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Today, I went to the Pepsi machine at work and found out they were all out of Diet Pepsi. So I picked a Diet Dr Pepper instead. As I drank it, I thought about the advertising that Diet Dr Pepper does: “It tastes more like regular Dr Pepper!”

First, notice that it’s a non-comparison comparison. Yeah, it doesn’t tell you what it tastes more like regular Dr Pepper than… That is, it could be “It tastes more like regular Dr Pepper than dirt.” Or it could be “It tastes more like regulard Dr Pepper than Pepsi tastes like regular Dr Pepper.” There’s so many ways to take that.

But more fundamentally, I noticed a simple fact. Diet Dr Pepper says it tastes more like regular Dr Pepper. But this is a uni-directional comparison. You never hear “Regular Dr Pepper tastes more like Diet Dr Pepper!”

That’s because regular Dr Pepper tastes so much better than Diet Dr Pepper that it would never want to make that comparison.

In the same way, of course, Darwinists will say, “Darwinism is just as proven as Einstein’s theory of relativity.” But you never hear a physicist say, “Einstein’s theory of relativity is just as proven as Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Yeah, that’s another uni-directional comparison.

Great sign that the comparison is bogus.

In my previous post on DNA, I mentioned the following argument:

A) DNA is information.
B) Information cannot arise from a random, non-directed process.
C) Darwinism requires DNA to have arisen from a random, non-directed process.
D) Therefore, Darwinism cannot explain DNA.

In my first post, I demonstrated A) DNA is information. In this post, I will demonstrate B) Information cannot arise from a random, non-directed process.

The first thing to note is an example that Apolonio brought up. He said:

For example, we can conceive of a case where a person knocks over a scrabble box and the letters I Love You comes out with that order.

While this would be a semi-random process creating information, it is not using foundational forces. The specific example requires a person to knock over the Scrabble box. But even if we adjust for that and make it gravity pulling a box off a shelf or something similar, Scrabble tiles are not foundational in nature; they are designed. So the information still requires a non-foundational force (human ingenuity) to create the tiles which are used to create information in the pattern “I love you.”

Even then, the odds that “I Love You” would form are quite rare. Assuming an equal sample of each letter of the alphabet (as well as an infinite supply of them), you have 8 letters, so the odds of pulling these particular letters would be 1/26⁸, or 1 in 208,827,064,576, which is: 4.79 x 10 ^-12. If you include the space as a character, we have 10 characters and 27 possibilities each draw: 1/27¹⁰, or 4.9 x 10^-15.

In reality, however, Scrabble boxes do not contain an equal sampling of each letter. Instead you have 12 Es; 9 As & Is; 8 Os; 6 Ns, Rs, Ts; 4 Ds, Ls, Ss, Us; 3 Gs; 2 Bs, Cs, Fs, Hs, Ms, Ps, Vs, Ws, and Ys; 1 J, K, Q, X, Z. Finally, there are 2 blanks. This yields 100 total pieces. If we use the blanks as spaces, the odds for each letter in “I [blank] Love [blank] you” are:

I = 9/100
Blank = 2/99
L = 4/98
O = 8/97
V = 2/96
E = 12/95
Blank = 1/94
Y = 2/93
O = 7/92
U = 4/91

Because we are not dealing with an infinite number of tiles, we have to reduce how many are available after each selection. Thus, we have a 9/100 chance of pulling an I on the first draw from the box. If we do so, there are now only 99 tiles remaining, 2 of which will be blanks. That means we have a 2/99 shot for the blank, etc. Note that when a letter repeats (for instance, the O), we have to decrease the number remaining too. Thus, the first draw of an O is 8/97 but the second is 7/92 (because the first draw picks one of the Os). Finally, we get the combined odds by the following:

9/100 x 2/99 x 4/98 x 8/97 x 2/96 x 12/95 x 1/94 x 2/93 x 7/92 x 4/91, which is:

774,144 / 62,815,650,955,529,472,000

Or 1.23 x 10^-14

Which is roughly 1 in 81 trillion. So even though the tiles were created by humans, a random arrangement of them to spell out “I love you” is still extremely rare.

The above does, however, help us understand a bit about DNA. As most are already aware, DNA uses 3-base codons to create amino acids. There are four possible DNA bases (ACGT), and that means that means 4³ (64) possible combinations of those letters. However, there are only 20 amino acids. As a result, amino acids are often encoded by multiple numbers of codons. For instance, Leucine (L) can be encoded by CTT, CTC, CTA, CTG, TTA, and TTG. Which means there are 6 possibilities for L. In fact, quickly going through the amino acids (using their single-letter code name) we find:

I = 3
L = 6
V = 4
F = 2
M = 1
C = 2
A = 4
G = 4
P = 4
T = 4
S = 6
Y = 2
W = 1
Q = 2
N = 2
H = 2
E = 2
D = 2
K = 2
R = 6
Stop = 3

As you can see, all 64 possible combinations would be represented in the above. Therefore, we can say that given a random piece of DNA with 3 codons, there is a 3/64 chance that it is I (Isoleucine) and a 2/64 chance that it is N (Asparagine), etc.

Because base pairs are so prevalent, we can treat them as if there is an infinite supply of them. As a result, if we wanted to calculate what the odds would be that six base pairs will code for Isoleucine and then Asparagine, we would simply multiply 3/64 and 2/64 to yield: 6/4096, or about 1 in 683.

Of course, proteins can have hundreds of amino acids chained together in polypeptides. (In fact, by convention, most scientists do not consider a polypeptide chain to be a protein until it has at least 50 amino acids in it, although that is an arbitrary dividing line.) Because of their size, the odds of even a single 50-amino acid polypeptide forming are quite rare. In fact, even if they were simply a chain of L (Leucine), which has a 6/64 chance of forming for each L, the odds of 50 formulating would be 6⁵⁰ / 64⁵⁰, which is roughly 8 x 10³⁸ / 2 x 10⁹⁰ which is approximately 4 x 10^-52, or 1 chance in 3 x 10⁵¹.

Clearly, this method of explaining DNA is insufficient to explain even a basic protein, let alone complex cells and higher organisms.

This brings us to our next point, which is something that Mighty Pile brought up: the definition of information (i.e., something that is non-repeating, non-random, and not based on foundational forces) seems to exclude the ability of random, non-directed processes in the first place. As such, B) seems to be proven by stipulation, which means it relies on a circular argument.

However, when we examine B) carefully we see that it does not rely on circular reasoning when cashed out. To demonstrate how that is possible, I must first point out that the Darwinist must assert the opposite of B). They must assert that information can arise from random, non-directed processes (as evidenced by premise C)). And this is demonstrated by the fact that you are reading this blog post, which is information.

This blog post has an author. The author is not a random, non-directed process. But, if Darwinism is correct, at some point we can link my existence back to a random, non-directed process. Therefore, in a causative sense, the Darwinist would say that a random, non-directed process somehow created a non-random, directed process that was able to create information.

And it is because this option remains open to the Darwinist that B) does not entail circular reasoning. All the Darwinist needs to do is to show that Information can arise from forces that are non-random, non-repetitive (to exclude crystals) and non-foundational if those forces (we will call them meta-forces) are themselves built on random, non-directed forces. In other words, the Darwinist can argue: “Information comes from meta-forces, which are non-foundational; but meta-forces come from foundational forces.” Putting it into this two-step process would avoid the circular reasoning charge, while also giving the Darwinist a possible route to establishing C).

