This is why I love science,new and exciting discoveries every day and answers to so many interesting unanswered questions. A very welcome change to the religious people's "God did it! now go pray".
I am sure that given enough time, scientists can plug holes in the theory of evolution and answer questions that critics throw at it like. Remember, a theory can always be changed and disproved by evidence unlike intelligent design which can't be disproved(and no one seems to have proved it either).
sortof like the unprovable assumption of evolution?????
a theory is a theory my friend, unless you have a blog entry from 10,000 BC (sorry...new earth dates)
But then again, the sheer numeric improbability of evolution is science. Sorry, I forgot.
First two minor points, then I'll get to the real subject, the math of evolution.
theory is a theory my friend
Every field of science is a theory, my friend. Everything from the theory of the atom to the theory of zymosis (that's fermentaion). You may as well try to attack relativity as being "just a theory".
sortof like the unprovable assumption of evolution?????
What unprovable assumption of evolution? Evolution fundamentally says that if if you have heritable variation and mutations and selection pressures on that variation then you will get evolution over generations. This is trivially observable fact. There is no genuine scientific dispute over biological evolution exacly because there is so much evidence that cross checks and cross validates across so many feilds, both current observations and study of prehistorical evidence left behind. Trying to even scratch the surface of this mountain of evidence in this post would be hopeless. If you are questioning the quantity and quality of the evidence, I suggest you either crack open a text book on the subject or at least browse the talkorigins [talkorigins.org] website. It's all well documented if you actually question the issue. If you don't truely question the issue and you instead simply reject the entire subject on non-rational grounds, well obviously you're not going to be swayed by something silly like actual evidence and actual science.
Anyway, the real issue I wanted to address was this one:
the sheer numeric improbability of evolution
Correction, the sheer numeric CERTIANTY. There's powerful mathematics to evolution, powerful effects going on that you don't hear about in the common explanations of evolution. The common idea of evolution is as a sequence of individual beneficial mutations, like climbing a ladder. If that's how evolution actually worked then critics would be right, it would have been mathematically impossible for evolution to produce the incredible complexity we see today.
To show the true mathematical power of evolution I will first abandon that "ladder climbing" of beneficial mutaions. In fact lets assume that every single mutation that occurs is either neutral or harmful. I'll demonstrate that we still get the real and powerful mechanism of evolution, the math of evolution.
A good place to start is with the common complaint of creationists that mutation and evolution "cannot create information". Well in the initial mutation phase they are right. When a mutation occurs it introduces noise, it tends to degrade information. But look what happens the moment that mutation gets passed on to an offspring. That mutation is now no longer random noise, it now carries a small bit on information. It carries a little tag saying "this is a nonfatal mutation". The presence of this mutation in the offspring is new and created information, the discovery and living record of a new nonfatal mutation. Over time the population builds up a LIBRARY of nonfatal mutations. This library is a vast accumulation of new information.
That information actually undergoes even more processing and synthesis. Over generations beneficial mutations would obviously multiply, but we're assuming there are none of those here. However entirely neutral mutations will also tend to accumulate and multiply. Nearly harmless mutations would also accumulate and multiply to a lesser extent. Somewhat harmful mutations will even accumulate, and extremely harmful-but-nonfatal mutations will pop up and disappear at the rarest frequencies. So not only do we build up a library of nonfatal mutations, the mutations get tagged with a tagged with a frequency, the percentage of the population carrying that mutation. Each mutation is tagged with a measurement. Every mutation now carries a cost/benefit information tag at the population level. The best ones have a high percentage representation and the most harmful ones have a near zero representation percentage. Our library now contains far more valuable and sophisticated newly created information.
The individuals in the population are on average going to carry a roughly stable load of harmful mutations, a roughly constant "cost" in harmful mutations. Individuals loaded with more than the average cost are generally going to die and remove a more-than-average load of harm out of the population pushing the average up, and individuals with a less than average load will multiply and pull the population average upwards. The cleansing effect of selection removing "damage" from the gene pool will automatically scale to offset the exact rate that mutation is causing "damage". Harm/cost/damage will be weeded out by selection at the same rate it is added by mutation. Neutral mutations will steadily accumulate in the library, and negative mutations will remain at a roughly fixed level constantly measured and scaled by the cost of each. Some mutations will dissappear while new ones appear.
