Being a Biblical scholar and not a modern historian, you’re not academically competent to judge whether or not Weikart’s historical writing is junk scholarship. You are relying on hearsay. And that’s pretty well standard around here – 90% of the commenters here – at least, 90% of the more aggressive ones who are sure they are right all the time – rely almost exclusively on hearsay.
If you spent half as much time reading original Nazi documents and original passages of writing from German Darwinians and Darwin himself as you do reading modern book reviews by atheists and others who have an axe to grind against Weikart and ID, your views on Weikart’s arguments might be worth reading. But as your thought is wholly derivative from the opinions of others, there is nothing in your comments to respond to.
Agreed. That is a bit suspect. However, on their site today they are up
front that Spurgeon was a believer in an old earth.
I do not know if such “inaccuracies” are a problem or not. I am not familiar with the large number of cases either. I would be sad to find out that these instances are purposeful attempts to deceive people. What can be done? I think the best thing to do is to contact the authors and ask them about it. People do make mistakes – honest mistakes at times. So that is also a possibility. Have you done so with Mr. Thomas or have you just concluded that he is purposefully trying to deceive people?
YECers are open to changing their opinions about things when the evidence supports the change. So if they are making a particular argument and then find out it is not scientifically accurate, I would think they would stop doing that. They have an article which I’m sure you have seen entitled “Arguments not to use”. Some of those arguments were ones they themselves had made in the past but evidence has come to light that it was not a sound argument so they are no longer using those arguments and are trying to get others not to use them either. There are other arguments they continue to use which I’m sure you feel are also improper, but that does not mean they are improper arguments. There
we come to the interpretation issue of the data which differs depending on your approach to the data.
How does that affect my trust in YEC scholars? Well, I guess I would need to see names and see the issues, but my trust is first of all in God’s Word. I already know that YEC scholars and scientists do not have all the answers and cannot explain all the scientific data that does not fit with the YEC paradigm. There are plenty of problems in the YEC paradigm that still need to be solved. Ultimately, my faith in a young earth does not depend on all these problems being solved. It depends on what the Bible says.
I think I pointed out that he did link to Behe’s article where that point is made clearly. He did, in his conclusion, mention that the experiment had to do with a single protein. So now you are accusing Behe also of dishonesty. Interesting!
Tell you what. Why don’t you write to Behe and have a little discussion with him about why you think he shouldn’t be dishonest in his reporting. Point out his error. I’m sure he’ll quickly see your point and confess to misleading the masses. Then you should also write to science.com, science daily, and all these science news sites and their editors who make unjustified claims - exaggerated conclusions - attention grabbing headlines that are not true - in their write-ups about new discoveries. After all, you wouldn’t want to limit yourself just to the creationist/ID side of things, right?
Perhaps you have already written about the sins of the evolutionists somewhere and I just missed it. I’m sure that has you very concerned as well. In fact, I bet that you have already written numerous letters to these guys trying to get them to be accurate and honest in their write-ups and interpretations and baseless but quite entertaining just so stories that they try to pass off as real “science”.
Now, I am not justifying dishonesty on either side, but I do find it interesting that it seems to be just the creationist side of things that has you up in arms. Or at least, that is all you have written about here.
I will grant that it is impossible to “disprove evolution”. Strictly speaking, there is no way to prove that evolution could not have happened because you cannot prove a negative. Perhaps he meant that it disproves the currently in vogue theory about evolution, but even that is probably overstating it. Anyway, personally, I think that phraseology should never be used. You can’t ever really prove it and you can’t ever really disprove it.
I think Thomas should have said that “evidence against evolution” or “evidence that does not fit the evolutionary paradigm” was found. And, yes, I do agree that both sides should be honest and as accurate as possible.
Interesting as the discussion about the relationship between Darwin and the Nazis may be, this example of Godwin’s Law at work unfortunately has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of this thread. I would suggest that anyone wishing to pursue it further should start up a separate thread in which to do so.
In the meantime, can we please get back to the subject at hand – namely, how should we respond to claims being made by YEC organisations about scientific evidence, the Bible, or whatever, that are clearly and demonstrably untrue?
I didn’t raise the question of Darwin and the Nazis. Old-Timer did, when he made another of his gratuitous anti-ID attacks on the trained modern historian who wrote about the subject.
