Materialists go aspirational on A.I yet again.

Yes, "We've Been Wrong About Robots Before," and We Still Are

Erik J. Larson November 12, 2014 5:55 AM 

More hype on artificial intelligence, now from Bloomberg News ("Robot Brains Catch Humans in 25 Years, Then Speed Right On By") and promoted by Drudge:

We've been wrong about these robots before.

Soon after modern computers evolved in the 1940s, futurists started predicting that in just a few decades machines would be as smart as humans. Every year, the prediction seems to get pushed back another year. The consensus now is that it's going to happen in ... you guessed it, just a few more decades.

There's more reason to believe the predictions today. After research that's produced everything from self-driving cars to Jeopardy!-winning supercomputers, scientists have a much better understanding of what they're up against. And, perhaps, whatwe're up against.

Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, lays out the best predictions of the artificial intelligence (AI) research community in his new book, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies."

This sort of thing aggravates me to no end. I've read most of Bostrom's book. "Superintelligence" and the supposed "dangers" it poses to humanity are about where the global-warming scare was circa 2005. It seems like every decade or so media and academia have to whip up some pseudo-scientific issue to terrify the unknowing public, while also promising them that a few elite thinkers using money-making "science" can figure out our path forward.

Nothing has happened with IBM's "supercomputer" Watson(pictured above) other than the probabilistic scoring of questions to answers using Big Data, with minimal actual natural language understanding. No surprise there: language understanding frustrates computation and has embarrassed AI since its inception. Outside of playing Jeopardy -- in an extremely circumscribed only-the-game-of-Jeopardy fashion -- the IBM system is completely, perfectly worthless.

It's worthlessness as a model of human intelligence is obvious from the fact that we clearly don't have a "play Jeopardy" program running inside us, but rather a general intelligence giving us a qualitatively different facility for general language understanding. IBM, by the way, has a penchant for upping their market cap by coming out with a supercomputer that can perform a carefully circumscribed task with superfast computing techniques. Take Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess in 1997. Deep Blue, like Watson, is useless outside of the task it was designed for, and so it too told us nothing about human intelligence -- or, really, "intelligence" at all, in the sense of a scientific theory or an insight into general thinking

Self-driving cars are another source of confusion. Heralded as evidence of a coming human-like intelligence, they're actually made possible by brute-force data: full-scale replicas of street grids using massive volumes of location data. The roof-mounted laser (which costs $80,000 a unit, so don't expect self-driving cars on the market anytime soon) as well as onboard GPS and cameras fix the location of the vehicle on the "game" grid using the real-time GPS coordinates and images from the cameras. The car is then driven around in the physical world, and the navigation is improved by using (what else?) machine learning from data on prior runs until it can get around in the area Google has plotted for it.

Computers are fast and have large memory for Big Data. Got it. But, again, this has nothing to do with human-intelligence. The hallmark of human intelligence is general thinking about different tasks, not brute-force computation of circumscribed tasks. But even this observation gives too much away to superintelligence enthusiasts.

For many commonsense "tasks" remain black boxes to computation, using Google's Big Data or not. Interestingly, where brute computation and big data fail is in surprisingly routine situations that give humans no difficulty at all. Take this statement, originally from computer scientist Hector Levesque (it also appears in Nicholas Carr's 2014 book about the dangers of automation, The Glass Cage):

The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam. What was made of Styrofoam, the large ball or the table?

Watson would not perform well in answering this question, nor would Deep Blue. In fact there are no extant AI systems that have a shot at getting the right answer here, because it requires a tiny slice of knowledge about the actual world. Not "data" about word frequencies in languages or GPS coordinates or probability scoring of next-best chess moves or canned questions to canned answers in Jeopardy. It requires what AI researches call "world knowledge" or "common sense knowledge."

The problem of commonsense knowledge -- having actual, not "simulated" knowledge about the real world -- is a thorny issue that has relegated dreams of true, real AI to the stone ages so far.

When we look closely at real intelligence, things get even gloomier (or more embarrassing) for superintelligence enthusiasts, trumpeting endlessly these days about the coming rise of smart robots. It is, indeed, much like the way scientists, politicians, and celebrities reached a fever pitch about imminent global catastrophe from climate change a decade ago.

