What evidence is there for evolution being non-random?

[articulett]

Oh, I thought of another way to show why it's confusing to say that selection is "random". Rain drops fall "randomly"--they can fill up a crevice in a rock and make a little puddle. The rock is the environment that "selected" for puddle formation. But, you wouldn't say it randomly selected raindrops. It would be confusing. You'd say, of the random raindrops that fail, the ones in the crevice were selected via the environment thus forming a puddle. We could forsee puddle formation given what we know about rock crevices and rainfall--but we couldn't predict which drops of rain would fall where and when to fill which crevices.

Saying selection is random is sort of like saying puddle formation is random. It obfuscates rather than clarifies which makes it an easy target of semantic abuse and goalpost moving. So I avoid the term randomness unless it can be used to clarify. It's too easily associated with "chance"--just as "theory" is too easily associated with "guess" by those eager to believe an alternate explanation.

I personally would not say evolution is random--because self assembly of mountains, puddles, and life forms is not random...nor is evolution of an idea. Although randomness is a part of the full explanation--it's the smaller part of an important concept.

I could give you a random sentence with which to start a story. The sentence might be random, but who would describe the story that followed as random? It would be predicated on the first sentence and thus not "random"--some might say it was the opposite of random.

 

[mijopaalmc]

I don't think you are. But I think the OP is. And I gave my analogy. I think most of the people here understand and agree with the "random" parts of evolution.

Certainly you understand how artificial selection is not random. Humans choose and breed for traits they like while culling those they do not want in agriculture, dog breeding, horses, etc.

We don't call it random, because we are selecting the traits. In that way, natural selection is not random either. Although it has no consciousness, the environment selects the traits that survive and are built upon through time. If it's cold, those with thinker fur preferentially survive...if being venomous enhances survival...venomous animals become increasingly so. They are selected because they are less likely to be eliminated by prey. The fact that they are selected is not random--it's BECAUSE they have evolved something which allows them an "advantage" in the game of life.

In that way selection is not random. Sure, it's "random" that the first step towards venomous clicked in...and it's random that it happened to be usueful in some creatures survival and reproductive success--but it's not random that such a success could be built upon or would be advantageous. It certainly is not advantageous to the prey--except that it acts as a selection process upon them--those more immune to the poison preferentially survive--they are "selected for". It confuses things to call that selection "random" because it boils down to a semantic game when biologists don't really disagree on what is occurring.

It is clearer to say that mutations are random (more or less) while selection is not (more or less). It avoids the creationist semantic game though it doesn't stop the whole moving the goal posts thing. Creationists (which I believe mijo is) seem to equate "evolution is random" to the tornado in the junkyard analogy. I think that mijo is doing just that. But I can't tell because he's one of those semantic game players from my perspective. A series of coin tosses is random. If you got to keep the money every time you got five coin tosses in a row correct that would be akin to selection. Your growing wealth would be akin to evolution. Your lucky streaks would be random--but we can predict that given and endless number of coin tosses you would have lucky streaks and accumulate wealth. We could even predict the likely frequency of lucky streaks...and thus the accumulating wealth. We couldn't tell when the next lucky streak would come. But we could be assured that the environment of endless coin tosses would produce them regularly and that is "selection". Tossing random into the equation, muddies understanding. I would only use the word random to describe each coin toss--not what happens through time. Wouldn't you? Could you see how it might be confusing to call the whole process random...and that someone could reply that a wealthy person got wealthy by complete randomness of the coin tosses?

(forgive me for the coin toss analogy...I live in Las Vegas and our town is built on this sort of randomness--coupled with peoples' confusion about it--and the predictability of large numbers of "randomness". If the house has a two percent advantage--the more people play the more that advantage is accurate--and the bigger it is, as well--that is non-random "selection". The cards a person is dealt are random. We can't predict which patrons will win. We can predict that the house (environment) will win in the end.)

