I thought about including this in my previous thread, but it has grown so large that I suspect it would be lost in the abyss. If Skeptical Zone readers are interested I’ll write a series of these posts, in which I’ll develop a number of themes concerning why I abandoned evolutionary orthodoxy and became convinced that an inference to design is most reasonable.
As most of you know, I am a classical musician. All great musical compositions have a theme, and the theme of this site is “think it possible that you may be mistaken.” With that theme in mind, might I suggest some skepticism concerning probabilities?
One doesn’t need precise numbers to recognize when proposed probabilities are way of whack. When I was growing up and learning mathematics my dad (a professor of chemical physics) admonished me to always check my calculations to see if they made sense on the surface (in my engineering department we call this “using the beverage out the nose” test). If I punch 87 x 53 into my calculator and get 46,481 I immediately know something is wrong (in this case I hit the 7 key twice by accident) even if I don’t know exactly what is wrong, because the result should be somewhere in the hundreds, not thousands. I don’t need to know exactly what the problem is in order to recognize that the result makes no sense.
I apply this logic to probabilities concerning evolutionary theory. We have some good empirical evidence that it took about 10^20 reproductive events for malaria to evolve chloroquine resistance. It could be that Lucy turned into Lizzie in 3.2 million years by stochastic Darwinian mechanisms filtered by natural selection, but I apply the beverage-out-the-nose test concerning the probabilities. Even given the most generous assumptions (a few hundred thousand generations with a few million individuals in each generation) the probabilistic Lucy–to-Lizzie resources don’t pass the smell test, in my view.
So, I ask Skeptical Zone readers: Is my skepticism unwarranted, and if so, why?
As a matter of principle, I’d say that skepticism is never unwarranted, provided that skepticism can be satisfied by the preponderance of the evidence, properly weighted. If a process is observed and tested, modeled and compared with observation in sufficient detail, covering sufficient range and scope, at some point it makes sense to say, well, maybe I can relax my skepticism.
Probabilistic arguments are something I’ve always found difficult to apply – a difficulty shared by enough people to make casinos rich. But if I calculate the probability of something that actually happens regularly, and discover that my calculations indicate this is essentially impossible, I have two options. I can question whether my calculations were appropriate, considered all of what is going on, etc. OR I can decide that what happens regularly must necessarily be impossible without some invisible agency diddling with the odds.
I know that models of evolution exist which almost certainly include the important parameters, because they produce results matching observation, and make predictions which also match observation, and do so with stunning regularity. IF these models include no outside forces rigging these results indetectibly (and this appears to be the case), yet my probability calculations say the models (and the real-world observations) MUST be WAY wrong, I personally would soon suspect I’d formulated my calculations incorrectly.
So: would I be better advised to be skeptical of an enormous number of observations, tests, and predictions performed, verified and validated by tens of thousands of experts over a century or more, or better advised to be skeptical that my calculations correctly model what they say should not be possible? This probably boils down to how humble I am, and what my posture is with respect to observational evidence. When nearly every scientific authority agrees, and ALL of them have far more knowledge than I, and the few who do not agree make it clear that their rejection is religious and not scientific, I’m inclined to accept the scientific understanding rather than the religious misunderstanding.
It’s a truism that convictions not based on evidence, cannot be modified by evidence. If I am pre-convinced that evolution simply can’t be allowed to be a natural process, and if evidence doesn’t really enter into this, I’ll probably follow this recipe:
1) Reject evolution as wrong a priori
2) Construct some unrealistic rationalization supporting my rejection
3) Ask others who disagree whether they might possibly consider that they could be wrong.
Gil,
Why don’t you go through these simple calculations step-by-step?
Skepticism is never a bad thing, so you’re really asking the wrong question. The question should be whether your beverage-out-the-nose-test is warranted. It’s an okay rule of thumb when you’re dealing with things that are relatively straightforward and familiar, and one that I use all the time. But it can lead you disastrously astray for complex or unfamiliar things, because many things in this world are not intuitive.