(Admittedly the analogy falls short in one respect. Superintelligence enthusiasts like Bostrom warn us about smart robots, while others such as Ray Kurzweil assure us about the coming Golden Age. Take your pick -- it's either the Apocalypse as robots outsmart and eliminate humans like pests, or we merge with them and create a new heaven on Earth.)

The commonsense knowledge problem, too, is letting superintelligence enthusiasts off easy, as the task of picking out relevant pieces of world knowledge is even trickier. Having real knowledge about the world and bringing it to bear on our everyday cognitive problems is the hallmark of human intelligence, but it's a mystery to AI scientists, and has been for decades.

The issue here is not one of degree, where the problem of general intelligence is slowly yielding to increased knowledge about machine intelligence, but rather one of kind. General human intelligence -- as opposed to automated techniques for circumscribed tasks -- is of a qualitatively different sort. There aren't any engineered systems that understand basic language, from Google or IBM or anyone else. The prospect isn't imminent either. There aren't even any good theories pointing in promising directions. It's simply one of life's mysteries, and perhaps a fundamental limitation of the underlying theory -- the theory of computation, the theory of Turing machines, that is. Depressingly, too, the current fad touting a coming superintelligence is in fact obscuring this mystery, rather than illuminating it as good science should.

Can an alligator run a steeplechase? As Levesque has pointed out, Big Data can't "crack" the answer here, because the syntactic terms "alligator" and "steeplechase" aren't likely to occur together anywhere else or with enough frequency to exploit shallow techniques.

Given that minds produce language, and that there are effectively infinite things we can say and talk about and do with language, our robots will seem very, very stupid about commonsense things for a very long time. Maybe forever.

File under "Really?"

From the Annals of Science: Chimp Cultures Are Less Complex than Human Cultures

David Klinghoffer November 13, 2014 12:46 PM 

Who would have thought? It turns out that chimp tribes have cultures but these are less complex and diverse than human cultures. Why? Because chimps are less inclined to learn from each other. It's a matter of preference, not anything exceptional on the part of human beings.

Live Science reports on the new research in Biology Letters ("Human children rely more on social information than chimpanzees do"):

"This study is new in showing a species difference in readiness to incorporate social information into one's own repertoire," study researcher Edwin van Leeuwen, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, told Live Science.

Cultured chimps?

Chimpanzees live in small groups, often near other chimp "tribes." These different groups do seem to have their own cultural traditions. For example, a 2012 study in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, found that three groups of chimps used different techniques for cracking nuts. These chimp groups interbred and intermingled, so the different tactics weren't genetic. Rather, they were likely passed down through social learning -- the definition of culture.

Still, a different technique for cracking nuts is not as dramatic as completely different languages, religions, styles of dress, social mores or traditions. Humans seem unique in the ability to splinter from one another, and it's not clear why, van Leeuwen said.

So, cracking nuts isn't as "dramatic" a cultural expression as creating diverse languages, faiths, arts, and the like. And it's "not clear" why human groups create separate cultures reflecting their deep traditions and beliefs, whereas chimp do not.

Anyone who follows our colleague Wesley Smith's reporting on challenges to human exceptionalism will know what comes next: some attempt to minimize the gaping chasm that separates humans from other creatures. Ah, here it is.

Perhaps, van Leeuwen and his colleagues thought, the difference between humans and chimps is not in capability, but in motivation.

The difference between us and chimps isn't one of "capability" but "motivation." How was this confirmed? By comparing chimps and human children with a test involving the subject getting the opportunity to lift a cup from a row of cups under which the researchers concealed a treat.

The children watched and learned from other children's mistakes or successes. Chimps, not so much.

While chimps picked cups at random even after seeing another chimp find a reward, human children were more likely to search in a location where they saw another kid score a treat.

The conclusion?

The findings suggest that chimpanzees are less motivated by social information than humans, he said. This, in turn, could explain chimps' relative lack of culture; they just aren't as interested in learning from others.

It's not that humans have any special ability to create cultures above that of chimps, just that the chimps don't care enough to go that extra mile. Couldn't be bothered.

Understand? This is why for enlightenment we always need to turn to the scientists.

It's so hard to find good help these days.

Uncooperative Fruit Flies Refuse to Speciate in Laboratory Experiments

Casey Luskin January 28, 2012 7:00 AM

The TalkOrigins Speciation FAQ spends a lot of space citing papers trying to document speciation through laboratory experiments with fruit flies. Its section on "The Fruit Fly Literature" is the single longest section of alleged examples of speciation in the FAQ.

