What evidence is there for evolution being non-random?

[articulett]

Philosopher of Science, Robert Pennock gives a pretty good discription of the development of the scientific method and how it is distinguished from the philosophy of Science at the Dover trial:

Q. How did science adopt this rule of methodological naturalism?

A. As I said, the term itself is something that philosophers have used. So one really has to go back and sort of see how that method, that concept arose, and it really arose in fits and starts. It's not as though one can point to a particular time, but it's a change that one can really trace back even to the pre-Socratics, we sometimes point to Hippocrates for example as one of the early glimmers of this type of view with regard for example to the nature of disease. An earlier view would have said that a disease is the result of some perhaps possession by some supernatural, divine, or demonic being.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day3am.html

He also explains the difference between the two.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Philosopher of Science, Robert Pennock gives a pretty good discription of the development of the scientific method and how it is distinguished from the philosophy of Science at the Dover trial:

Q. How did science adopt this rule of methodological naturalism?

A. As I said, the term itself is something that philosophers have used. So one really has to go back and sort of see how that method, that concept arose, and it really arose in fits and starts. It's not as though one can point to a particular time, but it's a change that one can really trace back even to the pre-Socratics, we sometimes point to Hippocrates for example as one of the early glimmers of this type of view with regard for example to the nature of disease. An earlier view would have said that a disease is the result of some perhaps possession by some supernatural, divine, or demonic being.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day3am.html

He also explains the difference between the two.

See, this is part that I don't think that most scientists understand: methodological naturalism, along with at least empiricism, is the philosophy of science and cannot be distinguished from science, because methodological naturalism forms one of the philosophical underpinnings of science. Thus, Pennock can go on to say that ID isn't science because it urges scientists to abandon methodological naturalism.

 

[Schneibster]

mijo, you bother me.

Science is that which is discovered using the scientific method. That which cannot be discovered using the scientific method therefore cannot be science. It's as simple as that. Anything beyond that is obfuscation. Also known as "philosophy."

I understand philosophy perfectly well; however, any system of thought that allows you to prove literally anything you like cannot be anything but bulls**t. That's the biggest difference between philosophy and science.

 

[articulett]

Mijo,

If you are interested in the difference between science and philosophy of science and why this is yet another line of reason that sets off alarm bells I suggest you read these links (because it's been abused ad nauseum by creationists): http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil.html

I don't think this is the right thread to make a case that science and philosophy of science are the same thing. Those who do science, don't think so...nor does Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett, nor Robert Pennock--all philosophers of science.

Recognizing science when you see it and explaining what it is to others is not science itself, nor is it on topic with this thread title. There's also a quick dismissal of your reductionist view linked there as well: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/reduction.html

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

True, but was my point clear about this thought experiment?

Yes. If you consider natural selection over a long time period then it could be described as random. Just as the earth's climate could be described as random. However, because over the time period organisms adapt to their environment the selection criteria (such as the climate) are pretty stable, "random" is misleading. Sure, some DNA from one generation to the next will be lost due to trees falling on heads, tornadoes and lucky preditors, but this is just noise on top of the general trend that dominates. If this noise was bigger than the general selection criteria then there could be no adaptation by organisms.

I was trying to put forward my view that the selection is truely random, and the precice course of evolution is truely random (probabilistic) and not pseudorandom, unlike the excel random number generator, for example...

Many individuals that would otherwise breed are just unlucky, due to random events. This affects the selection, starting from which sperm actually fertilises the egg in the first place.

Add in random behaviour of predators, then acts of Zeus, and one can only make short-term predictions about the course of evolution of any particular species descendants, other than to say it is highly likely that most will not reproduce sucessful offspring.

For the purpose of this thread are you considering meteorites, and volcanoes as random, or pseudorandom, or something else?

That's a hard question to answer. If there are rules that every particle in the universe has to obey then nothing is truly random. I prefer to think of random as a word to express qualatively the amount of ignorance an observer has about a process or the inputs to the process.

