7 Biology Myths No Electrical Engineer Would Ever Tolerate

As an Electrical Engineer, I am appalled at the intellectual slop that passes for science in biology.

Engineers would lose their jobs in droves if they tolerated the mushy thinking and lack of rigor that is routine in the life sciences. Before I elaborate on this, some background.engineer

15 years ago I couldn’t have imagined I would become interested in DNA, biology, evolution or any such thing. Biology in high school was b-o-r-i-n-g. Chemistry in college was a hard slog.

I got my degree in Electrical Engineering. Specialized in communications and control systems. Graduated and developed analog circuits. Worked as an acoustical engineer. Designed the speakers in the 1994 Ford Probe, the 1995 Acura Vigor, the 1995 Jeep Cherokee and the 1996 Honda Civic.

Left acoustics & pursued digital communications. Sold embedded networking hardware, software and IC’s in the automation and robotics industry. Fought digital networking standards battles in manufacturing.

Wrote an Ethernet book, published by the world’s #1 technical society for process control engineers. And now here I am discussing DNA, evolution, and telling you about scientific discoveries so new, you can’t buy books about them in the bookstore.

I’m loving it. As an outsider to the “biology industry” I bring a very particular perspective: That of an engineer who’s performed digital network design (very exact), analog circuit design (a quasi-art form), and acoustics (extremely complex and messy).

All industries become incestuous as they age. They resist change. All professions are run by good ol’ boys clubs.

In every industry, innovations almost never come from the inside. Novel approaches usually come from outsiders. External innovations are opposed by the old guard because they threaten the status quo. Bill Gates was a complete outsider to the computer business. Larry and Sergey, founders of Google, were complete foreigners to the search engine game.

(Early on, they tried to sell their search technology to Yahoo for $1 million but Yahoo turned them down.)

Fred Smith, founder of Federal Express, was a complete virgin in the shipping industry. Ray Kroc of McDonalds wasn’t a restaurant veteran; he was a milkshake machine salesman.

All these people had an outsiders’ point of view that enabled them to see what insiders were blind to. Like these men, I am a total outsider in biology.

Yet despite the fact that I wouldn’t pass a test on retroviruses or organic chemistry, as an EE I see certain things with crystal clarity that biologists are blind to.

One reason is, in Electrical Engineering, theory matches reality better than it does in almost any other engineering discipline. Examples: In metallurgy, when you predict the failure load of a steel beam, you’re lucky if your guess is within 10%. In chemical engineering, a 5-10% error factor is considered good for many reactions.

Civil engineers over-design bridges by 50% to 100% just to be safe. But a model of an electrical circuit or computer chip is often accurate to within 1% and sometimes 0.01%.

Because you can’t see electricity and shouldn’t touch it, EE is abstract and very mathematical. It’s also rigorous. I can’t tell you how many times in my engineering classes, the professor would be explaining something like, say, the behavior of a semiconductor, and he would derive the calculus equation from scratch.

Of the appliances in your house, which ones work exactly the way they’re supposed to? Your car doesn’t. Your dishwasher doesn’t. Your refrigerator needs new parts every few years. The mechanical stuff is prone to problems.

But your TV does exactly what it’s supposed to, for years. So does your iPod and your Microwave oven and your clock radio and your cell phone. You can thank an EE for that. For this reason, EE’s have very high expectations of theoretical models… because the model has to be built and it has to work.

Engineers don’t have much tolerance for B.S.

Today: 7 Urban Legends Biologists Believe…. but an Engineer Would Never Tolerate:

1. “Random mutations are usually neutral or harmful but occasionally they confer a benefit to an organism. Natural Selection filters out the harmful mutations, causing species to evolve.”

This is the central dogma of neo-Darwinism and is allegedly accepted by “virtually all scientists.” You will find it in literally 1,000 textbooks and 10,000 websites. To the average biologist and to the average man on the street, it sounds perfectly plausible. And I fully understand why people believe this.

But I’m an EE. I know that the information in DNA is a signal. By definition, random mutations are noise. Telling a communications engineer that adding noise to a signal sometimes create new, useful data structures is like telling a nurse you can occasionally cure a common cold by swallowing rat poison. This is absurd!

You’ll be hard pressed to find any communications engineer who, upon examining this claim, would agree with it.

Have you ever had a data glitch on your computer that improved your files? Ever? There is not a one single principle or practice in engineering that would ever suggest that this is actually true.

All the Natural Selection in the world is powerless without a beneficial mutation. And you’ll never get a major benefit from accidental copying errors. The mutations that drive evolution are systematic and directed, not accidental.

2. “97% of your DNA is junk – an accumulation of evolutionary leftovers from random mutations over millions of years.”

The only reason anyone believes lie #2 is that they believe lie #1. Here’s how any rational person can quickly figure out that #2 is B.S.: Human DNA holds 750 megabytes of data, the same as a Compact Disc.

If 97% of your DNA is junk, that means the 3% that isn’t junk is 22 megabytes. In other words, they’re implying that the entire plan for a human body only takes up 22 megabytes of storage space. Heck, the “Windows” folder on my PC – the directory that contains most of the Operating System – is 27 gigabytes.