As we saw in a recent article, to establish speciation, these scientists simply wish to establish a completely reproductive isolated population. While some limited degrees of reproductive isolation were sometimes produced, complete reproductive isolation -- i.e. speciation -- was never observed in any of the examples analyzed inmy response to the FAQ.

More importantly, none of the examples in the FAQ documented significant biological change. As the notable evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1972) admits, "Reproductive isolation evidently can arise with little or no morphological differentiation."¹

A few examples below tell some of these stories with regards to fruit fly studies cited by the FAQ:

Case 1: "Drosophila paulistorum"

Fruit fly breeding experiments published by Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky in 1971 showed that if you start with "semispecies" within a fruit fly species which are "indistinguishable morphologically," and then subject the strains to artificial breeding experiments, then "in none" of the experiments "has anything like complete isolation been achieved."² These results led a later reviewer to list this study among various studies where "none has succeeded in establishing complete sexual isolation."³

Moreover, there was no suggestion that the populations were no longer "indistinguishable morphologically" after the experiments. In fact, after reviewing this example, Dobzhansky concludes that sometimes "reproductive isolation and speciation precede differential adaptedness,"⁴ suggesting they had not diversified. At best, only a "new race or incipient species"⁵ was created; some authorities have challenged even the partial isolation, claiming the results "may have been due to contamination of cultures by other subspecies."⁶

Case 2: "Selection on Courtship Behavior in Drosophila melanogaster"

This experiment took two pre-existing strains of fruit flies from within the same species --Drosophila melanogaster -- and sought to determine whether changes in mating preferences could be induced. This included artificially killing hybrids between the strains (a process that does not necessarily mimic nature).

Incomplete reproductive isolation was established. One paper cited by the FAQ (Knight et al. 1956) called only "[p]artial sexual isolation,"⁷ another paper in the FAQ (Halliburton and Gall, 1981) lists this study among various studies where "none has succeeded in establishing complete sexual isolation."⁸

The most biological change that this example documented was small-scale behavioral differences pertaining to courtship, specifically changes in the amount of "licking" that males do to females to initiate mating. One paper cited by the FAQ (Crossley, 1974) showed just how unimpressive the sort of change observed in this experiment was:

Quantitative analysis of male and female behavior revealed the underlying causes of changed mating preferences and faster mating. In the LS experiment male courtship became more stimulating because percentage licking of both males and percentage licking plus vibration of e males increased.⁹

All that was observed were changes in the courtship initiation behaviors (licking and vibrations) changed between the strains. The two strains were "similar" before the experiments, and apart from slight changes in mating behaviors, remained very similar after the experiments.

Once again, not only was significant biological change not observed, but complete reproductive isolation (e.g. speciation) was not established.

Case 3: "Isolation Produced as an Incidental Effect of Selection on several Drosophila species"

In another section, the FAQ cited three studies on fruit flies which reported "slight" or "incipient" and "not complete" sexual reproductive isolation. None showed complete reproductive isolation or speciation, and none showed significant morphological change.

In one example, the FAQ discusses a paper (del Solar, 1966) which reported experiments that artificially selected for certain behavioral traits but produced only "slight" sexual isolation, or "incipient reproductive isolation," due to "changes in sexual behavior."¹⁰ The paper thus reports that complete reproductive isolation was not found:

Whether selection for geotaxis and phototaxis always and necessarily produces a change in the sexual behavior, and whether continued selection may carry the sexual divergence anywhere near complete isolation, can only be decided by further experiments.¹¹

Not only was "anywhere near complete isolation" not achieved, but significant biological change was also not achieved. As the paper reports: "The geotactically and phototactically positive and negative strains appear to be indistinguishable in external morphology."¹²

Another example discussed by the FAQ in this section pertains to Dodd (1989) which reported experiments on populations of the fruit fly Drosophila pseudoobscura. Schluter and Nagel (1995) described Dodd (1989)'s findings by stating that only "some premating isolation evolved," and "Reproductive isolation between divergent lines was not complete."¹³ Speciation was also not said to have occurred. Aside from mating and food preferences, there were no claims of biological change between the populations. Again, we see that not only has reproductive isolation not been demonstrated, but significant biological change did not evolve.