The real power in evolution is the recombination. Every offspring contains a random mixture of mutations from that library. every offspring is a test case searching for a jackpot beneficial combination of mutations. Lets assume an individual has a million random mutations across its entire code. There are 500,000,000,000 mutation-pairs being simultaneously tested within that individual in parallel. Perhaps one is a mutation creating a toxin and another mutation for mutant skin pores. Either mutation alone may be harmful, but the pairing could be breakthrough protecting against predators.
There are 160,000,000,000,000,000 mutation-triples. Each individual is also testing all of these triples in parallel. One mutation might be for a toxin, a second might might crank up production of that toxin to fatal levels (which would ordinarily a fatal evolutionary dead end), and the third might be a costly and ordinarily useless anti-toxin. The triplet is now a breakthrough, either a powerful defense against predators or a weapon for a predator to use, or even both at once.
Each individual is also testing 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 mutation quadruples in parallel for free. Maybe those four mutations individually yeild useless proteins and enzymes, but the chain of four together may yeild a new breakthrough digestive pathway.
Each individual also tests a near infinite number of mutation pentuplets and mutation sextuplets and more. Each individual actually acts as a test of a near infinity number of possibilities and it does this testing in parallel and it does so for free. This is called implicit parallelism. It astronomically multiplies the power of evolution to search for jackpot breakthroughs.
Another point that I raised and haven't actually applied yet is the fact that each mutation is present with a frequency percentage in the population. The measurement of the cost/benefit of that mutation. When you want the most efficient search pattern you want to minimize wasted effort and minimize your costs and maximize your return-on-investment for your available resources. Well each offspring is an investment of resources, a test effort. When you are investing your effort looking for a payoff you want to expend most of your effort on the mutations that have paid off the best in the past and the least effort on the almost-fatal mutations. You mostly want to test combinations of good stuff with good stuff, and you almost never want to bother testing two nearly fatal mutations that will most likely combine to cause a dead offspring and a wasted investment. However you do still want to make a very rare test of two nearly fatal mutations because it *might* just be a jackpot payoff. In mathematics this exact investment-of-effort and search pattern had already been studied and a mathematical optimization pattern found. And guess what? By an almost staggering coincidence the evolutionary population frequency on each mutation in the population and in the offspring exactly matches and produces the mathematically optimal and most efficient search pattern for the next generation of offspring. You invest lots of effort and lots of offspring on testing the best mutations and groups of the best mutations and you invest exactly the right level of very rare testing of really bad combinations that will probably be fatal but which *might* just find a jackpot payoff. Mutations at all levels are tested proportionally to the measured cost it impose on the host.
So evolution has a nearly infinite multiplier on its search power and it just happens to invest its search effort in the mathematically optimal most efficient search allocation. Two fairly deep and powerful mathematical results that are hardly apparent in the usual way evolution is explained.
A further point is that once some beneficial mutation or combination of mutations is found, evolution then searches that vast library of stored nonfatal mutations. Most new breakthroughs will be extremely crude at whatever it is they do, and they will probably come with harmful side effects. A set of limbs might be mutated into some useful form for getting some new food source, yet be horribly mutated and otherwise dysfunctional. Evolution then searches the library for mutations that combine to further improve that new breakthrough, and it also searches the library for mutations that will repair or offset any harmful side effects of the breakthrough. A search for ways to further improve the mutated limbs for the new purpose, and a search for modifications to repair problems caused by these malformed limbs.
Evolution is very rarely a simple ladder-climb series of beneficial mutations. Evolution is an information processing system building vast database of information and synthesizing complex measurements of that information and doing an incredibly powerful search and mining of that information database to discover and refine improvements.
And this fits in perfectly with punctuated equilibrium. During the quiet phase the library is accumulating new mutation contributions and measuring those mutations into a percentage of the population, and then when there is a breakthrough discovered or there is an environment shift then evolution goes into overdrive. It mines the database for contributions to the new development or to adapt to the new environment. The frequencies of all of the mutations also get re-measured to re-weigh their cost/benefit ratio in light of the new development or in the new environment. Not only can this radically shift the frequency of vast portion of the genes and mutations in the population, it can quite easily trigger the discovery of other independent breakthroughs. If the population underwent heavy selection pressure, if most of the population was exterminated or displaced by this change, then the gene pool gets decimated. Much of that accumulated library gets wiped out along with the losing majority of the population. With a depleted library in the new population you are naturally going to see little change and progress. You see a stable population, equilibrium, until that library can be very slowly rebuilt through accumulation of new mutations.
