What evidence is there for evolution being non-random?

[Ivor the Engineer]

Uh...you obviously haven't been reading the thread. There are plenty of constrained, time-dependent process based on non-uniformly distributed probabilities that all lead to orderly results. The problem with Dawkins and his intellectual compatriots (e.g., aritculett, Imaginal Disk, Ivor the Engineer, etc.) is that they use a very specific definition of "random" which is not universally recognized in any academic field, especially biology, as being the "correct" definition. This allows them ignore the fact that when people describe evolution as a "stochastic process" they are using a completely rigorous definition based in the principles of probability theory that allows for constraint, time-dependence, and non-uniformly distributed probabilities. It is also interesting that no matter how many times they are told that those who are arguing that evolution is better described as "random" n so far as "random" means "[o]f or relating to to a type of circumstance or event that is described by a probability distribution", they still come up with posts like this:



articulett is clearly using "random" is the sense in which I have been exclusively using it in the first instance (red) and in a clearly more colloquial sense (e.g., the second, fifth and sixth definitions at the Online Dictionary of Online Computing or any of the definitions in the Urban Dictionary) in the second instance. It is almost as if she is trying to obfuscate the definition and usage of "random".

To be fair and completely truthful, most other general use English dictionaries, including my personal favorite, The Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most complete compendia of the English language, define the statistical sense of "random" to be the uniformly distributed probability case. However, I'm really not interested in what the plurality of dictionaries say what "random" means as I have been nothing but explicit that I am using "random" in so far as it describes entities that are similar if not identical to "stochastic processes", which themselves have a rigorous mathematical definition.

The problem I see with "random" is that even in science and engineering, it covers a huge range of random processes. Some random processes have memory, some do not. Some have constraints on the randomness, some do not. How is the naive (with respect to evolution) scientist supposed to know that evolution requires a random process with memory from the statement "Evolution is random"? Or about the relative (and type of) randomness in the mutation and selection aspects of evolution? Or how selection does not have to be random at all for evolution to still work?

Surely you admit that significant additional explanation would be required to narrow down the range of possible processes that would describe evolution?

So why is it wrong (or less correct) to use a 1000 words that most people (including scientists) can understand and visualize opposed to a few hundred words that only a few can interpret meaningfully?

Or perhaps you would prefer a similar approach to that which Euler took to the debate over Gods existence. I.e. scribble some mathematical equation on a blackboard and declare "therefore evolution is random!"?

 

[articulett]

Non-deterministic: mutation.
Deterministic: selection.

The word random invokes imprecise and fuzzy notions.

Oh and don't look at one goddamn airplane if you want an analogy - look at the history of the design of airplanes. You will see a clear pathway of iterative design.

Airplanes did not spring off the drawing board fully formed any more than a hurricane could construct one.

Indeed...they evolved. All airplanes have a "common ancestor" in the first airplane... that which "works" is honed, expanded, and built upon. That which does not or becomes obsolete. They did not evolve "randomly"--the environment (human desires and capabilities) selected the best features and built upon them. The first airplane builders could not image the jet travel of a mere century forward in time. Evolution works on a much larger times scale with many more "trials and errors".

 

[mijopaalmc]

ETA: Just been thinking about the undefined/infinite mean and variance w.r.t selection functions. A selection function in practice would be required to be truncated. E.g., inifinitely large ears are not an option If you change the limits on the integrals from infinity to finite values, the integrals for mean and variance become definite.

I'm sorry, but it is statements like these (along with articulett's assertion that the only two sequences of 4 heads and 4 tails that are uniformly distributed are HTHTHTHT and THTHTHTH and therefore uniform distribution is a sign of order not disorder) that make me wonder whether the non-randomites actually understand probability theory at all. It is true that if you made the limits on the Cauchy distribution finite the moments would become defined. However, it would no longer be a probability distribution then because the area under the curve would no longer be 1, which is a defining property of the probability measure over the sigma-algebra of subsets of the sample space.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

I'm sorry, but it is statements like these (along with articulett's assertion that the only two sequences of 4 heads and 4 tails that are uniformly distributed are HTHTHTHT and THTHTHTH and therefore uniform distribution is a sign of order not disorder) that make me wonder whether the non-randomites actually understand probability theory at all. It is true that if you made the limits on the Cauchy distribution finite the moments would become defined. However, it would no longer be a probability distribution then because the area under the curve would no longer be 1, which is a defining property of the probability measure over the sigma-algebra of subsets of the sample space.

