>>>>Bertvan: I find it hard to believe any random mutation might improve any
delicate piece of machinery, much less a living organism, which is many times
more complex than any humanly conceived machine. You wouldn't open up your
computer and invite a monkey to rearrange the pieces, expecting a beneficial
mutation. You suggest that "given enough time" one might occur. We aren't
speaking of infinite time for the evolution of the biosphere. I believe
Dembski's augment is that it is mathematically impossible for such complexity
to have occurred by chance in some four billion years.
>>>Ralph: Letting a monkey dig into your computer and "rearrange the pieces"
is the equivalent of letting someone switch the positions of your heart and
liver. This is gross manipulation of the body form and no biologist that
I've ever read claims this is the way evolution works. This is the
equivalent of the creationists old battle cry: "I haven't seen any cats
evolving into dogs lately". The other point I'd like to make is that, while
it's true that humans are more complex than computers, we are also much more
tolerant of tinkering. We can lose a kidney and keep right on going.
Scratch a hard drive with a screwdriver and you have a non-functioning
computer. We can have anemia and still survive. Cut the computer's voltage
by 5% and nothing is going to work right. We are more complex but the
computer is much more delicate and the parameters for its survival are very
narrow. It would be very hard to find a random mutation that would improve a
computer but the situation is quite different for biological units.
****************************************
DNAunion: Ralph objected to Bertvan's analogy, but then took the analogy to
the other extreme end of the spectrum. Let's take a look.
>>>Ralph: The other point I'd like to make is that, while it's true that
humans are more complex than computers, we are also much more tolerant of
tinkering. We can lose a kidney and keep right on going.
DNAunion: Can we lose a brain and keep on going? Can we lose a heart and
keep on going? Ralph picked something none vital (instead of something
indispensible) to humans. But note what he then chooses for a computer.
>>>Ralph: Scratch a hard drive with a screwdriver and you have a
non-functioning computer.
DNAunion: So here Ralph zeros in on one of the most indispensible components
of a computer. Why did he not choose a sound card, or a floppy drive, or a
Zip drive, or a printer or scanner, or some other non-vital computer
component? Ralph does not maintain parallelism when he chooses his parts
with which to fiddle.
Reaching in with a screw driver to scratch the platters of a hard drive would
also first require the opening up of the system chasis and the dismantling of
the HDA (head disk assembly: a sealed and filtered compartment that houses
the head actuator and platters under "clean room" conditions).
Ralph's hard drive example is analogous to one's digging into a person's
heart with a screwdriver and ripping apart the valves. Would the
operated-upon human still function? No.
But one might object that instead of messing with the "patient's" valves, I
should have just said the "doctor" scraped the heart's tissue. No good -
doesn't maintain parallelism. Ralph claims that scratching a hard drive
results in a non-functioning computer: this is not true. First of all, the
random scratch could affect an unused allocation unit on the hard drive (a
sector-track area where neither data nor code is stored). Seoncd, the random
scratch could affect a mere data file (say an MS Word, MS Excel, or MS Access
file): everything else would function normally. That screwdriver would need
to scratch a vital portion of the hard drive, so a vital part of the heart
must also be affected to keep the analogy consistent.
>>>Ralph: We can have anemia and still survive. Cut the computer's voltage
by 5% and nothing is going to work right.
DNAunion: Computer's can operate within a certaion voltage range, which must
be why you made a fairly-drastic cut of 5%. But cut a person's energy intake
5% below his/her minimum life-sustaining value and the person will likewise
not work right.
Also, computers are actually *better* on this point. If a person loses
his/her energy source long enough, he/she will die (starvation) and will
*never* be able to function correctly again. If a computer loses it energy
supply, it will "die" only temporarily: once power is restored, even if a
full year later, the computer will again function normally.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Dec 04 2000 - 09:36:24 EST