Does anyone actually think Microsoft Windows Vista is more sophisticated than the human body? Bill Gates sure doesn’t. The fact that a plan for an entire human body can even be contained on one CD is nothing short of a miracle of data compression.

Actual fact: DNA is not 3% efficient. It’s more like 1,000% efficient. The same gene can be used in completely different ways by a dozen different processes. The result is a level of data density that software engineers only dream of.

Engineers see profound elegance where biologists see junk. Which perspective is more in keeping with the aims of science?

3. “You only need 3 things for evolution to occur: heredity, variation and selection.”

Tufts university philosopher and prominent atheist Daniel Dennett famously said this. He would never say this if he had an engineering degree. If this were true, computer viruses (which have heredity, variation and selection) would mutate all by themselves and develop resistance to anti-virus software. They don’t.

If this were true, the pirated copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Windows XP or The Eagles’ “Hotel California” that you can buy on the street corner for $2 in China would occasionally be superior to the original. It never is.

If this were true, Bill Gates wouldn’t have to employ 10,000 programmers in Redmond Washington. He would just buy truckloads of computers, add random errors to a billion copies of Windows and filter them through natural selection.

Nobody writes software that way. Nobody.

Have you ever wondered why?

Most biologists think evolution just happens automatically. They say all you need is time and a lot of raw materials and it will just happen. So why don’t computer programs ever evolve by themselves? They don’t and they never will – not unless they’re programmed to do so.

Evolution is not a given; in the real world it’s always a design feature. Software programmers will tell you that self-adaptive code is profoundly difficult to write.

Never happens by accident. This pronouncement by Daniel Dennett is Exhibit “A” of pseudoscience.

4. “Biology is nothing more than sophisticated physics and chemistry.” That’s like saying the Internet is nothing more than sophisticated copper wire and silicon chips.

I’m an e-commerce consultant. I practically live on the Internet. I have conversations with people about the Internet all the time. Nobody I talk to ever describes the Internet that way. Do you?

You talk about things like email and Google and Facebook. You tell your friend about the Youtube video where the guy goes to every country in the world and does his little dance jig. And the latest gaffe by Donald Trump.

All those things are information. 90% of Electrical Engineering is concerned with controlling and processing information. Only a small part of EE is concerned with things like motors and generators and watts and horsepower.

Even power equipment is controlled by information. All the interesting things you do with electricity involve signals or digital codes. Temperature measurement or text messages or a radio transmission.

The software is more interesting than the hardware. So it is with DNA. Chemicals are just the hardware.

Until the biology profession accepts that the real power in biology is in the information – the software and not the chemicals – it will continue to slam into brick walls and put forth evolutionary theories that make wrong predictions.

These assumptions continue to get nowhere in Origin of Life research. Information never improves by accident. Information evolves only through highly structured processes.

(By the way, Systems Biology bypasses old-school reductionism and is making great strides.)

5. “Genetic Algorithms Prove Darwinian Evolution.”

A Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a computer program that modifies code and then evaluates the code against some pre-programmed goal, keeping the winners and discarding the losers. GA’s refine software programs through an evolution-like process.

GA’s are not a be-all-end-all by any means, and they have limited application. But they are useful.

Some years ago Richard Dawkins wrote a software program that took the following garbage text:

WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P

After only 43 iterations, by deleting characters it didn’t want, the program reached its pre-programmed goal: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL

Traditional Darwinian evolution by definition has no goals, just blind natural selection. Dawkins’ program has a definite goal and is programmed to reach it.

This program has nothing to do with formal Darwinian evolution. It’s intelligent evolution.

Every single Genetic Algorithm I’ve ever seen, no matter how simple or complicated, only works if it has pre-programmed goals.

Which requires both a program and objectives. I’ve never seen a GA that actually mirrored Darwinian Evolution. They always sneak in some element of design. Which only adds to the reasons why the Neo-Darwinian theory of purposeless random events is wrong.

Real world evolution is pre-programmed and has goals of some sort pre-loaded. I’ve never seen an exception. This is no different than computer programs that evolve.

6. “The human eye is a pathetic design. It’s got a big blind spot and the ‘wires’ are installed backwards.”

There are many, many variations on this argument. It’s just another version of “Junk DNA.”

When I was a manufacturing production manager, I had to produce an indicator lamp assembly for a piece of equipment. The design had a light bulb and 2 identical resistors, which I thought were stupid. I suggested that we replace the 2 resistors with one resistor of twice the value. This would save money and space.

I told the customer the design was obviously lousy. The engineer got angry and almost took his business elsewhere. Then my boss spent 30 minutes lecturing me. He reminded me that my job was to put the customers’ product into production, not insult him with my warped critique of his design skills.

What I didn’t know was that 600 volts would arc across one resistor, but not across two. A second, “redundant” resistor was an elegant way to solve that problem and it only cost 2 cents.

