Re your post here:
- If you came across a table on which was set 500 coins (no tossing involved) and all 500 coins displayed the “heads” side of the coin, how on earth would you test “chance” as a hypothesis to explain this particular configuration of coins on a table?
Even if the observer was not party to the information that there was “no tossing involved”?
The reason I ask, is that you seem to have revealed an conceptual error that IMO bedevils much discussion about evolution as an explanation for the complexity of life.
Chance is not an explanation, and therefore cannot be rejected, or supported, as a hypothesis.
Some explanatory hypotheses are stochastic, meaning that they invoke a mechanism that is indeterminate in some way. One such hypothesis might be “fair coins were fairly tossed”, where “tossing” is itself a stochastic process with a known probability distribution – but we can reject this hypothesis in this case, either because we know, a priori, that there was “no tossing involved”, or because the pattern is vanishingly unlikely under the hypothesis of “fair coins, fairly tossed”.
This is not because we “reject chance as a hypothesis” but because, under the null hypothesis of “fair coins, fairly tossed”, there is a very small chance aka probability that they would all land heads.
So can we please jettison this canard that “Darwinists” propose chance either as as an explanation for the complexity of life, or even as the explanation for an unfeasibly long string of tossed heads?
Statistics is all about chance and chance is crucial to hypothesis testing, but it is never an explanatory hypothesis. In fact, it’s to what we attribute the portion of the variance of the data our model does not predict. It is also intrinsic to the probability distributions we propose for our data both under our null and under our study hypothesis.
And it is also crucial to the concept of sampling: if sample data as, or more, extreme than our data are very unlikely i.e. have a very slim chance, under our null we can reject our null.
But chance itself explains nothing. It is the exact reverse: Chance is what we call the part of our data we can’t explain.
What we can use to explain our data are processes with a specific probability distribution, whether those processes are intelligent, intentional, or the results of physical and chemical interactions. The more complex the processes (e.g the forces acting on a spinning, arcing coin), the greater the combinatorial possibilities, and so the the greater the spread of the probability distribution.
And if I say “I met so-and-so by chance yesterday”, in no sense do I mean that either of us was acting in a non-intentional, or non-intelligent manner (though we might have been). All we mean is that we did not predict that our intentions would result in our meeting. What caused that meeting was a highly complex multiplicity of events and processes, many of them intelligent and intentional.
What was chance about our encounter was not its cause but its unpredictability.
I’m wondering what you took Barry’s “(no tossing involved)” to mean, given that you seem to be interpreting the question as about tossing.
But then you are responding to you own private understanding of the problem, rather than to the actual statement of the problem.
Since you all are skeptical about the method by which coins appeared on table, I had to show that even tossing wouldn’t bring that result.
You are right. I, like many at UD, have interpreted the statement to mean chance alone. I don’t see what lead you to believe it was anything else.
Hi Cold Coffee! I think you’ve muddled a few things:
“But since you accept 2.3% , let me put it in a different way, would you bet
10,000 that tossing 1013 coins would return a result of heads that had a discrete probability of less than 10%, because they all do. When your reasoning is at odds with known reality, that’s a good sign you’re coming at things the wrong way. Any configuration of a shuffled deck of cards is massively improbable, but that’s because there are so many of them, not that chance can’t play a role in their configurations.
William J. Murray,
First, Barry Arrington and I are both guilty of “uninformed assumptions” regarding your identity, what does that tell you? Second, I already apologized for confusing you with the other WJM whose statements I thought were yours. And I would think that was sufficient and move on, except now you have implied that you are not opposed to “evolutionary theory.” Really?
So let’s back up a bit a review what I actually wrote; “I should have said you have been dogmatic about the impossibility of life’s evolution by natural mechanisms alone.” In my phrasing, what in particular do you object to? And what else could you have meant by this:
Do you suggest that non-human life does exist because of ‘Darwinistic evolution’ or do you accept some other purely natural mechanism (not Darwinian) that drives evolution? If not, then it certainly appears that you are making a case for the impossibility of life’s evolution by natural mechanisms alone.
500 Heads in a row is evidence that the coins were not fair coins tossed independently.
Of course coins don’t have natural selection. DNA sequences do.