Oh, I thought of another way to show why it's confusing to say that selection is "random". Rain drops fall "randomly"--they can fill up a crevice in a rock and make a little puddle. The rock is the environment that "selected" for puddle formation. But, you wouldn't say it randomly selected raindrops. It would be confusing. You'd say, of the random raindrops that fail, the ones in the crevice were selected via the environment thus forming a puddle. We could forsee puddle formation given what we know about rock crevices and rainfall--but we couldn't predict which drops of rain would fall where and when to fill which crevices.

Saying selection is random is sort of like saying puddle formation is random. It obfuscates rather than clarifies which makes it an easy target of semantic abuse and goalpost moving. So I avoid the term randomness unless it can be used to clarify. It's too easily associated with "chance"--just as "theory" is too easily associated with "guess" by those eager to believe an alternate explanation.

I personally would not say evolution is random--because self assembly of mountains, puddles, and life forms is not random...nor is evolution of an idea. Although randomness is a part of the full explanation--it's the smaller part of an important concept.

I could give you a random sentence with which to start a story. The sentence might be random, but who would describe the story that followed as random? It would be predicated on the first sentence and thus not "random"--some might say it was the opposite of random.

Don't these just show that "random" has too wide a lexical range to make for a rigorously scientific term?

 

[mijopaalmc]

But I think the OP is.

And once again you show you don't listen to anything I say. You just like to go on stereotypes that make feel comfortable in being convicted in your beliefs.

 

[articulett]

Do we really have to go over this again?

The internet is not analogous to biological life forms because it is a created entity. Furthermore, this is akin to the creationist straw man "evolution is an incomplete theory because it doesn't explain abiogenesis". Evolution is a theory describing how life developed after it came into existence and therefore doesn't to need to explain how it came into existence. Similarly, just because my description of evolution doesn't necessarily describe how the internet could come into existence (ignoring for a minute that the internet is a created entity and therefore not analogous to biological life forms) doesn't mean it isn't an invalid description as it needn't describe that event just as evolution needn't describe abiogenesis. In other words, I don't have explain how the internet came into existence for my description to be valid, sound, or true and therefore won't except to say that the internet was created by humans and the history is available online.

Honestly, I would have thought that, for people who complain so much about how creationists frequently set up straw men and claim that evolution is disproven when they demolish them, the "non-randomites" would be extra sensitive when they are using the same techniques themselves.

It wasn't a straw man. The internet evolved. And it muddles things to call the evolution of anything random even though parts of it certainly can be described as that. Doing so, places too little emphasis on the ratcheting through time and the selection of "that which works" in the given environment. I think the basics of how complexity comes from simplicity through time is a very important concepts--not just for life forms--but for many systems-- Landscapes, Cities, communities, the internet, meme-plexes, languages, biomes, galaxies, etc. Complexity doesn't spontaneously come about-- it evolves. Understanding that means that you can unravel the mysteries of the universe without appealing to something invisible and more complex that "designed" the "system". Complexity doesn't need to be built from something more complex--it just needs change through time and an environment which selects. That's evolution. All evolution. Not just life. Why dicker about the word random when it's not the most important piece to understanding evolution? Why is that word such a bugaboo for you? What was the purpose of your opening post? You suggested that you wanted peer reviewed research that shows that evolution is not random. It's a weird request. It reminds me of your discontinuous fossils request. It's a request that doesn't seem to have a "right" answer because it's one of those weird "creationist" type questions. The words we use don't change the facts that are.

 

[articulett]

And once again you show you don't listen to anything I say. You just like to go on stereotypes that make feel comfortable in being convicted in your beliefs.

I want to believe otherwise. I think the way you ask questions, refuse to clarify and reject answers are the reasons for my beliefs about you. It's what you don't seem to hear...the stuff you aren't interested in that people say versus the stuff that you are. It's the questions you ignore--the words you emphasize, the explanations you dismiss or sum up incorrectly. You tend to obfuscate both in your questions and your conclusions--not clarify. You don't seem to show areas of recognition or agreement even when the same thing is said many different ways and seem to address the question you were presumably interested in having answered.

