Evolutionist claim that anything can be made in small increments, one step at a time. Obviously there are other factors in the process but the basic development is one deviation.
Using words form the OED or Scrabble dictionaries:
change ANT
to
ANTIDISESTABLISHMANTARIANISM
You may add, subtract or exchange one letter.
Now, if this was IC we would expect there to be only one word each time., but Science claims that things could be made up from several independently formed components.
Therefore
You may have up to 5 valid words, but
Once words have been separated they are considered independent and therefore you cannot just exchange letters as if it was one anagram.
However
I will allow you to merge two words back together, at any one time
To be honest, I would not know where to start. There is a goal but the number of letters involved is more than the final word. Even if it is possible, which I doubt, it will take an intelligent person with a wide vocabulary a very long time to map it out.
Evolution does not have the final goal. Evolution does not have a guiding intelligence.
I am expecting this post to be ignored or ridiculed
So hereās the thing. I would guess that you donāt really care about what anyone has to say about your post. I always advise my students to start with really trying to understand the basics of some topic, before believing youāve overturned 150 years of scientific research with an aha gotcha riddle.
I donāt know if you are open to this sort of thing, but if you did understand evolution, you would have never dreamt up your particular question. Thatās kind of a harsh thing for me to say, but thereās no shame in not understanding or knowing something. In my past, I used many arguments against evolution that in actuality, were just artifacts of my ignorance. There were perfectly fine answers to my aha gotcha riddles and scenarios, but I didnāt have it in me to find them. I didnāt have it in me to take the time and try to understand why my riddles and scenarios were not real representations of what any real āevolutionistā thinks, just strawman caricatures based on my own misunderstanding.
I hope you find your way in this crazy world. Even asking Chat GPT to respond to your riddle and explaining why it doesnāt even make sense could be a good place for you to start. But itās up to you to try and learn more about evolution. Asking questions like this is not really a helpful way to start unless you are genuinely open to asking why is my riddle misguided in the first place.
In terms of the childhood game of King of the mountain, what did Richard do or try to do or fail to do?
ChatGPT says:
He built his own hill and crowned the peak: pre-picked one target word (the summit) and declared that the only win condition.
He roped off most of the paths: banned neutral steps and shortcuts (duplication, recombination), forcing a single tight staircase of dictionary wordsānothing like real play.
He played referee, not climber: set the rules to make ascent look impossible, but didnāt show a climb (no constructive chain or proof it canāt be done).
He undercut his own ban: the moment he allowed āup to 5 wordsā that can merge, he re-opened multiple routesāi.e., the teamwork/modularity evolution actually uses.
Bottom line: he tried to stay King by controlling the rules of the mountain, not by showing he could reach (or block) the summit under fair play.
Yes, Iām sure this is an impossible challenge. You have clearly shown that if we find any form of life that uses English to encode its heritable information, evolution will do nothing good for that life form.
But there are many ways to make the challenge easier. We could shrink the alphabet from 26 letters to 4, fix the length of words at 3 letters long, allow most words to have at least two valid spellings, and allow almost all 3-letter combinations to be valid words. Then, going from any single-word sentence (3 letters) to any ten-word sentence (30 letters) would be simple. If we allow word and sentence duplications as well as single letter changes, we could reach the goal even faster.
Of course thatās all cheating and in no way meets your original challenge. But, isnāt it interesting that life on our planet just happens to use a ālanguageā that fits with these changes? In other words, DNA encodes information using a āgrammarā that can easily meet your challenge, even though in English it would be impossible.
The reason for this is that the difficulty of your challenge is entirely based on how it differs from biology. Every change to make it more like the biology it analogizes simplifies the challenge.
Once we look at the differences between two species, which differences are allowed and which are not? For example, this is a comparison of human and chimp DNA:
There are 9 substitutions and 1 indel. Which are allowed and which are not? Does anyone have a reason why these differences could not be the result of 10 individual mutations accumulating in one of the two lineages? I suppose I could find a few examples of ācatā or āactā in those sequences, but I doubt English words have much to do with it.
Another dismissal, more pointed. I donāt know what i am talking about
More pointed. close to ridicule
missed the point completely This has nothing to do with the English language.
Change the rules and you will beat the challenge
Ignore the challenge and teach.
