For what it’s worth…
Dr Liddle has described her conception of chance as all outcomes being equiprobable, and has most assuredly used “chance” as an explanation of that outcome. [citation needed]
Sal:
The proper debate maneuver for the ID side, now that we’ve identified the vulnerability is to say:
Question for Lizzie?
Given you think anyone resorting to chance explanations is wrong to do so, do you think the evolutionary biologist Koonin is wrong to assert in
The overwhelming importance of chance in the emergence of life on Earth
or how about Richard Dawkins
If evolution worked by chance, it obviously couldn’t work at all.
Richard Dawkins
etc.
I hold Lizzie too high regard for her hospitality toward me I won’t go to TSZ and post such a discussion. But if I were less friendly, that’s how I would play the game.
Yes, I think “chance explanations” are not explanations. However, I do think that many, if not most, processes are stochastic – in other words they have variable effects, depending on complex interactions between many factors. This is true for the processes that govern mutations, and also for the processes that govern natural selection. Hypotheses about such processes therefore propose probability distributions for outcomes, rather than certainties. For example, instead of saying “If A is true, we will observe B”, we say “if A is true, B will follow probability distribution X”. Both mutation and natural selection are highly stochastic processes. But then so is intelligent decision-making.
What is certainly true is that stochastic processes that are orthogonal to each other are often at work. For instance, it is probably true that the stochastic processes that govern mutation are uncorrelated with the stochastic processes that govern natural selection. But even that may not be completely true – it may be that some of the processes are shared, and that certain mutations are more likely in certain environments.
All these questions are interesting, and the word “chance” is far to ill-defined to play a terribly useful role in them. Nonetheless, I would not say that a man like Koonin is wrong for using it without reading carefully what he is saying, and how he is using the word. My point is much simpler: that we need to be precise when defining our null hypotheses, otherwise our rejection or retention of that null will be meaningless.
And “due to chance” is not a serviceable null hypothesis, even though we may, if we retain our null, informally say that our retention of the null means that we can attribute our actual observations to “chance”, though I wouldn’t recommend it.
It is also worth noting that a two-tailed null is always literally false. Which is one of the many problems with null-hypothesis testing. But maybe we should leave that for another thread.
Exactly, Mike. Thanks.
However, we might well look for a mechanism that comprises complex processes with difficult-to-predict outcome, such as coin-tossing. In which case what we will do is characterise that outcome with a hypothesised probability distribution.
I don’t know if weighted coins are possible, but let me assume they are, and that while a normal coin has a probability of .5 of coming down Heads when tossed and a probability of .5 of coming down Tails (with a extremely tiny chance of coming down on an edge), a weighted coin may have, say, a .7 chance of coming down Heads and a .3 chance of coming down tails.
If I toss a coin many times, and I get approximately 70% Heads after many tosses, I can reject the null hypothesis that the coin is fair.
But I am not “rejecting chance” – I am rejecting a very specific property of the coin and the tossing with a very specific associated probability distribution, and, instead, concluding that the coin in question, instead of having a 50:50 chance of coming down Heads, has something like a 70:30 chance.
Both are, loosely “chance hypotheses” but they are highly specific, and again, it isn’t “chance” that causing the effect, but the properties of the coin.
So even if Barry meant, by “chance hypothesis” the hypothesis that the coins were placed by a “chance” process such as tossing, he would be wrong – the coins might well have been tossed, but were weighted in such a way that they had an extremely high (greater than 500:1) of coming down Heads.
But he didn’t apparently mean that – or at least he is, in his quotation from Thisted using the term “chance explanation” in a different way – to mean the “reason” you might get something different from your expectation under your null.
But clearly, chance can’t BE your “null” here, otherwise it would be tantamount to saying that chance is the reason our results are due to chance!
Such as?
I do not know what “chance is a cause” could mean, unless you mean that probability distributions are fundamental to existence, which is possible. But that is rather different to saying that “chance” is a cause – it is very much more specific, for a start. We know, to great precision, what those probability distributions are, and that they are not some other probability distribution. None of this precision is captured by the word “chance”.
As I keep saying, we use the word “chance” to describe what we do NOT know, and what we are NOT explaining – modelling – not what we ARE.
Liz said:
Provide the quote, Liz, where Mr. Arrington says anything about chance being a causal agency.