I’m all in favor of sternly chastising YECs when they say things that are not true. I’ve chastised YECs here many times, most recently, regarding their belief in a global Flood in 2340 B.C. But TE/ECs say many things that are not true, as well. They just don’t notice the beam in their own eye, because they are too busy looking at the splinter in the YEC’s eye. Among the refuted falsehoods constantly repeated on this site are: natural theology is bad theology because it takes away the need for faith in Christ; the majority of Church Fathers read Genesis 1-11 non-historically; “Wesleyan” creation doctrine teaches that God does not control the outcomes of evolution because he is not a “tyrant”; since the immune system as we know it makes use of existing randomness, therefore the immune system itself could have arisen from scratch out of random changes; macroevolution is merely microevolution repeated lots of times; the Discovery Institute champions putting ID into science classes; etc. No amount of textual evidence, no amount of rational argument, will dissuade any of the TE/EC leaders or commenters who hold to these views. In that respect, they are just like Ken Ham.
That may be the case, but if so can we please spin off a separate topic to discuss it? It’s still outside the scope of the subject at hand, and I’m keen that we remain on-topic here.
I’ve just arrived at work and I have things that I need to get on with, but I’ll go into more detail about why I’m asking for this later today when I have a bit of free time.
Don’t worry. I won’t be adding to the above discussion. I originally made my point against Old Timer, and didn’t intend that point to spin out into another long discussion with Dr. Ex-YEC. Sorry for the distraction.
When Einstein came up with the theory of General Relativity, he did not claim that he had disproven Newton’s theory. And when experimental results showed that Einstein’s theory was true, nobody shouted “Newton’s Theory of Gravity Disproven”. What we do in science is seek truth the best we can. Sometimes this means a previous theory is discarded (like the existence of the ether or phlogiston) and replaced with something else. Just as often the original theory is improved.
Evolution is in the latter category. The basic tenets of Darwin’s theory of evolution of species by natural selection will not be replaced, it is as solid as Newton’s theory of gravity. Even ICR accepts that theory as the mechanism for microevolution.
What is happening now, and the paper under discussion is part of that, is a refining of evolutionary theory to broaden its scope from what had been a narrow focus on genetic determinism and gradual smooth change in a causal chain. Darwin guessed that that might be the mechanism for evolution, but he admitted that he didnt really know. In the 1930s and 40s, that idea became prevalent and is called neo Darwinism. It isnt evolution that most so called “anti evolutionists” are attacking, its neo Darwinism. Modern evolutionary biology tends to agree, as has been discussed here and elsewhere for a while.
So the problem with Thomas’ article is not that he is wrong about what the original paper said, bu that he is wrong when he claims that the paper has anything to do with “disproving” evolution. Like so many modern papers that tend to get YECs excited for the wrong reason, it simply adds to the new movement to improve evolutionary theory,
I have recently had a couple of papers published on this subject, one of them in an online journal. I posted a link to that about a week ago, which got me into a bit of trouble here, but I will take the chance (and try to be better) and do it again for those who might be interested and havent seen it before.
This is the shorter paper . If anyone is interested in the longer one, (published in PSCF), send me a PM with your email, and I can send it to you.
Think again! It could hardly be more relevant to “Worries about apparent dishonesty repeatedly occurring within YEC scholarship”!
This forum is about dishonesty repeatedly occurring within YEC scholarship and attempts to make the Darwin-to-Hitler connection are a recurring theme at many Young Earth Creationist ministry websites including AIG, ICR, and Creation.com. (Anyone questioning that can look on Google for examples.) It is probably the very best example of the concern of the OP. (The fact that a few non-YECs have also gotten on board the Darwin-to-Hitler bandwagon despite the harsh denunciations of the historian peer-review community doesn’t change that fact.)
However, precisely because it is so obvious and recurring, I agree that it has run its course here. It would be more interesting to discuss other example of dishonesty in YEC scholarship. There’s certainly no shortage. The compilation of deceptive YEC quote-mines compiled at websites like TalkOrigins provides plenty of examples.
Why do you assume that many of us haven’t done exactly that?
Those of us who have interacted with him face to face will tell you that we’ve had much the same levels of success as his own departmental colleagues at Lehigh University.
That’s an excellent question, @tokyoguy111 . There are several answers which you will hear from a lot of people on forums like this one:
(1) Many of us have done exactly that (contacting errant science journalists), though we don’t necessarily receive a reply. They care about readership numbers and newsstand sales. Don’t assume that they necessarily care about reminders to honor the highest professional standards they were taught at their respective School of Journalism.