E.g., someone getting lung cancer is random. Someone who smokes 30-a-day getting lung cancer is less random to an informed observer than a non-smoker getting lung cancer.

Meteorites and volcanoes could be considered random. The effect of a large meteorite strike or volcanic eruption would be a step-change in the selection criteria. Either side of this step change the selection criteria would be pretty stable or simple functions over time. If there was insufficient variance in a particular population to cope with the new environment, that population would die out.

"That will not model the trend in evolution, which tends to reduce variance."

Speciation?

The sum total distributions of the genomes of every organism would show multiple distributions, (could one treat each DNA letter as part of a base4 number?- I am more than a bit unsure of this). Two separate sepcies would show different means and standard deviations.... arrgh. I hope that you can follow this as I am thinking after typing, but not deleting...

True this would be less than if every mutation survived and reproduces, which would be truely disordered.

Jim

Isn’t an environment with species less random than one with ponds full of goo?

A random process that reduces variance is best modeled as a random process that reduces variances.

If each year, we pick, deterministicly, one person who died childless, and somehow recover their genome (assuming we had some technology to do so) and pass it on, we would increase the variance in the population through a determistic method.

If I have the set of N random numbers (listed in order): 1, 2, 4, 4, 7, 8, 9 so N = 7. The mean and standard deviation are 5 and 3.055 respectively.

If I add a number to the set, say 7, the mean and standard deviation are 5.25 and 2.915. I.e. the standard deviation goes down, not up. If I repeatedly add the number 7, the standard deviation tends to zero and the mean to 7. So you’re statement is wrong.

If each year we selected one person in the population to die, using a random number generator to do so, we would reduce the variance in the population through a random method.

If I have the set of N random numbers (listed in order): 1, 2, 4, 4, 7, 8, 9 so N = 7. The mean and standard deviation are 5 and 3.055 respectively.

If I delete one of the numbers from the set, say 7, the mean and standard deviation are 4.667 and 3.204. I.e. the standard deviation goes up, not down. So you’re statement is wrong.

Increased variance should not be confused with random, and reduced variance should not be confused with non-random. You can't equate one with the other.

Walt

I don’t. What I think is that a distribution with a narrower variance is less random than one with a wider variance.

Useful selection functions are stable or simple functions over time, with less variance than the population being chosen from. Randomness in the selection function limits how well adapted an organism can be. I.e. it puts a lower limit on the variance of the population selected for the next round.

NB: All values were calculated using Microsoft Excel average() and stdev() functions.

 

[Meadmaker]

I don’t. What I think is that a distribution with a narrower variance is less random than one with a wider variance.

That's a common way of describing things, but it shows the definition difficulty. If "random" means "described by a probability distribution" then there is no such thing as "less random". There are just probability distributions with smaller standard deviations. However, I still knew what you meant.

One topic I brought up earlier, and I'll raise again, is the whole issue of the significance of using the term or calling evolution random. The common objection is that creationists abuse the term, and try to use it to mislead the public. I don't think that's true. When asked for examples, Paul posted one that quoted Richard Dawkins saying that evolution was not random, and then going on to ask why only some of the fish changed into reptiles. Kleinman is busily saying in the "annoying" thread, that evolution is completely predictable, and provably wrong. In those google hits on "evolution is random", I don't see abuse of the term.

In other words, I don't think that explanation of "random" as misleading is a good objection. If anything, I think I see more of what Fishbob was talking about when I read things written by real creationists. I see the false determinism, and asking why evolution didn't turn out the things that the deterministic models predict.

One of the problems I see about evolutionists attacking creationists is that they aren't attacking what the creationists are really saying. They don't bother listening to the creationists, and end up refuting arguments they don't make. That's no problem among us friends, but when a not so scientifically inclined person, who hasn't made up his mind on the debate, sees that happening, he is inclined to believe the creationist. He hasn't studied enough to understand the science behind the arguments, but he can tell a straw man when he sees one and, frankly, I think "our" side has at least as many as the other.

