Keith Devens .com

Entry 1343

I suppose a quick rebuttal before your coming rebuttal is in order (By the way, I love weblogs)

I'll deal with the most important thing first (even though that violates emphatic order?). "Macro-evolution is simply the result of cumulative micro-evolutionary steps." - That's absolutely not the case. The mechanisms are completely different. Unfortunately, a lot of these terms are often used with fuzzy definitions, so let me clarify:

Micro-evolutionary changes are those changes that deal with simply a "reshuffling" of existing information. Mutation is not the mechanism here. Micro-evolution explains things like why we look like a combination of our parents, and how genes work to give us inheritable traits.

Macro-evolutionary changes are those changes which involve a change in the DNA that never existed before. The only agent of macro-evolution is mutation. People who would support macro-evolution must show that there is a mechanism by which we can account for an increase in complexity in an organism due to random mutations. There's more, but I'll leave it at that for now.

Finally, the term "natural selection" refers to the process by which beneficial traits (that have come about through either macro-evolutionary processes or micro-evolutionary processes) are passed on to future generations, and detrimental traits are wiped out, according to "the survival of the fittest"

Also, about the computer models showing how something like the human eye can evolve from a "light-sensitive patch" of cells: I don't buy it. Of course, I'd have to reserve final judgement until I see an example, but there are reasons why these programs don't necessarily accurately represent actual evolutionary processes.

Finally, I honestly don't get your animal with wheels example But before I go, I'll bring up an example of my own that I've never heard an explanation for. How could the transition from single-cellular organisms to multi-cellular organisms have come about?

Oh, one more thing. Shortly before I first read that article that I linked to immediately above, there was another article, possibly at infidels.org, that came up with "seven proofs" or something for evolution. I found the article very interesting, and learned about things I didn't know before, such as that people have written programs that can evolve themselves to perform an action with greater precision.

Another one of the examples the article gave was that of a computer program which was designed to run indefinitely and reproduce itself. The computer program was the simplest they knew how to make, and fit in 80 bytes or something. After it ran for a while, they found after a while that there were 40-something byte programs hanging around in the machine too, piggybacking off of the reproduction code in the 80 byte beasts. I guess you could call them parasites.

Anyway, the article was very interesting. I don't believe any of the examples it gave were analogous to evolution, but I really wish I could find it again. If anyone knows which article I'm referring to and knows where it is, please tell me.

Update, while searching for the original article I mentioned, I found this article describing the artificial computer ecology of reproducing programs which evolved parasites, etc. This seems like it might be an interesting read, but there's no way I'm reading it now... too tired.

Finally found it. The link's at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, the link is broken! Argh.