How does the Mind Works? --- Easy.

"What we haven't been able to figure out are the proper algorithms to make it happen and there is a huge ongoing research effort at the moment to reverse engineer the brain to figure out what kind of algorithms it employs."

I figured this out a number of years back. It's an evolutionary algorithm. In fact, understanding that evolution is the mechanism by which intelligence works also explains a lot of distinct phenomenon like why human brains recognize intelligence in clearly evolved things like trees and such. A well done, open ended algorithm, slated with predicting future events given very sparse data would necessarily develop an embodied reality simulation, and allow us to understand things like what we mean to understand things. We have an accurate model by which we can predict the activities of such elements. And to borrow terminology from other known evolutionary algorithms like science (amazing how children learning and science seem very similar), consciousness is like having a theory of self much like it's accurate to say children have a theory of mind. And as far as useful organs go, predicting the future is basically worth dedicating a massive amount of resources towards, it's just that doing that requires one to accurate predict what's going on during the present. And it does this by testing the world with the senses, rather than brains processing the senses it's more akin to the brain predicts what should be happening and the sense check whether that's consistent with their perceptions, so from basically no information we evolve an understanding of the world such that our eyes, that cannot see what we see, can tell us whether or not our impressions of what's going on are right or not. -- One will find under this model basically every observation about brains and consciousness are explained.

Comments: Species Demarcation.

Kay asks:
Explain this for me if you will. The other day I saw a post from a creationist stating that the Theory of Evolution has to have some fault in it because there is no interbreeding of species. How in layman's terms did the first humans evolve from apes and then proceed to separate themselves from the apes? At what point did breeding with apes stop by humans?

That's not the theory of evolution. That's a question of taxonomy and demarcation. It's a real problem, but mostly with the way we typically think about such things, as oppose to the reality of evolution. Evolution doesn't directly deal with speciation, or how far is far enough to say that one species stops and another species starts. That's like asking where childhood ends and adulthood begins. There's just not a clear point.

Evolution says that the struggle for existence and nature selecting such that the most advantaged individuals have the most children who are similarly advantaged. This ensures that species tend to adapt better to whatever niche (way of living, food etc) they occupy. Evolution says that species adapt to changing conditions of life, and can result in amazing adaptations and solutions to environmental problems. This is all evolution says. Things go forward. But since they go forward in different ways, they also tend to drift apart.

Where the species fork, and part irrevocably is a matter of happenstance and saying how far is far enough, and what a species is, turns out to be a harder problem than one would suppose because gene pools in populations do not adhere to the sort of Platonic ideals. There is no perfect human. There's no absolute ape. There's no abstract rabbit to which all rabbitness is to be compared. That's just not the way it works.

If you go child, to mother, to grandmother, to great grandmother, and so forth and go back 350,000 generations, you'll never hit a point where a child was a different species than it's mother. It just doesn't happen. However, if you do this, with me and you do this with Oliver the Chimpanzee you'll end up at the same critter. My 350,000th grandmother is likely the same as his 350,000th grandmother. And at no point were any of my ancestors a different species than their direct offspring. And at no point were any of his ancestors a different species than their direct offspring. But, at some point, at some time, you could draw a line and say that these distant cousins are now two different species. But, that line would always be arbitrary.

We think there's some absolute human, that somehow adheres to a Platonic ideal of humanness. But, really that's not how things work. I mean, would one consider Neandertals a different species than human beings? They broke off the main human lines some 600,000 years ago. But, it turns out that modern humans interbred with them, and anybody with European ancestry is like 3% Neandertal. So are they really human? Were they always human? The Denisova hominims broke off of the Neandertal stock, and share a common ancestry with homo sapiens some 600,000 years ago too. But, they too interbred with humans in modern Melanesians (people in Oceania, like Vanatu where you get black-skinned kids with blond hair likely due to such influence). And apparently Denisova also from time to time (if a newly found toe bone is to be believed) bred with their closer cousins the Neandertals. So were any of these really different species? Under different definitions there are different answers, because the term species is absolute and evolution is gradual and progressive.

Species in some sense are a sort of hind sight thing. It is certain that at one time all of the rodents and all of the lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas) had a last common ancestor (which DNA analysis suggests lived ~90.1 million years ago). This last common ancestor had at least two offspring. One of which gave rise to all the mice, rats, capybara, beavers, squirrels, porcupines, etc, and the other which gave rise to every rabbit, hare, and pika. Somewhere along the line, you can draw a line, but it would an arbitrary line. And is somewhat irrelevant to the actual history that actually happened with regard to their populations. And more and more this is what we're finding. Taxonomy is largely what we tend to call things, we give populations names. But they aren't that exact thing, there is no exact thing. They gradually change all the time.

This is largely why more and more we're trying to move away from such things. Replacing the typical system of taxonomy with a nested hierarchy so we can say that this last common ancestor of rodents and lagomorphs was a glires and so are all of its offspring. But, this ancestor doesn't necessarily fit into any of the subgroups of it's progeny.

So if for example in the distant future, many animals have died off, and bats have diversified to take over their now open niches. Let's say there are bats that swarm during the day, bats that swim under the ocean, bats the size of mosquitoes that suck blood from bats that that graze in the fields. All of these bats would be different species, but they would never stop being bats. There would be more groups inside the old groups, but the old groups, which would be the species we currently know, wouldn't stop being real. Perhaps the bats under the ocean and the bats that graze in the fields, and the ones that burrow into trees to hunt for insects, would all be fruit bats. So fruit bats wouldn't be a species but rather a group of distinct species (to some extent they are as there's many species of fruit bats), just as the glires are a group that gave rise to every rabbit and rodent on the planet.

Which is a long way around to the question you initially asked. Largely this creationist is confused as to what evolution says and what problems are really problems for the theory. The problem here is with our old ideas of taxonomy and what species are. This isn't a problem for evolution. Reality is what reality is. Our taxonomy needs to fit with reality rather than our general beliefs about names and putting things in boxes (Platonic ideals). It's all gradual, and there are no absolute lines, and we know this because we know evolution. It isn't that there's flaws in evolution, it's that there are flaws in the way we think about biology and evolution lays these errors out for us.

How in layman's terms did the first humans evolve from apes and then proceed to separate themselves from the apes?

It doesn't work like that. We didn't separate ourselves from the apes.  At some point some of our ancestors took different paths than their siblings. One brother went one way, and the other brother went the other way, and they never got back together. And these ancestors of ours were apes, so we are apes. We don't ever stop being apes. Populations split and divide. The group that gave rise to the orangutans went one way and the group that gave rise to the gorillas/humans/chimps/bonobos went another and didn't get back together. Then the group that gave rise to the mountain and lowland gorillas went one way and the group that gave rise to the humans/chimps/bonobos went the other, and didn't get back together. And the group that gave rise to humans went one way and chimps/bonobos went the other. And then the chimps went one way and the bonobos went the other. There isn't some set in stone principle that says this is X and it perfectly exemplifies Xness. There are populations and they divide. Sometimes they get back together and sometimes they don't. When things started, they were no different than one brother is from another brother, in fact, necessarily you could find a set of siblings that gave rise to every divided group. You could find a pair of siblings where one gave rise to all the reptiles, dinosaurs, and birds, and the other to all the mammals.

At what point did breeding with apes stop by humans?

 There's no absolute lines there. Humans are apes. And humans breed with humans. So in a very real sense humans still breed with apes (namely humans). But, looking back to our last common ancestor with chimpanzees (our closest relatives), and it may well be that humans might still be able to breed with them! It's not impossible for lions and tigers to breed or horses and donkeys. They produce offspring, and it might well be possible to have human-chimp hybrids. We just don't try it. So at one point did the ancestors of all humans and the ancestors of all chimpanzees stop breeding? -- They stopped breeding when they stopped. Seemingly about 7.8 million years ago or so.

There are some humans in some distant parts of the rain forest who do not know civilization. The large interbreeding population of humans haven't bred with them since we stopped breeding with them. If for some reason we never started back up, eventually we couldn't and we may well end up with two species of humans, such as the Morlocks and the Eloy (from H.G. Well's the Time Machine). It all depends on when the populations stop and happen to stay stopped.

