Archive for the 'Evolution' Category

P.S.

In yesterday’s post, I claimed to have refuted Richard Dawkins’s claim that everything complex must have emerged from something simple by citing the natural numbers, which are provably highly complex (in a very precise sense) yet did not emerge from something simple. Numerous commenters suggested that I’d been unfair to Dawkins, because he’d surely meant his claim to apply only to biological processes.

Here is a quote from Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion”:

Time and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I siaid, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name….The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present existence.

I could provide additional quotes, but this one should suffice. Dawkins believes, unless I have misunderstood him completely, that he has a quite general argument, not tied in any way to biology (because the above quote, for example, has nothing to do with biology) to establish that complex structures must have simple causes. That argument, whatever it might be, cannot be correct because the natural numbers stand as a counterexample.

If Dawkins, or any of his defenders, wants to respond that his argument is not intended to apply to the natural numbers, it becomes incumbent on them to point to a hypothesis which is actually used in the argument which would rule out such an application. Absent such a hypothesis, the argument must be erroneous.

I claim to have explained in The Big Questions exactly how the first cause of our Universe could be a mathematical structure that is far more complex than the Universe itself; of course others, like Max Tegmark, have demonstrated this possibility in far more detail than I have. Whether or not Tegmark and I are correct in our beliefs, I claim we’ve at least demonstrated that (as far as we can tell) those beliefs could be true, which, once again, refutes Dawkins’s position.

An argument that leads to flat-out wrong conclusions cannot be a correct argument, even if some of its implications turn out to be true. So I stand by what I said both yesterday and in The Big Questions : Dawkins’s position fails for exactly the same reason that Michael Behe’s does — we have an explicit example that shows that complexity requires neither a simpler antecedent nor a designer.

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False ID

Bob Murphy, always my favorite theist, posts a defense of Intelligent Design theory, or at least an attack on its attackers, who, he claims, have largely failed to grasp what the ID theorists, such as Michael Behe, are claiming:

Behe is fine with the proposition that if we had a camera and a time machine, we could go observe the first cell on earth as it reproduced and yielded offspring. There would be nothing magical in these operations; they would obey the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. The cells would further divide and so on, and then over billions of years there would be mutations and the environment would favor some of the mutants over their kin, such that natural selection over time would yield the bacterial flagellum and the human nervous system.

Yet Behe’s point is that when you look at what this process spits out at the end, you can’t deny that a guiding intelligence must be involved somehow.

(Emphasis added.)

Perhaps Bob has forgotten that I disposed of this argument in Chapter 4 of The Big Questions , with a single counterexample that refutes both Behe and his polar opposite Richard Dawkins in one fell swoop. Let’s recall their positions, stated as simply as possible:

Behe: Irreducible complexity requires an intelligent designer.

Dawkins: Irreducible complexity requires evolution. (This is Dawkins’s stated position in his book The God Delusion.)

Landsburg: The natural numbers are irreducibly complex, moreso (by any reasonable definition) than anything in biology. But the natural numbers were not designed and did not evolve, so Behe and Dawkins are both wrong.

Continue reading ‘False ID’

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On Darwin’s 200th

Our reader Jeff Poggi sent me a sonnet he wrote in honor of Darwin’s 200’th birthday, and kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. How many hidden Darwin references can you spot?

On Darwin’s 200th
by
Jeff Poggi

Charles much under winter gray knew life
Would be back, be full, be gullible, need
Life. If inches crept by like miles rife
With their own history, then just a seed
Or stone therein would tell the story of
All this earth–all. He can’t let it be, sees
The earth make new earth, sees new stars above
Reflected, fits royal needs while he flees
Into his life in these new waters, lands.
Home in his garden he takes walks and writes,
Suffers loss most dear and is forced to hand
To them who will not hear what sorely smites
Their hallowed place, their no less hallowed birth—
From such simple forms we populate the earth.
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Beauty’s Daughter

fiskesmallI love evolutionary biology, so I love this argument: Beauty is more valuable to girls than it is to boys, so beautiful parents should have more daughters than sons. You want (or at least your genes want) to pass on your assets to children who can make the best use of them.

So I was delighted by recent news reports that beautiful women do indeed have more daughters. But I was stunned by the reported magnitude of the effect: According to one report, beautiful people are 36 percent more likely to have a daughter than a son!

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Jenkin Off

It is well known (to the sort of people to whom such things are well known) that the Scottish engineer Fleeming Jenkin was the first to formalize a toy model of Darwin’s evolutionary theory—with results that were most unfavorable to Darwin: The model predicts that random improvements, even when they confer survival advantages, still tend to disappear over the course of a few generations. This was in 1867.

It seems to be far less well known that Jenkin’s model also predicts that all life on earth dies out after a few generations, which would seem to cast doubt on its assumptions. Jenkin was apparently unaware of this, and so, presumably, was Darwin, who gave considerable credence to the Jenkin model in the final edition of The Origin of Species. This was in 1872.

It seems to be even less well known that the inadequacy of Jenkin’s model was identified in a little-noticed letter to the editor of Nature by the mathematician Arthur Sladen Davis. In that letter, Davis corrected Jenkin’s error and supplied an alternative model that he believed was favorable to Darwin. This was in 1871, but apparently Darwin never heard about it.

And it seems to be known only to me (and now, to the readers of this blog!) that Davis’s model is also flawed, in the opposite direction from Jenkin’s, in that it predicts that any species population must grow without bound following the appearance of a beneficial mutation. And as a result of this, the Davis model undercuts Darwin more than it supports him.

I’ve adjusted Davis’s model much as Davis adjusted Jenkin’s, and gotten a result that could be considered favorable to Darwin. In fact, it’s more or less the result that Davis thought he’d gotten, but hadn’t.

Here comes the more technical part. If this is not your cup of tea, stop reading now. Do come back tomorrow though. I’m not always like this.

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What Are You Surest Of?

Among the things you’re sure of, which are you surest of? For Richard Dawkins, writing in the Wall Street Journal, it’s the theory of evolution:

We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that [evolution] is the process that has generated life on our own planet.

Now, I would be thunderstruck if the theory of evolution turned out to be fundamentally wrong, but not nearly so thunderstruck as if arithmetic turned out to be inconsistent. In fact, I can think of quite a few things I’m more sure about than evolution. For example:

1. The consistency of arithmetic. (This amounts to saying that a single arithmetic problem can’t have two different correct answers.)

2. The existence of conscious beings other than myself.

3. The fact that the North won the American Civil War. (That is, historians are not universally mistaken about this. I am not interested in quibbling about what constitutes a “win”; I mean to assert that the North won in the everyday sense of the word, as reported in all the history texts.)
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There He Goes Again

I said this in The Big Questions and I’ll say it again: Richard Dawkins is an international treasure and one of my personal heroes, but he’s got this God thing all wrong. Here’s some of his latest, from the Wall Street Journal:

Where does [Darwinian evolution] leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

But Darwinian evolution can’t replace God, because Darwinian evolution (at best) explains life, and explaining life was never the hard part. The Big Question is not: Why is there life? The Big Question is: Why is there anything? Explaining life does not count as explaining the Universe.
Continue reading ‘There He Goes Again’

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