4,781
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 20:
Line 20: +
→Fractals and Intelligent Design: reply to Dinsdale
:::Also, you have not answered my original question about the shape. A fractal is complex, having all the self-similarity. To produce it, the fern would have to divide, bisect, and scale its own operations. What would be the source of such power? These are not simple shapes to come up with. In contrast, a circle (or oval) is a relatively simple shape. To scale it you just have to evenly push out the border, expanding outwards. If all our plantlife were like tree trunks or the circular fungi that grow on logs, I would find your arguments more plausible. But the wide complexity of shapes and structures found in nature cannot have such a simple principle as natural selection to explain them! It cannot have another explanation than that of being designed by an Intelligent Being. -[[User:Foxtrot|Foxtrot]] 16:41, 2 March 2009 (EST)
:::Also, you have not answered my original question about the shape. A fractal is complex, having all the self-similarity. To produce it, the fern would have to divide, bisect, and scale its own operations. What would be the source of such power? These are not simple shapes to come up with. In contrast, a circle (or oval) is a relatively simple shape. To scale it you just have to evenly push out the border, expanding outwards. If all our plantlife were like tree trunks or the circular fungi that grow on logs, I would find your arguments more plausible. But the wide complexity of shapes and structures found in nature cannot have such a simple principle as natural selection to explain them! It cannot have another explanation than that of being designed by an Intelligent Being. -[[User:Foxtrot|Foxtrot]] 16:41, 2 March 2009 (EST)
::::I haven't read the original papers related to the experiment, so I can't comment on your questions regarding it. As for the fractal question, that's the beauty of many fractal formulas - a relatively simple expression can yield complex results simply by iterating it enough times. Take a look at [http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/ferns/fractal.html this page] regarding fractal fern patterns, and you'll see that subtle variations in the formula parameters yield different outcomes. If these patterns were encoded in DNA, it's easy to see how it wouldn't take much of a genetic variation to result in diversity over time. Also, check out [http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractal_types.html this page], which lists various patterns that can be generated by the fractint freeware program, with links to sample output. If you've never played with fractint before, you're in for a treat. --[[User:DinsdaleP|DinsdaleP]] 17:07, 2 March 2009 (EST)
::::I haven't read the original papers related to the experiment, so I can't comment on your questions regarding it. As for the fractal question, that's the beauty of many fractal formulas - a relatively simple expression can yield complex results simply by iterating it enough times. Take a look at [http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/ferns/fractal.html this page] regarding fractal fern patterns, and you'll see that subtle variations in the formula parameters yield different outcomes. If these patterns were encoded in DNA, it's easy to see how it wouldn't take much of a genetic variation to result in diversity over time. Also, check out [http://spanky.triumf.ca/www/fractint/fractal_types.html this page], which lists various patterns that can be generated by the fractint freeware program, with links to sample output. If you've never played with fractint before, you're in for a treat. --[[User:DinsdaleP|DinsdaleP]] 17:07, 2 March 2009 (EST)
Thanks for the pretty pictorial representations of recreational mathematics. I'd like to keep to the issue at hand, though. Do fractals arise in nature as a result of God's Design or can they somehow occur from an evolutionary process? Your answer in the previous paragraph seems to be ''"If these patterns were encoded in DNA, it's easy to see how it wouldn't take much of a genetic variation to result in diversity over time."'' Do I see someone hedging their response with a hypothesis? If these patterns were encoded in DNA, then they would be encoded in the encoding for life, and they would indeed reproduce. But what (or, Who?) puts them in the DNA in the first place? How are these patterns encoded in that double helix? How did the DNA get to finding that infinite pattern in the first place, one which requires you to reproduce the smaller parts similarly to the whole? How did natural selection induce DNA that directs the plant to infinitely fractalize, if you don't mind the neologism? It seems so complicated to mechanize without an intelligent being there to initiate it. Your links to the other sites actually support me here: we had to have intelligent beings (people) enter in the parameters and generators in order to create the fantastic fractals. I could do it, but could some amino acids come up with that by themselves spontaneously? -[[User:Foxtrot|Foxtrot]] 19:15, 2 March 2009 (EST)