(2) I’m far more concerned with the dishonesty which harms the reputations of Christ-followers who care about the Great Commission and the credibility of the teachings of Jesus Christ. When a science journalist or some scientist at UCLA or Cambridge mangles the facts, the damage to the public’s understanding of science is very real. But when someone who claims to speak for Bible-believing Christ-followers ignores basic standards of honesty, that harms public perceptions of what it means to be a Christ-follower and what the Bible states (and doesn’t state.) Of course I care most about those who harm the integrity reputations of all Christ-followers. The general public doesn’t necessarily finally distinguish between the various types of Christians and even evangelicals. Whether I like it or not, the antics of various ministry leaders does change how some people look at all Bible-believing Christians.
(3) One person has finite time and energy and so we all have to make strategic choices, @tokyoguy111 . It is no different for Christ-followers. And when we have such atrocious dishonesty and foolishness promoted within our own evangelical world, of course it draws our attention and concern.
Thanks for the link, @Sy_Garte . I won’t get to it immediately but I’ve added it to a list of items I’ll be reading on a long trip beginning tomorrow, when I’m almost certain to be faced with a lot of airport delays.
I already know that I like your choice of photo captions: “Beavers: Hypothesized to be the most cute of all known niche constructors.”
Thanks, Dr. Ex Yec, but the only thing about the piece I can take no credit for was that. Emily Ruppel, the magnificent editor of the journal, chose that photo and caption.
Agreed for what microevolution is able to account for. The question in hand is if it can account for everything we see as well as the small changes that we can observe through microevolution. Can random mutations combined with natural selection and whatever else you want to throw in the mix – genetic drift, gene sharing, genetic duplication, etc. – can these mechanisms really traverse the genetic pathway from, for example a bellows lung to a flow through lung? From asexual reproduction to sexually reproducing organisms? Etc etc etc Of course ICR accepts microevolution. Almost all creationist groups do as far as I know. That has actually been observed and is not deniable. It doesn’t require any new genetic information because all that is necessary is to select all the genes coding for large size and you can go from a Chihuahua to a great dane over time if those genes are put into the genome through copulation.(or perhaps latent genetic information could be switched on again if it remains in the genome) But once you have selected all the genes for large size, then you have lost the necessary information for smallness and it will never re-evolve unless those genes are re-introduced into the genome through mating. Evolution cannot produce the genetic information from scratch. I’m sure you understand this part of the creationist position so claiming that ICR also accepts natural selection is meaningless. They accept it, but they view it’s ability is largely constrained and cannot account for any changes of substance.
Yes, I understand that. But evolution here as you call it so vague as to almost have no meaning whatsoever. All you mean by evolution is that natural processes can account for everything by some kind of mechanism yet to be discovered. The Royal Society is calling for a whole new paradigm for evolution because Neo-Darwinism is not sufficient to account for all the changes we see. Creationists have been saying this for years! Finally scientists are beginning to realize they are right. Now of course, they are not going to become creationists because that would violate their worldview and their understanding of science, so they want to come up with a richer more explanatory version of evolution. The point here is that evolutionists do not yet have a theory that can account for everything. They believe there has to be such a theory, but it is not yet in hand or understood.
I guess that depends on how you define “evolution” I think Thomas was using it for the generally accepted idea of new-darwinian theory and so, using it in that way, he is probably right. However, at the same time, I basically agree with you and said as much in my post. What this experiment does do is give evidence that a certain evolutionary hypothesis is probably wrong - the neo-darwinian version. Although, as I stated, the terms “prove” and “disprove” really should be avoided, because technically speaking neither proof or disproof is possible in science.
There is no way to disprove “evolution” as you define it because even if we show evidence that it cannot work in one particular way, evolutionists will just come up with another way or hope to solve the problem in the future. They will never give up on the idea that natural processes can totally account for everything that we see. That is really what you mean by evolution. However, if the mechanisms are not understood, then if we are honest, we really don’t know if they really exist or not.
That is putting it charitably. It adds to the improvement of evolution by giving evidence that one particular version of the theory is not true. If that qualifies for “improvement”, OK then. It really doesn’t add anything. It only helps to clarify what doesn’t work as opposed to adding insight as to what does work.
I understand that this is the creationist position, but I have never understood that position. I dont know where the idea comes from. Many of the arguments to support the “no new information” meme come from physics and engineering, and are usually supported by various interpretations of information theory. The problem is that none of the arguments have any biological validity, because they don’t take into account the facts of transmission and mutation of biological information.
While transmission of information can be subject to loss of accuracy in many physical systems, it isn’t in biology. Each step of the transmission process, including the replication of the DNA in the genome and its transcription into RNA followed by translation into protein structure, has a defined and extremely low error rate. This is not due to chance or luck, but to a complex and highly efficient set of repair systems that are constantly checking and fixing errors as they occur.
