Evolution vs Intelligent Design

[Dragontamer]

I should note my background: I'm a Computer Engineer Graduate. I have very little background in physics, and I sometimes enjoy these little debates that apply my knowledge to some theology. I'm also piss poor at theology, so please be patient. :-p

If you tire of this at any time, you can send me a PM and I'll stop. I do realize I'm being tedious sometimes, so I don't want any hard feelings to come across. Especially, because I agree with your primary point. I'm simply going through with this because I disagree with your logic on this specific train of though.

I said it's a given. You have *God* powers. You can place molecules at a precision of a planck length. You just don't know how to place them to get what you want. At this point, it's not a stretch to suppose you got a stash of truly random numbers lying around as well. I mean we're clearly not working on a limited budget here.

I disagree, particularly because recognizing "random numbers" would require intelligence (even "low quality" random numbers require college-level mathematical background), but I've accepted your "lexical order" answer, so I'll move on.

Pit the creature in a maze. Give it an exam. You know what the creature should be able to do, perhaps what it should look like, it's not difficult to test for that. You've got all the time in the world, it's not like you give a shit about false negatives either.

Now you have to make sure these exams take finite time, lest you fall into the halting problem or something similar. Even if you have (countable) infinite time, if it took you an infinite amount of time to test a specific creation, then you wouldn't test many creations at all.

Overall, here's my understanding of your argument. (Correct me if I'm wrong). You claim that an "intelligent designer" does not have to be intelligent: that randomness (or what we now use... an iteration over the lexical order of arrangements of atoms on a discrete grid) alone can create everything in this universe.

My first issue was with the randomness, but the lexical order thing is trivial. (well, its college level Comp. Sci, but thats not too much more intelligent than a human). Here's the next part however: filtering out the crap. I argue: this step is extremely non-trivial, especially if you're iterating over molecular formations.

At very least, it will require intelligence to test these creatures, and figure out if they are worthy of creation. After all, we already know how to kill the HIV virus: stick it in acid. Its figuring out how to kill the HIV virus without killing the human it infects thats the issue. (IE: designing a proper test so that we don't start injecting sulfuric acid into people to cure them of AIDs).

Similarly, how do you design a test to figure out that these creatures really do what you want? A non-intelligent test will fail on criteria you don't understand (because you're not omniscient). At very least, the "intelligent designer" has to be intelligent enough to create a good test, and intelligent enough to understand what he "needs" and not what he "wants".

 

[Brain]

If you tire of this at any time, you can send me a PM and I'll stop. I do realize I'm being tedious sometimes, so I don't want any hard feelings to come across. Especially, because I agree with your primary point. I'm simply going through with this because I disagree with your logic on this specific train of though.

I have no problems with it. Passes time.

I disagree, particularly because recognizing "random numbers" would require intelligence, but I've accepted your "lexical order" answer, so I'll move on.

When I say random numbers are a given, it means you don't have to recognize them. I mean, if you're simulating the physical universe on that same machine you are running this program on, it's pretty safe to assume you've already solved random number generation.

Now you have to make sure these exams take finite time, lest you fall into the halting problem or something similar. Even if you have (countable) infinite time, if it took you an infinite amount of time to test a specific creation, then you wouldn't test many creations at all.

Of course they'd take finite time.

Similarly, how do you design a test to figure out that these creatures really do what you want? A non-intelligent test will fail on criteria you don't understand (because you're not omniscient). At very least, the "intelligent designer" has to be intelligent enough to create a good test, and intelligent enough to understand what he "needs" and not what he "wants".

Why would the creator "need" anything? Imagine that you're this God we're talking about. You want to create intelligent beings, you have no idea how, but you have a neat machine that can brute force it for you. I don't assume you will be very difficult. I wouldn't be. Frankly, I'd just take what I can get.

I can also bootstrap my algorithm by brute forcing better search algorithms than brute force, brute forcing general purpose learning algorithms, and so on. Finding intelligent living organisms is harder than finding purely rational intelligent algorithms and the latter can help with the former.

But anyway, look, essentially, my point is twofold:
1) Evaluating if something does what you want is considerably easier than figuring out how to build it.
2) If you can afford to do brute force, it's not difficult to make up anything you want with it. "Figuring out what does what you want" becomes "trying everything until it does what you want".

Mechanizing that process would be the icing on the cake, but it never was the main point.