I learned the hard way that when you criticize a design, you may have a very incomplete picture of the many constraints the designer has to work within.

Designs always have delicate tradeoffs. Some have amazing performance but are extremely difficult to manufacture. Sometimes a minor change in material would make a huge improvement but the material is unavailable. Sometimes you have to make a compromise between 15 competing priorities.

Sometimes people have no appreciation for how difficult that maze is to navigate. I am not saying that there are no sub-optimal designs in biology – I’m sure there are lots of sub-optimal designs. Furthermore I do believe that life followed an evolutionary process and many designs are “best guesses” engineered by the organism’s ancestors.

But human beings must be very careful to not proudly assert that we could ‘obviously do better.’ We don’t know that. We do not understand what’s involved in designing an eye because we’ve never built one.

My friend, if you lose your eye, there’s not a single arrogant scientist in the world who can build you a new one. Especially not the scientists who try to tell you why the design of the eye is “pathetic.”

If I were selecting an eye surgeon, I’d look for one who has deep respect for the eye, not disdain for it. How about you? Every engineer knows that you never truly know how something works until you can build it. Merely taking it apart is not enough. Until we can DESIGN eyes for ourselves, we must be very cautious about what we say. The scientist must ALWAYS be humble in the face of nature and you should be wary of anyone who is not.

7. “There is no such thing as purpose in nature. There is only the appearance of purpose.” “Teleology” is a scientific term which is defined as ‘purpose in nature.’ Atheism denies teleology in the universe. For this reason some biologists have forbidden their students to use purposeful language. In 1974 Ernst Mayr illustrated it like this:

1. “The Wood Thrush migrates in the fall in order to escape the inclemency of the weather and the food shortages of the northern climates.”

2. “The Wood Thrush migrates in the fall and thereby escapes the inclemency of the weather and the food shortages of the northern climates.”

Statement #1 is purposeful, statement #2 is not. Mayr does fancy footwork in order to avoid reference to design in biology. (It also converts all of his writing to colorless passive sentences. Any good writer will tell you passive language is a sign of mushy thinking.)

The famous biologist JBS Haldane joked, “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.”

Everything in biology is purposeful. Which is precisely why biology is fundamentally different than chemistry.

Chemicals have no purpose. Organisms do. You cannot formulate a coherent description of life if you deny purpose.

For proof of this, look no further than the genetic code. Every codon in DNA maps to an amino acid that it is SUPPOSED TO make – but an error is possible.

It is not possible to even talk about any code at all without acknowledging purpose. Purpose is implicit in every strand of DNA in every organism in the world.

In his book “Perceptual Control Theory,” William Powers explains that the study of any goal-directed (control feedback) system is fundamentally different than the study of rocks or chemicals or magnetic fields or anything purely physical. The failure to acknowledge this has wreaked all kinds of havoc in science for 150 years.

Even something as simple as a thermostat cannot be understood if you see it as only an assembly of molecules.

A thermostat is programmed to hold your room at a certain temperature. The thermostat’s purpose can only be understood from a top-down point of view. It has a goal.

In Electrical Engineering, the top-down nature of information is described by something we call the OSI “7 Layer Model.”

Simplified explanation: The 7 Layer model says that in your computer, there’s an Ethernet cable that connects you to the Internet. The copper wire and the voltage on that wire is Layer 1 – the “physical layer.”

Layer 2 is is the 1’s and 0’s that voltage represents. Layers 3, 4, 5 and 6 are the operating system and layer 7 is your spreadsheet or email program or web browser, the “application layer.”

When you send me an email, information is encoded from the top down and sent through your Ethernet cable. When I receive your email, information is decoded from the bottom up starting with the signal on the cable, and I read your email on my screen.

ALL information is organized this way – in a top-down hierarchy. The wire has its purpose. The 1’s and 0’s have their purpose. The operating system has a purpose, my email program has a purpose and your message has a purpose.

You cannot deny purpose in computers or biology without immediately contradicting yourself 2 minutes later. Even a person who denies purpose is purposefully denying it.

Everything I just told you, I absolutely know to be true as a result of my education and experience as an engineer.

Darwinism as we know it CANNOT stand under the weight of 21st century DNA research. It’s impossible. Because I’ve read the literature. Amazon is absolutely littered with books written from every imaginable point of view, both religious and non-religious, pointing to the creaking, groaning edifice of Neo-Darwinism.

It is inevitable that it will fall. And it’s not going to be long. It will be replaced by an algorithmic model of Evolution.

BOLD HYPOTHESIS: When Biologists accept what Electrical Engineers know about information, a whole bunch of problems in biology will be solved:

1. The random mutation theory will be discarded. It will be replaced with Transposition, Natural Genetic Engineering, Horizontal Gene Transfer and Genome Doubling. Suddenly evolution will make sense because it is understood as an engineered process not random accident.

2. We’ll discover that what was originally thought to be junk DNA is actually the heart of the most sophisticated database format ever devised.

3a. Evolution will not be taken for granted but deeply appreciated as an utterly ingenious mechanism, pre-programmed into living things. As software engineers replicate the evolutionary algorithm in computer programs, we’ll achieve huge breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence.

