The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
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Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#2"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive."
Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#3"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.
"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive."
But you probably would have to be to think that the argument was relevant to Darwin's theory. Darwin book is titled: "The Origin of Species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life". That is to say, it is explicitly not about how the variation comes about but about how the variation becomes fixed.
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#4"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.
Indeed. Until we can quantify nature's computational power and the computational complexity of evolving solutions to problems in nature, the only sensible response to the fact that evolution works extremely well is no response because we lack comparisons. Evolution only surprises us when we falsely (or at least without good reason) regard nature and our own creative abilities to belong to the same reference class.
There are also already plenty of clues for why evolution works, e.g. distributed representations, parallelization, composition counteracting combinatorial explosions, selection for structures that evolve faster/better (kind of like learning to learn) etc.
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#5As usual, this article makes me think of Wittgenstein, who would probably say, "I agree with everything you're saying, except the word 'strange'."
The content is interesting, definitely, but you could save some time and potentially misleading "appreciation of strangeness" by stating that neutral drift allows for dramatically more random possibilities than those offered by one-time random mutations.
Not that Wittgenstein (or I) want to poopoo the "wonder" element of science or life in general... but I think it's telling that the author, as other comments point out, mentions creationism, as if that's a natural motivator for "wonder" (or a natural view to take in light of "wonder"). But creationism is simplistic, incoherent, and wrong. If "strange" is adding nothing to the truth or falsity of any of the statements involved, and "strange" is somehow an excuse for creationism, perhaps we should take issue with this being "strange" at all.
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#6"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.
This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed
I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind.
A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing more enlightened than a lack of independent thinking in an environment where atheism is in fashion among the cool kids.
I'll have to say that I'm astonished again and again when I write code that uses some "mindless" search process (including numerous experiments with evolutionary algorithms) and it finds the answer to some problem that I couldn't reason through. I can't seem to get over the feeling that if I have to reason to solve a certain problem, and I can't reason well enough to solve it, and another "thing" does solve it, it must reason better than I do--be smarter than I am--even when I wrote the code that did it.
It gives me a sense of "awe" for the power of evolution and a lasting "sympathetic attitude" toward those who just can't believe that it could work this well. Like the power of a simple, naive bayes spam sorter to "interpret the text of email", evolution is one of those things that, even when I can explain it well enough to actually implement it with my own hands, it's still hard for me to believe.
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#7"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive."
I used watch those Dawkins v the true believers videos and I suspect such opinions are promoted to discredit Darwinian Evolution acting on the genome. Regardless of the unknown nuances of DNA, Evolution is the environment acting on the species to further adapt it to the environment. Here's another quote from Philip Ball: "What often goes unremarked among the revisionism that current research is prompting is that DNA was supposed to be the missing part of the puzzle in evolutionary theory: the repository of Mendelian hereditary factors."
So if DNA doesn't act on the units of inheritance, there must be some kind of spooky spirit entities acting on matter,
http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/images/miracle_sharris.gi...
http://www.philipball.co.uk/images/stories/docs/pdf/genes%20...
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#8As usual, this article makes me think of Wittgenstein, who would probably say, "I agree with everything you're saying, except the word 'strange'." The content is interesting, definitely, but you could save some time and potentially misleading "appreciation of strangeness" by stating that neutral drift allows for dramatically more random possibilities than those offered by one-time random mutations. Not that Wittgenst…
A maybe relevant Wittgenstein quote: "It is not how the world is, that is the mystical, but that it is."
Tractatus 6.44
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#9"You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive." Interesting article but why are we still bringing up creationism. This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed. It adds no value to the article except ridicules itself.
This whole apologist / sympathizing attitude needs to be changed I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind. A person can be a creationist without being a fool and can be a believer in evolution by nothing…
> I don't know, as an atheist myself I think the attitude of smug arrogance embodied in terms like "benighted creationist" is the real problem, not that even acknowledging a theory that has been believed in some form by most humans who ever lived is too kind.
Creationism was never a scientific theory. And I think we can give a free pass to people being creationist before the theory was created and before it was taught in schools. Modern day creationist though, they are fools.
Re: The Strange Inevitability of Evolution
#10I don't like the anthropomorphization of evolution. It's a bad angle to view the subject
>If evolution is “searching” for that function by natural selection...
Evolution is "doing" nothing. It has no particular purpose and it is not "searching" for the particular life forms of this planet. The true shaper of the life-forms we know is death. Death (by resource starvation) is the knife cutting the uncontrolled growth of life, uncontrolled growth in number and variations.