Via Ensign Steve, Dean of Star Trek Studies at Freethought Forum, some cool YouTube videos of computer simulations, from a scientist, that demonstrate how evolution works and address creationist misconceptions about evolution. Links to the Mathlab code used are supplied on the Youtube page:
How evolution really works
Evolution is a blind watchmaker
More here
In the linked forum thread about the videos, it seemed clear to me that some people misunderstood what the author was demonstrating in the latter video.
The creationist analogy of a watch, clearly designed, for a living organism (also, in creationist thought, clearly designed) is nonsensical because a real watch lacks many aspects of organisms that evolutionary theory is premised on.
So the video's author first gives the elements of the watch analogy the qualities necessary to make it a working analogy, then shows how, given these qualities, watches would evolve over time
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Evolving watches
Labels:
Artifical Life (Software),
Evolution
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2 comments:
You know what I think would be interesting? If in the first video mating wasn't random, but rather there was some sexual selection pressure involved. You know, like how peacocks and whatnot look real pretty to attract a mate, but they also stand out to predators better. What do you suppose would happen if the organisms in the sims had a better chance of mating if they stood out from the background?
Probably the same thing that happens in nature, I think. Otherwise useless features would become increasingly exaggerated up to the threshold where they start being a disadvantage.
I suspect thats what happened with the exaggerated breasts of human women, since as far as I know there is is no other obvious advantage such as increased milk production.
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