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.
I didn’t only ask if it was “misleading”. Please answer these two questions:
If, in a peer-reviewed, published paper, a scientist tests a causal hypothesis, and concludes that the “cause” is “chance” (by saying it is “due to” chance or “explained by” chance):
1. Is their conclusion wrong?
2. Has peer-review failed?
EDIT: You answered these questions in a later post. Thanks.
And don’t give us any of thoughtful, reflective, and sophisticated nuance you types are always using to confuse us simple, honest folk — just answer the question, exactly as stated — (1) or (2)? Those are the choices, and there are no others — because I say so!
“Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
Is the speaker
1. Insane.
2.Satan in disguise.
Don’t try to confuse simple common folk. Just answer the question.
Not sure if you chose the example with this in mind, but in the 70s a group of people developed a physical model of roulette wheel to predict the result after observing the ball behavior for the first few spins. They computerized the model in a custom-built shoe computer, and won about 10K before being forced out by technical failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons
There are lots of roulette computers for sale. And systems.
I’m sure they work, because the people selling them say so.
Of course, I only mentioned this as an example of something that was treated as chance that really had a predictable, physical basis (and the original people were willing to bet their own money on it).
The catch is that it only improves your odds of winning: you still need a big stake to beat a run of bad luck/inaccurate predictions. Plus I think the casinos changed some of the rules of betting so that you did not have the same amount of time to observe what the ball was doing for a particular spin before placing a bet and that made the predication less accurate. Going by memory on that, though.
Liz,
It seems to me that when Mr. Arrington says: “The null hypothesis is that the difference between the groups is due to chance,” it is essentially the same thing as saying “Our null hypothesis will be that the mean height of Scotsmen is the same as the mean height of Englishmen, and that any difference between the two groups will fall within expected chance variance.”
It also seems to me quite obvious that the charity you would extend to fellow scientists when they phrase something informally or colloquially, you refuse to Mr. Arrington and other ID proponents. I think your insistence that Mr. Arrington “means” caused by, as if “chance” was an causal agency existent in and of itself, when he uses the terms “due to” or “explained by”, is something you would never attribute to any published, peer-reviewed scientific paper even if they used the exact same terminology and phrasing.
There are causal agencies and then there are characteristics of sets of processes and outcomes. Design, chance and necessity (physical laws) are not themselves causal agencies, but rather describe either sets of processes or sets of outcomes. Saying that X is due to/explained by design/chance/physical law is, IMO, quite different than saying design causes X, or chance causes X, or physical law causes X.
IMO, your insistence about what BA “meant”, and your interpretation of it, is nothing but a jargon bluff, whether used intentionally or not. You’re being incredibly picky and anal about something when, in any other case besides ID, you wouldn’t even attempt to correct the informal phrasing.
The thing about statistics in a casino is that one side is in charge of the game and will always modify if if a system can beat it.
Same “charity” you extend to the folks you malign as either “lying or psychotic” ?
You’re no one to talk, Billy boyo, unless you’re finally going to admit you’re ashamed of yourself and the horrible way you’ve behaved.
Didn’t your mom teach you to shut up if you can’t say anything nice?
BruceS,
As I was writing about the roulette wheel I came across this; Secret To Beating Roulette Wheel Revealed. A mathematician and an electrical engineer came up with an algorithm that had up to a 18 percent return on a European roulette wheel. Aside from implementation problems, they noted that “A dealer can also throw off the roulette wheel algorithm by altering the way he or she releases the ball onto the wheel.” In any case, the methods employed to beat the house rely on playing the odds, not knowing the outcome in advance.
You’re not going to last long as a casino employee if you don’t win.
On the other hand, having an occasional winner will attract lots of non winners.
hotshoe,
Whether or not I am a charitable debater is entirely irrelevant to the question of if Liz claims to be, and if Liz is being as charitable to BA as she is to published evolutionary biologists that say exactly the same thing as BA when it comes to chance.
