Quality Control the Gold Standard

In the last century one of the great scientific theorists was the mathmatician John Von Neumann. At one point he purposed to design a self replicating ,machine. He knew that such a device would have to have all of the subassemblies necessary to make the entire device including the assemblers themselves and the stored instructions for each operation. Because of the large number of devices and the stored programs size and exactness of its specification he also knew he would need error detection devices for each critical operation and repair devices to fix the errors before the entire device shut down due to errors. Yet the device also had to manufacture the error detectors and repair devices... ad finitum,, Von Neumann through in the towel.Yet in life the error rate in replicating the DNA molecule is about one mistake in a billion base pairs. And that is of course because every element in the Von Neumann model is present and works remarkably well in the human cell.The present Six Sigma paradigm attempts to design and operate complex processes so accurately that only 3.4 errors per million operations is realized over the long run. That is the three sigma level of performance.The cell/DNA replication process is operating at about 7 sigma... an undreamed of level of accuracy and quality performance.In achieving the real world standard thousands of manhours and millions of dollars are spent in the design, analysis, planning, measuring and correction tasks.At no stage is the improvement sought by introducing a source of random error, operating, seeing if the market accepts the new result keeping those that are accepted and discarding those that are unworkable or inefficient or otherwise unmarketable.Why,,, because it would absolutely never work in the real world.No such R&D effort would ever result in a new or higher quality profitable marketable product... not ever and the enterprise would simply go bancrupt.Yet evolutionists suppose that a seven sigma replicator arose by a random error generator and an accept/reject "market " mechanism, namely random mutation and natural selection.Our real life experiences refute such faulty nonsensical illogical proposals to say nothing of Von Neumann's mathmatical analysis.This message has been edited by Evopeach, 02-07-2006 08:52 PM

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

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Yet in life the error rate in replicating the DNA molecule is about one mistake in a billion base pairs. And that is of course because every element in the Von Neumann model is present and works remarkably well in the human cell.

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Tell that to all the victims of cancer. Or the victims of genetic birth defects. Or the animal and plant breeders who have managed to produce ever more diverse animals and crops. Or the scientists in genetics laboratories who constantly discover novel traits arising.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

Boy did you just fall off the turnip truck or what?

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Software configurable hardware, such as Programmable Logic Arrays, are on the market which accept a bit string instruction which is used to configure or “wire up” a hardware circuit to give it a desired architecture. This can be done an indefinite number of times. By treating the bit string instruction as a Genetic Algorithm “chromosome”, one has the means to evolve hardware.

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The concept was pioneered by Adrian Thompson who in 1996 evolved a tone discriminator, using fewer than 40 programmable logic gates and no clock signal in a FPGA. This is a remarkably small design for such a device, and it is still not understood how it works. For example, one group of gates has no logical connection to the rest of the circuit, yet is crucial to its function. It is thought that this group somehow modulates the power supply or influences other connections by generating a Magnetic field.

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The mechanisms of mutation and natural selection are not only so powerful that they do exactly what you just claimed they can't do - be used to design functioning hardware - but they can design hardware so effective we can't understand how it works.I'd say that's a fairly effective rebuttal of your OP. Judo chop!AbE: Sorry, didn't give the cite. Evolvable hardware - WikipediaThis message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-07-2006 09:16 PM

You seem to have your facts confused.There is a computer sitting in my office, that has been running continuously, never rebooted, for 396 days. It does around 1 billion operations per second. No errors after 396 days. That makes your one error in a billion look bad by comparison.The six sigma quality control standard is for complete products, not for individual operations within those products. In terms of biology, it would be like saying that only 3.4 pregnancies in a million would result in spontaneous abortions or in children born with birth defects. Biology does not come close to meeting that standard.If you thought you were giving an example that biology is so great that it must be intelligently designed -- then I'm afraid you missed badly.

A ray of light.. I presume.No one need inform me of the 99.99999999999...9999% of harmful mutations, especially the P53 which is very much the culprit in breast cancer. My wife died from the mutation. You know those good variations in the genome that lead to the creation of ever more successful organisms, reproductively speaking.One can only wait to see with baited breath what the beneficial effects of cancer and every other horrible disease that are specificially tied to "good" mutations. Good oh yes by evolutionary standards because they have been around since the invention of writing so they must be good otherewise they would have been eliminated by natural selection.Now try responding to the argument presented.

