I have just read through the link and what it proves above all is that the author does not understand biological evolution. He makes a number of elementary mistakes.
Some examples:
He says "The only time that we are referring to totally random everything, totally purposeless everything is in biological Darwinian evolution."
This statement is incorrect on two counts. First Darwinian evolution is not totally random. Only mutation is random. Natural selection is not. Natural selection takes the randomness out of evolution because it selects which mutations will endure and become fixed in the population.
Secondly, to characterize Darwinian evolution as "totally purposeless" is to introduce a metaphysical evaluation into a scientific discussion. Richard Dawkins may believe that evolution is totally purposeless, but he is an atheist. As a scientist he has no evidence that evolution is purposeless. As a theist, I am free to believe that evolution does have a purpose. Even that one of the purposes of evolution was to produce a species with which God could enter into a personal relationship. Nothing in biology can show that I am wrong. This is a matter of metaphysical preference, not scientific evidence.
Then there is his random mutation of an advertisement. Problem here is that he assumes the accumulation of many harmful mutations. He gives an example of one mutation, then of five then of ten. What he neglects is natural selection, which will operate to prevent the accumulation of harmful mutations.
He sneers at Dawkins "Methinks it is a weasel" illustration, because "Every time [the program] finds a wrong letter it throws it away. Every time it finds the right letter it keeps it." This he says, "is Scrabble, not Darwinian evolution." But if he understood Darwinian evolution he would understand it is more like Scrabble than the totally random process he portrays. That is the role of natural selection--to throw out what does not work and keep what does.
There are many other examples of misunderstanding evolution in the essay. One thing that seems to come through clearly is that he does not distinguish the individual from the species. It is an important distinction because mutations happen in individuals, but natural selection occurs at the level of the species.
When he speaks of mutations happening in the giraffe, he speaks as though a single mutation happens in all giraffes at the same time. And he again assumes that harmful mutations will accumulate so that even if improvement happens to the neck, other parts of the body will be destroyed by harmful mutations. But mutations happen to different individual giraffes, and if they are harmful enough, those particular individuals do not get the opportunity to reproduce, so the mutations die with those individuals. So only fit individuals pass their genes (including improvements) to the next generation.
Another item he seems to ignore is the redundancy in DNA. He mentions the redundancy in English and other human languages, but he neglects the fact that there is also a large amount of redundancy in the DNA code. Most amino acids have at least two codings, and some as many as six. Many mutations merely change from one coding to another for the same amino acid. This does no more harm than substituting a British for an American spelling of an English word (e.g. "colour" for "color")
And, of course, he does not define information in a biological sense or describe how to measure it. Deamiter's questions on how Shannon noise applies to DNA and evolution is very a propos. Can you, or anyone, show that a change in DNA information is necessarily harmful to either the individual in which the mutation occurs, or to its species?
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