Got ya. Not an example of any type of evolution.
There’s nothing to wager over. Evolution has to do with change over time, not abiogenesis. If Dawkins said that we evolved from the primordial soup, he is saying that that is were the first life started that eventually evolved into every living thing, including us. He is not suggesting that evolution is concerned with abiogenesis or that abiogenesis is an example of any kind of evolution.
IMO science can not explain macro-economics. I don’t see how they could ever test any of their theories.
Look, you’re playing a game of words, and you’re terrible at it.
A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. See synonyms at development.
The process of developing.
Gradual development.
Evolution MUST accur whenever new entities are created, and some of those entities are more “fit” than the others. If you wish to limit your idea of evolution to biological, genetic evolution, you’re free to do so, but it’s a terribly lumbering and ineffective definition.
I just wrote a quick and dirty program (Turbo Pascal 7.0, talk about old school). After 24 hours of the dice rolling every minute, it appears that (on average) about 4.8 of the 10 dice are sixes.
I may be wrong, but a cause of confusion here might be an overly narrow definition of the word “evolution”. In the popular usage - mine included - chemical abiogenesis is a facet of the concept of evolution as a whole. In particular, how self-replicating organic compounds achieved enough dominance to contribute to genetic evolution. However, given x-ray vision’s reaction, the “scientific” definition of evolution possibly excludes the concept.
And, by the way, there is something to wager about. You said Dawkins says evolution comes after the primordial soup, I say he’s very explicit about evolution working on that very soup. If you think he uses the word in a strict genetic way, consider the last chapter about memes.
Respect to the old skool krew! I should have guessed, fives and even fours will be quite common, too. 4.8 of 10 is still far more than what you’d get if you only rolled once.
I’m not going to argue this any further, but this is complete nonsense! Gradual change need not occur when a new entity is created, unless you’re talking about a new organism that came from a similar ancestor, which is what I’ve been saying all along. However, in the case of abiogenesis, the first organism was not part of a gradual change and has nothing to do with evolution. Good night!
This has nothing to do with being “fit” or gradual changes over time.
As would anyone who knows even a little about evolution.
Well sure, you can speak of the evolution of just about anything or any process that changes.
But I’m pretty sure diggleblop was speaking of biological evolution, and it was his post I was replying to. Do you mean to suggest he was talking about game theory or language development? If so, I misunderstood and I apologize. But if he was talking about biological evolution (and certainly I was, I specifically said so) then I’ll let my comments stand, with the addition below.
I’m not a scientist, but my understanding is that the word (when applied to biology) applies to the changes within populations and the theories to explain those changes, and not where life came from originally.
But the concepts are certainly related in the popular mind. And that may not be entirely unreasonable. The idea that life changed and evolved from very small, “simple” organisms into all the diverse life that has and does exists, kind of begs us to ask “But where did that original life come from?”.
But while one may lead naturally to the other, I still think they’re separate questions. Falsifying one, for example, does not falsify the other.
Since the original question was about what science can or can’t explain, I think it’s reasonable to try use terms in the way the scientists would.
Well, this isn’t necessarily true. There are several good theories of consciousness but in general they are met with “Huh, but there’s gotta be something else to it” but people who reply like that will not be satisfied with ANY explanation. Consciousness is a set of feedback loops inside a neural network. I’m entirely content with it and there is no aspect of human behavior or thinking that it does not explain for me.
Oh, good grief.
Don’t you understand that everyone questioning you on this assumed you were talking about rolling an equal number of fair dice an equal number of times, not this nonsensical forced solution? One that has nothing to do with sixes, since you can substitute any number in its spot and force that one to be favored?
Did you read my first post? Sixes last for six minutes, ones for one. How, in such a system, are sixes not more fit than ones? Another experiment: Flip coins! A hundred, this time, just because I can. Tails stay as they are, Heads are flipped again. Repeat as long as there’s any Heads left. Does or does not the pool of coins gradually evolve towards a pool of only tails?
And I’ll repeat, it sounds like a wager to me. I don’t have my copy handy right now, but if you have yours, I’ll dare you to read chapter one.