So, if anyone is interested in pursuing this, I would like to see examples of real arguments by real creationists that illustrate why we shouldn't say "random" a lot when talking about evolution. I know that Articulett posted some earlier, but, frankly, there was so much being posted that I couldn't keep up, or wasn't inclined to do so.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Addition to my earlier post in reply to Walter's Post:

A random process that reduces variance is best modeled as a random process that reduces variances.

If each year, we pick, deterministicly, one person who died childless, and somehow recover their genome (assuming we had some technology to do so) and pass it on, we would increase the variance in the population through a determistic method.

It depends on the population distribution and the selection function. E.g., if the population distribution was bell-shaped and your deterministic selection function favoured a non-reproducer that fell on one of the tails of the curve to survive then you could increase the variance. If you picked someone who was close to the mean to survive then the variance would go down.

If each year we selected one person in the population to die, using a random number generator to do so, we would reduce the variance in the population through a random method.

It is impossible to know if the variance would go up or down each year. Killing someone close to the mean would increase the variance. Killing someone far away from the mean would reduce it.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Schneibster and articulett-

Perhaps I should let this matter drop. I recognize my rather shallow knowledge of the philosophy of science, which extends only to a series of lectures given at San Jose State University as a credit course on the philosophy. My supportable frustration is much narrower than the grand, sweeping statements I have been making. I saw what I perceived as an out-of-hand rejection of the articles that I had posted that argue from a more theoretical (i.e., non-experimentalist) standpoint that evolution is better described through a statistical theory rather than a dynamical simply because they were posted by philosophers of science. For instance, "Trials" argued that since natural selection, like random drift, is based on sampling a population for genes that are passed on, it is an inherently statistical process. The article implicitly accepted evolution as a true scientific theory, so I thought it was a good example of how even non-scientists could accept evolution as scientific fact but still describe evolution as "random" (i.e., statistical). Furthermore, it provide a rather straightforward explanation of the statistical nature of natural selection without getting into the difficult technical definitions of probability theory. Thus, it seemed a little bit strange, but nonetheless unsurprising, when it was turned down because it supposedly only addressed drift as a "random" process, a claim which implied that even the abstract of the article had been disregarded, and I was denounced as a creationist for appealing to the philosophy of science.

 

[Meadmaker]

I saw what I perceived as an out-of-hand rejection of the articles that I had posted ....

And assumed that it had anything to do with how scientists treat any particular topic.

 

[mijopaalmc]

And assumed that it had anything to do with how scientists treat any particular topic.

Is that a statement of your opinion about the material I cited?

 

[Meadmaker]

Is that a statement of your opinion about the material I cited?

No. It's a statement about the out of hand rejection. The material you cited was how scientists think, at least when they are thinking about the philosophy of science. The out of hand rejection was a knee jerk reaction, not related to anything that scientists actually think.

ETA: Scheibster and I both "rejected" the material, too, but for different reasons. It just wasn't something we were all that interested in.

 

[jimbob]

A couple of replies to Ivor's post#1085

Isn’t an environment with species less random than one with ponds
full of goo?

Yes I do agree, and had done by the time I had finished typing, which is what I meant by "True this would be less than if every mutation survived and reproduces, which would be truely disordered.".

However, I actually have difficulty in conceiving such a system. I was thinking in terms of the cretinists viewpoint, "we have a fixed number of species, and that has been constent (except that the dinosaurs failed to get on the ark)."

Speciation from this would increase the number of species, but as you point out the variation would be less. Indeed wouldn't the IDiots non-acceptance of natural selection cause species to literally devolve towards the goo stage?

That's a hard question to answer. If there are rules that every particle in the universe has to obey then nothing is truly random.

IIRC, Experiments involving quantum entanglment *seem* to suggest that quantum effects are truly random, or that predetermination is far more blatant than one would think. If it is actually predetermined, then some quantum effects must have influenced the experimenter to perform the observations at the particular time in the first place, so that the results seem to be obeying the entanglement.

