I'm not sure what you mean by "DNA progression" but DNA itself makes for an excellent - practically ironclad - argument for common descent.
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones[1]) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution.
Now, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected - that of DNA. This really is a "text" being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees... and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or... common ancestry is actually true.
[1] Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the 'tree' of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.
I can't even understand why science is taught to ALL children, along with higher level maths, when the kids today can barely count, let alone read or speak properly.
Yes, there are problems with the educational system in the U.S. Big ones, even. But that doesn't mean that we should give up on the idea of a well-educated populace. A few hundred years ago the notion of universal literacy would have been laughable, but we have multiple societies today where literacy approaches 100%. I can't help but hear "why should we teach those slaves to read?" in your question, though I know you didn't mean it that way.
(As to your attempt to equate creationism and evolution - well, only one is an 'article of faith' in any reasonable sense, and as to why we should teach evolution more generally, see David Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone". I think you'd find it interesting.)
I used to work for an industrial robot company. I worked on the big arms that carried spot-welding guns around, mostly for the auto industry. Those arms were strong - there was one case where the gun welded itself to the truck frame it was building (as will happen if you don't clean the tips enough) and the robot kept right on going, and ended up tossing a truck body into the aisle when it returned to rest. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
But that incident, among others, spurred work to develop collision detection. They finally got some software running on the DSPs that'd estimate what the current to the motors should be, and measure what it actually was; too big a difference and the robot would halt. And then comes the fun part...
I got to test it.
For six months, my paid job was to take huge industrial robots and bang them into things.
I'm pure software now, and it's fun and pays better... but I still think about those days with fondness.
Then it's like when Gmail goes down - I can't use it. Such outages have happened, but I've managed to miss 'em. Moreover, Steam allows running a game in offline mode, so long as the game and Steam client are fully up-to-date. Can't do that with Gmail.
or when Valve decides to shut it down?
The odds of that happening in the next five years are small enough that I don't let it keep me up nights. By then, if it's a problem, someone will have cracked it. I paid for it, so I won't feel even a tiny pang of guilt bypassing the DRM then.
I pay for games (well, technically, I get almost all of them because I put them on my xmas or birthday lists, but either way, the game is paid for) and I don't pirate 'em. But I have small children in my house and I always use a no-CD hack so I can put the game media on a nice, safe, high shelf. I lost one game to little fingers and I won't let it happen again.
So, this xmas, when I wanted the Orange Box (hey, Portal looks cool), I just asked for it on Steam. No muss, no fuss, I don't need to pop in a CD and I can just download and go. I'm not planning on giving copies to others or anything like that, so what do I care? Sure, there's DRM and such in Steam, but it's not obtrusive and doesn't get in my way. So, why not? Hopefully other game publishers will learn from this.
For games, this kind of model makes sense. For many other apps... not so much. I use open-source for practically everything so I won't have the hassle of keeping track of keys and media and such. Games are basically the only software I purchase anymore.
you don't NEED very many of them for it to happen. You only need... about 19 of them to knock down some buildings actually.
Of course, they didn't do that alone - they were supported by resources from a lot more people. Money, material support, communications and coordination. Reducing the number of pissed-off people does reduce the risk of terrorist attacks. No policy will eliminate them, but overthrowing elected governments to install totalitarian puppet dictators a la Iran isn't exactly calculated to win friends.
(Note: motive is not the same thing as justification. Homicide investigators look for motive when solving a murder, they don't look for justification. The Islamist lunatics are not justified in attacking innocents by our actions, but they are in part motivated by them.)
Not just nuclear power plants, but nuclear rockets - e.g. this one. (The good tech stuff starts in section 7.) With that, we can lift a thousand tons into orbit in a completely reusable and non-polluting craft that even eliminates not only its own nuclear waste but can dispose of waste generated on Earth, too. Using those, we can put up solar-power satellites that send their energy down to Earth in the form of microwaves. (If you've ever played Sim City... forget it. It doesn't work that way, it can be done very safely with large margins of safety. See here especially the section on "Safety".) With the lower launch costs of nuclear rockets, we can make the U.S. a net energy exporter, in time.
This has plenty of military applications, as well. Space is the ultimate "high ground" and a dominant U.S. presence in space should have obvious strategic benefits.
Of course, at the same time we can work on more efficient techniques for utilizing the oil we do need. Cars with better mileage (improving our overall fuel efficiency by less than 3mpg would eliminate our need to import oil from the Persian Gulf), more efficient means of generating and using fertilizers, a bit of thought about how we use plastics, etc. Even better, we can sell the technology we develop to other parts of the world - further reducing world demand for oil, driving the price down. The lower the price of oil, the less funds the Islamist fanatics have to work with, and the less of a threat they pose. (Reducing oil prices also impacts people like Hugo Chavez, as a bonus.)