3b: Evolution is orchestrated at a very high level within the organism. It is controlled by a mechanism that is currently poorly understood. This mechanism is beautifully efficient, elegant, fractal, and follows a very exact mathematical protocol. Bioninformatics will become the most rigorous discipline in engineering. The ‘code’ of this protocol will be cracked because of the Human Genome Project and the public availability of DNA sequences. This discovery will lay the foundation of an entire new branch of Computer Science in the 21st century.

4. The “Physics and Chemistry” paradigm of biology will be replaced with a “Bioinformatics” paradigm. Evolution and the origin of life theories will make much more successful predictions.

5. Neo-Darwinism will be discarded because biologists will recognize that biological evolution is just like Genetic Algorithms: It employs pre-programmed goals and educated guesses, not random chance.

6. Rather than assuming designs in biology are “pathetic” or “stupid” we’ll discover deeper reasons for why organisms are the way they are. And greater insights into the subtlety of living things.

7. Everything in biology makes sense once you understand that every single one of the 5 million trillion trillion cells on earth is purposeful and intentional and the original cells were designed to evolve and adapt.

Finally I would like to suggest that there is nothing in the world that can teach us more about digital communications and software programming than DNA.

DNA is an absolute gold mine, a treasure trove of insights of data storage, error correction, software architecture, robust design and fractal data compression.

Every Electrical Engineer and Computer Science major should study it intensively. And there is much we engineers can learn from the biologists – because even the simplest living thing is more elegant than the greatest man-made supercomputer.

As Engineers and Biologists begin to talk to each other, the 21st century will be amazing indeed.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: Innovations almost always come from outsiders. This means that those who read widely and embrace multiple disciplines – pockets of humanity that don’t normally talk to each other – can enjoy long and prosperous careers as innovators. The watchword of 21st century biology will be “Interdisciplinary” – the great mysteries will be solved by people who bring the expertise of other fields to bear on the biggest questions in science.

My challenge to you: Make a deliberate decision to step outside of your normal and familiar environment and innovate. The world will reward you for it.

Download The First 3 Chapters of Evolution 2.0 For Free, Here – https://evo2.org/evolution/

Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0

186 Responses

  1. Michael Price says:

    “But I’m an EE.”
    I doubt that.

    ” I know that the information in DNA is a signal. By definition, random mutations are noise. Telling a communications engineer that adding noise to a signal sometimes create new, useful data structures is like telling a nurse you can occasionally cure a common cold by swallowing rat poison. This is absurd!
    You’ll be hard pressed to find any communications engineer who, upon examining this claim, would agree with it.”
    Unless you asked a competent one. Any system with imperfect information can be improved by random alternations BY DEFINITION. The measure of information is the log of the reciprocal of the probability that the system will be at least as ordered as it is, however “order” is defined. Any system that COULD contain more information, for instance an organism that could be more suited to survive, can by definition be improve by a change. And since logically there is nothing preventing a random change from being that change yes random change can increase information.

      • Bill Charlton says:

        Perry Marshall, although you are clearly not a creationist (as I am), I can tell from the comments on this page (and I certainly could have predicted) that you certainly get a lot of nasty criticism, insults, & condemnation from evolution idealogues.
        I certainly hope that we creationists don’t treat you with any negativity that even approaches what you receive from evolutionists.
        Again, thank you for your courageous critique.

    • Brian Shipley says:

      You are standing on the shore, shooting a rifle, with infinite ammo. But for the positive random change to take place, your bullet MUST strike and sink into the one underwater cup among billions, that would make the change. Of course, you cant see the change, don’t know what it is, and don’t even have a clue what direction it is. But, if you just keep shooting blindly, you COULD hit the change, randomly. Uh-huh.
      Sounds like the old proposition about giving enough monkeys enough typewriters and enough time and they would eventually write all the works of Shakespeare, “Randomly” That has been disproved, and its as plausible as you are.
      You would most likely fill the ocean with toxic lead well before you hit that single correct “improvement” box. Chances are, you would get critters whose bellies were lined with fur, or birds with fins, or, if lucky, only change the eye color or something similar. But random mutations positive? Easier to win the lotto, 142 times in a row.
      Your whole argument is based on your personal presumption that all creatures are poorly designed junk that you can fix with a blindfold and a hammer, (random) Try it with your car, let us know the improvements.

  2. Michael Price says:

    “Actual fact: DNA is not 3% efficient. It’s more like 1,000% efficient. The same gene can be used in completely different ways by a dozen different processes. The result is a level of data density that software engineers only dream of.
    Engineers see profound elegance where biologists see junk. Which perspective is more in keeping with the aims of science?”

    Actually biologists are intensely aware of how sophisticated and wonder DNA is they’re just aware that yes, it has junk. It has things that a designer intelligent enough to have produced the wonders of DNA would never allow. For instance why have psuedogenes that are broken versions of genes that code for things not used for millions of years? The L-gulono-γ-lactone oxidase (GLO) gene in primates is a good example.