I have written extensively about this on my blog in two different posts, here and here, including examples. .
I think a great deal of progress could be made if creationists would simply abandon this very strange and scientifically unsupported notion of no new genetic information.
Well put, @Sy_Garte. I would also encourage readers to read his blog essays. You will see the links in his post above. Even the young earth creationists who will disagree with those essays should learn from the basic science he explains.
I’ve asked many YECs to explain to me this “can’t produce new information” argument, especially when various ministry leaders start quoting Popper and others. Few are able to articulate the argument but it is clear that its purpose is to convince anti-evolution loyalties that “the new Information Theory science is on our side.” It’s just posturing to sound science-y. They forget that if it truly had merit and that it could serve as a “proof of God”, we who are theists would be jumping on the bandwagon saying “Here’s a powerful argument that the biosphere must have had a creator!”
Of course, that is why it is so essential that they insist that “evolutionists are atheists or friends of atheists trying to win their favor.” Yes. It’s that childish.
It also should be noted, both scientifically and theologically, that the most frequent mutation events are not really errors, because they are transitions caused by keto-enol isomerization. The machinery is doing the “right” thing, but the difference occurs because the template itself changes at a very low rate.
It is simply not true that the transmission of information is not subject to loss of accuracy in biology. That is what a mutation is - a copying mistake - insertion, deletion, etc. The error correcting system is indeed wonderful and a challenge for Materialists and Biologians who do not believe in creation, because it would seem difficult for reproduction to work if the error correcting system was not already in place, but that’s another point.
So, if you think that a mutation in the genome constitutes “new information”, then I agree with you, but that doesn’t mean that this kind of “new information” is going to be meaningful or helpful.
Consider the first cell. It had dna and learned to reproduce, but what extra software would be necessary for it to jump to a multicellular creature or from a prokaryote to a eukaryote?
I do not know personally, but I’m assuming you would need some new genes/proteins/coding etc. Are mutations capable of providing the new “information” necessary for that cell to begin to function as a eukaryote? Are mutations capable of providing the new information necessary to take an asexual organism and transfer it into a sexually reproducing organism complete with a male and female reproductive system? I sure do with claims like these could actually be tested! I’m skeptical.
Quote from the previous LONG article:
" The development of new functions is the only thing important for evolution. We are not talking about small functional changes, but radical ones. Some organism had to learn how to convert sugars to energy. Another had to learn how to take sunlight and turn it into sugars. Another had to learn how to take light and turn it into an interpretable image in the brain. These are not simple things, but amazing processes that involve multiple steps, and functions that involve circular and/or ultra-complex pathways will be selected away before they have a chance to develop into a working system. For example, DNA with no function is ripe for deletion, and making proteins/enzymes that have no use until a complete pathway or nano-machine is available is a waste of precious cellular resources. Chicken-and-egg problems abound. What came first, the molecular machine called ATP synthase or the protein and RNA manufacturing machines that rely on ATP to produce the ATP synthase machine? The most basic processes upon which all life depends cannot be co-opted from pre-existing systems. For evolution to work, they have to come up from scratch, they have to be carefully balanced and regulated with respect to other processes, and they have to work before they will be kept.
Saying a gene can be copied and then used to prototype a new function is not what evolution requires, for this cannot account for radically new functionality. Thus, gene duplication cannot answer the most fundamental questions about evolutionary history. Likewise, none of the common modes of mutation (random letter changes, inversions,
deletions, etc.) have the ability to do what evolution requires. Darwin pulled a bait and switch in his On the Origin of Species. He actually produced two separate theories: what I call his special and general theories of evolution, following Kerkut45.
Darwin went on at length to show how species change. This was the Special Theory of Evolution and he was preceded by numerous others, including several creationists, with the same idea.
It took him a long time to get to the point, but he finally said,
“ … I can see no limit to the amount of change … which may be effected in the long course of time by nature’s power of selection.”46
The ‘can mutations create new information’ argument is really about the bridge between the special and general modes of evolution.
This was his General Theory of Evolution, and this is where he failed, for he provided no real mechanism for the changes and was ignorant of the underlying mechanisms that would later be revealed. To use a modern analogy, this would be akin to saying that small, random changes in a complex computer program can create radical new software modules, without crashing the system.47
Thus, the ‘can mutations create new information’ argument is really about the bridge between the special and general modes of evolution. Yes, mutations can occur within living species (kinds), but, no, those mutations cannot be used to explain how those species (kinds) came into existence in the first place. We are talking about two completely separate processes.