 

[Dragontamer]

I have no problems with it. Passes time.

Good to hear.

Of course they'd take finite time.

Why would they? For example: lets say you created a creature with immortality, and you're waiting for that creature to die to measure how long that creature's life span is. When do you stop waiting?

But anyway, look, essentially, my point is twofold:
1) Evaluating if something does what you want is considerably easier than figuring out how to build it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

No: this is actually an unsolved problem in Computer Science. We DONT know if "evaluating" is easier than "building". In fact, one common technique in Algorithms is to create an algorithm that builds the optimal result... and then compares the optimal result to the tested result. Sometimes, building is easier than evaluating (or I should say... building ties with evaluating because you can always "evaluate by building". No one has ever proven that evaluating is actually easier)

2) If you can afford to do brute force, it's not difficult to make up anything you want with it. "Figuring out what does what you want" becomes "trying everything until it does what you want".

I understand this part. Its #1 that I have the issue with.

 

[DIABLO69]

A lot of ID proponents are just stubborn individuals who don't care to look at the big picture and wider possibilities. I personally, am an evolutionist and a creationist at the same time. I believe (very similarly to Darwin himself) that God (read: Higher/Powerful being) created some sort of life, be it a tiny amoeba or some other simple prokaryote, and then facilitated the transformation of that organism into something else, possibly even letting chance play a factor in the evolution of that organism.

People who actually believe everything today existed exactly as it is at the beginning of the world are just...stubborn.

I think that is a brilliant answer to this thread but I will post what I posted on "there is no G-d" thread.

"Each of us could post millions of posts hear, but we won't solve anything. Every good point here will have an equally good argument.I think the best thing we can do in our short lives is to accept that we will never know everything, especially how we arrived on "Earth" and what we are supposed to do here.

The best thing we can do is try to be the best person we can be, because, surely helping our fellow man, and animals shows (if you beleive in any type of) G-d that we should be shown the truth? THAT IS THE BEST ANSWER WE WILL EVER GET! I needed to put that in caps because it is the only answer which can be entirely accepted by everyone, and surely this shows more will power than worship? Being entirely kind, giving and forgivful...is impossible, but we should all try.

This argument has been going on since the dawn of man, and we should all know that some Pokemon community will NOT end it, unless, we be the best person we can be..."

And by the way, what does the Bible say about dinosaurs?

 

[Dragontamer]

It should be noted that Abigenesis and Evolution are two distinct concepts. Evolution can be proven with an experiment now a days. Humans can pick and choose fruit flies that survive and then make red eyes or black eyes more likely. (or something like that. But this experiment only takes a few weeks to to and you'll clearly see certain traits in the population that didn't exist before). Or... the fact that there are Bacteria that can now eat Nylon more or less proves the claims of Evolution. Traits can randomly mutate into a population.

Abigenesis on the otherhand is what Intelligent Design wishes to answer (most of the time). IE: how did the world start? How did life start?

I'm not really starting an argument, just commenting on the issue. Its hard enough to argue about ID vs Evolution when people are arguing about Abigenesis instead. (which really isn't "scientific" as much as "lets guess what happened 4 billion years ago" or whatever)

 

[Brain]

Why would they? For example: lets say you created a creature with immortality, and you're waiting for that creature to die to measure how long that creature's life span is. When do you stop waiting?

Wanting an "immortal" creature does not seem very useful, nor reasonable. I wouldn't really bother with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

No: this is actually an unsolved problem in Computer Science. We DONT know if "evaluating" is easier than "building". In fact, one common technique in Algorithms is to create an algorithm that builds the optimal result... and then compares the optimal result to the tested result. Sometimes, building is easier than evaluating (or I should say... building ties with evaluating because you can always "evaluate by building". No one has ever proven that evaluating is actually easier)

What does theoretical complexity have to do with this? If we can't do something in practice, it is not "easy". Even if P = NP, a polynomial algorithm for an NP-complete problem is a lot harder to find than a straightforward exponential time one. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be wondering if it existed, we'd have found it. It's usually easy to find a way to verify efficiently if X does Y. It usually isn't easy to find a way to build efficiently an X such that it does Y, even it can be done.

Abigenesis on the otherhand is what Intelligent Design wishes to answer (most of the time). IE: how did the world start? How did life start?

No, not really. ID is typically presented as an alternative to macro-evolution itself. Not that it would fare much better as an "explanation" to abiogenesis.