Similarly for the single slit experiments with individual photons/electrons.

(I wish I could recall better, maybe someone with better memories could elaborate, or politely tell me that I am talking complete DJJ, please)

Jim

 

[Meadmaker]

Indeed wouldn't the IDiots non-acceptance of natural selection cause species to literally devolve towards the goo stage?

Yes, and some of them say that explicitly. They think it is only the Hand of God that keeps us from devolving.

 

[Jorghnassen]

mijo, you bother me.

Science is that which is discovered using the scientific method. That which cannot be discovered using the scientific method therefore cannot be science. It's as simple as that. Anything beyond that is obfuscation. Also known as "philosophy."

So mathematics, and, say, the arts are BS?

I understand philosophy perfectly well; however, any system of thought that allows you to prove literally anything you like cannot be anything but bulls**t. That's the biggest difference between philosophy and science.

That appears to be quite a narrow, reductionist view of philosophy. Are you implying that all of philsophy is just BS? Socrates, Aristotle, Nietzche, Descartes, et al, just obfuscators?

Not to be the devil's advocate here, but I just can't let these kinds of blanket statements and hasty generalizations unchallenged.


ETA: And this thread is still going on after 28 pages? Are there still quibbles over the definitions and usage of "randomness"?

 

[articulett]

Schneibster and articulett-

Perhaps I should let this matter drop. I recognize my rather shallow knowledge of the philosophy of science, which extends only to a series of lectures given at San Jose State University as a credit course on the philosophy. My supportable frustration is much narrower than the grand, sweeping statements I have been making. I saw what I perceived as an out-of-hand rejection of the articles that I had posted that argue from a more theoretical (i.e., non-experimentalist) standpoint that evolution is better described through a statistical theory rather than a dynamical simply because they were posted by philosophers of science. For instance, "Trials" argued that since natural selection, like random drift, is based on sampling a population for genes that are passed on, it is an inherently statistical process. The article implicitly accepted evolution as a true scientific theory, so I thought it was a good example of how even non-scientists could accept evolution as scientific fact but still describe evolution as "random" (i.e., statistical). Furthermore, it provide a rather straightforward explanation of the statistical nature of natural selection without getting into the difficult technical definitions of probability theory. Thus, it seemed a little bit strange, but nonetheless unsurprising, when it was turned down because it supposedly only addressed drift as a "random" process, a claim which implied that even the abstract of the article had been disregarded, and I was denounced as a creationist for appealing to the philosophy of science.

I am the only one calling a creationist on this thread...and that is because you use the exact same arguments in the exact same way to say nothing at all while implying something else. The words you use and the way you say things and the articles you use to support your position does not clarify anything about evolution or why the biology sites refer to natural selection as "non-random"--the or "the opposite of chance". It's a very simple concept to understand, but from my perspective you do bizarre semantic shenanigans just so you can say "evolution is not 'non-random'" as if that means anything at all when you have defined random as: "relating to or described by a probabilty distribution". You use nearly the identical argument quoted in talk origins by saying some variation of this, "if mutations are random and selection is random then scientists really do think humans came about randomly". There is a lot more that biologists understand about evolution than this pithy summation and none of your stochastic models illustrate that. Just because you've dug up some philosophy of science papers that model the entirety of evolution on a stochastic or "probability distribution" model doesn't mean that it's useful or informative to describe evolution as a random process.

You use tactics identical to creationists to imply..."random is the best answers that scientists have, and what are the odds that all this could come about randomly? That's like saying a tornado could go through a junkyard and assemble a 747".

It's easy enough to find stuff out without playing word games or appealing to the philosophy of science. You got your answer--if per your definition of random, the evolution of this thread is random, then so is evolution itself. From my perspective, if you can sum up this evolution of this thread as random, you've done a pretty piss poor job of explaining the evolution part.

