Casey Luskin’s ignorance is well-known, and this recent essay stopped most of us cold at his Ford Pinto comparison. We should have kept going. Karmen plucks out another particularly stupid statement, one that’s even dumber than the Pinto remark:
The article called evolution a “simple” process. In our experience, does a “simple” process generate the type of vast complexity found throughout biology?
Luskin apparently thinks the answer is “no.” I think Karmen could teach him a few things about fractals to get him started, but it’s trivially true that yes, biology is all about the simple becoming complex through natural processes.
I’d suggest they start by reading Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. It’s even online.
Oh, but wait – How can something as complex as the Internet emerge from simple protocols?
It doesn’t, Toby. It’s all the work of the Intelligent Designer that sits at the center of the Internet, dreaming, lulled to sleep by the piping of shrill flutes.
“Oh, but wait – How can something as complex as the Internet emerge from simple protocols?”
Its not complicated. Its just a SERIES of TUBES!
How appropriate that your random quote displayed:
coincidence?
I’ll bet Luskin is also trying the trick of asking people to use their “common sense” experience for a situation where people have no experience – what can be accomplished over millions of years.
Our intuitive, experiential-based knowledge is okay (not great) for judging things within the realm of our experience, but a very poor basis for judging something beyond that experience.
Luskin might as well have said, “have you had the experience of seeing one species evolve into another? No. Therefore, evolution is a myth.”
In our experience does a simpleton generate insight into complex processes?
Luskin is a perfect example of why I am a Type 2 Atheist!
I am a Type 2 atheist and I approved this message.
“I am heaving, if you are believeing.”
In other creationist news, Denyse O’Leary and William Dembski are back at that old Darwin/Nazi saw:
Hitler as social Darwinist?: Another salvo in the controversy
No more Mr. Nice Guy
Between writing articles to post-darwinist, then linking to them from uncommondescent, O’Leary seems to have her own personal blogosphere.
It’s called “iteration” of simplicity.
Look, you could argue that evolution is simple in one sense, while in another sense you’d have to call it very complex. I tend to label it “complex” myself because of the extremely complex ecological interactions. In that sense, yes, it takes a very complex process like evolution to make complex ecosystems, and complex organismic interactions within those ecosystems.
In the reductive sense, however, the basics of evolution are fairly simple. That is to say, in the ideal reductive causal sense, we have the processes mostly figured out. We have the proximal causes in hand which predict the fairly simple patterns that we see throughout evolution, despite the high complexity that exists comprehensively. Mutation is due to fairly simple processes, and, in its barest sense, natural selection is one of the simplest concepts/processes known to science.
Simple mutations happen, and these are selected by the environment in a rather straightforward competitive process (in the abstract). The variations on this simple abstraction of what actually happens are very complex and impossible to reproduce, but this is what we’d actually predict from the simple, well-understood processes seen in labs and in nature, when these are extrapolated to open-ended systems. It’s like turbulence, iterations of simplicity and slight variation produce extreme complexity.
Compare how the simplicity of evolution is both understandable and irrefutable, coupled with the predicted and inevitable integrated complexity coming from those processes, with the idiocy of saying that a designer or designers sat around and thought up the extremely complex adaptations existing throughout one, let alone hundreds of, ecosystems.
And tell us again, Casey, how ID shows any promise of reducing evolution/ecology down to understandable science.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm
If you doubt that this is possible, how is it there are TURING MACHINES + CELLULAR AUTOMATA???
Yup, I thought “fractals!” and other iteratively-generated things before I got through the quote.
… which is why I think demonstrations of iterative generation of complex stuff would be a Good Thing to show kids, before they start to fall for the notion of Conservation of Complexity, or whatever principle this person is trying to invoke.
It can be even easier and more concrete than fractals – my first thought was my current knitting project. Whadya know, I do this same little simple move, loop push flick, over and over and over, and whoa! All of a sudden it’s a blanket! And it has a pattern! How did that happen? Is god hiding around here somewhere?
I see that we arrived to the same idea. Chaos, fractals and turing machines gets their full properties from the simple but subtle mechanism of iterations. And I can’t think of anything more iterative than replicating life, filling much the same fitness and genetic landscape as the former population. One of those properties is a fixed point. Check: no mutations – OK.
According to computer scientists a turing capable process is the most efficient computing system there is, capable of processing or creating all algorithmic constructs. I think some of them believes that is as much as nature can do. (Since abstract math methods like infinities aren’t feasible for a finite process.)
With this in mind it is no big reach to think provisionally that evolutionary algorithms can do everything naturally possible within biophysical constraints. (Not that I think any biologist thought otherwise. :-) Even such simple cellular automata like Conway’s Game of Life are turing capable.