So how did we separate from the other groups of apes. We went one way, and the other group went another. At what point did we stop breeding with them? We didn't breed with them anymore, when we didn't breed with them anymore.

The actual answers seem sort of anticlimactic, and they are. But, mostly because the problems are with our understanding and not evolutionary theory. We tend to see species as these distinct things which fit into these specific boxes. But, that's not what they are. They are siblings and a few million years of isolation. If you want to draw a line, at some point and say your 30,000th cousin is no longer the same species, you can, but realize that it's an arbitrary line, and our 30,000ths cousins the Neandertals bred with us just fine.
You could go further back, but it's still all just where you draw the line and that has nothing to do with evolution, that has to do with you and your line.

" The other day I saw a post from a creationist stating that the Theory of Evolution has to have some fault in it because there is no interbreeding of species."

No. There's a problem there but it's our idea of species that has the fault, not the theory of evolution.

On De-Evolution and the Fall of Man

 Though it is not very common, there is an argument that stupid design is explained by the fall of man in Genesis. I tend to go to the trouble of showing how silly such ideas are by refuting them. It seems like a lot of work to refute a rather laughable claim, but why not? It's just a few thousand words and maybe you'll free a mind. As I bothered to write up a pretty good explanation elsewhere I'll repost it here, because it's awesome and I tend to look back here to find awesome things. Even if nobody read this blog, except for you (warning nobody might read this, but if that's true then its a safe statement because nobody read it), it still works as a great resource to save things.

While one could attempt to make that argument. The problem is that Pareto efficiency of the designs observed combined with an understanding of the evolutionary ancestry requirements producing better and specific assumptions, don't fit at all.

Allow me an example. There is a nerve in humans and in all mammals called the recurrent laryngeal nerve which travels from the brain to the larynx, via the heart. It travels down from the head, loops around the aortal arch and back up to the larynx. In the giraffe this is like twenty feet of unneeded nerve to travel a few inches. This is a largely inefficient design, but under your theory it would have had to have developed since the Fall of Man. That somehow the deterioration of the perfect design made all the recurrent laryngeal nerves of all mammals and all the four legged land critters (and a good number of the ocean critters, just not arthropods) suddenly lengthened and looped around the heart.for no reason.

Moving from one design to another would likely cause the larynx to fail. Basically what we have is a Pareto efficiency, it's not the best design, but it is one that any alteration would cause serious errors and thus cannot be changed (save gradually), and no set of gradual changes could get you to the more efficient design. But, the reverse is also true. You can't go from the efficient design to the inefficient one without also likely breaking the system completely.

However the evolutionary explanation is really straight forward. We are rejiggered.fish. In fish the path the nerve takes is a straight line. It goes right through the heart there because that's the best and most efficient design. The problem is that through our evolution the heart has moved down in the torso the head has become more isolated and the larynx is not located much closer to the brain than to the heart. So once it developed in our evolutionary ancestor (and the ancestor of a all the rejiggered fish, read all four legged land animals and any of the water dwelling descendents thereof)  it couldn't be changed. In fact, it can't be changed. You can't get from the efficient design to the inefficient one or the efficient design to the inefficient one. Evolutionary the design was quite efficient  in our distant ancestors but doesn't work well for us, and as such, it is not only explained by evolutionary theory but such things are predicted by evolution and are only explained by evolution. You could say that that our eyes are so fantastic that they need an intelligence to explain how wonderful and intricate they are, however, you can't use that explanation to explain why all the blood vessels and nerves in the mammalian eyes (including ours) go forward towards light and not back towards the brain which is their final destination. Which requires that they be narrowed and made rather clear and that a large hole causing a blind spot exists in our vision.

You also cannot use some sort of de-evolution from the Genesis Fall of Man as an explanation. The designs are good, they are just wrong. They are well designed to cope with things like flawed design at the most basic level, but also it's impossible to go from the most basic design principles to the inferior ones without breaking the entire system. And even if you could,  you'd need an explanation for how good the system is at coping with the most basic errors.

So,
The explanation you are offering fails to account for such designs.
The explanation you are offering could not allow a transition from a perfect design to the inferior but well coped designs.
The alternative explanation explains such specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation predicts these specific mistakes.
The alternative explanation gives the specific reasons why those mistakes should be very common.
The alternative explanation makes a wide swath of specific explanations which perfectly mesh with what we know. We know for example that evolutionarily fish are the first vertebrates and some of the systems would work fantastically for them.

So the explanation accepted by the science is one that explains all the data at hand, predicting a great deal of it, fits with known facts, and requires no unknown assumptions. Your explanation cannot account for the data at hand, does nothing to predict how things should turn out or if they are consistent with the assumptions, requires a great deal of unknown assumptions and is primarily based on iron age interpretation of Semitic mythology from late bronze age principly accepted by some of the nomadic goatherders of the time, and varied throughout the region.

I think when things are this clear you should seriously consider if you could be wrong. Taking into account things like the modern understanding that certainty is an emotion rather than reliable metric by which to judge the quality of the evidence, and that being wrong feels exactly like being right while it's happening.

Young Earth Creationists and Hyperevolution.

It seems rather odd but if you look for it, a number of YEC people believe in hyper-evolution. They believe that only the "kinds" of animals survived on the Ark and then diversified after being returned to the newly purged Earth. I've even heard some creationists go so far as to suggest that "birds" is a "kind". This means that over the last four thousand years or so that doves haven't just diversified in to the rock pigeon and all the fancy birds that fanciers fancy, but the hummingbird and the ostrich. It is one thing to suppose that a lone wolf became every variety of dog as well as all the varied wolf species, but if we are to believe that a mass extinction of so much biodiversity occurred four thousand years ago, there must also be hyper-diversification over the extraordinarily fast periods of time.

Perpetual Motion and the Singularity.

Many futurists and transhumanists tend to focus, in part, on something called the singularity. The point of intelligence explosion where the world before is qualitatively different than the world after:

A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so extremely rapid, due to positive feedback, that it makes the future after the Singularity  qualitatively different and harder to predict. It has been suggested that a singularity will occur during the 21st century, and there are several mechanisms by which a singularity could occur.

That at a certain point intelligence will become self-recursive and improvements to intelligence will lead to improvements to intelligence and eventually we'll have growing infinite intelligence, and the world will be a completely different place.

This is stupid.

It's based on a flawed assumption that you can tweak up intelligence and get greater amounts of intelligence. That just isn't the case. You can't just gather more and more intelligence and reach a point where you can use intelligence to make intelligence and then make more intelligence. Because, intelligence isn't a thing, it's a process and it takes real work to do. It's equivalent to evolution (I also mean this literally) and you don't get something for nothing. You can't have something that evolves to the point where it goes into superevolution. Evolution takes real work. This is the insight of Paley and the legacy of Darwin. You can't get it for free. You don't get solutions out of the blue like gifts from on high granted by your possession of intelligence as a skyhook. Intelligence is only and can only be a crane. You can only build from the ground up, and improve upon what you've already built. And while we're building better and faster, you don't at some point turn into a rocket ship and fly to the end of the universe abandoning your foundations.

There is an older and clearly example of this idea at work with regard to the idea of perpetual motion. That at some point with growing technological improvements the work out keeps improving and the energy in keeps decreasing and at some point these lines are going to cross and the energy in is going to exceed the energy out and we'll have a brave new world. Because once that happens, even if the amount is very slight we can use that energy to make more energy and more energy and more energy and soon we'll have limitless supplies of ever increasing energy.

If you apply computer power to intelligent pursuits the increases in computer power is going to make it much faster and easier to test more and more ideas and predictions and see if they are accurate or useful, but this is just going to make intelligent faster not more intelligent. You can have an intelligent computer that knows everything I know, and give it the same problem I'm given. And it might come to a consensus answer within a few milliseconds whereas it might take me a minute. And in some distant future, it might come to the answer I would come to in microseconds and it would still take me the minute. But that isn't making it any more intelligent.