But then again it’s not even guaranteed to work for familiar things. Your calculator example is a case in point: You say you were surprised to see thousands when you thought you should have gotten hundreds. However, the product of your numbers is in the thousands, not hundreds, so your self-reported expectations were not in fact correct.
Gil – I would say some initial scepticism is warranted. It appears that the mechanism that got from Lucy to Lizzie differs in some important respects from the mechanism that generated chloroquine resistance in mosquitoes. I am no biologist but I imagine that evolutionary biology recognises this. What does seem very odd is when confronted with this puzzle to conclude that an intelligent designer was involved and subject this hypothesis to no scrutiny whatsoever.
Thanks for this contribution Gil!
Gil:
I would say yes, it is unwarranted by the grounds you have given.
Your example is of trying to multiply two two-digit numbers into a calculator, and getting out a 5 digit number. Using my knowledge of logs I can reason that the largest number that is the product of two 2-digit numbers is a four digit number , so a 5 digit number cannot be correct, except by rounding upwards, and even then could not exceed 10000.
In other words, I do not need a “smell test” to be skeptical about the 5 digit output that my calculator tells me is the product of two two-digit numbers. What I need is some understanding of how multiplication works, as well as of base 10 numbering systems.
Now take your example: you express skepticism that Lucy -to-Lizzie can be achieved “in 3.2 million years by stochastic Darwinian mechanisms filtered by natural selection”.
OK, let’s unpack this. Assuming four generations per century, and assuming that Lucy is a direct ancestor, or at least a member of a directly ancestral population, that means that Lucy, or one of her friends, was my great*128,000 grandmother.
In other words that 128,000 generations separate me from Lucy.
And you are saying that I should regard this as a plausible result of “stochastic Darwinian mechanisms filtered by natural selection” with as much skepticism as I would regard a 5 digit “result” of product of two 2 digit numbers.
And I say: show your reasoning just as I have shown my reasoning for distrusting your calculator result. I may be so familiar with the nature of base 10 numbers that I do not need to make explicit the reasoning that forces my beverage from my nose, but it needs to be there. Otherwise we are in the position of those who ejected their beverages from their noses at the suggestion that the earth was spherical: (“Hey, guys! This Columbus dude thinks that if he sails west, he’ll can get back home without turning round! That doesn’t pass the smell test!”)
So what is the reasoning here?
You say that it could not happen by “stochastic Darwinian mechanisms filtered by natural selection”. That, to me, with all respect, in itself, betrays misunderstanding of Darwinian theory. I notice that people have taken to substituting “stochastic” for “random” recently, which I guess I should welcome, because I have been banging on about stochastic being a much more precise term, but that just means that makes what I maintain is erroneous more explicit. Let me explain:
First of all, “Darwinian mechanisms” is a term usually invoked to denote the whole shebang – replication with variation plus natural selection, but from your usage, it looks as though by “Stochastic Darwinian mechanisms” you simply mean whatever mechanisms result in variation-generation. And yes, indeed, these are stochastic, meaning that they are drawn from a probability distribution. However, they are not “Darwinian” in any meaningful sense, as Darwin had no clue (indeed was actually wrong) about the mechanisms of variance-generation. What is arguably more “Darwinian” is the second part – “natural selection” which was of course his term. And natural selection is also a stochastic process – if you bear a trait that is broadly beneficial in your environment (good camouflage, for instance, as protection from predators) that only slightly increases your chances of surviving to fecund adulthood, and you could still succumb to a myriad other hazards before doing so.
So I will rephrase your putative process as: “reproduction with heritable variance in the probability of successful reproduction in the current environment”.
And so to address the plausibility of Lizzie-to-Lucy in 129,000 generations, what we need to find out is:
Without knowing those things, we are not in a position, as we are in the case of your calculator, of simply spotting an obvious error, and while it would be quite wrong to claim that we know that Lucy was my ancestor (actually she almost certainly wasn’t, nor was her group likely to be directly ancestral to all humans), but equally wrong to claim that she, or some hominid not radically different from here, was obviously not.
