This is the house of cards they built Expelled on? Really?
Back in 2003, a man named Stephen C. Meyer wrote a paper entitled Intelligent Design: The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories. Another man, named Richard Sternberg, had just resigned his editorship of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, but still had a few issues to get out before he was done. He put Meyer's paper in the last issue that he edited.
The paper caused a controversy when it appeared, and it ended up as the root cause for claims by Sternberg that he was discriminated against by the Smithsonian Instutue. All of this ended up in the movie Expelled, with Ben Stein, that claims that scientists are prejudicially preventing any real scientific discussion of Intelligent Design.
Now, Sternberg claims the Smithsonian institute took his keys and his office, and denied him access to specimens. The Smithsonian claims that they took his keys, but gave him a card, just like they took keys from everyone else when they switched to cards. His research sponsor claims that he was moved from his office while a bunch of other people were also moved around, that he still has space, and that he still has access to specimens.
And Sternberg apparently still has an unpaid position with access to specimens, which is all he ever had to begin with.
But this post isn't really about Sternberg ... that's just background. This post is about the paper.
In the paper, Meyer writes the following:
"Genetic algorithms are programs that allegedly simulate the creative power of mutation and selection. Dawkins and Kuppers, for example, have developed computer programs that putatively simulate the production of genetic information by mutation and natural selection (Dawkins 1986:47-49, Kuppers 1987:355-369). Nevertheless, as shown elsewhere (Meyer 1998:127-128, 2003:247-248), these programs only succeed by the illicit expedient of providing the computer with a “target sequence” and then treating relatively greater proximity to future function (i.e., the target sequence), not actual present function, as a selection criterion."
The guy is citing his own papers as references for this statement, and the portions of those papers that he is citing are so close that he probably took text from one and dropped it in the other - but that's not the worst bit. Dawkins' program definitely has a target sequence. However, Dawkins does not, in fact, make the claims that Meyers claims he is making. Dawkins wrote it to prove a very specific point about the monkey/typewriter argument, and said himself that it was never intended to model evolution accurately.
The thing that pisses me off here, though, is the implication Meyers is making that no genetic algorithm can work without having a target sequence. I've written evolutionary algorithms, and I've written genetic algorithms. THEY WORK. If they didn't, nobody would use them - and if they required a target sequence to compare against, they would be useless, because you would already know the solution to the problem that you're using a genetic algorithm to discover. If genetic algorithms always required a target sequence, Adrian Thompson's experiment would have never found the circuit it did. It would have found a nice, neat, human designed circuit, not one that depended, in an unknown way, on FPGA cells that weren't even electrically connected to the circuit. It would not have found a circuit that breaks the "digital design rules".
I don't know enough about paleontology and taxonomy to critique Meyer's paper on those bases. But I damn sure know code - and if the rest of the paper is as ill researched as this portion, if the rest of the paper makes blatantly false claims that can only have been written in an environment where the writer is either deliberately ignoring research in the area or deliberately avoiding even reading that research, then the statement in Expelled (given to us by Ben Stein) that "The paper ignited a firestorm of controversy merely because it suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began." is so ridiculous it's not even funny.
The paper caused a controversy when it appeared, and it ended up as the root cause for claims by Sternberg that he was discriminated against by the Smithsonian Instutue. All of this ended up in the movie Expelled, with Ben Stein, that claims that scientists are prejudicially preventing any real scientific discussion of Intelligent Design.
Now, Sternberg claims the Smithsonian institute took his keys and his office, and denied him access to specimens. The Smithsonian claims that they took his keys, but gave him a card, just like they took keys from everyone else when they switched to cards. His research sponsor claims that he was moved from his office while a bunch of other people were also moved around, that he still has space, and that he still has access to specimens.
And Sternberg apparently still has an unpaid position with access to specimens, which is all he ever had to begin with.
But this post isn't really about Sternberg ... that's just background. This post is about the paper.
In the paper, Meyer writes the following:
"Genetic algorithms are programs that allegedly simulate the creative power of mutation and selection. Dawkins and Kuppers, for example, have developed computer programs that putatively simulate the production of genetic information by mutation and natural selection (Dawkins 1986:47-49, Kuppers 1987:355-369). Nevertheless, as shown elsewhere (Meyer 1998:127-128, 2003:247-248), these programs only succeed by the illicit expedient of providing the computer with a “target sequence” and then treating relatively greater proximity to future function (i.e., the target sequence), not actual present function, as a selection criterion."
The guy is citing his own papers as references for this statement, and the portions of those papers that he is citing are so close that he probably took text from one and dropped it in the other - but that's not the worst bit. Dawkins' program definitely has a target sequence. However, Dawkins does not, in fact, make the claims that Meyers claims he is making. Dawkins wrote it to prove a very specific point about the monkey/typewriter argument, and said himself that it was never intended to model evolution accurately.
The thing that pisses me off here, though, is the implication Meyers is making that no genetic algorithm can work without having a target sequence. I've written evolutionary algorithms, and I've written genetic algorithms. THEY WORK. If they didn't, nobody would use them - and if they required a target sequence to compare against, they would be useless, because you would already know the solution to the problem that you're using a genetic algorithm to discover. If genetic algorithms always required a target sequence, Adrian Thompson's experiment would have never found the circuit it did. It would have found a nice, neat, human designed circuit, not one that depended, in an unknown way, on FPGA cells that weren't even electrically connected to the circuit. It would not have found a circuit that breaks the "digital design rules".
I don't know enough about paleontology and taxonomy to critique Meyer's paper on those bases. But I damn sure know code - and if the rest of the paper is as ill researched as this portion, if the rest of the paper makes blatantly false claims that can only have been written in an environment where the writer is either deliberately ignoring research in the area or deliberately avoiding even reading that research, then the statement in Expelled (given to us by Ben Stein) that "The paper ignited a firestorm of controversy merely because it suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began." is so ridiculous it's not even funny.