12.31.07
Posted in biology, design, evolution, philosophy, science at 12:56 am by nogre
Darwinian Evolution is a theory of Intelligent Design. Darwin argues for Natural Selection by starting with ‘Artificial Selection’, a theory of Intelligent Design. When Artificial Selection is generalized to Natural Selection Darwin is entirely cognizant of and makes no attempt to remove the elements of intelligent design embedded in the theory. In fact, he recognizes that these elements of intelligent design are what make evolution by natural selection so compelling and he specifically exploits them in his argument.
The Theory of Artificial Selection, also known as ‘Selective Breeding’, begins with domestication and husbandry of animals. Many species have changed over the course of history as a result of humans choosing animals to mate. Humans did this to produce offspring with desired traits, e.g. cows that produce more milk or sheep with a fuller fleece. This practice eventually was expanded to include plants such as corn, wheat and rice. Artificial Selection refers to all breeding practices (both plant and animal) in which humans mate certain (select) organisms to obtain individuals with specific desired traits.
Artificial Selection represents a theory of Intelligent Design because the human intelligence designs and creates new organisms.
Darwin then turns to Natural Selection:
As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends… How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man ! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.
Notice the heavy personification of Nature in this passage. Nature selects as a breeder selects: intelligently for the continued life of the species. Darwin compares nature to a breeder to exploit our understanding and acceptance of domestication and breeding practices as an underpinning Natural Selection. Hence Darwinian Natural Selection is derived from, and inherently is, a theory of Intelligent Design.
However, Darwin also says evolution works through a random process, apparently contradicting intelligent design. This is only an apparent contradiction though: if nature is intelligent it is more intelligent than we are. And if something is more intelligent than ourselves, we will not understand how it acts, i.e. its actions will appear random to us. Since we have to work very hard to understand the natural world, nature is smarter than we are and hence it follows that we view nature as random.
In conclusion, Darwin’s Evolution is a kind of Intelligent Design. Unlike other theories of ID, however, evolution is intelligent design based upon nature and not a supernatural agent. This reveals that both the supporters and opponents of Intelligent Design are arguing erroneously. ID’s supporters argue that the supernatural is needed to explain design found in nature whereas ID’s opponents argue that evolution is not intelligent design, and neither is correct. Personally, I prefer my evolution sans design, sidestepping these and other serious issues entirely.
Darwin likely knew all this when he placed this quote at the beginning of the second and subsequent editions of On the Origin of Species:
The only distinct meaning of the word ‘natural’ is stated, fixed or settled; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e., to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.
–Butler: Analogy of Revealed Religion
——–
As always, comments are highly appreciated (login no longer required!) . I apologize to my readers outside the USA for the recent US centric posts. I’m going to start posting some ontology soon (I will explain that Xmas post) and I doubt I could make ontology provincial even if I tried.
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12.27.07
Posted in motivation at 10:18 pm by nogre
The deal, which sent the Patriots the 110th selection overall in the weekend draft, was completed when Moss passed the Raiders-administered physical examination after arriving in the Oakland area on Sunday morning. With the draft choice acquired in the deal, New England chose University of Cincinnati cornerback John Bowie. [link: ESPN]
Oh, wait, no, that’s the other way around. Just in case anyone needed reminding of ridiculous things.
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12.24.07
Posted in Relativity, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy at 1:58 pm by nogre
There is no preferential ontological perspective. I hope your new year is awesome.
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12.20.07
Posted in art, ethics, philosophy at 10:50 pm by nogre
There is a television show coming out in the new year called “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”. At first I was massively excited. My father said that he thought it is taking place in between the first and second movies when Sarah was learning to be a hardcore bad-ass. I thought this was a brilliant idea: someone traveling through Mexico and the U.S. with a baby engaged in what amount to ostensibly terrorist activities. All sorts of questions about our society and terrorism would get brought up and, instead of the usual ‘us versus them’ situation, we would be rooting for the terrorist on our own soil. Any casualties/collateral damage would always be a decent person just doing their job: no one could foresee the rise of the machines. And what ends would Sarah go to when faced with a serious problem - she is working to save the future of humanity and she is the only one who knows it. We know she won’t shoot through a kid to kill the father, but that leaves a lot open, and she is under a good deal of stress. Never mind having a baby/toddler along for the ride who will grow to be the messiah.
Then I saw a recent commercial and it was a bunch of pretty 20 somethings in some US city. No crazy military types, no terrorist training, no her struggling to provide for a kid while keeping free of any public records, no Mexico, no her trying to convince people she isn’t psychotic. Granted, they were blowing something up in the commercial, but then I saw that there were multiple new terminators. Back to ‘us versus them’.
I’ll still give it a chance but my expectations are much lower now.
(update: caught the tail end of a new commercial in which I heard some female say, “You pack the bombs, I’ll make pancakes.” Some potential…)
—-
On the subject of TV there is one other point that is very important. CBS is channel 2. NBC is 4. Fox is 5. ABC is 7. I really have trouble accepting other channel lineups. They don’t count. I know this is ridiculous but I don’t care.
