Has Computer Software Evolved?
Up until close to the turn of the century man-made artifacts were hand made, one at a time, often of the craftsman’s own design. During the Industrial Revolution articles began to be mass-produced. Even then, though, the mass produced items may have, for example, been based on a casting from a wood pattern that a skilled pattern maker would painstakingly construct one at a time. There was not necessarily much similarity between one line of goods from another even if they came from the same factory.
Around that same time, before the Industrial Revolution really got started, the observation was made that animals tended to have certain similarities. There are many features in common between, say, a calf and a cow because the one turns into the other. Taking that line of reasoning, if there is some similarity in the number of bones in their backs, or the fingers on their hands, or the shape of their wind pipes, or whatever, between an ape and a man then the ape must have at some point become the man, or at least they were cousins. This is called evolution, where the idea is that one thing evolves into another. The most radical evolution theorized that simple organisms, no more complex than the plaque on one’s teeth, sort of appeared in the ocean by accident, and then began a lengthy process of evolution whereby some part of it would randomly mutate, and the most useful mutations would then be passed on, with the inferior creatures loosing out to the strong. Eventually every animal, including man, was simply the product of millions of random mutations upon that single organism. If some God did in fact make everything would not he do it as a black smith, a potter, or a jeweler, or even as a watch maker and make each mountain, each ocean, and each animal one at a time ex nihilo? If so why would they have any resemblance in any way? Why they must have evolved then. Man (and supposedly a God if there were one) did not make articles that evolved; rather each one was different and independent of the others.
If one were to look at computer software starting in the last part of the twentieth century, one would note that it all started to look the same. One version of Windows looked like the last. A feature in one program was found in another. An intrepid scientist hundreds of years from now could conclude that the software evolved. Are there not similarities between the various programs? Did they not become more complex as time went on? Did not people discard the inferior programs for the better ones? Perhaps when copying programs on floppy disks some bits and bytes would mutate. Perhaps these mutations over many subsequent imperfect copies would further mutate into functions that were actually useful, and then people would copy those disks all the more (that was a time period of rampant boot legging). Since the software had similar features one could conclude that they evolved from each other. Our scientist could construct a floppy record of the boot leg selection that went on. As for the missing links, no matter, they would be found some day no doubt. Until then he could commission an artist to sketch out the progression of software through the ages. Perhaps he would even conclude that since no programmers were involved with the evolution of programs that they were not involved in writing the original software either, and in fact never existed at all except in legend.
In reality, software is made by intelligent beings. After the field of computer programming really got established programmers rarely created software from nothing. Instead they would reuse old code for new programs, or even write software that would write programs for them. That was just being smart. Programming could be compared to winding up a machine and then turning it loose, and various programs would be created, all of them with some similarity and with an observable progression. Of course, when need be a programmer could manually add or modify code in any program. The early programs were written one at a time and were very different from another. As time went on and the profession developed they started to show similarities. The observable similarities and progressions of animals do not indicate the lack of a design or the lack of a designer; rather they reveal the presence of a brilliant designer. Only as our own knowledge increases do we being to get some faint glimpse of not the impossibility of God creating the world, but of the sheer brilliance of it.
It would be a miracle if a corrupted piece of software (rub a fridge magnet on a floppy disk and see what happens) were to work at all, much less have any new useful feature. Of all the millions of computer tapes, punch cards, paper tapes, CD-ROM’s, floppy disks, and other memory devices out there, not one corruption of the data has ever yielded anything useful. Who found out that their disk was corrupted and then got excited at what new features would appear in their software? Even if some bits and bytes were headed in the right direction on a computer disk, a miracle in and of itself, the disk would be discarded unless the corruption actually did something useful right then. If it did nothing but hang around for still more mutations it would be erased. In the same way, look at the human ear, or almost anything. Did each individual component, each nerve, bone, muscle, fluid, and tissue just accidentally appear one at a time and keep on appearing and keep on appearing until one day, presto, someone or something had hearing? A true corruption, or a mutation, in human genetics is never ever a good thing; it nearly always means sickness and hospitals and desperate surgeries. When ever a human carries mutated genetics it results in tumors, missing organs and limbs, and generally very bad things and the unfortunate victims are not likely to reproduce at all. The unfortunate deformities resulting from corrupt DNA are not going to be passed along to some day experience yet another mutation and yet another and yet another and yet another until what started as a hereditary tumor turns into an underwater breathing gill or some other useful new appendage. Take something simple: did skunks carry about a gland for millions of years until a skunk then had a miraculous mutation to carry smelly fluid in the gland and then millions of years later another skunk had yet another miraculous mutation whereby the smelly substance could then be expelled from the gland onto an attacker1? If it is survival of the fittest how are the fit to have carried about all these useless mutations for millions of years before the final miraculous mutation turns them into something useful? If a mutation is not immediately useful then it is a liability at best.
Not withstanding the issue of why the strong would carry about useless mutations for millions of years waiting for the mutations to mutate some more, the time argument is a favorite one of evolutionists. Given a million-gillion years supposedly anything can happen. Apparently anything but for the missing links to become fossilized. If the evolution happened slowly over millions of years then where are the fossils? Where are the missing links (not the missing piece of a tooth, not the missing fragment of a femur, but the missing whole skeleton)? Evolutionists want it both ways: anything can happen over millions of years, but don’t expect any evidence to be left behind from those vast millions of years. Unless a piece of a toe bone is found, then that will do for an artist to sketch what the evolutionist had in mind. If our intrepid computer scientist of the future found thousands of old word processor programs and thousands of old spread sheets but no word sheets and no spread processors then it would be reasonable to conclude that one did not turn into the other, especially if the process of transformation would have taken a long time.
If a person despised the concept of a computer programmer, not so much upset with the software that was made, but upset that there was someone behind it, then they may go to extreme measures to convince themselves that programmers never existed. If they were not responsible for software being modified then obviously they don’t exist so obviously they did not originally create the software in the beginning either so therefore they never existed. Must have been the ‘bit bang’ when a disk was struck by lightening or got microwaved by accident. It all makes perfect sense if one really, really wants desperately to believe it.
__________
1Members of a species can vary within the bounds of that species, but that is all that they can do. A dog may be bred larger or smaller, but no breeder has ever managed to breed a dog into a cat, much less a catfish. When evolution was first proposed the understanding of even the cell was simplistic (just a blob of organic matter, not a complex structure of dozens of different components all working in harmony), and no one had even suspected DNA. When one thinks that the building blocks of animals and humans are simple and trivial then why not say that they were an accident? The more complex biology becomes the more improbable evolution becomes.