That was a great post! It took me ages to get my head around that lot. That's the best post I've seen for ages. I hope that turkey comes back for more.
Evolution is an information processing system building vast database of information and synthesizing complex measurements of that information and doing an incredibly powerful search and mining of that information database to discover and refine improvements.
Wait, I'm confused.
Are you saying Lexis Nexis is our creator? Or is it Google?
Alsee, I found this posting fascinating. One thing I don't understand, though, is how you can claim such a huge number of parallel tests. The individual is testing just ONE of the possible huge range of combinations. The net result is to pass on a random half set of mutations to an offspring- or not.
Is there a confusion between the population, which is carying out the parallel testing, and the individual which is carrying out just one of the parallel strands of tests?
I would also be grateful for any use
Any reference texts with this sort of stuff would be excellent.
A well thought out post, and I agree with Aeternal's analsysis . . . this is very true with, say, bacterium or insects (with a massive reproduction rate allowing a huge amount of "tests") but when you're getting to larger life forms, where the amount of offspring dramatically lowers, there aren't as many tests that are performed in one species, correct?
I wrote an obscenely detailed explanation to Aeternal over here. [slashdot.org] The implicit parallelism is within each individual.
Bacteria do NOT have this enormous multiplier because they generally do not sexually recombine their genes. For the first few hundred millions of years life on earth plodded along with nothing but bacteria and little noticable change. It is beleived that sexual recombination and this implicit parallelism effect was one of the primary driving forces in the first big explosion of diversity.
There's no confusion, consider the case of an organism with 4 mutations. That means that there is one quadruplet mutation combination being tested, 4 (4 choose 3) triplets being tested, 6 (4 choose 2) pairs and 4 singlets. The key is to remember that all of these combinations are tested in parallel in one individual, and the rest of the possible combinations are being tested in other individuals, also in parallel.
This result is so straightforward that it doesn't really merit much investigation.
I posted an excellent introductory referrence on the subject for someone else like a year ago, but I'm finding it exceedingly frustrating trying to Google a suitable source today. The ultimate refference is a mathematical proof called the Schemata Theorem prooving the exact nature of the effect, but it is littered with obscene equations and obscure terminology and effectively unreadable. There are tons of other sources, but generally still not appropriate for an introductory explanation, and almost universa
I wanted to clarify that the Schemata Theorem is a mathematical proof that all of these parallel schema contributions and measurements blended in a single individual through the number of offspring really do contribute to the genetic distribution in the next generation in this manner. Schemata are basically building blocks. The contribution of each individual schema twords the offspring success of an individual may be tiny, but just as many tiny raindrops can acumulate to form a river these contributio
Thanks, that is very helpful. I appreciate the time and effort that has gone into this.
The John Holland article you provided the link to is the same as the Scientific American article you referred to (I dug it out of my Sci Am archive (actually 'Pile').
I contribute to of a Google group 'Creationism vs Evolution'
May I copy your last post to this group, properly credited of course?
Or maybe you would like to post it yourself.
May I copy your last post to this group, properly credited of course?
Sure. I hereby dedicate my past and future posts in this "The mathematics of evolution" thread to the public domain. You may need to tie it together with parts of my preceeding post. Any improvments you can make would be welcome. I'm sure it could benefit from an entire presentation overhaul:) In particular do not hestitate to trim anything that needs trimming. I think I tend to go overboard when I'm not sure how well I'm communicating so
Alsee, your post is not only a fantastic writing, but is well thought out. You obviously took the time to negotiate your chain of logic well. So, before I progress I must at least say a hearty "cheers" for your work. And thank you for taking it seriously, as opposed to those who just ranked it a Troll.;)
I'm actually going to try and spell out some of the major concerns that I have with the theory of evolution.
I will begin with your mathematics.
To be fair, your math is accurate for the most part (t
AND THAT CAME FROM ABSOLUTELY NOTHING...THAT'S RIGHT FOLKS...ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Not just nothing. It was nothing nothing. Yep,
Asserting the above is silly. We can only speculate about the origins of the universe, and test our speculations against models based on measurable evidence.
Demanding for conclusive proof right now or else you'd dismiss the idea, is the very height of silliness. You are concluding that there can be no answer, because we do not already have it.