So the question now becomes, can random, non-directed processes create non-random and non-repeating meta-processes that could then create information in the form of DNA? DNA is one of the simplest information processes we can think of (compare it to trying to establish the framework for a spoken language), but even it is vastly complicated. In order for DNA to function, it has to store information that is used to create amino acids that bond together to form proteins that then create the mechanism for storing and reading DNA. In other words, in order for DNA to function biologically, we need to have a loop where DNA is used to create the processes needed to create more DNA. DNA is copied via cellular processes that are created with proteins that are themselves created by DNA. Thus, we have a vicious cycle going on.

But before we get to the loop, is there a simple way to just encode amino acids into DNA? Amino acids, after all, are fairly easy to create in a test tube, as Stanley Miller demonstrated (albeit his experiment does not prove what he thought it proved). Using those same “primitive” conditions, however, it is not possible to create DNA.

DNA also presents a problem because, as you’ve seen above, sometimes as many as six different DNA codons can represent a single amino acid. While moving from a DNA codon to an amino acid is easy, moving from the amino acid to a particular strand of DNA is much harder.

Due to the limitations of DNA, Francis Crick proposed that life began based on RNA instead of DNA. RNA is only single stranded, as opposed to the DNA double helix. RNA can also sometimes function similarly to proteins. DNA, however, is much more stable and less prone to errors (which is why an intelligent being would pick DNA instead of RNA to start life off; and which is why Darwinists claim DNA was “selected for” by Natural Selection).

Which brings up an important point. The “central dogma” (as Crick named it) is DNA to RNA to protein. It doesn’t go in the opposite order. (There are a few exceptions to the strictness of the “central dogma”, most notably RNA viruses (like HIV) which go from a single strand of RNA to DNA before then going through the “central dogma”; but there are no instances that I am aware of where proteins go to RNA then to DNA.) This makes it highly unlikely that amino acids bonded to become proteins and then those proteins created RNA that was then made into DNA and eventually stored in cells.

That means we had to start someway with DNA or RNA and then create proteins from that; but in order to create the proteins, it means we must have the structure in place by which RNA can be converted to a protein. Once again, we’re left with the chicken and the egg problem. And this system cannot have arisen by blind chance, since as you’ve seen even a single protein of 50 of the most common amino acids has astronomically long odds at forming randomly.

Regardless of where we start, we have to have some method of going from a random soup of amino acids to a particular sequence of amino acids being coded in information, be it RNA or DNA. But this will only start to happen if there is a reason for the information of a protein’s make-up to be converted to RNA or DNA.

That DNA is useful for life is not debated. Suppose that the amino acid “soup” manages to create a protein that could be used by a cell later on. It would be useful for the cell to have a way to rapidly create this protein. And the protein is created from amino acids that can be stored in DNA. Obviously, if we have this end in mind, we could design the process by which the DNA code comes about. But this requires teleology, which Darwinism denies. We cannot have the end of a working cell in mind; we have to have completely random processes that somehow create the necessary steps involved.

But suppose that we are left with only the random creation of the system to begin the evolutionary process. According to modern materialistic theory, life first became possible about 3.5 billion years ago. That is, the Earth cooled enough, the atmosphere was in the correct state, water existed, etc. so that life would not be extinguished if it was formed. Amazingly enough, according to these same scientists, the first life on Earth appeared roughly 3.5 billion years ago. In other words, as soon as it was possible for life to exist on Earth, life did exist on Earth. This must mean that the creation of life ought to be an “easy” process, given materialistic claims. If it is easy, then it should not rely on a process that has such poor odds of succeeding. Either life’s occurrence on Earth was a miracle against all odds, or else this cannot be how life began on Earth.

NOTE: This post has been updated since it was originally posted to correct the line: “While this would be a random process creating information, it is not using foundational forces” to “While this would be a semi-random process creating information, it is not using foundational forces.”

I mentioned in my comments with Mighty Pile the Gambler’s Ruin. The GR occurs when a gambler runs completely out of money. There are two aspects of the GR that impact our understanding of Natural Selection. First is the fact that if you are at a numerical disadvantage, then even if you have a statistical advantage in gambling you will often hit GR first simply because the other person can take “more damage” before he reaches it. Thus, just because one individual gains a favorable mutation does not mean that that mutation will be automatically chosen for due to the sheer number of competitors that the individual would have to compete with.

But more importantly is the fact that Natural Selection, in order to work at all, is an All-Or-Nothing proposition. That is, favorable traits must be selected for while unfavorable traits must die out. In one of his comments, Mighty Pile said:

Some traits DO confer an advantage to a particular organism and its progeny. While fit individuals certainly do die sometimes and unfit individuals certainly do live sometimes, the fit organisms would outcompete the unfit ones in large numbers. One antelope’s chance vs another antelope’s chance may be a 49%-51% split. But in a whole herd, the one that gets eaten will almost always be of the slower variety, or of the sick or injured variety. This is, of course, supposition based on logic. I don’t know how I’d prove it right now; it seems obvious in any context I can come up with for it. The difference between fit and unfit would probably be very small most times, setting up a sort of tipping point situation. I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you, right?

In response, I pointed out that one would be foolish to wager everything he owned for a chance to win a billion dollars if he only had a 51% chance of winning it and a 49% chance of losing it. This did get me to thinking a bit further, however, and I developed the following.

Suppose you start with 100 individuals. Each begins with $100. Each wagers $100 in order to gain $100. The odds are 51% win and 49% lose each bet, but with the following stipulation: as soon as you hit $0, you’re out of the game. You cannot continue. This is important to mimic Natural Selection, because as soon as you die you can no longer reproduce. It’s over. So you need a final set point.

How long will it take for a person to reach $1,000 given this structure? And how many people will hit GR before that occurs?

I made up an Excel spreadsheet to show this to me (click here for graphic). It assumes a literal 51% - 49% split for each round (in other words, I don’t randomize the data; this is the “ideal”). The vertical axis is how much money people have; the horizontal axis is the number of rounds. The number plotted in each cell is how many people remain for each row (i.e., how many people have whatever money is in that row). The bottom line beneath the graph simply sums how many people remain (i.e., those who did not hit GR). The cell at the far right of the 0 line is the grand total of those who hit GR.

Thus, we begin with 100 people holding $100. After the first round, 49 people are bankrupt and 51 people have $200. In the second round, 51% of those 51 people (26.01) at $200 will gain another $100 for a total of $300, while 49% (24.99) lose $100 to go back to $100 total. For the third round, we again calculate each group: 51% of the 26.01 (13.27) at $300 will go to $400; simultaneously, 49% of the 26.01 (12.74) drop back to $200. In the meantime, 51% of the 24.99 (12.74) who dropped to $100 will gain $100 and make it back to $200. They combine with the 12.74 who lost $100 to drop down to $200 to make 25.49. Finally, 49% of the 24.99 (12.25) who were at $100 will go bust.

Note that unlike in real life (where a whole number of people either win or lose), these calculations are made with the decimal points from the previous numbers still intact. In fact, I used dependent formulas for each cell. If we were rounding before we did the math, the answers would vary slightly.

And the results: It takes 11 rounds for the first person to hit $1,000 (and that’s only if you round 0.58 up to 1; the line does reach in round 9, but the value would round down to 0). In the meantime, 75.93 people have gone bust. That means that in order to get one person from $100 to $1,000, 76 people have to go bankrupt. And that’s starting with 100 people. A 1% advantage does not provide much of an advantage at all under these circumstances.

