>Your attempt to support you faith and religion is silly. Why are you wasting your time on this site?

Nice little bit of denial there!

The way I figure it, you are the only one expressing a belief in a faith: you believe in mathematical miracles. I don't. I go where the data lead me. Physical nature — enslaved by its identity to the 2nd law of thermodynamics — doesn't produce codes.

>To even make that statement is outrageous.

You're welcome!

>All of genetics is overwhelming evidence of evolution.

Not evolution by any sort of Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection.

1) The key discovery in genetics was that inherited traits are recorded in DNA using an alphabet of 64 codons that symbolically and **sequentially** represent the alphabet of 22 amino acids that are randomly floating around the cell's cytoplasm in a random **unsequenced** way. The codons never physically interact with the amino acids. They represent and "map to" the amino acids, but they never "determine" the eventual polypeptide sequence in any mechanically causal way. The relation between a codon such as "GCA" and the amino acid "alanine" is exactly the same relation that exists between a triplet like "***" and an English alphabetic letter like "S". "***" and "S" don't physically touch or interact; the first doesn't mechanically "cause" the second; the relation is formal code relation called "meaning": In Morse Code, the triplet "***" MEANS "S" in English. Similarly, in the Genetic Code, the triplet "GCA" MEANS "alanine".

Physical nature doesn't map symbols from one alphabet to symbols in another alphabet. Mappings between different alphabets are examples of codes, and codes are language-like inventions of mind.

Physical nature is entirely governed by the 2nd law of thermodynamics: thermal entropy, which adds randomness — literally "noise" — into any kind of ordered, hierarchical process (like life); noise *disrupts* feedback loops (required by living organisms); it doesn't create them.

2) The fossil record also shows evidence of evolution but not Darwinian evolution. In fact, the fossil record shows the opposite of Darwinian evolution.

The essence of the Darwinian story of evolution is the so-called "Tree of Life," with a single trunk buried deep in the ground (symbolizing the "Ur-Organism") with gradually diverging branches as we ascend (the height of the tree representing time), and the branches themselves diversifying yet more into branchlets and twigs representing the varies species we empirically find.

Unfortunately, the ***great majority*** of the node points — the points where one branch splits off into another branch — are missing; and these nodal-point fossils are assumed by Darwinism to be the "common ancestors" of both branches. Paleontologists used to think this was because the nodal fossils used to be there but were shifted, or destroyed by earthquakes or tectonic movements, etc., but ever since Niles Eldridge and Stephen J. Gould, they generally accept the idea that the missing common-ancestor fossils are missing because they were never there in the first place. This runs counter to what Darwin himself expected would be found, and runs counter to what any committed Darwinist would expect to be found based on Darwinian assumptions of small, incremental modifications over very long periods of time. If those assumptions were true, there would be clear fossil evidence of all those incremental changes between phylum A and phylum B. But these intermediate forms aren't in the fossil evidence.

Finally, the so called Tree of Life is, in reality, inverted: the deepest, oldest strata — found in the Burgess Shale in Canada and the Chengjiang formation in China — show lots of diversification among phyla (fundamental body plans) occurring more or less simultaneously in the geological record: a bunch of organisms with widely disparate body plans appear all about the same, with no precursors, and no intermediates between one body plan and another — gradually dying off and converging into fewer and fewer body plans. This "explosion of body plans", occurring in the Cambrian Era and often called the "Cambrian Explosion", runs completely counter to what one would expect with classical Darwinian assumptions. Under the latter, there ought to be a single life-form (or just a few life forms) giving rise to a plethora of many different kinds of life forms later on. Turns out it's the exact opposite. Life started out with wide disparatity, and gradually narrowed to various superficial diversifications among only a few basic body plans.

None of this "disproves" Darwinism in a formal, logical sense, but none of it offers any evidential support for it, either.

>>The only point of an experiment is the idea that it is repeatable.
No experiment is precisely repeatable. Even just asking two people to measure the length of the same object with identical rulers will yield slightly different results. The question then becomes, are these differences significant?

