Betting on the Weasel

… with Mung.   In a recent comment Mung asserted that

If Darwinists had to put up their hard earned money they would soon go broke and Darwinism would be long dead. I have a standing $10,000 challenge here at TSZ that no one has ever taken me up on.

Now, I don’t have $10,000 to bet on anything, but it is worth exploring what bet Mung was making. Perhaps a bet of a lower amount could be negotiated, so it is worth trying to figure out what the issue was.

Mung’s original challenge will be found here.  It was in a thread in which I had proposed a bet of $100 that a Weasel program would do much better than random sampling.  When people there started talking about whether enough money could be found to take Mung up on the bet, they assumed that it was a simple raising of the stake for my bet.  But Mung said here:

You want to wager over something that was never in dispute?

Why not offer a meaningful wager?

So apparently Mung was offering a bet on something else.

I think I have a little insight on what was the “meaningful wager”, or at least on what issue.  It would lead us to a rather extraordinary bet.  Let me explain below the fold …

Mung accepted that Weasel programs reach their goal far faster than random sampling.  However Mung also said (here) that

Weasel programs perform better than blind search because they are guided. I didn’t think the performance was in dispute, nor why the performance was better.

and elsewhere characterized Weasels as succeeding because of “intelligence” as opposed to ignorance.

So let’s imagine what might happen if we took Mung up on the $10,000 bet.  We would bet that the Weasel would succeed, because of cumulative selection.  Mung would bet that (because of “intelligence” or being “guided”) the Weasel would succeed.  The stake would be held by a house of some sort, which would not take a commission.

The Weasel would be run.  It would succeed.  So the house would declare that we had all won.  The stake would be given to the bettors, in proportion to their bets.  But alas, no one actually bet against the Weasel.  So the winnings would be zero.  Everyone, Mung and the rest of us, would get their stake back, and that’s all.

To bet against Mung, we have to come up with some event that distinguishes cumulative selection from “intelligence” (or being “guided”).  That seems to be the issue on which Mung was offering a $10,000 bet, and declaring (here) us all to be “pretender[s]” because we would not put up or shut up.

So there it is.  We’re all betting on the same side, and no one will win or lose a penny.  Unless Mung can come up with some test that distinguished “intelligence” or being “guided” from cumulative selection.

Now I am possibly misunderstanding what the bet actually would be.  I hope that Mung will straighten us out on that, so that we can understand what test is proposed, and place our bets.

664 thoughts on “Betting on the Weasel

  1. Mung: Yes, having a long range target which can be aimed for over many generations is essential to having cumulative selection. You win the prize Joe.

    Please explain how you have not just admitted to this.

    There has to be an environment for evolution to adapt the population to, yes. This isn’t a surprise to anyone.

  2. Mung: Rumraket: They accept limited descent within what they call “kinds”. They think there’s some mystical magical barrier that prevents diversification beyond certain limitations they are unable to actually define or identify.

    So? They accept the “scientific explanation” for life’s diversity.

    No, they don’t, they reject it and substitute it with an explanation that says God supernaturallly created lots and lots of original kinds. That’s not part of the actual scientific explantion for life’s diversity.

    You claimed they did not. Your claim was false. So now you shift the goalposts to universal common ancestry.

    Universal common ancestry is PART OF the scientific explanation for life’s diversity.

    Another part of the explanation for life’s diversity is it’s chronological order and the time it takes for that diversification. How the many different organisms got to be in the geographical locations they are (biogeography) and so on. All of these things creationists reject and substitute with some sort of miracle story.

    If that’s what you meant to say originally that’s what you should have said. As it is, what you actually did say, is false. And a PRATT.

    As just argued all of that is wrong and has never been refuted even once, never mind a thousand times.

  3. Mung: Weasel is actually an argument for ID, lol. That may deserve it’s own OP.

    No, the weasel is an argument for evolution. And we don’t need another OP, all the ones that exist are sufficient to showcase the total and utter refutation of that fatuous claim.

  4. Mung: Rumraket: Once again, it was merely meant to demonstrate the performance of cumulative selection as compared to random guessing without selection (what dawkins calls single-step selection).

    So we agree that Dawkins’ argument depends on having selection without selection.

