Intelligence: Random Chance or Deliberate Design?

[Edge]

What is intelligence anyway?

I'm really hoping it's not defined as the ability to decipher lurch's posts...

[Lord Mhoram]

Edge,

I'm really hoping it's not defined as the ability to decipher lurch's posts...

If so, then I am legally retarded.

[Kinslaughterer]

Is intelligence the ability to preceive cause and effect or comprehending abstract thought. I mean are we really "intelligent"? We have logic and the ability to oppose our instinct.
Is intelligence the process of creating new streams of thought?

[danlo]

Is intelligence the process of creating new streams of thought?

that's what I've always thought--TV has a way of "retarding" that in the masses, unforunately...

[lurch]

..Now we're getting to "degrees". Take th example of a+b=c,,and compare to the "intelligence" of the brain that thought up the Pythagaron Therum...or any of the Eucliadian equations,,etc. The arguement goes that very rarely is anything "new",,including ideas or streams of thought. Its all evolutionary, cause and effect, action reaction,,one step at a time if you will. Even Einstein had to have Newtonian Physics to deduce something else was required to answer questions that new observations were surfacing.

,,,Quantum realities could represent, " new streams of thought",,heck Einsteinain realitys are still very difficult to get an understanding of.And now we have string theory to contemplate..new streams of thought indeed. SRD's caesures represent a recognition to all that. Which brings me back to my original glib...Each of us is a stream of thought. Each of us has the potential for newness. While each of us is unique, that doesn't mean the unique will turn the corner to " new"....It is a matter of degrees..... or....start eating algae on a regular basis and you may understand the wisdom of Grace Slick bellowing.."Feed Your Head,,,Feed Your HeeEEaaAADDD!...God bless you Louis Carroll,,you pervert....MEL

[Fist and Faith]

Apparently, the odds of the synthesis that brought about intelligent life on Earth happening again is about equivalent to a storm sweeping through a junkyard and creating a jetplane.

Aside from what Nathan said, this comparison is less useful than a random guess. While I'm willing to concede without proof that there has never been an incident of a storm sweeping through a junkyard and creating a jetplane, I'm not willing to say the same about how many times intelligent life has arisen in the universe. I don't know of any examples of extraterrestrial intelligence, but the Hubble Deep Field thing I pointed out recently tells me that I can't possibly rule out much of anything in this universe. How was this "equivalence" arrived at?

[Loredoctor]

What is intelligence anyway?

Maybe I should copy & paste my thesis - which was on the structure of intelligence?

[Kinslaughterer]

Is it something that we can truly define?

[Fist and Faith]

Maybe I should copy & paste my thesis - which was on the structure of intelligence?

It might need its own forum, but it would be cool to read!

[Zarathustra]

The junkyard/jet analogy completely mischaracterizes evolution; namely, it leaves out an analogous function to natural selection.

Evolution is both random and nonrandom. Mutation is random. Natural selection is most certainly not. Only those mutations which confer a survival advantage will get passed on to successive generations. Harmful mutations will not. Thus, there is a "weeding out" process that forces order upon a random process. This is how order is built up spontaneously.

However, in the storm/junkyard analogy, there is no nonrandom selective feature. It's all just random. Also, there is not a process of successive generations accruing very small changes, but rather a one-time global reorganization of all parts simultaneously. Evolution does not work like this. The analogy completely misses the point.

[Lord Mhoram]

Regarding the jetplane analogy:

The eccentric astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle once famously said that evolution was as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. This saying was gleefully seized upon by creationists, who have promulgated it ever since as "proof" of the impossibility of evolution producing complex, highly ordered forms.1

As will be shown, this argument is not even close to being an accurate representation of evolution. It is a straw man, a ridiculous caricature of how evolution works. However, it is first necessary to establish a few things about the credentials of its author. As stated above, Fred Hoyle was an astronomer -- he was not trained in biology, paleontology, population genetics, or any other field having to do with evolution. He was no more qualified to make pronouncements about evolution than any layman, and indeed his comments demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of the theory. Nevertheless, whatever he was, he was certainly not a creationist.

"The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qu'ran or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion." --Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe, Our Place in the Cosmos, p.14

"We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia.... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today.... Darwin's theory, which is now accepted without dissent, is the cornerstone of modern biology. Our own links with the simplest forms of microbial life are well-nigh proven." --Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lifecloud: The Origin of Life in the Universe, p.15-16

With that established, we turn to the tornado in the junkyard. It is the purpose of this essay to show that this analogy says nothing about the validity of evolution because it fails to represent evolution on at least four crucial counts.