I asked where Mr. Arrington claimed that chance was the cause of anything. Alan Fox responded by quoting where Mr. Arrington said that chance was an explanation of something – many things, in fact. I then asked Alan Fox if, in his miind, then, “causal agency” (or “cause”) is the same thing as “explanation”, to which he replies:
I’m unsure if this is a yes or a no. Alan (and Liz, if you wish to answer); since you are apparently substituting “cause” for “explanation”, does this mean that in your minds that if Y is said to explain X, it means that y caused X?
Wow, that’s a bizarre coinage. It’s so ideosyncratic that google doesn’t even have any instances of it (although of course google has “themself” which is acceptable, if informal; and “them self” which is substandard).
I thought Gregory was supposedly from Canada and a native speaker of English. Weird that he invents words which sound as if they’re badly translated from Russian.
Here, for one:
Barry, apparently, thinks that “Everyone knows that it is not true” that “chance is never an explanation”.
And yes, I would say so. Not all hypotheses are causal – we can test the hypothesis that men are taller than women, for instance, in which case we are not saying that being male causes people to be taller. It could be that whatever it is that causes being male also causes people to be taller. So if we reject the null hypothesis that the mean height of men is the same as the mean height of women, we are not rejecting a causal hypothesis, nor inferring a support for a causal one.
But if, as Barry set out, we are faced with inferring the likely cause of 500 coins lying heads-up on a table, and he invites us to “reject the chance hypothesis” he is inviting us to reject chance as a cause, and he also says here:
Explanatory hypotheses are hypotheses that A causes B; correlational hypotheses are hypotheses that A and B tend to co-occur. Barry suggests, as many people, including statisticians, sloppily do, that some things are “due to chance”. This does not matter very much in general, as we all know what is meant. But in the context of a precise statement of the null hypothesis it is simply wrong. The null hypothesis (or any alternative hypothesis) cannot be that “A was due to chance”.
In order to test a null we need a precise probability distribution for that null. For instance, the probability distribution for coin tosses if the coins are fair and fairly tossed. In that case, what causes the coins to fall with that probability distribution is the fact that a) their centre of gravity is at the geometric centre of the coin and b) and that there are a near infinite ways of tossing it, all beyond the capacity of a human tosser to know well enough to select with any certainty of the outcome.
And that is the null that is tested (that the coin is fair, fairly tossed), not that the coins landed in the configuration that they did “due to chance”.
Well, it’s an admirably gender-neutral locution, although hardly necessary, at least yet, in the case of popes.
If you mean something else by Darwinism, Gregory, that’s fine. I’m telling you what I mean when I use the term.
No, I won’t “start”, Gregory – I started some time before you could even read, I suspect.
I meant Darwinism as in Darwin’s theory. If you thought I meant something different then you misinterpreted my statement.
No, because I am not using the word “across a range of academic disciplines” – I am using it narrowly as I have defined it. If I’d meant what you mean by the term, I’d be wrong, but I didn’t, so I’m not.
The catholic church is certainly opposed to atheism, although Pope Francis has had some nice things to say about atheists.
I can see the difference between the meaning you attach to the word “Darwinism” (which seems more or less to mean “atheism”) and the meaning I intended when I used it above.
Well, you seem unaware that I was a theist (and a catholic) for half a century. But that is actually beside the point, because, to repeat, I was not using the word “Darwinism” to mean the thing that you thought I meant. I have told you now what I meant, so there should be no more confusion.
I’m perfectly happy with such a topic, as long as it isn’t an actual exercise in throwing mud. But as long as it keeps within the rules of this board, no problem. I look forward to your OP.
Liz,
Mr. Arrington said nothing in your quote about chance being the cause of anything. He said chance was the explanation. Should I conclude that, in your mind, the explanation of something is the same as the cause of something? And so, if X explains Y, then one can assume that X causes Y?
Blas,
I think your understanding of Catholic doctrine in relation to evolutionary theory (and Darwinism) is a bit suspect. I encourage you to read this Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life, (The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October – 4 November 2008). Within it you will find the following from Cardinal Christoph Schönborn on “Pope Benedict XVI on ‘Creation and Evolution'”:
You are evadng the answer Lizzie, the distriution of the result of a stochastic process is always the same given the same initial conditions?