You know, William, much of this stuff about probability, statistics, and measurement uncertainties is taught in high school physics, chemistry, and biology courses. These notions come up near the beginnings of introductory courses in high school and in the introductory science and engineering courses in colleges and universities. The material is so basic and so routine that it has been standardized for many decades now.
Do you know where that places you?
Yet you seem to think that those of us who have spent our entire careers doing this stuff routinely – as well as teaching good research habits to others – are idiots.
Elizabeth answered your “question” several times over; but you apparently want to argue just to argue.
I would recommend that you learn the proper meanings of scientific terms and concepts; but I doubt that you will even consider making the effort.
Mike,
I think I’ll coin another phrase: Education Bluff – when instead of an actual rebuttal or argument one does nothing more than repeatedly claim or imply that their opponent lacks the education necessary to argue competently.
Make your case, Mike, or you’re bluffing.
I notice yelling “literature bluff!” is a favorite tactic of Creationists unwilling to read the professional scientific literature when it is presented. Fits right in with their “Let’s Ignore Reality” mind set and all the other tools they use to remain willfully ignorant.
We don’t always like the popularizations and colloquial language because, when it is done sloppily, it makes the job of teaching basic science harder for the rest of us.
On the other hand, many of the popularizations and colloquial uses of words have a context that makes clear what the author means. However, the big problem for ID/creationists is that every one of you – to a person – quote mines the writings of others and ignores context.
So it is your own fault if you get it wrong.
Unfortunately for you, in the 50 some odd years I have been making that observation of ID/creationists, I have never been wrong. None of you can pass simple concept tests at the high school level; and many of you can’t get middle school science concepts right.
And I am not bluffing. I study ID/creationist misconceptions, misrepresentations, and socio/political tactics; and I know full well that the aggressive, wannabe debaters are incapable of learning.
Afraid he’s got you there Mike. You can’t prove a negative. WJM could very well be a PhD molecular biologist only pretending to be scientifically incompetent with his arguments that would earn a high school student an F.
I think you broke the code.
And this is the Internet no less; full of Loony Toons and trolls.
But profiles do add up over time. Misuse of language is hard to disguise in the long run.
Spy versus spy.
We are all part of The Matrix; er, a Mad Magazine comic book.
Liz,
Don’t you think:
… is a funny way to phrase something for someone who claims that chance is not a causal agency in the first place, and also claims that “due to” means “caused by”?
Yeah, I’m still not seeing you admitting that you’re ashamed of yourself for behaving so badly.
And I’m still not seeing an answer to my question about whether your mom taught you to shut up if you couldn’t say anything nice.
Maybe your New Year’s resolution should be to learn to listen to your mom. Better later than never.
It doesn’t matter whether or not they are educated enough to make their case, Mike; what matters is whether you make your case about the actual content of the argument, or if you do nothing more than cast aspersions about the education of those you are arguing against.
If you don’t actually make a case about the content of the argument, all you are doing is making an education bluff.
William J. Murray,
Quick, Mindpowers, get on Uncommon Descent and chastise Barry over his educational bluff vis being a Lawyer and all that entails. I know you don’t want to look like a hypocritical twat, again.
And when we do explain, you are not equipped to understand because you have made a conscious choice to remain smugly ignorant of science.
When you ID/creationists pretend to be a critics of science and yet you can’t get the scientific concepts straight or use scientific words properly in a sentence, you would be better off if you said nothing until you actually made it a point to understand what it is you presume to critique.
Your whining about other peoples’ obligations to keep repeating explanations, while you simply respond with sneering ignorance, is a childish game; you are just jerking people around. You are not being a persecuted martyr; you are simply making yourself look like a complete fool.
As I have said, a number of times, William, while I wouldn’t personally OK that phraseology in a peer-reviewed paper, I even give it half marks in an exam, if the context is explaining why there is a discrepancy between the samples where the null proposes none.
