Wednesday 10th August 2005

I Thought It Was West Ham

Yet another No Brainer.

Re: The line :-

The president has suggested that a theory known as "intelligent design" should be taught in the classroom.

It proposes that life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and an unseen power must have had a hand.

Many times I think of some element of life in the world which seems too difficult to explain and every time I eventually see some glimmer of the mechanism through which evolution produces that element. The beauty of evolution is that it is simple rather than complex. It just takes a long time. This links in with my theory of blogging - that the majority of people in the world actually have no idea how big the blogosphere is and by extension no idea how big the world is. Extend this into time as well and you find that most people cannot think beyond the next five minutes. It is not surprising then, that the concept of a beautiful and simple mechanism which takes billions of years comes as a threat to some people. Douglas Adams as usual had this tied down with the idea of the planet Krickett covered in thick clouds living at peace with themselves and unable to see the rest of the Universe. As soon as a spaceship comes crashing through onto their world, the Kricketters have their eyes opened to the rest of the Universe where their immediate reaction is "That'll have to go." Destroy anything you do not understand - that's the game these days.

I have said many times, that none of the development work I do is the programmatic equivalent of anything more than the basic mathematical operators (with a few brackets). There is no differentiation, no integration or standard deviation. Occasionally it may slide over into square roots but the bottom line is that information is simple to handle and simple to search. I would say the same of evolution. You may need lots of basic operators, lots of brackets and even the odd Sigma in there to allow for the length of time and amount of iteration required but nothing deeply disturbing. The trouble is that basic maths is a problem these days.

I received an email with a quiz in this week. It was a challenge to make a given solution number from four other given numbers using only the four, basic maths operators (and any brackets required). You have to use all the four given numbers, once and once only but any of the operators any number of times. The four given numbers are 1,1,1,5 and the solution is 5. Evolution is that simple, just extended over time. How then do we need to make it complex by introducing the concept of a designer which in mathematical terms is probably about as complex as the proof of Fermat's? Maybe it's the desire for authority which does it. Everyone likes to have higher justification of their actions these days.

Very unstructured today but I have another analogy. There is the old argument that evolution is like the idea of the Monkey typing away and coming up with the text of Hamlet. The real idea of evolution (and I know this is very simplified) is the Monkey typing away and after each word say, having someone look to see if the writing put down so far "survives" as being meaningful. If you tie it down to being Hamlet then you just have to compare it with the original and it is many orders of magnitude down from the complete random typing of the whole script. I know that's not a good argument but suppose you decided that what was written just had to be meaningful, (either grammatically correct gibberish or a proper narrative), this would be a full test. The test of being 'correct' is analogous to the conditions in which evolved life has to survive. I know I have removed a lot of the variability but the idea shows how something which sounds statistically impossible becomes entirely plausible when tested incrementally against a solution even if that solution is not defined at the start. I have a blurry idea in my head that this could be akin to the way neural nets work but that may be a dud link. And the old Jumbo-Jet-out-of-a- hurricane argument is laughable. It shows a lack of thinking about the problem. Can’t be bothered any more. I should have taken notice of what one guy said at the end of the article about Bush’s idea about intelligent design –

There is no science to intelligent design, it's not even a scientifically answerable question.

Alan Leshner, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Finally and without naming names for I do not wish to become involved in a debate, I was annoyed by some blogger’s schadenfraude ( had to look that up BTW) regarding the deaths of some prominent left-leaners. It struck me that recently there has been a debate over the ejection from this country of certain people who express glee at deaths. My simple mind cannot see the difference.