It's beyond my understanding, as a physicist and programmer, how can someone write a full comparison between DNA and a programming language or source code as written by intelligent beings, and at the end recommend a work on 'evidence that there is no designer' of life.
The very definition of intelligence is not 'being smart', but having the ability to select one option out of a set of possible options. That is what we, programmers, do. We don't just throw lines of code randomly. We select specific ones for a specific purpose. That's how we build software, mechanisms of information put in motion by the computer. We put our logic into a decisional mechanism which mimics our decisional ability.
However, life does more than that. Life is more than a mechanism driven by a source code. Consciousness goes beyond rules of decision found in programmable machines. But even if you're a physicalist, the abilities that simple beings have such as recognizing objects, paths, building nests, traveling long distances, using tools, are amazing in their own right.
And yet, these all are strong evidence there is no designer beyond it all. It's mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature.
As far as consciousness goes, where do you draw the line? At what point are creatures merely programmed by instinct, mechanical in their nature? Rotifers [0]? Nematodes? Flatworms? Ants? Where do you decide that consciousness suddenly appears and that it necessarily requires a "designer"? It's evident from the span of existing nervous systems that response to external stimuli is a basic trait of animals, and indeed even plants that lack a nervous grow towards light, and amoebas move along concentration gradients.
Natural selection acts on randomness, natural selection itself is the antithesis of random chance. I mean no offense, but your statements reveal a lack of understanding of the potential and strength of evolution by natural selection in general. It is elegant in its simplicity. Basically, given a stable replicator, make variations on it and those that continue to replicate will necessarily have some differential in survival, sometimes due to the variations. This is clearly explained in a segment of The Blind Watchmaker [1], where generations of an aerofoil shape are varied at random, but selected for their lift potential. Please give the short segment of the video a few minutes of your time, I think it is a wonderfully intuitive explanation of the core of natural selection.
Not to go all [0][1][2][3] on one word in your thoughtful comment, but for me, it is always worthwhile to ponder the fact that the theory of evolution is not about chance per se.
You take the intelligent-design approach - pattern recognition on designed things. I hear you. But what about the compelling inductive evidence we have that deterministic, if chaotic, natural systems are perfectly capable of establishing a feedback loop and modifying themselves?
IMHO, accepting evolution is all about wrapping one's head around the notion that the result of this modification, when stretched over unimaginably large timescales, is significant change.
Edit: I think the parent comment was about the difficulty imagining the process of evolution which we assume takes billions of years because we cannot observe its impact directly in ourselves except to interpret the results. Yet, it is both observable and inducible in things around us. Not so hard to imagine.
Right. My point is that the evidence is there but there's a difficulty in developing or accepting an intuition for evolution given the huge timescales involved in unicellular-to-human evolution, even though it's well-supported by inductive and deductive evidence.
I would add that if you think it's not so hard to imagine, maybe share your imaginations with others. Simply asserting it's easy to imagine hasn't worked out well for science in terms of communicating its findings to the public. There are still lots of people who find that imagining hard - it's a psychological barrier to accepting evolution for many people.
Look at how much a human being changes over the course of one lifetime through learning and experience. Evolution is similar process, except instead of storing individual memory in biochemistry you are storing species memory in the genome.
There is no evolutionary equilibrium. The below linked study of e.coli demonstrated that even during periods where morphology is somewhat fixed that the genomic evolution rate does not slow down.
That's why I said near-equilibrium, precisely because I read about the E. Coli experiment on http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/15/245168252/bacteri... and I trusted the editor where it says "The pace of improvement is slowing down, but shows no sign of stopping". Perhaps I shouldn't had to say "evolution", but "improvement" instead, which is much more accurate.
when it comes to evolution, people get stuck on the word "chance". evolution uses chance as a search mechanism. it is death which "chooses" in the design-sounding way you mention. it is because evolution is 'blind' as to what will and won't be deathed that randomness is a good search algorithm.
i.e. the idea that life is due to nothing more than chance is a strawman
If I generate a set of balls of random radii, and also a set of random circles in a wall, of random radii, and throw the balls in random directions, some of the balls make it through the wall.