Yes or no?
If no what make that given the same initial conditions make the result of a stochastic process be different?
Blas,
Also worth reading is Synodus Episcoporum Bulletin, (XIII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, 7-28 October 2012) that features guest lecturer Professor Werner Arber, appointed President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI in January 2011 (the first Protestant to hold the position).
For Lizzie too.
Church will not accept that as true any theory that deny the goal of creation ( the universe) is humanity.
Will not accept as true any theory that deny the humanity was originated in a one man and one woman.
Will not accept any theory that deny Divine intervention in the creation of man, body and soul.
If I do not miss something, all the rest is up to us.
<
One and three are unprovable, one way or another. Two is simply wrong, though I guess ensoulment offers a loophole.
But if you offer beliefs that are orthogonal to science and evidence, don’t be surprised if science ignores them.
That may be linked to the fact that I am unsure what William Murray means when he talks about “causal agency”. Give me a couple of examples of “causal agencies” and perhaps I can be a little clearer. Bear in mind I’m likely to be sceptical of imaginary “causal agencies”.
ETA just noticed this: “..where Mr. Arrington said that chance was an explanation of something – many things, in fact.” Not sure if this is a correct paraphrase of what Barry intended, William. You’re safer providing direct quotes and links, in my view, but I’m sure you’re not interested in my advice.
As I said Blas, your understanding is suspect. Random events are not limiting. Chance (Darwinism) does not prevent God from fulfilling his plan and nor does it force God to intervene, except for the soul. Souls are created immediately and directly by God, not so the body:
I do not start teological debat about what tha Catholic Church thinks about darwinism. That document differ in what I stated only in that the action of God in the creation of God could not be direct in the creation of man, and that humanity could start with more people that one man and one woman.
There are documents of higher magisterial relevance that contradict this.
Given the actual controversy about darwinism I do not think that the documents I refer would be adapted to this one.
“I meant Darwinism as in Darwin’s theory.” – Elizabeth Liddle
Sorry, Lizzie, but you’d fail a 1st year university PoS class with that answer. And you can’t just over-will your definition upon those who have thought and reasoned many long hours on the topic.
I wouldn’t presume to teach you music (although music appreciation is another topic). Will you not honourably stand to reason that perhaps your “Darwinism [i]s Darwin’s theory” is too simplistic to take seriously?
In what conceivable class do you fail for saying precisely what you mean? Many words have multiple meanings, which is why we have to be precise about which meaning we intend. I made mine clear.
I’m not expecting you to teach me what Darwinism means when I use the term, any more than I expect you to teach me what x means when I say: “let x stand for the number of coins on the table”. You now know what I meant. If the word displeases you, mentally substitute another. My meaning will remain unchanged.
“There are documents of higher magisterial relevance that contradict this.” – Blas
Which ones of ‘higher magisterial relevance’? Please document your claims, Blas. Otherwise, how can anyone take you seriously?
“the actual controversy about darwinism”
Now you sound like a propagandist for IDist ideology, outdated and irrelevant. These people are mostly extremists, Blas. Do you wish to go down a dead-end road with them?
I’ve met most of the IDM’s leaders and surely can convey to you that there’s far more pretense than evidence in their (radical USAmerican neo-creationist) right-wing-funded ‘tent.’
rhampton is providing a legitimate alternative, with great depth and sincerity in science, philosophy, theology/wordlview discourse. Have you closed the ears of your heart to this or are you perhaps willing to listen and read what the Catholic Church says on this topic?
I do not what are you trying to tell me with this. I do not have any problem with a position of the universe fully ramdom or fully determined.
My discussion here is with people that claims chance is not a cause and at the same time that given other chances humans could not be here (Gould), Science can explain all the universe included life without God (Dawkins, Sagan …).
Because that statements are in contradiction. That´s all.
“due to” means “caused by”.
And yes, in science, hypotheses are either causal (explanations) or correlational (associations).
God appears to be a hidden Markov Selector.
I don’t know if you are being deliberately obtuse or whether you just don’t bother to read the answers you are given. You appear to argue just for the sake of argument.
Did you read this response to your question? And did you read Elizabeth’s concurrence here?
Do you know what a statistic is? You don’t, do you.