It is an example of selection (albeit a very artificial selection, deliberately designed to increase the yield of sixes). It can’t, however, be considered analogous to Darwinian selection insofar as no information or heritable characteristics are transferred from one “generation” to another.
Are you suggesting that an organism that we would view as alive (i.e. with a self-replicating structure with nucleic acid encoding of genetic information that produces phenotypes) emerged out of an organic soup with no intermediate precessor? Because that would be wholly improbable. We can expect (and Dawkins as written extensively on the topic, especially in The Blind Watchmaker) that there were intervening steps of self-replicating not-quite-life that were winnowed out by a selective process, albeit obviously not one involving the principles of Mendelian inheritance.
It’s possible to talk about evolution and natural selection without discussing abiogenesis, but pretty much impossible to discuss spontaneous abiogenesis without bringing in some mention of evolution somewhere. The line between “It’s alive! Alive!” and “Detecting no life signs, Captain,” is almost certainly a lot broader than can be jumped in a single bound.
Stranger
What’s so hard to understand? The above quote was my first post on the subject, and I still consider it a perfectly sensible example to show that evolution isn’t necessarily something to do with genes.
Oh brother. Sixes are not more fit! You are choosing to take the dice with sixes away at longer intervals than you are other dice. Sixes would be more fit if those dice were lopsided or landed on six more than other numbers. Either way, there are no gradual changes and no examples of “fitness” given that can lead one to believe that this is an example of any type of evolution.
Well, that’s sort of like saying “stars are balls of fusing gas” without getting into any of the nuclear transformations or electrodynamics of stellar evolution. If the best that neuroscience can tell us about consciousness is that it’s “a set of feedback loops inside a neural network” (and that is essentially the Cliff’s Notes version of psychoneurobiology to date) then it has a long way to go before it can give us anything useful like being able to read, control, replicate, or transfer conscious thought patterns. Pinker’s How The Mind Works, Adam Zeman’s Consciousness: A User’s Guide, and Ian Glynn’s terrifically comprehensive An Anatomy Of Thought each take several hundred pages to essentially say, “uhuhknow,” in answer to that question.
There’s no doubt (in my mind, anyway) that there is a strict biochemical explanation for the workings of the brain which doesn’t rely on any supernatural phenomena, but it’s only honesty to admit that we currently have only the crudest understanding of it.
Stranger
Look. The example is intended to show that evolution can happen within any system.
The system in question is an extremely simple one, set up for this example. It contains ten dice and one rule. I’d love to give you an example with molecules appearing out of nowhere, and how one sort of molecule are more stable than others, but I’m really rather clueless about how that sort of thing works. The point is: my system has a rule for randomly creating new “entities”, and a rule for determining which of these entities are more “stable”, or “fit”. If you know enough about physics and/ or chemistry to substitute these rules for natural rules, go ahead, but you’ll find that such a system is still subject to evolution, albeit not a genetical one, yet. And the point of the example is to give a (very) sketchy outline as to how a system of genetical evolution could evolve from a simpler one, because evolution works on more than genes.
Strictly speaking, natural selection doesn’t work on genes at all. It works on the carriers of the gene, based upon the phenotypes expressed in physiological characteristics. If the carrier succeeds in reproducing, then the gene gets passed, but a “good gene” in a defective carrier isn’t going to be any more successful than a “bad gene”.
With regard to your analogy with the dice, it is again an example of selection (albeit, artificial selection) but not evolution proper, as no information regarding characteristics or behavior is transmitted down the line. It’s strictly a statisical game, which is useful for demonstrating how preferred characteristics can predominate, but not an analogue to evolution, biological or otherwise.
Stranger
Again, I’ll argue that’s only a play on words, and that the only difference between evolution in the broader sense and genetic evolution is one of speed. All new changes are random, anyway. In the dice example, “good” traits survive, in the gene pool, good traits survive and multiply. New traits, however, come about in much the same fashion. Anyway, it seems most disagreements have been cleared and I’m tired. Good night!