I try to give you a heads up on creationist arguments so you don't sound like one or you don't abuse language and make implications like they do or get all defensive because we've seen this ploy a hundred times (or something like it)--but you never read the links...and then you seem to argue exactly like it's been done a hundred times before--and to me it's just words upon words saying nothing at all and going out of the way to miss the point. But that is just to ME. However, I think everyone will be offended if you confuse "knowing about science and what it is and isn't" with actually "doing science" as you seem to have done regarding and the "philosophy of science". To paraphrase Pennock--the philosphy of art is not doing art...it's about understanding various aspect and interpretations of art.

To me, Ivor is very easy to understand in the above article. It's simple and not wordy and explains some important terminology in regards to statistics.
I think it's more than clear the ways random can be abuses or misunderstood and so it's more than clear, I suspect, that Dawkins, the Berkeley site, and Talk Origins go through great lengths to separate the understanding of the relative randomness of mutations from that which brings about order to that randomness (natural selection and time--tweaks through the eons.)

Sure, evolution is "random" if you mean that it can be described by a probability chart. But so is just about everything else--the evolution of anything, most "processes", your life, and dying. Whether it's meaningful to describe it that way or whether that illuminates the "non-random" elements or variability of one event over another is a completely different question. Science tends to move towards the best explanation of the data, and clearly, in biology, the trend is not in the direction you seem to be going. I contend that it's because it confuses more than it clarifies. I think it's great to use probability distributions or game theory to find out all sorts of things about genetics. I think is ridiculously uninformative to say, "there is no evidence that evolution in is 'non-random'", and I suspect this is the feelings of the majority who teaching in this field. If the goal is clarity in regards to understanding the facts, you haven't achieved it in any of your posts as far as I can tell.

 

[Schneibster]

So mathematics, and, say, the arts are BS?

We aren't discussing mathematics or the arts. We're discussing science, and specifically assertions that science cannot be defended against non-scientific assertions without the use of philosophy. What you've basically done is deliberately misstate my assertion; this is generally referred to as a "straw-man fallacy."

That appears to be quite a narrow, reductionist view of philosophy. Are you implying that all of philsophy is just BS? Socrates, Aristotle, Nietzche, Descartes, et al, just obfuscators?

Evidence is immaterial in philosophy. See "deconstructionism." When I read that stuff, I stopped paying attention. It's a waste of time, if you're trying to figure out how things work.

Not to be the devil's advocate here, but I just can't let these kinds of blanket statements and hasty generalizations unchallenged.

Unfortunately, it looks like you misrepresented the supposed blanket statement, and can't provide proof that the generalization is hasty, considering I have provided proof it's not.

 

[articulett]

Yes, and some of them say that explicitly. They think it is only the Hand of God that keeps us from devolving.

Exactly. That is the whole idea of claiming that evolution says we all got here "by chance"--to obfuscate rather than clarify natural selection. If a person doesn't understand natural selection, it all seems impossible--but understanding natural selection allows a person to "Climb Mount Improbable"!

THAT is why biologists are very careful in explaining natural selection, the key to understanding how the order arises from the randomness...the key to undoing the "tornado in a junkyard" analogy. THAT is why creationists use every tactic in the book to keep people from "getting" it--from understanding the simplistic beauty of natural selection. It makes evolution entirely and obviously comprehensible and so much MORE likely than an intelligent designer. In fact, it's cobbled together with immense amounts of wasted life and suffering and time-very clearly "not designed" from any "intelligence", but "designe" from the bottom up.

Almost every link above shows you this attempt to obfuscate the very simple understanding of natural selection by playing semantic games such that it looks like scientists are equating the arising of life on this planet to the 747 in the junkyard analogy--and then offering an "alternative" (as though if scientists can't explain it, religion could). Really. You misperceive scientists when you think they aren't hearing creationists and flatter yourself in thinking you are. They are all obfuscating the understanding of natural selection to infer that scientists think this all came about "willy nilly". That is an understatement at best. Once they've made that implication--their designer seems a plausible alternative.