Change the rules but in a way that does not reflect evolution (IMHO)
Analogies prove nothing. This is not a slam dunk or any other euphemism of that nature. It is an illustration of a principle. No analogy is erfect and i admitted that it was a simplistic view of evolution
Now if people are gin to claim that evolution does not work incremetally, step by step, one deviation at a time, then perhaps it is them not me who have missed all the points.
There are several obvious protagonist AWOL who qualify for the ignore it claim.
But perhaps you are thinking of this like tinker toys, which is nothing like what is happening. It is alterations of the genome, one of which can have multiple effects and not so easily connected with alterations of visible structure.
BTW evolution is not limited to singular alterations of the genome, one after another. The genome of offspring differ from that of their parentās in far more than singular alterations. But the point is, we have seen no evidence whatsoever that evolution requires anything but alterations of the genome one alteration at a time.
Duplications of sections of DNA is something which happens a lot which means alterations can happen to only one copy, but then the different versions can be active in different individuals as if the species is testing the different variations against each other to find which works best. It is not like tinker toys at all.
Even if some-one manages to meet his challenge, heāll find some way to claim it doesnāt count. Like, for example, misspelling āantidisestablishmentarianismā. Or moving the goalpost to āhonorificabilitudinitatibusā, which would be much harder.
I asked my AI to provide a detailed response to the question - Is Biological Evolution Dependent on Small Changes Occurring Over Lengthy Periods?
A Comprehensive Analysis of Gradualism, Punctuated Equilibrium, and the Mechanisms of Evolutionary Change?
It produced a detailed response that is too long to paste here, but the conclusion was:
āThe current scientific consensus is thus pluralistic: evolution proceeds primarily through small, cumulative changes, but the tempo and mode can vary widely across contexts. Both gradual transformation and episodic divergence are observed, and together they form a comprehensive picture of biological evolution as a dynamic interplay of genetic variation, population processes, environmental context, and deep time.
This pluralistic understanding continues to be refined by discoveries in genetics, paleontology, and experimental evolutionāand remains a central topic of scientific, philosophical, and theological reflection.ā
This isnāt the first such challenge - there have been many others set by creationists and IDers, notable Denton and Fernandez - nor will it be the last.
Such challenges are consistently marked by a failure of the challenger to appreciate either the versatility of the English language or the differences between words and genomes - usually both. Many, including Dentonās, havenāt even been tried by the challenger. Some, such as Fernandezās, are deliberately designed to be impossible.
Every one Iāve seen that wasnāt fixed has been easy (to me, not to the challenger).
Which is one obvious reason why this challenge is irrelevant to evolution. Evolution doesnāt have defined targets. Any working system will suffice.[1] Evolution does not have a guiding intelligence.
Other obvious reasons include that words and genomes behave differently, that genomes have multiple reading frames, that genomes can contain unparsed sequences, that genomes can be read in either direction, that any genome sequence can be valid, etc etc etc.
So while these challenges are a great way to show that IDers and creationists lack linguistic ability and imagination, they donāt have any impact at all on evolution.
ANT
ANT - ANT (duplicate)
ANT - ART (mutate)
ANT - ART - ART (duplicate)
ANT - ART - ART - ART (duplicate)
ANTI - ARY - MART - ARE (mutate)
ANTI - PRY - MAST - AREA (mutate)
ANTI - PAY - MIST - ARIA (mutate)
ANTI - PAY - MIST - MIST - ARIA (duplicate)
ANTI - SAY - LIST - GIST - ARIAN (mutate)
ANTI - STY - LIST - GISM - ARIAN (mutate)
ANTI - STY - LIST - ISM - ARIAN (mutate)
ANTI - STY - LIST - ARIANISM (merge)
ANTI - STY - LIST - LIST - ARIANISM (duplicate)
ANTI - STYLIST - LIST - ARIANISM (merge)
ANTI - STYLIST - LIST - LIST - ARIANISM (duplicate)
ANTI - STYLISH - LIS - MIST - ARIANISM (mutate)
ANTI - STALISH - DIS - MINT - ARIANISM (mutate)
ANTI - STABLISH - DIS - MENT - ARIANISM (mutate)
ANTI - ESTABLISH - DIS - MENT - ARIANISM (mutate)
ANTI - DISESTABLISH - MENT - ARIANISM (merge)
ANTI - DISESTABLISHMENT - ARIANISM (merge)
ANTIDISESTABLISHMENT - ARIANISM (merge)
ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM (merge)
ANTIDISESTABLISHMANTARIANISM (mutate)
All words used are in Chambers except STALISH (OED) and ANTIDISESTABLISHMENT (Wiktionary).