Natural Selection falls to the same principal. Just because a favorable mutation may confer a 1% advantage onto an antelope does not mean that the antelope really has that much more of an advantage than other antelope. And I should point out that living systems are actually far more complex than even this illustrates.

The key to why this works this way is because the chart is capped at 0. Once you hit 0, it’s over. That provides a literal line in the sand that has a huge impact. Because in Natural Selection death is such a line in the sand, this demonstrates that even a 1% advantage holds no real benefit to the furtherance of a trait in the species.

In reality, survival rarely comes down to a single trait though. Chance encounters are almost always going to outweigh any mutational advantage of a single trait. Consider all the following that mitigate against the classical view of Natural Selection:

* An antelope is born with 1% more speed than any other antelopes who have been born. However, when the antelope is a newborn, he is not as fast as the adults. As a result, despite being 1% faster than all other newborns, he is still slower than the slowest adult; therefore, he remains a preferential target for predators. If he is near adults at the edge of the herd when lions attack, they will go after him rather than the adults. This brings to mind the second point:

* As Mighty Pile pointed out, there is an oft repeated joke that one need only be faster than the slowest prey when a predator attacks. This, however, ignores the fact that if you are faster than me, but you are five feet away from a hungry bear while I am a quarter mile away from the hungry bear, the bear will catch you before you can run far enough to surpass me and make me a target.

* Sometimes pure dumb luck happens. A ram may be the fittest ram ever, but if he slips and breaks his leg, he’ll be eaten. And accidents happen quite often in nature. And even aside from nature. A highly specialized and advanced snake in Baghdad might happen to get hit by a mortar round fired from an insurgent that was not intended to strike the snake, but did. Or a random lightning strike could kill an elk in the forest who was “superior” to the other elk. When it comes to random events, traits have no bearing on survivability. There is no survivability trait for bad luck.

* For that matter, the strongest bull may be cut down by a viral infection that attacks only strong animals, leaving the weak bulls alive. The weak bulls are “more fit” (by definition, since they survived) but once the infection runs its course the herd would have been better off with the stronger bulls.

* A mutation for greater intelligence might occur in a sheep that’s also the least hearty sheep in the herd. Despite the fact that this intelligence trait would benefit the herd as a whole, the sheep dies of an illness before reproducing.

So survival rarely is about any one trait anyway. Instead, to have the best chance at surviving, organisms need to have a wide range of traits, any one of which may or may not be relevant at any particular time. But some traits are mutually exclusive. Because evolution must be blind (in a materialistic world) it cannot predict which trait will be needed in the future. And because it cannot predict what is needed (after all, it is non-teleological; and furthermore, even intelligent agents like weathermen cannot predict what will happen in the environment tomorrow), the random forces of nature will far outweigh any slight statistical advantage that individuals in a herd have.

So the only way to have beneficial mutations that avoid the GR problem is if they grant a far greater than 1% chance upon the individuals (after all, think of mutations, which convey far more than a 1% disadvantage to the individuals and therefore are seen!), or if they occur more often than random mutations would enable them to occur so that more individuals get the trait (remember, we started the above graph with 100 individuals already having $100, and 76 of them went bankrupt before a single person reached $1,000; if you had 1,000 people to begin with, 760 would go bankrupt…but you’d have 10 make it to the $1,000 mark, so clearly having more individuals get the same mutation would help), or the mutation would have to occur in an individual that is already “more fit” due to other traits to begin with (and that brings up the converse: a detrimental mutation can occur in those who are “more fit” due to other traits and therefore be “selected for” simply because it’s riding along with the system; whereas a “less fit” organism might evolve a wonderful trait that cannot overcome the aspects that make it “less fit” and therefore that trait is not “selected for”).

That’s a lot of front-loading you need before you can get the system going. Living systems are far too complex to be affected greatly by any slight advantage in a single trait.

One of the best offenses against Darwinism is the teleological argument. In fact, that is what Intelligent Design is (teleology = the study of design). This is most damaging to the Darwinist position because on the one hand Darwinists will repudiate teleology, but on the other hand they will employ it at every corner. To give examples of both in the same book, Ernst Mayr wrote:

Another widespread erroneous view of natural selection must also be refuted: Selection is not teleological (goal-directed). Indeed, how could an elimination process be teleological? Selection does not have a long-term goal. It is a process repeated anew in every generation.

Mayr, E. (2001). What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books. p. 121

Yet Mayr also writes:

When the selective advantage of a skeleton developed among the ancestors of the vertebrates and of the arthropods, the arthropod ancestors had the prerequisites for developing an external skeleton, and the vertebrate ancestors for developing an internal skeleton. The entire evolution of these two large groups of organisms has since been affected by this choice among their remote ancestors.

(ibid, p. 141, emphasis added).

Evolution is an opportunistic process. Whenever there is an opportunity to outcompete a competitor or to enter a new niche, selection will make use of any property of the phenotype to succeed in this endeavor.

(ibid, p. 221, emphasis added).

Likewise, we read:

The legitimate use of the term adaptation is for a property of an organism, whether a structure, a physiological trait, a behavior, or anything else that the organism possesses, that is favored by selection over alternate traits. But the term also has been used quite incorrectly for the process (”adaptation”) by which the favored trait was actively acquired. This view can be traced back to the ancient belief that organisms had an innate capacity for improvement, for steadily becoming “more perfect.” Also, if one accepts an inheritance of acquired characters, activities such as the straining of the neck by giraffes “adapts” the neck to an improved construction. In this view, adaptation is an active process with a teleological basis. Some recent authors still seem to look at adaptation as such a process and therefore reject the whole concept of adaptation. But this is not defensible.

(ibid, p. 150).

Yet of adaptations, we read:

The shift from the quadropedal locomotion of a lizardlike reptile to bipedalism and flight in birds initiated a considerable restructuring of the body plan: a compacting of the whole body to have a better center of gravity, the development of a more efficient four-chambered heart, restructuring of the respiratory tract (lungs and air sacs), endothermy, improved vision, and an enlarged central nervous system. The acquisition of all of these adaptations was a matter of necessity.

(ibid, p. 219, emphasis added).

But Mayr is not the only one who falls prey to this. Indeed, when trying to describe their theories Darwinists are forced to use teleological representations. For instance, Gould wrote:

The model of the grabbag is a taxonomist’s nightmare and an evolutionist’s delight. Imagine an organism built of a hundred basic features, with twenty possible forms per feature. The grabbag contains a hundred compartments, with twenty different tokens in each. To make a new Burgess creature, the Great Token-Stringer takes one token at random from each compartment and strings them all together. Voilà, the creature works–and you have nearly as many successful experiments as a musical scale can build catchy tunes. The world has not operated this way since Burgess times. Today, the Great Token-Stringer uses a variety of separate bags–labeled “vertebrate body plan,” “angiosperm body plan,” “molluscan body plan,” and so forth. The tokens in each compartment are far less numerous, and few if any from bag 1 can also be found in bag 2. The Great Token-Stringer now makes a much more orderly set of new creatures, but the playfulness and surprise of his early work have disappeared. He is no longer the enfant terrible of a brave new multicellular world, fashioning Anomalocaris with a hint of arthropod, Wiwaxia with a whiff of mollusk, Nectocaris with an amalgam of arthropod and vertebrate.

Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. p. 217-218

Naturally, Gould was trying to be poetic; but one wonders if it is even possible for him to explain his “grabbag” idea without resorting to the teleology of a designer (in the above case, the “Great Token-Stringer”). One suspects not. And those outside the field of biology are oblivious to the fact that evolution is supposed to be non-teleological. In fact, they see quite the opposite. For example, James Gleick in his book on the Chaos Theory wrote:

In science, on the whole, physical cause dominates. Indeed, as astronomy and physics emerged from the shadow of religion, no small part of the pain came from discarding arguments by design, forward-looking teleology–the earth is what it is so that humanity can do what it does. In biology, however, Darwin firmly established teleology as the central mode of thinking about cause. The biological world may not fulfill God’s design, but it fulfills a design shaped by natural selection. Natural selection operates not on genes or embryos, but on the final product. So an adaptationist explanation for the shape of an organism or the function of an organ always looks to its cause, not its physical cause but its final cause. Final cause survives in science wherever Darwinian thinking has become habitual. A modern anthropologist speculating about cannibalism or ritual sacrifice tends, rightly or wrongly, to ask only what purpose it serves. D’Arcy Thompson saw this coming. He begged that biology remember physical cause as well, mechanism and teleology together. He devoted himself to explaining the mathematical and physical forces that work on life. As adaptations took hold, such explanations came to seem irrelevant. It became a rich and fruitful problem to explain a leaf in terms of how natural selection shaped such an effective solar panel. Only much later did some scientists start to puzzle again over the side of nature left unexplained. Leaves come in just a few shapes, of all the shapes imaginable; and the shape of a leaf is not dictated by its function.

Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin Books. p. 201-202

Because of this cognitive dissonance, teleology works well against Darwinists. If something looks designed, the simplest and straightforward reason is that it’s because it was designed. It is because of how much design is apparent in the living world that Dawkins had to take the time to pen The Blind Watchmaker in the first place. If nature didn’t have the designed appearance of a watch, Dawkins wouldn’t have needed to try to come up with an alternate explanation for it.

So teleology has found a niche in anti-Darwinian circles. I, however, would like to expand it out a bit further than that. Most recently, I’ve been studying cryptology as part of my endeavors to better understand such things as information theory, etc. Cryptology is also important since I enjoy dissecting Darwinist arguments and DNA happens to be very prominent in many of them. Since DNA is a “living code” understanding certain principals of cryptology can be beneficial.

Surprisingly, however, my thoughts have strayed from their original course in biology. The living order is teleological, and it is difficult for anyone to honestly look at it and yet still deny the inherent design. But so too is the non-living universe. Teleology surrounds us everywhere we look. It is not just in living systems, but anywhere that there is a system. And because of that, my original focus and my original purpose for reading up on cryptology (besides the fact that I’m weird and actually enjoy the subject) has expanded somewhat.

All reality is teleological.

Since my thinking has come about as the result of reading on cryptology, it perhaps wouldn’t hurt if I gave the specific example that got me thinking on this issue. William Friedman, who was instrumental in the US breaking of the Japanese cipher PURPLE in World War II, wrote The Index of Coincidence and Its Applications in Cryptography in 1920 when he was 28 years old. It was later updated somewhat after Friedman found the solution for a cipher machine using cryptographic rotors. David Khan, in The Code-Breakers, illustrates the theory in this manner:

Imagine an urn containing one each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. The chance of drawing any specified letter, say r, is one in 26, or 1/26. Now imagine another, identical urn. The chance of drawing an r is equally one in 26, or 1/26. What are the odds of drawing a pair of r’s, one after another, in a two-draw situation? The likelihood of drawing the second r is 1/26 of the chance of drawing the first, which is 1/26. So the chance of drawing two r’s in a single event, or “simultaneously,” one from each urn, is 1/26 x 1/26. Similarly, the probability of drawing two a’s is 1/26 x 1/26, of two b’s 1/26 x 1/26, and so on. Consequently, the chance of drawing a pair of letters—any pair of letters, no matter which pair may come up—is the sum of all these probabilities. It is (1/26 x 1/26) + (1/26 x 1/26) + … + (1/26 x 1/26), repeated 26 times, or 26 x (1/26 x 1/26), or 1/26. This quantity may be written as the decimal 0.0385.

Assume now an ideal cryptosystem whose ciphertexts yield a perfectly flat frequency count—one with as many a’s as b’s as c’s…as z’s. Polyalphabetics approach this in varying degrees and may, for practical purposes, be regarded as generating such ciphertexts. These texts are called “random” because they are what would be obtained if letters were drawn at random from the urn (each letter being replaced after being noted and the urn shaken to mix the lot, chance alone dictating their identities). If two such random texts are superimposed, the chance that the letter above will be the same as the letter below is the same as the chance of drawing a pair of identical letters from the two urns. This is 0.0385, or, to put it another way, there will be 3.85 such coincidences in every 100 vertical pairs. Experiment will confirm this.

Now imagine an urn filled with 100 letters of English in the proportion in which they are used in normal text—8 a’s, 1 b, 3 c’s, 13 e’s, and so on. The chance of drawing a specified letter is now proportional to its frequency. The probability that an a will emerge is 8/100ths, that a e will is 13/100ths. With two such urns, the chance of drawing two a’s is, as before, the product of the individual probabilities, or 8/100 x 8/100; the chance of drawing two e’s is consequently 13/100 x 13/100. And the probability of drawing a pair—any pair—of identical letters is the sum of all these pair-probabilities: (8/100 x 8/100) + (1/100 x 1/100) + (3/100 x 3/100) …, and so on through all 26 letters. This calculation has been made (with a slightly different frequency table). The result is 0.0667.

These two plaintext urns may likewise be replaced by two strings of plaintext. If they are superimposed, there will be as much likelihood that two letters will coincide vertically as there was that two identical letters will be drawn from the two urns. This probability is 0.0667, or 6.67 coincidences per 100 paris. For example:

text A wheninthecourseofhumaneventsitbecomesnecessaryforo
text B fourscoreandsevenyearsagoourfathersbroughtforthupo

text A (cont.) nenationtodissolvethepoliticalbandsthathaveconnect
text B (cont.) nthiscontinentanewnationconceivedinlibertyanddedic

There are just seven coincidences in the 100 pairs—precisely what theory predicts.

…[O]ne must recognize first that the superimposition of two monalphabetically enciphered texts will result in the…figure of about 6.67 coincidences per 100 vertical pairs, or 6.67 per cent of coincidences. This is because the coincidences will occur whether the letters are clothed in ciphertext disguises or not. The calculation does not ask the letters for their identities. It merely notes their coincidence. By the same token—and this is important—two polyalphabetic cryptograms enciphered in the same key and superimposed so that the two occurrences of that key are in synchronization with one another will also show 6.67 per cent of coincidences. The reason is this: In a correct (in-phase) superimposition, the two letters of each vertical pair have the same keyletter. Thus whenever a coincidence occurs in the plaintext, the letters of the pair will be identically enciphered. This results in an identical pair—a coincidence—in the ciphertext. It does not matter that a pair of e’s may be enciphered into V’s at one point and into Q’s at another, or that a coincidence of a’s becomes a coincidence of L’s here and a coincidence of F’s there. The toal number of coincidences will remain the same as the number in the plaintext.

