http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ee/</p>
This is a Christian making some silly claims about evolution.
I feel very compelled to respond to these points, but he is not allowing new registrations on his blog, so I guess I'll just post my response here, in case anyone cares, lol.
I'll respond to each "myth"...
1. “Random mutations are usually neutral or harmful but occasionally they confer a benefit to an organism. Natural Selection filters out the harmful mutations, causing species to evolve.”
...
But I’m an EE. I know that the information in DNA is a signal. By definition, random mutations are noise.
Telling a communications engineer that adding noise to a signal sometimes create new, useful data structures is like telling a nurse you can occasionally cure a common cold by swallowing rat poison.
Two problems with this analogy. One, DNA is not a signal. By "signal" he is implying that it is intended to be transmitted across some medium, and that therefore mutation ("noise") will hide the signal, which is a bad thing (in communications). DNA is not a signal because there is no thing that is intending to transmit the DNA noise-free across some medium. If a piece of DNA is a signal, then that DNA when mutated should be considered a DIFFERENT signal, rather than a noisy signal, due to this lack of intention.
Two, evolution isn't JUST "adding noise to a signal". He's ignoring selection, which in this analogy would be akin to a filter.
2. “97% of your DNA is junk – an accumulation of evolutionary leftovers from random mutations over millions of years.”
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Human DNA holds 750 megabytes of data, the same as a Compact Disc. If 97% of your DNA is junk, that means the 3% that isn’t junk is 22 megabytes. In other words, they’re implying that the entire plan for a human body only takes up 22 megabytes of storage space.
Heck, the “Windows” folder on my PC – the directory that contains most of the Operating System – is 27 gigabytes. Does anyone actually think Microsoft Windows Vista is more sophisticated than the human body?
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Actual fact: DNA is not 3% efficient. It’s more like 1,000% efficient. The same gene can be used in completely different ways by a dozen different processes. The result is a level of data density that software engineers only dream of.
Here he seems to contradict himself. He seems to argue that all that junk DNA cannot be junk because the human body is so complex. Yet by the end of it he seems to be arguing that you can get a lot of complexity out of a small amount of DNA! Didn't he just disprove his first point?
3. “You only need 3 things for evolution to occur: heredity, variation and selection.”
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If this were true, computer viruses (which have heredity, variation and selection) would mutate all by themselves and develop resistance to anti-virus software. They don’t.
Except computer viruses don't have variation (mutation)...
If this were true, the pirated copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Windows XP or The Eagles’ “Hotel California” that you can buy on the street corner for $2 in China would occasionally be superior to the original. It never is.
This example lacks selection...
If this were true, Bill Gates wouldn’t have to employ 10,000 programmers in Redmond Washington. He would just buy truckloads of computers, add random errors to a billion copies of Windows and filter them through natural selection.
This doesn't work for a practical reason, because our understanding of the mechanisms of evolution and genetics isn't strong enough to allow us to write a genetic algorithm that can operate effectively on complex code bases cost-effectively yet. Hiring programmers is a lot cheaper and faster at the moment.
In other words, organisms have had a lot of time to evolve better ways to evolve. heredity, variation, and selection are just the PREREQUISITES. The basics of evolution. There is a lot more to it than that.
4. “Biology is nothing more than sophisticated physics and chemistry.”
That’s like saying the Internet is nothing more than sophisticated copper wire and silicon chips.
Not really. There's more to the internet than copper and silicon chips, but there isn't more to biology than physics and chemistry. Not sure what his point is here anyway.
5. “Genetic Algorithms Prove Darwinian Evolution.”
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Every single Genetic Algorithm I’ve ever seen, no matter how simple or complicated, only works if it has pre-programmed goals. Which requires both a program and objectives. I’ve never seen a GA that actually mirrored Darwinian Evolution. They always sneak in some element of design.
Guess he's never seen artificial life simulations that use genetically programmed agents who are not evaluated by pre-programmed goals but rather by whether or not they survive (which do exist, and I have programmed one myself). Regardless, the pre-programmed goals he speaks of are equivalent to the environment/ecosystem in real world evolution - i.e. they determine what survives and what doesn't - so GAs do in fact seem to mirror Darwinian evolution in this aspect.
Which only adds to the reasons why the Neo-Darwinian theory of purposeless random events is wrong. Real world evolution is pre-programmed and has goals of some sort pre-loaded. I’ve never seen an exception. This is no different than computer programs that evolve.
Wait, what the fuck? I thought he was just arguing that real world evolution DOESN'T have pre-programmed goals.
6. “The human eye is a pathetic design. It’s got a big blind spot and the ‘wires’ are installed backwards.”
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Every engineer knows that you never truly know how something works until you can build it. Merely taking it apart is not enough. Until we can DESIGN eyes for ourselves, we must be very cautious about what we say. The scientist must ALWAYS be humble in the face of nature and you should be wary of anyone who is not.
Okay, except for the fact that octopi have eyes that do not have this design flaw, and they have good eyesight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Evolutionary_baggage</p>
7. “There is no such thing as purpose in nature. There is only the appearance of purpose.”
Annnnnnnd, I'm gonna skip this section because really, who cares?
