Dawkins explains non-random evolution, attacks faith

[Fred H.]

In an April 28, 2005 Salon.com article/interview, The Atheist (Richard Dawkins attacks God, faith), by Gordy Slack, Dawkins discusses the “ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in,” notes that “Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side,” and, additionally, when asked whether evolution is random, says that, “This is a spectacular misunderstanding.”

Here’s a bottom line summary on Dawkins’s explanation of evolution:
While evolution by natural selection is not “somehow aimed” (at humanity or elsewhere, i.e., evolution is directionless), evolution is nevertheless not random because natural selection—“about as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine”—selects from variation provided by mutation—although mutation is random—and natural selection, working on random mutation, “directs evolution toward improvement.”

And I imagined that the quantified gravity and electromagnetism forces would have been more “non-random” than the natural selection force that Dawkins refers to. But then I also imagined that Bush and bin Laden were on different sides, and, admittedly, I’m one of the uneducated that voted Bush in.

Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask Dawkins what improvement is (nor, for that matter, what he thought about ex-atheist Flew’s recent change of mind), but I’m thinking a new catch phrase—survival of the most improved.

[Fred H.]

Something we never learn: the cover-up is always worse than the offense.

In 2005, the Edge Annual Question, of big name scientists (see http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html), was: "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"

Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist, an atheist, and probably the strongest advocate for Darwinian evolution around, responded:

I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Well, that says it all—a veritable Apostle’s Creed for Darwinian atheists.

I guess the ID folk are right after all, more or less, and I think the folk on the other side of issue just need to admit the shortcomings of Darwinian natural selection.


From an interview with DR. ANTONY FLEW (by DR. GARY R. HABERMAS), at http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/index.cfm

HABERMAS: So of the major theistic arguments, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological, the only really impressive ones that you take to be decisive are the scientific forms of teleology?

FLEW: Absolutely. It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

[Carey N]

"Improvement" would be any trait that affords some kind of reproductive advantage. There is absolutely no redundancy or circularity in this logic, as you seem desperate to infer wherever you read or hear about this subject.

[Carey N]

I don't know who Dr. Flew is, but he doesnt know anything about evolution. You cant take the word of guys like that, who are clearly un-informed, as support for anything.

No doubt, there is much controversy over how life began on Earth, but only two essential features were needed (replication and heritable information). The organic chemical soup of Earth's early atmosphere and oceans, combined with an oxidizing, high-energy environment, had more than a billion years to fulfill those two essential features before evolution got going in earnest. See "Major Transitions in Evolution"

[Fred H.]

Carey: "Improvement" would be any trait that affords some kind of reproductive advantage. There is absolutely no redundancy or circularity in this logic . . .
Yes Carey, it is difficult to argue with your improved round of reasoning here—and it seems that you have provided the most fitting reasoning in our discussion regarding the circularity of natural selection . . . because otherwise you wouldn’t have.

Let us meditate upon the Dawkinsian creed:

I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.
It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution.
Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
Amen

[Fred H.]

Is probability a measure of inherent randomness, or a measure of what we know/don’t know about something? Stated another way, are the variables affecting the probability of something, like the 50/50 heads-tails probability of a coin flip, or the mutation of genes, actually random, or merely uncertain?

Bayesians, and I suspect many Physicists, would select uncertain. On the other hand, natural selection (Dawkins’s “as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine”), selecting from ”uncertain mutations,” rather than from “random mutations,” probably implies less directionlessness than I think most neo-Darwinians perceive.

Too bad. The Darwinians might have been able to avoid that unpleasantness in Kansas if they’d been more willing to adapt, by changing their doctrine to, using Dawkins’s term, a “non-random” natural selection, selecting from, using the Bayesians term, uncertain mutations, rather than random mutations . . . if that had placated that pesky Kansas school board, then just think—the world, even Richard Dawkins, would have seen that all Americans, even the simple-mindedly pious of Kansas, are indeed committed to science.

[Carey N]

I think I perceive your distinction between randomness and uncertainty . . . a coin toss is not random because the precise weight, rotational velocity, linear velocity, and flexibility of the coin, combined with wind speed and the arrangement of other objects in the room, could in principle (but in practice??) be used to determine the exact outcome of the flip.

Similarly, if one were to possess all of the relevant information about incoming UV rays (and other mutagens) plus the orientation of the organism and all of its contents, then one could predict (again, only in principle) which, when, and where mutations would happen. In that sense mutations are only uncertain because we have insufficient information and computing power to predict their occurrence.