The meta-information challenge
We need to get past the naïve idea that we understand the genome because we know the sequence of a linear string of DNA. In fact, all we know is the first dimension out of at least four in which the genome operates (1: the one-dimensional, linear string of letters; 2: the two-dimensional interactions of one part of the string with another, directly or through RNA and protein proxies; 3: the three-dimensional spatial structure of the DNA within the nucleus; and 4: changes to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd dimensions over time). There is a tremendous amount of information packed into that genome that we have not figured out, including multiple simultaneously-overlapping codes.48
When discussing whether or not mutations can create new information, evolutionists routinely bring up an overly-simplistic view of mutation and then claim to have solved the problem while waving their hand over the real issue: the antagonism between ultra-complexity and random mutation.
If a four-dimensional genome is hard enough to grasp, there is also a huge amount of ‘meta-information’ in the genome. This is information about the information! This is the information that tells the cell how to maintain the information, how to fix it if it breaks, how to copy it, how to interpret what is there, how to use it, when to use it, and how to pass it on to the next generation. This is all coded in that linear string of letters and life could not exist without it. In fact, life was designed from a top-down perspective, apparently with the
meta-information coming first. According to a brilliant paper by Alex Williams,49 for life to exist, organisms require a hierarchy of Perfectly pure, single-molecule-specific biochemistry,specially structured molecules,functionally integrated molecular machines,comprehensively regulated, information-driven metabolic functions, and inversely-causal meta-information.
None of these levels can be obtained through natural processes, none can be predicted from the level below, and each is dependent on the level above. Meta-information is the top level of biological complexity and cannot be explained by naturalistic mechanisms, yet life cannot exist without it.50
Putting all other arguments for and against the rise of biological information aside, where did the meta-information, upon which all life depends, come from?
Conclusions
Can mutation create new information? Yes, depending on what you mean by ‘information’. Also, ‘new’ does not necessarily imply ‘better’ or even ‘good’. When evolutionists cite examples of ‘new’ information, they are almost invariably citing evidence of new traits, but these traits are caused by the corruption of existing information.
Mutations can create new varieties of old genes, as can be seen in white-coated lab mice, tailless cats, and blue-eyed people. But damaging mutations cannot be used to vindicate molecules-to-people evolution. Breaking things does not lead to higher function (and presupposes a pre-existing function that can be broken). Also, not all new traits are
caused by mutation! Some come about by unscrambling pre-existing information, some from decompressing packed information, some from turning on and off certain genes."
Thanks for providing the link to Carter’s article, which is one of the best creationist pieces I have read on the subject. He even admits that new information is possible. But he makes a surprising and common mistake about how evolution works. Here are some quotes that illustrate this.
Why would anyone expect a deactivated gene to stick around for a million years or more while an unlikely new function develops?
gene duplication is usually, though not always, bad.
New functions arising through duplication are not impossible, but they are vanishingly unlikely,.
Richard Dawkins wrote a book called “Climbing Mount Improbable” which deals with this issue very well. The title alone gives the answer. What biology can do (btw, I love the term Biologian, I will use it but change the definition a bit) that nothing else can, is overcome statistical improbability to an amazing degree.
If we start with a population of a million cells growing on a dish, and add a poison they will all die. But if first add a mutagenic chemical, we find that many of the cells (say 10%) will develop mutations. The majority of those mutations will be harmful, and 90% of those mutated cells will die. That leaves 10,000 cells in the dish with non lethal mutations.
Now we add the poison. All of the cells with no mutations die. What about the 10,000 mutated cells? Almost all of them die also, because their mutations do nothing useful about the poison. But 2 of those 10,000 (0.02%) cells have a mutation that changes the way the cell transports or metabolizes or excretes the poison and those 2 cells survive. And reproduce. And after a few days, we dont see an empty dish. We see a dish with two visible colonies of healthy growing cells. With a week or so, the dish is full of cells that have resisted the poison. I have personally done such experiments, and I would bet others here have done them also.
Yes, this is micro evolution. The cells are still the same species, but a mutation has overcome enormous odds, in this case 2 in a million, and it doesnt matter how rare, unusual, or unlikely such an event is, because biology doesnt care about statistics, all you need is one. One in a thousand or (if the population is large enough) one in a billion. Statistical arguments, like those of Carter or Behe just dont work until we get to values like 10^-20 or so. But saying that something is unlikely in biology has no import.