Can you explain how “chance” pushes things around?
How far away does “chance” have to be from the members of a population or from the elements of a series of events in order to have no effect? Do the effects of “chance” vary with distance and time?
Do you know why measurable properties have distributions?
Do you know the differences between a population distribution, a sampling distribution, and a statistic?
Do you know why these distributions occur?
Do you even care?
If you invite me in a religious blog I will be glad to discuss this points. I do not like discuss religion in the middle of a science blog. Unfortunatly the only place I can invite you is in italian.
This isn’t a science blog, Blas. Feel free to post an OP on religion 🙂
Please don’t be deceived, Blas, this is not JUST ‘a science blog.’ Where does it say that it is? No, it’s a conversation about science, philosophy and theology/worldview. (It is understood that most of the people here are atheists or agnostics, but not everyone is.) That is the way current and future interdisciplinary dialogues must go.
The DI’s PR claims that Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) is a ‘strictly natural scientific theory’ are hogwash (disingenuous). They do it for the money, otherwise their ‘movement’ would fall apart.
Your arguments in defense of IDism, Blas, are very weak. And that’s not just because atheists, materialists, naturalists, etc. (pick your dancing partner) say so. They simply cannot validate the IDM’s scientistic requirement.
[Btw, I met an Italian at the Discovery Institute. Nice guy and a scientist. But nevertheless he was not able to defend IDism in the end.]
Please *do* speak about religion (theology/worldview), Blas, in dialogue with science and philosophy here. It really cannot and should not be avoided, even if some people are afraid and hesitant. If not, you’re really missing the deeper significance of IDism vs. evolutionism vs. creationism and actually wasting everyone’s time. Indeed, why not elevate the conversation instead of reducing it to empirical data empty of personal meaning, when meaning, purpose and value about origins, processes and destiny is the name of the game?
Instead of treat me as ignorant why you AND Lizzie answer my two questions:
The distriution of the result of a stochastic process is always the same given the same initial conditions?
Yes or no?
If no what make that given the same initial conditions make the result of a stochastic process be different?
Liz,
So whenever a biologist publishes a paper that describes some evolutionary result as being “due to chance” or “explained by chance”, they are in error, and peer review has failed, and they are misleading everyone who reads their work?
With this level of posts:
“Why Metaphysics is (Almost) Bullshit”
No, thanks.
So your answer is that you don’t read the answers you were already given and you don’t really give a damn; you argue just to argue.
But we already noticed that.
They deny that according to darwinism human could not exists
They deny darwinists claims science explains (or will explain) everything without God
They deny “drift” is due to chance
They deny haeckel´s draws are still in school books
why do not deny scientific papers?
How does “chance” push things around?
How do the effects of “chance” vary with distance and time?
Do you know the difference between a population distribution, a sampling distribution, a population parameter, and a statistic?
Do you know why measurable properties have distributions?
Can you read a scientific paper?
Have you read any of the responses to Blas and to you?
For Elzinga and Lizzie. This is the third time I´m posting this cite at TSZ, may be one of you can address the topic. What chance means there?
Blas,
From your link, Futuyma is quoted as saying:
Seems clear.
Well, as I’ve said, William, several times, it’s quite a frequent informal way of speaking, and indeed, even professors of statistics will say that if we retain the null hypothesis, we are effectively assuming that the reason we saw something different in our sample from that assumed in our null was due to random sampling. That doesn’t mean that “chance” “caused” or even “explained” the data, but that the random sampling process meant that unmodelled factors did.
However, saying all that gets a little tedious, so people take shortcuts. However, it is wrong (as Luskin et all point out) to say that chance causes anything; and it is even more wrong to say, as Barry said, in my quotation above, that:
Not only does he ascribe causality (“due to”) to chance, but he says that the null hypothesis is that the difference between the groups is due to chance (Sal is trying to claim that I put the words “null hypothesis” in Barry’s mouth, but I copy and pasted the above from a post by Barry).
Barry’s statement above is simply wrong, anyway way you look at it. Even if we buy the rather loose statement that IF we retain the null hypothesis THEN we are also saying that any differences between the groups is due to chance, the latter is still not the null.
