Turkey. You aren't really paying attention to this debate, are you?
If we saw an enormously unlikely event once, we might adopt your argument. But, sadly, with living organisms, we see these unlikely events over and over again. To put it in your terms, if I see a man draw a royal flush once, I might move on with my life. If I see him do it 10 times in a row, I look for a baseball bat.
You are confused. In each of your points:
1) Evolution doesn't have a goal, but the original post doesn't talk about goals. It talks about objective functions, which are dynamic. What you can do is look at an organism and evaluate the odds of arriving at that organism given the mechanisms one thinks account for evolution. This argument in no way needs a "goal" or final state or sense of improvement in the common sense.
2) Dawkins is using a simple example, but that's the problem with it. He shows, as you point out, how the proposed mechanisms of evolution account for cummulative change; the problem, of course, is that these mechanisms only result in cummulative change in separable objective functions. The "fraud" is that these same mechanisms, when presented with a different and more realistic class of objective function, do NOT result in cummulative change. So to the degree you are making in argument, it is non-responsive to the original point.
3) I have no idea what you think this paragraph means in relation to the original post.
Sigh.
Environments (broadly construed) create objective functions. Often, other organisms within the environment are important in defining an objective function for a given organism (e.g., predators and prey, theories that sexual reproduction is a response to viruses, etc.). And objective functions are not fixed; they obviously change through time. Go take a look at the replicator dynamics literature in game theory and the concept of an evolutionarily stable equilibrium.
And learn some math. It helps.
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Turkey. You aren't really paying attention to this debate, are you?
If we saw an enormously unlikely event once, we might adopt your argument. But, sadly, with living organisms, we see these unlikely events over and over again. To put it in your terms, if I see a man draw a royal flush once, I might move on with my life. If I see him do it 10 times in a row, I look for a baseball bat.
You are confused. In each of your points: 1) Evolution doesn't have a goal, but the original post doesn't talk about goals. It talks about objective functions, which are dynamic. What you can do is look at an organism and evaluate the odds of arriving at that organism given the mechanisms one thinks account for evolution. This argument in no way needs a "goal" or final state or sense of improvement in the common sense. 2) Dawkins is using a simple example, but that's the problem with it. He shows, as you point out, how the proposed mechanisms of evolution account for cummulative change; the problem, of course, is that these mechanisms only result in cummulative change in separable objective functions. The "fraud" is that these same mechanisms, when presented with a different and more realistic class of objective function, do NOT result in cummulative change. So to the degree you are making in argument, it is non-responsive to the original point. 3) I have no idea what you think this paragraph means in relation to the original post.
Much of the above argument is made by Stuart Kauffman. Check out http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Bulletins/ bulletin-spr95/12debate.html
Sigh. Environments (broadly construed) create objective functions. Often, other organisms within the environment are important in defining an objective function for a given organism (e.g., predators and prey, theories that sexual reproduction is a response to viruses, etc.). And objective functions are not fixed; they obviously change through time. Go take a look at the replicator dynamics literature in game theory and the concept of an evolutionarily stable equilibrium. And learn some math. It helps.