It is an informal way of saying “the difference between what I observed in my sample(s) and what the null proposes is the result of sampling variance”.
But, as I keep saying, it is not the null. It doesn’t explain anything, as my own sentence, the one you quote above, makes clear. The evidence suggested that there was far more going on in the difference between the exit polls and the vote count than sampling error. The question was, “what”?
The people I was arguing with at the time were making exactly the mistake I am pointing out here – of not specifying their null properly. In this case, the null should have been “the exit poll samples were random samples of those who had cast votes that were subsequently counted”. If I’d been as anal then as I am now, I’d have said (and I recall doing so on at least some occasions): clearly the difference between count and poll was not the result of sampling variance only.
Because “chance” is not a cause. What I am asking in that quote is: what was the cause? Were the samples non-representative because some of those polls cast votes that weren’t counted, or were they non-representative because the samples weren’t random samples?
The evidence far more strongly suggested the latter than the former, although it remains possible that the former did account for some of the discrepancy. Certainly US voting systems are not as rigorous as they could be.
I think a lot of the problem here is that quite a lot of people play p0ker and other games of chance, and get there statistics from that – which is fine – it’s the relevant math. However, the problem is (and it’s Dembski’s as well as Barry’s, as well as that of all those non-statisticians who weighed in on the exit poll fracas) one of scientific methodology and how statistical methods are used to test empirical hypotheses, and unless you are clear about the methodology of hypothesis testing, then you are apt to make errors.
Not that it’s difficult – I could explain it to you here and now, and probably have already. But the first thing with null hypothesis testing is to get your null clear, because that is what you are trying to falsify.
And if you have a causal null (you are trying to explain what causes some phenomenon or other) “chance” is useless as a causal factor, because, as Casey Luskin et al agree, chance doesn’t “cause” anything, except in a loose informal sense. And we don’t do loose informal science, which would be “mush”. Science isn’t “mush”.
I agree entirely, William. Which is why I have consistently made my case about the content of my argument, which is that chance is not causal, and therefore is useless as the postulated causal agent in a null (or alternative) hypothesis.
William, I note that you write, at UD:
I find this quite extraordinary. First of all, no “bluff” was involved – at all stages I made quite clear what I was saying. Second, my case, consistently, has been that “chance” cannot be the null hypothesis, which is what Barry claimed. I notice that you do not mention the term “null hypothesis” here. I have also said, consistently, that we do speak informally of “chance” as the explanation for observed differences not predicted by the null hypothesis when we have not rejected the null. Third, my case about “chance” not being an explanation is exactly the same as that put forward by Casey Luskin et al – so if it’s “jargon” it is “jargon” also in use by the ID community.
Fourth, it is entirely valid to point out that if an IDist has misinterpreted a statement made by a scientist who was using a term in a specific, not general, sense, that the scientist was using the term in that specific sense. This is why operational definitions are a basic requirement of scientific methodology. If you want to understand a scientific argument, you need to check the operational definitions of the terms being used. If you don’t, you risk the fallacy of equivocation, and it is to avoid that fallacy that scientists are so anal about operational definitions.
Last, yes, it is extremely important that terms such as “macro-evolution”, “random”, and many other phrases used by scientists are interpreted in the way defined in the context in which they are used. So it is fallacious (and often a quote-mine) to take some statement by a scientist about “macro-evolution” (for example from a paper about evolution above the species level) and then interpret as, say, being about saltation. Or to take a statement about a “random variable” process, and interpret “random” to mean “drawn from a flat probability distribution”, for example, or, worse, to mean “unintended”. I have seen both of these done.
Many words have multiple meanings – which is fine, and is what makes language rich and flexible. But to be precise we have to be specific about which meaning we intend in a given context, and people who ignore this context are likely to misunderstand what is being said. And people who don’t make it clear, are likely to be misunderstood.
