and the second activation (due to a hardware change) the key from being valid becomes invalid, well what then? Additionally, they can add "genuinity" of software on top of it...
And here is an application of what is Popper's article talking about ("The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A tautology like 'All tables are tables' is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave the most offspring leave the most offspring.")
to "Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word", which
says:
whereas all the articles in the evolutionary genetics journals used the word "evolution," ten out of 15 of the articles in the biomedical literature failed to do so completely.
Is this a tautology? or maybe an almost tautology?
Imagine that someone finds, by scientific means,
that the word "physics" is used much more often in physics journals,
whereas word "chemistry" is used much more often
in chemistry journals. That would be well, as close as one gets to a tautology,
but authors of this article have no time for logical conundrums: they do not
say that the word "evolution" is used less often, they find a failure to do so
instead, and not even that is enough: it is a complete failure.
So let's see how this comes about:
In research reports in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word "evolution" was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes[...].
This means that even when one reads a scientific
paper in such a journal, one can in fact determine whether the article talks about
evolutionary processes even when the people who wrote the article (by definition
experts in the field) do not write that this is the case.
How is this possible?
Other nontechnical words describing the evolutionary process included "develop," "acquire," "appear," "trend," "become common," "improve," and "arise."
Now authors essentially replace a whole set of words with "evolutionary process".
Notice a certain amount of interpretative violence involved in doing so:
How is it possible that two words like "develop" and "acquire", or "arise"
and "trend",... can mean the same thing? In what context? It seems as if the
"evolutionary process" is such a rich, powerful, almost omnipotent concept
that can easily subjugate to itself so many different things, that justifies
one to claim complete failures (as if partial failure would not be enough of a failure)
when one does not use it.
The first sentence of the article is:
The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time,[...]
The matter of fact statement. But, is this the fact?
Do findings of the article support such a conclusion?
Does this kind of analysis matter to authors at all? Nothing is more certain.
This is all perfectly fine with me. The question is what these biochemical
processes have to do with the evolution. This is kind of present in the main
article of this thread: should not biochemical researchers refer more to
the word "evolution" or not in their scientific publications?
Now, if food sources changed again and for whatever reason, the long beak was no longer best suited for foraging, the process could reverse. On the other hand, had the food shortage continued for several more generations, the short-beaked birds would have almost completely been wiped out and the species would now be the "long beaked bird" rather than the "short beaked bird" and would remain that way until an evolutionary mutation changed them again...
but we may as well argue that the evolutionary mutation was not what changed the number of
short and long beak birds in the first place: it was the "disease that struck
their primary food source" (kind of "revolutionary" event) and allowed only the
long-beaked birds to get to the secondary food source. These mutations seem to
require "several more generations" in order to work at all, and the impatient
short-beak birds might as well recourse to the third source of food (I mean not
having the possibility to migrate) instead to wait and dream (that is, have nightmares)
about the day when they would also have long beaks.
In other words, it seems to me that your example explains the evolution as
a process that requires some time towards the steady-state that, however, exactly due to
food shortages and whatnot, may be reached only sometimes, and becomes more
unlikely to ever take place the longer the time period under consideration.
It's easily demonstrable and easily repeatable on small scales. It merely requires a small expansion of your mind to consider it over the long-term.
So, from the standpoint of a mind exposed to movies, how does the flocking of birds to
attack humans from Hitchcock's "Birds" fit into the evolutionary scheme?
This is an interesting link, to a point. Popper recants (as others also
emphasize) his previous
views of the Darwinism. He speaks "always of today's theory", which is for
him "Darwin's own theory of natural selection supported by the Mendelian
theory of heredity, by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes
in a gene pool, and the decoded genetic code." His objection is that
authorities that influenced him see the theory as a tautology, and he proposes
"that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical
research programme" instead. Some additional details on what would that be
are, however, missing, such as the ontological founding of the theory. This
is a severe omission in my view: today, more than ever before would be of
great interest to have ethical aspects of the genetics research reexamined,
and his recourse to metaphysics implies that this is possible to do, alas
without going any further into the subject, for all too obvious reasons.
