Tom English: (If Mung does not know that authors at Evolution News and Views often disagree with one another, but never point out their disagreements, then I’ve given him way too much credit. For instance, Dembski told us that “evolutionary search” really does search for targets. But Meyer and Axe have both gone out of their ways to explain that “evolutionary search” actually does not search.)
Did Tom ever reveal his sources?
New article up at Evolution News and Views:
Douglas Axe on Evolution’s Search Problem
Are they flat out lying?
If a Creationist like Axe is moving his lips it’s a good bet he’s lying.
Let’s not forget about Arrington and Ewert fundamentally disagreeing about the circularity of using CSI to conclude Design.
I am not sure why it is important to establish whether evolution is or is not to be described as a “search”.
I’d say it is only a search in the sense of “searching” for higher fitness. Not as searching for the one genotype that has the very highest fitness.
I note that in the video clip that is linked to (via the Klinghoffer ENV post), Douglas Axe described the “search” as wandering aimlessly around until a new function is found.
That seems to rule out gradually climbing up a fitness surface (or climbing on it as it itself slowly changes). Axe is not interested in that, only in cases where you have no slope leading onward and upward. In the latter cases the “wandering” is not aimless.
Pitiful tactic, Mung. I thought we had kissed, and made up.
As I said before, you’re harping on a parenthetic remark I made (literally placing it in parentheses) in comment addressing quite a different topic. I told you I had links to the sources in a forthcoming post. In fact, I told you the title: “Evolutionary Equilibration Is Not Search.” Is it hard to believe I would work into a post by that title links to posts at Evolution News and Views where Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe go out of their ways to explain that “evolutionary search” doesn’t really search? (If Axe is contradicting himself now, I’ll have great fun with it, and thank you for calling my attention to his post — which I haven’t read yet.)
It is not your right to have requests for justification of side remarks satisfied immediately. I know it hurts to be deprived of one of your favorite tactics for munging threads. (You do call yourself “Mung” for a reason, don’t you?)
I can only imagine Mung is emulating Barry Arrington here. What you describe is standard operating procedure for Barry.
I like it when Mung et al pray. It keeps them busy and they can cause less trouble for the rest of us. When they are praying they are not interfering in a child’s right to a decent education, a womans right to choose etc.
I can only imagine Mung sees his activities in a similar way. As noted, he’s the most replied to commenter here. He probably thinks he’s keeping us busy with his insightful comments and sharpshooting.
I reality he’s of course more like the Japanese who kept fighting for decades after the war was over. Every generation there are fewer Mungs, FMM and WJM amongst us. Rational thought is gradually winning, and the world will be a better place for it eventually.
So long, farewell and thanks for all the red-herrings Mung!
I’ve got the windows open, and I’m afraid I just woke the neighbors, guffawing and guffawing and guffawing and… then gasping for breath. You can guffaw only so much before that happens.
I’m not making that up as an elaborate insult. It’s a dead-level report of what happened when I watched Axe’s video. Klinghoffer put on a good warmup act:
Thank you very much, Mung. I love you, even if you don’t love me back.
Axe:
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2010.1
Ergo it’s not a search.
BA77 collects a list of Axe’s claims regarding search here:
Another guffaw. PLEASE. No more. This is killing me!
It’s really not over until the plump lady sings. Right now, FiveThirtyEight puts the chance of it at 81 percent with its polls-only forecast.
Post on deck: Google Trends for “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and “intelligent design.” Guess which has declined steadily in interest since the Dover trial. Guess which has leveled out, and has generated 66 percent more online interest than the other over the past five years.
Gah. I’m at the end of my tether. I have bought some puppies. Every time someone makes the argument which is a variant of “proteins have to be long and there have to be 20 acids, and therefore …” , I am going to kill a puppy. Think of the puppies.
I learned only recently that Axe’s doctorate is in chemical engineering. Silly me, to have assumed that once the Discovery Institute got around to funding research, it put a scientist in charge.
The best indication of Axe’s greatness is the accomplishments of the Biologic Institute over the past ten years. Perhaps Mung would like to tell us what we’ve failed to see.
Tagging Axe as an engineer is not gratuitous. I suspect that, as with Robert Marks and Winston Ewert, it’s the fundamental reason that he takes calculations applicable to engineering, and misapplies them to science.
Crypto-creationism in a nut shell
Funny how, when challenging evolutionists, a very detailed narrative is demanded.
I think Mung thinks that he’s achieving something by attempting to start arguments between people on this side of the reality fence. What Mung does not realize is that arguments are how we’ve progressed so far on this side of the fence.