Despite the aforementioned underwhelming results, the FAQ then discusses another paper which it admits reported "Less dramatic results." According to the paper cited by the FAQ (de Oliveira and Cordeiro, 1980), the experiment only produced "incipient isolation"¹⁴ -- not complete reproductive isolation. As for the degree of morphological change, aside from a preference for a certain pH level in food, no biological change was reported. In fact, the paper notes that among three long-standing natural races of D. willistoni, "These flies are morphologically indistinguishable." This study certainly did not change that observation: Once again we have not seen complete reproductive isolation, nor have we seen significant biological change.

Many other examples from the FAQ discuss fruit fly selection and breeding experiments, and all have essentially the same results: complete reproductive isolation is not established, and significant morphological change is not observed.

For additional details, please see the full response to the TalkOrigins Speciation FAQ.

References Cited:

[1.] Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Species of Drosophila," Science, Vol. 177 (4050):664-669 (August 25, 1972).

[2.] Theodosius Dobzhansky and Olga Pavlovsky, "Experimentally Created Incipient Species of Drosophila," Nature, Vol. 230:289-292 (April 2, 1971).

[3.] Richard Halliburton and G. A. E. Gall, "Disruptive Selection and Assortative Mating in Tribolium castaneum," Evolution, Vol. 35 (5):829-843 (September, 1981).

[4.] Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Species of Drosophila," Science, Vol. 177 (4050):664-669 (August 25, 1972).

[5.] Quoted in Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, p. 56 (Regnery, 2006).

[6.] Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr quoted in Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, p. 56 (Regnery, 2006).

[7.] G. R. Knight, Alan Robertson, and C. H. Waddington, "Selection for Sexual Isolation Within a Species," Evolution, Vol. 10 (1): 14-22 (March, 1956).

[8.] Richard Halliburton and G. A. E. Gall, "Disruptive Selection and Assortative Mating in Tribolium castaneum," Evolution, Vol. 35 (5):829-843 (September, 1981).

[9.] Stella A. Crossley, "Changes in Mating Behavior Produced by Selection for Ethological Isolation Between Ebony and Vestigial Mutants of Drosophila melanogaster," Evolution, Vol. 28 (4): 631-647 (December, 1974).

[10.] Eduardo del Solar, "Sexual Isolation Caused by Selection for Positive and Negative Phototaxis and Geotaxis in Drosophila Pseudoobscura," Genetics, Vol. 56:484-487 (1966).

[11.] Eduardo del Solar, "Sexual Isolation Caused by Selection for Positive and Negative Phototaxis and Geotaxis in Drosophila Pseudoobscura," Genetics, Vol. 56:484-487 (1966) (emphasis added).

[12.] Eduardo del Solar, "Sexual Isolation Caused by Selection for Positive and Negative Phototaxis and Geotaxis in Drosophila Pseudoobscura," Genetics, Vol. 56:484-487 (1966) (emphasis added).

[13.] Dolph Schluter and Laura M. Nagel, "Parallel Speciation by Natural Selection," The American Naturalist, Vol. 146 (2):292-301 (August, 1995).

[14.] Alice Kalisz de Oliveira and Antonio Cordeiro, "Adaptation of Drosophila willistoni experimental populations to extreme pH medium," Heredity, Vol. 44 (1): 123-130 (1980).

Counting on chance and necessity

BIO-Complexity Paper: Why Chaitin's Mathematical "Proof" of Darwinian Evolution Fails

Casey Luskin April 7, 2014 5:08 AM

 

A new peer-reviewed paper in BIO-Complexity, "Active Information in Metabiology," reports on the further investigations of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab into the ability of unguided evolutionary mechanisms to produce new information. This time, authors Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks show that the budding field of metabiology only produces creative outputs through active information -- i.e., informational inputs donated by an intelligent source -- and does not truly demonstrate that unguided processes can produce new information.What is "metabiology"? According to the paper, it's "a fascinating intellectual romp in the surreal world of the mathematics of algorithmic information theory" where "halting oracles hunt for busy beaver numbers and busy beaver numbers unearth Chaitin's number, knowledge of which in turn allows resolution of numerous unsolved mathematical problems, many of whose solutions would earn large cash bounties." That description may not help most of us very much. The field of "metabiology" was developed by the Argentine-American computer scientist and mathematician Gregory Chaitin. In his 2013 book Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical, Chaitin describes metabiology as an "answer" to David Berlinski's "stinging critique of Darwinism" in The Devil's Delusion. "Metabiology" is Chaitin's attempt to use mathematics and (hypothetical) computer simulations to formally prove that Darwinian theory can create new information. It relies on an inherently gene-centered view of evolution, where a simulated "genetic code" (i.e., a computer program) can be "mutated," and when the program "halts" or stops running, it outputs a number that correlates with the program's "fitness." If the number goes up as the evolutionary simulation proceeds, Chaitin thinks he's shown Darwinian processes can increase fitness over time.