It's statements like this that make me wonder if some randomites have ever done anything useful in the real world, or just like to use complicated expressions to make out like they're really clever.

If I used the Cauchy distribution's inverse cumulative distribution function to generate a finite random sample, that sample would have a mean and a variance for a sensible model of evolution. I.e. some values would be so extreme that a clipping function would be used to kill them at birth, so to speak.

 

[cyborg]

But you are right, since design changes in living beings (mutations) are random, while in airplanes, the product of ideas.

Which one should note do not always work. Design does not guarantee correctness of the product. Iterative design compared to evolution is the application of an a priori rather than a posteriori selection. Mutations are not selected for, they merely occur with no desire that they should do so.

Evolutionarily speaking there is only one tool in the design tool-box and that is prototyping (and one could argue quite strongly that prototyping is the only tool required). Engineers have more tools to draw upon but that does not stop the fact that only the product can determine the worth of the product - abstractions are inevitably flawed.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

So, when someone says assembling DNA by random chance is like building a 747 using a tornado in a junkyard, there are lots of options.

1. You can say, "That's stupid" or many, many variations on that theme.

That response is tempting, and sometimes appropriate, but it will never achieve any understanding, either of the person to whom you are talking, or any listeners. Somebody has told them that the analogy is a good one. You can try to convince them they are wrong, or you can call them idiots.

2. You can say, "It wasn't built by random chance. It was built by selection combined with random chance."

That response suffers from the objections I raised earlier.

3. You can say, "It wasn't built in a single step. It was built in multiple steps. Of course, each step was random, but there were literally billions of steps."

You still have to argue about whether there was enough time, and whether each step was stable enough to last to produce the next step, but I think you are better off.

Or, you can say, "Evolutionary theory is an explaination for the development of living things which reproduce and pass down heritable traits to their offspring. These organisms grow in an environment with limiting resources, mutate, are acted upon by selective forces, all without any conscious guidance. These features are the engines that drive evolution, and when you compare a living, reproducing thing which passes on heritable traits to an inanimate object that was deliberately built you're missing the entire point of Evolutionary theory. Your question isn't meaningful."

 

[jimbob]

Which one should note do not always work. Design does not guarantee correctness of the product. Iterative design compared to evolution is the application of an a priori rather than a posteriori selection. Mutations are not selected for, they merely occur with no desire that they should do so.

Evolutionarily speaking there is only one tool in the design tool-box and that is prototyping (and one could argue quite strongly that prototyping is the only tool required). Engineers have more tools to draw upon but that does not stop the fact that only the product can determine the worth of the product - abstractions are inevitably flawed.

True, There are more differences than similarities between the development of the aeroplane, and evolution.

A slightly less bad analogy would be to ask "did dogs evolve from wolves?"

I would say no. They were selectively bred (artificial selection).

The difference from evolution is that the breeding pairs were chosen by the breeder, so their offspring would have the most promising traits. And the post-breeding selection is almost 100% efficient.

I can think of four methods of affecting an organism.

1) Evolution: Random mutatiion and probabilistic selection
2) Selective Breeding: Artificial selection
3) Genetic Engineering:
4) God the farmer: Supernatural Selection

If you say that aeroplanes "evolved", or scientific knowledge "evolves", then the defintion of evolution used could encompass almost all IDers' viewpoints...

 

[jimbob]

Edit to my previous post:

It should have read here are fur possible ways of developing determining an organism's DNA...

Articulett seems to be arguing that Aeroplaneds evolved, which would imply that dogs evolved from wolves (there are fewer differences between artificial selection and natural selection).

Artificial Selection is deterministic. It is actually pretty much how genetic algorithms that I am aware of work: Chose a measure of desirability (milk yield, electrical parameters etc) and from a starting population breed the best examples, and see how far that gets you. Repeat.

natural selection is subtly different: the only organisms that reproduce are thos which manage to. The only driving criterion is reprductive success. There are many "solutions" to this "problem" And there is a lot more luck, with "good" organisms failing to reproduce. The "efficiency" is far lower than with artificial selection (i.e. it is slower, and the final destination isn't known beforehand).

Articulett, I think your arguments could/would easily be used to posit Supernatural selection. (if Behe thinks that we shared a common ancestor with chimps, then this is probably the mechanism he proposes)

 

[cyborg]

True, There are more differences than similarities between the development of the aeroplane, and evolution.

Wrong conclusion. What one should be noting here is that there are far more similarities between engineering and evolution than there are not.

If you say that aeroplanes "evolved", or scientific knowledge "evolves", then the defintion of evolution used could encompass almost all IDers' viewpoints...

IDers viewpoints already encompass the whole of evolution - they are simply choosing an explanation with no explicative power.

Artificial Selection is deterministic.

So is natural selection; that's the point. There is a determiner. It is not non-deterministic.

(i.e. it is slower, and the final destination isn't known beforehand).

There is no final destination: it cannot be known by definition. As such notions of 'speed' are irrelevant.

 

[mijopaalmc]

Wrong conclusion. What one should be noting here is that there are far more similarities between engineering and evolution than there are not.

How does the above support your statements below?

Engineered thing are planned and designed with a purpose in mind and goals to be achieved.

IDers viewpoints already encompass the whole of evolution - they are simply choosing an explanation with no explicative power.



So is natural selection; that's the point. There is a determiner. It is not non-deterministic.



There is no final destination: it cannot be known by definition. As such notions of 'speed' are irrelevant.

 

[cyborg]

How does the above support your statements below?

I already stated the reasons.

Engineered thing are planned and designed with a purpose in mind and goals to be achieved.

As I said previously that is a priori selection. You still need to build the thing and one still needs to deal with the realities of the limits of design with respect to the abstractions used. Designs are wrong all the time. Anybody who thinks any successful engineering project can be neatly divided into planning, implementation and testing is simply wrong: doing it that way has been shown time and time again to fail to achieve the stated goals. This is iterative design; it is evolutionary in nature.

 

[articulett]

How does the above support your statements below?

Engineered thing are planned and designed with a purpose in mind and goals to be achieved.

In regards to technology, humans select based on what exists in the pool of technology so far and builds upon that.

In evolution, nature selects from the pool of randomness based on what exists so far and runs trial and error "tests" on that to refine and hone and evolve that which exists. In both examples, what is selected is determined in whole by what is left in the pool of randomness to select from.

And Jim Bob, Dogs DID evolve from wolves. Yes, humans selected wolves with traits that benefited themselves, and therefore those specimens benefited in a symbiotic sort of fashion--but those "selective breeders" of yester-year could not predict what would exist in the pool of randomness that todays dog breeders breed from.

All of these examples are designed from the bottom up--build as you go--no final destination. Everyone who participates in the evolution of anything is part of the "designer".

Tons of randomness...but just a select few are selected to be built upon, honed, pruned, replicated, evolve, splinter, and/or die out. This is true of genes, memes, languages, technology, and anything where info. can be utilized, copied, and built upon. "Designed" from the bottom up-- nobody knows where it's going next, but we can predict the near future by knowing the past...and we can examine the randomness that was selected in the past by understanding evolution. Although randomness plays a role, things don't evolve "randomly"--they evolve based on selection and "sticking" of that which "works"--that which is the best and getting itself copied.

As Igor said--your definitions are confused because you are mixing the memorylessness of randomness, with the a priori previously selected chains of events that are built upon.

 

[mijopaalmc]

cyborg and articulett-

You are trying to have it both ways, and obviously you can't.

You can't claim that evolution has no teleology and then claim that engineered objects that do have a teleology are examples of evolution.

If you think you can, I would appreciate an explanation of why Paley's watch in the field analogy shows that Paley and, by extension Behe, who modernized the argument, don't understand evolution.