When some priest is ‘explaining’ what some passage in the bible really means there can be no argument. The only way you can win such an argument is to be a more senior level priest. Then your interpretation ‘wins’.
Mung, on this side of the fence we relish arguments. It’s how we sift the wheat from the chaff. Whereas on your side you only have agreement. It’s a big tent. And when you really can’t agree you just split the congregation in two and go your separate ways. Nothing there based on facts. Just personalities.
When you see people arguing Mung, that’s healthy. That’s progress. And progress is something prayer will never achieve.
Including probabilities, of course. Evolutionists ought not to claim that evolutionary processes are random unless they know the probabilities of all events that adversaries might ever specify — right?
Note to Discovery Institute: It’s best not to overhype new hires in your propaganda, making them out to be Prophets of Id, when they’ve yet to produce anything at all for you. That makes it awfully hard to fire them for nonperformance. Admittedly, it is awfully hard to hire anyone you might reasonably expect to do better. But isn’t it terribly embarrassing to have funded Axe for ten years, and to find yourself promoting his yip-yap about a research project he did before you took him aboard?
I have an original of that issue.
Obviously, the sales pitch worked.
I do. But probably not for the reason you think. But I’ve never minded the connection to the use of the term you refer to.
That alone improves the probability of your success in searching for a puppy when you need one. Good design thinking! Salvador would be pleased.
This protein search-space argument they make really has become a PRATT. It should have a fallacy name.
Wait, it does. Hoyle’s fallacy.
How many times must we debunk this shit before it sinks in? At this stage it’s not far from up there with 2nd law of thermodynamics and why are there still monkeys?
By the way, I know we’ve been over this before, but Axe got to his numbers not by testing what evolutionary theory proposes happened to give rise to extant proteins, but in a great feat of irony, testing design and falsifying it. Yeah, you read that right. Douglas Axe and Ann Gauger in one of their experiments, tested “common design” to see if it worked (they say they tested evolution, but if you read their methods… well, ironic stuff).
Naturally it didn’t, the experiment revealed that if they design a new protein by taking one extant enzyme and inserting mutations into it found in another extant enzyme, it stops working at some point. From this they conclude evolution can’t have produced either enzyme, but they must have been designed.
Notice how this “test” is actually what some ID proponents like Frankie says is how new proteins are designed by the designer. Take something already existing, then derive something new from it.
You can cut slices of the irony and weigh them.
It’s from this bio-complexity article:
The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions:
A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway
Gauger & Axe
Let me just note that Kbl2 never evolved into BioF2, or the other way around, and nobody has ever suggested they did. There’s no reason to expect such a conversion to be successful by evolution, and it’s not required that it is sucessful to explain how these two enzymes came to exist.
They write:
No shit? This particular jump didn’t actually happen. Nobody has suggested it did. And evolution isn’t contingent on it having been the case.
Something much more accurate would be to try to identify what their most probable mutual ancestor looked like and then do selection experiments to try and evolve both of them from it (because this is what evolution actually says happened), independently. They didn’t do this. They tested something nobody thinks ever took place. From this they conclude the sequence differences between functionally divergent enzymes are so great evolution can’t ever produce new enzyme functions.
Right. We have an alternative and better explanation(Intelligent Design) than your stories(It evolved), except we don’t. Actually. Have an explanation. At all.
FFS. I’m almost out of breath from laughing.
Surely it has nothing to do with mung peas. What about viral munginitis?
I was in the Navy and on board ship we had one of those large coffee percolators. Underneath the spigot we kept a metal bucket to catch the drippings and collect old coffee people would pour out of their mugs. It was called the mung bucket.
That’s where the name come from.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/
Seems like a gossip site to me.
Axe, Douglas. Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (Kindle Locations 1586-1588). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Hey, I completely agree with that Douglas Axe quote. I will go so far as to say that I think Axe is a clear writer. He isn’t full of meaningless technical gobbledygook and obfuscating impressive-sounding jargon, terms and abbreviations (CSI, FSC , IC anyone?).
I like it. I wish other ID proponents (Durston, Dembski, Meyer and others) would learn from that.
The Axe quote is clear and coherent, but I see no relevance to evolution or ID.
The relevant question is whether there are non lethal variations within one mutation’s reach from most current sequences. In other words, are viable sequences connected.
Lenski’s results suggest that populations change continuously.
When I was in college our fraternity organized the necessary upkeep via a set of committees. The committee responsible for the kitchen was Food Comm. It had a subgroup named Mung Comm, mainly made up of freshmen, responsible for cleaning the drains, “mung” being the noisome, disgusting substance that collected in said drains in a kitchen used heavily by college age men.
Mung reminds me of my youth.
