Intelligent design / creationism

[Buffy]

If we accept this for purposes of discussion, what might the biological evolutionary processes be that develops "feelings" ? (I'm not talking "fight or flight", but feelings like love, :( ridicule, :xx: embarrassment, :cup: and the like.)

Easy!

• Love promotes sex which supports gene replication.
  
• Ridicule promotes maintenance of the hierarchy of control of social groups, which allows the social groups to be more cohesive and successful compared to other social groups, which makes that group more successful in dominating resources compared to those other groups which supports its dominance of the group's gene pool.
  
• Embarrassment promotes conformance to the norms of the social group, which is rewarded by acceptance by the social group which supports gene replication.
  

Got any more?

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Buffy]

If microsoft made DNA, I would probably be crashing 3 times a day...not that a nap is a bad thing! :(

If Windows could evolve for another 3 billion years, it might not crash as often!

 

Linux fans would probably make the argument that the reason that Linux is more stable than Windows is that Linux has an open gene pool, whereas Windows is excessively in-bred, producing deleterious mutations....

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[BEAKER]

DNA is a pretty amazing peice of work and rivals anything I've ever seen even the most intelligent humans produce.:(

 

I think it's the other way around. -(but of course that's giving too much credit to humans.)

[Lolic]

If Windows could evolve for another 3 billion years, it might not crash as often!

Linux fans would probably make the argument that the reason that Linux is more stable than Windows is that Linux has an open gene pool, whereas Windows is excessively in-bred, producing deleterious mutations....

Cheers,

 

Buffy

 

The software analogy brings this to mind. How do we account for the complex information-rich patterns in biological systems? Where did they originate from?

 

You don't give credit to Linux do you? :(

[Buffy]

The software analogy brings this to mind. How do we account for the complex information-rich patterns in biological systems? Where did they originate from?

Most of them are so chaotic (e.g. DNA) that they might as well have been hacked by a grad student on too much :(, or maybe a monkey on a typewriter :xx:. Things of great beauty and complexity can come from very simple formulas that can occur naturally: The Mandelbrot set, as complex as it looks is entirely described by the function c(n)=c(n-1)+c ... "Complexity" and "information-richness" are actually easy to generate or simulate....

 

You don't give credit to Linux do you? :cup:

I was hacking the unix kernel before you were born....

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Lolic]

The optic nerve is ... a nerve. There's nothing really outstanding about it compared to other nerves.

 

You mentioned the optic nerve is just a nerve. I would like to elaborate on that.

 

When a baby is conceived in its mother’s womb, the genetic DNA code governing the eye programs the baby’s body to begin growing optic nerves simultaneously from both the optic center of the brain and from the eye. A million microscopic optic nerves begin growing from the eye through the flesh toward the optical section of the baby’s brain. Simultaneously, a million optic nerves with a protective sheath, similar to a fiber-optic cable, begin growing through the flesh towards the baby’s eye. Each of these one million optic verves must find and match up to its precise mate to enable vision to function perfectly.

 

We are generally impressed when highway engineers are able to correctly align two thirty-foot wide tunnels dug from opposite sides of a mountain to meet precisely in the center of a mountain. (Probably even more impressed when it’s done by the lowest cost bidder!) An even bigger engineering design marvel is the Chunnel linking England and France via the underwater tunnel. This took a great deal of work, intelligence, resources, planning, and engineering design skills to accomplish.

 

However, every day, hundreds of thousands of children are born with the ability to see, their bodies having precisely aligned one million separate optic nerves from each eye to meet their matching optic-nerve endings growing out from the baby’s brain. Also astonishing is the eye’s amazing construction and activity. The degree of complexity displayed in the construction of the various parts of the eye makes the eye an impossible item for humans to currently design and manufacture.

 

Charles Darwin himself admitted that the intricate engineering displayed in the human eye was so specialized and complex that he could not begin to imagine how the eye might have developed through the evolutionary process of natural selection.

 

“To suppose the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd to the highest degree.” (the origin of species)

 

Another evolutionary scientist, Dr. Ernst Mayer, admitted the difficulty in imagining how the complex human eye could possibly form through chance mutations.

 

“It is a considerable strain on one’s credulity to assume that finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of vertebrates or the feathers of birds) could be improved by random mutations.”

 

Recent research reveals that the human eye is much more complex and sophisticated than any camera designed by man. Similar to our advanced cameras, the human eye displays advanced auto-focus features with a remarkable ability to adjust the diaphragm of the iris automatically and at a phenomenal speed. The lens of your eye modifies its shape through tiny muscles that allow the eye to correctly focus on an object that is moving toward you or away from you. This action is similar to a sophisticated, computer-controlled modern camera when it calculates distance and automatically adjusts the lens to bring the object into focus. The lens is constructed of microscopic and transparent living cells, allowing light photons to enter through the cornea, pass through the optical fluid, to be analyzed by the retina.