I could live in super-slow motion for and exist for a thousand years, I wouldn't be any smarter. I could get to the answers faster relative to you, but my answers wouldn't be any better. I could do more research and spend more time on the problems, but I wouldn't transcend human knowledge or intellect and I wouldn't suddenly be excluded from science to determine truth from falsehood. I could understand the entire corpus of human understanding, and arrive at answers in mere seconds, or fractions thereof. But I wouldn't become magic. And even if I could modify what I am and make time go even slower for me and my life even longer, I wouldn't suddenly become magical or stop needing to do actual work to come to actual explanations. You cannot do experiments in your own head and come to true and impressive conclusions, you need to actually do the experiment and look at the real world to figure out how things work out. And while you could do this process hugely faster relative to others, it wouldn't matter how fast your processor was. You could be know everything I know and be as intelligent as I am, but run on an old 100 megahertz processor and come to my answer that takes a minute in five minutes, but five minutes or five nanoseconds, it's the same damned answer.

How much better is a chess computer that makes the best move it can in 1 minute than one that does it in 1 second? Would it be proper to argue that a faster chess computer is a "smarter" chess computer?

WOW! Futurama For the WIN!

Seriously, you need to find, watch, have, and know the latest episode 609. It's just fantastic.It's about evolution and creationism and holy crap is it good... for about the first ten minutes.

From the flying spaghetti monster appearing and talking, the whole missing links giant line, and several other bits are to be quite likeable. Overall the message gets tweaked to the point where it's stupidish. I'm sure there was a better episode that they got talked out of making.

The parallel structure and suggestion of tiny nanobots to start life off and then it evolving from there is a bit stupid when you look at the science behind abiogenesis (there's no first sort of nanobot). The structures and forms of evolution just take normal meat and fat form, which is a little silly. And then the complete ignoring of how exactly evolution actually works is pretty bad. But, for the first ten minutes it's the greatest episode. Well, last weeks episode was pretty fricking awesome too.

He he he... Math is hard!

You call up a pet shop that you know has two puppies. You ask if at least one of the puppies is a male and they say "yes", what are the odds that the the other dog is also a male? Or rather that both dogs are male?

Interestingly I asked this question today and much to my surprise my sister got it right after a really short period of time. The answer is, oddly enough, one in three. Whereas almost everybody will say 50/50 and insist over and over again even if you just told other people who said that, that they were wrong.

There's a series of problems that fall into the same paradigm which are basically Monty Hall riddles, where known information is used to make a determination that change the odds from what we'd expect. And it turns out that *any* known information changes the odds. So when you picked Door Number 1 on the Monty Hall show and he opens Door Number 2, the odds that the prize is behind Door Number 1 is 1/3 and the odds that it's behind door number 3 is 2/3s. It's a strange math problem whereby the odds change because something is known about something else. Monty Hall wouldn't open the prize door. So we are given information that changes the odds.

In science, we start with a guess and then figure out what that guess would mean for the world and then check whether or not reality agrees with that guess. The most important step is that if reality is found to not agree that guess is wrong, it doesn't matter who suggested it or how interesting, beautiful, complex, simple or clever the guess is, it is wrong.

When we've checked a lot of things and find that we just can't prove this guess wrong over a very long period of time, it really does change the odds that that guess is correct, if we found a problem with the theory, it would be rejected. So when a scientific theory has withstood the test of time even if we are unaware of the particular tests it has withstood we can be more confident that it is true because being wrong would make it rejected. And if it's rejected, we can find a Monty Hall Door that hasn't been rejected yet which is almost certainly more likely to be correct, or with regard to scientific theory less likely to be wrong. Science is simply the least wrong guess we haven't managed to prove wrong yet. And we know it's the less likely to be wrong because we tried to prove it wrong and failed to do so thus far. This is why Einstein didn't dethrone Newton when his physics was accepted during the 20th century. Because up until then, Newton was the least wrong answer we had at the time. Now we have an even less wrong answer which can explain not only what Newton explains but more. To this end I highly recommend the Relativity of Wrong by Asimov.

The idea that knowing things about things change the odds falls a bit strangely into Hempel's paradox.

Hempel's raven paradox is basically stating that if we accept that we are given evidence to the statement "all raven are black" by the existence of a black raven, we should also accept that the existence of a green apple also provides evidence to the statement "all raven are black" because said statement is the same as saying "all non-black objects are non-raven objects" and a green apple confirms this given statement. The most accepted solution to the problem is to agree with the conclusion and suggest that the weight of evidence provided by green apples is very small because of the sheer range of non-black and non-raven objects. (As an amusing aside, there are albino ravens which are white). So really everything we know that fails to prove a statement wrong makes that statement a bit more likely to be true. Just as knowing that at least one of the puppies is male makes it slightly more likely that both puppies were male (after all we had a 1/4 chance of two male puppies before we confirmed that female/female wasn't an option). Failing to prove the theory male-male wrong by confirming female/female wasn't the case made the odds just a bit higher (though we seem to take the fact that at least one puppy is male to conclude one down, one to go and a 50/50 chance on the "other" puppy.)

The same is likely true with regard to evolution. A design is made more likely to be useful because an individual doesn't die when dying is possible. This is why the genotype (the DNA itself rather than what it codes for) which is insulated within the nucleus and doesn't interact with the outside world (there's transfer RNA and various other process that move this information around) can become very usefully complex and encode for very useful and functional proteins even though it has no access anything extra-nuclear. And this is also likely how our minds work by being able to make guesses about the world and by failing to be surprised by the wrongness of those guesses manage to build an internal view of the outside world without needing the eyes to take and process information (which is the model we are usually given). It simply isn't necessary to process information coming in from the eyes, there's only the need to see if that agrees with what we think it should be and react if we're wrong. You can build models of the outside world with guesses and checking if those guesses mesh with reality. That's the essence of science, evolution, and how our minds work. The part that understands, learns, encodes, works, theorizes, and discovers need not be actually connected to reality to understand it. It can simply trudge along failing to be wrong, and as a consequence become more reliable.

As a crazy person on the Daily Show once pointed out, either the LHC blows up the world or it doesn't. So the odds are 50/50. It's logic like this that makes me wonder how I could make money off such things.

---

If I roll two 6-sided dice and say that at least one of them is a 1. What are the odds that they are both 1s?

1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 6 6 6 6 6 6
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

Because we know one is a 1, the odds that the other is a 1 is different than the typical 1/6 that people would tend to believe. Because we don't know which one was the 1 and there's only one possibility of snake-eyes (1-1).

1 1 1 1 1 1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 1 1 1 1

These are the only possibilities and they are all evenly likely to occur. There's 11 of them and only in 1 of them are they both 1s. So knowing that at least one die is a 1 makes the odds that "the other one" (we don't know what other is because we don't know which is the principle one, and we should rather say "both of them") a 1 in 11 chance. We'd figure the odds to be 1 in 6, but really they are far longer than that and nearly double. This makes for a pretty good idea in a gambling game. I'll get some dice roll them somewhere, look and tell the other person what "at least one of them is X" and have them make wager that pays 8 fold that the other one is the same. They should think they are getting an advantage paying a 8X on a 1/6 chance when really they are getting paid 8X on a 1/11. I'll be rich!

Update:

Strangely due to the setup there the odds are actually 1/6. Since I would have to give information about what one die is, the chance that the other die is the same as X, is 1/6 or the odds that you roll doubles. Whereas you have twice as many things to have the dice be if you roll non-doubles. So the game would have to be setup, where you ask "Is there a 1?" and then go from there. There are 10 rolls for which the answer would be yes, and only 1 where the answer would be yes and the other one is a 1 too. Whereas if I simply offer what one die is (even if you don't know which die, it makes the odds of the other die 1/6 to be anything including X).

If I tell you that there is one 1. The odds that the other is 1 is 1/6. If you ask if there's a 1, and the answer is yes, then the odds are 1/11. The odds that I'll have a die to tell you the value of is 100%. The odds that you guess a value is lower when I've rolled doubles, so when you get that question right, the odds are 1/11th. Just as if I told you as a petshop owner that I have at least one male puppy thereby negating the chance that I have female/female puppies. As if I had female/female puppies, I would have volunteered that I had a female puppy rather than a male.

