SciAm had an article refuting 15 claims of creationists. Here’s one of its points:
“Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite : natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving “desirable” (adaptive) features and eliminating “undesirable” (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.
As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days.”
The counter-argument I’ve heard is, “Yeah, well how did the organism know which parts of the whole were the right ones to keep?” What is the response to this.?
In the computer program, someone told the computer the target result, and it was able to accomplish it quickly. There wouldn’t be a target in the biological process. Would it just be kicking out all the things that didn’t work by killing off the badly mutated animals or having the less adapted ones get killed off the fastest?
Is the objection flawed in that it presumes that the current state of the species (whichever one) is the target, when in fact it is just one of many viable versions that can or even currently survive?
SciAm had an article refuting 15 points of creationists. Here’s one:
“Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite : natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving “desirable” (adaptive) features and eliminating “undesirable” (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.
As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days.”
The objection I’ve heard to this is that someone had to tell the computer the target phrase so that it would know what to keep. Obviously there’s no one telling the organism what to keep or what the target is.
Is the problem with the objection that it assumes that there is a target at all? Is the reality that the badly mutated animals die quickly, while the less-adapted animals die faster than others, leading to well-adapted members of the species? Is the point really that the version of an animal you’re looking at is just one of many possible or even currently existing survivable versions, and a winnowing process has been going on for a long time, and is even currently underway?
The organism doesn’t “know” anything in this context, nor does it even need to. The fundamental idea behind natural selection is that there is a feedback loop between the environment and an individual, and this, in turn, translates to a change in the structure of the entire population. The “right [traits] to keep” are those which give that organism an advantage over its fellows, in that environment (which will necessarily also include its fellows). So those who possess certain advantages will be more likely to pass their traits on than the “average Joe”, and much more likely than the “inferior Joe”. As a result, the overall frequency of those advantageous traits within the population will likely increase over time. Eventually, the entire population may come to possess those traits, at which point it becomes the new standard for the “average Joe”, and the process continues.
Now which traits are the right ones to keep depends on the current environment. In any given environment, a trait may be considered beneficial, neutral, or detrimental. As environments change, a given trait may change status - previously neutral traits may become advantageous or detrimental, or detrminetal traits may become neutral or advantageous, for example (note that “detrimental” does not translate to “an automatic death-sentence”! Natural selection is a statistical phenomenon, not a guarantee for any individual). So, as environments change, the “good traits” are constantly changing, so the population changes in a sort of mosaic fashion: different parts are enhanced, randomly modified, or downplayed at different rates.
A better analogy for the program, then, might be something along the lines of the initial “target” being “TOBEORNOTTOBE”. However, in the next generation, the target becomes “TOBEARORNOTTOBE”. And the next one becomes “TOBEARNOTTONE”. And so on. Which traits are kept from one generation to the next depend on hitting a moving target, not a static one. So long as the actual target is not known up front by the selection process, the process would be much more akin to the operation of natural selection. In some cases, it may be that the “target” phrase becomes such that some individuals already match it exactly. This would be similar to an “exaptation” - a feature which is not the result of initial adaptation, but which has become one as the result of changing environments.
Part of the difficulty that creationists have with understanding evolution is that they INSIST on thinking in terms of targets, which is just wrong, no matter how many sets of quotes you imbed the word in.
There’s got to be a better analogy to help them achieve the paradigm shift that’s necessary for *getting * it.
The program is only meant to model cumulative selection, not natural selection. It’s not supposed to be a realistic model of evolution; it’s just showing how if you keep the pieces that work you can reach a goal quickly even with completely random changes between “generations”. The presence of a goal in the model makes it a big target for creationists.
On a side note, I wrote a program like this after reading Richard Dawkins’ “The Blind Watchmaker”. Mine generated the entire “To be or not to be” soliloquy (with spaces) in less than 300 “generations”.
I still think that the Lotto is a better analogy: there is no specific number that is a “target”; the only target is that SOMEONE will win. The numbers falling into place one by one to form a sequence that will net someone a hundred million dollars strikes me as a much better analogy than an analogy that begins with a predetermined sequence and posits monkeys reaching it.
