Testing Evolution Pt. 2 posted by Ben

Computer Simulations and Evolution as Theory
Read Part One

There is a crucial difference between Creationism and Evolutionism; the latter evolves. As the quest for knowledge progresses, each new piece of data gets entered into the overall model. The bible, however, is more-or-less set in stone, unless you’re involved in an academic study of religion, which probably means that you’re using types of analysis that would send your standard Creationist into conniptions. In other words, you have one mode of thought built on ineffable stability and another built on growth, experience, and change. If we were advocates of social Darwinism (a particularly unpleasant theory) judging the relative survivability of each system, it would quickly become clear that one has a clear long-term advantage, precisely because it can change and adapt.

With that in mind, it was with considerable interest that I read the article Testing Darwin in the February 2005 issue of Discover...

Click the title for the rest of the essay

To summarize, the article discusses the use of a computer modeling program called Avida, which has been set up to run basic elements of self-perpetuating code through tens of thousands of generations. The article calls them “digital organisms – strings of commands – akin to computer viruses.”

The creators of the program set out to answer a string of questions and thus far have come up with very surprising answers, one of which constitutes the bulk of this essay’s focus.

When the creation/evolution ‘debates’ took place at PLU, one argument from the creationist was surprisingly effective with the audience – the notion that the theory of evolution was fatally flawed because it could not account for biological complexity. The example used by the creationist was your average butterfly. He asked how a creature like this could evolve a cocoon, an adaptation that would serve absolutely no purpose unless it worked perfectly. How could something evolve through countless generations toward a form that would only make sense when complete? Therefore, he reasoned, God must have created butterflies, since evolution could not do so.

His argument at its core is about complexity. As the Discover article puts it, “What good is half an eye… The human eye, [is] made up of many different parts – lens, iris, jelly, retina, optic nerve – and will not work if even one part is missing. If the eye evolved in a piecemeal fashion, how was it of any use to our ancestors?”

People spend a lot of time arguing about effects rather than causes. My personal experience is that when they are unaware of the roots of their arguments, people tend to argue in circles. When they’re aware of those roots and don’t want to acknowledge them, the circularity gets vicious. In the case of the evolution/creation ‘debates’ neither side could afford to address their core assumptions, because those assumptions, while a priori for the believers, would engender a de facto dismissal of the argument by the opposing side if brought out into the open.

For example: the root of the creationist perspective is the belief that the Bible is the literal Word of God. But if that claim were made in a so-called scientific debate, it would be dismissed immediately, falling as it does outside the realm of science. So the creationist must use the tools and language of science to frame his arguments. (This theme will be discussed and inversed later on, especially in reference to the recent academic and popular publications by George Lakoff.)

Also for example: the root of popular modern evolutionism is in the Scientific Revolution’s vision of a clockwork universe. What the evolutionist must not do, according to the polarized parameters of the debate, is allow religion to enter the discussion. To do so would be to cede semantic ground to the creationist, who has implicitly claimed God for his side. According to how the debate has been framed, the evolutionist has been boxed into a lose-lose situation vis a vis his chances of engaging or reaching the literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelicals because he cannot acknowledge God.

Which prompts the question “So what?”

This is important for a couple of reasons.

First, it indicates that the debate in its current form (and by extension, much of the modern friction between science and religion) cannot be resolved, because the literalist post-denominational pentacostal evangelicals’ (LPPE) core model for understanding the world, that the Bible is the literal Word of God, only has one way of understanding God. What do I mean by this? For the LPPE, if somebody references God, that reference can have only one meaning, regardless of the speaker’s original intention. They know that their vision of what makes God God is correct, so any discussion outside that narrow parameter would be seen as blasphemy. To acknowledge God in any form to the LPPEs is, to them, to acknowledge the rightness of their faith. Sadly, this brings us to

Second, that evolutionists are placed into a framework where they cannot participate in discussions about faith. Unfortunately as well, that pressure comes not only their desire not to lose out to the creationist propaganda, but from the failure of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment to reconcile discrepancies between traditional faith and modern science, which, despite the best efforts of scientists like Isaac Newton, led inexorably to generations of thinkers who put God and faith to the test of the scientific method. (That the scientific method failed to find God is less than surprising.) This, of course, led to a much-increased public perception of the hard sciences as being representative of atheism, or at least wishy-washy agnosticism.

Together, these points paint a picture of intellectual and faith-based models of understanding that cannot reconcile. The creation/evolution debate, in its current form, is a dead end approach that only serves to calcify two increasingly separate camps.

What this means practically is that, like so many other advances in the sciences, the best hope that we can have for an eventual framework for mutual understanding is that inexorable march of scientific progress. No matter how much the church protested, scientists eventually proved that the earth revolves around the sun.

Which brings me back to those Avida computer simulations.

Essentially, what the simulation proved on a theoretical basis, is that given an environment in which the ability to compare pairs of numbers confers digital rewards, those simple bits of code were able to evolve highly complex functions that did not work if a single piece was taken out! Compare that to the eye or the butterfly. Granted, this is a computer simulation, but “If creationists were right, then Avida wouldn’t be able to produce complex [functional] digital organisms.”

From a scientific perspective, this is fascinating stuff! However, when viewed from the context of those larger, core assumptions and the discord that they create, the creation/evolution ‘debate’ underscores a much deeper fissure in our modern world.

End of Part Two – Next: Models of Meaning and Meaningful Lives