    Again you’re showing you don’t know the subject.

  3. Michael Price says:

    “If this were true, the pirated copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Windows XP or The Eagles’ “Hotel California” that you can buy on the street corner for $2 in China would occasionally be superior to the original. It never is.”
    Citation needed. Have you checked every pirated copy of “Hotel California”? Have you even done any of the math to determine how many pirated copies you’d have to test to determine if this is a valid conclusion?

    Professionally produced copies of media are EXTREMELY close to being perfect in the sense of perfectly reproducing the intended performance. There are very few places where a change would make them better at that. Organisms on the other hand are very imperfectly adapted to their environment and there are millions of potential changes that could improve their adaptation. So you’ve set up a test that is harder than that found in nature, and then not bothered to do it. You’re not very good at science or reason.

  4. Michael Price says:

    “Traditional Darwinian evolution by definition has no goals, just blind natural selection. Dawkins’ program has a definite goal and is programmed to reach it.
    This program has nothing to do with formal Darwinian evolution. It’s intelligent evolution.
    Every single Genetic Algorithm I’ve ever seen, no matter how simple or complicated, only works if it has pre-programmed goals.”

    Then you haven’t seen many. There are plenty of evolutionary programs that simply set out to demonstrate the process of evolution.

    Of course this is irrelevant since the goals aren’t enforced but only selected for, exactly as traits are selected for in nature, by differentially reproduction. If it works with preprogrammed goals as criterion then it works with simple survival and reproduction as criterion. The fact that natural selection works in an environment where mankind decides the criteria for survial and reproduction has been known since the dawn of agriculture. But thanks for showing that you lied when you said random changes couldn’t add information, since you’ve clearly seen it happen.

  5. Michael Price says:

    “Biology is nothing more than sophisticated physics and chemistry.”
    All I get searching for this quote is references to this article. You’re just lying

  6. Very good. Since your so open to real science might I suggest branching out in the future to the other sciences that deal with the age of the earth\universe. You think these life sciences are full of pseudoscience. Wait until you get to the other sciences.

    • little hugger says:

      We have discovered some real interesting facts recently, in lots of scientific fields, and there are some “theories” that really stretch credibility. You have to wonder, how can anyone who swallows these theories mock a belief in God? Especially since there is NO PROOF God does not exist. Atheism is pure faith without scientific basis, yet they ALWAYS claim “Science” Wow.
      Looking on at a true unbiased way, you would come to the conclusion that atheists are the truly gullible ones, willing to swallow ANY theory, no matter how fantastic, to justify their pre-determined atheism. They invent a whole new vocabulary to describe a zoo full of theoretical things, so as to make their theory work. There are huge, expensive underground labs that have been searching for theoretical particles for DECADES, and haven’t found any. Theory tells us the universe is 96% “dark matter” but, we cant find any. None. Nada, zilch. But yeah, Theists are gullible, living in blind faith. Wow, just wow.

  7. Brian Shipley says:

    I would not say that all this Darwin, atheism, fantastical theories are science, and do not see any real world application for it. Whether life “just happened Dude!” or God created it, neither is within our abilities, nor is there anything in either theory to apply. Have they built a “It just happened Dude!” machine that no ones heard of yet, based on Darwinism and atheism? Um…..no.
    Age of the universe? I thought the current “thinking” is that it is immortal and eternal and just always there? Yeah, another fantastical theory that eliminates God, and flies in the face of reality.
    But, Perrys theory DOES give us a real world handle on it. We can actually approach the subject with the expectation of discovery. But theories of spontaneous life, morality, etc? Please tell me how they add anything useful to biology studies? Which is what we are dealing with here.

  8. Keven says:

    I have a question for you since you’re an electrical engineer. Why haven’t you put your time into solving infinite energy? It has to do with E=Mc2 put into an electrical format. It is throughout the Christian Bible and even tells you how to build it if you understand what you are reading. It is something you should look into because it is how everything works.

  9. Williamfep says:

    Appreciate you sharing, great forum.Much thanks again.

  10. Hard to leave a meaningful comment. The piece is a compendium and collection of unfounded opinion in the vein of all so called intelligent design that concludes “I can’t figure this out. Therefore god.”

  11. In regards to Myth 1 you don’t address the question other than mocking any biologist who believes this to be true. The only evidence you offer is to ask if any computer glitch has ever improved a file. Until computer code begins to reproduce sexually within different environments it’s probably not the best example.

    But we do see where mutations provide benefit to organisms. Your post regarding the flagella is a great example. Without the flagellum the bacterium in question switches it’s ‘I am hungry’ genes in into overdrive. This causes a mutation in a nearby gene that takes over the flagella making process. This isn’t surprising since only 2 proteins in the flagella are unique to it.

    So I don’t see at why anyone would be dopey to see this as true??

    • “Until computer code begins to reproduce sexually within different environments it’s probably not the best example.”

      If someone is clever enough to make two computer programs that can mate sexually and then produce an endless supply of diverse child programs, we will all be VERY impressed. And that person will be richer than Mark Zuckerberg in about 3 years.