 

To appreciate the complexity, sophistication, and design of the eye, we need to mention the function of the retina. Lining the back of the eye, the retina acts as a type of film, receiving the actual image composed of light photons passing through the iris, cornea, and eye fluid. Thinner than paper, yet its tiny surface (only one square inch) contains 137 million light-sensitive cells. Appx 95% rods for B&W images and 5% cones for color images. Each of these millions of cells is separately connected to the optic nerve, which transmits the signal to your brain at approximately three hundred miles per hour (believed to be slower for some politicians :cup: )

 

The millions of specialized cells in the eye can analyze more than one million messages a second, and then transmit the data to the brain. Experiments have revealed that the retina can actually detect one single photon of light in a dark room, something far beyond the range of engineered optical instruments.

 

The specialized cells in the retina actually partially analyze the image in the eye before it is transmitted through the optic nerve to the brain. These retina cells perform up to ten billion calculations per second in determining the nature of the image transmitted to the eye by photons.

 

Dr. John Stevens make the following comparison in an article in Byte magazine back in 1985,

 

“To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous non-linear differential equations one hundred times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways it would take a minimum of a hundred years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.”

 

In his article, Dr. Stevens wrote that if we were to attempt to duplicate the computing power of the human eye, we would have to build the world’s most advanced computer with a single enormous silicon chip that would cover 10,000 cubic inches and contain billions of transistors and hundreds of miles of circuit traces. The retina operates with less than 0.0001 watts of electrical charge. To duplicate the retina’ abilities, the imaginary computer would need to consume 300 watts of power. In other words, the retina is 3,000,000 times more efficient in its power consumption.

 

I don’t state this because anyone here needs to be taught biology; I simply want to have common footing to ask this question:

 

The eye exceeds man’s ability in the areas of design, manufacturer, repair, processing, efficiency, etc. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific research program that searches for signs of intelligence from space. Should biologists also search for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not?

 

thank you all, :(

[Lolic]

Most of them are so chaotic (e.g. DNA) that they might as well have been hacked by a grad student on too much :(, or maybe a monkey on a typewriter :cup:.

 

You may be right, or you may be writing off the language of life as an accident.

 

Might just be a digital error correcting code.

 

"Parasite Or Partner? Study Suggests New Role For Junk DNA"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/05/020514075447.htm

[lindagarrette]

 

The eye exceeds man’s ability in the areas of design, manufacturer, repair, processing, efficiency, etc. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific research program that searches for signs of intelligence from space. Should biologists also search for signs of intelligence in biological systems? Why or why not?

 

thank you all, :(

I don't understand the question. We already know that intelligence exists in biological systems here on earth as a result of evolution. I should think that if extraterestrial intelligence exists, it is also part of an evolutionary system somewhere.

[jp3089]

Most of them are so chaotic (e.g. DNA)

DNA isn't necessarily chaotic. It's complex, but that is very different from chaotic. If you look at the results of DNA, the results are very organized. A living organism, the right cell at the right time. DNA doesn't have a 100% succes rate, but what does? However, it is dependable and the results are not chaotic. This leads me to believe that DNA isn't chaotic at all, merely more complex than we're able to handle right now. Thoughts?

 

-jp

[TeleMad]

Are there any hypotheses as to why there are such large gaps in the snapshots?

 

I wasn't giving a full rundown of the fossil records, just enough to make the point.

[TeleMad]

I wasn't giving a full rundown of the fossil records, just enough to make the point.

 

Not that I have a complete fossil record, but to demonstrate what I am talking about, I mentioned trilobites in just one clause of one sentence. That hardly does the trilobite fossil record justice...

 

“The new view of trilobite diversity stems from a reanalysis of the literature, led by Adrain. The team identified 945 genera and grouped them into 56 families that share common features, such as unique shell segments and shapes. They were then able to realize for the first time that the trilobite cluster into two major groups of families. Members of one cluster, the Ibex Fauna, dominated the start of the Ordovician but then grew less diverse and vanished at the end-Ordovician mass extinction 440 million years ago. The other cluster, the Whiterock Fauna, tripled their genera in the Ordovician and skimmed through that extinction virtually unscathed; not until 30 million years later did they start to wane.” (“Parsing the Trilobites’ Rise and Fall”, Robert Irion, Science, Volume 280, Number 5371 Issue of 19 Jun 1998, pp. 1837 – 1838)

[TeleMad]

TeleMad: The optic nerve is ... a nerve. There's nothing really outstanding about it compared to other nerves.

 

Lolic: You mentioned the optic nerve is just a nerve. I would like to elaborate on that.