And it is a basic tenet of scientific writing that the text should be clear enough that it would enable a reader to replicate the study exactly. You can’t do that unless you give clear operational definitions for your terms, which means saying what you mean by X for the purposes of this paper, whatever X may mean in other contexts.
Just to answer to Elzinga. I know that chance can´t be the cause of anything, that it is not my position. I´m saying that in some ocasions for darwinists chance is a cause and in others is “unpredictability”. And I will show you when and why.
I´m asking if given the same initial conditions a stochastic process would always give the same result. The answer that darwinit refused to give is yes. Reproducibility is one of the tenets of science. Unless you have a different epistemology given the same conditions you have to obtain the same results. That is not scientifically demostrable but it works if F=Mxa in my lab, given the same initial conditions it will be in my car on in a rocket.
Then a stochastic process is “unpredictable” only for one reason, we cannot reproduce exactly the same initial conditions of the stochastic events. That could be possible because we do not know all the variables or is difficult or not practical to reproduce exactly all the variables. For example, according to this paradigm it is possible that I build a very precise machine that gives to the coins always th same amount of movement in the same precise direction and I make it work in a proteted enviroment with very controlled air conditions. That machine should be able to toss the coin more than 500 times always tails.
Then when Gould said: “Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.”
He was wrong or he was not stiking to this “science” paradigm. Because given that the universe started with the same initial conditions everything is that result of that initial conditions and the physical laws. So why did Gould said that? What he added to his logic to this paradigm? Chance as a cause. Something should alter the result “unpredictably” in order to let a physical system give a different result given the same initial conditions and the constance of the physical laws. As Gould do not believe that God or a spaghetti monster or angels were “unpredictably” change the local initial conditions he created a new “physical cause” Chance.
Now thanks to Chance, humans are just a chance other way we are the resutl of the big bang, it inevitable that humans appear on the universe abd buld this nerbook.
The other problem that faces darwinits with the paradigm of reproducibility is uniqueness. Constant laws builds almost spherical rocks but in the universe we find Moses of Michelangelo.
If the initial conditions are the same and the physical laws are constant why we find almost unnique events. If planets are formed by constant physical laws, why there are so few “solar like systems”?, why so few earths? Why only humans here in this small planet lost in the Universe? Why if I´m product of the same initial conditions and the constant physical laws it is so difficult to found another human form whom I can accept an organ?
Or darwinist accept that that uniqueness is due to the initil conditions and the physical laws and then it is like I was “programmed” at the begining ( that sound to much ID) or they have to introduce local “unpredictability” and again it can´t be God or a spaghetti monster or angels then Chance as a cause it appears again.
Just a side comment if chance means unpredictability, evolution is all matter of chance because the argument that NS is not chance fall as “the reproductive success” is unpredictable.
They have to find a reason as to why their “work” gains no traction in the wider world. So, they are using the correct words and concepts but the wider world rejects their “work” on the basis that they are ID supporters.
They honestly believe this, and of course they must. If they were to realize the real reason behind their lack of progress then they would all abandon ship.
For all that stil denies chance is a cause for darwinits
Le hasard et la necessité. Jacques Monod
One of the bibles of materialists.
I guess you never get sick of sniping from the sidelines and contributing nothing. Fair enough, each to their own.
It’s exactly what Feynman meant by “cargo cult science” – the stuff looks like the real stuff but it’s not connected to anything.
Lizzie,
Reminds me of the bubble the Republicans put themselves into the last election cycle.
By all accounts they honestly thought they were winning…
Another example, a new post at UD from Cornelius
They just refuse to see that “non-random” != “Intelligent Design”.
The motions of individual water molecules are random. Does this mean that water can flow uphill? No? So that must be ID then, at least according to their definitions.
That seems to confuse reproducibility with determinism.
If you have reproducibility determinism is a possibility if reproducibility is not achievable determinism is false.