 

[cantab]

Why would they? For example: lets say you created a creature with immortality, and you're waiting for that creature to die to measure how long that creature's life span is. When do you stop waiting?

Well you don't do a test like that. If your creature lives longer than X years, you just note it down as such.

Also, there is another facet of the brute force approach, which I feel hasn't been properly stated. While certain aspects of it, like the testing or the enumeration algorithm, may indeed require some intelligence, the result is in no sense DESIGNED. That a deity could create all known lifeforms by brute force trial-and-error adds another proof to what we already know - just because something looks designed, doesn't mean it is.

In fact the deity doesn't even need infinite time. Taking a 100 metre cube (several times the size of the Blue Whale), a 'grid spacing' of 10^-35 metres (a little below the Planck length), the number of fundamental particles (including the state of 'no particle present') as 100 (a gross overestimate), and the number of energy states as a trillion (a guess that may be way off), then the number of possible arrangements in the cube is 10^125. A really high number, but emphatically not infinity - and it never will be as long as you use a finite region of space (heck, go crazy and use a trillion light-years!), a finite grid resolution (as has been explained will work if it's below the level of thermal motions), a finite number of fundamental particles (this seems sensible), and a finite number of energy levels (you can set an upper limit, since excessive energies would contradict life as we know it).

Enumerating over the possibilities is simple enough, either recursively or as a mass of nested loops. The recursive form makes for much simpler code.

 

[J-man]

Well you don't do a test like that. If your creature lives longer than X years, you just note it down as such.

Also, there is another facet of the brute force approach, which I feel hasn't been properly stated. While certain aspects of it, like the testing or the enumeration algorithm, may indeed require some intelligence, the result is in no sense DESIGNED. That a deity could create all known lifeforms by brute force trial-and-error adds another proof to what we already know - just because something looks designed, doesn't mean it is.

In fact the deity doesn't even need infinite time. Taking a 100 metre cube (several times the size of the Blue Whale), a 'grid spacing' of 10^-35 metres (a little below the Planck length), the number of fundamental particles (including the state of 'no particle present') as 100 (a gross overestimate), and the number of energy states as a trillion (a guess that may be way off), then the number of possible arrangements in the cube is 10^125. A really high number, but emphatically not infinity - and it never will be as long as you use a finite region of space (heck, go crazy and use a trillion light-years!), a finite grid resolution (as has been explained will work if it's below the level of thermal motions), a finite number of fundamental particles (this seems sensible), and a finite number of energy levels (you can set an upper limit, since excessive energies would contradict life as we know it).

Enumerating over the possibilities is simple enough, either recursively or as a mass of nested loops. The recursive form makes for much simpler code.

That's one of the flaws the evolutionist has to deal with. Everywhere you look, everything looks created. The evolutionist simply shrugs it off with his hard faith in evolution and says "just because it looks created doesn't mean it isn't"
Take a look at everything around you at this moment, what hasn't been created? I would bet, if i were a better, my whole bank account you could find nothing in the area you are in that hasn't been created. It's the entire theme of this universe. It's not just the manufactured stuff as well. Humans are created, no? We all have been created by the ingenious sexual intercourse process that sadly has become abused over. Take a look at the Bombardier Beetle, an insect who can create a chemical explosion to ward off predators without blowing himself up. Look at the giraffe, have you ever wondered why it doesn't blow its brains out when it's trying to get water? The long neck obviously must cause massive head head rush, no? I don't remember the the name of it, but there's a bird that builds a giant nest to the exact height in order to get the exact temperature for the eggs to correctly hatch. These are just three samples of finely tuned animals that makes me question how a random event can do this. This leads to another nitpick of my problem with evolution- Fine Tuning. Because everything is so fined tuned so life can exist, and the fact that you have such a vast and large amount of outcomes to get things right, you just start running the infinite monkey theorem.

I'm done with this thread as of now, unless i'm called out again. I'm not an arguer, only a defender of my beliefs. I've let myself become part of the perpetual cycle of a ID vs Evolutionary Hypothesis argument. If you all have sense, then you'd stop as well.

 

[cookie]

That's one of the flaws the evolutionist has to deal with. Everywhere you look, everything looks created.