      Dennis, do you have any reason to believe that if someone could do that, that this amazing code (which I’m sure is theoretically possible) would be any more immune to the effects of noise than any other kind of code?

      Remember, Dennis, I’m a communications engineer. Nowhere in ANY branch of engineering or computer science is the idea of “noise adding to the content of a signal” even exist. The idea is completely absent from the field.

      If it doesn’t exist in communication theory, why should we think it exists in biology? Where has anyone in biology proven otherwise?

      I’ve been writing about this online for 11 years and nobody has come forward with any evidence that I find convincing.

      Where is the evidence that would support your thesis?

      As for mutations, one must be very specific about what one means. Mutations that obey the rules of the editing and error checking machinery in the cell? or completely random accidental mutations? There’s a big difference between the two.

  12. Thanks for your reply. Always thoughtful.

    Of course I will never forget that you are an engineer. I am a molecular biologist, evolutionary biologist, nuclear environmental scientist, father of at least seven children, one time guitar player, Frankophile, and lover of Russian literature. So what? It’s that facts that count. Oh – I also infuse myself with lots of coffee each day.

    I don’t want noise in engineering. I want bridges that predictably remain standing. I like glue that works. These are all things made with a very specific purpose in mind. They are boring – it’s the individual expression, the noise, that makes a classical guitarist playing sheet music interesting- but useful tools. Engineers, at least where I work, work within the constraints of an evaluation that defines the environment of their product. Want to see an engineer cry? Tell them that you are changed the parameters. Now none of their work applies and they have to start over. Nature skirts this via genetics and sex.

    Noise is exactly what we expect and rely on in evolution. Everything is in flux in nature. The only way that either stasis or growth can occur is by mixing up the genome and trying out new things. Most things don’t work but some do. Some will actually make organisms stronger and create a genetic shift in the population. One example are those bacteria who, with the threat of shriveling up without a flagellum, grow new flagella via mutated genes.

    So I think your question regarding sexually reproducing computer code is a non sequitur. It’s too short sighted and constricting. Nothing in nature is strictly binary but swims in a myasma of continuously changing conditions.

    Cheers!

    • In all the engineering I’ve done, the parameters and environment are CONSTANTLY changing. For me and for engineers who actually design products, instead of merely executing them, it’s creatively very demanding. In my world it’s never just about meeting the specification. It’s language, it’s music, it’s poetry.

      I designed the speakers in the ’94 Ford Probe, the ’95 Acura Vigor, the ’95 Jeep Cherokee, and even within the narrow constraints of the auto maker’s specification was a considerable range for choice and creativity.

      Today in my business work the parameters and environment change EVERY DAY. My clients and I all have a gun to our head – “evolve this business / design / product / plan / strategy – NOW – or you are road kill.”

      Pure noise in the strict formal sense is never the answer. It’s always combinations of structures that make logical sense.

      Same with biological systems. And we can prove that with analysis. Barbara McClintock’s work shows that very clearly.

      That flagellum in the U of Redding video did not get repaired by accident. It got repaired because the system had an adequate piece of code, elsewhere, that could be used to execute the repair and it put it in the right place.

      The statistics for that happening by accident are embarassingly absurd. One time in the history of the universe absurd. The only reasonable explanation is that the cell executed a systematic response to crisis. Such things are very well known – SOS response and all the rest. This has been known for decades.

      Nobody in the 21st century should be asserting that any of this stuff just happens randomly. Nothing in your own guitar playing, language or poetry is truly random. It may be randomly chosen from a narrow range of choices and a roll of the dice determines which option is taken – but the experiment overall is not random.

      I think you have an incorrect stereotype of engineers.

      • And if the organism hadn’t had the repair mechanism it wouldn’t have survived. That happens every day in evolution. Most organisms don’t work well enough to pass on there genes so they die out.

        Some ( a very few) do work. So they do pass on there genes.

      • “The statistics for that happening by accident are embarassingly absurd”

        No they’re not. Not given the sheer amount of time and number of generations involved.

        • Back up your statement with a statistical analysis.

        • little hugger says:

          That statement of happening by accident, given an enormous amount of time has all the plausibility of the Flat Earth theory. Hey, it looks flat! So it is! Anyone can see that, eh?
          This particular theory saw its scientific demise when a statistical analysis was done about the old “infinite number of monkeys pounding on typewriters, given enough time, would produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
          Hardly.
          I previously posted the link here before. Its quite thorough. Accidental life, and monkeys writing Shakespeare, are statistically absurd, with staggering chances against it, approaching infinity. The only thing preventing it from being impossible, is the infinite factor, which only changes the statistical possibility to not quite impossible.
          Would like to hear your scientific defense of your theory.

          • Yo hugger. The problem with the scenario that you refer to is that it is entirely random while evolution is not. Mutations are random because we can’t predict what will mutate or when. But natural selection is not random and winnows out mutations that do not promote success.

            Are you familiar with the Weasel Program? See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program

            • You have not in any way shape or form addressed the issue he is raising.