There are many reasons why Chaitin's model does not accurately reflect how Darwinian evolution works, if it does work, in the real world of biology (some of which are summarized nicely over at Theory, Evolution, and Games Group). Not the least of such problems is the fact that the simulation basically grants itself infinite probabilistic resources (actually, computing resources, but that's analogous to probabilistic resources in biology).

As Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

Because metabiology programs have unbounded length and can run for an unbounded amount of time, the unboundedness essentially undermines the creativity required to solve the large-number problem. With unbounded resources and unbounded time, one can do most anything.

In the real world, probabilistic resources are limited. Time is finite, and populations have finite sizes, and this imposes limits on what traits can evolve especially (as Stephen Meyer shows in Darwin's Doubt) when traits require multiple mutations before providing some advantage. Metabiology uses a population of one single "digital organism," which then "evolves" over time, but it grants itself essentially infinite computing resources to do this. With such a generous endowment, sure, anything can eventually evolve. But we don't live in an unlimited world, which is precisely why Darwinian evolution faces major theoretical problems. They thus write:

Although elegant in conception, metabiology departs from reality because it pays no attention to resource limitations. Metabiology's math obscures the huge amounts of time required for the evolutionary process. The programs can run for any arbitrarily large number of steps. Additionally, programs can be of any length with no penalty imposed for longer programs.

Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain that Chaitin's program uses a halting oracle as a source of "active information." A halting oracle is a hypothetical meta-program that can tell you if a given program will ever stop running. As they explain, such an oracle could be useful in disproving certain mathematical conjectures, such as Goldbach's conjecture, "which hypothesizes that all even numbers greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes." They discuss how a halting oracle could determine if the conjecture was false:

Suppose a program X can be written to test each even number sequentially to see if it were the sum of two primes. If a counterexample is found, the program stops and declares "I have a counterexample!" Otherwise, the next even number is tested. If Goldbach's conjecture is true, the program will run forever. If a halting oracle existed, we could feed it X. If the halting oracle says "this program halts," Goldbach's conjecture is disproved. A counterexample exists. If the halting oracle says, "This program never halts," then Goldbach's conjecture is proven! There exists no counterexample.

The difficulty for Chaitin is he admits that for metabiology, "[The halting oracle] is where all the creativity is really coming from in our program," but also admits that such an oracle is "mathematical fantasy." Ewert, Dembski, and Marks thus aptly observe, "A computer tool proven not to exist is admittedly at the outset an obvious major strike against a theory purporting to demonstrate reality."

Now at this point, one might reasonably ask, "If a halting oracle is a hypothetical fantasy, how can Chaitin claim to use one in metabiology?" The answer is that Chaitin isn't actually creating a computer program. He's seeking a mathematical proof of the Darwinian model, where he's allowed to indulge thought experiments that invoke hypothetical entities. All he needs to be able to do is to prove what might happen if he theoretically had a halting oracle. But it doesn't help that one could never exist.

That problem aside, they explain that the "halting oracle" used by Chaitin's program has three different options of how to find a search target: "

• Exhaustive Search (poor)
• Random Evolution (good)
• Intelligent Design (better)

Metabiology uses "random evolution" but not in a manner that is biologically realistic. The program is capable of systematically simulating all possible programs, which in effect allows it to totally rewrite itself instantly -- something that simply doesn't happen in biology -- and thereby grants unrealistic access to the equivalent of unlimited resources in an organism's developmental process. This unrealistically guarantees the program could never get stuck on a local fitness peak because it can keep trying out entirely new "genetic codes" indefinitely until a better one is found.

