Why evolution works and American society doesn't

[Mark Isaak]

A constant lesson I got all through school is: Don't get things wrong.
If you do, your grade, and by implication your worth as a person, gets
lowered. I now believe this an entirely wrong message to impart.
Instead, we should be teaching: Go ahead and get things wrong; just
don't get the same thing wrong twice. In other words, mistakes are only
a problem if you don't learn from them.

In the words of Miss Frizzle (who came after my time), "Take chances,
make mistakes, get messy!"

I see the effects of worry about being wrong in many places. Probably
most prominent is in politics, where leaders lie rather than admit
mistakes; where they rationalize mistakes and keep making them; where
they find fault with others who have made mistakes and corrected them.
I see the same thing here -- People say something that is obviously
wrong, but rather than admit it, they go through all sorts of defense
mechanisms. The book _Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)_ gives a lot
of examples of the damage caused by cognitive dissonance that results
from such refusal to change one's mind. On subjects like climate
change, vaccine efficacy, and (of course) evolution, most people are so
committed to being right that giving them reliable information that
they're wrong about part of it makes them entrench their position even
more strongly.

I recently made a mistake about the function of homeobox genes. Someone
else tried to shame me about it (repeatedly), but I'm not sorry I made
the error, because I got to learn from it, and perhaps others did, too.
What I feel bad about is another time when I made a mistake, got
corrected, and a year or two later made the same mistake again.

You may have already noticed the tie-in with evolution. Genetic copying
makes mistakes (mutations). The ones that don't work get corrected
(natural selection). A few manage to work even better. Functional
complexity advances; some might call it progress. But a crucial part is
the correction of mistakes.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

[RonO]

In a way science works by correcting past mistakes. The goal is to
understand nature, and there is constant improvement of that
understanding. One of the best ways to gain recognition in science is
to demonstrate that others have gotten something wrong in the past, and
things aren't what we had thought.

IDiocy/creationism keeps making the same mistakes over and over with no
intention of improving the understanding of much of anything. The goal
is to keep believing what they want to believe. Making the same
mistakes over and over is the only way they can keep doing that.

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

No reason to feel bad because you make the same mistake more than once, but you should feel bad for the reasons you make the same mistake repeatedly. And remember that you learn by gaining new knowledge, not by simply making mistakes as your analogy below attempts to describe.

>
> You may have already noticed the tie-in with evolution. Genetic copying
> makes mistakes (mutations). The ones that don't work get corrected
> (natural selection).

No, you're conflating, or confusing, genetic copying error correction code systems with "evolution" and "natural selection".
Genetic copying sometimes makes mistakes that error correcting codes can not repair, and sometimes results in mutations that can be neutral, beneficial or deleterious when expressed in the phenotype. The mutations that "don't work" are not "corrected", they are deleterious.
Your analogy is tainted by your preconceptions. Mutations don't learn from their mistakes.

>A few manage to work even better. Functional
> complexity advances; some might call it progress. But a crucial part is
> the correction of mistakes.
>

You are probably right, genetic error correction has always, since first life, been crucial to survival. Too bad you don't recognize that the genetic copying system has no way of learning, as you do when you make mistakes, such as reading books or being convinced by logical arguments.
You might consider also that you have made many mistakes in this post, such as claiming that functional complexity increases ("advances").
Most evolutionists would likely claim that evolution does not tend to increase complexity, nor does evolutionary theory predict that, but just the opposite, when it comes to "functional" complexity.

[jillery]

Consider two cases, one where you say something right, and one where
you say something wrong. Consider both as potentially teachable
moments.

If you say something right, chances are nobody says anything about it.
At most, they might affirm what you say, but you haven't learned
anything new.

But if you say something wrong, chances are lots of people are
inspired to tell you all the many different ways that it's wrong. And
even if you don't remember them all, you're far less likely to make
that same mistake again.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, errors are the aperture to learning what is
right.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[Glenn]

Pure horseshit. Sagan didn't ascribe to learning what is "right".
And your "popular" claim is also contrary to Sagan's philosophy, as is your idiotic "chances are".

[jillery]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 12:33:30 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

And then there are posters like Glenn, who post mindless noise for the
sake of it, because they have no idea what they're talking about and
are proud of it.

[Zen Cycle]

And as glen demonstrates, many times when you say something right, he and his tribe on the left side of the bell curve will claim it isn't right simply because they have disagreements with you in other areas.