If determinism is true we shoul have reproducibility if determinism is false reproducibility is meaningless matter of … Chance.
Are two sides of the same coin.
Liz,
It doesn’t appear as if you read/responded to my post above that starts:
Because you write:
… and, again, it seems to me that you are being uncharitable in your reading of what Mr. Arrington said in terms of the “null hypothesis”, whereas a charitable interpretation from the assumption that Mr. Arrington was being informal would interpret that characterization as being much the same as what you and others have said. IOW, it seems to me that you have jumped onto the way Mr. Arrington phrased his comment about the null hypothesis because it doesn’t clearly state it the way you would prefer, but as I said in the aforementioned post, it seems that if you were being charitable, you would interpret his post (using your height example):
That seems to me to be a fair reading of Mr.Arrington’s statement (although it wasn’t about height), unless I was simply assuming Mr. Arrington didn’t know what he was talking about and wanted him to be making some kind of big conceptual error – like a failure to understand what a “null hypothesis” was, or believing that “chance” was in itself some kind of causal agency.
Let’s look at this quote from the abstract of How Was the Australian Flora Assembled Over the Last 65 Million Years? A Molecular Phylogenetic Perspective Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Vol. 44: 303-324 (Volume publication date November 2013) :
.
Ehh …. chance and opportunity don’t actually cause anything, now do they? Yet, that’s not how I would interpret what this guy is saying – it’s not how anyone would charitably interpret what he said, unless they were specifically looking to jargon bluff or, perhaps more appropriately, jargon block him.
It seems to me that when someone says “the null hypothesis is that the difference is due to chance” the are obviously using a shorthand means of saying that the null hypothesis is that there will be no difference between the sets of data, and any difference should be within expected chance variance (IOW, “due to” or “explained by” chance).”
Moving on to your point about the ID claim that “the null hypothesis is that X feature in biology is caused by chance” being a huge, fundamental conceptual block, I think that – once again – your are using a jargon bluff (or a jargon block) because you don’t like the way they phrase it, but I can almost certainly assure you that no one in the ID community thinks of chance as some kind of causal agency in and of itself. That’s absurd.
The ID null hypothesis you quibble with has often been described that all biological features are due to necessity and chance. An uncharitable, jargon-block reading of which would paint by chance as meaning chance to be a causal agency, and “chance” the direct null hypothesis.
But, is that really what ID proponents mean? Of course not. Are ID proponents even using a null hypothesis in the way you characterize as necessary? Is it necessary?
I think that ID proponents are using the alternative method – comparing two different hypothesis to see which one better explains the data. The null, in this case, would be that phenomena X occurs as a result of the relevant materials interacting in accordance with known natural laws and tendencies, without any deliberate or teleological intervention/influence. The alternative hypothesis is that phenomena X cannot be plausibly achieved without teleological influence. The ID advocate is not really saying that the null is that X is “caused by physical law and chance” in the strict sense, because those are not causal agencies – they are characteristic descriptions of processes and/or outcomes. As is “design”.
The question is if one can establish an acceptable “teleology metric”, where at a certain value, the design hypothesis is preferred because the data places X outside of acceptable variance for the non-teleological explanation set.
That’s just nonsense.
A scientist make a specific claim, and provides experimental support for that claim.
Another scientist attempts to check the claim. That other scientist designs his own experiment. He does not copy exactly the setup of the first experimenter.
“Reproducible” simply means that support for the claim can be reproduced by independent researchers designing their own experiments. There is no requirement that they exactly replicate all of the experimental setup and get exact replica results.
I’d be curious to see if anyone else here regards me as a poor defender of philosophy in these discussions. And I’d also be curious to see if you have any reasoning at all to support this assertion, or if this is one your typical sneering quasi-insults.