Arbitrarily complex chemistry systems can and do (when the temperature is neither to high or low) move to self catalyzing reactions. A self catalyzing reaction is a series of chemicals, 1 catalyzes the formation of 2, 2 the formation of 3, etc. until the last catalyzes the formation of 1. Thus, given raw materials more of the series of this chain of chemicals will increase.
The do part was a simple chem simulation that shows that even without the myriad of potential chemical reactions that are possible w
Akk this got long. Last post I sort of cheated, most of it was copy/paste/cleanup of something I had written before. This post I got adsorbed and didn't realize just how long I wrote on so many deep topics until I hit the preview button to proof read. Chuckle. Anyway....
It seems we may be able to come to pretty much come to agreement (almost a surprise when it comes to debates on things like evolution or copyright law, heh).
The first important point is to to be more precise and define the language we are
These are exactly the questions that need to be asked. Of course, they are simply dismissed as "silliness."
You're absolutely right; all of the mathematics of the original post are constrained to a very specific (and very complex) system, based upon monstrous, unsupported assumptions.
Evolutionists always argue accordingly: "You can't say that something couldn't come from nothing just because we don't know that yet!" Putting in place as much faith as any of their religious counterparts. Yes, the Big Ba
Just wanted to point something out - mutation has VERY little to do with evolution.
It turns out that crossover is the primary mechanism of evolution. Mutation, as is insinctive, tends to do more to hurt an organism than to help it. Crossover is far far far more likely to produce non-detrimental genes and changes within genes, because it's always reusing combinations of the same code that's already there.
(of course with only 4 bases, every possible combination can still come from reusing and reordering t
Yes, I usually make that point more directly. On review is seems that in this particular thread I may have underplayed that point. It was implicit, or supposed to be implicit (chuckle) in my point that the real engine of evolution is in the combinations and recombinations and that we could do away with the ladder climbing theory of mutation-driven evolution. Mutations largely serve as diversity-fuel to prevent the recombination engine from running dry. An acumulation of mutations over time is mostly garbage
Yes!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I am sure that given enough time, scientists can plug holes in the theory of evolution and answer questions that critics throw at it like. Remember, a theory can always be changed and disproved by evidence unlike intelligent design which can't be disproved(and no one seems to have proved it either).
And before
Re:Yes!!! (Score:0, Troll)
The mathematics of evolution (Score:5, Informative)
theory is a theory my friend
Every field of science is a theory, my friend. Everything from the theory of the atom to the theory of zymosis (that's fermentaion). You may as well try to attack relativity as being "just a theory".
sortof like the unprovable assumption of evolution?????
What unprovable assumption of evolution? Evolution fundamentally says that if if you have heritable variation and mutations and selection pressures on that variation then you will get evolution over generations. This is trivially observable fact. There is no genuine scientific dispute over biological evolution exacly because there is so much evidence that cross checks and cross validates across so many feilds, both current observations and study of prehistorical evidence left behind. Trying to even scratch the surface of this mountain of evidence in this post would be hopeless. If you are questioning the quantity and quality of the evidence, I suggest you either crack open a text book on the subject or at least browse the talkorigins [talkorigins.org] website. It's all well documented if you actually question the issue. If you don't truely question the issue and you instead simply reject the entire subject on non-rational grounds, well obviously you're not going to be swayed by something silly like actual evidence and actual science.
Anyway, the real issue I wanted to address was this one:
the sheer numeric improbability of evolution
Correction, the sheer numeric CERTIANTY. There's powerful mathematics to evolution, powerful effects going on that you don't hear about in the common explanations of evolution. The common idea of evolution is as a sequence of individual beneficial mutations, like climbing a ladder. If that's how evolution actually worked then critics would be right, it would have been mathematically impossible for evolution to produce the incredible complexity we see today.
To show the true mathematical power of evolution I will first abandon that "ladder climbing" of beneficial mutaions. In fact lets assume that every single mutation that occurs is either neutral or harmful. I'll demonstrate that we still get the real and powerful mechanism of evolution, the math of evolution.
A good place to start is with the common complaint of creationists that mutation and evolution "cannot create information". Well in the initial mutation phase they are right. When a mutation occurs it introduces noise, it tends to degrade information. But look what happens the moment that mutation gets passed on to an offspring. That mutation is now no longer random noise, it now carries a small bit on information. It carries a little tag saying "this is a nonfatal mutation". The presence of this mutation in the offspring is new and created information, the discovery and living record of a new nonfatal mutation. Over time the population builds up a LIBRARY of nonfatal mutations. This library is a vast accumulation of new information.