You, Fred, misunderstand the precise meaning of randomness used implicitly by Dawkins . . . mutations are uncertain in the way you describe, but they are absolutely random with respect to their potential effects upon the organisms in which they happen. That is the entirety of Dawkins's point: there is no pre-existing design according to which mutations occur. That's all that matters in this discussion.

Natural selection is not a force in the way you conceive it but simply a consequence of the fact that some mutations (rare though they may be) happen to increase the reproductive output of the organisms in which they have occurred. The imagery created by terms like "selection pressure" is misleading . . . nobody and nothing is applying any pressure. Pressure simply emerges from the connection between differential reproduction and heritable variability.

Your proposed resolution to the Kansas problem is no such thing. The conservative fundamentalists in Kansas and elsewhere are pushing to put an idea into the science classroom (by all means talk about creationism in a history or english class) which has no place there whatsoever. Creationism is not a viable scientific alternative to the theory of evolution. By its very own dogma creationism is pseudo-science, totally lacking the potential to posit testable hypotheses and instead relying on the intellectual cowardice that reigns in people too fearful to confront difficult questions without conjuring some mystical force that sets aside the problem at hand (though by no means solves it). To give up on that point would be to give up on the educational foundation of however many millions of kids live in Kansas (and the others that live elsewhere in the South). Fundamentalists are not committed to science; they are committed to their own insecurities and cultural heritage (can't blame them for the latter). But to defend those things they are fighting to submit their own children to a fake science education. If we compromise in that direction we'll be one step closer to the dark ages.

[Fred H.]

I was using Dawkins’s definition of natural selection—he said it is “about as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine.”

But I’m inclined to agree that your explanation of natural selection—that it is “a consequence of the fact that some mutations . . . happen to increase the reproductive output [fitness?] of the organisms in which they have occurred”—probably better captures the essence of what Darwinians mean by it.

And it does seem to be almost self-evident that evolution does involve some amount of selection, although I don’t know how to qualify/quantify the concept in a noncircular way, whether one invokes blind nature or some sort of intelligence. (And, as I think JimB has indicated in times past, there does seem to be selection going in both directions—top down and bottom up, along with that whole Stu Kaufman self-organization thing.)

It’s just that I don’t know of any evidence/physics confirming that things ever truly occur/evolve randomly—it often just appears that way because we don’t know enough and/or because of complexity and/or so-called chaos.

All the known natural laws of physics are deterministic, certainly at the classical level, although there is that pesky probability thing that occurs when “measurements” are made at the quantum level (wherein the quantum particle’s wave function complex numbers are squared to compute probabilities)—but even that is best thought of as a measure of what we don’t know/understand about stuff at that level.

[Carey N]

And it does seem to be almost self-evident that evolution does involve some amount of selection, although I don’t know how to qualify/quantify the concept in a noncircular way, whether one invokes blind nature or some sort of intelligence. (And, as I think JimB has indicated in times past, there does seem to be selection going in both directions—top down and bottom up, along with that whole Stu Kaufman self-organization thing.)

Yes, evolution very deeply involves natural selection, but again that selection is not exerted by anything . . . it is the logical consequence of organism-organism and organism-environment interations combined with heritable information. There is nothing circular about it, particularly if you avoid the term fitness (which is context-dependent and tends to lead us down a circular road). Realize instead that evolution by natural selection is about reproduction, reproduction, reproduction. Alleles that afford their respective organisms with a greater capacity to reproduce and pass on that heritable information to future generations are preserved at the expense of alternative alleles that do not. It's a straight line from reproductive advantage governed (at least in part) by heritable information to the biased preservation of that same heritable information in future generations. You don't find straight lines like that in much of scientific theory . . . I say we should cherish this one.

The emphasis JimB has placed on self-organization is very interesting, but it doesn't change the implications for how natural selection works, however hard Stu Kaufman argues to the contrary. The idea behind self-organization is that many interacting individuals, each of which is behaving according to a small set of rules-of-thumb using only local information, can produce vastly complex higher-level organizations that could not have been anticipated from knowledge of the individuals involved. The classic examples are fish schools, termite mounds, and army ant raids. If we push beyond this admittedly staggering phenomenon, we see that self-organization is not another force of evolutionary change, but rather a consequence of conventional natural selection. Natural selection "sees" a system's emergent properties and molds them via changes in the rules-of-thumb (which are heavily heritable) used by the individuals involved. I think self-organization is going to be one of the (if not the one) most important processes in our understanding of nearly everything from development to social behavior, but that doesn't mean it is an alternative to natural selection; it is simply one of many properties of biological systems visible to conventional Darwinian selection. See "Self-Organization in Biological Systems" by Camazine et al. [Note: I'm aware of the anthropomorphic lanuage I'm using to describe selection's influence (there I go again), but that is simply shorthand for the proper characterization of natural selection that is described in my first paragraph.]