His previous work was to a great extent influenced also by physics and he says
"really severe tests of the theory of natural selection are hard to come by,
much more so than tests of otherwise comparable theories in physics or
chemistry" [emphasize mine]. One way to read this is to notice the difference
between the two, where Popper (unwittingly) retains his previous views about
the verifiability/falsifiability of Darwinism like in the case of physics,
but implies that there is some additional difficulty in carrying out his
previous program. Not that this is essential, but it does play some role in
the context of the recantation: if he had remorse about possible negative
implications that his previous claims might have on more people pursuing the
Darwinism, well, that is not gonna be sorted out by him repenting (did
somebody say Christianity?), since science is not directed by recantations.
Another somewhat more radical reading would be that he wanted to distance
himself from both the radical negation of the Darwinism and from the pragmatism
by recoursing to metaphysics ("I too belong among the
culprits. Influenced by what these authorities say, I have in the past
described the theory as 'almost tautological', and I have tried to explain
how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology)
and yet of great scientific interest. My solution was that the doctrine
of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme."
[emphasize mine]. He would like then to maintain his intelectual integrity
by distancing himself from the authorities and to have some ethical
position via recantation but without talking about ontology.
it seems that now everything is restated in terms of the "viability of offspring" which
is somehow still not satisfactory, since I still don't know what that would be.
All this being about a mathematician and all,
I could not have not noticed that the story is Hardy's
(and there are some more in his book "Ramanujan: 12 lectures on subjects suggested by his life and work")
All kinds of changes happen to genes. some good, some bad, many just neutral. These changes are being combined and recombined in different ways in the population. Maybe a change in a gene makes an organism secrete a weak poison to which it is not immune. It's negative, but not negative enough to be extinguished from the population completely. Now, another mutation might come along, a protein gets made a different way. It's neutral, unless the organism has the poison mutation, in which case it is very bad: the poison is very strong and kills the organism. But here's a third mutation. This one happens to be slightly good, it helps the creature digest things better. But it also provides immunity to that poison. Now, if all three changes make their way into the same creature, it gets a very big fitness boost from what was a negative, neutral, and only mildly advantageous mutation.
Oh, that's just like mother's milk! You know, it's good for the baby but also bad, for some of the
chemicals found there are apparently also poisonous. As they say: if it does not kill me it
makes me stronger. Not to mention that some poisons are bad for you, but good for me,
or perhaps the other way around. Some are good in a bad way, or neutral in a mildly positive
way. And then combinations of those... fitness can get very big (or small) if you get the
right (i mean wrong, or perhaps neutral) mutations to mutate in (a) (dis)advantageous
combination(s). Add the animals in the mix (cocktail?) and it gets complex alright: in the movie
"Magnificent Seven", at the beginning a group of kids is playing with a scorpion that is
encircled in a ring of fire, so he pokes himself. Were any animals harmed in making this movie?
What if all of this, that is evolution, is so complex that it additionally changes in the
process of change? Is that even imaginably unimaginable process of grasping (to follow
the logic of "Evolution is hard for people to grasp because they have a hard time grasping
how combining very many simple things and processes can make something unimaginably complex"),
for instance depending on the standpoint, or the lack of it.
I hear what you are saying, and it seems to me that you are making a distinction
between genetics and evolution, which perhaps should be more
emphasized. Let me then emphasize a bit:
I have some experience with the use of genetic algorithms (GA) to minimize some
though functions with (exponentially) many local minima, and GA work remarkably
well, that is when properly combined with more standard methods for minimization
of functions.
Now, the trick is that GA are not actually algorithms for minimization at all,
they are sort of a class of meta-algorithms where the cost function (which one
may call as well the evolutionary fitness) can be defined arbitrary, I mean not
even by any formula at all (you can see already how the genetics and evolution get
mixed up).
That's where the things get complicated: I've attended the talk by John Holland
where he was talking about usefulness of GA in "nonstandard problems", i.e to
recognize the "criminally looking" faces: one "simply" "chooses" among the given
set of faces a few, and then let the mutation and crossover give you the next
generation of faces to look at and continue with the quest. To what end
exactly?