On the other hand, if the two cryptograms are improperly superimposed, so that the keys are not in step, any coincidences will result from different keyletters operating on different plaintext letters to accidentally produce the same ciphertext letter. The coincidences will be caused, in other words, by chance. Chance alone will produce 3.85 coincidences per 100 vertical pairs in random text, and polyalphabetic ciphertext is equivalent to random text. Hence an incorrect superimposition should yield about 3.85 per cent of coincidences. But 3.85 per cent is substantially less than 6.67 per cent, and so a comparison of the percentages of coincidences at various test superimpositions should show which superimposition is correct.

An example should make things clear. A cryptosystem with the Vigenère running key THE BARD OF AVON IS THE AUTHOR OF THESE LINES…starts the key for the first message with the first keyletter, but starts the key for successive messages with the third, fifth, and so on, keyletters. If plaintext 1 is If music be the food of love, play on, and plaintext 2 is Now is the winter of our discontent, the encipherment will be these:

key             THEBARDOFAVONISTHEAUTHOROFTH
plaintext 1     ifmusicbethefoodofloveplayon
ciphertext 1    BMQVSZFPJTCSSWGWVJLIOLDCODHU

key         (TH)EBARDOFAVONISTHEAUTHOROFTHESE
plaintext 2     nowisthewinterofourdiscontent
ciphertext 2    RPWZVHMERWABWKVJOOKKWJQTGAIFX

A cryptanalyst, receiving these two cryptograms, will superimpose them so that they start at the same point:

ciphertext 1  BMQVSZFPJTCSSWGWVJLIOLDCODHU
ciphertext 2  RPWZVHMERWABWKVJOOKKWJQTGAIFX

Since there are 28 vertical pairs, the cryptanalyst would expect 28 x 0.0667 coincidences or 1.8676, or about 2, for a proper superimposition. But in fact he finds none, so he shifts the second cryptogram one space to the right and tries again. There will now be 27 vertical pairs. The cryptanalyst again calculates the theoretical expected number of coincidences for random and for correctly superimposed texts of this length so that he may compare the values with what he actually observes. Thus, a wrongly superimposed text would yield 27 x 0.0385 = 0.9695, or about 1 coincidence that would produced by chance alone, while a correct superimposition would yield 27 x 0.0667 = 1.2369. (These fractional differences become more pronounced with longer texts.) One coincidence appears….

Since the differences between the chance and the caused values are so slight with so few letters, the cryptanalyst might wonder whether this is not in fact a random result (which in fact it is…) and try the next superimposition. Here the number of coincidences immediately jumps. This superimposition is obviously correct.

ciphertext 1  BMQVSZFPJTCSSWGWVJLIOLDCODHU
ciphertext 2    RPWZVHMERWABWKVJOOKKWJQTGAIFX

If the cryptanalyst wishes to continue, he will find that at the next superimposition the number of coincidences falls again, to 2, and will return to begin his attack with the third superimposition…

Kahn, D. (1967, 1996). The Codebreakers. New York: Scribner. p. 377-380.

With this as the immediate background, I’ll simply note how my train of thought has progressed. When dealing with language, we are dealing with something that we know is designed. Language requires intelligence, and this is even more evident when it comes to written text. Because text is a product of intelligence, it will always display the hallmark of intelligence. One will be able to differentiate between that which is designed and that which is random.

The above examples demonstrate it beautifully. Take the illustration of putting the opening line of the Declaration of Independence above the opening of the Gettysburg address. Because both texts were written in English, and because English is designed rather than random, English traits will carry through. There will be vertical alignment of almost 7%. Random texts only have 3%. Because this is the case, even hiding English within a cipher does not destroy these traits, although it obscures it at first glance.

Design, therefore, is something that would permeate everything. It might not be immediately apparent at first glance, but there will be traits that can be sought mathematically that will yield results nowhere near what random results would give us.

Now obviously when one thinks about living systems, one can see that there are processes at work that are not random. Even the relatively simple actions of an ion pump inside a cell demonstrate values that are not what one would find in a random environment. A cell becomes charged due to the existence of these ion pumps (which is how the electrical pulse can travel the nerve), but under random circumstances the charge would dissipate.

Indeed, when thinking of what is truly random one immediately must think of entropy. The less entropy there is in a system, the less random it is. If a room has low entropy, it is because everything is ordered. If it has high entropy, it is randomized. The more ordered something is, the less random it must be.

This brings us immediately to questions of the universe as a whole. And not just in terms of entropy amongst galaxies and such. Instead, I want to ask more foundational questions.

Suppose we see iron filings arrayed on a table next to a magnet. The filings will lay in a particular pattern and won’t lay randomly. Why is this the case? Of course the immediate answer is because magnetic forces have arranged the iron filings in that manner. But why is it that magnetic forces would act in that manner? We can dig into the quantum levels, perhaps. But that merely begs the question: why is it that those quantum particals act the way they do? What is it that causes electrons to be repulsed from one another? What is it that causes protons to attract electrons? Why is it that these things always happen this way, that there is no variance…no randomness to it?

Even things that are apparently random turn out to hide hidden order. Take radioactivity for instance. Radioactive elements are used to produce random cipher keys even, because no one can predict when an alpha particle will decay. But despite how “random” the decay is, radioactive elements always decay at a specific rate. Despite the random nature, there is an over-riding law that stipulates what the half-life of that radioactive element will be. We may not be able to predict when the next alpha particle will decay, but we know that after a set amount of time exactly half of the element will have decayed.

Is that not an instance of the non-random showing itself? Like the cipher text that cannot help but display the design of the English language, if one but knew where to look, don’t the underlying laws that govern all the universe scream out that there is underlying order to even what we think is chaos?

Earlier I quoted Gleick’s comment about the shape of leaves, which are governed not by forces of Natural Selection but instead by fractal designs. The key there is “designs.” All of reality is based on these deep, inherent designs. And these designs cannot be random because they are, in fact, distinct from what we would see in a purely random field.

Naturally I know that some chaoticians say that order springs from chaos, and they will use mathematical representations of chaos to illustrate this…all the while ignoring the fact that the mathematical system that they are using to generate those fractals is itself non-chaotic. Indeed, as some may already know I’ve spent lots of time playing with what I call the “Factor Field.” It’s an Excel program that I made (you can e-mail me if you want a copy using my yahoo account. Simply put “petedawg34” and follow it with “@” and finish with “yahoo.com”, and yes defeating spambots is always fun). The Factor Field is simply a graphical representation of integers. The left-most column counts by 1. The second column by 2s. Etc. Because I used Excel, it only shows 256 wide, but it goes 65,536 deep. Here is but one example of what you can see at cell number 60,480:

This shows what I call a “starburst” pattern. You can also see the skeletons of parabolas in there, as well as many different lines of various slopes. All this was created by putting integers in patterns next to each other.

If you were to isolate some of the pixels on the right side of the graphic, the dots would look very chaotic. There would not appear to be any particular rhyme or reason for any of them to be where they are. Yet they came about due to a specific rule. There is an underlying order that created the seeming randomness that is seen. And stepping back, viewing it from the distance where one can see the whole starburst, the order is obvious.

Likewise, the factor field can make it easy to find if a number is a prime number, but it doesn’t make it any easier to predict prime numbers that aren’t shown on the graph (although via observation, I hypothesize that all prime numbers greater than 3 are numbers that end in either 1 or 5 in base-6, but that’s another blog post for another time). One can tell that previous portions of the graph affect later portions, but it is so complex that it is difficult for humans to predict how the effects will play out “off screen.”