Go figure, math is hard.

Feynman, the scientific method and evolution.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before but science is an evolutionary algorithm. And I love how well Feynman's explanation of science fits into the algorithm itself.

Guess -> Compute consequences of guess -> Agrees with reality?

If it fails to agree with experiment, the guess is absolutely wrong, even if it's beautiful. That's very closely akin to the typical algorithm employed by biology:

Mutation -> Develop organism out of DNA -> Dies?

If it fails to thrive, the mutation was less fit. The fact is that without the unforgiving nature of science or the unforgiving nature of nature, things don't work at all.

Intelligence is evolution, thread

I did a pretty poor job of explaining my thoughts on the issue previously, but I started a thread on About's Agnosticism/Atheism forum that does a remarkably good job of explaining it when prompted for more evidence and explanations etc.

http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ab-atheism&tid=44116

Some of the posts are quite long, but I think they are quite good.

Evolution is intelligence, summary

Imagine if there were no intelligence, and rather than intelligence, people could evolve robust new instincts in real time after repeated exposure to a given environment and do so without the massive trial and error of entire genomes but just the trial and error of specific neurons and patterns of neurons of the brain. How would this differ fundamentally from having a mind?
 

Intelligence is evolution & evolution is intelligence

Evolution === Intelligence.

I don't mean this in any sense but the most absolute. The two have an absolute equivalency. Intelligence is an evolutionary algorithm and only an evolutionary algorithm. Evolution is intelligence at the very core of its essence.

I think it's strange that this idea hasn't found any traction or have been fully realized as a fundamental equivalence. I also find it to be completely understandable that it has not, because it seems to throw up red flags.

I figured it out 6/29/07 while blogging and narrowly managed to not dismiss it out of hand. It's actually a fundamentally profound idea and a seemingly obvious one that suffers a long history of near misses.

A lot of people seem to understand evolution is intelligence at a cursory level. I've watched as people come tantalizingly close over the years, while others have waxed poetically about obvious absurdities.

Gerald Edelman's neural Darwinism goes to great lengths to show how the seeming learning of the immune system via a microcosm could be expanded to explain how neurons work. And for as much promise as that idea has it seems to get bogged down in explaining neurons rather than piercing the fundamental equivalencies.

People point out how intelligently designing things requires a sort of tinker, tweak, and try methodology which sort of works like evolution, or how more generally technology evolves over time.

Jeff Hawkins goes on about how prediction is fundamentally what intelligence is about but fails to see what this means about the underlying algorithm. I read his book and looked at the source code for the work it spawned. A lot of promise and its ends up a basic Bayesian engine.

There's a 1995 paper from 15 years ago. That seems to get it (which I discovered a few days ago) but suggests using it with regard to neural networks and fuzzy logic.
http://65.44.200.132/Library/1995/Evolution_CI.pdf

In principle the truth is all of these ideas and none of them. Intelligence and evolution are two sides of the exact same coin. And to actually program a machine intelligence you need to evolve a prediction biosphere. How would a well functioning evolutionary algorithm whose population's successes and failures depend on the efficacy of their predictions about the outside world differ from an intelligent mind? I don't think they would.

If you were to codify predictions about anything and everything and evolve organisms whose success depends upon making accurate predictions, even if you could not see them as directly and obviously as equal to an intelligent mind, you should at the very least be given the jaw dropping impression of the power of such an idea.

One of the obvious problems with using genetic algorithms for anything more than making a really awesome antenna or critters to walk in a virtual world is that even the best solutions are still profoundly limited to their selection metrics and the sparsity of the environment. However, what couldn't you do with evolved predictions? You would have a set of understandings that could apply at a given time. In example of illusions two or more could apply but rarely at the same time.

With evolved predictions you could figure out the nature of the planets. You could identify a briefcase. You could use sound to help recognize something visual. You could go from the tiniest predictions about the distance of objects to the nature of the universe. After all, there's really no fundamental difference between a child playing and a scientist trying to figure out the nature of reality. There's also no real difference in going from a thoughtless baby to having figured out the most basic elements of the real world. One can go through most of Jean Piaget's developmental steps and understand why and how those understandings build.

You should also note that the idea answers a number of fundamental questions about how the brain works. Such a system would necessarily reverse the generally assumed information flow of senses and the brain. It isn't light hits your retina goes through some neurons and into the brain and then gets processed by the brain. Rather the mind is constantly making predictions and this light either confirms or denies those predictions. You don't need the image at all. There is no Cartesian Theater to watch the outside world through your eyes. You have already predicted what it should look like, and the only thing "seeing it" does is check if that prediction is correct or not. This is after all how evolution works. It isn't the DNA that contacts and interacts with the outside world but rather the body built by the DNA that either survives or does not.

This also demands that the brain is very plastic. That you should entirely be able to see again via electrical impulses on your tongue. You should be able to learn echolocation to see. You could quickly learn how different magnetic and electrical fields feel with a tiny magnet surgically implanted into your finger. If we allow for new predictions to be made, even if they seem rather absurd, if they are right they thrive and expand if they are wrong they die off. The first law of psychology is the second law of thermodynamics. We can learn skills quickly and effectively, even if we don't know we're learning them. We evolve a robust complete intelligence. We have a good "picture" of what the world looks like even without needing to really see anything in the world. There's no need to program anything about this internal landscape because evolution is a fantastic programmer (as I've seen many times first hand).

Much to my dismay, there is a lot of popularity for the Computational Theory of the Mind. That we have evolved programming and simply re-adapt it to a more modern context. But, there's no need to take the Pleistocene programming to throw spears and re-adapted it via fuzzy laws to do Euclidean geometry. After all, if we're already going to suggest that our brains have programs in them and these programs are evolved, why not evolve them again in real time? The idea ultimately relies on evolution making programs, and in fact there's no debate that evolution is at the core of human intelligence (regardless of what people think it is).

Why are we to conclude that this programing is somehow stored in our genes? After all, we don't have that many genes to make these programs. And why would these programs largely need a massive amount of development in order to perform? Why must children learn the basics in order to adapt the basics to other tasks. Why is childhood development so damned long before children engage these magical eye focusing programs? And why do they seem to actively learn so much? If so much of this is adapted from other bits of mentalese then why can't such things be coded by the brain from ground up. Why can't we all be Cartesian code houses? Solving the problems as they arise? And why can't we just use the same very powerful idea to solve all of these problems?

Further, when you realize the power of the idea, you also realize all the little things that cognitive science typically leaves out of the theories. Even the simple act of learning to focus your eyes involves a lot of prediction. You need to know which part of which eye fits with which part of the other eye and when those two points are actually further apart than expected it gives one the prediction that the perceived object is further away. While also accounting for the jiggling of the eye, and staring at different things, while not changing anything about the ones internal idea of what the world should look like. Your brain does a powerful amount of work that at some level everybody gives credit to evolution but somehow escapes people's that if its really evolution all the way down, all the problems go away.

William Paley is credited with one of the better versions of the Argument from Design, which in turn is probably the best argument in favor of a God (even despite it's shortcomings). The argument is admittedly an argument from ignorance. It says, basically when you look at a tree you know that it needs an explanation far different than what you could give for a stone because there's some kind of intellectual real work there. That there is an amazing amount of real design work that has gone into that tree and when we consider things like watches we equally well know that a lot of real design work went into them and they need a real explanation. He then "reluctantly" admits this is must be God. Then after Darwin, the evolutionists chime back that the equivalency is false. If I can explain exactly how the tree came to be using only natural well understood laws, it can't be intelligence. Therefore Paley is wrong and there's no equivalency between the intelligent works of man and the evolved works of nature.