I think I was thrown off by the use of the word “theology” here, because I think of theology as a branch of metaphysics — the branch of metaphysics concerned with God. That’s usually how the term is used, I think. But perhaps you alluding to a distinction between philosophy and theology along the lines suggested here: Philosophy and Christian Theology. If so, I don’t understand why you didn’t make explicit what you were thinking about. We’re not psychic — we can’t figure out what you’re thinking unless you tell us.
As for that quite troublesome little word, “faith” — well, if by “faith,” you mean something like what Paul Tillich called “the object of ultimate concern,” of course faith is central to how I live my life. And perhaps by “worldview” you mean something similar to what Rawls called “comprehensive doctrines” — one’s overarching account of what is (and is not), what is truly valuable, and what makes life worth living. And of course I have a comprehensive doctrine that is as important to me as anyone else’s is to them.
Does that include evolution?
I’m not sure of the term “defender”, as that suggests a war. I have very much appreciated your presence and contributions to the discussion.
Neil Rickert,
Thank you! I’ve enjoyed being part of these discussions as well — and I certainly don’t think of myself as a “defender” of philosophy, since I don’t think that philosophy is under “attack” here to begin with.
I’d be surprised if anyone here besides me has read Chance and Necessity. I think it’s an interesting book but I profoundly disagree with it. One of the things I found most objectionable about it is that Monod uses what he calls “the postulate of objectivity” to conceal his own Epicurean bias. “Chance and necessity” is code for Epicurean metaphysical physics — the atoms act with necessity, except when their motions “swerve” for completely unknowable reasons. (Unlike the epistemologically responsible scientist, Epicurus did seem to think that chance itself was a kind of cause!)
The main reason why I find this objectionable is that Monod uses “the postulate of objectivity” to declare ex cathedra that interpretations of Darwinism through the lens of teleological metaphysics are out-of-bounds. Here I’m thinking of classical American pragmatism (esp. Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey) and phenomenology (esp. Hans Jonas’s The Phenomenon of Life, an unjustly neglected masterpiece of biophilosophy.) Jonas’s views have been largely neglected by philosophers, but I’m beginning to see more respect given to his work by people like Evan Thompson, Terrence Deacon, and a few others.
Put otherwise (and more polemically), Monod just deceived everyone, both the ultra-Darwinists (“Dawkinists”) and design theorists alike — there’s absolutely no reason at all why Darwinism (as an empirical theory) is incompatible with teleological metaphysics. All that Darwinism commits us to is that teleological processes are an unnecessary posit for the purpose of empirically explaining adaptation and speciation. It does not commit us to saying that teleology is off-limits for a philosophical interpretation of the empirical theory. Monod doesn’t even have an argument against teleological Darwinists — he just declares it off-limits with a summary dismissal, invokes “the postulate of objectivity,” and moves on.
William writes at UD:
Yup. That’s because it isn’t. ID is chronically non-specific – because the devil, unfortunately, is in the details.
And making the sense in which they are using term perfectly clear
Because they aren’t. Even though it has been clearly defined over and over by the scientists. Still the IDist insists on using some other meaning, and interpreting the scientists as saying something other than what they did say.
um, no. The “anti-ID advocate” typically does not do this. In fact, they insist on addressing the content of a debate at nauseam, explaining things in terms a child could understand, until finally they are banned from the site, at which point they set up another site, and invite the ID proponents to join them there. Only a few (and to those few, including William, credit is due) do so.
Again, no. The “anti-ID advocate” may seek to excuse the ID proponent’s lack of understanding on these grounds, but will, typically insist on explaining over and over. Some ID proponents will airly dismiss this explanation as not being their field (William, for instance), even though the ID proponent makes it clear that the material is well within the grasp of anyone’s understanding.
And where, typically, the ID proponent has misunderstood the definition of terms as used in the source (see above) or removed key context – including substantial matter being replaced by ellipses.
Actually, usually the “anti-ID advocate” goes to find the source, and supplies context, which generally shows that the quote-mine was indeed, a quote-mine, usually a second-hand quotemine from a quotemine sources, complete with typos as in the original mining.