(Not that, realistically, Islamist fanatics pose an existential threat to the United States. They can harm us, certainly, and even cause a relatively large amount of damage, sometimes. That's not the same thing as posing a threat to the existence of the United States. For perspective, more than 30 times as many American citizens have died in traffic accidents since 9/11 than have died in 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Obviously I'd focus a lot more on preparedness for terrorist attacks rather than just going insane and throwing out civil liberties to try to prevent them. That'd help against natural disasters like Katrina, too.)
Palm and Windows smartphones...both at first where also non-programmable (yes they where and anyone who says otherwise is a liar)
What, exactly, do you mean my 'non-programmable'? Developing Palm applications is quirky but not particularly hard, and I'm not aware of any Palm phone ever that wouldn't let you load third-party apps. The vast majority of the apps I use each day on my Treo 650 are third-party.
Do you mean the phone functions themselves aren't programmable? Maybe that was true at the introduction of the early Treos, I didn't have one. Even those would take third-party apps for other functions, though. Nowadays there are multiple applications that add phone and SMS and other functions, and the API is available. I have a hard time believing that the Windows side is much different.
You can do a lot by proper moularization and resuse... On the other hand, it is possible that MS is not large enough to develop a new operating system with the fature profile they wanted Vista to have. It may in fact be impossible today to write an integrated OS with these features, because of complexity.
That's exactly why Vista was such a cluster (and not the compute or failover kind). Microsoft can't modularize, strategically. They ran into trouble with Internet Explorer way back when, and ended up dispersing its functions across a bunch of unrelated modules so that it was impossible to remove and still have the OS boot.
They've been adding complexity while, at the same time, increasing the incestuous and promiscuous interrelations between their components. OSX & Linux and most other sane operating systems break things, insofar as possible, into unrelated modules with limited and defined interfaces. (See, e.g., here.) That's because humans can't manage a 50+ million line codebase without strict modularization. Microsoft discovered about halfway through Vista development that even their huge resources couldn't overcome exponential growth in complexity, so they had to throw out much of what they'd done and start from scratch with significantly more modest goals.
I've said before that Vista is Microsoft's "PS/2" moment. IBM discovered that they couldn't take back the PC market. They came out with the PS/2 and the Microchannel bus - and fenced it 'round with patents, and wanted to charge big bucks for others to play there. Third-party companies and consumers failed to beat a path to their door, and used alternatives like EISA until the roughly-as-good PCI came out. Microsoft figured they could just dictate where the PC market would go, too... but the alternatives are getting to be (frankly, have gotten) 'good enough' for the majority of purposes.
The hardware market changed out from under them, too... we picked up a $450 Dell desktop last year, because it was (or should have been) enough for my wife to run the MS Office she's hooked on. It came with Vista Home Basic and we could not believe what a pig it was. I dropped it back to XP at her demand and things are much nicer. People don't spend thousands on single computers anymore, and they badly misjudged the hardware requirements of Vista - it takes a $2000 computer to run well, from what I've seen.
Then there's the whole DRM fiasco... it's a 'perfect storm' for MS. They'll ride it out, like IBM did, but in ten years MS will be one option among many, not the colossus astride the PC market.
I routinely dream that I can fly. And at least 90% of the time when I'm in a dangerous situation in a dream I just teleport away from it. Sometimes I just time-travel, or pop over into an alternate universe...
Personally, I believe that we are on a track towards a divergence in our evolution.
Not without some kind of reproductive isolation. At most, we might get a ring species, but physical and social mobility is high enough now that I... strongly doubt it. Hell, the much greater reproductive isolation experienced by humanity during the ~100,000 years of the Stone Age wasn't enough to generate separate species! How could it possibly happen now?
Eric Raymond wrote, in "The Art of Unix Programming": "The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction."
The product I work on at work features all three. It can be 'interesting' to maintain sometimes. That being said, it's frequently possible to rewrite sections and management sometimes listens to the programmer types and has let us restructure things sometimes. For example, we've mostly gotten rid of the RPC stuff.
When I want to satisfy my urge to work on good, clean code, I do some open-source work. Open-source tends to have that, because nothing else tends to work for very long.
the ship would only be able to acheive extremely small accelerations before the uranium began escaping it's vortex and getting into the exhaust stream owing to bouyancy
Un, no. Please actually read the article I indicated. The hydrogen stream at no point mixes with the UF6 gas. It flows along the outside of the quartz containment vessel.
it doesn't specifically mention the worst case (and quite possible scenario) that the fission rocket blows up somewhere in the atmosphere
Well, "quite possible" is a relative term. As noted in the article, this is a very conservative design, well below theoretical limits. With that much thrust, you can afford a bunch of extra safety measures, like the three independent scram measures listed here.