1. It operates according purely to random chance.
2. It is an example of single-step, rather than cumulative, selection.
3. It is a saltationary jump -- an end product entirely unlike the beginning product.
4. It has a target specified ahead of time.

The first point is the most important. The tornado in the junkyard is an example of intricate, complex and highly ordered forms being produced by nothing more than random chance. But evolution is not chance. (See here for more on this.) Rather, it operates according to a fixed, deterministic law -- the law of natural selection -- which has the power to favor some assemblages over others; it preferentially selects for those adaptations which improve fitness and selects against those that do not. The tornado, by contrast, slams parts together and tears them apart with no preference whatsoever, thus completely failing to represent natural selection, the force which drives all of evolution. To more accurately represent evolution, one would have to grant the tornado some power to recognize assemblages of parts which could serve as part of a 747 and prevent it from tearing them apart.

Secondly, the tornado analogy is an example of single-step selection -- in one step, it goes from a random pile of parts to a fully assembled airliner. This is completely unlike evolution, which operates according to a process of cumulative selection -- complex results being built up gradually in a repetitive process guided at each step by selective forces. To more accurately represent evolution, the tornado could be sent through the junkyard not once, but thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving chance assemblages of parts that could make up a jumbo jet.

Thirdly, in relation to the point above, the tornado in the junkyard is an example of saltation -- a sudden leap in which the end product is completely different from the beginning product. Evolution does not work this way; birds do not hatch out of dinosaur eggs and monkeys do not give birth to humans. Rather, species grow different over time through a process of slow change in which each new creature is only slightly different from its ancestor, the whole forming a gradually shading continuum in which any two steps are almost indistinguishable from each other, though the creatures at the beginning and end of the continuum may be very different indeed. If we sent a tornado through a junkyard once, we would not expect to see a complete airplane; but if we repeated the process thousands or millions of times, at each step preserving useful assemblages, we might see a jumbo jet gradually taking shape out of slowly accreting collections of parts. The idea is the same with living things. We do not see complex new creatures appearing suddenly in the fossil record; rather, we see them gradually forming by a process of modification from a line of increasingly similar ancestors.

And finally, the tornado analogy fails to represent evolution in one more significant way: it has a target specified ahead of time. Evolution does not. Natural selection is not a forward-looking process; it cannot select for what may become useful in the future, only what is immediately useful in the present. To more accurately represent evolution, we might add the additional stipulation that the tornado would be allowed to assemble, not just a jumbo jet, but any functional piece of machinery.

A tornado racing through a junkyard hundreds of thousands of times, at each step somehow preserving rather than tearing apart functional assemblages of parts, with the aim of ultimately producing some sort of working machine, be it a 747, a station wagon or a personal computer. This is still not a very good analogy to describe evolution, but it's a lot better than the implausible caricature of random, single-step saltation with a predetermined target the creationists put forth -- an analogy that utterly fails to represent evolution in every significant way.

www.ebonmusings.org/evolution/tornado.html

I mean gosh sorry guys. I was wrong! Just something I heard mentioned in a biology class.

[Kinslaughterer]

Not really accurate but a great line nonetheless.

[Edge]

The analogy completely misses the point.

No, you're missing the point. That quote is not, and was never intended to be, an 'analogy'.

It's not "evolution is like as a tornado blowing through a junkyard" - it's as likely as - referring only to probabilities, and not in any way intended to draw a parallel between two processes.

[Zarathustra]

Edge, come on, this was an analogy. And following the analogy, we are supposed to conclude that evolution is unlikely in precisely the same way that making a jet from a tornado is unlikely. Further, we are supposed to jump to this conclusion based on the supposed similarity between the two events. If this isn't an analogy, then I confess I don't know what an analogy is.

Otherwise, why not say that evolution is as likely as the earth suddenly becoming a black hole? Or smurfs actually being real? Or something else very unlikely? No, the comparison being made isn't in terms of probabilities (which are never mentioned as real numbers), but in the PROCESS of order coming from a chaotic source.

It's easy to compare probabilities. You just put the numbers up there and look at them, and decide if they are equal, and if not, which is greater. The reason that this isn't done is because no one knows the probabilities of evolution happening. Thus, if the author was really comparing actual probabilities, then his claim is meaningless.

Either way, this COMPARISON is stupid.

[CovenantJr]

Edge, come on, this was an analogy. And following the analogy, we are supposed to conclude that evolution is unlikely in precisely the same way that making a jet from a tornado is unlikely. Further, we are supposed to jump to this conclusion based on the supposed similarity between the two events. If this isn't an analogy, then I confess I don't know what an analogy is.