This is wrong. It's true that the 'God conclusion' that Paley attempts is unwarranted but there is a conclusion you can draw and it is that the intellectual works of man and intellectual works of nature are cut from the same cloth. Establishing that evolution is the foundation of the works of nature doesn't set asunder the ingenuity of man might not also be evolution incarnate. After all, what kind of refutation is that: "This can't be intelligence because it's evolution." Why can't it be both! On one end we have a well understood, natural process, and on the other end we have a glorified and fundamentally unexplained skyhook. The only problem that seems to arise is that accepting that it is true demands that we finally have an explanation for intelligence.

The problem with the "intelligent design" movement isn't the claim that there is "design" but rather that "intelligence" is a solution. Intelligence isn't a solution unless it's on fundamentally firm ground. You can't claim that intelligence is the answer unless you can explain intelligence. After all, Alan Turing provided the only answer for the question "What is intelligence?" that was ever met with any good reception. It was pretty well Justice Potter Stewart's explanation of what obcenity is: "I don't know but I'll know it when I see it." It seems a bit silly but prudent to note that I know something that passes the Turing Test: an oak tree. People have for millennia been identifying the products of nature as being the product of an intelligent mind, maybe, just maybe, they aren't all completely stupid? After all it is admittedly rather naive to suggest that humans don't have a spidey-sense of design. That we can look upon the natural world and see real intelligent design work having gone into every twig and every critter while at the same time knowing that that it's evolution at work. Why must we tell ourselves that these are mutually exclusive? Why can't they be a very fundamental equivalency?

Nature is the product of non-random selection of randomly varying replicators. To say that because we understand this, it certainly can't be intelligent, is rather naive. If nature is so stupid, why do we steal many of our best ideas from nature? If nature is dumb, why are natures designs so much better than our designs?

“I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, “Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away'” - Duke of Argyll (F. Darwin 1888, I:316)

With much being played at via this observation of intelligence in nature from Paley's arguments to William Dembski arguing that there's some amount of "Specified complexity" where evolution no longer suffices to explain design and only intelligence on the other end of this same fuzzy line can manage to explain anything (while explaining nothing, as it taken as a hollow skyhook). There's no limit to the amount of obvious interplay between the jaw-dropping power of evolution proper and the cunning wit of sharp intelligence. And while we noddingly agree with things like Orgel's second rule "Evolution is cleverer than you are." we don't take it seriously, and we should.

The truth will set us free. Nature's design, nature's intelligence, and nature's brilliance are not merely illusions they are reality and the production of evolution and evolution is intelligence. Evolution is the real intellectual work of nature. If we are to manage to have any hope at all of programing intelligent computers to do real intellectual work, we need to know that intelligence is to do more than code a tiny subset of poorly executed solutions. We need to make the solution to solutions, and with evolution this is exactly what we have. With evolution working on prediction space, we'd can answer everything. Until we see life itself as the most basic form of intelligence, we stand little chance of programming anything of note in Artificial Intelligence (a term which itself makes about as much sense as artificial evolution.)

It has been said that geology is just physics in slow motion with some trees. Well, biological evolution is just intelligence in slow motion carried out in nature, rather than in a skullful of neurons. They are the same exact thing. And the sooner we pay attention to that fact, the sooner we can use the universal acid of evolution to melt away our problems with intelligence.

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." - Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

Googling: "intelligence is evolution".

• "The cause of human intelligence is evolution"
• "But the essential ingredient in using these structures in computational intelligence is evolution: population-based search with random variation and selection."
• "If intelligence is evolution squared then what comes next will be expolution"
• "One major advantage that animal intelligence has over robotic intelligence is evolution."
• "Intelligence is evolution's unique gift to humans."
• "The cause of human intelligence is evolution."
• "The seeking for Intelligence is Evolution and bangers big or small"
• "less sophisticated forms to complex life (or even intelligence) is evolution."
• "Intelligence is evolution on steriods."

Googling: "evolution is intelligence"

• "It was these extensive research areas that later became the watershed for his book, “Nuclear Evolution is Intelligence, and Intelligence is Life”"
• "As the major survival element in human evolution is intelligence, the conclusion that the higher evolved race, the Caucasians, possessed a superior"
• "The biggest issue I have with evolution is intelligence. If we arrived over millions of years of chaos, chance, uncertainty and random processes"
• "The key to this evolution is intelligence and information management. In order to hit a target,"
• "The positive tool of evolution is, intelligence used with honesty, love, understanding, compassion, sensitivity and kindness."
• "Evolution is intelligence/information accumulation. Development is intelligence/information preservation. Evolution causes ongoing unpredictability"
• "I'm inclined to agree with Idiocracy: the determining factor of procreation (and therefore evolution) is intelligence, though I would add"
• "A more likely sign of Human evolution is intelligence level."
• "Would they argue about evolution? Is intelligence a blessing or a curse?"
• "The most important trait in human evolution is intelligence."
• "I agree that the pinnacle of evolution is intelligence"
• "So, I guess that what I am saying, is that evolution is intelligence at work. Not there yet. What we have is mechanical principles at work"
• "Evolution is intelligence/information accumulation. Development is intelligence/information preservation. Evolution causes ongoing unpredictability"
• ""Evolution is intelligence denying intelligence." Sorry to ruin your party, guys."
• "If evolution is intelligence then why can't we identify it? -- Some have claimed evolution to be the cause behind design and yet who has isolated the scource of this ability for evolution to think or built?"
• "'Evolution Vs. Intelligence?' - Evolution is intelligence. -- We think we're intelligent, so we look at nature and some think that it shows intelligence, while others think it is down to evolution. The basic principles of both intelligence and evolution are the same"
• "Details of Evolution Is there intelligence behind it ?"
• "Further, you make an implicit assumption that the 'aim' of evolution is intelligence – that is completely untrue."

This is every example I've can find of those words together. And the solutions themselves seem so very satisfying that I cannot fathom that they are out there, in earnest, and I've somehow never heard of them. Please consider the idea, and please tell me what you think.

Somebody from the internet actually kinda pissed me off.

That's rare. Usually I look the various people I converse with a sort of distant amusement. I can crush their arguments with absolute ease and wax poetically about fairly obscure notions that necessarily reveal their rather critical mistakes. But, I'm always cool and calm. But, this one actually pissed me off.

In a long exchange involving several points, I noted that minds are sloppy and therefore can make mistakes and often do. He advocated that perhaps that means evolution is false. I pointed out how scientific theories that explain a great amount of evidence are a bit better than guesses and because of the scientific method are of a different quality. The next topic we had discussed was a claim he made that the Discovery Channel was now claiming that the new scientific evidence said the Earth was 7-8 billion years old. I pointed out that the Earth is certainly 4.5 billion years old and that perhaps he misheard and they were talking about the galactic core and did he have a reference for this claim. Then, I was given this chestnut:

Someone else told me the Discovery Channel said that, so I’ll concede that one. Sorry.

That pisses me off. ARG! You... ARG!

I replied:

FFS. Seriously, how much less false crap would you accept as true if you didn't accept second and third hand anecdotal evidence about silly things? I daresay you might not suggest that groggy figments of your imagination and second hand innuendo trumps 150 years of well verified scientific data confirmed by fossil, genetic, morphological, developmental, paleontological, and embryological evidence by a massive collection of some of the worlds greatest scientists if you had a modicum of intellectual honesty or personal reflection. And as a secondary (but personally relevant) effect, I wouldn't want to flay all the skin, tendons, and muscles off my hands right now for their inability to reach through the monitor and punch you.

If evolution is true, why haven't mothers evolved extra arms?

Development works like a pattern triggered on and off by various genes. Certain parts of the program code for certain things so things like arms and legs are triggered by limb buds and follow very similar programs. The primary bone is a single bone be it the femur or humerus then a joint and then a lower limb of two primary bones (tibia and fibula or ulna and radius). The same pattern is followed with modifications.

For example the knee cap is actually an ossified tendon that evolved early within the placental mammals. You won't find them in marsupials or any more diverse tetrapods. Likewise other tetrapods like some of the hoofed ungulates have modified limb ends, or sloths have fewer digits, or pandas have heavily modified wrist bones to make a thumb (look at their hands they have 6 digits because their thumb is not a digit).