But, actually, it does address the worst case, that of all the fuel and waste getting released into the atmosphere. It's really not that bad.
Will lift a thousand tons to orbit in a reusable and totally non-polluting craft. (Yup, the exhaust isn't radioactive at all.) But it's "nucular", and therefore terrible. Even though we could finally launch a bunch of solar powersats and turn the U.S. into a net energy exporter...
Hmm. Not exactly the specifics I was going for. So, we've shown that reproduction + mutation leads to increasing complexity over a short period of time even in simple, restricted systems. Now, in biology we have more complicated systems that also involve reproduction + mutation (operating massively in parallel), along with vastly longer timescales. But in that case it suddenly doesn't work.
Sorry, not buying it. It's a bit like finding the Lorenz Attractor in a simple model of the weather, and then claiming that real weather, which is even more complicated, could not display that kind of behavior. On the contrary - we would know that weather would be capable of behavior at least that complicated, and probably much more so.
Just for grins, what - specifically - is different about biology compared to the computer programs here that makes the results inapplicable? If anything, biology has a lot more room for variation, larger space for trials, and better error tolerance... but perhaps I'm missing something.
We've observed 30,000 generations of fruit flies and have yet to have one mutation that has added information to the genome.
Well, not exactly.... And here's an example of a transition adding information you can partially test on your own body:
Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
...how does that relate to demonstrating that evolution occurs in a system without a designer?
That's not what the parent asked for - he was asking for evidence that evolution could happen at all. The programs that Minev and Tierra evolve are objectively more complicated and sophisticated than the ancestors, and even contain 'irreducibly complex' parts like unrolled loops, etc.
We don't know how life got started on Earth. Right now, it's impossible to disprove that gods or aliens planted the first cells here. That's a separate question from whether or not evolution happened after that, or whether evolution can happen at all. (But you might want to reflect on this if you doubt the former.)
We must remember that evolution is historical science and we cannot test/repeat what has happened in the past.
How ironic. I just put this up this morning. Back in the mid-1990s, just for fun, I reimplemented Tierra ('ancestor' to Avida) myself, and I detailed the results I found. Finally converted it to HTML. Source code is there, too, if you want to play with it. Vanilla ANSI C, should run on practically anything/
Basically, you've got little programs that compete to survive. No other fitness function, just: do they reproduce? You get parasites, optimization, and other such things. The little suckers figured out features of the instruction set I implemented that I hadn't thought of.
But there have been no more terrorist attacks on the US during that time.
There were eight years between the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. How many years has it been since 9/11/2001? Oh, right, just over six. We might actually have some evidence that the current policies are working if we were to go, say, 1.5 times as long between al-Qaeda terrorist incidents on U.S. soil, to allow for statistical variation.
Slashdot Mirror
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones[1]) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution.
Now, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected - that of DNA. This really is a "text" being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees... and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or... common ancestry is actually true.
[1] Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the 'tree' of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life.
Yes, there are problems with the educational system in the U.S. Big ones, even. But that doesn't mean that we should give up on the idea of a well-educated populace. A few hundred years ago the notion of universal literacy would have been laughable, but we have multiple societies today where literacy approaches 100%. I can't help but hear "why should we teach those slaves to read?" in your question, though I know you didn't mean it that way.
(As to your attempt to equate creationism and evolution - well, only one is an 'article of faith' in any reasonable sense, and as to why we should teach evolution more generally, see David Wilson's "Evolution For Everyone". I think you'd find it interesting.)
But that incident, among others, spurred work to develop collision detection. They finally got some software running on the DSPs that'd estimate what the current to the motors should be, and measure what it actually was; too big a difference and the robot would halt. And then comes the fun part...
I got to test it.
For six months, my paid job was to take huge industrial robots and bang them into things.
I'm pure software now, and it's fun and pays better... but I still think about those days with fondness.
Then it's like when Gmail goes down - I can't use it. Such outages have happened, but I've managed to miss 'em. Moreover, Steam allows running a game in offline mode, so long as the game and Steam client are fully up-to-date. Can't do that with Gmail.
The odds of that happening in the next five years are small enough that I don't let it keep me up nights. By then, if it's a problem, someone will have cracked it. I paid for it, so I won't feel even a tiny pang of guilt bypassing the DRM then.