 

[Jorghnassen]

We aren't discussing mathematics or the arts. We're discussing science, and specifically assertions that science cannot be defended against non-scientific assertions without the use of philosophy. What you've basically done is deliberately misstate my assertion; this is generally referred to as a "straw-man fallacy."

Evidence is immaterial in philosophy. See "deconstructionism." When I read that stuff, I stopped paying attention. It's a waste of time, if you're trying to figure out how things work.

Unfortunately, it looks like you misrepresented the supposed blanket statement, and can't provide proof that the generalization is hasty, considering I have provided proof it's not.

Hey, I just wandered back into this thread to see how it could still be going on after 28 pages. Quickly scanning I see something along the lines of "philosophy=obfuscation". That does sound like a blanket statement, but it's obviously taken out of context because there's been pages of text which I haven't bothered to read that led to this . Still, you seem to dismiss all of philosophy because of a subset of it? Is that correct or is it a misinterpretation (which, incidentally, is not the same as a misrepresentation) of your text?

/just fueling the thread some more...

 

[articulett]

So mathematics, and, say, the arts are BS?



That appears to be quite a narrow, reductionist view of philosophy. Are you implying that all of philsophy is just BS? Socrates, Aristotle, Nietzche, Descartes, et al, just obfuscators?

Not to be the devil's advocate here, but I just can't let these kinds of blanket statements and hasty generalizations unchallenged.


ETA: And this thread is still going on after 28 pages? Are there still quibbles over the definitions and usage of "randomness"?

Philosophy of math is not math and philosophy of science is not science. Both Math and Science are axiom based...fact based...the same for everyone no matter what they believe...empirical. If one piece is proven incorrect...every thing built upon that piece is incorrect just as if one piece of a puzzle is in the wrong place, everything built upon that piece is also in the wrong place. Understanding math as a field and how it is taught and the various ways we came to understand what we know is not doing math. The same is true of science.

We've long since reached the conclusion that the word has so many definitions that no matter what definition of random you use--if there is no evidence of this thread being non-random, then there is no evidence of the evolution of anything (including life itself) being non-random. Whether that means anything in regards to the OP is another matter. Mijo wants to add in philosophy of science to contend that it makes sense to define evolution in regards to being a random or stochastic process. I think he's doing it for the same reason as linked above--to avoid understanding and describing the very simplicity of natural selection.

Others think he is being technically correct in some way because he is defining randomness as anything that can be described by or related to a probability distribution. To me, that is so all encompassing that it's absolutely useless in describing evolution and conveying any semblance of an an answer to the OP. (Biologists feel that "natural selection" IS the de-randomizer in the evolution equation...that which brings order to the randomness...the "opposite of chance"--etc.) Biologists go out of their way to separate the relative randomness of mutations from random events that may influence the selection process because it is a known creationist strategy to muddle these together and assert that evolution says this all arose by chance...which is then extrapolated to the tornado in the junkyard assembling a 747 analogy. It creates a strawman, creationist love to knock down and insert their intelligent designer as a more plausible explanation. (See anything by Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort for these shenanigans in the extreme.)

 

[Schneibster]

Hey, I just wandered back into this thread to see how it could still be going on after 28 pages. Quickly scanning I see something along the lines of "philosophy=obfuscation". That does sound like a blanket statement, but it's obviously taken out of context because there's been pages of text which I haven't bothered to read that led to this .

I think my point was it was taken out of context even from the point of view of the post and the one it was a reply to, which was immediately prior to it. Reading all 28 pages was not necessary to see that, I think.

Still, you seem to dismiss all of philosophy because of a subset of it? Is that correct or is it a misinterpretation (which, incidentally, is not the same as a misrepresentation) of your text?

I dismiss it as a scientific pursuit; I dismiss quite a bit of it completely, particularly any of it done in the past century or so, but it has its place (and will no doubt continue to). Perhaps soon the philosophers will wake up and actually contribute something other than deconstructionism or other fantasies about how we're not actually here and nothing is real.

/just fueling the thread some more...

Well, be careful not to use gasoline- your hair might catch fire.