Carlie makes an excellent point, one that hadn’t occurred to me before. Have any of these people ever made anything? Whenever something is created, complexity arrises through simple processes. Do they think automobiles spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus?
This is the thing that pisses me off most about creationists. Not only are their arguments bloody stupid, they’re irrelavent to their thesis. One can easily argue that creation implies a series of simple processes; therefore, the creationist position, if true, would imply the nonexistance of a creator. What they’re actually making is the “steady state” argument–the universe must have always existed in its current state.
Of course, the other version of the argument (simple processes resulting from the will of a creator) implies either occasionalism or deism, neither of which is really compatible with the position they want.
To anyone trained in logic this would suggest that their position is simply untennable–regardless of the truth of the propositions they put forward to support it. Fortunately for them, these people are no more burdened by logic than by honesty.
More precisely, it is recursions that is the specific requirement for turing processes. But that is pretty much iterations of a set folding onto (a subset of) itself. Also life is more precisely recursive.
Yes, Carlie cut to the chase.
That got me thinking of other biological analogies like that multicellular organisms are iterations of simple cell types, cell machinery is iterations of processes controlled by genes, genetic DNA is iterations of base pairs. Simple iterations making complexity on all levels. Not that we are discussing turing completeness here but constrained complexity, I think, but nevertheless complexity from humble origins.
Carlie, you forgot the stopping and turning at the end of the row!
That’s where the IDers really have us beat as knitters. God sends a little *poof!* miracle at the end of each row to get to the next.
He also makes sure they don’t drop any stitches.
Thanks for the link, PZ!
“… which is why I think demonstrations of iterative generation of complex stuff would be a Good Thing to show kids, before they start to fall for the notion of Conservation of Complexity, or whatever principle this person is trying to invoke.”
My 5-year old can identify and understand fractals, but has no idea what angels and devils are. When I try to explain the latter, he just looks confused.
And for Carlie (or any other knitters or cephalopod lovers) check out theseguys. I’m learning how to knit now (for the first time) just so I can make them.
Carlie, you forgot the stopping and turning at the end of the row!
Dang, that’s why it looks more like a hollow octopus tentacle…
The nautiloids are wonderful! Alas, my knitting skills are limited to scarves.
S’okay. My scarfing skills are limited to nautiloids.
Carlie makes an excellent point, one that hadn’t occurred to me before. Have any of these people ever made anything? Whenever something is created, complexity arrises through simple processes. Do they think automobiles spring forth fully formed from the head of Zeus?
That’s because “complexity” only arises from “intelligence”. Humans can do that because they have “intelligence”. Or you could just say humans can do that because we have “X-factor” or “magic” and you’d have an argument that’s as substantive as those made by ID folks.
Steviepinhead
Best laugh I’ve had all day. Wear your moniker with pride.
Props.
Quite right! And it’s not as if nature produces anything as complex as knitting.
I think it’s best formulated as “conservativism of simpletons.”
If you look at the above link and particularly the picture of Romanesco Broccoli, you will see the most beautiful example of complexity from simple beginnings. Not only is it fractal, but adjacent rows have numbers of flower heads which are adjacent terms of the Fibonacci sequence!
I buy this regularly, and not only do the kids love to eat it, I use it to teach them about fractals and Fibonacci and emergent complexity.
Fibonacci is really easy for kids to grasp, and it leads to many other things, like the golden mean.
P.
Ooops – the link didn’t appear in the previous post.
It’s here :-
http://xahlee.org/SpecialPlaneCurves_dir/Spiral_dir/spiral.html
Paul
simple leading to complex?
(1/x)*sin(x)
According to computer scientists a turing capable process is the most efficient computing system there is, capable of processing or creating all algorithmic constructs
That is utter gobbledegook, sticking disparate computational concepts together nonsensically. There are Turing Machines, there are processes, there is computational efficiency, there is computational power, there is processing, there are algorithms … but sticking the words together the way you have done is somewhat comparable to “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. The term “efficient” is particularly misplaced here. You seem to be reaching for the Church-Turing Thesis, which is that every “naturally computable” function is computable by some Turing Machine — or, the class of Turing Machines is sufficiently powerful to compute all “naturally computable” functions. The notion of “naturally computable” isn’t well-defined, but intuitively corresponds to carrying out a series of specified steps.
I think some of them believes that is as much as nature can do.
That would be the Physical Church-Turing thesis: “Every function that can be physically computed can be computed by a Turing machine”.
(Since abstract math methods like infinities
More gobbledegook. “infinities” are not “methods”, and all math is “abstract”.
aren’t feasible for a finite process.)
Turing Machines can carry out infinite processes — they are defined to have an infinite tape. If limited to finite processes and discrete, rather than continuous, ranges, Finite State Automata, which are a considerably weaker class of computational mechanisms than Turing Machines, suffice.