And fortunately we do know some of the mechanisms that generate heritable variance, and that some of those variants affect reproductive success. And we even know some of the specific genetic variants that contribute to important differences, for example in degree of cortical folding, and, interestingly, degree of “torque”: human brains are remarkably assymmetric, and, in particular, a key human facility, namely language, is assymmetrically handled by the brain.
There is even some evidence that two specific, non-simultaneous mutations resulted in this torque.
So I certainly do not see that there are good a priori grounds for skepticism that stochastic genetic variation and stochastic enviromental hazards that may impede successful reproduction could not together have produced me from a Lucy-like ancestor, or even from a fish-like ancestor, or a uni-cellular ancestor.
I’d want to see the actual reasoning, and the actual probability calculations that you think make the chance remote. Not just liquid nasal ejecta 🙂
Historical note: While it’s true that Columbus had a different view of the Earth’s construction than most other people of his day, the disagreement was not about the Earth’s shape, but, rather, the Earth’s size. ‘Round-Earthism’ was the common view at the time; it’s just that Columbus thought the Earth’s circumference was about 30,000 kilometers, as compared to the commonly-accepted figure of about 40,000 kilometers. Colombus had other nonstandard geographical views as well, all of which added up to his thinking that Japan was less than 4,000 kilometers to the west of Europe, as compared to the actual figure of more than 19,000 kilometers.
Basically, Columbus got real lucky — had there not been a previously-known continent right where he thought Japan should be, he would very likely have died at sea, as he simply would not have provided his ships anywhere near enough food and water to last out the real journey.
Leviathan,
I expected a result in the neighborhood of 46 hundred, not 46 thousand.
Yes indeed. I should have picked another example!
No doubt you did, but I couldn’t help ribbing you on the semantics. The larger point still stands, however, which is that your beverage-out-the-nose test will only take you so far. While fine in your multiplication case, it is misapplied in your evolution case. In the latter case, you have not been skeptical, you have invoked the argument from incredulity, which is fallacious reasoning antithetical to proper skepticism.
Elizabeth, Dr. Liddle : Can I make a request (again!) for you to look at resurrecting a post (actually a comment) that you were in the middle of when you got banned by DaveScot oh so many years ago. You were explaining using a very simple analogy (from what I remember) the relation between evolutoin and probability in a way I had not seen written down before.It really seemed to get to the heart of issues anyone had around probability and evolution.
GilDodgen,
Mr. Dodgen, if you do not believe in natural selection, do you believe in common descent? I think you must have answered this question before at UD, but I can’t remember what your position is. Ie, could Lucy -> Lizzie have happened, in your opinion, just not by natural selection, yet there is common descent between the two?
Elizabeth,
Your reply is entertaining and accurate as far as it goes, but I suggest it fails to address what’s really going on here. After all, no informed person would take anything as complex and contingent as biological evolution, omit any considerations of environment, genetics, etc. and reduce it to a simple numerical calculation, EXCEPT if doing so served some other purpose.
Gil is not reasoning to a conclusion from anything resembling an informed analysis, but rather rationalizing a foregone conclusion driven by ideology. As I read it, he is clearly trying to force reality to fit his requirements, and “concluding” that its inability to do so indicates that reality is somehow bogus, which he knew before he started, or else he would have made some sensible effort to address the underlying process he is rejecting.
You ask “what is the reasoning here?” And to me, especially in light of having seen the equivalent so many many tines, the reasoning is that the ideological position can’t be doubted, reality doesn’t fit it, reality must be doubted, gin up some rather absurd rationalization to “support” the doubt, which reinforces the pre-existing supernatural convictions.
So my sniff test tells me you DO “see that there are good a priori grounds for skepticism.” Ideological grounds are about as a priori as they come – to the point where, as Dawkins wrote, “no evidence, no matter how overwhelming, no matter how all-embracing, no matter how devastatingly convincing, can ever make any difference.” Your ability to marshal and organize that evidence is impressive. But you are unfortnately doing the equivalent of using a tank to combat poison gas.