And this is important, because to compute the p value of a null hypothesis test, we have to compute how likely any given observation is under our null. And “due to chance” is wildly nonspecific. What chance? What process are we postulating, as our null, and what probability distribution does it have? Is it binomial? Is it symmetrical? And even if we have a nice symmetrical binomial null as with a coin toss, how does that tell us anything about a possible designer or lack of it? Anything to do with coins is likely to have involved a human being doing something deliberately, whether it was tossing coins, or laying them heads-up.
However, it’s perfectly possible for entirely non-intelligent processes to result in exquisitely intricate patterns – crystals, for example, or sorted pebbles on a beach.
In other words, the question of whether an ID was involved has very little, if anything, to do with whether or not the pattern observed is the result of a stochastic process.
And if we are going to test hypotheses about the process, we need to specify an actual null hypothesis about that process,and its associated probability distribution of outcomes.
Futuyama in your link answers the question beautifully:
Chance means “unpredictability”. In other words, it’s the “unmodeled” portion of the variability of your data, as I keep saying. It doesn’t cause anything – it is the word we use to describe processes that have an associated probability distribution of outcomes, and rather than modeling every event that causes an effect, we model the distribution of effects given by the proposed probability distribution.
Yeah, I’ve got to admit I also thought that was a pretty silly, self-defeating title, especially for a (western, analytic, pragmatist, physicalist) philosopher to post! Disenchantment and alienation spawn strange things sometimes.
“Genetic drift, the process I referred to earlier, is a matter of “unpredictability””
Very scientific language. Really for initiates.
Liz,
My question isn’t about Mr. Arrington, and what Mr. Arrington may or may not mean when he writes something. My question is about you and your claim what “due to” means in science.
It’s really pretty simple. You said that in science, “due to” means “caused by”. You were unequivocal about it.
If so, then if any biologist publishes a paper on biology where an evolutionary result is described as being “due to chance”, then according to your claim about what “due to” means in science, they have at best made an error, peer review has failed, and readers are being misled. Correct? Can I get a yes or no answer?
There is no “yes or no” answer to your question. Scientists often use colloquial language in popularizations; but it is discouraged in peer-reviewed publications. Scientists are supposed to lay out their experimental technique and analyses, showing how they arrived at the numbers and their uncertainties in their experiment.
Here is a standard reference of constants, units, and uncertainty that believers in “chance” as a cause may wish to contemplate.
One of the first topics in most science courses is about measurements, their uncertainties, and how to express them properly in standard form. This standard applies throughout all the sciences and in engineering as well.
How do Blas and William think those uncertainties are established?
Difference between chance, cause, intention and design:
The dealer caused the ball to roll, and the interaction with the wheel caused it to stop. Where it did so was randomly determined. The casino intended to win more than it lost over the course of the night, so did you. The dealer intended to manage the gaming table fairly. And your fellow player intended to inspire you to become a better person. The game is designed so that casino will in fact win more than lose, and for you to lose more than win. Yet you came away a winner thanks to the designs of your chance encounter, who did not need to rig the game.
Well, you really do need to learn what the technical/scientific words mean. If you can’t, or don’t make the effort, I see why you would snivel that they’re for initiates. But that’s just sour grapes, Blas. Too bad.
Of course there is. If, as Liz claims, in science “due to” means “caused by”, and chance cannot be scientifically claimed to “cause” anything, then any published scientific paper that attributes any evolutionary result as being “due to” or “explained by” chance is an error by definition, peer review should have caught it, and anyone reading the paper may be misled.
Unless, of course, the phrase “due to” and “explained by” doesn’t necessarily mean “caused by” in science and scientific papers; perhaps the authors were using a shorthand colloquialism for something much more problematic to spell out; and perhaps they were counting on the charitable reading of others to not throw a hissy-fit about using the term “due to chance” as if they were making the claim that “chance” was some fundamental, causal agency in the world.
I wonder what their reaction would be if Liz attempted to take one of those peer-reviewed, published Darwinists to task for using the phrase “due to chance” or “explained by chance” and proceeded to lecture them that chance doesn’t “cause” anything (is not a causal agency)?
I imagine those scientists would react to Liz much like Mr. Arrington, I, and many other IDists are reacting.
IF the latter – if “due to” or “explained by” doesn’t necessarily mean “caused by”, in the sense that chance would be regarded as some distinct causal agency – then one wonders why Liz is insisting that this is how Mr. Arrington is employing those phrases?