It's as likely as an old lady knocking over a trolley filled with tins of Spam and the tins landing in a pattern that forms a likeness of Winston Churchill. It's as likely as every member of Kevin's Watch except you secretly being alter egos of Stephen Donaldson. It's as likely as only catching colds on Tuesdays.

It's a comparison of probabilities of two unlikely events. The physical attributes of the process are irrelevant.

[Zarathustra]

The physical attributes of the process are irrelevant.

I have a hard time believing this. These are supposed to be two completely unrelated scenarios (evolution and jet formation) EXCEPT for the fact that they are both extremely unlikely?

However, by PURE COINCIDENCE, both of these scenarios involve producing ordered things out of a random process.

I'm sorry, but I find your characterization extremely unlikely. It's not just coincidence that the two scenarios share this similarity: in fact, the jet example was chosen by the original author. Do you think he chose it completely at random, with no regard to the procedural similarity at all?

And in the end, are you saying that this is a good comparison? That the two scenarios actually do share equivelant probabilities? This argument is getting silly.

[matrixman]

This is an excellent topic, but it seems to have stalled or been derailed because we've ended up discussing semantics.

While I personally adhere to evolution, I'm going to play devil's advocate here and bring up the voice of a dissenting scientist. Is anyone familiar with the book, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, written by Michael J. Behe? Behe is Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. I read this book a few years ago and found it very stimulating, regardless of whether or not I accepted what Behe was saying.

Let me quote some excerpts:

Almost a century and a half after Darwin proposed his theory, evolutionary biology has had much success in accounting for patterns of life we see around us. To many, its triumph seems complete. But the real work of life does not happen at the level of the whole animal or organ; the most important parts of living things are too small to be seen. Life is lived in the details, and it is molecules that handle life's details. Darwin's idea might explain horse hoofs, but can it explain life's foundation?

Shortly after 1950 science advanced to the point where it could determine the shapes and properties of a few of the molecules that make up living organisms. Slowly, painstakingly, the structures of more and more biological molecules were elucidated, and the way they work inferred from countless experiments. The cumulative results show with piercing clarity that life is based on machines--machines made of molecules! Molecular machines haul cargo from one place in the cell to another along "highways" made of other molecules, while still others act as cables, ropes and pulleys to hold the cell in shape. Machines turn cellular switches on and off, sometimes killing the cell or causing it to grow. Solar-powered machines capture the energy of photons and store it in chemicals. Electrical machines allow current to flow through nerves. Manufacturing machines build other molecular machines, as well as themselves. Cells swim using machines, copy themselves with machinery, ingest food with machinery. In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.

Can all life be fit into Darwin's theory of evolution? Because the popular media likes to publish exciting stories, and because some scientists enjoy speculating about how far their discoveries might go, it has been difficult for the public to separate fact from conjecture. To find the real evidence you have to dig into the journals and books published by the scientific community itself. The scientific literature reports experiments firsthand, and the reports are generally free of the flights of fancy that make their way into the spinoffs that follow. But as I will note later, if you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines--the basis of life--developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an-as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach. To find out why, in this book I will examine several fascinating molecular machines, then ask whether they can ever be explained by random mutation/natural selection.

Behe wrote his book for a general audience, but even so, he still goes into mind-numbingly dense detail (for a layperson like me) about the workings of biochemical systems--and by necessity he must, because Behe says that the story of the impact of biochemistry on evolutionary theory rests in the details.

It's been a while since I read the book, so I've forgotten a lot of the details--which sucks, because the importance of biochemistry is in the details. Basically, Behe delves into complex, finely tuned processes such as vision, blood clotting, and the antibody system (to name three) and asks whether these could really have evolved in a gradual, step-by-step fashion. Or if we must infer intelligent design to account for them.

And I really think I should read the book again before I try to summarize Behe's arguments, and even then I might end up quoting the whole damn book.

[Loredoctor]

The evolution of vision is not so complex.

[Avatar]

Aah, but a shared view of the semantics involved is so important.

Regardless, an interesting post. In a sense, I agree about the incredible complexity of the "machinery of life" but I don't see that simply because something is complex, it needs to have been "designed."

Indeed, when you break it down to such a minute molecular level, the opportuities for "experimentation", in the sense that ineffective changes "die out" while successful ones prosper, seem far greater.

Anyway, that's an intuitive feeling, I've certainly got nothing to back it up, being as much a layperson as MM when it comes to molecular biology. (Hey, maybe SafetyJedi can add a comment here?)

--A

[Kinslaughterer]

Behe's premise was addressed by other evolutionary biologists and completely disproved. He later admitted to not actually testing his theory and then finally rejecting his own hypothesis