Golly – I’ll have to check out that thread. OK.
Without wishing to boast, I can say with some confidence that I am an arrangement of uncounted trillions of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles that occupies a unique position in the space-time trajectory of this Universe. From what I understand, that number could be even higher if we count all the possible superposed states my sub-atomic particles could occupy, unless I look at them, that is.
Yet, for all that mind-boggling complexity, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t designed, unless my parents lied to me. I was brought about by the good old natural process of human sexual procreation. You could say my father had designs on my mother but that’s not quite the same thing. Further, the generations of my ancestors, all equally improbable arrangements of uncounted trillions of tiny particles, stretch back until they are lost in the mists of time, with nary a designer in sight. Actually, that’s not entirely true. One of my uncles worked as a designer in the shipbuilding industry for a while but you get my drift.
And if the odds against me coming into existence here and now are bad enough, what about the more than six billion other equally improbable people on this planet here and now. Does that improbability mean that they were all designed?
I’ve never been impressed with the Argument from Big Numbers approach. A sense of incredulity is no guide to anything because our imaginations are way too limited to really comprehend the true scale of of our universe of time and space and all that comprises it.
Ahh, you see this is where you go wrong, there is no good empirical evidence that it took 10^20 reproductive events to evolve chloroquine resistance, Behe got that wrong, as has been pointed out in numerous other fora. And the kind of events he was talking about was multiple simultaneous mutations in a single gene with no natural selection involved.
We have a good idea of the kinds of differences between chimps and humans, and all involve fairly standard evolutionary mechanisms (naturla selection of single mutations, copy number variation and deletions), not the Beheian highly improbables.
In defense of my thesis that skepticism concerning evolutionary theory is justified:
Evolutionary theory is a theory about what occurred in the distant past, which cannot be directly observed or reproduced. It is therefore necessarily speculative. This is not to say that speculative theories are not worthwhile or that evidence cannot be advanced in their defense, or that accumulating evidence cannot make the speculation increasingly believable, but the speculative nature of the enterprise remains.
In addition, evolutionary theory on a grand scale (e.g., the origin of species) is based on extrapolation from observable phenomena. There are many observable and empirically verified sources of biological variation (mixing and matching of existing genetic information through sexual reproduction, mutations, and a wide variety of other sources) and the results of these variations can be observed and evaluated as to their survival quotients on which natural selection can work. But the extrapolation of these observable phenomena to explain the origin of all biological diversity and sophistication remains speculative, of necessity, because it can’t be observed or reproduced. The proposition that phenomena that work at one scale can be endlessly extrapolated to explain all else at all scales has a miserable track record in the history of science.
The history of evolutionary theory has included quite a number of skeptics (the Wistar dudes were no dummies, and even Gould had reservations, until he was forced to recant), including Charles Darwin himself, who observed that the fossil record did not comport with his assumption that nature makes no jumps, but speculated that future investigation would reveal that the fossil record really was infested with the transitional intermediates his theory required.
Finally, I propose what I call the trajectory of the evidence. When a scientific theory is correct, the more we learn, the more the theory should have explanatory power, but the opposite has occurred concerning orthodox evolutionary theory. The more we learn about the incredible engineering sophistication found in even the simplest living cell, the more I’m inclined to be skeptical that the probabilistic resources could have been available to accomplish such a task through the proposed evolutionary mechanisms.
I thus defend the rationality of my skepticism.
Finally, thanks to Liz for her hospitality and graciousness in allowing me to make my case here, and I greatly appreciate the civility with which my challenges have been challenged.
I think the exact opposite, I see that evolution has been confirmed as time goes on. The discovery of DNA and the sequencing of genes correlated beautifully with the fossil record. We discover fossils of new internediates. Lenski’s work and the list goes on.
The empirical evidence for evolution is huge, also the history of science so far is one of naturalistic explanations. So if ID has a different explanation the need pretty strong evidence.
I don’t think bringing up creationist tropes like Wistar and ‘Gould recanting’ does yourself any service. Wistar was some mathematicians who didn’t understand evolution trying to create a model and didn’t they themselves admit later they got it wrong.