This interplay of chaos and order is only possible because the structure of the factor field is built on order. It’s an order that displays chaotic behavior later on, but it remains order. Likewise, all the representation of chaos theory are built on mathematical models that are, themselves, strict. Math doesn’t randomly make 1 + 1 = 7. It cannot happen. And the rules of chaos mean that doing the same math formula over with the exact same data will yield the exact same result. That there are wild differences if the data is even minorly tweaked doesn’t change the fact that not tweaking it yields identical results.

In other words, even in the most random systems we can think of, because they are real, have order underlying them. Reality is not random. Reality is, at heart, the opposite of random. And what is the opposite of randomness?

Design.

I TOLD YOU SO!

The producers of Expelled made the Dawkin’s rap video :-) (Click the “I told you so” line above to see the ending of the clip.) :-D

With the relative success of Expelled, Intelligent Design is back in the news again. It is therefore perhaps a bit helpful to have a quick overview of some of the differences between Intelligent Design and Creationism.

First, I should note that we must define how we are using the term “Creationism” in this essay. Most atheists define the term as equivalent to Young Earth Creationism, but this is too narrow. On the other extreme, one could say that anyone who believes in any sort of creation would be a Creationist, but this is so broad that you could even fit Darwinists who believe in a naturalistic creation of the universe (via quantum mechanics at the Big Bang, or whatever) into the definition.

Instead of those two extremes, for the purposes of this essay I will define a Creationist as a Christian theist who believes that God created the world and all the various “kinds” of plants and animals in it at some point (YEC or OEC is irrelevant, and this definition allows for variations within kinds to stand). Note that this definition is very arbitrary. It excludes alternate religions, and would not include theistic evolutionists either (as the variations in kinds—which may include differences between such creatures as zebras and horses, wolves and dogs—are not significant enough to establish Darwinian descent of all species from a common ancestor). While some may disagree with this definition, it is useful to demonstrate the distinction between Intelligent Design advocates and Creationists in general, especially in American culture where Christian theism is the dominant alternative to Darwinism. In any case, the focus of this essay is more on Intelligent Design than it is on Creationism, so this definition of Creationism ought to be sufficient to establish the point clearly enough.

Virtually every atheist would like to link Intelligent Design with Creationism since the religious views of Creationists would legally exclude them from public schools. However, even some Creationists (as defined above) link themselves to Intelligent Design. Indeed, often it is only the ID advocates themselves who separate themselves from the Creationist view point. Speaking as a Creationist, this is dangerous for Creationism, and not just because it allows Darwinists to exclude ID without sufficient cause.

Consider this example. Suppose that the universe is 15 billion years old. Furthermore, suppose that Darwinism, as understood by Richard Dawkins, is entirely correct. Further suppose that there exists a star several hundred light years away from us that has a planet rather like Earth on it, where over the course of time, beings equivalent to humans evolved. Suppose this planet was formed ten billion years ago (when the universe was five billion years old), life evolved until these human-like creatures came into existence after another five billion years. By then, these human-like creatures had developed a flotilla and launched out into space to conduct a science experiment on another planet. They traveled for one billion years (nowhere near the speed of light) and found Earth, four billion years ago. Over the course of the next few billion years, this species of human-like creatures seeded life, introduced retroviruses to reprogram DNA, and shaped the flow of evolution until the year 1945 when, seeing an atomic bomb detonate to end World War II, the human-like species decided to get out of Dodge. As a result, by the time the space program ramped up, these guys were no longer watching the planet, having fled back toward their distant star system.

Now suppose that this just-so story is actually true. This would not fit Creationist accounts…but it would fit Intelligent Design accounts. In fact, one need only ask a simple question: if the above did occur, how would we set about to prove it?

This question is actually one that Darwinists never bother to consider, since they assume by default that such a thing could not have occurred. But the above just-so story represents no religious viewpoint, it is completely materialistic, and it assumes all Darwinistic theories. If it actually occurred, how would we be able to verify it? It’s a natural and materialistic occurrence, and if science has anything meaningful to say then it ought to be able to answer the question.

Firstly, we must note that since these intelligent human-like creatures left we cannot go up into space and see them now. They are gone, and for all intents and purposes no longer exist within our realm of observation.

Science does deal with this sort of thing all the time with sentient beings. You may observe a bear on a migration route one year and not on the next year and then again on the third year. That you did not see the bear the second year does not mean the bear did not exist that year. So when dealing with sentient beings, it is quite possible that they do not wish to be seen or happen to be somewhere other than where the observer is.

So how then would we try to determine whether they had been here or not? If we cannot currently observe them, then we look for artifacts. This is how we know that the Roman Empire existed, for instance: historical references and items recovered by archaeology. We excavate ruins and read old books to find evidence that they used to exist, etc.

But we’ve already said that these human-like creatures are scientists working to keep their experiment pristine. They would not want contamination to occur, because that would ruin everything for their experiment.

What is left to examine then? Can we conclude that it would be impossible to verify the existence of these creatures? No, for there is one other thing that we can look at.

These creatures were conducting their experiments on life itself. They were introducing retroviruses to change DNA to shape evolution, to grow a particular species. They seeded life on the planet in the first place. That means that what we look for is this: evidence that what is here cannot have arisen naturally, but instead can only be explained by the actions of an intelligent agent.

Because the intelligent agent was actually involved in the way life happened on Earth, things occurred on Earth that would not have occurred otherwise. If this story is true, then life cannot be the same as it would have been without these intelligent actors involved.

Now here is the key for the Darwinist to consider. If we are to say that science has no way of differentiating between the materialistic and naturalistic theory that I proposed above and Darwinism, how potent is science after all? That is, if science works, it ought to be able to differentiate between a world that is designed and a world that is not designed.

The ID proponent says that science can and does differentiate between what occurs naturally and what occurs due to intelligent agents. Oddly, for all its talk about the power of science, it is Darwinism that believes science to be impotent on this issue. But IDers have no problem saying that science is able to detect design, even when the designer is materialistic.

The designer need not be an omnipotent God. In fact, the designer need only be as intelligent as we currently are. After all, it is certainly within the realm of human intelligence to be able to create a space flotilla with its own self-contained farming system, to use atomic power to move us (at nowhere near the speed of light, mind you), to take enough people to keep the population going, and for us to use Darwinian theories to seed new life on another planet, introducing retroviruses when we wish to make alterations, etc. We could theoretically do these things and construct an intelligently designed world.

Suppose we did just that. That would not be Creationism. It would be Intelligent Design, but not Creationism. And that’s the major difference between ID and Creationism.

Creationism requires that the Intelligent Designer be God, specifically (as I’ve defined Creationism above) the God of the Bible. ID has no such requirement. The designer could just as easily be a human-like organism that evolved on a different planet six billion years ago who then traveled to our planet to seed life. Of course, IDers do not rule out the possibility that the designer is the Christian God; but He is not a requirement for Intelligent Design. Nor does ID have to identify the designer in order to be scientific: it is enough to show that some kind of design must have occurred (just as one can rule out natural causes for the death of the body in the hotel room without knowing who the murderer—the designer of the death—is).

This is why Creationists are libel to misstep with all the success of ID. If we allow ID to do all the heavy work without working out the issues ourselves, then we have not advanced Creationism at all. Even if ID utterly guts Darwinism, that would not prove the designer of our world is God. That ID is currently sympathetic with Creationists in no way implies that this relationship must always remain, and Creationists should be aware of this fact.