I did. The DNA replication process is not even close to 100% perfect. It makes errors. Which, by the way, is exactly what is needed for evolution to occur.But the mere existence that there are mechanisms that correct some errors is in no way "evidence" for a designer.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

First the techniques you talk about are designed bit strings much like mag tapes for a tooling machine and bear no resemblance to the issue at hand.To be a reasonable analogy:Start with say a totally randomized string and see if it generates any functional gate or flip flop.. whatever from say a three bit codon. If so preserve it if not interchange two bits in the string again randomly with zero guidance.Lets see how many bits are required to make a gate or other device within the algorithm. Let me guess its something like three orders of magnitude less than that required to make the simplest protein in the cell from mrna, etc.Let me know when the forty element curcuit is all set. LOL LOLIn debate setting up red herrings is called a logical fallacy.

First you fail to say if your blops are doing anything other than OS routines over and over. Second all OS of any sophistication and associated firmware have self correcting code which eliminates errors in read write, memory operations and communications routines that you would never be aware of, never observe and would be totally undetected.. that's sort of the purpose of having them. So your sophmoric example merely demonstrates a laymans view of IT.Page not found - WNM Communications

You have no concept.The absolutely agreed upon error rate for copying the 3 plus billion base pairs in the human genome is 1 per billion. This is so well documented as to be ludicrous to even discuss. One error per billion is about 7 sigma in quality parlance.If you can't accept that fact please don't even bother replying.. I don't have the time.

Right. Exactly like DNA. Exactly like the issue at hand.Look, evo, if you didn't understand the argument, it would have been better for you to simply say so, rather than reply to me with this nonsense.

My wife's phylogenetics text has a slightly different number; the accepted rate of substitution in nuclear mammalian DNA is more like 3.2 per gbp (billion base-pairs).So the mutation rate is a little higher than you've been saying. I can cite that from the text if you wish. I notice that you haven't cited anything at all.

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If you can't accept that fact please don't even bother replying.. I don't have the time.

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Hee hee hee. I foresee a suspension coming.-

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You have no concept.

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You have no argument. The error rate in DNA replication is pretty high -- high enough that the effects are pretty easy to see from cancer victims, birth defects and spontaneous abortions, and even in laboratory studies of genomes of other organisms.And also, the exact error rate is largely irrelevant to the whether or not we should accept Intelligent [sic] Design.

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"Intellectually, scientifically, even artistically, fundamentalism -- biblical literalism -- is a road to nowhere, because it insists on fidelity to revealed truths that are not true." -- Katha Pollitt

Evopeach, I'm sorry for your loss--cancer has visited tragedy on so many of our families. It killed my father, grandfather, and other family members; it nearly killed older brother, and, based on my family history and other risk factors, will probably kill me.Please note, however, that:1) The P53 mutation does not stand accused of causing all breast cancers.2) Mutations are neither good nor bad; mutations are random, and they may have deleterious or advantageous effects for survival and, potentially, reproductive fitness. 3) Many cancers occur later in life, as do many other debilitating and fatal diseases. If a disease has a genetic component, but the disease does not strike until after the reproductive years, then it will not be subject to natural selection, and thus would not be eliminated.Even if the genes are expressed early enough in life to affect reproductive fitness, there is no reason to expect natural selection to eliminnate or reduce its occurrence in the human genome in only a few thousand years, the time since the invention of writing. Evolution works on a much large time scale. Oncologists have noted that if we lived long enough, we would all die from cancer; they also suggest our lengthening life spans account for some portion of rising cancer rates.I don't see any consistency in this message, though. Do you deny that cancer has a genetic component? If it does, how does the occurrence of cancer support intelligent design rather than evolution, and how would the occurrence of cancer support the notion of a perfect, all-powerful creator rather than an error-ridden, "just good enough" process of evolution?*P.S. Please note that "baited" breath is a common mutation of language usage: "bated" is the correct term. One waits with breath held (i.e., "abated"), not with breath become a lure.

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Ever heard of Hemoglobin C? It's recent mutated version of the human hemoglobin complex that confers resistance to malaria. Did you and your wife have children? I'm sorry if you did, and they were left motherless, but if you did, then there was no selective pressure against her oncogene, because the cancer it caused didn't prevent her from passing on her genes.If you hadn't had children yet, then you're mistaken - her gene was selected against.Also I notice that you don't seem to be terribly concerned about the 10-50-odd mutations you yourself possess.