So, this xmas, when I wanted the Orange Box (hey, Portal looks cool), I just asked for it on Steam. No muss, no fuss, I don't need to pop in a CD and I can just download and go. I'm not planning on giving copies to others or anything like that, so what do I care? Sure, there's DRM and such in Steam, but it's not obtrusive and doesn't get in my way. So, why not? Hopefully other game publishers will learn from this.
For games, this kind of model makes sense. For many other apps... not so much. I use open-source for practically everything so I won't have the hassle of keeping track of keys and media and such. Games are basically the only software I purchase anymore.
Of course, they didn't do that alone - they were supported by resources from a lot more people. Money, material support, communications and coordination. Reducing the number of pissed-off people does reduce the risk of terrorist attacks. No policy will eliminate them, but overthrowing elected governments to install totalitarian puppet dictators a la Iran isn't exactly calculated to win friends.
(Note: motive is not the same thing as justification. Homicide investigators look for motive when solving a murder, they don't look for justification. The Islamist lunatics are not justified in attacking innocents by our actions, but they are in part motivated by them.)
This has plenty of military applications, as well. Space is the ultimate "high ground" and a dominant U.S. presence in space should have obvious strategic benefits.
Of course, at the same time we can work on more efficient techniques for utilizing the oil we do need. Cars with better mileage (improving our overall fuel efficiency by less than 3mpg would eliminate our need to import oil from the Persian Gulf), more efficient means of generating and using fertilizers, a bit of thought about how we use plastics, etc. Even better, we can sell the technology we develop to other parts of the world - further reducing world demand for oil, driving the price down. The lower the price of oil, the less funds the Islamist fanatics have to work with, and the less of a threat they pose. (Reducing oil prices also impacts people like Hugo Chavez, as a bonus.)
(Not that, realistically, Islamist fanatics pose an existential threat to the United States. They can harm us, certainly, and even cause a relatively large amount of damage, sometimes. That's not the same thing as posing a threat to the existence of the United States. For perspective, more than 30 times as many American citizens have died in traffic accidents since 9/11 than have died in 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. Obviously I'd focus a lot more on preparedness for terrorist attacks rather than just going insane and throwing out civil liberties to try to prevent them. That'd help against natural disasters like Katrina, too.)
What, exactly, do you mean my 'non-programmable'? Developing Palm applications is quirky but not particularly hard, and I'm not aware of any Palm phone ever that wouldn't let you load third-party apps. The vast majority of the apps I use each day on my Treo 650 are third-party.
Do you mean the phone functions themselves aren't programmable? Maybe that was true at the introduction of the early Treos, I didn't have one. Even those would take third-party apps for other functions, though. Nowadays there are multiple applications that add phone and SMS and other functions, and the API is available. I have a hard time believing that the Windows side is much different.
If your post wasn't a troll, it would have some links to support the allegations you make, or at least some arguments in support of them.
I did something a lot simpler, using TCP/IP, and much easier on CPU requirements. (I use it on a 16MHz M68K machine.) See the link in my .sig...
That's exactly why Vista was such a cluster (and not the compute or failover kind). Microsoft can't modularize, strategically. They ran into trouble with Internet Explorer way back when, and ended up dispersing its functions across a bunch of unrelated modules so that it was impossible to remove and still have the OS boot.
They've been adding complexity while, at the same time, increasing the incestuous and promiscuous interrelations between their components. OSX & Linux and most other sane operating systems break things, insofar as possible, into unrelated modules with limited and defined interfaces. (See, e.g., here.) That's because humans can't manage a 50+ million line codebase without strict modularization. Microsoft discovered about halfway through Vista development that even their huge resources couldn't overcome exponential growth in complexity, so they had to throw out much of what they'd done and start from scratch with significantly more modest goals.
I've said before that Vista is Microsoft's "PS/2" moment. IBM discovered that they couldn't take back the PC market. They came out with the PS/2 and the Microchannel bus - and fenced it 'round with patents, and wanted to charge big bucks for others to play there. Third-party companies and consumers failed to beat a path to their door, and used alternatives like EISA until the roughly-as-good PCI came out. Microsoft figured they could just dictate where the PC market would go, too... but the alternatives are getting to be (frankly, have gotten) 'good enough' for the majority of purposes.
The hardware market changed out from under them, too... we picked up a $450 Dell desktop last year, because it was (or should have been) enough for my wife to run the MS Office she's hooked on. It came with Vista Home Basic and we could not believe what a pig it was. I dropped it back to XP at her demand and things are much nicer. People don't spend thousands on single computers anymore, and they badly misjudged the hardware requirements of Vista - it takes a $2000 computer to run well, from what I've seen.