Given all the same initial conditions the other day Will I win?
What make the difference?
Given all the same initial conditions the other day Will I win? What make the difference?
Depends on your belief. Physics does not have the means (an perhaps never will) to answer the question, though the nature of quantum uncertainty suggests a do-over would result in a different chain of events. That reality, however, is not the one we live in, the one chosen and sustained by God’s will.
Nope, that’s bizarre projection on your part.
No, they wouldn’t, because few if any scientists are vicious win-at-all-costs scum like Arrington and the rest of the UD denizens. Few if any scientists react to being corrected with vituperation about “lying or psychopaths” like you and your friends do.
No, you can’t have a “yes or no” answer, William, because meaning matters, and context matters to meaning. Whether readers will be misled or not depends on that context.
But if you test a causal hypothesis, and conclude that the “cause” is “chance”, then yes, I think that is misleading. If you talk loosely and informally, having retained a null hypothesis on the basis of a low p value, that any differences between groups were “due to chance” I wouldn’t say it should fail peer review, but as a reviewer I would tend to ask for it to be rephrased.
My key point is methodological: that when we do hypothesis testing in science (which is pretty well all the time) we have to be clear about what our null is – and it will either be causal or correlational. And in neither case will you posit “chance” as a “cause”, whether as your null hypothesis or as your alternative hypothesis. You may well posit stochastic processes as contributing to the variance in your data, but you will actually characterise those processes, not simply lump them as “chance”.
But this is what Dembski does when tells us to reject the null hypothesis, which he describes as “the relevant Chance hypothesis” if the probability of a pattern under that null is less than one in 2^500.
Dembski is canny enough to insert that word “relevant” in there – but does not tell us how to define it, and most IDists (kairosfocus for instance) simply ignores it, and regards the “Chance hypothesis” as the null hypothesis that a pattern (a protein, for instance) was the result of some kind of unspecified random draw process that no-one actually proposes.
What evolutionary biologists do propose may well be stochastic processes – involving chemical affinities, and effects of proteins in protecting an organism for environmental hazards, for instance, but they are not what is modelled under the null rejected by such claimants, and they do not invoke “chance” as a cause – they invoke complex interacting forces that are too complex to be modelled separately but can be modelled as a probability distribution.
Yes, if someone attributed an evolutionary result as being “due to” or “explained by” chance, that would certainly be misleading and an error by definition. The phrase more commonly comes up when some one retains a null hypothesis, and even then they shouldn’t really say “our results were explained by chance”, although they might say “our results were inconclusive, and may have simply been a result of sampling error”.
Well, as I said, it would depend on context. But if the context was that they were claiming “chance” as their null hypothesis, then yes, that would be inept. However, if it was a “shorthand colloquialism” for a null result, then it would be less so, and while not very apt, probably not misleading.
They would very probably see my point, but I’d like to see an example of the kind of thing you have in mind.
I doubt it.
Because Barry expressly claimed that the “chance hypothesis” or the hypothesis that the “results were due to chance” was the null hypothesis. It won’t work as a null.
Let me try to explain the reasoning here:
Let’s say we have are testing the idea that Scotsmen tend to be smaller than Englishmen. Our null hypothesis will be that the mean height of Scotsmen is the same as the mean height of Englishmen. I sample 100 Scotsmen and 100 Englishmen, and I find that the mean height of the Scotsmen is 5’11 1/2″ and the mean height of the Englishmen is 5’11”. I take into account the variance as well, and “retain my null” – in other words I retain the hypothesis that there is no difference between the mean heights of both populations, even though I found a small difference between my two groups. This is because I compute that it is really quite likely that if I randomly sample from the two populations, I will find a difference between the means in my two samples of about half an inch.
So I could also say that the difference between my two sample means was “due to chance” – by which I would mean that it was due to my random sampling methods.
It would not actually explain why the means were different, which would be due to the different genetics and diet of the people I sampled. It would just be an informal way of describing my result.
And it would NOT be my null hypothesis.
Who cares about the title — what did you think of the argument? I didn’t see you engage with me there at all. Too turned off by the title to actually see what the argument is? If it turns out to be a bad argument, then show me that it is.