              Monkeys & typewriters = garbage.

              Monkeys & typewriters & natural selection = still garbage.

              And the Weasel program has the goal pre-programmed before it even starts. So the Weasel program proves design, not Dawkins’ point.

              • “”

                You have not in any way shape or form addressed the issue he is raising.

                Monkeys & typewriters = garbage.

                Monkeys & typewriters & natural selection = still garbage.

                And the Weasel program has the goal pre-programmed before it even starts. So the Weasel program proves design, not Dawkins’ point.””

                I agree with you and hugger. Monkeys typing the Bard is absurd. I’ve never met a monkey that can type. But stats are tricky. It’s all in the design and description. What are the odds of flipping 100 heads in a row? Tiny! What are the odds of flipping the 100th coin and having it fall heads up? 50%.

                And selection certainly has a goal – usable sequences. It is only random within parameters.

            • little hugger says:

              Your argument seems to support exactly what I said.
              Dawkins deliberately limited the possibilities, and even HE calls it a program. For the theory to work, nature would have had to already have randomly created a complete, complex, working program, that had specific, narrow possibilities, randomly, out of chaos.
              Its like scientists in a lab, fooling around with human DNA, or sperm and eggs, then announcing they created life. Nope.
              Dawkins weasel proposition only proves Perry right, by deliberately using a designed program and the great speed of computers. Even so, if you translate the enormous numbers of deliberately, and artificially limited possibilities into real life, how many organisms can afford that many “evolutionary” dead ends before its extinct? Dawkins only got his results by deliberately limiting it to a highly unrealistic scenario, and using a deliberately DESIGNED program to reach a goal he programmed it to reach. So, where is the force in his argument? It only supports Perry.

              Its just another version of, “It just happened Dude!” Throwing

              • Hugger – of course Dawkins limits the possibilities. Natural selection limits the possibilities. Have you been reading Ken Ham again?

                • little hugger says:

                  I see you ignore the fact it is a DESIGNED program. Exactly as Perry states. It proves Perry is right, if anything.
                  Besides, creation and evolution deliberately use the near infinity of time, over billions of years, to make their theories plausible. Dawkins takes a theory that is already limited in scope, by the number of keys on a typewriter, (old theory obviously) and results are limited to the works of Shakespeare. He needs to severely limit even the original monkey theory just to get his argument into the vaguely plausible range. Creation and evolution are very finite possibilities in a near infinite number of possibilities.
                  Then, he uses a directed program to “disprove” Perry’s very elegant theory of, DIRECTED creation, evolution, etc. Hardly.
                  I will also reiterate that 11 seconds of computer time represents infinity to any living organism. Even with all his cheating, and using directed methods, Dawkins organism would become extinct almost immediately from all the failures. Organisms do not live and breed in nano seconds. 11 seconds sounds swift, but in fact, is an utter biological failure.
                  Perry is right.

    • little hugger says:

      Hum. Then why are there species millions of years old, that have not changed, if everything is continuously changing? Because its built in code, tells it that it does not need to, or, that it does. Not random, but directed.

      • Gross misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection. Change occurs to drive success within a niche or environment. And is not required. Esp phylogenetic change. Just about any book off the self at Barnes and Noble explains this well.

        • little hugger says:

          ANY book? So, if given an infinity of time, with random mutation, eventually I will choose a book on Darwin? And given all the possible mutations possible, and given the length of a book, and the limited number of choices on a keyboard, and also given infinity, eventually, the Darwin book will actually be a copy of Darwins work. And, meanwhile, I win the lottery 42 million times in a row.
          Mutation is either random, or directed. Random cannot work.

  13. Zaya Kolpa says:

    “I know that the information in DNA is a signal. By definition, random mutations are noise. Telling a communications engineer that adding noise to a signal sometimes create new, useful data structures is like telling a nurse you can occasionally cure a common cold by swallowing rat poison. This is absurd! You’ll be hard pressed to find any communications engineer who, upon examining this claim, would agree with it. Have you ever had a data glitch on your computer that improved your files? Ever?”

    “Human DNA holds 750 megabytes of data, the same as a Compact Disc.
    If 97% of your DNA is junk, that means the 3% that isn’t junk is 22 megabytes. In other words, they’re implying that the entire plan for a human body only takes up 22 megabytes of storage space. Heck, the “Windows” folder on my PC – the directory that contains most of the Operating System – is 27 gigabytes. Does anyone actually think Microsoft Windows Vista is more sophisticated than the human body?”

    This is not how any of this works. You don’t even know biochemistry and molecular genetics, do you? If you knew, you wouldn’t construct such absurd analogies and arrive at such erroneous conclusions. Learn the very basics, dude!

    http://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-hypothesis-as-to-why-there-are-only-22-amino-acids-and-not-64
    http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/653/why-22-amino-acids-instead-of-64
    http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-information-in-dna-determines-cellular-function-6523228

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncoding_DNA
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteomics

    • Everything I have said regarding information storage in the genome is correct. You have not said anything of substance, and I do not see any indications that you have knowledge of information theory. Please state your qualifications and experience that would qualify you to comment on this. Please be prepared to back up everything you say with facts. A half dozen random links will not suffice.