"Looks" created? Sounds rather subjective. Basing the merits of ID on nature being 'too good' is ridiculous -what if someone with extremely high standards turned around and thought that there's a lot of room for improvement in animals' designs? This is the main flaw in ID - it's fucking subjective. Something subjective cannot be seriously compared to a scientific theory that is by definition objective. Besides, you're forgetting something: nearly everything we see in animals today has to work or that animal wouldn't survive very long. Giraffes that get massive haemorrhages when they drink water don't exist because they're all dead. Babies born with anencephaly (missing their frontal lobe) or some other disfigurement are certainly not 'fine-tuned' yet they exist, because of random mutations. If there was any designer behind those babies s/he certainly doesn't deserve to be labelled intelligent.

The evolutionist simply shrugs it off with his hard faith in evolution and says "just because it looks created doesn't mean it isn't"

Evolutionists, or scientists for that matter, do not have faith in theories. Theories not only not require it but are detrimental to it: if the theory works, it's supported. No faith is involved.

Take a look at everything around you at this moment, what hasn't been created? I would bet, if i were a better, my whole bank account you could find nothing in the area you are in that hasn't been created. It's the entire theme of this universe. It's not just the manufactured stuff as well. Humans are created, no? We all have been created by the ingenious sexual intercourse process that sadly has become abused over. Take a look at the Bombardier Beetle, an insect who can create a chemical explosion to ward off predators without blowing himself up. Look at the giraffe, have you ever wondered why it doesn't blow its brains out when it's trying to get water? The long neck obviously must cause massive head head rush, no? I don't remember the the name of it, but there's a bird that builds a giant nest to the exact height in order to get the exact temperature for the eggs to correctly hatch. These are just three samples of finely tuned animals that makes me question how a random event can do this. This leads to another nitpick of my problem with evolution- Fine Tuning. Because everything is so fined tuned so life can exist, and the fact that you have such a vast and large amount of outcomes to get things right, you just start running the infinite monkey theorem.

These changes occur over the course of millions of years, through natural selection of random mutations. The fine-tuning that you describe seems incredible because it's hard for people to comprehend geological timescales, but when you do fully grasp the time nature has to come up with these solutions it's perfectly reasonable to accept that no intelligent designer is needed.

However, let me put this in another light: what use is saying god created all this? Say he did, then what? By accepting evolution you can put it to use to predict the development of bacteria once people start using antibiotics for example (bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics is very good evidence for evolution, unless god introduced resistant bacteria just as we started using antibiotics).

 

[Obsessed]

That's one of the flaws the evolutionist has to deal with. Everywhere you look, everything looks created. The evolutionist simply shrugs it off with his hard faith in evolution and says "just because it looks created doesn't mean it isn't".

Your argument amounts to what is called "the watchmakers argument." Your argument has been thoroughly debunked. Yes, just because something looks created does not mean it was. Evolution clearly explains how things went from simple single celled organisms, to the complex ones we have today. Perhaps if you studied the theory you would see that complexity is not an issue for evolution. If you are interested in a through debunking of your argument then I suggest "The Blind Watchmaker."

 

[cantab]

That's one of the flaws the evolutionist has to deal with. Everywhere you look, everything looks created. The evolutionist simply shrugs it off with his hard faith in evolution and says "just because it looks created doesn't mean it isn't"

On the contrary, a lot of organisms show features that DON'T look designed. Wikipedia has a host of examples of suboptimal features in organisms (Merely treat the article as a reference list of such features for this discussion; I am not advocating the correctness of the arguments described there). Such features are entirely explainable by evolution, as a consequence of local maxima in phenotype space (I wish I could say that in non-jargon...but Wikipedia does anyway) and of the fact that 'good enough' often suffices, at least until a better competitor arises.

And those who agree with evolution do not have a "hard faith" in it, because we do not need any faith in it, because we evaluate the scientific evidence as in favour of evolution. Likening the theory that evolution by natural selection accounts for the origin of different species to a religious belief is yet another strawman.

Take a look at everything around you at this moment, what hasn't been created? I would bet, if i were a better, my whole bank account you could find nothing in the area you are in that hasn't been created.

Well creation's a vague word anyway. Everything's been created in the sense of being made. But as for designed - well the wood that makes my table isn't designed. And of course, I can just look at myself - I have seen no good evidence that I am designed. (Indeed, as mentioned before, many aspects of human physiology are a bit crap).
Most things I see are designed by humans, but that's because I'm in my house in a city. If I was hiking in Snowdonia, most of what I would see would not be designed.