Popper's opinion of scientific process would have more force if he had been a scientist.
From the point of view of force, that is relations of forces, the fact that he was
not scientist might be, if you pardon my pun, just as well beneficial, I mean,
more forceful than some naive views of a brilliant scientist who spent a lifetime
doing scientific research rather than researching science.
The real question is not whether the criteria are met but whether the practitioners have the intention of seriously testing their theory by attempting to disprove it or not.
I could almost agree on this with you. (The question I have on mind is how is
the intellectual integrity possible at all in order to do science?)
But ok, let's keep on with intentionality, I mean the serious one (did Popper
seriously intended to label the evolution as pseudoscience as well?)
What is testable is the volumes of evidence that support the claim that evolution is
the simplest method of interpreting and explaining the fossil record
What a fun (and, to make this more complicated, perhaps unintentional?) mix of
Occam, Decartes and Popper (after you have already uncovered barely concealed
objective of Popper in respect to Marx (who was not even a marxist as you
quote--and therefore according to this logic he evaded the critisism of
Popper) and Freud).
Does this mean that whatever happens to organisms/populations is an evolutionary process?"
As far as there is a notable change compared to the ancestral organisms, by definition, yes.
Then we might as well call "a change", or "a notable change" by the name "evolution", and
call pretty much everything an evolution (that is all except the revolution).
Evolution is the observable phenonmenon of changes in the allele frequencies of a given population.
This is kind of the same thing as in the previous quote, just more specific, isn't it?
I mean if there was a certain mathematical law involved in this change of these mathematical
quantities, well that would make it look like physics or chemistry or some other such science.
Or, to be more in tune with your post, what is the "evolutionary fitness"?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that we are already living in the post-humanism. And if the universe is a giant computer, what's its operating system, etc?
Maybe the main server is already down?
Or that human DNA and (illegal) Alien DNA are the same, pornographically speaking.
How about encoding many bacteria with the same code to increase the longevity?
Experiment turned out to work just fine, but that does not mean that it proved that the general relativity is true. The idea here is that one can keep on with making up theories, and show that they are wrong with respect to experiments, but never show that they are true. If one's theory cannot be tested for being wrong, well maybe that person is just fooling him/herself and others.
Now let's see what happens with evolution. You say: Let's say that it turns out that all life on Earth evolved from several ancestors. Would that really disprove the evolution? I do not think so. So there is another "point" about falsifiability: it kind of asks from the practitioner to come up with very elaborate tests.
AS220? oh yeah... I saw some wicked shows there about 5 years ago... highly recommended!
keyboard ever?
You can also try Linux instead.
But how do you generate "the database of invalidated keys"? I mean, "invalidated key" sounds a bit strange: to invalidate a key, company must decide whether the valid key has been generated in an invalid way (i.e became somehow invalid). How can the database be created? At the beginning, the database is empty, then it gets filled in with some keys (so it is dynamically updated as new pieces of software come out to the market, or over the internet). Sooner of later there will be a key that is both valid and invalid: imagine somebody sharing the key with somebody else or a hacker writing the key generation program without ever unlocking a single piece of software with it. So company now can do some hacking on their own, i.e use the hacker's software to figure out which keys it can generate. They get some list of keys: are these keys invalid? There is no way of telling, because the generated keys can be exactly the same as some of the keys printed on the labels that come with computers from the store. Activation business makes all this even more complicated, because if between the first and the second activation (due to a hardware change) the key from being valid becomes invalid, well what then? Additionally, they can add "genuinity" of software on top of it...
Having a little debate with yourself?
Yes, just like in the US.
The first sentence of the article is: The matter of fact statement. But, is this the fact? Do findings of the article support such a conclusion? Does this kind of analysis matter to authors at all? Nothing is more certain.
This is all perfectly fine with me. The question is what these biochemical processes have to do with the evolution. This is kind of present in the main article of this thread: should not biochemical researchers refer more to the word "evolution" or not in their scientific publications?