There is a difference between Intelligent Design and Creationism. To use the dead body illustration yet again: Darwinists claim that Bob Jones died naturally; Creationists claim that Bob Jones was murdered by Jim Smith; and Intelligent Design advocates merely point out that some unnamed person killed Bob Jones. While there is overlap between the ID and Creationist accounts, it is a mistake (both on the part of the Darwinist and on the Creationist) to assume they are the same.

The past couple of days I’ve been thinking a bit about the fossil record. I’ve e-mailed a couple of people some of my thoughts, but today something finally crystallized in my mind and I’ve come up with a paleontology study to propose. Obviously, this study is beyond my capabilities to perform myself, but I wanted to throw this out there to see what other people thought about it anyway (and who knows, if a paleontologist reads it and decides it’s worth studying then maybe I’ll get an actual answer sometime!).

First, this study begins with two assumptions:

Assumption 1: Most (animal) organisms that die will be very young, very old, or infirm; the “ideal” specimen (i.e., the age when the species is, on average, the healthiest) only dies in the case of random accidents, which are rare. As anecdotal evidence to back up my assumption here, consider your local city’s closest graveyard. If you go through it and look at the various tombstones, you will see that the large majority of people buried there are going to be very young or very old. Furthermore, a detailed excavation of the graveyard would indicate many people there died of diseases. However, if you look at the number of graves of, say, people aged 15-30 years, the vast majority of those will be people who died of non-natural causes (e.g., suicide, murder, car accidents, drug overdoses, etc.).

We also have evidence from the animal kingdom. Most victims of predators are the young and defenseless, the old who have weakened, or those who are otherwise already disabled in some manner. It is rare that a healthy animal will be killed by a predator (it still happens, but statistically this would happen far less often than any other type of death of a species).

Assumption 2: Most living (animal) organisms have larger populations close to the “ideal” specimen age than in any other demographic. In the case of the elderly, since organisms have to pass through the younger ages to get to an advanced state and there is the possibility of death in those younger ages too, it is obvious that there will be fewer elderly people than younger people. However, it is also the case that given the high infant mortality rate of most species and the fact that only a few will survive past the first couple of months (and also the fact that the youngest age ranges are typically far shorter than the length of the “ideal” specimen), there will usually be more of the “ideal” organisms living than the young. Again, this is not a hard and fast rule, but it is an assumption I think has some validity in the animal kingdom).

Hypothesis: If fossils have more “ideal” specimen types than very young, old, or infirm types, then organisms that are fossilized are almost always killed by catastrophic and indiscriminate “accidents” rather than due to factors such as predation, illnesses, or other more natural causes.

Note that under these circumstances, the “catastrophic and indiscriminate accidents” would not necessarily be such things as mudslides (although depending on the extent of the mudslide, one could qualify). The reason being is that if you have two organisms of the same species and a mudslide is heading toward them, the one that is the fastest will have greater odds of escaping than the slower one (this is the unobjectionable—and trivial—aspect of Natural Selection). Therefore, the very young, very old, and infirm would have a greater likelihood of dying in that mudslide than would a healthy organism.

This would not be the case, of course, in a widespread mudslide that would kill everything regardless of the speed of the organism involved. As such, minor mudslides would not qualify as a “catastrophic and indiscriminate accident” whereas a major mudslide would. Note also that the “major” and “minor” aspect of the mudslide depends on such things as the size of the organism and the location of the organism too. For instance, a meter high mudslide has a good chance of wiping out an entire colony of trilobites, but probably wouldn’t kill a Brachiosaurus. Further note that there could be other things than mudslides too (I only use the mudslide illustration since fossils are often explained as having been created by rapid burial of animals, such as during a mudslide).

The reasoning for my hypothesis is: Since most natural deaths will be of organisms that are very young, very old, or infirm (assumption 1), then if the fossilization happens after a natural death there should be far more young, old, and infirm specimens than “ideal” types. However, since there will be more of the “ideal” specimens alive at any one time (assumption 2), then if a catastrophic and indiscriminate accident occurred to create the fossil, a random selection out of the entire population has a greater chance of landing on one of the “ideal” specimens than on any other demographic. Therefore, if there are more “ideal” types of fossils than the very young, very old, or infirm, most (if not all) fossils are caused by catastrophic and indiscriminate events instead of natural and common causes.

If that reasoning is valid, the question is: What does the fossil record show? Are most fossils “ideal” types? Or are most fossils very young, very old, or infirm?

While this study would be interesting just for the sake of knowledge alone, there’s another reason it might be important. Think about the large size of many dinosaur species. After all, we’ve already noted that a mudslide could be one of these catastrophic and indiscriminate events for a colony of trilobites; but many dinosaurs were huge. If there are more “ideal” types of these large dinosaurs, then there would have had to have been many large-scale catastrophes to hit these dinosaurs (especially since modern assumptions are that it is very difficult to make a fossil in the first place, let alone to find it after it has been made, so there would have been many more of these catastrophes that have occurred than we have found fossils). And that, of course, would lead to the question of whether it is more plausible to assume a score of major catastrophes or that our assumptions about fossil creation are false.

By the way, I’d also note that if someone responds that it would be impossible to tell this from the fossil record, then it would be impossible to tell anything relevant to evolution from the fossil record too. That is, if we cannot tell the relative age of a dinosaur or whether or not it was severely ill from the fossil record, how are we to tell the relationship of that dinosaur to other similar-looking dinosaurs? Could they not be similar looking because they’re identical species but one had scurvy, for instance?

Just some thoughts.

Suppose that you were an alien visiting Earth for the first time and someone asked you to put the following two organisms into a Darwinian cladogram. How would you do it?

Now obviously because most of us have a rudimentary understanding of Earth biology, we already know the answer on the above. Not only are these two organisms the same species, they’re actually the same individual (see http://lifecycle.onenessbecomesus.com/indepth.html for the full picture cycle (note that I don’t endorse anything on that site; just happened to find these graphics there).

Assume that you are an alien who has never before seen the Earth, however. Further assume that all you have are these snapshots. You do not have the ability to see these creatures in motion. You can’t watch the caterpillar turn into a butterfly. You only have the two pictures: one organism looks worm-like, the other looks moth-like. There is nothing morphologically-speaking that would link these two organisms.

The relevance to this topic comes when we study the fossil record. Just as the aliens in the example would not have access to a video of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly, so we do not have the ability to see fossils as they grow and change through life. We are left with “snapshots” and not only that, we only have snapshots of organisms as they died (not as they lived).

And the difference between an adolescent organism and an adult organism are not the only things to consider. For instance, take this picture (from http://www.bluechameleon.org/Madagascar%20Photo%20Gallery%20(long%20Thumbnail%20Page).htm:

Is this a picture of Darwinian change, of an adult and an adolescent, or is it simply a picture of two of the same species after one has been mangled by a predator? The answer is none of the above. Instead, what this picture shows is the sexual dimorphism between male and female of the same species of (the rather interestingly named) satanic leaftails.

This example is particularly relevant since, unlike the first, these two organisms look similar to each other, and yet different enough to bring one to question whether they are the same animal. If we have only fossils of these organisms, there is no way to tell what their behavior would be. It would be easy to assume that we have proof of two similar organisms that obviously evolved from a common ancestor, when it’s really just the same species that naturally exists in two forms depended on the sex of the organism.