The reason that IDists lose debates, William, isn’t because your opponents use shady tactics – it’s because they use logic and evidence, and ID fails to meet the challenge.
Not because it is true that there was no Designer, but because nothing in the evidence tells you whether there was a Designer or not. It’s not the conclusion that is at fault but the method of reaching it.
Which, presumably, is why so many IDists insist that “Darwinists” are atheists – because it somehow matters to them that ID be proven, because if it fails, then God must not exist. Which is nonsense, of course. IDists simply lack faith.
I’ve read it, and disagree with it also – or at least, I find it mostly philosophically unhelpful which I thought might be partly because of my lack of understanding of philosophy.
But I do really like the concept of teleonomy which I found an extremely useful way of thinking about function, where the function feature serves the persistence of the entity of which the the functional feature forms a part. A nice label for an important loop.
Regularity and predictability arise out of stochastic processes all the time. The prototype example is an ideal gas where pressure and temperature are well-defined macroscopic properties of an underlying stochastic process.
Chemistry relies on stochastic processes that can explore far more available states than if all atoms were simply frozen in place.
Where ID/creationists go off the rails – and this tactic was started deliberately by Henry Morris back in the 1970s – is to make the assertion that the second law of thermodynamics says that everything decays and comes all apart. That is simply false.
Complex molecules evolve in stochastic processes taking place in energy cascades. Atoms and molecules pass through various energy states where they can get bumped up to higher energies and find bonds that were not accessible at lower energies. They then get shuttled into low energy environments where they can stabilize. Atoms and molecules can get bumped over potential energy barriers and find different configurations.
Industrial process that produce chemicals and all the other technological materials we use rely on the underlying stochastic nature of atoms and molecules at given temperatures. Annealing is a stochastic process. Fractional distillation relies on stochastic processes. Filtering relies on stochastic processes. Guiding close-fitting parts into position relies on stochastic processes. Controlling friction relies on stochastic processes.
The list goes on and on and on. If there were no stochastic processes in nature, everything would be frozen solid and nothing could move or explore other energy states and configurations.
Matter can be found in every state from completely frozen, to soft matter states, to liquid states, to gaseous states, and to plasma states. If atoms and molecules are not allowed to move around and explore other available states, nothing interesting would ever happen.
Evolution and change require stochastic processes AND the second law of thermodynamics.
I don’t think a definition of a “null hypothesis” can afford to be “informal”. I’m sort of OK with someone saying, IF the null is retained, that that “means” the apparent differences were “due to chance” but I’d rather phrase it differently. But when you are formulating your null you have to be extremely precise, because it’s the null that forms the basis of the computation you do to get the p value that will tell you whether to reject or retain it.
But if Barry is happy to agree that chance is never a cause (as Luskin et al agree), and that the null is not in fact “that observations are due to chance” but something much more specific, then that’s OK with me. But right now, it is Barry who is insisting that it is I who is saying something “stupid” when I make that point. I may be saying something persnickety, and perhaps I should have cut Barry a bit of slack, but his view seems to be that I am actually wrong. I’m not, and Luskin et al would seem to agree with me, not with Barry.
I think this is very badly phrased, certainly, although with more context it might be more clear. But it’s passages like this that make me say that it’s really important not to use this phrase, because it tells you nothing except that you don’t know what the cause was. However, if, as I expect these authors are doing, is talking about the stochastic processes that govern radiation and extinction, which can be predicted statistically (e.g. rate of increase of species; rate of extinction) but not which specific lineages will divide or end, then it makes some kind of sense. It isn’t “chance” that is doing the extinguishing, it’s just that we only know statistically what will happen. Just as, in fact, we don’t identify the direction of every molecule in a gas, but we know that “by chance” a certain proportion will bang into the side of the container – and we know this probability so well that we can formulate a “gas law” to predict the pressure. Most scientific laws operate above the level of the individual events that contribute to the phenomena we are trying to explain, which are “unmodelled” and therefore “chance”. But that doesn’t mean that “chance” is doing the work – it means that we can predict statistically what those events will do on average.