So biology and genetics is more like a toolkit and the various cells and different cell types follow a decentralized build scheme to invoke specific organs in specific places. So it only takes one mutation to make limbs into hooves or to make humans largely hairless (by changing the growth rest cycles) rather than coding for individual parts.

This evo-devo scheme of developmental biology combines the understanding of evolution, development, genetics, and embryology into a single coherent field. So we know interesting things like octopuses, like squid, have ten legs but, unlike squid, have two of their legs suppressed by other genes. So you'll encounter an occasional "mutant" octopus with nine or ten legs, but never eleven. Or that the gene used in mice and fruitflies to start the program to build an eye is the same, even though mice have a lensed eye and fruitflies have a compound eye. You can simply move the gene from one to the other and it works just as well. Or that snakes still have functional leg genes that don't get activated and are just invoked elsewhere for non-leg purposes.

To properly change a lot of the patterning you need to change a lot of the structure, you'd need to make another upper torso section or otherwise cause the patterning to start the arm creation program multiple times. But, as the program only really takes small tweaks it would be hard to cause such a duplication and have a viable resulting phenotype.

It's like asking if there's some step you could tweak in making a chocolate cake that would actually end up making cookie dough icecream instead. If you want to gradually make a larger cake or tweak the coloring or flavor, that's easy, but you can't make a small tweak to the recipe to make a cake into cookie dough. Even if cookie-dough icecream were a great thing to make, using slight modifications of a cake recipe you'd likely end up with a cake that mimics cookie-dough icecream rather than the real thing. You can't really change the plan you already have down in the books, that's the reason why animals have vestiges. It's why humans have an eye with a blind spot. It's why aquatic flightless penguins have wings. You can only tweak the previous recipes, rather than change them wholecloth. And the recipe for land animals with four limbs was set down during the evolution of fish prior to migration on to the land. Tweaking that bit is going to cause serious problems for every step that comes later, which is pretty much every step.

We can tweak the expression of genes a lot easier than the pattern. So longer arms or more hair or to change the degree of anything is easy. However to actually change the recipe itself is not so simple. Which is why things typically evolve gradually from very small nearly inconsequential traits to large robust developments. Rather than encountering freakish but awesome new organs like sharp spikes on one's knuckles or extra arms or whatnot.

Humans like all the tetrapods are really just a jerryrigged fish.

Sorry if I'm cryptic at times, but evo-devo is very impressive science and somewhat cutting edge biology. And is actually the correct answer to why if extra arms might be evolutionarily advantageous could humans never evolve them. A lot of organisms get locked into certain patterns. For example humans have seven neck vertebrae, want to venture a guess as to how many a giraffe has? How about a mouse? A cat? A dog? A cow? -- The answer to all of these is always seven. Giraffes and humans have the same number of neck vertebrae they just get longer and shorter rather than more common like one would find in long necked birds, because, for some reason, nearly all mammals are locked into this pattern and the recipe is really hard to change.

You want me to believe sorting algorithms work?

Statistics is the wrong math to use concerning evolution. Rather algorithmics is correct. Allow an analogy.

If I used a bubble sort to sort 1000 items in a list, the odds of getting the correct answer is going to be 1000! (1000 factorial). That's 1000*999*998*997...*3*2*1. It's absolutely astronomical! It would like having a tornado hit a beach of sand and just happen to build the Empire State Building and the rest of New York.

402,387,260,077,093,773,543,702,433,923,003,985,719,374,864,210,714,632,543,799,910,429,938,512,398,629,020,592,044,208,486,969,404,800,479,988,610,197,196,058,631,666,872,994,808,558,901,323,829,669,944,590,997,424,504,087,073,759,918,823,627,727,188,732,519,779,505,950,995,276,120,874,975,462,497,043,601,418,278,094,646,496,291,056,393,887,437,886,487,337,119,181,045,825,783,647,849,977,012,476,632,889,835,955,735,432,513,185,323,958,463,075,557,409,114,262,417,474,349,347,553,428,646,576,611,667,797,396,668,820,291,207,379,143,853,719,588,249,808,126,867,838,374,559,731,746,136,085,379,534,524,221,586,593,201,928,090,878,297,308,431,392,844,403,281,231,558,611,036,976,801,357,304,216,168,747,609,675,871,348,312,025,478,589,320,767,169,132,448,426,236,131,412,508,780,208,000,261,683,151,027,341,827,977,704,784,635,868,170,164,365,024,153,691,398,281,264,810,213,092,761,244,896,359,928,705,114,964,975,419,909,342,221,566,832,572,080,821,333,186,116,811,553,615,836,546,984,046,708,975,602,900,950,537,616,475,847,728,421,889,679,646,244,945,160,765,353,408,198,901,385,442,487,984,959,953,319,101,723,355,556,602,139,450,399,736,280,750,137,837,615,307,127,761,926,849,034,352,625,200,015,888,535,147,331,611,702,103,968,175,921,510,907,788,019,393,178,114,194,545,257,223,865,541,461,062,892,187,960,223,838,971,476,088,506,276,862,967,146,674,697,562,911,234,082,439,208,160,153,780,889,893,964,518,263,243,671,616,762,179,168,909,779,911,903,754,031,274,622,289,988,005,195,444,414,282,012,187,361,745,992,642,956,581,746,628,302,955,570,299,024,324,153,181,617,210,465,832,036,786,906,117,260,158,783,520,751,516,284,225,540,265,170,483,304,226,143,974,286,933,061,690,897,968,482,590,125,458,327,168,226,458,066,526,769,958,652,682,272,807,075,781,391,858,178,889,652,208,164,348,344,825,993,266,043,367,660,176,999,612,831,860,788,386,150,279,465,955,131,156,552,036,093,988,180,612,138,558,600,301,435,694,527,224,206,344,631,797,460,594,682,573,103,790,084,024,432,438,465,657,245,014,402,821,885,252,470,935,190,620,929,023,136,493,273,497,565,513,958,720,559,654,228,749,774,011,413,346,962,715,422,845,862,377,387,538,230,483,865,688,976,461,927,383,814,900,140,767,310,446,640,259,899,490,222,221,765,904,339,901,886,018,566,526,485,061,799,702,356,193,897,017,860,040,811,889,729,918,311,021,171,229,845,901,641,921,068,884,387,121,855,646,124,960,798,722,908,519,296,819,372,388,642,614,839,657,382,291,123,125,024,186,649,353,143,970,137,428,531,926,649,875,337,218,940,694,281,434,118,520,158,014,123,344,828,015,051,399,694,290,153,483,077,644,569,099,073,152,433,278,288,269,864,602,789,864,321,139,083,506,217,095,002,597,389,863,554,277,196,742,822,248,757,586,765,752,344,220,207,573,630,569,498,825,087,968,928,162,753,848,863,396,909,959,826,280,956,121,450,994,871,701,244,516,461,260,379,029,309,120,889,086,942,028,510,640,182,154,399,457,156,805,941,872,748,998,094,254,742,173,582,401,063,677,404,595,741,785,160,829,230,135,358,081,840,096,996,372,524,230,560,855,903,700,624,271,243,416,909,004,153,690,105,933,983,835,777,939,410,970,027,753,472,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000

That's roughly 4 * 10^2568 it's more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 googols all multiplied together! And you're going to tell me that the sorting algorithm just happens to get the correct answer? Any statistician would laugh at you!

You want me to believe sorting algorithms work? You have more faith than religion. THAT'S INSANE!!!

Hawaii and evolution.

I'm starting to really like these little quick explanations and information given out in quick little videos.



Also like so...

Been picking on ignorant people lately...

You'd be astounded how often people think evolution says they evolved from a monkey. I'm thinking of getting a generalized reply to the claim:

Common ancestry suggests that humans have common ancestors with monkeys. This common ancestor seems to have lived about 30.5 million years ago. It isn't that one species or group turns into another but the variation within the previous group in the past lead to all the successive species.