    Sorry I should have said random guessing without cumulative selection. So no.

    phoodoo: I can come up with 150 other ridiculous things he said, if you give me about 2 minutes to read him.

    Selection without selection would have to be one of them.

    But there is selection, it’s just that the results aren’t cumulative, as the string completely resets at random every generation.

  5. phoodoo: Rumraket: And it’d still massively outperform random guessing

    Gee, what a surprise. You tell a computer what to look for and when it does you keep it, and it does much better than if you don’t tell it what to look for.

    Yeah and the process by which mutations are filtered by their effects on reproductive success also manages to produce adaptations in nature. Once you understand the process, it naturally follows. I’m glad we agree that evolution is expected to bring about adaptations simply when we rationally understand how the process works.

    Phoodoo the evolutionist.

  6. So we select a randomly generated string. What makes it any more or less complex than any other randomly generated string?

    Weasel is supposed to show us how things can become more and more complex over time, taking the itty bits that are not so improbable that they could not happen by random chance alone and creating from them something that is too complex to have arisen by random chance alone.

    Of course, there’s nothing about the generation of the string by the program that prohibits it from generating the target phrase in one go. So it’s not that the target phrase is too complex to have arisen by random chance alone. So that’s a straw-man.

  7. Rumraket: But there is selection, it’s just that the results aren’t cumulative, as the string completely resets at random every generation.

    Selection requires differential reproductive success. “Single-step selection”, where there is no differential reproductive success, is any oxymoron.

  8. Mung: Weasel is supposed to show us how things can become more and more complex over time

    Where the hell did you get this idea?

  9. Mung: and creating from them something that is too complex to have arisen by random chance alone.

    Mung: Of course, there’s nothing about the generation of the string by the program that prohibits it from generating the target phrase in one go.

    Way to straw man yourself right there, where did the key element “random chance” go in that last sentence?

    The generation of the initial string has an astronomically low probability of hitting the target BY RANDOM FUCKING CHANCE

    Ugh

  10. Mung: Selection requires differential reproductive success.

    “Single-step selection”, where there is no differential reproductive success, is any oxymoron.

    Ahh yes I see now what you mean. I take your point and agree that Dawkins chose a strange term to use instead of just going with “random guessing” or something along those lines.

    An intuitive and common sense understanding of the word selection, at least to me, implies something is being selected in favor of something else. Which would imply differential reproductive success as you say.

    But this doesn’t happen for what Dawkins calls “single-step selection”, as every generation the whole string resets. So they all have equal fitness. So I would agree that when he uses the word selection in a term that doesn’t actually involve selection, it’s nonsensical. I see now why you would call the term single-step selection an oxymoron and I agree.

    He should just have called it what it is, random guessing without selection.

  11. Mung: “Single-step selection”, where there is no differential reproductive success, is any oxymoron.

    That’s blatantly false: there is differential reproductive success, it just ignores the predefined fitness criteria in the algo and makes fitness meaningless, because any string is just as likely to reproduce as any other

  12. dazz: That’s blatantly false: there is differential reproductive success, it just ignores the predefined fitness criteria in the algo and makes fitness meaningless, because any string is just as likely to reproduce as any other

    But if any string is just as likely to reproduce as any other, there is no differential reproductive success, and if there’s no differential reproductive success, nothing is being selected instead of something else.

    On this point I actually agree with Mung. It’s nonsensical to call it selection then.

  13. Rumraket: But if any string is just as likely to reproduce as any other, there is no differential reproductive success, and if there’s no differential reproductive success, nothing is being selected instead of something else.

    On this point I actually agree with Mung. It’s nonsensical to call it selection then.

    I think we’re falling for Mung’ stupid word lawyering here, but anyway…
    I guess it depends on what we mean by reproductive success, no string has any intrinsic reproductive advantage because all of them are equally fit, but there’s still one string selected at every iteration, and that string produces descendants while the rest don’t, so in that sense there is differential reproductive success

  14. I don’t think there’s anything to fall for here as it doesn’t change anything about Dawkins conclusions. Dawkins used a nonsensical term as his label for what is actually just random guessing without selection. But the conclusion he derives, that cumulative selection is much much better than random guessing without selection, is still true.

  15. Rumraket: But the conclusion he derives, that cumulative selection is much much better than random guessing without selection, is still true.