The problem is that “the null hypothesis is that the difference is due to chance” doesn’t actually make sense. For a start, your null precedes your data collection, and until you’ve got your sample data, you don’t know whether you’ve got a difference or not. And if your null is true, then it will be true whether you collect any data or not. It is also inaccurate. The null hypothesis typically refers to some summary statistic, such as a mean, or the difference between two means. So the null for a drug might mean that the mean effect of the drug in the whole population is zero. But that doesn’t mean that the drug has no effect – it may have a positive effect on some people, and a negative effect on others, and zero effect on yet more. And if you get a difference between a sample of people who receive the drug and a sample of people who don’t, it doesn’t mean that the difference is “due to chance” but to the fact that the first group a greater proportion of people in whom the drug was effective than is true in the whole population. It’s “due to chance” in the sense that in another sample you might recruit a group of people in whom there was a different proportion of people, but that means that the “chance” part is nothing to do with whether the drug is effective or not, but to do with how likely you are to recruit people in whom it effective, in your study.
So to regard the null as being “that differences are due to chance” is highly misleading – we aren’t testing our sampling methods when we test our null hypothesis, but hypothesis that the drug has no mean effect. We set up a null hypothesis so that we can attempt to falsify it (and, in this case, show that the drug has an effect). You can’t “falsify” something that is simply an artefact of your sampling methodology.
And this is the important point: scientific methodology typically is about falsification – and what we do is we attempt to falsify our null. This means that it is extremely important to set up the null correctly. So if an ID scientist wants to falsify the null that a protein evolved without ID intervention, then they need to specify just what that null is. Saying “by chance” is totally inadequate, and yet this is exactly what ID scientists do. Which is why I am making a song and dance about it.
Good. In that case, they should stop setting up “chance” as their null.
Dembski is. And kairosfocus is. And gpuccio. And Durston et al.
I’m not a fan of null hypothesis testing (though it is remains,for good reason, the workhorse of science, flawed though it is). But it’s the chosen method of most ID proponents, including Dembski and Behe.
Actually, mostly they aren’t. Sometimes they talk about “inference to the best explanation” (kairosfocus, for instance) but without putting numbers on it. Which is a shame, because the rigorous way to do that is to use Bayesian inference. But most IDists get very upset if you mention Bayes, and Dembski rejects it. But Bayesian methods allow you to compare one hypothesis with another.
But whenever an IDist puts numbers on an ID argument, they use (in my experience) null hypothesis testing. Which is why I keep asking them how they have computed P(T|H) – in other words, the probability of their target under their null.
And they won’t say. That’s why I have dubbed it the eleP(T|H)ant in the room.
Well, I think that’s a potentially valid approach. Keep going with that, William! You may rescue ID yet!
I worry that Monod’s distinction between “teleology” and “teleonomy” just assumes anti-realism about teleology, and I don’t see how Monod is entitled to that.
I prefer Kant’s distinction between “inner teleology” and “outer teleology” (though I’d rather follow Varela and use the terms “immanent teleology” and “transcendent teleology” for this purpose), where inner/immanent teleology is the purposive organization of the physiology and developmental life-history of the organism itself and outer/transcendent teleology is the purposive organization of the process that generates that kind of organism.
I don’t see the difference that makes a difference between talking about teleology and talking about function. As far as I can tell, when someone like Millikan talks about proper biological functions as the effects of past natural selection, one is giving a causal explanation of teleology.
I read it – maybe 35 years ago. I don’t recall much about it. I surprised myself by putting my hand to my copy after a few moments search – the 1972 paperback Vintage Books edition, yellowed pages and all. If I read it now, it will fall apart. I face the same risk.