Humans are members of the following groups in descending order of size.
cellular organisms; Eukaryota; Fungi/Metazoa group; Metazoa; Eumetazoa; Bilateria; Coelomata; Deuterostomia; Chordata; Craniata; Vertebrata; Gnathostomata; Teleostomi; Euteleostomi; Sarcopterygii; Tetrapoda; Amniota; Mammalia; Theria; Eutheria; Euarchontoglires; Primates; Haplorrhini; Simiiformes; Catarrhini; Hominoidea; Hominidae; Homininae; Homo

Japanese Macaques are members of the following groups in descending order of size.
cellular organisms; Eukaryota; Fungi/Metazoa group; Metazoa; Eumetazoa; Bilateria; Coelomata; Deuterostomia; Chordata; Craniata; Vertebrata; Gnathostomata; Teleostomi; Euteleostomi; Sarcopterygii; Tetrapoda; Amniota; Mammalia; Theria; Eutheria; Euarchontoglires; Primates; Haplorrhini; Simiiformes; Catarrhini; Cercopithecoidea; Cercopithecidae; Cercopithecinae; Macaca; Macaca fuscata

Common ancestry doesn't suggest that humans came from monkeys but rather humans came from Catarrhinis and monkeys such as Japanese Macaques also came from Catarrhinis some time in the past. And where variation with species are minor, those small variations in separate groups over the last 30.5 million years have lead to greatly varied species such as humans and gorillas on one side of the divide and macaques and baboons on the other. The theory of evolution suggests that the slight variation between species such as the gray and red squirrels could become as great as the variations between the different primates. It isn't that we are related to monkeys, but rather that if you go back far enough, we are related to all life on this planet.

The process by which organisms change is called evolution, and the mechanism is natural selection. Given any population of crickets for example if allowed to reproduce such that every offspring were able to grow to adulthood and have more offspring themselves the entire world would be several feet deep in crickets within a few generations. Therefore there must be forces which are restricting the ability of crickets to carry out their natural exponential growth. Predation, access to food, access to mates, etc limit the cricket population. Now, if in this necessary struggle for life a change were to occur in a cricket's DNA which was beneficial to it's possessor in this struggle for life, that cricket and those crickets with that gene would do better than those organisms without that gene. If it were not useful it would either quickly die or be less successful in the struggle for life.

What once was very little variation, over eons becomes very large variations. So what once was several millions of years ago only a slight change within a species become a small change between two species such as gray squirrels and red squirrels and as time goes on and more and more beneficial changes are added into the genomes as they better and better adapt to different and changing conditions of life, independently and among the great tapestry of lifeforms and selective pressures.

Taken to the intellectual limits this suggests that all organism on the planet are related and explains the biology, genetics, design, development, distribution, and every other aspect of life on this planet.

--

Somehow I think it needs a toss in with the theory of evolution by natural selection. A sentence or two with some oomph that if thought about would explain the theory.

update: added a couple paragraphs describing the main thrust of the theory.

Algorithmic Darwinism?

Generally evolution isn't just a theory but an algorithm for beneficial change in direction of the selection. So if variations occur within a species and any of those variations are, for any reason, beneficial to that organism it will increase at a rate greater than that of the average population. So whatever seeks to keep a population down will keep only a certain subset of the population down. The population which can avoid being naturally selected against will flourish. If there is a general ability (like that in DNA) to change and engineer very specific structures and organs and organisms then this process will spiral up creating organism of ever increasing adaptation, complexity, and functionality. Further as every species is undergoing this process they all will play off each other in complex and wonderful ways like newts so poisonous that they could kill thousands of people with a drop of poison and snakes that regularly eat them. Like cheetahs running quickly and gazelles running about as quick. Like the antlers of a deer that weigh so much that they make the deer far easier prey and the females who mate with the males with the largest antlers. It's a very simple process but, even a cursory look will show that such a process would work, and when we look at nature there are abundant artifacts that are only explained by exactly that process.

It's all a work in process. Whatever explain the theory in an understandable way in a pretty short read is certainly the most fit variation of this.

Scientists find Crockaduck.

The famed predicted animal that Kirk Cameron predicted that evolutionists should find if evolution were true! It was located. Reported one scientist, "Wow, that's odd, the existence of that thing absolutely demolishes the theory of evolution. We have to scrape pretty much all of it." Another added, "Yeah, there's no way that thing conforms to common descent, we're pwned."

Primate Fossil being pitched as the second coming of Christ, hurting the cause.

The fossil is admittedly really cool. It certainly is up there with some other impressive fossils and it could shed some light on primate ancestry but in many other ways it's not as cool as tiktaalik or archeopteryx. It really does look like a monkey. It might shed some light on primate evolution and thus our evolution but then so did Tiktaalik, and I wasn't joking in the title. It's actually being hyped as the second coming of Christ. One of the dates listed in the hyperbolic advertisement for the program was 0AD. Despite the fact that there was no 0AD, it's a pretty clear reference to Jesus and putting this up there with the importance of the supposed date of the birth of a mythological character during the time when both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew rule out as a supportable birth year (after 4CE Herod the great isn't alive to murder the children, before 7AD there's no supposed Roman governor to order a census).

So when creationists chime back in and point out that it's one fossil that looked like a monkey and that's where all the damned evolutionists put their marbles in one last grasp to try and justify their "made from nothing" theory... they will be partially right. The hype is massively overblown.

Google Title Missing Link

Though, typically over estimated, it's still super awesome. There's a 47 million old primate preserved absolutely fantastically. It looks a bit like a lemur. But, it's cool that Google chimed in with a logo.

Did Darwin Kill God, Part 2: Science

Continuing from Part 1.

When we left off we learned that the battle between Evolution and Christianity has nothing to do with science and religion and rather everything to do with politics and morality. Having previously learned that real Christians have never ever believed Genesis was literal.

William Jennings Bryan was a fundamentalist Christian Socialist who opposed evolution largely because he hated social Darwinism and clearly Social Darwinism is exactly the same as evolution.

So no Christian ever takes Genesis as literal in the all of history and nobody has ever opposed the teaching of evolution. Until now, we are currently caught out in left field by Bizarro-Superman's failure to stop the Scopes Monkey trial. Bryan was a complete freak and that's why he opposed evolution. Darrow on the other side, thought that science and reason could give a better morality than Christianity. We are told that that "Is a morality based on survival of the fittest!" However, nobody on either side bothered to ask if by embracing some absurd apologetics they couldn't be compatible and this is why people thought they were at odds, because everybody was just too stupid to ask whether they actually were at odds. When, as Cunningham has repeatedly told us, Magic Man done it in a garden with a magical tree is clearly compatable with it happened slowly by a self-refining process over billions of years so long as nobody *ACTUALLY* believes "Magic Man done it in a garden with a magical tree."

But Bryan suggested that the days were time periods rather than literal days. That's old Earth Creationism and they aren't at odds. What? Pfft. Worried about morality and social decline Christians embraced Young Earth Creationism by the 1960s because somebody wrote a book about Noah's Ark and how it totally happened. The creation museum freaks him out.

Literal Biblical interpretations undoes several hundred years of science and several thousand years of theology. However, the theology he's talking about is just pragmatism. You shouldn't tell the non-believers the funny parts because they'll laugh... guess what, we're laughing.

"By calling Genesis a science textbook they are calling upon us to worship science" -- WTF. No. Talk to creationists you dumbass they want you to worship God, not science. They oppose science because the Bible and scientific understandings are at odds with each other and they want their Bible to win.

But then there was ID which claimed to be science. "But, in reality it was just Paley's discredited notion of God." Oh, fuck you very much. Paley's notion of a watchmaker God was clearly the majority opinion and though the argument has a few holes in it (you can't actually conclude God did it) the notion is far more impressive and important than Cunningham credits it with. He seems to be very inclined towards suggesting that the Argument from Design is a mere footnote of frindge elements who weren't part of real Christianity that always disregarded Genesis as hokum.

'ID talks about God who intervenes with world affairs, and this means that he should intervene to defeat evil.' There are so many problems with that that I'm at a loss to list them all. First off ID doesn't need an intervening God. God could have just designed everything and scampered off. Cunningham's God still doesn't get to dodge the Argument from Evil because Cunningham's God is "the source of the gift of life". As to why this couldn't be the God of ID escapes me, but apparently for those keeping track:

ID God, Has no solution to the problem of evil. Not the source of life.
Cunningham God, doesn't need to solve the problem of evil. Gives gift of life.

