Apple fights the feds on iPhone security hack

4th March 2016

This is for those who are not sure they understand the basic principles behind the natural selection of heritable variations. Creationists, please check you understand this, even if you have objections to it, to avoid arguing against a straw-man version of evolutionary science.

At the time of writing this, Apple is resisting a court order to help the FBI hack the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Apple password security is so designed to lock an iPhone completely after a small number of attempts at guessing the password have failed. The FBI want Apple to help them hack the system so that an unlimited number of guesses are possible without the iPhone locking up. This would make it vulnerable to a "brute force" attack, whereby an automated system could make a huge number of guesses in rapid succession.

What does this have to do with evolution? Some creationists say that even potentially advantageous mutations do not exist. Consistency is not their strong point, because this is at odds with creationist lore, according to which, creation was originally "good" and became corrupted by the "Fall". Thus, there must exist potential back mutations that would fix corrupt elements. Other creationists say that such advantageous variations would only arise extremely rarely so they cannot be a part of any mechanism of evolution. They miss the point that rare events, such as brute a force search finding a password do actually happen. In fact, it would be inevitable, given unlimited trials and time. Creationists also miss the implications of the fact that these variations are heritable.

In nature, we can regard a breeding population as a brute force search for advantageous variations. Each time progeny are produced, new variations arise. These are like blind "guesses". These "guesses" are produced in huge numbers. But as with hacking a password, we need a feedback mechanism to tell us when we have hit upon an advantageous one. The key to this lies in the fact that we are talking about heritable variations, and in the fact that what we mean by "advantageous" is anything that increases the chances of the organism reproducing successfully and copiously. Thus any advantageous variation that arises, however rarely it arises, is more likely than not to be passed down to progeny, and this, generation by generation, will increase in frequency in the genomes of the population. The other side of this coin is that disadvantageous (deleterious) variations will tend to be flushed from the population, as those possessing them, by definition, will tend to be less successful in passing on their variations.

As all the above happens naturally, resulting in the selection of certain traits and the deselection of others, we call it the "natural selection" of heritable traits, variations or mutations. Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin were the first to articulate this explanation. Darwin's friend, Thomas Henry Huxley remarked, "My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the ‘Origin’ was, ‘How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!’" Like many brilliant ideas in science, it is extremely simple, and obvious, but only in hindsight!