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Originally Posted by NotReady
I'll try one time but continue with the language and I'm done.
Haha! Like I have the slightest interest in discussing anything with you.
I'd obviously rather spend my time talking with and reading material from people who I can actually learn from -- rather than trying to punch through the shield of Fear of Cognitive Dissonance of a religious person who's actively trying to
not learn anything at all that might cause him the slightest discomfort.
But anyway, in case anyone else are reading and might be interested in some details:
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By beneficial change/bug do you mean in the program, such as a typo, or in the compiled code?
I've seen both, though more of the former.
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Maybe just give an example.
Here are a few:
- Typos, miscalculations or logical errors in GUI-related code, especially parts that have done widget layout, have lead to better / smarter / more efficient design than what was originally either previously in place or planned.
- Behaviour of agents in a 3D environment virtual world became more realistic due to a memory overwrite bug causing random data to "seed" some of their attributes.
- The weirdest, and funniest, and perhaps most relevant when comparing with mutations in biological organisms that I've seen:
A friend of mine had written a so-called "Eurodemo", which is something that was (and still is, to a lesser degree) wildly popular way to show off programming skills in the days when the dominating microcomputers were C64s, Amigas and Ataris. One part of this demo was a common type of routine called a 'star-field', which is supposed to look like you're in a spaceship blasting into deep space or something. Guy had a disk-crash, managed to salvage his files, but there was random corruption in a bunch of them. When he tried to re-run his demo executable, it ran as before, except the star-field effect had changed to look different -- it was exactly like a swarm of flies, or gnats.
He debugged the binary machine code, noted down the random op-code change, and incorporated it with some spiffier graphics into an "insect-swarm" effect in his next demo program.
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What I know from my own experience, most of my programming time was spent chasing down bugs, whether they were typos, bad reasoning or misunderstanding some command or language usage.
That's how it goes most of the time, especially if you're using a crap programming language like C++, or other crap tools, on a crap platform, and you're a crap programmer.
The higher level language you use, the less chance your program will simply crash or otherwise halt when you make a mistake, and the larger the chance it will do something "interesting" instead.
I wouldn't give a flying f**k what Berlinski says about anything. A guy who think it's a tough challenge for science to come up with examples of beneficial mutations -- not only that, but he's presenting it like it's really a
killer problem for evolution! -- is a raging idiot who obviously hasn't bothered to do even 15 minutes of research before opening his big, uninformed, arrogant mouth.
I mean, take 10 seconds to break out google on 'examples of beneficial mutations' and the 2nd hit will be the abstracts of 6 peer-reviewed papers on a page titled
"Examples of Beneficial Mutations in Humans".
And the 4th google hit is the
talkorigins.org page that explains in like ~50-100 lines of text the mistake in the creationst claim 'most mutations are harmful, so the overall effect of mutations is harmful'.
The Discovery Institute should certainly be proud of having the "secularist" Berlinski on their team. He fits right in.