Maybe if you told me why the word random and the random parts of evolution were so important to you and your definition or understanding of the term, I would be swayed. I don't really think it's my fault if I've jumped to a wrong conclusion. I think it's your means of communication. You seem to pick out the information you want to hear--and you want to hear that evolution is "random". Mutations are better described as random--evolution is more of a process and calling it random obfuscates in the opinion of many. I don't think there are many in the field who would agree with the statement that "evolution is random" without at least a caveat as to what they mean by "random". And YOU want a "peer reviewed" paper that says as much.

It's an odd request. What's the reason?

(p.s. it was you who opened the post with a stereotype or slam towards alternative explanations on an alternative thread...and it's you who has insulted others before who have defended you and bent over backwards to help you understand a question you were really not even interested in knowing the answer to--a similarly "vague" question, I might add.)

 

[articulett]

Don't these just show that "random" has too wide a lexical range to make for a rigorously scientific term?

Yes. That's why your OP is bizarre.

You have answered the question posed as a topic in this thread. We can't tell you how evolution is "non-random" in a scientific way because of the word "random" itself. Not because evolution IS "random"--which seems to be your claim--in a moving the goalposts game.

 

[articulett]

Mijo, I've seen you boil detailed explanations about the fossil record into a summation that there was no explanation for the supposed discontinuity--why never really defining discontinuity despite pleas to do so.

I have no doubt that you have boiled pages of explanations into your belief that biologists think that life just happened randomly. It's a simplification that muddies a better explanation. It's an explanation that is abused by creationists. Just as your fossil record simplistic conclusion was.

Perhaps you are more to blame for my perceptions of your motives than my "not listening to anything you say". From my perspective, you are the one that doesn't listen despite tons of people going over careful examples and explanations-- you are the one refusing to clarify while insisting on using obfuscating terms that lead to conclusions you prefer.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Mijo, I've seen you boil detailed explanations about the fossil record into a summation that there was no explanation for the supposed discontinuity--why never really defining discontinuity despite pleas to do so.

I have no doubt that you have boiled pages of explanations into your belief that biologists think that life just happened randomly. It's a simplification that muddies a better explanation. It's an explanation that is abused by creationists. Just as your fossil record simplistic conclusion was.

Perhaps you are more to blame for my perceptions of your motives than my "not listening to anything you say". From my perspective, you are the one that doesn't listen despite tons of people going over careful examples and explanations-- you are the one refusing to clarify while insisting on using obfuscating terms that lead to conclusions you prefer.

You know what articulett, you don't seem to have read my retraction of my OP in the Fossil and Evolution thread. I tried to explain my misunderstanding of the issue at hand there.The point is, jut as with your attack on me in the Scientists Repeat Evolution's Most Famous Experiment thread, it seem that it is your unwillingness to explore scientifically valid questions that allows your to accuse me of being a creationist rather than any actual creationism that I might espouse.

I have provided links to any who are confused ans care about what articulett and I are, I fully admit, rather indecorously bickering about in public so that your can judge for yourselves whether you think I am a creationist or not.

 

[Schneibster]

It is clearer to say that mutations are random (more or less) while selection is not (more or less). It avoids the creationist semantic game though it doesn't stop the whole moving the goal posts thing.

See, to me, random means something completely different from what y'all are arguing most people think it means (not that I disagree with your assessment). To my mind, because emergence of order from chaos is such a pervasive phenomenon it is better to adjust what people think "random" means. It fixes all sorts of problems in physics, astronomy and astrophysics, and biology, for starters.

Creationists (which I believe mijo is)

I have a strong suspicion you are incorrect here.

ETA: Looks like I called that one.

 

[Meadmaker]

Articulett,
I think there's a much simpler explanation for mijo's behavior. He's telling the truth.