The point of an experiment is as an attempt to falsify the hypothesis. If the experiment fails to falsify the hypothesis (that is, if the experiment "succeeds"), then the hypothesis can tentatively be held as "true" until a stricter experiment can be devised that would falsify the "true" hypothesis (usually by now called a "theory").

Karl Popper is correct: experiments are attempts at refuting a hypothesis.

>The whole basis of statistics is a lack of knowledge about a system.

As posted previously, statistics is not the same as probability, but in any case, the universe is not a mechanical clock running like a machine (comforting as that metaphor is to Objectivists and other philosophical materialists). The argument of quantum physicist Alfred Landé known as "Landé's Blade" shows in a logically irrefutable way that statistical (or probabilistic) descriptions of many phenomena can only be replaced by other statistical (or probabilistic) descriptions of those phenomena as we descend to ever smaller elements of the system we're trying to describe, and as we employ ever finer measuring instruments. Irrespective of how much knowledge we gain of the system's initial conditions, we never reach a point at which a statistical (or probabilistic) description can be replaced with a single, certain, deterministic function. And this is as true of simple coin tosses as it is of something like radiactive decay.

The uncertainty is not something inherent in a coin qua coin. The uncertainty is an inherent property of the *system*: coin+arm+toss+gravity+air-resistance. Even if, hypothetically, we could know the exact mass and center-of-gravity of the coin, the precise force exerted by an arm (including all muscle movements it might involuntarily make), the exact gravitational flux at a precisely located point, and the precise air resistance, the odds of the coin landing heads or tail are still an indeterminate 50/50.

Conclusion: statistics and probability give us real knowledge about the real world, and in many cases, gives us the only kind of knowledge made possible by the very nature of the entities interacting with one another in a *system*. Thus, neither statistics nor probability is a poor-man's placeholder for "real" knowledge of a single-value deterministic kind, in which we apply some function (f) to a variable (x) and confidently arrive at one, and only one, predictable answer.

That's a fantasy that makes philosophical materialists feel better about themselves ("whew! I'm sure glad I live in a universe that is 100% predictable and knowable! Otherwise . . . who knows? Anything could happen!"), but it just doesn't happen to be the real universe in which we live.

>What brand of vacuum are we talking about?

Hoover. Possibly Electrolux.

>Interesting, but actually that is not true of EM waves. They wave in a vacuum. A vacuum has electrical and magnetic properties.

Then, by definition, it's not a vacuum; a vacuum cannot have "properties"; only entities have properties.

EM "waves" were originally conceived to be disturbances in the EM aether; then the word "aether" was replaced by the less intuitive (but more mathematically quantifiable) idea of a Maxwellian "field." Then the idea of a field was seen as ultimately superfluous and EM "waves" are no longer thought to be "waves" but quanta: particle-like entities that display wave-like characteristics (like interference) when subjected to measuring devices that measure wave-like characteristics.

A "quantum" of something does not require a medium in which to propagate, any more than a baseball requires some medium in which to travel.

What brand of vacuum are we talking about?

>2. 'most biologists', surely this is not given as an argument?

Just stating it as a fact. You can make of it what you want. If you wish to hold onto a notion of natural selection that is many decades out of date out of ideological loyalty to a philosophy of materialism, that's up to you.

>you ignore all the evidence in favor of evolution,

There is none. Cite ONE example of evidence in favor of Darwinian evolution.

>1. Genetic algorithms are not intended to nor do they prove biological natural selection.

GAs certainly don't prove biological natural selection because they are always written with "front-loaded" information: the goal toward which the simulation is desired to proceed is written into he steps of the alorithm. A classic case is Dawkins' own simulation of "Methinks it is like a weasel." Conversely, if a simulation does not front-load a pre-ordained goal into its code, and really does generate random variations that are "selected" on some ad hoc idea of fitness, the result is computer gibberish.

>This is a technique for producing useful solutions to problems by step by step improvements.