Which, again, is nothing like how the real world of biology, where an organism is forced to rely on the genome it receives, which at best will have just a few small mutational differences from its parents. Darwinian evolution in real biology requires a grueling ascent of mount improbable, but Chaitin's program can fly wherever it wants at any time. To put it another way, metabiology cheats by giving a digital organism unrealistic access to any program at any time which will lead to a higher fitness state. As Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

As any computer programmer will tell you, landscapes of computer program fitness are the opposite of smooth. We would therefore not expect Darwinian evolution to fare well. Chaitin notes this when he writes [3], "The fitness landscape has to be very special for Darwinian evolution to work." The environment for evolution to occur, therefore, has to be carefully designed. Indeed, in the paradigm of conservation of information, smooth landscapes can be source of significant active information [14]. Metabiology's construction of smooth landscapes is accomplished by running all viable programs, a computationally expensive approach that is only possible because there are no resource limitations.

Chaitin also presents a different model that uses what he calls "intelligent design" to find a search target. This obviously doesn't help show what unguided evolutionary processes can accomplish. The author of the blog "Theory, Evolution and Games Group" critiques Chaitin's model, writing that metabiology uses "a teleological model -- a biologist's nightmare." Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

Like AVIDA and ev, metabiology makes use of external information sources to assist in the search. Like the simple Hamming oracle, the halting oracle can be mined for information with various degrees of sophistication. Evolution thus requires external sources of knowledge to work. The degree to which this knowledge is used can be assessed using the idea of active information.

They conclude: "In order for evolution to occur in these models, external knowledge must be imposed on the process to guide it. Metabiology thus appears to be another example where its designer makes an evolutionary model work. ... Consistent with the laws of conservation of information, natural selection can only work using the guidance of active information, which can be provided only by a designer." Properly understood, in other words, these programs demonstrate that evolution requires intelligent design.

 

To him was given a large sword.

Revelation6:4NIV"Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword."

How the science gets settled.

Why are Darwinists hiding from their own ideas?

Busting another Darwinist Myth: Have ID Proponents Invented Terms like "Microevolution" and "Macroevolution"?

Casey Luskin September 13, 2007 12:54 AM |

In 2005 I busted the Darwinist myth that ID-proponents have invented terms like "Darwinist" or "Darwinism" by noting that, well, Darwinists themselves have long-used such terms to describe themselves and their viewpoints. Jonathan Wells also recentlybusted this same myth, and Anika Smith recently busted the myththat evolution is not "random." In 2006, I also busted the myth that skeptics of neo-Darwinism don't exist outside the United States.

When engaging in debates, every once in a while I hear the claim that Darwin-critics also invented terms like "microevolution" or "macroevolution." For example, Jonathan Wells reports, "In 2005, Darwinist Gary Hurd claimed that the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution was just a creationist fabrication. ... Hurd wrote to the Kansas State Board of Education: "...'macro' and 'micro' evolution ... have no meaning outside of creationist polemics." (Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, pgs. 55-56). This is also a Darwinian urban legend, for such terms have been used regularly in the scientific literature. Indeed, textbooks commonly teach this terminology, including two of the textbooks I used in college when learning about evolutionary biology.

The glossary of my college introductory biology text, Campbell's Biology (4th Ed.) states: "macroevolution: Evolutionary change on a grand scale, encompassing the origin of novel designs, evolutionary trends, adaptive radiation, and mass extinction." Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology, a text I used for an upper-division evolutionary biology course, states, "In Chapters 2h3 through 25, we will analyze the principles of MACROEVOLUTION, that is, the origin and diversification of higher taxa." (pg. 447, emphasis in original). Similarly, these textbooks respectively define "microevolution" as "a change in the gene pool of a population over a succession of generations" and "slight, short-term evolutionary changes within species." Clearly Darwin-skeptics did not invent these terms.

Other scientific texts use the terms. In his 1989 McGraw Hill textbook, Macroevolutionary Dynamics, Niles Eldredge admits that "[m]ost families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa with their presumed ancestors." (pg. 22) Similarly, Steven M. Stanley titles one of his books, Macroevolution: Pattern and Process (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 version), where he notes that, "[t]he known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid." (pg. 39)

The scientific journal literature also uses the terms "macroevolution" or "microevolution." In 1980, Roger Lewin reported in Science on a major meeting at the University of Chicago that sought to reconcile biologists' understandings of evolution with the findings of paleontology. Lewin reported, "The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No." (Roger Lewin, "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire," Science, Vol. 210:883-887, Nov. 1980.)