I've been where mijo's at. Back in some other place, he made some fairly sensible statements, but other posters jumped on them because those posters thought his statements contained some sort of creationist code words. Instead of reading what he wrote, they read the secret code encrypted inside his statements.

The word "random" has some linguistic ambiguity, but mijo has said what he meant by it. Given what he meant, he's correct, and he's trying to get other people to see that he's correct. Well, he is correct, and if you read what he wrote, instead of looking for the code, it isn't difficult to see it.

 

[Dancing David]

I apologize for my bias. Statements like "evolution is random" have I heard too often in an ID context, and tend to set me on the defensive.

No apology neeeded < I made assumptions about your position and did not state myself clearly. I also did not even ask what you were trying to say.

I apologise to you. I too respond to strange perceptions that I think people might be saying. You are not taking the position of philospohical determinism (as I call it) which is what I was percieving.

You are quite correct, I understand why the statement that "evolution is random therefore goddidit" is a real bugbear, even on these boards.

 

[Dancing David]

So you are saying that it is wrong to say that natural selection confers a specific probability of "survival" on an individual?

I think you ought to consider the debate I just got myself into. Taffer is saying that there are parts of evolution that are dependant upon causal processes, say the flow of sodium through a neural ion channel (which could be modified by a faster reuptake mechanism allowing the nerve cell to fire at a faster rate) that may involvre probalistic processes but can also be said to be deterministic.

If I understand Taffer correctly (I am sorry if I am goofing this up) the beneficail aspects of alleles are basicaly deterministic. In the proper enviroment the expression of a trait will lead to reproductive success (sorry Taffer if I am talking for you), and that is essentialy something that is not based upon a probability.

Taffer stated

Evolution involves many factors. While the end outcome, given an initial set of qualities, may be essentially random, and unpredictable, it is the few parts of evolution which act in a predictable way which make evolution possible.

This is equivalent to someone saying that

"While the motion of molecules may be essentialy random, the chemical process of oxidation is known and therefore makes metabolizim possible". A very poor analogy.


Where are you going here Mijo, many have asked you to explain yourself, myself included and again you seem to be opaque on your motives in the discussion.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Then by definition standardized test scores cannot be random as there is almost alway a range of values that they can take on. Therefore, you cannot rank people according to their percentile because such a process depends on having a random variable for a score and a random sample of the population of individuals who took the test.

Huh? Please explain further.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

And I can't help but wonder why you feel that way.

Because you have yet to explain why you feel it is so important to call evolution random. Just like you ask whether people have some deep underlying desire for evolution to be nonrandom, you appear to have one for the opposite stance.

Because it is easier to question people's motives and attack their character than to actually address the argument. After all, if he fails to convince us by presenting evidence which he has done, he can always claim that we were creationists trying undermine evolution.

I have no idea whether you are creationists, nor would I ever claim that you are without evidence. I just don't think Meadmaker is being entirely forthcoming. If I'm wrong, I apologize.

I think you hurt "sample"'s feelings.

Possibly so, but that was part of the definition given under the heading "random."

~~ Paul

 

[Dancing David]

And once again you show you don't listen to anything I say. You just like to go on stereotypes that make feel comfortable in being convicted in your beliefs.

Uh huh?

And when you respond to the multiple requests to clarify your position and answer questions your sniffy hurt pride won't seem to be such a pose.

Articulett is not blasting you, get over it. I stated before that is the way the boards are, we argue with each other. Meanwhile you avoided answering multiple requests for clarification of your statements. So go back and answer them.
And then you totaly ignore much of what Paul A. wrote, then you come out with some opaque one liner, and then you get all pouty when someone makes a clear, cogent and plain argument.

Chill out dude. If you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen.

 

[Dancing David]

You know what articulett, you don't seem to have read my retraction of my OP in the Fossil and Evolution thread. I tried to explain my misunderstanding of the issue at hand there.The point is, jut as with your attack on me in the Scientists Repeat Evolution's Most Famous Experiment thread, it seem that it is your unwillingness to explore scientifically valid questions that allows your to accuse me of being a creationist rather than any actual creationism that I might espouse.