I surmise I feel this way because the news is exciting around here (NYC area) and the anchors are awesome. When I leave the area the stations just don’t have the same feel.
Happy birthday to Jim Rosenfield of CBS 2 news (December 18).
Other matters of some concern:
Boston Legal is the only scripted show I (somewhat regularly) watch. Those characters are my heroes. No ‘reality’ TV unless This Old House counts. NFL football/MLB baseball depending on season. I once had a logic midterm during the world series. Forget studying. So we convinced the teacher not to give us the test, the morning of the test. Not postponed, canceled. He pulled the test from his bag to pass out and we got him to change his mind. This was in a (Leiter-rated) grad school. Damn right we were that good.
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12.08.07
Posted in biology, evolution, news, politics, science at 10:01 pm by nogre
Today my dad showed me a review of a book in the New York Times. The book is something about natural selection and how it supports/underpins capitalism and those who were capitalist first. This reminded me about an old objection to evolution: at the time Darwin wrote the “On the Origin of Species” the idea of capitalism was en vogue and therefore ’struggle for survival’ was taken to be just a metaphor for capitalist society. Darwin’s theory of evolution was supposedly reduced to capitalism with window dressing. (ah how fortunes are reversed)
Thankfully I remembered my old response to this objection: evolution works just as well under socialism. The ‘metaphor’ that you use to describe the process of evolution is independent of evolution itself: we can use both a capitalistic ’survival of the fittest’ and/or a socialistic ’survival of communal’ to describe the process of evolution. This means that instead of focusing upon the struggle for survival, we focus upon organisms ability to best work within their community/environment. The organisms that work best within their respective environment will be the fittest.
Since evolution works with socialist metaphors, it is not dependent upon capitalism and I can’t see any reason for using evolution as support for capitalism, or vice versa.
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12.06.07
Posted in biology, evolution, logic, measurement, philosophy, science, time, wittgenstein at 4:05 pm by nogre
In my biorelativity series I used mutations per generation as a measurement of distance. However, with my recent historical/generative musings, specifically the post on the logical foundations of biorelativity (the logic of which is at the foundation of how I arrived at biorelativity), I fear I may have ignored the distinction between a mutation and an adaptation.
Consider an organism with some feature. The feature can be considered both a mutation or an adaptation depending on what the organism is being compared to. If the organism is being compared to another organism, then the feature is likely to be called a mutation. If the organism is being discussed in reference to the ecosystem, then the feature will be referred to as an adaptation.
Now I am sure that there may be some technical properties/definitions having to do with genetics or whatnot that distinguish mutation and adaptation. This is not my concern, though, because in my arguments the two can be used interchangeably.
What does concern me is that there are different sets of related concepts associated with the two words. An adaptation is, to my ear, always a positive thing. A mutation can be good or bad, e.g. mutant freak. By this line of thought adaptations are useful mutations, a subset.
Since mutation is the measurement of time and adaptation is only those mutations which are useful, then we can use adaptation to signify the forward motion of biological time (and forward change of a species as adaptations per generation) which will almost always be what people are discussing (”as time marches on, as things adapt…”). Conversely, to describe biological time going backwards, we could say something like ‘unmutating’.
——
On a slightly different note it is interesting that that there is no word for adapting in the opposite direction: it’s a significant gap. Unadapting? This could imply mere stagnation; the idea here is to think of what it would mean to be adapting in a way to specifically undo previous adaptations. I think a word like this does not nor cannot meaningfully exist: the logical/grammatical structure of adaptation presupposes forward progress.
Consider, “If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would not have any significant first person present indicative.” (Philosophical Investigations Part II Section x)
“The species is currently *counteradapting*” — It just makes no sense.
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12.05.07
Posted in Idependence Friendly logic, Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, game theory, logic, measurement, science at 7:57 pm by nogre
How can we represent biological relativity in logical notation?
Organism a is adapting relative to organism b
Aab
Organism b is adapting relative to a
Aba
Organisms a and b are adapting relative to each other
Aab & Aba
This schema is unsatisfactory because it describes the situation from an indeterminate outside perspective: a and b are said to be adapting relative to each other without regard to the observer describing the situation. Relativity applies to all the perspectives in question (with special focus on any observer perspective) and hence we need a way to include the observer perspective. This means we need to take into account how the observer is adapted such that the observer(s) can be compared to the organisms in question.
To remedy this problem let quantifiers range over organisms and include witnesses to identify the specific organisms in question:
For any organism x, for any organism y, there exists an organism z and there exists an organism u such that x is adapted relative to y according to organism z, and y is adapted relative to x according to organism u.
(∀x)(∀y)(∃z)(∃u)A[xyzu]
Unfortunately this formulation is insufficient because witness z is logically dependent upon both x and y (as is u as well) and we want z to only witness x and u to only witness y: as both z and u are dependent upon both x and y, both x and y must be chosen before selecting z and u. This means that organisms x and y are selected (logically) independent of the witness organisms defeating the purpose of having those witnesses.