 

When a baby is conceived in its mother’s womb, the genetic DNA code governing the eye programs the baby’s body to begin growing optic nerves simultaneously from both the optic center of the brain and from the eye. A million microscopic optic nerves begin growing from the eye through the flesh toward the optical section of the baby’s brain. Simultaneously, a million optic nerves with a protective sheath, similar to a fiber-optic cable, begin growing through the flesh towards the baby’s eye. Each of these one million optic verves must find and match up to its precise mate to enable vision to function perfectly.

 

...

 

However, every day, hundreds of thousands of children are born with the ability to see, their bodies having precisely aligned one million separate optic nerves from each eye to meet their matching optic-nerve endings growing out from the baby’s brain.

 

First, it's a bit of a nitpick but there aren't millions of optic nerves: there are only two.

 

Second, as you point out, the information needed to do all of this in contained in DNA; it doesn’t come from outside the organism.

 

Third, the optic nerves are … nerves. Other nerves also have to navigate their way through the developing body to meet up with the appropriate target, be it a muscle, gland, or whatever. And scientists know a good deal about how this occurs by having done experiments on neuronal outgrowth during development.

[TeleMad]

Also astonishing is the eye’s amazing construction and activity. The degree of complexity displayed in the construction of the various parts of the eye makes the eye an impossible item for humans to currently design and manufacture.

 

We developed something comparable to the human eye in structure and function many decades ago: the camera. And recently an artificial eye was developed that should help blind people to see within the next few years.

 

Charles Darwin himself admitted that the intricate engineering displayed in the human eye was so specialized and complex that he could not begin to imagine how the eye might have developed through the evolutionary process of natural selection.

 

“To suppose the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd to the highest degree.” (the origin of species)

 

This is an out-of-context quote in that Darwin goes on later to say that he CAN see how eyes could be the product of evolution. It's like me saying, "I freely confess that it seems absurd to the highest degree that observer A can see event X occur before event Y while observer B can see event X occur after event Y", then a bit later going to explain how theory actually says such is the case.

[Buffy]

DNA isn't necessarily chaotic. It's complex, but that is very different from chaotic. If you look at the results of DNA, the results are very organized. A living organism, the right cell at the right time. DNA doesn't have a 100% succes rate, but what does? However, it is dependable and the results are not chaotic. This leads me to believe that DNA isn't chaotic at all, merely more complex than we're able to handle right now.

Even though there are proposals that the "junk sequences" do provide error checking, its clear that there is junk in there. This is typical of what happens with systems that are built on evolutionary models. I've done some work with "neural network" programming, and I can tell you that the databases that get built up have large chunks that were "failed attempts" at finding patterns in the input data that basically can't be used directly anymore, because there are no longer any paths in the data that point to it.

 

Chaos can indeed be a "perceived" quality--there actually *are* formulas in information theory that can strictly measure it though--but it can be picked out rather easily by inspection given enough effort and understanding. My point actually is that DNA shows lots of order and also shows evidence of a process that creates lots of "junk: learning driven by trial and error evolution of rules, the same thing used by the brain both internally and as an evolutionary process.

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[TeleMad]

Another evolutionary scientist, Dr. Ernst Mayer, admitted the difficulty in imagining how the complex human eye could possibly form through chance mutations.

 

“It is a considerable strain on one’s credulity to assume that finely balanced systems such as certain sense organs (the eye of vertebrates or the feathers of birds) could be improved by random mutations.”

 

Which I imagine is also not the full story of what Ernst Mayer had to say on the subject (similar to how the quote of Darwin is not).

 

And what year is that quote from anyway? And what's the source?

[TeleMad]

Similar to our advanced cameras, the human eye displays advanced auto-focus features with a remarkable ability to adjust the diaphragm of the iris automatically and at a phenomenal speed.

 

In other words, a muscle contracts. That happens all the time just about everywhere in the body.

 

By the way, you forgot to mention all the people who are near sighted, or far sighted, or have other vision problems. You're making the eye out to be an example of perfect design but you're leaving out the imperfections. Not a huge problem but we do have a blind spot at the optic disk. Also, many people's lenses do cloud up, the majority of us need glasses by the time we're 40, etc.

[TeleMad]

Dr. John Stevens make the following comparison in an article in Byte magazine back in 1985,

 

...

 

In his article, Dr. Stevens wrote that if we were to attempt to duplicate the computing power of the human eye, we would have to build the world’s most advanced computer with a single enormous silicon chip that would cover 10,000 cubic inches and contain billions of transistors and hundreds of miles of circuit traces.

 

And back around 1985 computer professionals also said no computer would ever be able to have 4GB of RAM. They were wrong.

 

 

The retina operates with less than 0.0001 watts of electrical charge. To duplicate the retina’ abilities, the imaginary computer would need to consume 300 watts of power. In other words, the retina is 3,000,000 times more efficient in its power consumption.

 

And yet a computer can sort a database table containing a billion rows in about an hour, whereas a human would take multiple decades to do so manually.