I have provided links to any who are confused ans care about what articulett and I are, I fully admit, rather indecorously bickering about in public so that your can judge for yourselves whether you think I am a creationist or not.

Wah, wah, wah.

I can also post all the times you ignored pointed question in this thread and others, Chill out, answer questions, flow with the river.

If you ride the rapids you will get wet.

Meanwhile you are totaly looking silly with this hurt pride routine. Seriusly, get over it. I have been torn into on this board and I am plain in my statement, you have ignored much of what was addressed to you in your OP and later posts.

This wounded pride thing is most unbecoming.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Going back to this quote, Paul, you are falling for the bait. Other posters have already alluded to this, but I'll add my two cents. This argument* works by setting up the trap. They say that, and they hook you in to quibbling about the premise. The premise, as we have noted is oversimplified, but basically correct. Meanwhile, you've let them get away with the fallacies in the rest of the argument.

I can assure you that I address the entire argument, not just the "evolution is random" part.

It would be instructive to post an example of a real, honest to goodness, anti-evolution argument that takes this form, and see how disputing the randomness of evolution would affect the argument. What say you? Do you think you could find an example of the sort of argument that you worried about, so we could dissect it?

There may not be any official creationist argument of this form. We're talking about confusion in the mind of the average guy on the street, not the average ID apologist.

But certainly you can find Web sites drawing conclusions from "evolution is random":

http://www.williambranning.tv/blog/2007/04/30/Evolution_is_Impossible

There, the guy seems to think that evolution should take a random walk.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

See, to me, random means something completely different from what y'all are arguing most people think it means (not that I disagree with your assessment). To my mind, because emergence of order from chaos is such a pervasive phenomenon it is better to adjust what people think "random" means. It fixes all sorts of problems in physics, astronomy and astrophysics, and biology, for starters.

It ain't gonna happen, my friend. People think random means haphazard.

~~ Paul

 

[Taffer]

No apology neeeded < I made assumptions about your position and did not state myself clearly. I also did not even ask what you were trying to say.

I apologise to you. I too respond to strange perceptions that I think people might be saying. You are not taking the position of philospohical determinism (as I call it) which is what I was percieving.

You are quite correct, I understand why the statement that "evolution is random therefore goddidit" is a real bugbear, even on these boards.

No harm, no foul.

I think, as a suggestion to the OP, that instead of arguing the name of something, wouldn't it be better to discuss the substance of the thing?

Therefore, mij, wouldn't you rather learn about evolution, rather then worrying about what people call it? I too, as is obvious in this thread, fell to the same problem, but in the end, isn't it better to understand (as much as anyone can) evolution?

I find evolution a wonderful, beautiful, and dare I say magical, thing. My field of interest and study is evolutionary genetics, and I have done a number of different researches into phylogenetics. My current graduate project is one of phylogenetics. And even then, every time I sit down and analyze results, run aligned sequences through different statistical tests (parsimony, bootstrap, etc), and then take the resulting evolutionary tree into context with things such as geography, and the 'greater picture', as it were, of taxonomy, I have yet to not be awestruck by the complex wonder which is evolution. The world we live in is a truely wonderful thing, made even more so by the diversity of life we see all around us. Why anyone would want to shut that out from their lives, would want to make up, or choose to believe, stories to try to make the world seem a 'better' place is beyond me. Sure, current evolutionary theory may not have all the answers. I passed up the opportunity to develop computer models for the maintenance of the levels of polymorphism we see in populations (a current puzzle as yet unsolved), for example. The field of evolutionary genetics is a very exciting one, on the 'breaking edge' as it were. I consider myself lucky to be able to be a part of it.

 

[Taffer]

It ain't gonna happen, my friend. People think random means haphazard.

~~ Paul

Enough monkeys and enough typewriters, eh?