Then there's the whole DRM fiasco... it's a 'perfect storm' for MS. They'll ride it out, like IBM did, but in ten years MS will be one option among many, not the colossus astride the PC market.
I routinely dream that I can fly. And at least 90% of the time when I'm in a dangerous situation in a dream I just teleport away from it. Sometimes I just time-travel, or pop over into an alternate universe...
Not without some kind of reproductive isolation. At most, we might get a ring species, but physical and social mobility is high enough now that I... strongly doubt it. Hell, the much greater reproductive isolation experienced by humanity during the ~100,000 years of the Stone Age wasn't enough to generate separate species! How could it possibly happen now?
Well, you could read the section where the quote appears, and the previous section where some of the problems are laid out.
The product I work on at work features all three. It can be 'interesting' to maintain sometimes. That being said, it's frequently possible to rewrite sections and management sometimes listens to the programmer types and has let us restructure things sometimes. For example, we've mostly gotten rid of the RPC stuff.
When I want to satisfy my urge to work on good, clean code, I do some open-source work. Open-source tends to have that, because nothing else tends to work for very long.
Still thinking of chemical rockets...
Un, no. Please actually read the article I indicated. The hydrogen stream at no point mixes with the UF6 gas. It flows along the outside of the quartz containment vessel.
Well, "quite possible" is a relative term. As noted in the article, this is a very conservative design, well below theoretical limits. With that much thrust, you can afford a bunch of extra safety measures, like the three independent scram measures listed here.
But, actually, it does address the worst case, that of all the fuel and waste getting released into the atmosphere. It's really not that bad.
Will lift a thousand tons to orbit in a reusable and totally non-polluting craft. (Yup, the exhaust isn't radioactive at all.) But it's "nucular", and therefore terrible. Even though we could finally launch a bunch of solar powersats and turn the U.S. into a net energy exporter...
Sorry, not buying it. It's a bit like finding the Lorenz Attractor in a simple model of the weather, and then claiming that real weather, which is even more complicated, could not display that kind of behavior. On the contrary - we would know that weather would be capable of behavior at least that complicated, and probably much more so.
Just for grins, what - specifically - is different about biology compared to the computer programs here that makes the results inapplicable? If anything, biology has a lot more room for variation, larger space for trials, and better error tolerance... but perhaps I'm missing something.
Well, not exactly.... And here's an example of a transition adding information you can partially test on your own body:
Lay your fingers on the side of your jaw. Now, trace along the edge up to the very top of the jawbone. Notice how close your fingers are to your ear canal. Inside the inner ear are three bones, the ossicles: malleus, incus, and stapes. They are carefully arranged to transfer sound energy from the eardrum to the cochlea as efficiently as possible. How could such an amazing mechanism arise? (One that's been cited, even, as 'irreducibly complex' - just Google around a bit.)
It turns out that a classification of dinosaur called the therapsids had two jaw joints. The therapsids are known (by several independent lines of evidence) to be ancestral to modern mammals... and we have a basically complete fossil record of the gradual transition of one of those jaw joints into the modern bones of the inner ear. Note that intermediate steps were all advantageous, though not as efficient or optimized. Some transitional forms did help amplify sound energy but didn't work while the animal was chewing. We still have problems with that under some circumstances (try to listen to someone while eating celery) but the separation is far more developed now.
See a useful illustration of this here.
That's not what the parent asked for - he was asking for evidence that evolution could happen at all. The programs that Minev and Tierra evolve are objectively more complicated and sophisticated than the ancestors, and even contain 'irreducibly complex' parts like unrolled loops, etc.
We don't know how life got started on Earth. Right now, it's impossible to disprove that gods or aliens planted the first cells here. That's a separate question from whether or not evolution happened after that, or whether evolution can happen at all. (But you might want to reflect on this if you doubt the former.)
How ironic. I just put this up this morning. Back in the mid-1990s, just for fun, I reimplemented Tierra ('ancestor' to Avida) myself, and I detailed the results I found. Finally converted it to HTML. Source code is there, too, if you want to play with it. Vanilla ANSI C, should run on practically anything/
Basically, you've got little programs that compete to survive. No other fitness function, just: do they reproduce? You get parasites, optimization, and other such things. The little suckers figured out features of the instruction set I implemented that I hadn't thought of.
There were eight years between the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. How many years has it been since 9/11/2001? Oh, right, just over six. We might actually have some evidence that the current policies are working if we were to go, say, 1.5 times as long between al-Qaeda terrorist incidents on U.S. soil, to allow for statistical variation.