Also I can’t see Gould being forced to do anything. I know he had some ideas about evolution that weren’t mainstream but didn’t he put in the hard yards and got most of them into the mainstream.
I’m not an expert but I wonder how anybody could put a number on the probability of a function forming.
Not only do you have to work out the probability of going directly from A to B but you would need to ADD to this all of the other paths as if may go A C D E F B. Not only that the existing structure for chloroquine resistance may not be the only structure that gives this function. You would need to then ADD all of the possible paths to all of the possible structures that give chloroquine resistance.
I think that by the time you did all of these calculations you would find that the probability would grow to the very probable.
The basic “were you there” argument being put forth is disappointing and tired. The “speculative science” argument seems peculiar, not only in light of the truly boggling amount of corroborating evidence and accurate predictions, but in light of the lack of doubt expressed about astronomy or plate tectonics, theories which allow for FAR less active experimentation, which deal with the distant past, and which according to Gil’s criteria are thus a great deal more speculative than evolution. But of course, they do not provoke a religious response.
To see the hundreds of thousands of studies done by hundreds of thousands of scientists for over a century, dismissed basically as “all guessing wrong” reveals either a deep comtempt for evidence, or else a wilfully perverse need to tune it out. When everything we learn dovetails neatly into what we already know and understand, yet each increment in our knowledge renders what is learned “less likely” to support the very mechanisms they corroborate, we finally understand that, once again, evidence doesn’t matter.
There’s that all too common confusion between theory and hypothesis. Admittedly, the langauge can be confusing, because sometimes the word “theory” is used for an hypothesis.
An hypothesis can be speculative. A theory is a framework that guides research. The theory of evolution has proved a very effective framework.
Sure, you might be skeptical as to whether it is an accurate description of past events. However, theories don’t have to be. Many scientific theories are idealized accounts, so aren’t really descriptions.
I’d say that you are wrong about both Gould and Darwin, but right about the Wistar institute.
I think you have that a bit wrong. The more we learn, the more we discover some of the limitations of the theory. That’s why Einstein’s relativity and Quantum theory are there to overcome some of the limitations of Newtonian theory.
Gil,
This is an appeal to authority. Such an argument cannot be taken seriously. Several people asked you to present the “simple probability calculations” you referred to. Why don’t you do that? No need to rely on anyone’s opinion if the calculations are indeed simple.
Gil,
For years you’ve claimed that “simple math” demonstrates the absurdity of “Darwinism”. For years you’ve been asked to produce this “simple math.” For years you have run away when the question is asked.
Can you back up your claim, or will you run away yet again?
Liz has given you a platform. Show us the simple math that exposes the absurdity of Darwinism, or drop that claim from your shtick.
He showed us simple math in this thread. Or at least a numeric result: 10^20. And it was wrong.
GilDodgen,
Mr. Dodgen – do you accept common descent?
GilDodgen,
This is like saying Newtonian theory is only concerned with reconstructing ancient comet orbits (Halley anyone). It is completely an utterly wrong.
Evolutionary theory is a theory of how populations of organisms change over time. While evolutionary theory can be used to reconstruct past events (and some of the most riveting examples of the use of evolutionary theory involve things long past), it is also used in the here and now. Evolution is happening in populations right now (just look at the table of contents of recent issues of the journal Evolution). Understanding the response of populations to environmental change is evolution, and our ability to bring back fisheries that have collapsed depends on an understanding f evolution.
The current triple therapy for HIV and dual therapy for malaria depended on an understanding of evolution. And just because something can not be observed directly (or reproduced directly) doesn’t mean it is speculative (otherwise all forensic investigations would be useless), we work with indirect evidence all the time.
It will, and always will, but this is as true about what has happened in the recent past as what has happened in the distant past, and does not stop us deriving hypothesis from the theory that are predictive. A hypothesis only has to predict new data, not new events.
