Tag: amoeba

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Gallup Poll on Evolution 2019

Gallup Poll on Evolution 2019The latest Gallup poll on evolution was conducted June 13-16, 2019, with 1015 adults 18 and above in all 50 states. Gallup used the same questions they used in a similar poll in 1952, and others since then. Here is a summary of what they found this time:

40% of those in the survey said they believed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

33% said they believed that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.”

22% said they believed that “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Atheists have made a point of the fact that the report of the Gallup poll on evolution stated that the 40% group were “associated with lower educational levels, Protestantism and weekly church attendance.” The message that atheists are putting out from this Gallup poll is that those who believe in God are poorly educated recluses who hide in their church buildings and refuse to look at the evidence.

There are so many mistakes in what is being popularized that it is hard to know where to start. The poll was conducted by “telephone interviews.” The sampling of what kinds of telephones the pollsters used radically alters the numbers. The results for landlines will be different from that for cell phones. “Protestantism” is a very poorly defined term. The Young Earth view that humans have been unchanged in the physical history on this planet is not held by most of the major Protestant denominations. Assuming that the 40% represented all those who attend church weekly is a very bad assumption.

The most critical problem with the report of the Gallup poll on evolution is that it only focuses on the development of the physical characteristics of humans without defining what those characteristics are. The phrase “less advanced forms of life” is so ambiguous that we don’t know whether they are talking about an amoeba or Homo erectus. The report includes a graph of the changes to the way these questions have been answered since 1952. Whether the changes are because people have more facts or because the media have indoctrinated them is open to debate.

The Does God Exist? Ministry is an effort to show that science and faith are friends and not enemies. We do not represent any denomination and try to be open to all kinds of evidence – scientific and biblical. We have materials at all educational levels, and our college-level correspondence course is available on our doesgodexist.org website. You can watch our video series covering questions of creation and God on our doesgodexist.tv website. All of these materials are free.
— John N. Clayton © 2019

You can see the report on the Gallup website.

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Amoeba Can Solve TSP

Amoeba Can Solve TSP
A famous challenge in computer science is called “The Traveling Salesman Problem,” or TSP for sort. Scientists in Tokyo have found that a one-celled amoeba can solve TSP.

The problem goes like this:
Suppose you are a traveling salesperson going from city to city to sell your goods. You want to maximize your efficiency to make as much money in as little time as possible. You want to find the shortest path that will let you hit every city on your route one time and return you to the starting point.

There is no simple mathematical formula to find the best route. The only way to solve the problem is to calculate the length of each possible route and see which is the shortest. The problem gets exponentially harder as more cities are added to the route. With four cities there are only three different routes to consider, but with six cities there are 360 different routes. If you had ten cities or more, the number of routes could be in the millions. With an increase in the number of cities, the number of routes increases logarithmically.

The traveling salesman problem is one of a broad class of problems computer scientists call “NP-hard.” (NP stands for nondeterministic polynomial time. People involved in hacking encrypted systems and mining cryptocurrency are interested in this sort of problem.)

At Keio University in Tokyo, scientists have discovered that an amoeba can solve TSP, with the help of some human ingenuity. They used a single-cell slime mold amoeba known as Physarum polycephalum which moves toward food and away from light. The scientists built a chamber filled with channels and placed some food at the end of each channel. The channels represent a city on the salesman’s route. The amoeba would extend tendrils into the channels to get the food. As it reached the food, a light would go on in that channel so that the amoeba would not go back to the same “city.”

The advantage is that that the amoeba doesn’t have to calculate every individual path as most computer algorithms do. Instead, the amoeba just reacts passively to the conditions and figures out the best possible arrangement by itself. What this means is that for the amoeba, adding more cities (channels) only increases the time linearly rather than logarithmically.

The lead study author Masashi Aono said, “The mechanism by which the amoeba maintains the quality of the approximate solution, that is, the short route length, remains a mystery.” If researchers can figure out how the amoeba can solve TSP, it could speed up our ability to solve all kinds of challenging computational problems.

This design feature in one of God’s simplest creatures is another demonstration of how we can know there is a God through the things He has made” (Romans 1:19-23).
–John N. Clayton and Roland Earnst © 2019

Reference- https://www.sciencealert.com/an-amoeba-has-solved-an-exponentially-complex-problem-in-linear-time