From: throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.messianic,alt.atheism,sci.skeptic,talk.origins
Subject: Re: Object-oriented creation
Summary: specific reasons why OO model doesn't fit well
Date: 04 Oct 92 23:39:35 GMT

: From: ken@sycraft.com (Ken Richardson)
: Message-ID: <1992Sep29.003242.6@sycraft.com>
: I mean, consider for a moment: If you were the Creator, and you were about
: to create life, what techniques would you use to put order and simplicity
: into the task?  Object-oriented techniques!

It may be true that if humans were to attempt the task, that's the way
they'd go about it.  But in fact the world does *not* contain evidence
of an object oriented design.  Others have pointed out some of the
reasons why the living world isn't well considered to be the result of
object-oriented design, but I don't think the reasons why the
object-oriented model doesn't fit have been presented strongly enough
from the programming point of view.  This came up several months ago,
and here are reasons I gave then:

From: throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: evidence of common descent
Summary: incorrect analogy: OO inheritence results in different tree details

> henley@eng.auburn.edu (James Paul Henley)
>> colby@bu-bio.bu.edu (Chris Colby)
>> [...] The heirarchical organization of biologic diversity [...]
[.....]
> Every argument you are giving is an argument for object oriented design.

Sorry, but that's not the case.  In object oriented designs, the
*function* (or interface) of objects is inherited in heirarchical
patterns, but the *implementation* is spread across objects in a
non-heirarchical manner.  Typically either by multiple inheritance (or
"mixins"), or by using a separate graph for "contains" as well as
"inherits", or even (somewhat more rarely) the method mentioned by Paul
for the case he outlined:

> The underlying mechanisms for communicating
> with other objects, allocating memory, etc. are part of the base type.

But these two features (functional heirarchy, basic mechanisms shared
across the heirarchy) are *not* true of the evolutionary tree.  What is
inherited in heirarchical patterns is not the function (or ecological
niche) of organisms.  It is the the implementation of all the
"underlying mechanisms" that fall into heirarchical patterns.  In
designed things, the underlying mechanisms are shared across a
functional scheme, as Paul himself points out just above. 

Examples like the Panda's thumb, the octopus' eye, the marsupial
"wolves" and "squirels" and whatnot, the cetacians and ichthyosaurs, 
and many others, provide abundant confirmation of this point. 

Thus, we can see that, even with the object oriented perspective,
living things have the *wrong* *pattern* of what one would expect
from a designed suite of organisms.

( Some issues of OOD are simplified in the above treatment, but the
  point remains much the same for more complicated and detailed analysis
  of the expected patterns resulting from OOD.  )

( There is also the issue that OOD is a method used by finite minds to
  deal with complexity that would otherwise overwhelm them.  Is the "God
  used OOD" claim then meant to imply that God's mind is finite, and that
  God had some trouble organizing the design of life? )

( And by the way, there might be a bit of the "Velikovsky effect" here,
  in that to somebody outside the field, OOD might look like the
  evolutionary tree.  But the more you know about the details, the less
  tenable the analogy becomes, as I hope I've shown above.  )
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw