Side/Comments on What if Design is Compatible with Evolution

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@Rope

Thanks for the comments, everyone! I can respond to some questions and clarify a few points. If there are actual misunderstandings of biology or the relevant evidence in my book, I would be glad to hear.

Hi Rope and welcome.

I hope you don’t mind a couple of quick comments while I digest the rest:

The compatibility of evolution and design-based explanations is a philosophical question though, so the philosophy is very relevant and should not be dismissed! If you reject the compatibility, this will also be based on philosophical ideas, so the philosophy cannot be avoided.

I don’t think anyone has ever rejected the idea that design and evolution are compatible, not least because they can be shown to be compatible by looking (as you do) at implementation of genetic algorithms.

For the science, perhaps we need a further article on PS in the future to summarize the evidence. Before that, I will have to direct you to the summaries in my book, or to Peter Jeavons’ article in the book symposium for one aspect of it: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/zygo.12840 .

Thanks for the link.

Perhaps it’s my background in implementing evolutionary algorithms, but that paper seemed rather shallow.

Some specific issues I found with it are:

• It doesn’t mention one of the most vexing issues when implementing evolutionary algorithms - their tendency to take advantage of loopholes in either the fitness function or the environment and reach ‘solutions’ that are nothing like the implementer’s goal^[1];
• It refers frequently to Dawkins’ ‘weasel’ program, but not to any more recent or more sophisticated evolutionary algorithms, which generally don’t share 'weasel’s simplifications;
• It seems to assume that selection takes place by looking at the fitness values of the entire simulated population, but there are many evolutionary algorithms that implement selection by directly comparing two (or sometimes three) individual ‘organisms’, without ever calculating a fitness value.

P.S.: I’ve found that people who use English words and phrases to model evolution inevitably underestimate the flexibility of the language (and neglect recombination, passable misspellings and the differences to macromolecules), and this is no exception.

YONDER CLOUD ALMOST IN CAMEL
PONDER CLOUD ALMOST IN CAMEL
PONDER CLOUD ALMOST IN TAMEL (a place in Portugal)
PONDER ALOUD ALMOST IN TAMEL
PONDER ALOUD ALMOST IN TAMIL
PONDER ALOUD A POST IN TAMIL
PONDER ABOUT A POST IN TAMIL
PONDER ABOUT A POST IN TAMIL
WONDER ABOUT A POST IN TAMIL
WONDER ABOUT A POST IN TAMEL
WANDER ABOUT A POST IN TAMEL
WANDER ABOUT A PORT IN TAMEL
WANDER ABOUT A PORT ON CAMEL
WANDER ABOUT A PORT ON A CAMEL
…

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1. Such as the one intended to produce a signal generator, which produced an aerial and amplifier instead. ↩︎