In other words, a monkey with a bucket of ping pong balls could pick a winning lotto number his first try, though it would take the same monkey however many million tries to pick, at random, a predetermined sequence of numbers.
The paradigm shift that’s necessary for creationists to understand evolution is quite simple. In science, theories are changed and adapted to fit with the available evidence. In creationism, evidence is changed and adapted to fit a theory. Evidence that does not fit with the theory is dismissed as wrong, usually by invoking Piltdown Man.
Another thing creationists need to be able to grasp is that logical arguments and analogies do not constitute scientific evidence. The Schroedinger’s Cat analogy does not provide evidence for Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; experiments do. Similarly, creationists often argue that since there exists some evidence which they think suggests that the world was created, it must have been created by Yahweh in accordance with Genesis. Even if they can build a logical argument to this effect, it is not evidence. Many things which are observable are illogical, and many things which are improbable do happen. (Winning a lottery is an example of both of these.)
The analogy does not imply that evolution has a target; I think it was specificially meant as a rebuttal to the ‘monkeys writing Shakespeare’ argument. Perhaps a better analogy is that a random process must produce a viable English sentence of a certain length. It doesn’t have to be Hamlet; it just has to have all the necessary parts to be functional. Random chains of letters that happen to contain one English word will be retained (compare this to a simple organism such as a bacterium). Over time, random changes to these chains will result in more and more complex sentences.
Incidentally, let’s consider the number of possible random chains of letters 13 characters long (the same as TOBEORNOTTOBE): 26^13, or 2.48 x 10^18. Remember that DNA only has four letters in its ‘alphabet’, so the time taken to generate a 13-letter sentence is roughly the same as the time taken to generate a 30-base DNA sequence. 30 bases isn’t long, but there are catalytic RNAs that are only about 100 bases long (1.6 x 10^60 combinations), corresponding to a 42-character sentence. Early nucleic acids may have had a smaller number of bases than four, improving the odds still further, and a very large number of the possible combinations would do something useful. Incidentally, it is now possible to ‘evolve’ catalytic RNAs and DNAs of about 100 bases long through an entirely random process. Nucleic acids are synthesized randomly, and the ones that best perform the desired function are isolated and duplicated many times. The random synthesis can be done on a timescale of hours.
Even with all this, it comes down to the fact that evolution is not random, and involves selection of favorable (in terms of environmental adaptation) genetic combinations. All arguments based on the improbability of a sequence coming together randomly are irrelevant.
The example was not meant to be a model, simply an analogy. That is why I did not choose the second example to be something like “FOURSCOREANDSEVEN” - such would be an example of a drastic change.
Environments change constantly. Remember that even other individuals, and the effects of one’s own existence make up an individual’s environment. Relative to the string of characters given, a single character change is not overly drastic.
Actually it was 2 characters, and given that the original sequence was 13 characters long, and assuming that character set is representative of the genome, that would be a > 10% change in the genome every generation. That’s why I said it was a radical change.
If you absolutely must express it in terms like “how the organism knew which parts of the whole were the right ones to keep” (which, as others have said, is introducing a massive conceptual barrier in the first place), maybe you could say it like this;
The genome asks the environment a question; the question is ‘will the organism that I can make survive and reproduce?’ - the question is not asked in words, but in actions; the genome asks the question by producing the organism.
The environment answers the genome’s question, but again, not verbally; the affirmative is supplied in the form of the organism happening to be able to cope with staying alive long enough to successfully produce offspring. The negative is supplied in the form of a dead organism that was not successful at producing offspring.
These offspring carry their own (flawed)copy of the genome and the genome gets to ask its own question “Will this organism survive and reproduce?” - but, because it is a slightly imperfect copy, the ‘this’ is a slightly different organism and the answer might be different.
Like I said, you can think of it that way, but why bother?
You’re right; the problem with the objection is that it assumes there is a target, and that there must be a creator/designer/God to select it. In reality, the “target” is nothing more than a combination of traits that allows the organism to survive and thrive in its current environment.