arthwollipot
Limerick Purist
Yeah, you're going to have to explicitly point that out, because I'm not seeing it. Was it Leumas? I certainly would have missed that.
Split Thread Atheism and lack of belief in the afterlife
- Thread starter psionl0
- Start date
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
It's constrained, but it's not zero. It's also surely pretty random as to which particular sperm fertilises which particular egg to produce which particular combination of DNA from all the possible permutations from the DNA of the two parents, which also provides variety on which natural selection can act.
The important question, I think, is: if it was possible to turn back time 4 billion years and start again from exactly the same point with exactly the same laws of physics, would you end up with lifeforms identical to the ones we now see? My understanding is that the answer to that question is no, though I'm willing to be corrected.
The problem with the wishers for determinism is not just that they wish for determinism on its own but also for a determiner who determined the trajectory of it all right from the start and he does not play dice.
So when they ponder over the question of winding back time... not of course knowing that you can't do that because of Entropy and all... they don't just ponder if life would be started again or that it would be the same... but indeed, they go further and think that individuals also will come about again and would live the same life again.
Which cannot possibly happen unless there is a clock-maker who made the gears and wound the clock.
When I throw a deck of American playing cards in the air and look down which one landed closest to my left foot out of the 52... the probability of it being the Queen of Diamonds is 1/52.
It is totally random but it is not going to be the Sota de Bastos of a Spanish playing cards deck.
So when genetic mutations happen due to solar flares or a neutron from a 14C atom fissuring and bombarding a particular ACGT sequence and mangling it, it is all RANDOM.
But just like the Queen of Diamonds is not going to become the Sota de Bastos, there is a limit on the randomness... and that is of course before the final result being viable or sexy enough to mate or survive long enough to do it again in the environmental constraints and pressures.
So evolution is
Constrained random mutations punctuated by environmental constraints
Even the environmental constraints can be considered random because the Queen of Diamonds landed next to my left foot but a different card landed next to my right one and the Jack of Clubs never came close to my feet... so when I picked my card the selection process was constrained by WHERE the random landing of the card ended up...
A favorable random mutations could have happened to some poor African girl in Somalia yesterday that made her a genius who could have figured out a cure for cancer... but... ah well... RANDOM environmental constraints punctuated her right out.
Thus resulting in Jimmy and Tania in Australia having to die because no one found yet the cure for their bloody cancer. And Tania's mother was so sad that she divorced her husband and became an alcoholic and ended up killing Mary and her baby on a pedestrian crossing when she was driving under the influence. And Mary's baby also had a genetic mutation that could have made the human race find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. But now Jimmy's dad will eventually never be cured of his Alzheimer's... all because some bloody brigand in Somalia had a nasty dad who beat him up.
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For certain uses of the word random.
Random can mean different things depending whether it is being used colloquially or in a particular field.
How are you using the word random?
That is correct. Fundamentally the universe is not deterministic and there are no "hidden variables", we've known this for quite a few decades now. It's all been gone over with psionl0 before but they don't have the interest in learning why that is the case so this will simply be a repeat of their ignorance. As I said to another member recently all we can do is take them to the water.
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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Seems this thread has turned into more or less an all topic thread, so ...
Randomness and determinism are not as much opposites as many think. You can find many systems that include a lot of randomness but still exhibit an overall deterministic behavior. Evolution is one of them, but a prime example is radioactive decay:
The decay of any individual atom is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely random, but the half-life of a larger sample is deterministic enough to be used as a very precise clock.
Hans
Randomness and determinism are not as much opposites as many think. You can find many systems that include a lot of randomness but still exhibit an overall deterministic behavior. Evolution is one of them, but a prime example is radioactive decay:
The decay of any individual atom is, to the best of our knowledge, entirely random, but the half-life of a larger sample is deterministic enough to be used as a very precise clock.
Hans
Don't forget evolution also works as a theory for changes that arise which are not from "random" mutations, we have processes such as "gene swapping" as well, which again are random in the sense of not predictable but constrained by what is possible in our universe.
What is incredible about evolution as a scientific theory is how well it has stood up to ever increasing knowledge over the last 150 years.
sphenisc
Philosopher
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Let me know when someone observes a new species of coelacanth and deduces it's five past six on a Tuesday.
psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
You are describing the "regression towards the mean" theorem - the very thing that makes statistics useful in areas of science.
If a Bernoulli trial is repeated indefinitely then even though we have no idea what the outcome of an individual trial will be, the proportion of successful trials will be approximately the same as the probability that an individual trial will be successful.
This has nothing to do with whether "true" randomness exists nor whether the universe is deterministic or not.
Judging by the incessant indefatigable well funded efforts of religious charlatans and the irrevocable and INCREASING ignorance of their followers who are increasing in numbers at a much faster rate than sane people... I don't see a reason to be hopeful for much in the next 150 years... I have Mad Max movies often on my mind recently.
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Can you please give me an example of precise clocks made based upon half-life of a radioactive decay?
I think you might mean Atomic clocks which ARE NOT based on radioactive decay or half-life.
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psionl0
Skeptical about skeptics
ftfy.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
Using "clock" in the wider sense of a means to measure time, then all radioactive decay dating systems are clocks. They make use of the well known phenomenon that, although individual radioactive decay events are entirely random, statistically a sufficiently large selection of them follow a law precisely. That is, indeed, an inescapable conclusion of the fact that there is such a concept as "half-life".
Dave
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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Quantum particles and electrons are random forces that are predictable at the same time.
We know that decay rate of uranium but we do not know specifically when a particular atom will decay. Is that good enough for you? We are surrounded by random forces.
Ninja'd by Dave.
Great minds think alike.
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MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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I don't know of any clocks, as in time-pieces, but radioactive decay is extensively used for dating in geology, paleontology, and even occasionally in forensic dating. That sort of clock.
Hans
(There are also such people for whom dating is so rare that it might be measured in half-lives.)
Clock / Dating are different things though.
We determine how old things are with radioactive decay, we don't (to the best of my knowledge) don't tell the tame based on the type of radioactive decay being discussed.
We determine how old things are with radioactive decay, we don't (to the best of my knowledge) don't tell the tame based on the type of radioactive decay being discussed.
acbytesla
Penultimate Amazing
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Only slightly.
We measure time by the number or seconds in a minute and the number of minutes in an hour and so on.
So we start by defining what a second is. And we define a second by the numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.[1]
The United States official time is kept by the NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado. It isn’t based on radioactive decay, but it does use the radioactivity of the caesium atom to keep time.
We use radioactive decay to date the age of materials. How is this not like an atomic stopwatch?
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Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
Only in the sense that measuring a millimetre is different to measuring a thousand miles. The scale and the techniques used are different, but the same dimension is being measured.
Dave