Two years earlier, Robert E. Ricklefs had written in an article in Science entitled "Paleontologists confronting macroevolution," contending:

The punctuated equilibrium model has been widely accepted, not because it has a compelling theoretical basis but because it appears to resolve a dilemma. ... apart from its intrinsic circularity (one could argue that speciation can occur only when phyletic change is rapid, not vice versa), the model is more ad hoc explanation than theory, and it rests on shaky ground.

(Science, Vol. 199:58-60, Jan. 6, 1978.)

Finally, in 2000 Douglas Erwin wrote a paper the journal Evolution and Development entitled "Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution" where he explained the historical controversy over whether microevolutionary processes can explain macroevolutionary change:

Arguments over macroevolution versus microevolution have waxed and waned through most of the twentieth century. Initially, paleontologists and other evolutionary biologists advanced a variety of non-Darwinian evolutionary processes as explanations for patterns found in the fossil record, emphasizing macroevolution as a source of morphologic novelty. Later, paleontologists, from Simpson to Gould, Stanley, and others, accepted the primacy of natural selection but argued that rapid speciation produced a discontinuity between micro- and macroevolution. This second phase emphasizes the sorting of innovations between species. Other discontinuities appear in the persistence of trends (differential success of species within clades), including species sorting, in the differential success between clades and in the origination and establishment of evolutionary novelties. These discontinuities impose a hierarchical structure to evolution and discredit any smooth extrapolation from allelic substitution to large-scale evolutionary patterns. Recent developments in comparative developmental biology suggest a need to reconsider the possibility that some macroevolutionary discontinuities may be associated with the origination of evolutionary innovation. The attractiveness of macroevolution reflects the exhaustive documentation of large-scale patterns which reveal a richness to evolution unexplained by microevolution. If the goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the history of life, rather than simply document experimental analysis of evolution, studies from paleontology, phylogenetics, developmental biology, and other fields demand the deeper view provided by macroevolution.

(Douglas Erwin, "Macroevolution is more than repeated rounds of microevolution,"Evolution and Development, Vol. 2(2):78-84, 2000.)

So the next time a Darwinist tells you that scientists don't use terms like "microevolution" or "macroevolution," remind them why this claim is a long-debunked myth!

Sleight of hand.

Flying Fish in the Darwin Magic Show

Evolution News & Views November 6, 2012 5:56 AM 

First there was one; now, like magic, there are two independent flying fish families that "evolved." They just evolved.

Saying something doesn't make it so. Darwinists have a bad habit of saying this or that wonder "evolved" with no sense of obligation to say how it evolved. Tracking down the individual lucky accidents that led to a complex adaptation (behavior included) is too hard, so here's what they do: assume evolution, then just assert that the trait evolved, because evolution is already assumed to be a fact.

Worse, they say that it "evolved so that" the animal could do something, like fly. This is a technical foul in evolutionary theory. Evolution cannot plan to arrange mutations toward a goal. If it were a law of nature that one animal "evolved to" fly, then science would predict every animal would fly, including pigs. In the following case, we see how evolutionists commit these fouls. Most fish evolve to swim, we have been taught, but two families independently "evolved so that" they could fly as well.

The BBC News reports the discovery of an "exceptionally preserved" fossil of a flying fish in Middle Triassic strata from China, dated 235-242 million years ago. Nothing in the data or pictures would lead an impartial observer to conclude unguided Darwinian evolution produced this fish. The artist reconstruction shows a beautifully adapted fish with fins outstretched to glide over the water, as modern flying fish do.

The observations, please:

The study shows that the new flying fish, named Potanichthys xingyiensis, was 153mm long and had the "unusual combination of morphological features" associated with gliding strategy in fishes.

This is the earliest known fossil of a flying fish, and it is already well adapted for flying. Moreover, it was found on the opposite side of the world (China) from previously known fossils of its family, found in Austria and Italy.

Weaved around these sentences are statements about geographical distribution, species count and other empirical matters. The magic act begins when we are told that these fish are among the survivors of a mass extinction that destroyed most of earth's species:

The Triassic period saw the re-establishment of ecosystems after the Permian mass extinction.

The fossils represent new evidence that marine ecosystems re-established more quickly than previously thought.

In evolutionary parlance, "re-established" does not mean simply that the numbers of survivors increased. It means that Evolution told life to be fruitful and multiply, to once again fill the earth and the seas. The agent of this creation is natural selection, producing endless forms most beautiful after destroying 90% of them.