In other words, it seems to me that your example explains the evolution as a process that requires some time towards the steady-state that, however, exactly due to food shortages and whatnot, may be reached only sometimes, and becomes more unlikely to ever take place the longer the time period under consideration. So, from the standpoint of a mind exposed to movies, how does the flocking of birds to attack humans from Hitchcock's "Birds" fit into the evolutionary scheme?
This is an interesting link, to a point. Popper recants (as others also emphasize) his previous views of the Darwinism. He speaks "always of today's theory", which is for him "Darwin's own theory of natural selection supported by the Mendelian theory of heredity, by the theory of the mutation and recombination of genes in a gene pool, and the decoded genetic code." His objection is that authorities that influenced him see the theory as a tautology, and he proposes "that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme" instead. Some additional details on what would that be are, however, missing, such as the ontological founding of the theory. This is a severe omission in my view: today, more than ever before would be of great interest to have ethical aspects of the genetics research reexamined, and his recourse to metaphysics implies that this is possible to do, alas without going any further into the subject, for all too obvious reasons.
His previous work was to a great extent influenced also by physics and he says "really severe tests of the theory of natural selection are hard to come by, much more so than tests of otherwise comparable theories in physics or chemistry" [emphasize mine]. One way to read this is to notice the difference between the two, where Popper (unwittingly) retains his previous views about the verifiability/falsifiability of Darwinism like in the case of physics, but implies that there is some additional difficulty in carrying out his previous program. Not that this is essential, but it does play some role in the context of the recantation: if he had remorse about possible negative implications that his previous claims might have on more people pursuing the Darwinism, well, that is not gonna be sorted out by him repenting (did somebody say Christianity?), since science is not directed by recantations.
Another somewhat more radical reading would be that he wanted to distance himself from both the radical negation of the Darwinism and from the pragmatism by recoursing to metaphysics ("I too belong among the culprits. Influenced by what these authorities say, I have in the past described the theory as 'almost tautological', and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific interest. My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme." [emphasize mine]. He would like then to maintain his intelectual integrity by distancing himself from the authorities and to have some ethical position via recantation but without talking about ontology.
it seems that now everything is restated in terms of the "viability of offspring" which is somehow still not satisfactory, since I still don't know what that would be.
All this being about a mathematician and all, I could not have not noticed that the story is Hardy's (and there are some more in his book "Ramanujan: 12 lectures on subjects suggested by his life and work")
What if all of this, that is evolution, is so complex that it additionally changes in the process of change? Is that even imaginably unimaginable process of grasping (to follow the logic of "Evolution is hard for people to grasp because they have a hard time grasping how combining very many simple things and processes can make something unimaginably complex"), for instance depending on the standpoint, or the lack of it.
I hear what you are saying, and it seems to me that you are making a distinction between genetics and evolution, which perhaps should be more emphasized. Let me then emphasize a bit:
I have some experience with the use of genetic algorithms (GA) to minimize some though functions with (exponentially) many local minima, and GA work remarkably well, that is when properly combined with more standard methods for minimization of functions.
Now, the trick is that GA are not actually algorithms for minimization at all, they are sort of a class of meta-algorithms where the cost function (which one may call as well the evolutionary fitness) can be defined arbitrary, I mean not even by any formula at all (you can see already how the genetics and evolution get mixed up).
That's where the things get complicated: I've attended the talk by John Holland where he was talking about usefulness of GA in "nonstandard problems", i.e to recognize the "criminally looking" faces: one "simply" "chooses" among the given set of faces a few, and then let the mutation and crossover give you the next generation of faces to look at and continue with the quest. To what end exactly?
But ok, let's keep on with intentionality, I mean the serious one (did Popper seriously intended to label the evolution as pseudoscience as well?)
What a fun (and, to make this more complicated, perhaps unintentional?) mix of Occam, Decartes and Popper (after you have already uncovered barely concealed objective of Popper in respect to Marx (who was not even a marxist as you quote--and therefore according to this logic he evaded the critisism of Popper) and Freud).
Or, to be more in tune with your post, what is the "evolutionary fitness"?