So if Barry “wins” the 500 coin exchange, where are we?
Is the counterpart to the coins a stretch of DNA that brings about a nonrandomly well-adapted phenotype?
If so will he show us why natural selection could not bring about the adaptation?
I stayed out of that UD thread, because I could not make sense of what was being asked.
rhampton,
I can only surmise that the inferences you draw from my posts are generated by a whole host of assumptions that are not valid in my case, because I simply cannot envision how you can begin with my statement which you quoted, and then end up with the characterization that I am ” dogmatic about the impossibility of life’s evolution by natural mechanisms alone.”
Nowhere in that quoted statement was their any implication of “impossibility”, but rather was only a logical observation that IF one can somewhat correctly characterize natural selection as tending towards “hardiness that increases ongoing reproductive success”, THEN humans did not come into existence because of that selective tendency, but rather in spite of it – because one can make the argument that humans (and all higher, more complex life forms) appear to be far less hardy, and have far less reproductive success, than the kinds of organisms life apparently started with.
Also, there is a difference between “evolutionary theory” and Darwinistic evolution, the latter being characterized as the idea that no intelligent and/or teleological commodities were involved in the process.
Oh dear Mindpowers.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/
” At the time life arose, the atmosphere of Earth is thought to have contained little or no free oxygen, instead consisting principally of CO2 and N2 in addition to smaller amounts of gases such as H2, H2S, and CO.”
If you’re referring to me, Richard, I literally have no idea how you think anything in that link has anything whatsoever to do with what I wrote.
Well, there are many potential reasons, Mindpowers, mental limitations being one.
The earliest life competed in literally a very different world, atmospherically different and somewhat devoid of competition.
I don’t know if these early organisms would be viable in the modern world. So it’s a very misinformed comparison to make.
Evolution is greatly concerned with organism / environment fit.
coldcoffee,
Hi coldcoffee,
I think you’re getting the probability of between 499 and 501 heads inclusive in your calculation (which would explain why it’s about 3 times Rich’s number). At least that’s consistent with what I get using the normal approximation.
That would give (per my math)
Heads Probability
499 0.022430702
500 0.023058761
501 0.023611067
Total 0.06910053
We still don’t know where all this is going; if it is meant to go anywhere.
Cordova seemed initially to have some notion that he could find an ID/creationist “second law of thermodynamics” from the “law of large numbers” that ID/creationists could feel comfortable with.
So far, we still don’t have any explanation about what coin flips have to do with the behaviors of atoms and molecules or the second law of thermodynamics; just endless mud-wrestling over elementary probability.
Weird!
Yes, that was weird. If the law of large numbers is the best they have got, then they have nothing. (Well, okay, we know they have nothing anyway). But it ought to be obvious even to ID proponents, that the law of large numbers is too weak.
As best I can tell, Cordova seems to think that homochirality is like 500 heads in a row when tossing coins. The mind boggles.
On the plus side, I did find it entertaining.
Yup; weird can indeed be “entertaining.” 🙂
Thank you ! I just noticed I used <= sign instead of just < It was bugging me that Richardthughes had a better probability in my stupid calculation. Oh, sorry Excel !
Richardthughes,
Yes, that was stupid of me. I just noticed I used <= sign instead of just < was bugging me that you had a better probability in my stupid calculation 🙂 . Oh, sorry Excel !
P.S:In this blog, the less than sign gets converted to < even though the preview is shown properly
[note: fixed your comment (I think). The “<” character is the start of an html tag, so you cannot use it directly. Instead use “<” — Neil Rickert]
Coldcoffee, you’re inserting an unsupported assumption into Richardthughes’ statement. That statement specified the heads/tails state of the 500 coins which remain on the table (namely, they’re all heads)—but it doesn’t say anything about the heads/tails state of the 513 other coins which got swept off the table. Those 513 other coins could have been all-tails, sure—but they could just as easily have been 510 tails and 3 heads, or 456 tails and 57 heads.
Try again.
coldcoffee,
Why, that’s … that’s greater than the Upper Probability Bound! What a coincidence!