    So on one side we have random guessing, and on the other side we have non-random guessing. Sort of like an easter-egg hunt where no one is telling you whether you are closer to an egg or further away from an egg vs. one in which someone is telling you whether you are closer to the egg.

  16. dazz: I think we’re falling for Mung’ stupid word lawyering here, but anyway…

    🙂

    If people are going to go to such great lengths to try to convince phoodoo that they always mean the same thing when they use a term, the least they could do is be consistent. Selection is differential reproductive success or it isn’t.

  17. Mung: So on one side we have random guessing, and on the other side we have non-random guessing. Sort of like an easter-egg hunt where no one is telling you whether you are closer to an egg or further away from an egg

    Which would be the random guessing part, sure.

    vs. one in which someone is telling you whether you are closer to the egg.

    For that analogy to have a resemblance to real biology, the egg is the environment which organisms are adapting to, and you are a population. And the distance from you to the egg is a metaphor for the reproductive success of the species (or in other words, how well-adapted the species is to the environment).
    Which then means that when you (the population) moves closer to the egg, this is then a metaphor for the species having better adapted to the environment.

  18. Rumraket: But if any string is just as likely to reproduce as any other, there is no differential reproductive success, and if there’s no differential reproductive success, nothing is being selected instead of something else.

    I disagree with dazz because I don’t think that random genetic drift makes selection meaningless. But I would ask you whether you think random genetic drift results in differential reproductive success or not. Another way to put it would be to ask whether you can have differential reproductive success without selection.

    Because I think that random genetic drift is just another form of selection. I don’t see it as the absence of selection. And I obviously have been arguing for cumulative random genetic drift.

    Oh, and Weasel isn’t about adapting an organism to its environment, it’s about evolving a “complex object.”

  19. Rumraket: For that analogy to have a resemblance to real biology…

    The analogy is to the Weasel program, which has little to no resemblance to real biology.

    “Life isn’t like that.”

    – Richard Dawkins

  20. dazz: Fitness is reproductive success

    No dazz, you are conflating the measure of a thing with the thing itself.

    Fitness (often denoted w or ω in population genetics models) is the quantitative representation of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary biology.

  21. I disagree with Rumraket. In the case of single-step selection, there is a string that is favored above the others — the target string itself. The problem is that you have to hit the target string in one go — a single step — instead of cumulatively via partial matches.

    The phrase “single-step selection” is fine. It does not mean that no string is favored over any other; instead, it means that the fitness landscape is flat except for a spike at the exact location of the target phrase. The fitness surface isn’t climbable, as it is in cumulative selection; you have to land, by pure luck, on the tip of the spike. In one go. A single step.

  22. Mung: I disagree with dazz because I don’t think that random genetic drift makes selection meaningless

    Where did I say that?

  23. dazz: The generation of the initial string has an astronomically low probability of hitting the target BY RANDOM FUCKING CHANCE

    But it can happen. It’s not impossible. So we don’t need itty bitty cumulative steps for extremely improbable things to come about.

  24. As usual, Mung is flailing away on the margins, attempting to word-lawyer his way out of a bind instead of simply understanding what Dawkins is saying.

  25. dazz: Where did I say that?

    dazz: there is differential reproductive success, it just ignores the predefined fitness criteria in the algo and makes fitness meaningless, because any string is just as likely to reproduce as any other

  26. keiths: As usual, Mung is flailing away on the margins, attempting to word-lawyer his way out of a bind instead of simply understanding what Dawkins is saying.

    In your typical helpful manner you claim I am in a bind without saying what that bind is. Thanks for nothing!

  27. Mung: But it can happen. It’s not impossible. So we don’t need itty bitty cumulative steps for extremely improbable things to come about.

    LOL, priceless.
    Let me guess, we don’t need cumulative selection but a Designer is more than welcome to help, right?

  28. Mung:

    I was referring to this particular case where selection is solely based upon randomly picking one descendant arbitrarily (in my made up conception of single step selection) because the target string is randomized every generation, meaning that fitness becomes random

    In a proper model of drift plus selection like the Wright–Fisher (IIRC) one that Joe F. described a while back you can have both selection and drift no problem

  29. Mung: No dazz, you are conflating the measure of a thing with the thing itself.

    Why would you stop there? In the next frigging sentence…

    It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment. In either case, it describes individual reproductive success and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by individuals of the specified genotype or phenotype.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology)

    Jesus Christ…

  30. Mung,

    In your typical helpful manner you claim I am in a bind without saying what that bind is. Thanks for nothing!