This argument is highly relevant to the original topic of this thread, namely the article by Thomas. He accurately reports the finding that a mutation conferring a new function to GR is exceedingly rare. The authors of the original paper would be astonished to see that their work is being used to argue for creationism, since Im sure the idea would never have occurred to them. Their work put an upper bound on the probability of the mutation producing this new functionality for a protein was somewhere in the order of 10^-3, well within biological normalcy. And in fact, it did happen. All of the other extremely rare events like eukaryotic cells, sexual reproduction, and so on, also happened. Sometime only once, sometimes a few times.
I will also repeat that any reference to analogies to software, systems engineering and building bridges and other non biological systems are simply non useful, when trying to understand the biological world. While those are wonderful systems that humans can be proud of, they pale to insignificance when we contemplate the wonders of God’s incomprehensibly amazing creation - life.
I’d say that simply by your being willing to take the general reader into the nitty-gritty of the science, you are giving them access to the very evidence which paranoid ministries like AIG don’t want their readers to see. Every time I see a YEC website attack and accuse anyone who dares hold another position, they usually avoid providing a clickable link. They obviously want their readers to only know of their “interpretations” of what others are publishing. They don’t want their readers to read from the other side in their own words. Their fears are so evident.
I haven’t yet read all of your material. (I’ve saved it for my airport/airline reading list because I know that I can focus in long time-blocks without interruption.) But regardless of whether I will agree with all of your positions, I’m already confident that I will learn from your essays. The unwillingness to learn is what frustrates me most about the YEC world I left.
As to the topic of mutations and adding new information to the genome, I want to append a link which several have already posted on various forum threads. This simple demonstration of an evolutionary algorithm and how simplicity can produce complexity can be an eye-opening experience for those of us who do not work in the evolutionary biology realm. As many have said before me, our natural intuitions are very valuable to us in some ways but potentially misleading in others. Even after I began to accept the overwhelming evidence for evolution theory, I still found it very difficult to believe that even trillions of years would be enough time for evolutionary processes to bring about the complexity and diversity we observe in the biological world. Why? My natural intuition lacked the experience and easy-to-follow information to make the evidence and their implications “obvious” and to make the massive quantity of material I had to digest seem neatly plausible AND LIKELY.
I think lots of people can identify with my frustration in “feeling in my gut” that the Theory of Evolution made sense—even after it had already passed muster in my brain. Our sense of intuition doesn’t mature overnight! And that’s why an exercise like this one can be so important:
Not until I spent a lot of time playing around with evolutionary algorithm demonstrations like this
one did the COMPELLING BEAUTY of the evolution processes God created start to feel obvious to me. We as academics often discount and dismiss feelings in our intellectual rigor and it is easy to understand why. But with my comprehension of evolution, I began to realize that I would never really feel at peace with the science of evolution until my intuitive evaluations had been satisfied.
Ever since I got through that hurdle, I’ve felt far more empathetic towards my Christian brethren who struggle with the overwhelming evidence for evolutionary science. Many of them aren’t simply ignoring that overwhelming evidence—although a great many certainly do. Many of them feel “stuck” in the same limbo I experienced as long as my intellect and my “gut feelings” intuition were not in harmony and working together to reassure me that I had resolved my former conflicts.
Therefore, when we try to educate non-scientists on the realities of evolution, we shouldn’t stop at presenting the evidence and explaining why its overwhelming. We should do more to provide simulations, exercises, thought experiments, analogies, and any other tools which engage the intuitions of the reader so that the Theory of Evolution feels right and not just sounds right. I can’t say exactly how that should be done but the following evolutionary algorithm is a good start, especially if it were to be supplemented by some helpful commentary.
I don’t know if anyone has done a Youtube video of commentary about such exercises. On its own, I’m not so sure that the program is self-evident to non-scientists. I think many need help in understanding what they are observing. If nothing else, it could demonstrate that even extremely simple algorithms can develop— evolve! — very complex and efficient machines without the intervention of intelligence. Also, if some skeptic rushes to interject, “But the programmer designed front-end intelligence into the program!”, then you can thereby know that they totally failed to comprehend what evolutionary algorithm’s illustrate and how they work. A programmer can write extremely simple evolutionary algorithms to develop solutions which the programmer would never have predicted in a million years. (By the ways, I’ve never seen an article at the Discovery Institute website fully grapple with this topic. Many of their writers insist that simplicity without “intelligence” CANNOT produce complex designs. That sounds reasonable to many non-scientists. Their intuitive instincts favor that position.)