It’s just that I don’t know of any evidence/physics confirming that things ever truly occur/evolve randomly—it often just appears that way because we don’t know enough and/or because of complexity and/or so-called chaos.

The point is not whether mutations happen randomly with respect to the total information available in the universe. The point is that mutations occur randomly with respect to their potential effects upon the organisms in which they reside. When one such mutation just happens to afford a reproductive advantage upon the organism in which it lies, it will (as a purely logical consequence of this fact) be proliferated at the expense of other mutations. That is selection pressure . . . no one exerts it; it just happens. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.

[Fred H.]

Carey: Yes, evolution very deeply involves natural selection, but again that selection is not exerted by anything . . . it is the logical consequence of organism-organism and organism-environment iterations combined with heritable information. There is nothing circular about it, particularly if you avoid the term fitness (which is context-dependent and tends to lead us down a circular road).

Very deep Carey. So you’re saying that natural selection, Dawkins’s non-random force, is actually something that isn’t exerted by anything . . . yeah, give a fool a horse and he’ll ride it to Hell. Perhaps you should enlighten Dawkins with this novel exegesis—he can employ it in his next rant on the simple-mindedly pious of Kansas. BTW, you may want to look-up circular.

[Carey N]

Carey:
Very deep Carey. So you’re saying that natural selection, Dawkins’s non-random force, is actually something that isn’t exerted by anything . . . yeah, give a fool a horse and he’ll ride it to Hell.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. You can call me a fool on a metaphorical horse, but if I'm riding it somewhere then it sure isn't hell.

"Circular - (adj) - being or involving reasoning that uses in the argument or proof a conclusion to be proved or one of its unproved consequences."

Natural selection:
[hertiable variation] + [differential reproduction] -> [evolution]

Show me the circularity Fred . . .

[Fred H.]

Carey:Show me the circularity . . .

Circular reasoning is assuming something in order to prove what you assumed. E.g., evolution is the result of heritable variation and differential reproduction—therefore:
[heritable variation] + [differential reproduction] -> [evolution]
More circular reasoning: evolution is the result of beginning low entropy, uncertain variables, self-organization, and selection—therefore:

beginning low entropy + uncertain variables + self organization + selection = evolution

Which I believe is closer to the reality, although it’s still circular.


In contrast, here’s something that’s falsifiable and not circular: e = mc^2—therefore, energy is essentially equal to mass.

[Carey N]

We are arguing on two different playing fields . . . I hope I can clarify this and allow the debate to progress and perhaps reach a conclusion.

You think you are arguing about the process of natural selection, but you are not. You are discussing the nature of evolutionary biology . . . unlike physics or chemistry, evolution is a historical science. We perceive the living world, wonder about why it exists, and search our creative repertoire for different processes that could have led to its existence. But you're right that evolutionary biology, like any other kind of history, possesses a kind of circularity. We start with what we see around us and try to explain why it came about . . . we take the end result (life) and then think backward to what kinds of processes could have allowed this end result to occur.

Evolutionists must accept this fact . . . they study a kind of history, and in so doing they analyze the present and reconstruct the past: it's an inherently circular thing to do. Think of a more conventional historian trying to explain the sorry state of current US politics: he takes the present condition (i.e. there's an increasingly senile moron in the highest office of the land), and proceeds backwards in time to consider the various ways in which this could have happened. No matter what, by the very nature of his study, he must come to the conclusion that Bush is in office, for this is the factual phenomenon he set out to explain in the first place. Evolution is similar, though a bit more rigorous: biologists take the current condition of life on earth and set out to explain why it came to be . . . analysis starts with the end result in mind (namely, there is a biota on earth). You must understand, Fred, that this is not what I'm arguing about in my discussion of selection.

For, in the course of putting history back together in all of its intricacy and detail, biologists search for non-circular processes (i.e. processes that do not pre-suppose the existence of higher complexity) that could have resulted in the complexity and diversity we see around us today. This is where our argument has been confused (probably for a year): the process of natural selection is not circular, while the overall study of evolutionary history is circular. Also your equation for evolution is wrong. Earth was lifeless in the beginning, so discussion of low entropy at the start of the universe (if that is in fact true . . .) is irrelevant to the debate about complexity on this planet, and self-organization is not a force of evolution on par with selection.

In summary . . . natural selection is the pure consequence of a non-zero correlation between heritable variation and differential reproduction, which in turn leads to changes in the proportion of different alleles over time. It is a perfectly linear logical process. You, on the other hand, are inclined to include the influence of a complex creative hand in the existence of life on earth. We both set out to explain complexity, Fred, and while I invoke only natural selection, you pre-suppose a complex influence in the very beginning. Tell me, Fred . . . who of us is really falling victim to circular logic?