    We’ve been over it again and again. It’s the same bind you’ve been in since the first time the Weasel kicked your ass.

    Cumulative selection works. It’s powerful. Weasel demonstrates that power.

    Cumulative selection also puts paid to the goofy junkyard tornado arguments that IDers are so fond of.

    It’s no wonder that cumulative selection and Weasel give you the heebie-jeebies. I enjoy seeing your attacks fail and watching your Elmer Fuddish frustrations mount.

  31. keiths,

    Cumulative selection works. It’s powerful. Weasel demonstrates that power.

    Cumulative selection also puts paid to the goofy junkyard tornado arguments that IDers are so fond of.

    Do you honestly believe this?

  32. colewd,

    Do you honestly believe this?

    Yes. And as someone who is constantly making junkyard tornado arguments (of the ‘sequence space’ variety), you clearly have not absorbed the lesson.

  33. Mung: I disagree with dazz because I don’t think that random genetic drift makes selection meaningless. But I would ask you whether you think random genetic drift results in differential reproductive success or not.

    It does, it just isn’t consistently biasing towards increased reproductive success for specific genotypes.

    Another way to put it would be to ask whether you can have differential reproductive success without selection.

    You can, but then it just isn’t biased towards increased reproductive success for specific genotypes.

    Because I think that random genetic drift is just another form of selection. I don’t see it as the absence of selection. And I obviously have been arguing for cumulative random genetic drift.

    Some population geneticists argue that drift and selection are sort of two sides of the same coin, and in reality you can’t have one without the other.

    The main difference is that drift doesn’t have a consistent bias towards increased reproductive success for carriers of specific alleles. Differences in fitness will result from drift, but they aren’t systematic over longer periods in the same way they are with cumulative selection. Drift is sort of when the cause of the differences have nothing to do with the genotypes of carriers.

    Oh, and Weasel isn’t about adapting an organism to its environment, it’s about evolving a “complex object.”

    Where did you get this idea? I can’t find it in The Blind Watchmaker.

    Dawkins says cumulative selection can explain how complexity evolves, but he never says this is the purpose of the Weasel program to show.

    So where do you get this idea?

  34. Mung: Rumraket: For that analogy to have a resemblance to real biology…

    The analogy is to the Weasel program, which has little to no resemblance to real biology.

    “Life isn’t like that.”

    – Richard Dawkins

    I agree, it has little resemblance to real biology. Little, but not none.

    The aspect of real biology it highlights is how cumulative selection works much better than the random-guessing strawman of evolution that creationists try to paint evolution as being identical with.

    Although the monkey/Shakespeare model is useful for explaining the distinction between single-step selection and cumulative selection, it is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of selective ‘breeding’, the mutant ‘progeny’ phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress towards some distant goal seems, with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of short-term selection. The ‘watchmaker’ that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal.

    – Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p50.

    I think it’s funny how you dug that single sentence out of this quote.

  35. keiths: I disagree with Rumraket. In the case of single-step selection, there is a string that is favored above the others — the target string itself. The problem is that you have to hit the target string in one go — a single step — instead of cumulatively via partial matches.

    The phrase “single-step selection” is fine. It does not mean that no string is favored over any other; instead, it means that the fitness landscape is flat except for a spike at the exact location of the target phrase. The fitness surface isn’t climbable, as it is in cumulative selection; you have to land, by pure luck, on the tip of the spike. In one go. A single step.

    I understand that this is how the creationist strawman of evolution pictures the fitness landscape for a single-step selection process, it just isn’t clear to me that is how Dawkins intends the term single-step selection to be understood.

    Regardless I think it’s an irrelevancy regarding whether fitness is a meaningful concept (it is), whether natural selection helps explain the emergence of adaptations(it does), whether complexity can evolve(it can), whether the Weasel is a good analogy to cumulative selection(it is) and so on. This argument about a particular label Dawkins chose is a total red herring.

  36. Mung: But it can happen. It’s not impossible. So we don’t need itty bitty cumulative steps for extremely improbable things to come about.

