Evolution IS a blind watchmaker - Simulation of a watch evolving

Posted On Sep 23, 2008 at 4:11 pm
4 Comments

There are two famous arguments that creationists yield concerning a watch and its maker. First, they assert that if you find a watch on the beach, you KNOW its made by a person because of its complexity, and that this somehow "proves" that God designed everything in its present form. (so if i show a creationist my leather wallet, they should be able to tell me the NAME of the person who hand crafted it, right? After all, they can draw the name "God" from nowhere!?) The other is that if you smash up a watch, put the parts in a box and shake it about, creationists somehow think that evolution predicts the watch will put itself back together again. Unless your five years old or mentally retarded with a caretaker, I don't understand how you can even survive with that logic, but I digress.

The creator of this video wrote a matlab program that takes creationists' watchmaker arguments and shoves 'em up their collective ass. Watch as this simulation uses the concepts of evolution to design a clock that keeps time accurately. At the end of this post, there is a link where you can even download the SOURCE CODE and study the algorithms. Although if your smart enough to understand evolutionary algorithms in source code, then I'm going to take a wild guess that you probably don't succumb to the creationists' bullshit :)

This video brought to you by CDK007

In this video I deconstruct the broken watch straw man argument used by creationist / ID supporters to attack evolution. I had to pack a ton of information into this video so you WILL need to pause it periodically.

The basic premise of the argument is that a bunch of parts will never randomly assemble into the correct arrangement to form a properly functioning complex. Once again, creationists / ID supporters miss the basic concept of evolution entirely. No biologists believes, nor is there any evidence that complex systems form spontaneously in one fell swoop. That would be creation. Systems evolve through many intermediates, one step at a time, slowly building up the complexity.

Here I deconstruct their straw man argument. Basically, I simulate clocks as living organisms. Selective pressure is focused on their ability to accurately tell time. NO goal is imposed on the design (you can tell this because every simulation ends with a differently constructed clock). And it works. Clocks evolve through a series of transitional forms: Pendulum, Proto-clock, 1-handed Clock, 2-handed Clock, 3-handed Clock, and 4-handed Clock. Gradually the complexity is built up.

These labels I have assigned to the transitional forms have nothing to do with the simulation itself. They are names I assigned so that we could analyze what the population was doing. The clocks are just clocks, living in their world, trying to tell time as accurately as possible.

One thing I wanted to address but didn't have time in the video is how rapid the transitional period can be. In some simulations the population goes from pendulums to 3-handed Clocks in a hundred or so generations. And the transitions between the transitional forms are even more rapid, happening in about ten generations. Chances are none or a very limited representation of that transition will be preserved in the fossil record.

One thing I should add. The program does not draw the clocks. It maintains, mates, and simulates them, but the drawing must be done manually from the genome matrix.

The program is written in MatLab.

The hand rotations that begin with 86 are 86,000 not 86.000. When YouTube compressed the video it becam hard to tell a comma from a period.

To download this video go to: http://www.mediafire.com/?9e1zz000mq7

To download the program go to: http://www.mediafire.com/?1umdtnwayyp

Learn the facts, spread the truth, and most importantly, Think About It.

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