Cunningham's God doesn't stop child molesters either, but these failures are only failures for other people's gods. Cunningham's God is the god of Traditional Christianity. Your Christianity is a freakshow bit of nonsense that actually has the audacity to believe the Bible. Philistines!

"God is existence itself." -- There's a word for that retard! It's called "existence". Creationism is a modern anomaly, that has nothing to do with Christianity. They believe that God created the world like it says he did in the Bible. That means they are nothing more than idolaters who want to worship science. -- I'm running out of absurd things to say about this position so I've taken to just repeating it in different words.

DARWINIAN FUNDAMENTALISTS! He's going to Boston to meet somebody who says that evolution has killed the need for God all together. Who could this fundamentalist be? Who could this closed-minded bigot against religion be? I'm on the edge of my seat! Universal Darwinism? Ultra Darwinism? Targets God? Hm. Who could it be. -- Dan Dennett? Really?

He uses evolution to justify atheism? What? Hey dumbass, you don't seem to know what you're talking about. "There's no role for a creative God. It takes no intelligence and it happens automatically." -- That's absolutely right.

"Ultradarwinists say that evolution says that there cannot be a God. " -- What? What part of "no role for" said "cannot be"? Evolution properly understood doesn't need God. It doesn't need anything but imperfect replication and heredity. That's why it's so jawdropping. It doesn't mean there's no God, it just means that God isn't needed to create life because life is fully able to create itself.

The basis for the newfound confidence in this is "The Selfish Gene". Now this is just poor scholarship. Its much the same as attributing all of Young Earth Creationism to one book on Noah's Ark. The Selfish Gene simply takes the Gene-Eye-View to better explain things like kin altruism.

"Some of those who disagree are some of the best scientists in the world." Hm. Francis Collins? What does he have to do with anything. There are more genes in other things than in other people. And our understandings of genes are quickly becoming more fuzzy. And this means the Selfish Gene fails and Ultradarwinism fails. What? These are certainly insightful but they aren't demolishing to universal-darwinism or evolution as an algorithm. Gene-Eye-View isn't a rock solid view, it's just a better view than organisms-eye-view. People with Huntingston die of Huntingston, but they also have more children on average than those who don't have it. This means that the gene prospers at the expense of the organism. It's hard to understand how a fatal genetic disorder could prosper without understanding that it makes more copies of itself. Also, things like altruism don't make much sense when one is constantly competing with others. Why should you give your life to save your entire family, because the genes that tell you you should are found more in your family.

You can't just reduce it to a gene and say that's the only unit. Nobody does that. In fact, after the Selfish Gene Dawkins made a point in several of his later books to point out the levels at which evolution occurs. However, since genes are the units of heredity it is these emergent properties at higher levels that ultimately reverberate down (they don't actually go anywhere, evolution is a bit like spooky action at a distance in this respect) and promote those genes that gave rise to those properties.

While flocking is useful to birds, and something about genes causes birds to flock (or those genes in those environments in those mixtures), it's those genes that benefit from flocking but the behavior even if we can't really pin down exactly what does what. We can predict however that if a gene somewhat critical to flocking breaks down that organism is going to be less fit in certain circumstances.

Collins: "Atheism, the statement that there is no God. Is not a scientific statement." -- Well the statement, I don't believe in God because I don't feel the proponents of the God theory have successfully made their case, IS a scientific statement.

"Science is limited to making statements about nature." -- In nature, we find no evidence that there is a God.

"Evolution is the answer to how. God is the answer to why." - Why is grass green? How did that come about? They evolved to be green because the red and blue ends of the spectrum are filled with some high quality photons and a vast number of low quality ones. The middle line green photons are fairly common but fairly weak and neither way of exploiting chemical reactions as such can properly utilize them (either get the most or get the best). So we have plants that evolved from blue-green plants into green plants and reflect green light because they never evolved a way to properly utilize it. How the fuck does that not answer the questions of how AND why?

"The God of the Gaps was never part of Christainity." -- Really. I'll just let that line sink in.

Not just believers in God who share his views. Atheists do to, who is this Chamberlin atheist he's going to bring up? Michael Ruse. Hey, I remeber that name. He published a few things that were utterly incoherent and nonsensical.

Neither Dan Dennett nor Richard Dawkins implies that Evolution implies atheism. Ruse is fucktarded if he doesn't understand their position.

"Atheists use the selfish gene to try and suppose that evolution does imply atheism." -- No.

"A theory has emerged that thinks it can explain everything, love, morality, even my belief in a creator. So is it safe to say that Darwinsm has killed god. It's a theory, which was born in Britian, it's call the theory of memes." - While certainly Christianity would be a meme of sorts, it's certainly the case that love and morality are both largely explained largely in the context of good old genetics.

"It goes much further than saying there's no God. It says there's no you or me." -- First off, evolution never said there was no God and neither did your supposed Darwinian Fundamentalists make that implication from evolution. There's no God because there's no God. Evolution is true because evolution is true. Memes don't suggest for a moment that you don't exist, but that you are colonized by memes. That a number of the ideas you have are had by you because those ideas are propagated by society, because those ideas are those ideas which are good at propagating.

It's a really good theory and the deficits are in the vagueness of how they are stored which is more an problem in cognition than with the theory in the context of universal Darwinism. This doesn't mean that everything is an illusion, it means that much of cognition is gleamed from society and society evolves. This doesn't imply for a moment as Cunningham suggests that being colonized by the Christianity meme means he's deluded and God isn't real. I'm infected by the gravity meme and I can verify that a trillion different ways, all of which are quite useful.



There's a fundamental flaw at the heart of theory. He also believes in evolution and therefore he's been colonized by the theory of evolution meme. Yes, it does. "How can I trust this meme to be any more true than any other meme?" -- Science. Ever heard of it? The meme that humans only use 10% of their brains is popular but false. You can quickly verify that it isn't true with a little research or careful reflection. Science is how you sort the true from the false. Science is the epistemological foundation that allows you to accept the true and reject the unproven.

Cunningham, with dramatic music, suggests that his utter idiocy on this point is a "philosophical problem that confronts anyone who believes in the theory of memes." Science requires objective truth, but there's no benchmark and their survival has nothing to do with their truth. The problem is science in such a view of the world is the clear suggestion that we should test these ideas and reject those which aren't true. Science is the methodological process by which we are asked to give true memes a selective advantage over the false ones.

Darwin's theory cannot be the whole story, and being but a chapter can't explain away God. First off, nobody said it was the whole story, he misunderstands universal Darwinism. Evolution by natural selection is an algorithm, algorithms apply everywhere and where ever we have the needed bits, evolution will occur. Memes, however, meet this criteria and thus must by definition evolve as such.

Cunningham then visits Morris who talks about music who notes that birds use music in much the same way humans do. This is generally as Dennett notes a Good Trick™, where two different bits of evolution converge on the same solution, much like bats and birds both fly. This isn't a demolishing blow to evolution, or something bizarre or odd, it's quite common and fairly interesting. The fact that there are solutions to things in design space which can be discovered via evolution, doesn't suggest that evolution is somehow flawed or incomplete. The reverse of the insinuation here is utterly flummoxing, would we expect to find that evolution actually made flight work in the first place? Is it evolution that made insects fly, not because the design for flight evolved within the world of physics, engineering, and design space, but because evolution itself produced flight and deigned that an upward force exceeding the downward force of gravity would propel something upwards?

"The theory of evolution helps my understanding of God from becoming too comfortable. Darwin hated religious controversy. He would have been dismayed. Accepted it and stop using it to attack religion!" -- Fuck you. Your magic man done it ideas are retarded, and just because you can claim with a straight face that nobody actually thinks "magic man done it" doesn't make it remotely true. I don't say there's no God because of evolution, I say there's no God because there's no God.

Part 3, Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda, coming soon.