It's the entire theme of this universe. It's not just the manufactured stuff as well. Humans are created, no? We all have been created by the ingenious sexual intercourse process that sadly has become abused over.

Now you're just deliberately misusing the vagueness of the word 'creation'.

Take a look at the Bombardier Beetle, an insect who can create a chemical explosion to ward off predators without blowing himself up.

The evolution of the Bombardier Beetle is fairly well understood.

Look at the giraffe, have you ever wondered why it doesn't blow its brains out when it's trying to get water? The long neck obviously must cause massive head head rush, no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_mirabile . They exist in many species, it's not like it's a giraffe-specific thing, and it's not hard to explain the evolution of.

I don't remember the the name of it, but there's a bird that builds a giant nest to the exact height in order to get the exact temperature for the eggs to correctly hatch.

How 'exact'? In any case, the weather's variable enough everywhere that no matter what height you are, the temperature's going to vary. Since you are unable to name the specific example, I am unable to check the validity of it, therefore I will assume you misunderstood it.

These are just three samples of finely tuned animals that makes me question how a random event can do this.

EVOLUTION IS NOT RANDOM CHANCE. If you don't even understand that, keep your mouth shut about it. And no creature arose due to 'a' random event; rather, evolution works incrementally - making small changes - and locally - only selecting on the basis of survival in the environment the organism lives in.

I'm done with this thread as of now, unless i'm called out again. I'm not an arguer, only a defender of my beliefs.

But your belief in ID is accompanied by a lack of knowledge and understanding of evolution by natural selection.

 

[Obsessed]

The evolution of the Bombardier Beetle is fairly well understood.

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB310_1.html

Just in case anyone wants to read it.

 

[Brain]

That's one of the flaws the evolutionist has to deal with. Everywhere you look, everything looks created.

As a matter of fact, no, it does not. Any "creator" or creating process has a signature that taints anything it creates. Using that signature, one may infer the origin of an object. If you found a watch, through analysis, you could infer that the most likely origin for it is that it was made by a watchmaker, because its design would follow certain specific, logical patterns. First, it would not have any way to reproduce itself - this suggests that it was made by a third party. Second, it would not be self-sufficient, so it is reasonable to assume that it is a tool to a third party. Third, it would not contain any redundant or vestigial parts, which suggests a stage of abstract conception before the object was made. Fourth, it would be composed of metallic elements of smooth, regular shape, many of which would be identical, which gives further hints as to what abstractions were used by the maker during conception. By analyzing the way everything is put together in a watch, we could infer many properties of its maker and partly figure out how he thinks.

Well, it so happens that analysis of lifeforms on Earth show that they are constructed in a way that the process of evolution would shape them. They can reproduce themselves and mutate, meaning that they are automatically subject to evolution and natural selection. They are self-sufficient. They seem to be a patchwork of many features, some half-baked, some redundant, some others vestigial. We have massive evidence all over the place that leads us to say that the "signature" (or maker) of lifeforms is evolution, and very good reasons to think that it was not some sort of cosmic watchmaker.

If something evolved, we can tell.

 

[ivar]

What kind of creator would make kiwis the way they are? They're delicious but man that fuzz is hella annoying to peel off. Only a twisted creator would do that.

I say this in response to the banana argument: a banana is so convenient to eat, suggesting that there is a creator.

 

[MetalGearSamus]

That's one of the flaws the evolutionist has to deal with. Everywhere you look, everything looks created. The evolutionist simply shrugs it off with his hard faith in evolution and says "just because it looks created doesn't mean it isn't"

Adding to what has already been said, something "looking" created is completely arbitrary. What looks created to someone does not look created to others. It's totally a matter of opinion and thus cannot be measured or used in any scientific or logical manner.

Also, you are looking at the creatures of the world in only one frame of time and then judging their entire existence based off that one fragment of information. You concluding that a god or gods must have created animals based off of one stage in their evolution because they look complex is like me saying you must have popped out of the ground as you are now because you are much too big to have been born from your mother's vagina. If I had any incling of sense I would look back at hospital records and photos (Fossils and DNA) and see that you started out smaller (less complex) and eventually grew to the height (level of complexity) you are now.

And even though you may not have photos from every second of your life, I can very well assume that you grew in between the time those photos were taken. It's just common sense: Things change over time.

 

[Obsessed]

a banana is so convenient to eat, suggesting that there is a creator.