Fair comment, although given that this is hardly the first time this kind of line of thought has been laid out, people can perhaps be forgiven for cutting to the chase straightway and/or demanding a bit less sloppiness/more clarity in the formulation. If it’s just about coins, what’s the point?
Allan Miller,
Of course you are right 🙂
Apparently (I am fairly new at UD so I am not sure) people feel that evolutionists/ Darwinists are so stubborn that they wouldn’t agree to what is pretty obvious and true.
William J. Murray:
To echo a comment of yours to me, what does preceding the word ‘correctly’ by ‘somewhat’ add? 🙂
Net reproductive output is the thing, not ‘hardiness’. It is only relevant to selection when there is competition for a resource – any differential may lead to extinction of the lesser. If a niche is fully saturated, the average available replacement rate is 1 (for asexual organisms) or 2 halves = 1 (for the likes of us), regardless how fast they’d grow if you put them somewhere else. NS occurs when organisms temporarily raise their rate when compared to their competitors. It can only be temporary, in a finite world, because when these newcomers have caused the extinction of the old, everyone’s the ‘new’ type, competing with itself, and back to that base rate 1 or 2 halves – until the next adaptive change causes another sweep.
We are not operating in the same niche as organisms 3.8 billion years ago, nor even as bacteria right now. They have to compete with whatever else is in their niche, not with us. Try getting a bacterium to catch a deer and you may get a flavour of the eccentricity of your formulation of Natural Selection.
What is fairly obvious is that ID advocates are mor interested in gotcha lawyering than in productive discussion of how evolution works.
coldcoffee,
It’s one possibility. But it’s a bit of a generalisation. If I can’t find my coffee cup, it’s ten to 1 one of my kids has hidden it for a laugh. I don’t go looking for non-agency explanations!
But if a familiar scenario is offered which includes the number of bits that exceeds the UPB, comments that immediately go on to chirality, and bears the strong favour of something that’s been seen many times before, the fact that people treat it as a metaphor is unsurprising. Barry twirling his moustache and saying “Oh, those lumbering Darwinists, they fell right into my trap, mwhahaha!”? I don’t buy it – if one lays a trap, one tends not to lose one’s temper when people do exactly what the trap was lain to do!
The trouble is, that which is “pretty obvious” to some is not necessarily true. That’s why some of insist on such fripperies as scientific, mathematical, and statistical rigour when backing up assertions of the “pretty obvious and true”
ID falls by the wayside if an entirely appropriate rigour is applied; see the constant attempted abuse of Large Numbers, probabilities, 2LOT, and so on.
Rodw
I see your point. I was the first and main opposing commentator on UD . It might have been the most effective debating tactic but it would not have been honest. I really don’t think it is obvious that someone placed them there without more context. And it ducks the key point that Lizzie makes here – “chance” without further context or detail is not a hypothesis. You only dismiss a hypothesis if you can articulate it well enough to calculate the likelihood of the result given the hypothesis.
I see you playing Jimmy Stewart being lured by Mr. Potter in Wonderful Life.
Seasonal and Gouldian.
But do you understand why “chance” cannot be a hypothesis?
Why “chance hypothesis” is an oxymoron?
If not, you are still in the outer darkness when it comes to critiquing evolutionary theory. As is almost every other ID proponent I have read.
CC:
The game played at UD is to point at something and say “the chances of that coming into existence by random forces is nearly zero”. The sad thing is that nobody generally disagrees with them, it’s basic probability.
Where there is disagreement is on the basics of biology. No biologist makes the claim that a complex protein came into being “by random forces” and yet that is their claim. It’s unlikely, therefore ID.
It can be agreed by all sides that unlikely outcomes are unlikely. However the process of getting to that unlikely result is what is in dispute, and typically IDers refuse to confront that.
So now you know.
And, if you think about it for more then a moment, if the IDers really had a killer critique then all they need to do is write it up and publish it so others can take notice. Then, once published, if it’s rejected on anything other then the contents IDers can point and say that their case is proven, even when they provide evidence it’s ignored simply because it supports ID.
Yet, for some reason, they never do that. Perhaps it’s down to the fact that they know deep down that nobody makes the claims that they say are made, that their entire position wrt formation of proteins (for example) is but a strawman designed to look solid to those untrained in the mathematical arts but only to them (buy my book!).
