Apologetics: Evolution and Dawkin's Weasel Experiment

i've been surfing around the Talk.Origins usenet site. the site claims to try to promote open and honest discussion of the origins of man and the universe. however, if you read some of the arguments closely you would realise that some scientists there are not completely honest in treating the subject and they tend to push for evolution. one of their flagship articles, "The Evolution of Improved Fitness by Random Mutation Plus Selection", by Edward E. Max, M.D., Ph.D., is one that i think relies on pseudo claims and the fact the casual readers do not think that much but accept what they read.

one of the most famous and most cited examples of the probability of evolution is a computer experiment created by Richard Dawkins. In it, he wrote a program to general a pre-defined statement from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Methinks it is a weasel". the program would make 28 random selections from 27 characters (26 letters and space).

the total number of possible outputs would be 2728 (27 characters picked 28 times), which is approximately 240, which gives something around the region of 1011 (about 100 billion different combinations).

they then rightly state that deriving a single strand of protein from this random arrangment of amino acids is so statistically low that it can be considered impossible.

HOWEVER, they state that "...the real evolutionary model for the origin of protein sequences involves MULTIPLE ROUNDS OF RANDOM MUTATION followed by MULTIPLE selection steps..."

so based on this, Dawkins created another program that supported "The real evolutionist model is that modern amino acid sequences evolved by successive steps in which random mutations of pre-existing sequences were subjected to selection; any rare mutant that provided more efficient function was propagated to future generations, in which the process of mutation and selection was repeated over and over".

this new program would make "...make multiple copies (progeny) of this sequence, while introducing random "errors" (mutations) into the copies. The computer examined all the mutated progeny and selected the one that had most similarity (however slight) to the line from Hamlet. This selected sequence was used as the basis for another generation of progeny with further mutations, from which the best copy was again selected -- and so on."

here lies the problem: the computer had a SPECIFIC GOAL TO WORK TOWARDS!!! there was a predefined statement for it to generate. in evolution, there is no intelligence. how would a process that lacked intelligence know which mutations are beneficial and which mutations are not, thereby enabling it to make informed decisions on which amino acid sequences to propagate?

evolution can't possibly know beforehand what the desired outcome is and therefore can't perform intelligent selection.

further down the page they highlighted a particular creationist, a Duane Gish who refutes their claim saying that the experiment was skewed and that "...the final line from Hamlet was achieved only through an intelligently designed program running on an intelligently designed complex computer..." the author then refutes it by saying "...that Gish's argument is false because it conflates the need for intelligent design in performing the simulation (a need that no one denies) with the need for design in what is being simulated; and it is the latter that is the issue at question."

he then cites an example: "Suppose a computer model of weather conditions is able to predict a rainstorm; no one will reasonably deny that the computer and the weather simulation software were intelligently designed, but this does not imply that the storm itself was created by a designer. The designed computer program is only an analytical tool for studying the natural process, and the necessity of intelligence for the analysis says nothing about the necessity of intelligence in the natural process."

this, in my opinion, is a bad argument that is refuted by a bad analogy. indeed, it is correct that the issue at hand is not the use of a highly complex computer and a highly complex software. to this end, it IS true that the weather, which is random, is possibly predicted by a highly complex and intelligently designed computer and computer program.

but they are missing the point here aren't they? the author is comparing weather, which has a totally random and meaningless end result to evolution, which they claim created all of life.

man still can't comprehend how life works. the simplest unicellular organism is far more complex than any machine that man has ever created. in fact, a single cell is so complicated that scientists still haven't been able to figure out completely how it works.

if a single cell is so complex, how much more complex are humans and other living creatures with more than one cell? and how, when even human intelligence fail to understand the nuances of their inner workings, could a mindless and random process like evolution create such wonders?

the gist of the second law of thermodynamics states that "any organised system, without intelligent and guided intervention and left to its own device will flow from a state of order to disorder". when a cup falls on the floor and shatters, it never forms the original cup again or any meaningful structure. basically, evolution goes against a law of nature. hmmmm...

there's actually another article on the Talk.Origins site that deals with this: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Evolution, and Probability. That's quite questionable too, and i think i'll deal with that in another post.

now i have to go out and buy food otherwise no dinner tonight... bleahz...