Let the excuses and/or moving of goalposts beginā¦
P.S. āNow, if this was IC we would expect there to be only one word each timeā is utter rubbish. Neither of Beheās definitions of IC requires there is only ever one component.
Note that, for biological evolution, the goal is not some arbitrary target, but rather to have something that fits the environment well enough to survive and reproduce. Evolution does not need to āknowā a target; the target is produced by the basic physical laws governing the form and composition of the planet, including atmosphere and hydrosphere. Once life is present, the other organisms around also have significant effects on what is or isnāt successful.
If we take the sentence from Hamlet that Dawkins used, but assume the meaning is literal, āMethinks it is like a weaselā could be achieved also by āThe organism in question appears to represent the small, terrestrial members of Family Mustelidae.ā The message would be conveyed, though not as well, by āDuh! A Weezul!ā A relatively similar message is conveyed by Homer and Jethro: āThere was a smart guy from the city, And he picked up a striped kittyā¦We held our nose as we buried his clothesā. On the other hand, āA weasel thinks it is like meā is quite different in meaning.
A very large proportion of possible DNA sequences make something. Extra DNA that doesnāt do anything useful can be kept and might mutate into something useful. Once you have a functional sequence, variations on it are highly likely to do something.
The āfind a way to spell this wordā is thus not a very good match for what evolution actually is like, though as Roy demonstrated they still can be achieved evolutionarily.
3 Likes
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
14
It is worth mentioning that large genetic changes can occur such as whole genome duplication or hybridization. In fact, there are many instances of plant speciation that are the result of hybridization, such as the recent finding that the potato was the result of hybridization between a tomato and some other plant species.
There are also examples of rapid speciation in animal species, such as the cichlids.
4 Likes
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
15
Instant strawman argument. If you want to argue against evolutionists who say anything can be produced by small incremental steps then you are arguing against zero evolutionists.
There is also always existing variation, both phenotypically and in terms of genetic variation such as alleles. Thus, not all extent ANTs are spelled ANT to begin with, and a new competitive pressure may favor the already present ARTs.
No excuses. Perhaps I made it too easy with 5 words, but i was trying to be fair to the scientific claims about not needing the thing to bbe built up alone.
Just a few comments, take them or leave them.
No, you did it fait and square. I wonder how long it took? And, more significantly whether you were permanently conscious of the final goal. I would guess so.
Which is why the task for evolution to construct a complex system would be more difficult, if no imossible.
You had both a goal and intelligence. Evolution has neither. It would have been better if i could have chose a more awkward word, like the one you suggested
but, I am sure you would have persisted given your prowess. I remember spending three days to solve a puzzle that claimed to be virtually impossible.
The point here is to illustrate the dynamics and problems of incremental growth. Like I said, Nature does not have the intelligence to know what pats are needed or the ability to gather them together or even create them.
The other aspect, which seems to be overlooked is how come any new sequence can just function You had a dictionary. Is there such a comparitive list of viable sequences? And how could Nature understand or access them?
If nothing else this thread has attacted some attention and maybe some thought.
As such it is still successful. There was never an intent to āproveā anyting either way.
I am still enjoying the way some here are avoiding the issues because they see no relevance.
Richard
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
18
Why would it be more difficult?
Nothing in biology needs to conform to the English spelling for words. Your analogy is pretty irrelevant when it comes to biology. For example, here is the protein sequence for human cytochrome c:
You never give up, do you.
The point of using analogies is that it highlights things that can be less clear in the actual field of interest. You clearly have a limited understanding oof concepts, being only concerned with specific examples. I cannot get through to you because of this.
BTW. I am getting very tired of you trying to teach me. All you are doing is trying to prove your superior knowledge and belittle mine. I know it, but I am not convinced you do.
RIchard
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
20
Arenāt we talking about biology?
We already understand that you think there are evolutionary steps that couldnāt happen. Your analogy doesnāt add anything to what we already know. Whether or not there are paths between English words has no bearing on biology.