My hunch is that there is a huge amount of baggage attached to the word “chance” (or “random”). For many, it means “unintended” or “unintelligent” or “meaningless”. And so the idea that life is “due” to “chance” is equivalent to saying that life is “meaningless” and therefore must be wrong.
Because, of course, life is self-evidently not meaningless – living things mean things all the time, especially human ones.
So I think the idea that evolutionary theory is the theory that “chance did it” rather than “god did it” needs radical debunking. That isn’t what evolutionary theory is, and what evolutionary theory actually is is not at all incompatible with the idea that life was intended.
And this is why ID vs Evolutionist arguments go nowhere, AFAICT. IDists think that Evolutionists are saying, in effect, that life is meaningless (and therefore there is no objective morality yadda yadda and we might as well go and top ourselves now, or possibly torture babies for personal pleasure, at least if we were honest enough to understand the implications of our theory….)
But we aren’t. Life is no more caused by “chance” than a falling apple is, and nobody objects to falling apples. It’s just a lot more complicated, and so we have to talk in terms of probability distributions instead of the nice neat constants of Newtonian Physics, but interestingly, not QM.
Which raises the interesting question as to why pdfs in QM are fine, and possibly the answer to all sorts of ineffable questions about consciousness and the free will, but pdfs in biochemistry are a deep threat to both.
Why should quantum pdfs in the brain give us free will, but molecular pdfs don’t? Why is only the second “reductionist” and “materialist”?
I kept out of the thread, because questions about probability need some sort of mathematical model (or probability mode) to clarify what is being asked.
I thought that you and Nick did a pretty good job of showing that there are many possible mathematical models, and that they yield a variety of different conclusions.
Stubborn? In order to deny the coins are best explained by ID, and to deny that chance is an implausible category of explanation, stubbornness is not enough. One must either be lying or psychotic.
WJM – I do get frustrated with the way you guys are so imprecise in your thinking and seem to think it is uniimportant. No one denied that the coins were best explained by someone placing them there. In fact I said on the UD thread (comment 35):
I do think that “chance” is meaningless as an explanation without further context. As Lizzie says it is loaded with baggage and confusion. For example, this morning KF offered a fair die as an example of a chance explanation and a loaded die as one of that was not. However, both involve someone deliberately designing a die to get a particular probability distribution. I really can’t see the relevant difference.
But William, your premise is false. Nobody is denying that the coins are best explained by an ID laying them there, rather than an ID (or even some other more naturalistic accident) tossing them there.
So how can it be true that our denial makes us “stubborn” when nobody is denying it?
Of course people deny ID is an explanation for the configuration of the coins because they deny ID can be an explanation for anything – including the existence of battleships.
Also, a chance explanation means that the distribution of X (heads or tails on coins) falls within acceptable deviations from the norm considering the known or expected commodities influencing the outcome.
Humans can design chance systems. That such systems are designed is irrelevant to any case brought against the system claiming it is rigged. Is a roulette wheel not a chance system simply because it was designed? Should we have no expected parameters of chance distribution just because it was designed?
Here’s a question for you: you and Liz have agreed that the best explanation for all the heads being up on the table – with no information other than that they are fair coins – is ID.
Why is that? How is that? You have virtually no context that describes the process by which the coins arrived on the table, yet you agree that ID is the best explanation. How was your null hypothesis formulated? How did you formulate the expected chance distribution parameters of whatever process put the coins on the table in order to have a significant null hypothesis to provide the basis of your conclusion?
But nobody IS denying ID as an explanation for the configuration of coins.
So your “because…” is irrelevant to anything.
Yes, but “chance” is not the hypothesis we reject.
Of course we do. That doesn’t mean that chance is the hypothesis – it means that our hypothesis has an assciated probability distribution.
No, I have not. I have rejected the hypothesis that they were fairly tossed.
That is not the same as inferring that they were laid by an ID.
I’ve explained this in detail William. I do not “agree that ID is the best explanation” although, given the nature of coins and tables, it probably is, just as it would be if they’d been tossed (most likely tosser is an ID).