That information actually undergoes even more processing and synthesis. Over generations beneficial mutations would obviously multiply, but we're assuming there are none of those here. However entirely neutral mutations will also tend to accumulate and multiply. Nearly harmless mutations would also accumulate and multiply to a lesser extent. Somewhat harmful mutations will even accumulate, and extremely harmful-but-nonfatal mutations will pop up and disappear at the rarest frequencies. So not only do we build up a library of nonfatal mutations, the mutations get tagged with a tagged with a frequency, the percentage of the population carrying that mutation. Each mutation is tagged with a measurement. Every mutation now carries a cost/benefit information tag at the population level. The best ones have a high percentage representation and the most harmful ones have a near zero representation percentage. Our library now contains far more valuable and sophisticated newly created information.
The individuals in the population are on average going to carry a roughly stable load of harmful mutations, a roughly constant "cost" in harmful mutations. Individuals loaded with more than the average cost are generally going to die and remove a more-than-average load of harm out of the population pushing the average up, and individuals with a less than average load will multiply and pull the population average upwards. The cleansing effect of selection removing "damage" from the gene pool will automatically scale to offset the exact rate that mutation is causing "damage". Harm/cost/damage will be weeded out by selection at the same rate it is added by mutation. Neutral mutations will steadily accumulate in the library, and negative mutations will remain at a roughly fixed level constantly measured and scaled by the cost of each. Some mutations will dissappear while new ones appear.
The real power in evolution is the recombination. Every offspring contains a random mixture of mutations from that library. every offspring is a test case searching for a jackpot beneficial combination of mutations. Lets assume an individual has a million random mutations across its entire code. There are 500,000,000,000 mutation-pairs being simultaneously tested within that individual in parallel. Perhaps one is a mutation creating a toxin and another mutation for mutant skin pores. Either mutation alone may be harmful, but the pairing could be breakthrough protecting against predators.
There are 160,000,000,000,000,000 mutation-triples. Each individual is also testing all of these triples in parallel. One mutation might be for a toxin, a second might might crank up production of that toxin to fatal levels (which would ordinarily a fatal evolutionary dead end), and the third might be a costly and ordinarily useless anti-toxin. The triplet is now a breakthrough, either a powerful defense against predators or a weapon for a predator to use, or even both at once.
Each individual is also testing 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 mutation quadruples in parallel for free. Maybe those four mutations individually yeild useless proteins and enzymes, but the chain of four together may yeild a new breakthrough digestive pathway.
Each individual also tests a near infinite number of mutation pentuplets and mutation sextuplets and more. Each individual actually acts as a test of a near infinity number of possibilities and it does this testing in parallel and it does so for free. This is called implicit parallelism. It astronomically multiplies the power of evolution to search for jackpot breakthroughs.
Another point that I raised and haven't actually applied yet is the fact that each mutation is present with a frequency percentage in the population. The measurement of the cost/benefit of that mutation. When you want the most efficient search pattern you want to minimize wasted effort and minimize your costs and maximize your return-on-investment for your available resources. Well each offspring is an investment of resources, a test effort. When you are investing your effort looking for a payoff you want to expend most of your effort on the mutations that have paid off the best in the past and the least effort on the almost-fatal mutations. You mostly want to test combinations of good stuff with good stuff, and you almost never want to bother testing two nearly fatal mutations that will most likely combine to cause a dead offspring and a wasted investment. However you do still want to make a very rare test of two nearly fatal mutations because it *might* just be a jackpot payoff. In mathematics this exact investment-of-effort and search pattern had already been studied and a mathematical optimization pattern found. And guess what? By an almost staggering coincidence the evolutionary population frequency on each mutation in the population and in the offspring exactly matches and produces the mathematically optimal and most efficient search pattern for the next generation of offspring. You invest lots of effort and lots of offspring on testing the best mutations and groups of the best mutations and you invest exactly the right level of very rare testing of really bad combinations that will probably be fatal but which *might* just find a jackpot payoff. Mutations at all levels are tested proportionally to the measured cost it impose on the host.
So evolution has a nearly infinite multiplier on its search power and it just happens to invest its search effort in the mathematically optimal most efficient search allocation. Two fairly deep and powerful mathematical results that are hardly apparent in the usual way evolution is explained.