Correction: Modern bananas that are the result of a couple years of artificial selection are convenient to eat. Wild bananas however... are anything but edible.

 

[MrIndigo]

Something I haven't seen pointed out yet is that the original statement of the Intelligent Design school of thought is actually inherently flawed.

It goes like this:

1) You observe a pocketwatch in the forest.
2) The pocketwatch is too complex to have been created by random/itself/nature.

Thus you can infer there must be an intelligent watchmaker.

The problem is that there is no justification for the second point. You are equating your own inability to understand the processes that led to the creation of the watch, with the idea of a limitation to the power of nature.

This analogy is misleading because it is using the audiences preconceptions that a watch is artificial. If you were to walk on an alien planet, and find a multicoloured crystalline lump on the grey rocky ground, you would not think "There must be a crystal maker".


The idea that "Everything looks created" is much the same. The fact that you don't understand the evolutionary processes involved doesn't mean that there isn't one. Furthermore, not everything DOES look created. A prey animal might look created because of the special feature it has to escape it's predators. But then there is a predator animal that looks created because it has the perfect counter to the prey's escape measure. Suddenly the prey doesn't look so well created. Or is the creator taking sides?

 

[Dragontamer]

One minute Brain, I'll go gang up on this guy's arguments with yall. :-p

Checkers [/URL]
2. Audio Watermark Detection
3. Even an Antenna was "evolved"

We can simulate evolution. It is a process that has been exactly described by Charles Darwin. From simulated experiments, as well as empirical experiments, we know what the properties of Evolution look like. In particular, how creatures are "built up", and how creatures that "evolved" from a previous creature would have similar features.

Now, evolution is not perfect (in fact, those who know Genetic Algorithms wrestle more with its deficiencies than with its successes). It is greedy, it creates imperfect beings. Sometimes, the critters that are created have redundant parts. We can find these imperfections in Humans, and other creatures in the world.

The only conclusion is that evolution describes our world and biology pretty darn well. It explains the deficiencies with human wisdom teeth, why our eyes aren't as good as a hawk's, and why hunters have eyes in the front of their head, while prey have eyes on their sides.

Wanting an "immortal" creature does not seem very useful, nor reasonable. I wouldn't really bother with that.

You misread my statement.

If you are testing the lifespan of creatures, and you happen to have created an immortal creature, then it will take an infinite amount of time to figure out it's lifespan.

IE: you're not wanting an immortal creature, you're simply testing its lifespan. This is an example of how a "test" for a feature may take an infinite amount of time.

Here's another one, maybe that example isn't very good. Lets say you want to test if a creature can figure out PI. You give it a few hints (draw a few circles, and whatnot), and you wait a few billion years. Have you proven that the creature won't learn Pi? No. What if its the environment you put it in? What if there weren't enough circles in the environment? Arguably, you may need to enumerate all of the environments to find there exists at least one environment in which the creature can learn PI.

If you need to enumerate an infinite number of environments to complete a test of intelligence, then no, you'll never complete your creation.

All you've done is move the "intelligence" of the intelligent design from the "Design" into the "test". Anyone who's written some AI should know that testing and evaluations can still be a hard problem. (IE: How do you evaluate a chess board? How do you know what a good position is vs a bad one? Yes, I know you can solve it with infinite time easily, but chess is a finite game)

What does theoretical complexity have to do with this?

Its an example, where we don't know if "Evaluation" is easier than "searching". Because "easy" is a poorly defined word, I used the Computer Science definition of easy (which is a problem solvable in polynomial time). I'd rather not get into defining what "easy" or "hard" exactly means however.

In this specific case... we don't know if "evaluation" is easier than "searching", at least by the Computer Science definition of "easier".

No, not really. ID is typically presented as an alternative to macro-evolution itself. Not that it would fare much better as an "explanation" to abiogenesis.

Hmm, in my experience, most ID people tend to backtrack to the origin of life as a platform as they start to lose their argument.

 

[Luduan]

What kind of creator would make kiwis the way they are? They're delicious but man that fuzz is hella annoying to peel off. Only a twisted creator would do that.

I say this in response to the banana argument: a banana is so convenient to eat, suggesting that there is a creator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HW06Wz_R74

God is a bitch.

 

[Brain]

You misread my statement.

If you are testing the lifespan of creatures, and you happen to have created an immortal creature, then it will take an infinite amount of time to figure out it's lifespan.