[Mark Isaak]

Also engineering, or design in general. To a lesser extent, so too in
art and law.

> IDiocy/creationism keeps making the same mistakes over and over with no
> intention of improving the understanding of much of anything.  The goal
> is to keep believing what they want to believe.  Making the same
> mistakes over and over is the only way they can keep doing that.

Not just creationism, but pseudoscience in general. When I was a kid, I
read an account of a UFO incident exposed as a fraud. A few years
later, I heard someone expounding on the same event as a genuine UFO. I
no longer remember enough details of the incident to look it up, but I
bet you can find credulous references to it even today.

[Glenn]

Jillery's head bounces up and down...

[Glenn]

Good example of pseudoscience there, Mark. Just point to the series Ancient Aliens. By the way, why didn't you ever grow up?

[Martin Harran]

When I was doing my computing degree, one of the modules was on
Design. The lecturer pointed out that most hardware elements in a
computer are adaptations of existing things; for example, the keyboard
is based on the typewriter, the monitor on CRT screens for radar and
TV, and so on. He claimed that the only entirely new item was the
mouse, it wasn’t based on anything at all that previously existed.
Maybe Creationism/ID will be taken seriously when they show us
something that isn’t an adaptation of something else.

[*Hemidactylus*]

I don’t know if getting things right (Ultimate Truth) is attainable. Maybe
less wrong or what Popper (name drop) called verisimilitude.

With obsession over getting things right there is the closure problem, or
premature closure, instead of doxastic openness. I am borrowing from Peter
Boghossian on this who borrowed from others. Closure is a field of its own.

[*Hemidactylus*]

There are the desktop metaphor and everything is a file analogy too. The
GUI, mouse, and ethernet all came from Xerox, not appreciating what it had.
As legend has it Jobs did and Gates followed.

Bluetooth was a distant byproduct of a piano roll or some such (Hedy Lamarr
and George Antheil).

[jillery]

>> mouse, it wasn?t based on anything at all that previously existed.

>> Maybe Creationism/ID will be taken seriously when they show us

>> something that isn?t an adaptation of something else.

>>
>There are the desktop metaphor and everything is a file analogy too. The
>GUI, mouse, and ethernet all came from Xerox, not appreciating what it had.
>As legend has it Jobs did and Gates followed.
>
>Bluetooth was a distant byproduct of a piano roll or some such (Hedy Lamarr
>and George Antheil).

You're channeling James Burke's "Connections", a dated yet still
excellent series about the history of technology.

[Zen Cycle]

The lineage is a technique known as 'frequency hopping' which was originally developed by Marconi. Lamar and Antheils contribution was the first practical application for torpedo guidance systems (to prevent jamming), and yes, it used a piano roll as a pseudo-random frequency shift mechanism (more appropriately a frequency _modulation_ shift). Since the advent of wireless computer networking, frequency(channel) hopping was applied to allow for more reliable communications within a narrow band of carrier frequencies - The systems scan across all the available frequencies for an open channel to link up. In applications where security is an issue, the entities on a specific channel constantly renegotiate and switch to other available channels.

[Ernest Major]

On 05/09/2021 18:44, Mark Isaak wrote:
>
> I recently made a mistake about the function of homeobox genes.  Someone
> else tried to shame me about it (repeatedly), but I'm not sorry I made
> the error, because I got to learn from it, and perhaps others did, too.
>  What I feel bad about is another time when I made a mistake, got
> corrected, and a year or two later made the same mistake again.

I don't think that it was specifically aimed at you - the emphasis was
on no-one else pointing it out until I looked at some old posts. Note
that he was also trying to make something out of no-one mentioned* the
well-known fact that transcription factors also exist in prokaryote
genomes. It looked to me more like an attempt a generalised ad-hominem
aimed at pro-science posters.

He made quite a few mistakes himself in the process.

*No-one had mentioned that recently, but it has been mentioned on
talk.origins in the past. Ron Okimoto had referred to the Lac operon
twice earlier this year, which might have been the most recent mentions.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Tim Norfolk]

If you don't get anything wrong, you likely will not get anything new.

"Americans fix the blame, Japanese fix the problem. Their way is better" - Michael Crichton, 'Rising Sun'
Politicians, managers and administrators just don't want blame to stick to them. They would rather avoid success than risk failure.

My wise brother says that lawyers in charge of entities will eliminate risk, accountants will try to convert everything to cash.