OK. Evolution is not"random". Evolution happens through natural selection which is about the least random process you can imagine. The mechanism for organisms to change is in fact random mutation, but by far the majority of mutations are either neutral or non-adaptive and die out. So those few random mutations that are adaptive survive and propagate. This may, to people like Mims, make them seem magical, but to most biologists they're just common sense.
I agree with your general inputs and conclusions. However, I think that Mims is correct, in a sense.
"The evolution of these complex molecules, which had to exist in the earliest cells, is so improbable..." --Mims
Yes, it is improbable, on a small-scale, and that seems to be where Mims' analysis has stopped.
"If enough random things happen and the beneficial things survive, then not only is the evolution not improbable, it's almost inevitable given enough time." --parent
I found Mims' statement that he has "built thousands of circuits, none of which were made by randomly wiring together components" very telling. If he were to wire billions of circuits by randomly wiring together components, then he might end up with a few that were useful.
That experiment was also done. Doing it in hardware turned out to give a lot of unexpected side effects, such as not being able to remove a "dead" circuit, as it's effect on capacitance and cross talk having a real effect after all.
So in order to address this they instead tried simulation of passive analogue filters (obvious fitness function and you can control which building blocks that "nature" gets to play with) and matched against the patent data base. It turns out that you indeed end up with a lot of different filters that work very well, but can be difficult to analyze, being messy evolved creatures. And also that you find the ones that made it into the patent data base.
So, even that particular version of "we do it by design so therefore nature must have" is a bust. We've done it both ways, and both ways demonstrably work. This was hot stuff in academia in the nineties so it's not exactly brand new...
Total misrepresentation of Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
OK. Evolution is not"random". Evolution happens through natural selection which is about the least random process you can imagine. The mechanism for organisms to change is in fact random mutation, but by far the majority of mutations are either neutral or non-adaptive and die out. So those few random mutations that are adaptive survive and propagate. This may, to people like Mims, make them seem magical, but to most biologists they're just common sense.
Mims writes: "The evolution of these complex mol
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is improbable, on a small-scale, and that seems to be where Mims' analysis has stopped.
Yes indeed.
I found Mims' statement
Re:Total misrepresentation of Evolution (Score:2)
I found Mims' statement that he has "built thousands of circuits, none of which were made by randomly wiring together components" very telling. If he were to wire billions of circuits by randomly wiring together components, then he might end up with a few that were useful.
That experiment was also done. Doing it in hardware turned out to give a lot of unexpected side effects, such as not being able to remove a "dead" circuit, as it's effect on capacitance and cross talk having a real effect after all.
So in order to address this they instead tried simulation of passive analogue filters (obvious fitness function and you can control which building blocks that "nature" gets to play with) and matched against the patent data base. It turns out that you indeed end up with a lot of different filters that work very well, but can be difficult to analyze, being messy evolved creatures. And also that you find the ones that made it into the patent data base.
So, even that particular version of "we do it by design so therefore nature must have" is a bust. We've done it both ways, and both ways demonstrably work. This was hot stuff in academia in the nineties so it's not exactly brand new...