IE: you're not wanting an immortal creature, you're simply testing its lifespan. This is an example of how a "test" for a feature may take an infinite amount of time.

Oh, okay. But I thought I said the tests would take finite time? It's not difficult to make tests that take finite time. At worst you cut them off after a set amount of time.

Here's another one, maybe that example isn't very good. Lets say you want to test if a creature can figure out PI. You give it a few hints (draw a few circles, and whatnot), and you wait a few billion years. Have you proven that the creature won't learn Pi? No. What if its the environment you put it in? What if there weren't enough circles in the environment? Arguably, you may need to enumerate all of the environments to find there exists at least one environment in which the creature can learn PI.

Who cares? I already said we don't give a damn about false negatives. If the creature fails to figure out pi using the tools I provide, it is rejected, and that's the end of the story. Some other creature will pass it instead, with such a wide search space it's not what I would call a risk. I also don't see why I'd give a damn about some creature being able to learn pi in any other environment than the one I'm going to put it in. I'm not fitting the environment to the creature, I am fitting the creature to the environment! It needs to be intelligent there.

All you've done is move the "intelligence" of the intelligent design from the "Design" into the "test". Anyone who's written some AI should know that testing and evaluations can still be a hard problem. (IE: How do you evaluate a chess board? How do you know what a good position is vs a bad one? Yes, I know you can solve it with infinite time easily, but chess is a finite game)

Of course evaluation is difficult if you're being anal about it. If I am searching for intelligent creatures, all that matters is that my tests manage to catch a bunch of them. If they flunk 99.9% of all intelligent creatures, that's not a problem at all. If they flunk all but one, okay, it'd be nice to have more variety, but I still found one, didn't I? I can live with that. If only 0.1% of creatures that pass are actually intelligent, that's not a problem either, as long as it's not an absurdly low ratio.

Its an example, where we don't know if "Evaluation" is easier than "searching". Because "easy" is a poorly defined word, I used the Computer Science definition of easy (which is a problem solvable in polynomial time). I'd rather not get into defining what "easy" or "hard" exactly means however.

In this specific case... we don't know if "evaluation" is easier than "searching", at least by the Computer Science definition of "easier".

I'm using the terms colloquially, which is how most people would understand them. imagine that you are trying to solve a problem. If it takes you ten minutes, it is easy. If it takes you the whole day, it is hard. If you can't do it at all, it's very hard. That's what I mean. It doesn't get any simpler than this.

 

[cantab]

All you've done is move the "intelligence" of the intelligent design from the "Design" into the "test".

I said this already, but I'll say it again. The brute force argument disproves the design part of 'intelligent design'. Even if the tests have to be absolute genius, the fact remains that the result of this process was not designed, for any reasonable definition of 'designed'.

 

[traitor_dice]

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB310_1.html

Just in case anyone wants to read it.

just posting to say thanks for the link. it was an interesting read.

as a 15 year old student, I don't understand this whole conversation, but its interesting to read.

 

[darknite]

I would like to share part of why I am a Christian, and why I believe in ID. This video series is about the Star of Bethlehem at Christ's birth, one of the most amazing events in all of history. It is really incredible if you have the time to watch it. There are 8 parts, with the 8th video being what really got me. But please watch the others before it to understand what's going on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRk4ZBCxO3s

 

[cantab]

Well, my internet is screwing up right now. And anyway, very few ideas take 1 1/2 hours of video to at least outline. So care to explain? In particular I'd be surprised at any connection the Star of Bethlehem and intelligent design.

 

[Dragontamer]

I said this already, but I'll say it again. The brute force argument disproves the design part of 'intelligent design'. Even if the tests have to be absolute genius, the fact remains that the result of this process was not designed, for any reasonable definition of 'designed'.

I disagree. Lets assume that the tests need to be "genius" as you put it. In this case, the creatures that are eventually put on earth are a combination of a trivial search AND a "designed" test.

For example, the wavelet for the experimental SNOW codec was found through brute-force search. The genius of it was testing the various wavelets: figuring out which wavelet was best for compression.

Just because it is possible to brute force the damn codec doesn't mean that you'll recognize the codec when the brute-forcer comes out with it. And just because the Snow Codec (or part of it) was brute-forced does not mean it wasn't "designed".

I'm out of time Brain. I'll respond to your post later.