A further point is that once some beneficial mutation or combination of mutations is found, evolution then searches that vast library of stored nonfatal mutations. Most new breakthroughs will be extremely crude at whatever it is they do, and they will probably come with harmful side effects. A set of limbs might be mutated into some useful form for getting some new food source, yet be horribly mutated and otherwise dysfunctional. Evolution then searches the library for mutations that combine to further improve that new breakthrough, and it also searches the library for mutations that will repair or offset any harmful side effects of the breakthrough. A search for ways to further improve the mutated limbs for the new purpose, and a search for modifications to repair problems caused by these malformed limbs.
Evolution is very rarely a simple ladder-climb series of beneficial mutations. Evolution is an information processing system building vast database of information and synthesizing complex measurements of that information and doing an incredibly powerful search and mining of that information database to discover and refine improvements.
And this fits in perfectly with punctuated equilibrium. During the quiet phase the library is accumulating new mutation contributions and measuring those mutations into a percentage of the population, and then when there is a breakthrough discovered or there is an environment shift then evolution goes into overdrive. It mines the database for contributions to the new development or to adapt to the new environment. The frequencies of all of the mutations also get re-measured to re-weigh their cost/benefit ratio in light of the new development or in the new environment. Not only can this radically shift the frequency of vast portion of the genes and mutations in the population, it can quite easily trigger the discovery of other independent breakthroughs. If the population underwent heavy selection pressure, if most of the population was exterminated or displaced by this change, then the gene pool gets decimated. Much of that accumulated library gets wiped out along with the losing majority of the population. With a depleted library in the new population you are naturally going to see little change and progress. You see a stable population, equilibrium, until that library can be very slowly rebuilt through accumulation of new mutations.
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Parent
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:0)
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
Wait, I'm confused.
Are you saying Lexis Nexis is our creator? Or is it Google?
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
Re:me too, Aet (Score:2)
A well thought out post, and I agree with Aeternal's analsysis . . . this is very true with, say, bacterium or insects (with a massive reproduction rate allowing a huge amount of "tests") but when you're getting to larger life forms, where the amount of offspring dramatically lowers, there aren't as many tests that are performed in one species, correct?
Re:me too, Aet (Score:2)
Bacteria do NOT have this enormous multiplier because they generally do not sexually recombine their genes. For the first few hundred millions of years life on earth plodded along with nothing but bacteria and little noticable change. It is beleived that sexual recombination and this implicit parallelism effect was one of the primary driving forces in the first big explosion of diversity.
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Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
This result is so straightforward that it doesn't really merit much investigation.
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:2)
P.S. (Score:2)
I wanted to clarify that the Schemata Theorem is a mathematical proof that all of these parallel schema contributions and measurements blended in a single individual through the number of offspring really do contribute to the genetic distribution in the next generation in this manner. Schemata are basically building blocks. The contribution of each individual schema twords the offspring success of an individual may be tiny, but just as many tiny raindrops can acumulate to form a river these contributio
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:2)
Sure. I hereby dedicate my past and future posts in this "The mathematics of evolution" thread to the public domain. You may need to tie it together with parts of my preceeding post. Any improvments you can make would be welcome. I'm sure it could benefit from an entire presentation overhaul
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
I'm actually going to try and spell out some of the major concerns that I have with the theory of evolution.
I will begin with your mathematics.
To be fair, your math is accurate for the most part (t
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:2, Informative)
The do part was a simple chem simulation that shows that even without the myriad of potential chemical reactions that are possible w
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:2)
It seems we may be able to come to pretty much come to agreement (almost a surprise when it comes to debates on things like evolution or copyright law, heh).
The first important point is to to be more precise and define the language we are
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:1)
You're absolutely right; all of the mathematics of the original post are constrained to a very specific (and very complex) system, based upon monstrous, unsupported assumptions.
Evolutionists always argue accordingly: "You can't say that something couldn't come from nothing just because we don't know that yet!" Putting in place as much faith as any of their religious counterparts. Yes, the Big Ba
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:2)
It turns out that crossover is the primary mechanism of evolution. Mutation, as is insinctive, tends to do more to hurt an organism than to help it. Crossover is far far far more likely to produce non-detrimental genes and changes within genes, because it's always reusing combinations of the same code that's already there.
(of course with only 4 bases, every possible combination can still come from reusing and reordering t
Re:The mathematics of evolution (Score:2)