What is different about non-repeating events is not that hypotheses concerning them are necessarily speculative (all hypotheses are speculations, albeit well-grounded ones that make predictions) is that substantial traces of what happened will be lost forever. In other words, the data we have (literally, “what we are given”) may always be fitted to more than one model, and data that would distinguish between two alternative models may simply be unobtainable.
All empirical science is based on extrapolation from a sample – i.e. scientific methodology is predicated on the assumptions that events are predictable. And so, if we can demonstrate, for instance, that a population adapts to changes in its environment in real time, we can justifiably extrapolate that process to other populations in other times, unless we have good reason to suppose that something was crucially different.
Well, no, not easily, because what promotes survival, on balance, in one environment may be disadvantageous in another. But yes, indeed, “There are many observable and empirically verified sources of biological variation (mixing and matching of existing genetic information through sexual reproduction, mutations, and a wide variety of other sources)” and no doubt many that we have not yet discovered. Moreover, we need to consider the loose linkage between genotype and phenotype, and, indeed, longitudinal transmission of information by other-than-genetic means (e.g.culture; epigenesis). It is vital to remember that it is the organism that does the surviving and reproducing, so regulatory sequences a that determine when and where a protein coding gene are probably key to most selectable phenotypic characteristics i.e. changes that affect reproductive success. It is also important to bear in mind that selection can and does occur at between-population as well as within-population level population-level selection, meaning that evolvability itself evolves.
But it can, and is, reproduced. We can actually observe, in real time, populations adapting, and even speciating. Yes, it remains “speculative” in the sense that all we have are models, but they are predictive models, and are supported if our predictions are confirmed.
Yes, but think what you are saying here. No evolutionary biologist is claiming that adaptation and speciation occurred at any different scale in the past than it does in the present, merely that we are observing the results of the same processes over a longer period. Now, it may well be that certain large single-step beneficial variations occurred rarely, but importantly, and those are of great interest, but they are not proposed through extrapolation from real-time observations of adaptation and speciation, but by actually trying to figure out the nature of those specific events. For instance, one hypothesis for the origin of eukaryotes is symbiosis (Margulis and Sagan): endosymbiotic theory. Hox genes, too, may have given rise to rare substantial beneficial phenotypic changes – or possibly not. Key genotypic variations may not have been particularly beneficial at the time they appeared, but proved to be so following changes to regulatory sequences.
When and where was Gould “forced to recant”?
Well, there are a great number of transitional fossils!
However, I’m glad you brought up the issue of “nature makes no jumps”. There is no reason, in principle, why nature can’t make a jump, and, pace Aristotle, we know know that at a fundamental level it does. Also at a less fundamental level: atoms are discrete. Democritus, not Aristotle, turned out to be correct. Chemistry does “make jumps” and molecules, including the DNA molecule, consists of discrete units. A codon specifies one amino acid; a change to that codon will, or will not, result in a different amino acid. There will be a “jump” or “no jump”. At the macroscopic level, of course, biologically, we tend to see continua. But not always. Sometimes an alteration to a gene produces a specific syndrome that is either present or absent. At the genetic level, in other words, all changes are jumps. At the phenotypic level, changes are smoothed by development in which external as well as internal factors modulate gene expression.
So while we would expect, in general, genetic variants to result in incremental phenotypic changes, there is no reason to think that that is an absolute rule. For example, one of the big genetic differences between humans and the other great apes is that humans have only 23 pairs of chromosomes whereas the other great apes have 24; and we can also see what happened – one of our pairs is a fusion of two pairs of chromosomes found in the other great apes. So that was a “saltation” event” if you like. Whether it was beneficial or not at the time it happened is unknown; it may have no relevance to the differences between us and the other great apes. Or it may have had no benefit at the time, but formed a platform on which other beneficial changes subsequently took place.
In other words, Natura non facit saltus is not an article of faith, but a heuristic. It’s generally true at the macroscopic level, but not always. Small changes are commoner than large ones. That’s about all one can say. It’s really just an outcome of the Central Limit Theorem!
Yes indeed.