At the end of this Darwinian trick, the magician announces the evolutionary climax:

Gliding has evolved many times in animals, such as in frogs, lizards and mammals but has "evolved only twice among fishes", according to the study: once in the Triassic Thoracopteridae fishes and again in the modern-day Exocoetidae family.

Scientists suggest both families of flying fishes evolved so that they could escapemarine predators by "gliding" over-water to safety. (Emphasis added.)

You may applaud now, please.

It may well be that flying fish gained their adaptations from fish that did not have them. It would seem improbable, but not impossible, to imagine the fins growing longer as certain fish leaped above the water to avoid predators. Perhaps this kind of adaptability is itself a product of design. But with no fossil record of the transition, we need a lot more than a Darwinian evolutionist's word for it that a blind, purposeless process produced a functional adaptation.

Instead, we are told that these fish "evolved so that they could escape predators by 'gliding' over-water to safety." No transitional forms are needed; no accounting of mutations is required. The magic occurs in a black box the audience can't see, and presto! -- a fully functioning flying fish leaps above the water, complete with brain software to know how to use its new equipment.

If we demanded that evolutionists drop all teleological language to be consistent with their anti-teleological worldview, evolution would be a very boring act. If we insisted on looking into the black box to see how the trick was done, there would be a loud hissing sound as the hot air escapes. What would be left, if anything, would undoubtedly be a finely tuned, designed mechanism for producing adaptive change. That's not natural selection; that's intelligent design.

Some more on the skills gap.

The skilled trades:A viable choice.

The divine law and blood VII:Right and smart.

Evidence in favor of bloodless surgery mounts

BY KEVIN JESS     OCT 28, 2009

Physicians around the world are now successfully treating patients with bloodless surgery. Evidence shows that many benefits are being realized by using alternatA recent study conducted at the Maritime Heart Center in Halifax, Nova Scotia showed that blood transfusions for stable cardiac-surgery patients increased their risk of death, renal failure, and sepsis or infection.

The results were released at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress show, and was presented by Robert Riddell, a medical student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The study looked at 3842 consecutive patients, who were all undergoing different types of cardiac surgery.

According to theheart.org,the patients were sorted into four groups: the first received no blood product transfusions; the second received blood products during their surgery; the third group received blood products within the first 48 hours; and the fourth received blood products 48 hours or later after surgery.

After making adjustments for age, sex and other factors the study concluded that blood transfusions dramatically increased morbidity and mortality rates compared with those who received bloodless surgery.

The study also suggests that the later the blood transfusion the worse off the patient is.

There are realistic alternatives to blood transfusions today.

According to AllSands, since the tragedy of AIDS people have become all too aware that our blood supply can never be completely safe and that in a recent poll 89 per cent of Canadians would rather have an alternative to donated blood.

Most people associate the refusal of blood transfusions to the stand taken by Jehovah's Witnesses who look upon the procedure as against Bible teachings.

However, according to AllSands, that stand has led to bloodless medicine and surgery reaching "an advanced level of development and is the preferred treatment of many informed people."

The avoidance of blood during surgery means that post-operative infections and complications are avoided, and blood types would not have to be matched, erasing any complications from matching errors.

Bloodless surgeries typically cost 25 per cent less than those that use donated blood with extra savings from a 50 per cent increase in recovery times, translating into shorter hospital stays.

In the event of a large blood loss, in most cases the volume of blood can be maintained by alternative fluids such as Ringer’s lactate solution, dextran, hydroxyethel starch and others that will prevent hypovolemic shock.

Drugs are now being used before surgery to stimulate the production of red blood cells, blood platelets and various white blood cells to increase the volume of blood as well as other medications to reduce blood loss.

Surgeons are now able to manage bleeding better by the use of biological hemostats. New glues and sealants can block puncture wounds or cover larger areas of exposed bleeding tissue.

Patients can now have blood that is lost in surgery or trauma to be salvaged by the use of machines that cleanse the blood and return it to the patient without storing it.

According to the Encyclopedia of Surgery, new instruments and surgical techniques now allow surgeons to perform procedures with minimal blood loss.

All of the above procedures have been performed successfully on thousands of patients worldwide, who seek safer medical care, whether it be for religious reasons or not.

By the end of 2002, 30 per cent of all requests for bloodless surgeries came from people who were not Jehovah's Witnesses.