    It’s true, technically we don’t need it as extremely unlikely things can still happen. But this is where plausibility enters into the picture. Evolution is much much more plausible than just pure single-step emergence of a radically different (and possibly more complex) and new species.

    Which is why IDcreationists are working day and night to make it seem as if evolution is synonymous with single-step selection aka random guessing with no feedback from the environment.

  37. colewd: Do you honestly believe this?

    I also honestly believe it. Because it both makes perfect sense, and is experimentally provably true.

  38. Rumraket,

    I understand that this is how the creationist strawman of evolution pictures the fitness landscape for a single-step selection process,

    It’s a strawman to picture evolution that way, but not to picture single-step selection that way. Dawkins’ point is that evolution works by cumulative selection, not by single-step selecion.

  39. phoodoo,

    You see this is where you and Allan want to change your definition of fitness ONCE AGAIN (fuck off Allan).

    The definition of fitness does not change just because something which is fitter in one environment may be less fit in another. The definition of fitness is not changed when we talk of wings, then fur, then running fast, then sharp teeth. That would be moronic. And yet that is what you think I do. Despite the fact that the definition of fitness I have repeatedly adhered to is the mean number of offspring (more strictly, the mean number of organismal cycles) accruing to carriers of a trait. I say so, again and again. And still you accuse me of changing it. That is known in some circles as ‘lying’.

  40. Rumraket,

    I also honestly believe it. Because it both makes perfect sense, and is experimentally provably true.

    I agree, it has little resemblance to real biology. Little, but not none.

    I think Keith’s claim is that the Weasel program validates cumulative selection in biology. How can this be the case if it has little resemblance to real biology?

  41. Mung,

    Rumraket: Can I ask you how you understand the word random?
    Mung: Same way as Richard Dawkins and Allan Miller.

    Amazing the things one finds attributed to one that aren’t actually what one has said. I disagree with Dawkins, and anyone else, that selection is non-random. It is random in the mathematical sense – subject to a probability distribution. An extensive thread at RDF’s own forms persuaded me to change my mind on this. People shy away from the use of the word – Not In Front Of The Creationists! They might make something of it. But Creationists will make something out of anything, in my experience, so let ’em. The word is too subject to multiple meanings to be much use anyway, particularly with the kind of audience that will suck the marrow out of ‘selection’, ‘fitness’ , ‘code’, or any other argumentum ad Merriam-Websterum it may please them to pursue – whipping up arguments over definitions, rather than attempting to understand concepts, is SOP.

  42. Allan Miller: Despite the fact that the definition of fitness I have repeatedly adhered to is the mean number of offspring (more strictly, the mean number of organismal cycles) accruing to carriers of a trait.

    What the hell does carriers of a trait mean? An organisms has many traits. It is round, and green and fuzzy and short and fast and wet and using oxygen, and has organs, and, and and…

    What’s the trait? How can you be the carrier of a non-trait?

  43. phoodoo,

    Now Allan hates definitions.

    Ask him again tomorrow.

    No, definitions are fine. It’s when poltroons try to obfuscate by making the argument solely about the definition that I get testy. Honestly, I’ve just read part way through your ridiculous nonsense on the subject of fitness, having been away a day, and found myself losing the will to live. 500 dogs? What about a brown bear in a volcano? Or a West Kentuckian sharecropper with a … ? Christ on a bike. God loves a trier, I assume you are hoping.

  44. phoodoo,

    What the hell does carriers of a trait mean? An organisms has many traits.

    Which is why you need to accumulate data from many organisms. Which is why your nonsense about individuals is so pointless.

    What’s the trait? How can you be the carrier of a non-trait?

    Those are the options? You are either the carrier of a trait, or a carrier of a non-trait? Jeez. You either have a bucket, or a non-bucket.

  45. I wonder if phoodoo has the same problem with the concept of ‘slope’? “You people keep trying to change the definition of slope because sometimes it goes up at an angle of 35 degrees and sometimes it goes down and then they built a car park and if you go over there there’s a glacier and … “

  46. Allan Miller: I wonder if phoodoo has the same problem with the concept of ‘slope’?

    Perhaps I should assist phoodoo in seeing how pointless his quest is. phoodoo, why don’t you pick a scientific paper you say is incorrect then I can help you write a rebuttal paper?

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