I absolutely disagree. Although I ‘m not sure what that word “orthodox” is doing in there. The only “orthodoxy” in science is the rule that the model must be fitted to the data, which is almost the inverse of “orthodoxy”. What must be “ortho” is not the “dox” but the data.
Can I add my voice to the chorus asking you to compute the “probabilistic resources” you think are required? Because this seems to me the eternal sticking point between we “evos” as Joe calls us, and IDists.
No evo suggests that cells just happened to come about by some accident of chemistry – passing nucleotides, lipids, amino acids in a “warm little pond” just got together on some convection current one day and lo and behold – a cell.
And it seems to me, from what I have read, is that all “probabilistic resources” ID arguments are the (right) rejection of this null.
That’s the $64,000 question, Gil!
Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant
Except that we may not 🙂 I await your answer to my question with interest.
You are more than welcome Gil, and I hope you will continue to post here. While I understand that Barry may want to reserve UD as a place that largely serves the ID community, as the strapline says, I do think there is a place for robust discussion of the issues that separate us, not least because on both sides I detect some profound misunderstandings of the case being made by the other.
With respect, it’s entirely the WRONG question, because it gives the impression that the origin of cells was a random “poof here’s a cell” rather than as a process with both deterministic and stochiastic elements; and that the first “cells” were nothing like modern cells, and that there are wide variety of possible “cells” rather than “a” cell, which ID and creationist folks try push.
It’s a bit like trying to compute the probability of the natural nuclear reactors in Africa by trying to computer the probability uranium poofed together in one place, when you should be studying the details of the original atmosphere, erosion rates, uranite deposition, initial uranium levels in the primordial earth and so on.
The following may be of interest: Selection without replicators: the origin of genes, and the replicator/interactor distinction in etiobiology
John S. Wilkins, Clem Stanyon and Ian Musgrave
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h475867185551688/
Ian Musgrave,
Well, I would agree that there probably isn’t a right answer, but it seems to me it’s the right question to ask of someone who claims that the probability is too small for the even to have occurred.
And that is the central claim of ID, it seems to me: that life is too improbable to have occurred within the lifetime of our universe, and therefore must have had “outside help”.
So the probability calculation is fundamental to the claim, no?
Elizabeth,
The problem is the question, in the words of a famous physicist is “not even wrong”.
Ian Musgrave,
Well, I would agree. But I’d still like those who think it’s a valid question to show how they compute the answer!
Well, it’s the wrong question again because its an origin of life question and not an evolution question. Creationists constantly conflate the two, especially when they’re smoke-screening.
Slightly off topic but apropos to all this, there’s an interesting discussion over at Point of Inquiry about cultural cognition and motivated reasoning, entitled:
The Great Ideological Asymmetry Debate
It’s an hour long but worth the time.
Hi GilDodgen,
It’s important to realize that, with regards to evolution, there is a significant difference between a large population for a small number of generations and a small population for a large number of generations. Think of an analogy: You command a military camp and want to reconnoiter the surrounding area. You can send a thousand soldiers, each to take ten steps and return. This will give you a very clear picture of everything nearby, but no knowledge of anything farther away. Or you can send ten soldiers, each to take a thousand steps. This may give you an incomplete picture of what is nearby, but it will also allow you to explore areas much farther afield, including over a nearby hill that might conceal dangers.
Chloroquine is a schizontocide, so it only acts during part of the Plasmodium life cycle, when the parasite is infecting and feeding on erythrocytes (red blood cells), primarily in the ring or trophozoite phase (depending on species). It can be several weeks for the entire life cycle to complete, months for species with hypnozoites, cells that remain dormant in the liver. It’s difficult to determine an average life cycle, as it can vary considerably; however, it usually takes a few weeks for each complete life cycle. Let’s just say 10 life cycles per year over 50 years. Compare this to 200,000 generations since Lucy, albeit in smaller populations. Whatever else you can say, the descendants of Lucy can travel much farther.
And Plasmodium overcoming the best efforts of the most technological organism on Earth is no small feat.