"Useful" by what standard? Either it is meant to simulate what purportedly happened in nature millions of years ago (and thus simulate the plausability of something called "natural selection") or it just isn't very useful. As I wrote previously, GAs are, indeed, useful, but not in the way you believe. They prove that evolution can work IF the end-result (the biological goal) is front-loaded into the algorithm from the start, which, of course, requires an intelligent agent to think up, or imagine, the goal. That's a very useful solution to the problem of origins, but it sure doesn't strengthen the case for Darwinism.

>There need be no direction setting or bias,

No, but when there isn't a direction or bias, there is no useful result; when there is a direction or bias, there is a useful result. THAT is the useful solution to the problem of biological origins and speciation: randomness leads nowhere.

>if the design team knew what to do they would do it, this technique uses randomness to produce steps and evaluates them as an improvement or not

Thanks for proving my point. There is no way EXCEPT by goal-projection and front-loading a bias and direction into an algorithm that a coder can know what is or is not an "improvement" or a "non-improvement" or what does or does not represent "fitness." We can claim to see it in nature because what nature presents to us is a given — the RESULTS of, presumably, some long series of experiments. Once we see a result, we of course, engage in tautology: "since animal X survived, it must be because it is fit; and how do we know it really is fit? Obviously, because it survived!"

Tautologies might be useful in logic and mathematics, but they are empty of knowledge when used in science. To claim "X survived because it was fit" and "X is defined fit because it survived" explains nothing, and adds nothing to our knowledge about X.

The fact is, the classical Darwinian notion of natural selection is that it works only at that very instant in which it confronts some mutation (which must be random, and therefore unforessen and unpredictable by natural selection). Thus, natural selection was originally assumed to work in a purely "ad hoc" manner, completely dependent on the environment-of-the-moment and the mutation-of-the-moment. There can be no "fitness function" that natural selection consistently makes use of; yet this is what is assumed by coders when they decide what is or is not biological "improvement".

I hope that explains why GAs prove nothing about evolution proceeding by any sort of Darwinian process

>However, the process of evolution does not require and shows no evidence of intelligence.

Huh? WHAT process of evolution? We don't see any such process in a laboratory, we don't see it in nature, and we certainly don't see it in the fossil record.

And regarding laboratory experiments, to the extent we see anything interesting — e.g., amino acids formed from reducing gases and electricity — we see it ONLY because (and precisely because) of the intentional, purposeful, intelligent intervention of the laboratory technicians who are helping the whole process along and directing it specifically toward chosen goals.

>I read you argument to be the presentation of the hypothesis of intelligent design as independent of religion which takes the discussion too far away from the intent of the thread.

Perhaps. My original intent, in any case, was to show that Rand was certainly not influenced by Darwin in her philosophy, and certainly not in the ethics of rational selfishness.

It is well known, though seldom pointed out, that laissez faire capitalism not only encourages competition, but it also encourages — and requires, in fact — social cooperationg via the division of labor. Additionally, as Rand pointed out (and economist George Reisman argued), the "less able" under capitalist division of labor profit personally from the productive achievements of the "more able." This is the exact opposite of a Spencerian/Darwinian "survival of the fittest" scenario.

>but my money is on the fact that we will find everything is a wave

Fantastic. But also nonsense. Whenever there's a wave, there's some physical medium doing the waving: sound waves require air (or some other physical medium) to wave; water waves require water to wave; so-called light waves were presumed to require a super-rigid medium called the "lumineforous aether" (which the Michaelson-Morley experiment proved doesn't exist).

So with wave phenomena, there can never be just the wave: there must be the physical medium that transmits the wave phenomena, then there must be the wave itself, then there must be the thing or things causing the disturbance in the medium that gives rise to the wave phenomena.

So if you're trying to reduce all of the physical universe monistically to one thing — "waves" — you haven't quite succeeded.

>This thread started with the question of whether the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM is consistent with Rand

No, it started with your arbitrary assertion that the CI was inconsistent with 400 years of western science, which you incorrectly believe rests on mechanical determinism — a "clockwork universe."