Many of those studies were actually proved later to be false. Consider the moths - they don't alight on tree trunks (except when released a particular way at a particular time of day).
That is an irrelevancy. Where the moths alight does not affect their relative visibility to predators. And in any case, they do alight on tree trunks about 25% of the time. Have you looked at only Kettlewell's work or have you looked at Majerus' work as well?
It was later found the genes adapted in accordance with the pollution on their own - the adaptation took place but for chemical reasons.
Any change in a gene is, by definition, a chemical change. But the change in the gene does not explain why the melanin form became more common.
Population dynamics is not causal.
Yes it is. Without population dynamics you don't have evolution. You only get increased variability in the population. Individuals do not evolve. Evolution is a population-level event, so you have to have a change at the level of the population. And you have to have something that triggers a change at that level.
If I do a study and note gross changes in population, that does not go to cause in the genome for adaptations moving toward "improvements".
Evolution is not about "improving the breed". Adaptations do not move toward improvements; they move toward ecological fitness as determined by transient ecological parameters.
You will not notice "gross changes" in a population without selection for those changes. Differential reproductive success is the means of getting those "gross changes" in a population.
You can have all the changes you want in an individual; it won't change the population without differential reproductive success aka natural selection.
More likely a machine will just stop running - it takes a heck of allot of smarts to make something that adapts towards improvements all the time... and they have to be improvements in order to survive, but to survive means they overcome.
Non-living machines certainly will. I've often noticed that engineers have the most problems understanding evolution; occupational hazard I expect. But keep studying genetic algorithms--the application of evolution to solving tough engineering problems. It may make understanding the process in biology easier.
The laws of statistics include Heisenberg uncertainty and in general, entropy. Informational entropy is very real.
Of course it is. But biology has a few things going for it that telephones and computers don't. Lots of redundancy, for example, and lots of flexibility. A gene is not as fragile as a verbal sentence being transmitted through the ether. For one thing, the message received by the embryo does not have to be exactly the message that was sent by the parent to still be functional. In fact, if you did not sometimes get "garbled information" (thanks to mutations) you would have no means of establishing the variations in a population that allow for evolution to occur. At some point the gene that prevents melanism in a light coloured moth has to be altered to generate melanism. No melanism, no possibility of adapting to soot-covered trees.
That is not true. You have no idea how something is going to adapt a priori unless you construct a one dimensional flawed study to prove your point (like the moths). Then years later, when people critically analyze the data, and find that chemical changes were closer to cause....
Most experiments deal with one selective factor. So that is a simplification on nature. However, that is typical of scientific work. But it takes a lot of gall to say that every one of several hundreds of experiments were flawed. Is the moth experiment the only one you know of --and only Kettlewell's work at that?
Actually, when pressed Chuck said it was the strong survive and the weak die, though that was years later when pressed about it.
Citation? Have you checked whether this was a mined quote?
And irrelevant in any case. If he said it, he was wrong. "Fitness" is not synonymous to "strength".
Many people took it that way, with horrible effects because science has become a sort of religion of nations since Christendom fell.
The fact that people misunderstand and misapply a scientific theory does not make the theory wrong. Just as the misapplications of Christianity (which led to pogroms and witch-burnings, crusades and the Inquistion) does not make Christianity wrong.
ie. it changed when convenient.
Well, it didn't actually change. It was just spelled out genetically instead of phenotypically when genetics and natural selection were brought together in the modern synthesis. By phrasing it in terms of the distribution of alleles, one goes to the underlying source of phenotypic difference. One also avoids confusing the what (change in the genetic features of a population=evolution) with the why (ecological adaptation, sexual selection, genetic drift). By measuring a change in allele frequency, we know evolution happens whether or not we know the precise genetic change and/or the precise fitness factor that brought it about. Further research can reveal these. Nowadays DNA sequencing makes it fairly straightforward to find the relevant mutation. Figuring out why it was selected is often more tricky and gives rise to "just so" stories until the hypotheses are tested.
No to say death forms life when it is actually life that overcomes (yes - adapts) over death is a fundamental error and not part of the overwhelming reality or evidence.
And isn't that what evolution is about? Life overcoming extinction-threatening events?
You can't use statistics to make a real machine that is useful, unless you make a machine within the statistics that adapts to statistical change.
Natural selection is measured by statistics, but it would be a mistake to say those measures change without an underlying cause. You need to have pre-existent variability to begin with. And you need a factor that non-randomly favors the production/survival of offspring hosting certain alleles. Evolution is not a one-step process. It is also not a one-level process. People often get confused because they attribute different aspects to the wrong level.
One simple way to remember the appropriate level is this:
genes mutate, individuals are selected, populations evolve.
Consider for example genetic algorithms. Not meant for evolutionary study, but you have to tune those things and put allot of smarts in to get a simple optimized answer.
Curious that you would say something that came from evolutionary study is not meant for evolutionary study. Actually the processes of genetic algorithms contributes plenty to evolutionary study.
The chief difference between genetic algorithms and biological evolution is that genetic algorithms are used to generate functions defined in advance by human engineers. In this respect genetic algorithms are a bit more like breeding programs where a human intelligence sets the parameters of the final product.
No human agent sets the parameters for an evolutionary change in natural biological populations.
Those are fundamental laws that govern reality, where entropy is very real.
Of course, and biological evolution complies with those laws.
Physics, information flow, statistics, logic, mechanics, fluid dynamics, capacitance, inductance, resistance, chemical balance, energy, heat transfer.... all these things are tricky to balance in a machine.
They are tricky to balance in a cell too. It is much easier to change an already complex organism (shift the bones around to make an ear from a jaw) than to make a cell in the first place. But that takes us into abiogenesis.
Saw an article recently in Scientific American on the first successful production of a perpetually self-replicating RNA molecule. Have you looked much into the RNA world hypothesis?
and that is why ID has gained traction
What makes you think ID has gained traction? Scientifically, at the moment, it is dead in the water.