Gil,
I’m glad to see you venturing outside of UD. Like several others here, I’m very interested to see the probability calculations you mention.
On a related note, I see that your profile here includes this:
When you have responded to the requests to show your math on this thread (and the subsequent questions that are sure to arise), I would like to request that you start another thread describing the ID arguments that you found most persuasive and why. I hope you are so inclined and have the time.
Regards,
Patrick
What kind of question should be asked of someone who claims that the probability is not to small for unintelligent processes to be a reasonable explanation?
This is false. All models that are based on evolutionary schemes are wildly inaccurate. Researchers continually inflate the numbers to hoodwink the general public. I challenge you to point to some of these models. Let’s analyze them and see if they’re accurate.
Events of unimaginably small probability are occurring all the time.
Yes, I agree. This is the case in social sciences on a regular basis. Umpteen times more ‘complex’ for social systems than ‘simple’ natural systems because ‘will’ is involved, thus unpredictability.
Check out the Jeremy Lin show in (Palo Alto-Harvard) NYC. How ‘probable’ or ‘predictable’ would the natural scientific calculation be for that ‘event’?
Gil:
I’m surprised Gil’s been left off the hook for this one. Darwin’s observation was based on his knowledge that the available fossil evidence was scarce in relation to the amount of time spanned by the fossil evidence.
He made a prediction. His prediction has been confirmed: the gaps in the fossil record have been steadily filled as more and more fossil evidence has been unearthed.
This observation combined with a successful prediction does not make Darwin a “skeptic” in the sense that Gil proposes (i.e. that Darwin himself did not believe in his own theory of evolution).
And theories that lead to successful predictions aren’t undermined, they’re strengthened.
Could you cite someone who has made this claim? I’m serious, William, because this is one major assymmetry, as I see it, in the ID vs evo argument. IDists claim that the probability of life occurring not-by-design is too small to be reasonable. Evos (I quite like Joe’s word) merely claim that we don’t know what the probabilities are, and that we do have good candidate non-design mechanisms.
ID depends for its inference on rejecting non-design. Evolutionary theory merely depends for its inference on the fit of its model to the data. It does not require us to reject ID.
Elizabeth is right. Here is an example:
Here is an evolutionary model that I published. What’s inaccurate about it?
Could you give an example of researchers “inflat[ing] the numbers to hoodwink the general public”? I’m not sure what you have in mind.
Ido,
Hey, I saw that paper when it came out! Awesome!
Thanks! I was in Tokyo out drinking with students when I got the message it was accepted for publication. We got very drunk that night.
Ido,
I’ll bet 🙂
I don’t think that’s the objection being made. Ian is right, I think, that the question is a leading question, sensible only of one already accepts the assumption that “a” cell just happened to occur. Kind of like asking for the probability of a baseball game as we know it.
But baseball games, like cells, didn’t just sort of occur, all at once and nothing first. Instead, the game evolved in small stages over long periods of time from prior games such as rounders. Record books struggle to deal with performances achieved under very different sets of rules, such as different numbers of fielders, distance between bases, no such thing as walks, etc. “The” game of baseball has always been a work in progress.
I imagine you could take a hundred cellular biologists back in a time machine, start sampling every million years or so, and taking a vote as to whether “a cell” had been sampled. We could define “a cell” as whatever >50% of the biologists agreed was close enough. With the understanding that non-cell-based life is surely also possible.
I’ve seen discussions of the likelihood of some sort of life arising where conditions have been suitable for long enough. The SWAG is that it’s very likely, but that IS a guess, not something calculable.
I’m echoing my understanding of AVIDA.
I think you misunderstand. Imagine dropping a crystal glass onto a concrete floor. Shards scatter in all directions. Now, what is the probability of those shards all coming to rest precisely where they have, and nowhere else? Well, that probability is so small as to defy calculation. Repeat the experiment, and EVERY result is infinitely unlikely. The experiment is simple. No will is involved in creating the pattern of shards.
Most of reality actually consists of these extraordinarily unlikely coincidences.