 

[articulett]

cyborg and articulett-

You are trying to have it both ways, and obviously you can't.

You can't claim that evolution has no teleology and then claim that engineered objects that do have a teleology are examples of evolution.

If you think you can, I would appreciate an explanation of why Paley's watch in the field analogy show that Paley and, by extension Behe, who modernized the argument, don't understand evolution.

They speak of a single watch...not all the timepieces that came before, you dolt. Or the single airplane. Or the single human. Or the fully formed eye. None of this things were envisioned when the first prototypes were evolving...and these things are all still evolving--Paley didn't know that digital watches and atomic clocks would evolve. INFORMATION is what is evolving--"design instructions"--not the vehicles that carry them. You die the species you are. The airplane doesn't become another airplane--the information about building prior airplanes is built upon based on what worked.

INFORMATION. You guys just don't seem able to distinguish information from the vehicle it is contained in. DNA is information. Blueprints are information. This thread is evolving because the information is being added to, built upon. I guess this is just not comprehensible to some people while being obvious to others. "Hone as you go" is a lot different than random combinations resulting in sudden "winners".

If you've already flipped 9 coins and know what they are, then the 10nth coin can only be one of 2 possibilities compared to the the 1024 possibilities before flipping them all. In the former example the first 9 coins have been selected. Do you really not understand the difference? Nobody designed (telelogically) the first 9 coin flips--each successive flip made the series outcome increasingly constrained...

This thread, contrary to your definition of random didn't spring suddenly into being--it evolved, non-randomly (though randomness as to who reads and responds is involved), but it evolved based on (determined by) what came before! The randomness of who happens to read this and respond does not make the evolution of this thread random.

(I give up, cyborg...it's been pages of this, I swear)

 

[cyborg]

You can't claim that evolution has no teleology and then claim that engineered objects that do have a teleology are examples of evolution.

Since I have not claimed that I have not in fact claimed that. I really wish people would actually go away and understand what it means for something to be analogous.

N.B. it does not mean, "exactly the same in all respects," it means, "there is a relationship that can be identified by a non-logical mapping rather than logical sentences such that relationships in one domain map onto the same relationships in the other domain."

ETA: That would be, as articulett stated, the informational aspects not the physical ones.

If you think you can, I would appreciate an explanation of why Paley's watch in the field analogy shows that Paley and, by extension Behe, who modernized the argument, don't understand evolution.

They understand: understanding makes them uncomfortable. So much in fact that they are determined to find some way in which only an a priori selection of a genetic modification can result in a certain phenotypical expression. So far they have failed miserably to demonstrate any such requirement. Not my problem.

 

[mijopaalmc]

They speak of a single watch...not all the timepieces that came before, you dolt.

A sundial is fundamentally different from a pendulum clock is fundamentally different from a pocket watch is fundamentally different from a cesium fountain clock. The way these devices keep time are so different that it is fallacious to compare them to organisms that are all based on DNA.

Anyway, you haven't explained why you can compare objects with a teleology to objects with out a teleology.

 

[cyborg]

The way these devices keep time are so different that it is fallacious to compare them to organisms that are all based on DNA.

It would appear that you are not paying attention whatsoever.

 

[mijopaalmc]

It would appear that you are not paying attention whatsoever.

How do you come to that conclusion?

 

[cyborg]

How do you come to that conclusion?

Because you are hung up on the fact that biological machines have their blueprints encoded using a base 4 chemical digital sequence and manufactured machines have their blueprints stored in base 2 electronic digital sequences and also on dead trees with symbols formed using chemical dyes. As such you are not comprehending that it is the change in the blueprint, not the expression of the blueprint, which is important here.

 

[articulett]

Because you are hung up on the fact that biological machines have their blueprints encoded using a base 4 chemical digital sequence and manufactured machines have their blueprints stored in base 2 electronic digital sequences and also on dead trees with symbols formed using chemical dyes. As such you are not comprehending that it is the change in the blueprint, not the expression of the blueprint, which is important here.

My hero!