Again, we have the ability to view these organisms in their living habitat so we know that this is sexual dimorphism. But what if we can’t view the living habitat? What if we had to classify the following, for example:

Here we have three trilobites. These trilobites look similar, yet there are differences between them. The question is, therefore: are these differences proof of Darwinian evolution, sexual dimorphism, or the differences between an adolescent and an adult trilobite? Or is there another answer?

After all, we haven’t even dealt with environment yet (although mentioned obliquely in the question of the satanic leaftails when we questioned whether one had been mangled by a predator). In fact, when it comes to morphology, it is not simply DNA at work, but the environment plays a huge role too. For example, if you take identical Caucasian twins and raise one inside a cave and the other at the equator in the sun, the twins will have completely different shades of skin color. The one in the cave will be pale; the one at the equator will be tanned. This is a morphological difference caused solely by environmental changes that has nothing to do with Darwinian selection pressures or DNA mutations.

Another example is the fact that many Inuit’s have a different jaw structure from other Inuits for the sole reason that some Inuits use their teeth to pull at whale blubber and the skins of animals. Over time, this actually pulls their jaw out of alignment, but it’s gradual enough that the muscular structure can adapt somewhat to the new bone structures. If one compared two skulls, one of an Inuit who did this “teeth pulling” and the other who did not, the jaw structure would be morphologically different. Yet these would not be two difference species: they could be identical twins, after all!

So what about those trilobites? Scientists have a problem. We can’t view the original environment that these creatures lived in, and all we have is a snapshot of individual organisms in fossils. We don’t even have the context of those individual organisms in many cases. We only have isolated organisms sprinkled in the fossil record.

Given the magnitude of variations within the species we can see today, there is no reason to expect that all organisms of the same species must have looked nearly identical in the fossil record. And since we have many instances where only one or two organisms make up the totality of our fossil record of that species, it is fallacious to try to plug those into a cladogram with any sense of certainty. Polymorphism exists within the same species today, and therefore polymorphism cannot be proof of Darwinian evolution.

As a professional satirist (who has yet to be paid, but the check’s in the mail), I find our modern culture to be extremely disheartening. It seems these days that the only way the average person will understand that he is watching satire is if it says “Stephen Colbert” somewhere in the title. Personally, I think this has to do with the liberal mindset.

In fact, when I wrote Public Transit my goal was for Conservatives to roll in the aisle laughing at the irony while Liberals read it going, “What’s wrong with this? Sounds like a good idea to me!” In other words, I wanted my satire to be so realistic that those who believe the concepts that were being mocked wouldn’t even realize they were being lampooned.

Now whether or not I succeeded in that book, I have found something that has! It’s the Richard Dawkins Rap Video that Sinner & Saint first pointed us to a while back. When I first saw the video, frankly, I couldn’t see how anyone could miss the fact that this is a blatant anti-Dawkins video.

Then I read the response from the New Atheist front. They think that this video is pro-them!

Somehow, the atheists over at Richard Dawkins’s blog and PZ Myers’s blog (and many other dark holes) are convinced that this video is anti-Creationist and pro-Darwin. It’s actually quite revealing that these are the people who proclaim themselves to be the intellectual towers in the land…and they were sucked in by this.

From the opening, this video demonstrates how arrogant Dawkins is. “We appreciate your concern. It is noted and stupid. After all, we are scientists much, much smarter than you.” (By the way, am I the only one who thinks the Dawkins voice actor in this video sounds a lot like the guy who did the Dawkins Delusion parody?)

Immediately following this, you have two scientists examining a test tube. The Darwinist comments that “Natural Selection creates that sort of thing every day” and the other responds, “I think there’s something else going on here.” At which point, the Darwinian scientist makes a call: “Big Gadget, this is Little Tool. We’ve got ourselves a situation.” (Obviously, then, the Darwinians are “tools” of the machine, and now the atheists have edjukated us that being called a tool is a good thing instead of an insult!) The non-Darwinian scientist is then ejected from the lab with “Expelled” stamped on his forehead.

Obviously, this video was not done by the producers of Expelled. I mean, it totally doesn’t fit the theme of their movie at all…

Most of the atheists have simply managed not to view this entire section of the video. Instead, they respond: “The rap lyrics are pro-science!” In other words, they ignore the prologue that sets up the context to the video in order to claim the video is on their side.

It’s amazingly similar to the way Darwinists do science, too. Ignore all the evidence that doesn’t fit with their theory, and then claim that science agrees with Darwinists. They must have gotten used to skewing reality so often they didn’t even realize they’d done it here.

The lyrics of the song are hardly flattering either. And it’s certainly not “pro-science.” Instead, you have Dawkins claiming science while arguing solely from a position of authority. The chorus of the rap is:

He’s the Dick to the Dawk to the PhD
He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree.
Dick to the Dawk to the PhD
He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree.

The second time through the chorus it changes (evolves!) to:

Yo, he’s the Dick to the Dawk to the PhD
He’s smarter than you, he’s got a science degree.
Dick to the Dawk to the PhD
He’s still smarter than you, he studied biology.

Yet every good scientist ought to know that degrees don’t matter to science. Science is science if it’s testable and repeatable, not if someone with a degree says it’s science. So the lyrics are hardly “pro-science.” At best, one could claim they’re pro-Dawkins…IF you ignore the fact that 99% of people who hear someone say, “I have a PhD therefore I’m right” experience this negatively. But it can’t be good for science to rest on laurels instead of evidence.

That’s what makes it scary. Atheists who claim they want science to be the standard are saying this is what they mean by “science”. Makes one feel all warm and tingly inside, don’t it?

So to sum up how this video goes, it begins by portraying Darwinism as an out of control “machine” that stifles intellectual thought and expels those who disagree with the Darwinian orthodoxy; it shows Dawkins is one of the most arrogant people on Earth (a true statement, by the way); it shows that the Darwinists argue on authority, not science; and it ends with Dawkins admitting he’s a rabid atheist:

Now the machine of our makin’
Sees culture ripe for the takin’
Cuz I’m the rapinest rabidest atheist too*
Unlike the Catholic, the Muslim, or even the Jew
Believes that no god but Science could ever be true.
[Heck] if I was dyslexic, I’d even hate dog too.

* That’s my best guess as to the last word in that line. It actually sounds like he says “atheist Sue.” Interestingly enough, none of the atheist’s versions of the lyrics that I read said “rabidest” there. The one on PZ Myers’ site, for instance, just says: “Cos I’m the rapper thats rappin the ….” (the “….” at the end shows I’m not the only one who can’t figure out that last word!) But if you listen to the video at the 3:12 mark, he definitely says “rapinest rabidest atheist”).

Now, in what way could this possibly be construed as a pro-Darwinian piece? Well, because:

it’s far too smart to be pro-creationism. Whoever made it is on the side of the atheists…

I get the feeling that the video is meant to poke fun at both sides of the evolution/ID debate, albeit I agree with the commenter who said that it seems too clever and hip to be the work of a creationist.…

This is simply not how a creationist would parody the pro-science side….

The quality of the work was relatively high (except for a talent for blustering…and whining craetionists have never shown that they are capable of anything artistic, unless directly aping [heh!] another source.)…

No wonder these atheists thought it was pro-them. They’re just as arrogant as Dawkins!

Check out this sweet video.

H/T: Saint & Sinner.