The Urban Dictionary has its take.
Petrushka is a fictional marionette. Mung might be pleased by his fate.
Yeah, I googled that. Wish I hadn’t.
Guys can be mean. My cousin’s second husband was a submariner (in the UK Navy). He developed psoriasis (possibly to do with lubricants, not sure) and thereafter, his life was hell in the service. He’s found a new niche in the US servicing printing equipment.
I heard it was what collected in their showers.
If evolutionary algorithms are search algorithms, and evolution is not a search, then what can evolutionary algorithms tell us about evolution?
And why shouldn’t evolution be described as a search? Presumably there are combinations of nucleotide sequences that are nothing but junk and there are other combinations of nucleotide sequences that are detrimental and there are other combinations of nucleotide sequences that are beneficial.
Why should we not call the exploration of the possible configurations a search? The are likewise in physics and chemistry possible configurations of particles and elements and exploration of the possible. What’s the essential difference between exploration and search?
I admire Tom. He’s got the guts to publish in a book called Design by Evolution: Advances in Evolutionary Design.
Does Tom ever conclude that this design is merely illusory, that it is not real?
On another note, the chapter in the book asserts “Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree that the God of Abraham created the diverse forms of life on earth, imbuing only humans with a capacity to create ex nihilo.”
Let’s chalk that up to Tom’s co-author, who was obviously too ignorant to know better, and to Tom’s disengagement with the theological issues. The editors, as is customary, get a pass.
There’s some unclarity here. There are genetic simulations, which simulate the outcome(s) of inheritance, random mating, genetic drift, natural selection, mutation, migration etc. These are not structured as search algorithms. They can tell us about evolution, and have been very useful for that. They tell us about the behavior of theoretical models of evolution, models that are too complex to solve mathematically.
Then there are uses of these to search for a good solution for some engineering problem (such as layout of integrated circuits) by concocting a fitness function that is higher the better the problem is solved. These do not tell us any more about evolution than the genetic simulations mentioned above.
Be my guest, call it a search. One can either call it that or not. I just don’t see why that helps us think about it.
Dembski, Ewert, and Marks have described their models as searches. Most evolutionary models are best not described as searches, but being called a search is not what is wrong with their argument. Rather, the theorem that they come up with that is supposed to show that evolution cannot on average do better than changing genotypes at random does not prove that. Because the average over all possible “searches” that they use includes a great many things that are worse than any model of evolution. For details see here.
But sure, yeah, go ahead and call it a “search”. Or don’t.
Mung,
Have you explored the obvious implications of your take on evolution Mung? I mean, you accept common descent, but IIRC you buy Axe’s claim that functionality in sequence space is far and between. That must mean that the designer had to intervene to overcome the difficulties in navigating through these “islands of function”.
Putting it all together, you must then accept that to go from island to island in a given lineage, if there’s no gradual pathway available, some organisms at some point had to give birth to something more or less radically different.
Almost like cats giving birth to dogs. Is that really what you believe?
Mung,
Interesting story about the mung bucket. Thanks.
Mung is not endorsing Axe. He is advertising Axe, much as he advertised Denton, though it appears that the primary purpose of his post is to quibble about prior quibbling.
I know that was off-topic, I’m just curious about how Mung or Bill Cole would connect the dots of their beliefs. They don’t seem to be willing put the effort to find where their premises might take them
It’s easy to ask much the same thing, and stay on topic. Mung is quibbling over the meaning of “search.” But my point, as you can see in his quotation of me, was that prominent ID activists often disagree with one another on hugely important matters, and yet never mention their differences.
The closest match I see for Mung, a theistic evolutionist, among prominent ID activists is Michael Behe, whom the folks at BioLogos recognize as a theistic evolutionist. I genuinely do not see how to reconcile Behe and Axe. Behe allows that evolutionary pathways exist, but says that the probability of following them is exceedingly low. Axe says that the evolutionary pathways do not exist.
If X is impossible without intervention, why is their focus not on seeing how X actually comes about?
It seems there is a clear research path for ID to follow. Why are they not doing so?
Possible translation: That’s why we’ve gotten nothing out of the Biologic Institute, and why Axe is still talking about a research project he did long ago.
Ah, but for all we know they have the proof already! Paul Nelson notes they are conducting their resarch in secret!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060815191617/http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/08/from_a_senior_scientist_observ.html
They’re completing Nelson’s book?
I wonder what the designer had in mind with Guaico Culex.
Joe Felsenstein,
Did you even bother reading what Mung asked:
“If evolutionary algorithms are search algorithms, and evolution is not a search, then what can evolutionary algorithms tell us about evolution?”