  14. Bill Charlton says:

    This is absolutely one of the most logically brilliant criticisms of evolution I have ever read. Having studied computer science in college, I have often found the argument that “accumulated errors result in efficient design” to be extremely absurd! Yet, when discussing that aspect with an evolution proponent, they become unreasonably hostile, arrogant, condescending, etc., substituting ad hominem for logical rebuttal.
    And, regarding the arrogant criticism of design by non-designers, I imagine that would be even worse than your “client” example when laymen try to criticize how stupid your electrical designs are.
    Thank you for your courage and brilliant us of logic!
    P.S. One of my sons is a Master Electrician, and one received his degree in Electrical Engineering Technology. I HAVE to share this with them!

  15. Perry Marshall

    Congratulations on your book, Evolution 2.0. I am a researcher with an engineering background similar to yours and very active in exploring and defining the neural system of biology. I contacted your office about sending you a concise but important email critiquing portions of your book and asking if you would like to review my text related thereto in a book currently in preparation. The email contained two attachments that I believe you would be of interested to you.

    I am not interested in contributing to the extensive social intercourse on this blog they directed me to. I do recognize the significant amount of time you are dedicating to this blog.. The blog will not accept attachments

    Therefore, I am enclosing a URL that leads to the 25 pages or so of my Chapter 1 of “The Neuron and Neural System” that address much of your book. It is totally searchable and includes a Table of Contents, List of Figures, and Index at its end.

    http://neuronresearch.net/neuron/pdf/1Introduction.pdf#page=98

    I believe Figure 1.2.8-4 would be of particular interest to you with regard to cloning in the context of Evolution 2.0. I have also summarized some key features of your theory in Figure 1.2.8-2, which I expect to extend further based on Mukherjee’s recent book on “The Gene: An Intimate History.”

    Figure 1.2.8-5 compares your matryoshka dolls with the “Wedding cake” usually used to illustrate the 7-layer OSI (Open Systems Interconnect) model used in communications engineering. The two variants may be appropriate for different audiences.

    I found the PZ debate very interesting, mostly because you two were talking by each other at the technical level. PZ had little knowledge of what he was actually talking about. I would suggest you could strengthen your position relative to the PZ debate significantly by reading up on the use of pseudo-random codes in cryptology and encryption in general. A lot has occurred since Claude Shannon’s work of the 1940’s. Pseudo random codes are now considered perfectly random within the appropriate code block lengths.

    As you must recognize, most of the respondents to your million dollar challenge did not understand your specification at even the most casual level, typical of those in the biology community. You were very courteous in your response to them.

    If you would like to converse further with regard to these areas, I would love instructions on how to communicate with you separately from this blog.

    James T (Jim) Fulton
    Director of Research
    http://neuronresearch.net
    Newport Beach, California

    P.S. I think the blog from Eleanor Sanchez, “7 Biology Myths No Electrical Engineer Would Ever Tolerate” is right on.

    • Jim,

      I took a long look at your PDF. Quite fascinating. I appreciate the references and you seem to have delved into my book further than anyone else who has quoted it in another publication. Impressive work you’ve done here.

      I hope other readers will take a look because there’s a lot there to explore.

      My assistant will reach out. Would like to find out more about what you are doing.

  16. Jesse Reek says:

    This article is an embarrassment to the author. I am an electrical engineering major and have actual coursework in molecular biology and organic chemistry unlike the religiously motivated author. Just because you are an electrical engineer (are you even licensed too? was your school even ABET accredited?) Evolution is real and the author should stick to their field. Noise can generate a signal if useful mutations are preserved and damaging are not. This simple principal is called natural selection. Since you use your electrical engineering credential to back up your article, you could simply write a simple evolving computer program as many have. Just because religion makes you feel good does not make it true. You are not an expert in biology. This website is very disrespectful to the actual experts. You have no credentials in biology and taking the first semester of general chemistry basically means you known almost nothing about that either.

    • My EE degree is from the University of Nebraska. ABET accredited etc. I wrote an Ethernet book for the world’s #1 society of process control engineers, the ISA. I have never seen a single genetic algorithm work unless it was designed to do so. All of them “cheat.” And they all require fitness functions that are difficult to design. They never taught me “random mutation and natural selection” in engineering school. Why? Because those things all by themselves don’t design anything. If you disagree please show me an example. And please understand I will be hard-ass rigorous about everything that you submit. So get your facts in order before you present them.

    • SCOTT HARWELL says:

      I am just a lawyer but even if can read your post and deduce that this evolving program you referenced was written/designed by am intelligent …. being. In your example, it was a human being.

      Now if a program could organize itself from chemicals, never mind the hardware (which was also …… designed) to run the program AND …… the electricity or battery to run the computer THEN get back with me. Until then, you are living in a fantasy world and might as well believe in the tooth fairy.

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