Getting around this difficulty is not trivial in first order logic. There is no way in first order logic to linearly order the four quantifiers such that z only depends on x and u only depends on y (Kolak & Symons p.249 [p.40 of the pdf]). Independence Friendly logic suffices though :
(∀x)(∀y)(∃z/∀y)(∃u/∀x)A[xyzu]
This statement says that for any organism x, for any organism y, there exists an organism z that does not depend on y and an organism u that does not depend on x, such that organism x as witnessed by z, and organism y as witnessed by u, are adapted relative to each other.
However, though this statement gets very close to describing biological relativity, if we consider how the witnesses witness the organisms, i.e. how z witnesses the organism x, there is a problem. By stating that z witnesses x and that z is independent of y, the statement ‘x is adapted relative to y as witnessed by z’ is nonsense: since z is independent of y it could not be a witness to ‘x adapting relative to y.’ Likewise for u.
The solution is simple enough though:
(∀x)(∀y)(∃z/∀x)(∃u/∀y)((x=z) & (y=u) & A[x,y])
By letting x=z, making z independent of x and dependent on y, z witnesses y from the perspective of x without requiring x to be chosen before z. Likewise for u: if y=u, u is logically independent of y and u is dependent on x, then u may be chosen before y, u is dependent as a witness to the choice of x and witnesses x from the perspective of y. Perhaps more prosaically: x and y are adapting relative to each other, as witnessed by organisms z and u (who have the equivalent adaptations respectively to x and y), and it is not necessary to predetermine what those adaptations are.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 2:53 pm by nogre
If and when I am in a position to do so, I will provide free floss and toothpaste at work. If possible, a mini locker for people to store their own toothbrushes in (with big locks- I shudder to think of the office pranks possible with public access to toothbrushes).
Businesses already subsidize all sorts of preventative health benefits such as gym memberships. Floss and toothpaste are cheap and probably would save lots of money in dental work and insurance over the long run. ¡Vivá la revolución!
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12.04.07
Posted in General Relativity, Relativity, Special Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, measurement, philosophy, physics, science at 8:22 pm by nogre
It’s always interesting to see the start of ideas. Although I don’t have anything from the Spring of ‘04 when I recall realizing biorelativity for the first time, I have found a file with a ‘last modified’ date of June12, ‘05, the contents of which are below:
Quantum Biology
biology: the study of the physical attributes of life.
the rate of mutation is constant, much as the speed of light
organisms mutate. light shines. hence organisms bend/curve life-time as objects bend/curve space-time. greater the mass, the more the curve… the greater the inertia (momentum), the greater the curve. so what is meant by inertia in biology (or in physics)? what does mutation light, as photons light objects? [mutation is the smallest unit of life. photons smallest things with momentum.] we use mutation to view changes of a species. so if a species remains the same, its genetic(?) inertia/ momentum is remaining constant. that with the greatest inertia/ momentum creates the most gravity. that with the greatest inertia/ momentum creates biological gravitation towards itself…
space as vacuum for objects, DNA as vacuum for mutations. objects bend space; mutations do what to DNA? organisms bend life. as objects move to the speed of light their mass (apparently) goes to infinity. as organisms move to the rate of mutation (sex), their DNA (apparently) goes to infinity. as objects slow to absolute 0, their mass (apparently) disappears; as organisms cease mutation (death) the DNA (apparently) disappears. [space is a non-material object, same as concepts, numbers, words etc]
so when there is some massive change to the organism.. say when bats developed sonar, every other mutation became pulled closer around that as to become a part of it. nose, ears, face… eyes are just satellites now
we can then use the fossil history to see what was a major mutative innovation of the day- when preexisting mutations became reoriented around a new mutation (as we can see objects by the change they cause in the motion of other objects, and know their relative size)
location * momentum </= const
species * mutation </= const
——————-
Biological General, Special and plain Relativity in both physics and biology are all confused and mixed together and I was nowhere near my current understanding of biological mass (which didn’t happen till sometime in September of this year and perhaps I’ll go through how I came to that a bit later). It looks like I used DNA for biological mass.
Still, there is a lot of good stuff here.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 11:10 am by nogre
I love my dentist. He is consistently awesome. Whenever I go he ends up saying something like, “Well, you have some problems, but we’ll get them fixed later.” It’s been over 10 years. Apparently he’s found a way to make my problems painless and ignorable.
Saturday I chipped a tooth on falafel (really). And currently: no dental insurance. So I was heading over to the office with some trepidation. He said, “I’ll patch it and it will hold for a long while, but you will need a crown eventually. Come back when you have some insurance.” “Eventually” he says… I’ll be middle aged by the time this thing breaks.
Then he says, “I need to do a little bit of drilling, but it’s only a little, so it’s up to you if you want a shot (to deaden the pain).” I think I am tough, so the shot was forgone. When he said a little bit of drilling, he meant a very little: no more than 3 seconds, barely enough for me to feel it.
Lastly, as I was getting out of the chair he says “It’ll be fine, just stay off it for a few hours.” My patched cleaved tooth is a mere twisted ankle to this man. So here’s to Dr. Pacia: hip hip hooray!
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