And it is the latter that I reject.
You are still massively missing my point.
No they don’t. Here, look – ID could be an explanation for the configuration of the coins, and likely is.
There, I’ve just admitted it.
There’s the rub, right? You can do that for coins, but not proteins. Yet you want to expand the coin analogy to proteins. I’m afraid I can’t let you do that….
You appear to be addressing an argument that nobody is making.
Why is it that you can ask questions to clarify matters and expect an answer but when Barry is asked similar questions it is used as evidence of dishonesty?
It’s a thought experiment, and within the bounds of that experiment a simple probability calculation appears to suffice.
And anyway, you appear to want to conflate the “intelligent design” that humans do with the “Intelligent Design” that you claim is involve in biology. Your attempt to do that has been noted.
Careful, or you might start asking similar questions the next time a claim of “proteins are impossible to evolve” comes up on UD.
They are professional point missers I think. Their worldview only survives because salient points can be ignored.
They are so fixated on the idea that the conclusions of their coin game can be extended to biology that anybody who rejects that must be, as William notes, lying or psychotic.
Yet if their viewpoint is as strong as they think it is, don’t they ever wonder why they cannot succeed over people who are lying or psychotic? What does it say about their ability to get their ideas across that they cannot beat a group of lying psychotics?
How’s it feel to be beaten by a bunch of lying psychotics William? That’s gotta burn!
Here’s where the rubber hits the road:
Blas has suggested that genetic drift could be god at work. I will not pretend to argue the math involved, but I believe I can ask the relevant question.
In Behe’s Edge of Evolution, he argues that it is unlikely that a function requiring two independent and concurrent mutations can evolve. He argues that a function requiring three independent and concurrent mutations is statistically impossible to evolve.
In the Lensky experiment, the evolution of citrate metabolism required three independent mutations. Two of them entered the population without any apparent affect on health or reproductive success. But they enabled the citrate function when a third mutation occurred.
In this experiment, what would a god hypothesis add? How would the odds be different?
Jumping in:
I don’t agree. William misses the important little word “an” here. Lizzie refers to an ID (an example of which would be a human being). ID is not any more of an explanation of anything than “chance” is.
ETA Oops, I see Lizzie already addressed this.
Obviusly, god wanted E coli to evolve citrate metabolism, but it didn’t want to be too active, so it waited until one of its pets (the human named Lenski) got the idea for his experiment, and then it meddled just a little – just two little believable changes. Stir, wait a few more years, and god gets what it wanted while the humans did (almost) all the work.
God, what a slacker.
I should point out, of course, that here I do the very thing they want me to do.
ID can equal things done by humans.
ID can also equal things done by entities at some point in the past, somewhere, somehow, around the same time as life began at the very least.
They keep repeating the “everyday experience” mantra, KF’s “billions of examples of FSCO/I all around us” over and over again, it’s all an attempt to conflate “id” and “ID”.
You have to wonder why they want to reduce their deity to the “id” level, seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. Do they want people to join their cause because the “designer is fallible too”? lol.
But it seems all they need their designer to do is “cheat the odds” just once, and then everything can continue as it is.
Very poor designer, builds a universe but can’t kick-start life without “cheating”.
If they had to back off from their tossers’ scenario, and admit that no biologist ever had proposed the formation of functional proteins or nucleic acids by tossing handfuls of amino acids or nucleotides into a vat (or any analogous process), they would be discarding their favourite argument.
They have few arguments, so that ain’t gonna happen!
As an evilutionist, I think intelligence is evolutionary. Learning and evolution can be mapped to each other in many important respects.
The alternative to a feedback steered learning system, is one that is omniscient.
Omniscience needs no process of design. It already knows everything and everything virtually exists timelessly. So why call it either intelligence or design?
Poofing virtuall stuff into existence is not designing.
petrushka,
YEC makes so much more sense from a design perspective. Shame it fails every test, eh Sal?
Liz said, all in the same post:
Frankly, Liz, I wouldn’t want to have a mind that could “get the point” of the mush you present as an argument.
Ignorance is Bliss, Mindpowers. And ID and IDists have never *really* been about understanding, have they?