Re: [asa] Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics Introduction now available

----- Original Message ----

From: Gregory Arago <gregoryarago@yahoo.ca>
To: Bill Hamilton <williamehamiltonjr@yahoo.com>; Dave Wallace <wmdavid.wallace@gmail.com>
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 12:27:10 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] Evangelicals, Evolution, and Academics Introduction now available

Hello Bill,

You wrote: "I was using "trial and error" in the sense that evolution is a process of trial and error."

Would you be willing to reverse this statement: 'trial and error is a process of evolution'? This is important because in my view trial and error is independent from evolutionary thought. T&E is comandeered (one of many seemingly related things, just like 'altruism') to shore-up the legitimacy of evolutionary thought outside of natural-physical sciences. But it makes no sense when human beings are involved, which is exactly what I'm repeating to you. The human-making feature of trying and erring itself invalidates 'evolution.'
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Bill responds
If I decided to solve a problem by throwing dice and using the results to choose the next stage in the solution process, that would be a trial and error process. At each stage I'd select the resulting partial solutions that were in some sense better than the others and use them as the base for the next set of trials. Such a process could be carried out with no human intelligence involved. In nature selection at each stage would be survival. You seem to be concentrating on the humans doing the trials. Nature can do trials and select the results by killing off thee less well-adapted individuals.
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Technology doesn't 'happen on its own.' Gladly, on this we are agreed.
 
You write: "Of course it doesn't happen on its own. Other technologists/inventors/what have you invent it. However, they have little or no knowledge what their inventions will be used for."
 
Shall we call these particular inventors, those who "have little or no knowledge what their inventions will be used for," 'clueless inventors'? Or did you mean that the uses of technologies are beyond their inventors' knowledge, rather than not knowing what they were doing at all? This is totally different! I put to you that a vast majority of inventors at least know what they are 'trying' to invent. The A.G. Bell example is another - trying to make a hearing aid, ended up with a 'telephone.' But this doesn't discount the obvious point I've been making that inventors invent with intention, purpose, meaning, goal-directedness, etc. otherwise they would never get anywhere! This, in my view, is a non-evolutionary process; invention, innovation, humans making things.
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Bill responds

Of course I did not mean to imply that the inventors don't know what they're doing (and you ought to know better than that). What I meant was that the inventor develops something for one purpose and someone in another field sees a use for it aand uses it. Another example of this is fuzzy logic. When Lotfi Zadeh invented it in the 60's he thought it would be useful for legal analysis. I don't know whether it was ever used for that, but in the 80's and beyond it became a very popular technique for designing control systems. The point is that the inventors seldom foresee all the possible applications of their inventions.
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So again, automobiles or 'the automobile' does not 'evolve' anything like a biological entity can be said to 'evolve.' You would agree with this, right Bill? To disagree is to committ a category mistake, to force one's disciplinary specific context (nod to Murray's semantics of evolution thread) upon another.
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Bill:
The issue is not whether automobiles evolve. It's that if an observer from an alternative universe observed a junk yard and had no knowledge of humans, he might conclude that the "fossilized" cars in the junkyard had evolved.
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For a 'stickler about language,' Bill, you seem to equate development and evolution in your recent post ("they do evolve, because they are developed..."). Trial and error should be freed from the constraints of evolutionary thought; it is easier to understand on its own without the confusing selectionist/adaptationist ideology. As an electrical engineer/computer scientist, does it make any sense to say you, Bill, 'evolved' programs and projects? Isn't there a better way, without the baggage ideology of evolution, to express the action of your engineering and programming? Are you perhaps holding on to evolution too tightly (for reconciliation)? Maybe to let go would offer something new...
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Bill:
Individual developers don't for the most part evolve programs and projects(although as Rich pointed out, genetic algorithms purposely simulate evolution to solve problems, and there is a technique called evolutionary programming where the program itself undergoes random modifications to seek out the optimum program for a particular task. I've used genetic algorithmss and they work. I haven't used evolutionary programming, and have very little confidence in them!). However, as others have pointed out, with very large development groups developing very large software systems, there are often unforeseen interactions that have to be corrected or exploited, and this can look like evolution.
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 William E. (Bill) Hamilton, Ph.D. Member ASA
248.821.8156 (mobile)
"...If God is for us, who is against us?" Rom 8:31
http://www.bricolagia.blogspot.com/
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Received on Mon May 26 12:37:51 2008