The one possible point for circularity to tarnish evolution by natural selection is at the origin of life on earth. As you know, we cannot reproduce the conditions present on this planet 4.5 - 4.0 billion years ago, and we cannot empirically test to complete satisfaction any one theory of the origin of life. We can very specifically outline what must have happened for natural selection to get going: reproducing entities, be they the simplest of chemical hypercyles, must have arisen, along with a mode of inheritance, also likely to be much simpler than what we have now. This is a more difficult issue, but in the end Occam's Razor implies No Creator.

[Fred H.]

Carey: Earth started in an extremely high state of disorder, so discussion of low entropy at the beginning of the universe (if that is in fact true . . .) is irrelevant, and self-organization is not a force of evolution on par with selection.
I suspect that you pulled that starting at a “high state of disorder” out of your ass—entropy is a measure of disorder and it only increases with time. Physics 101 stuff—and no natural laws explaining how/why it got so low at the beginning. If it hadn’t been adequately low 13 billion years ago, your selection wouldn’t have had much to select, and we’d not be here.

Carey: Think of a more conventional historian trying to explain the sorry state of current US politics: he takes the present condition (i.e. there's an increasingly senile moron in the highest office of the land), and proceeds backwards in time to consider the various ways in which this could have happened. No matter what, by the very nature of his study, he must come to the conclusion that Bush is in office, for this is the factual phenomenon he set out to explain in the first place.
A great illustration of your problem and the cause of circular reasoning—beliefs/assumptions in your premises, in this case rather brazen—that that US politics are in a “sorry state and that Bush is a “senile moron.”

[Carey N]

"entropy is a measure of disorder and it only increases with time. Physics 101 stuff"

Entropy increases with time with respect to the entire universe, but can decrease through time at a local scale (if it increases somewhere else to compensate for it). You're right that my statement was not technically correct in its delivery, but my meaning stands: when this planet originated, there was no life on it, and in local compartments entropy has been decreasing as a result of natural selection, with corresponding increases in entropy occurring elsewhere (e.g. metabolic heat released into the environment).

You have also completely ignored the rest of what I was trying to get across to you . . . namely that you are arguing about evolutionary biology when you talk about circularity, not the process of natural selection.

And Bush is indeed headed toward senility; look:

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2005/bush-ten-years-ago.php?gobackto=home

[Fred H.]

Carey: You have also completely ignored the rest of what I was trying to get across to you . . . namely that you are arguing about evolutionary biology when you talk about circularity, not the process of natural selection.
Apparently, you’ve completely ignored and/or forgotten the beginning of this thread. Dawkins affirms that natural selection is a belief—when asked by Edge, "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" Dawkins replied:I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
Got that Carey? Your high priest, Dawkins, affirms that natural selection is a belief that can’t be proved. Beliefs tend to be circular—interestingly, both you and Dawkins also believe that Bush is a “moron” . . . I have my own theory/belief—that left leaning atheistic academia frequently mutates individuals into hysterical morons.

[Carey N]

Here's my last post on this thread. You don't really try to process what other people say, but rather selectively read their posts and then throw back ad hominem comments. It's frustrating.

Dawkins is not my high priest. While I sometimes admire his rhetorical style, he's often an arrogant prick and his comments generally don't go a long way towards creating an environment of open discussion (not with people who aren't already atheists, anyway).

That evolution happened is not a matter of belief; it's a fact like gravity and good old E=mc^2. That evolution happened by means of natural selection is not a belief, but a theory subject to theoretical and empirical analysis. That "all life everywhere" is a result of evolution by natural selection, some would say, is an inevitable conclusion guided by Occam's Razor alone. But there can be no proof of it, as you never fail to remind me, because evolution is history, and we cannot reconstruct the past without some degree of uncertainty. Just what fills those uncertain gaps is a matter of personal philosophy, but frankly I'd rather be in the camp that appeals to simplicity than the one that appeals to mysticism.

[Fred H.]

Carey, you say, “that evolution happened by means of natural selection is not a belief,” but Dawkins affirms that it is a (his) belief that “all life . . . is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.”

Hmmm, I don’t know Carey—is it possible that you don’t “really try to process what other people say?” Think I’ll side with Dawkins on this one. Thank God, or in your case Natural Selection, that that was your last post.

But this thread has been good for me—my wife’s been bitching at me for my occasional outbursts, taking God’s name in vain—so next time I stub my toe I’ll just yell: “Natural f--king Selection!”