The balls that make it through the wall, make it because of chance or there's something else /I don't understand/?
Right, but which balls make it through and which don't isn't random -- that's decided by the holes. It is tricky though. I guess it depends on what you consider to be within the system and outside of it. In this example you have randomly generated the holes, whereas I don't think there's anything random about what it means for something to be dead or alive.
For example, we might say that children born with fatal/harmful defects are "unlucky," which is true, but this is a short-term perspective. Over larger timescales, we can say (poetically) that the rarity of these particular kinds of DNA configurations is a "design choice" rendered by the laws of nature. The larger the time scale, the less meaningful individual "chance" things are and the more "systemic" factors come into play. This is probably an instance of "the law of large numbers".
--
Another important thing to point out is that the environment is dynamic and species interact with eachother in all sorts of ways. The concept of a single species evolving in vacuo is very dry, but the reality is different. Throw a few different species into the mix and suddenly you have an explosion in the kinds of behavior and phenomena you will find. I think intelligence is one of those phenomena.
In other words, the natural world has all the depth and richness necessary to account for the "enlightened" properties that you attribute to life. In fact, if I had to pick one gripe I have with religion, it would be that it blinds people as to the raw amazingness and beauty that can be found in the natural world.
Two random variables connected by a rule still form a random system. The end result of a process that has at least one randomly variable parameter is random. I don't see how that could be anything else.
As I said, it depends on what you consider part of the system. And over large time scales the randomness 'blurs' such that other factors become more significant (e.g., your DNA is not a random sequence of nucleotides).
Here is a question. Do you agree or disagree that survival/death decides which of nature's experiments work?
Do you have any evidence to suggest that "consciousness" is anything other than a physical process occurring in the neurons of the brain? It sounds like you've been reading too much Chopra.
Wait, I'm confused. You express disbelief at the recommendation of a book against intelligent-design, but you seem to end your comment in the opposite tone:
> ...yet, these all are strong evidence there is no designer beyond it all. It's mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature.
Are you saying that you believe that random processes are the designer?
Ah, I see, it's difficult to parse before coffee...
But it's not just
> mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature
but an incredibly complex and chaotic system ("the universe") with billions of feedback loops, with agents both affecting the universe and being affected by it and their own actions. It's not surprising that with all the processes occurring (many of them [chaotic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory), if not truly random) we get emergent behaviours, and then even more emergent behaviours on top of those!
You can define "Life" to be the set of self-sustaining phenomena, and there are remarkably few of those. But then that's what makes it exciting!
Large phenotypes (individual organisms) consist of billions of cells each doing their own thing and interacting with others in very specific ways, and every one of these is in turn a complex system of proteins and molecules doing the same, which are all complex arrangements of atoms, etc.
The complexity of life on earth is owed to exceedingly hospitable conditions and the good luck of not one, but multiple levels of self-sustaining mechanisms bootstrapping themselves. But it still took literally billions of random events for those to occur. Each level works according to the interactions of those below, but they each exist due to exceedingly good luck.
I am still confused. So your non-ironic argument -- your serious argument -- is one for intelligent design?
How is that the most upvoted comment on HN? Because honestly, the only way my mind can make sense of that fact is by postulating the existence of an all powerful being able to bend reality to his will....
The very definition of intelligence is not 'being smart', but having the ability to select one option out of a set of possible options. That is what we, programmers, do. We don't just throw lines of code randomly. We select specific ones for a specific purpose. That's how we build software, mechanisms of information put in motion by the computer. We put our logic into a decisional mechanism which mimics our decisional ability.
However, life does more than that. Life is more than a mechanism driven by a source code. Consciousness goes beyond rules of decision found in programmable machines. But even if you're a physicalist, the abilities that simple beings have such as recognizing objects, paths, building nests, traveling long distances, using tools, are amazing in their own right.
And yet, these all are strong evidence there is no designer beyond it all. It's mere chance, bits on a string selected by nature.