Randomness in Evolution: Valid and Invalid Usage

[Dancing David]

Come see articulett embarrass herself when she discusses the stochasticity of evolution with real evolutionary biologists.

So did they agree with you when you posted?

From looking at the last page, I would say it is undecided, are you MJPAM?

 

[millwallfan]

huh??

 

[cyborg]

This is pointless anyway. Let us grant you that "randomness" equates to "acausal". What does this get us? It means nothing to evolution by natural selection - the acausal element only creates variation, variation which could arise by any means at all and evolution would still occur.

What is your point with all this?

Just because my entire point was answered right before I even got started in the thread. But it seems too difficult a point to grasp for some where chasing acausal relationships somehow makes sense.

 

[articulett]

So did they agree with you when you posted?

From looking at the last page, I would say it is undecided, are you MJPAM?

He started another thread on it... he is embarrassing himself there like he did here. It's not undecided by Dawkins et. al. or any of the professional biologists. Most are pretty clear that it's a 2 part process, with the emphasis on "natural selection" which selects from the "randomness". As far as I can tell, only those who don't really understand natural selection are hung up on defining evolution as " wholly random" or a "theory of chance" (and creationists like Behe.) Mjpam thinks that because you can model evolution "stochastically", it makes sense to call it "random"- but, by his vague definition, smoke alarms work "randomly", and poker is random, and so is whether seat belts save lives. In fact, if it has any randomness whatsoever, Mijo insists on calling it "random"--so this thread is "random". This is not informative for explaining what evolution is nor for addressing the OP--but it's something creationists are oddly fond of doing.

Mijo lives to convince himself (by trying to convince others) that it's informative or useful to call evolution random. I think that on the Dawkins forum they just think he (mjpam) is daft and dishonest...

I think he's a creationist, because all his arguments on all his threads are rehashes of creationist arguments... but he'll pretend he wants to know "for a friend" or "a date" or some people he "ran into". He also tried the same argument at Internet Infidels and who knows where else... --everyone pretty much realizes he's not really saying anything coherent after a bit.

As far as I can tell, the only person buying what he's saying is himself.

(BTW, Happy Birthday Cyborg!)

 

[T'ai Chi]

Just in case anybody missed it, I have a great article that started this discussion at

http://www.statisticool.com/main.htm

It is funny those that say evolution is not random. Because they essentially are either denying the scientific definition of random for whatever reason (usually because they are afraid of creationists misuing the term, or they are catering to the general layman's understanding of random), or are saying everything is deterministic.

So it is fun popping in every few months to see some strange denials.

 

[sol invictus]

Just in case anybody missed it, I have a great article that started this discussion at

http://www.statisticool.com/main.htm.

That's a silly article. The argument given there immediately implies that all physical processes are random (for exactly the same reason Mijo's did), making it equally pointless.

The whole debate is utterly useless.

 

[articulett]

I think Tai Chi and Mijo are of the same "bent" and taken about as seriously as each other around these parts. Tai Chi (along with Behe) are examples of the "sorts of people" I think of when I hear folks bent on playing semantic games so that they can think it's informative or useful to refer to evolution as a "theory of chance" (the creationist straw man).

As far as I can tell, their expertise is in their own minds. After a while, they all blend together to me.

 

[T'ai Chi]

That's a silly article. The argument given there immediately implies that all physical processes are random (for exactly the same reason Mijo's did), making it equally pointless.

That's a silly response.

Let's forget about "all physical processes" and just focus on evolution. Either it is random or it isn't. Now what is your answer?

Say what you mean and mean what you say.

 

[articulett]

Either poker is random or it isn't. Either smoke alarms are random or they aren't. Either this thread is random or it isn't.

Now, whether it's informative or useful or descriptive to say such a thing is an entirely different matter.

(But that is a conversation that is beyond those who need to believe it makes sense to call evolution "random".)

 

[Dancing David]

That's a silly response.

Let's forget about "all physical processes" and just focus on evolution. Either it is random or it isn't. Now what is your answer?

Say what you mean and mean what you say.

[translation]

Don't focus on the errors in my logic, just look exactly at what I want you to look at.
[/translation]

Variation in expression can be somewhat random, selection is not.

 

[articulett]

And variation doesn't need to be random at all for evolution to work. Sexual recombination is a great way for making new varieties--no "random mutation" is needed... the genes are just shuffled.

Natural selection is the key to understanding evolution, and it is no more "random" than any other iterative, cumulative, process connected through time-- the formation of canyons, ecosystems, the internet, languages, technology, and science, itself.

Having random components does not a random process make.

The only people I know who insist on calling evolution "random" are creationists, like T'ai (and Behe). Doing so shows a profound lack of understanding regarding natural selection as well as a need to "obfuscate" understanding so that evolution sounds akin to the creationist straw man --rather than the fairly easy to understand process that Darwin (and later, Dawkins) brilliantly clarified.

 

[sol invictus]

Let's forget about "all physical processes" and just focus on evolution. Either it is random or it isn't. Now what is your answer?

Either that blue and red shirt is blue or it isn't. Now what is your answer?

It's a stupid question, and stupid questions have only stupid answers.

 

[Wowbagger]

We can demonstrate that a system with some random inputs or components are not necessarily completely random systems, with a simple model:

Let's say some child ONLY likes blue M&Ms. He builds a machine that can detect the color of M&Ms that are poured into it. Blue ones come out, intact, into a bin. And, other colors are sent to another bin to be given away or disposed of.

What goes into the system? An unpredictable, random assortment of M&M colors.
What comes out? Only the blue ones.

The entire system is NOT random, because we can predict important aspects of its output, with very high reliablility, even though the input was completely randomized.

Evolution via Natural Selection is kinda, sorta like that.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Either that blue and red shirt is blue or it isn't. Now what is your answer?

It's a stupid question, and stupid questions have only stupid answers.

All you did, like others have, is just avoid it again, or appeal to humor to hide your ignorance of the science.

Do you believe evolution can be modelled accurately by mathematics? Yes or No?

 

[sol invictus]

All you did, like others have, is just avoid it again, or appeal to humor to hide your ignorance of the science.

No, actually, I showed that your statement (that evolution "is random or isn't") is idiotic. Complex processes cannot necessarily be accurately characterized with one term, particularly one as ill-defined as "random".

Do you believe evolution can be modelled accurately by mathematics? Yes or No?

No, not accurately and in full detail. However one can easily build models in which some type of evolution by selection occurs, using either random, pseudo-random, or non-random algorithms.

 

[CFLarsen]

Stephen Jay Gould - certainly not one who would avoid explaining Evolution, had this to say about randomness.

It is false to say that Evolution is random, period.

We've been over this, again and again. Repetition of a falsehood does not make it true; It is only done because it works: The same way people are indoctrinated within religious circles and totalitarian societies, the same way it is hoped that we will simply accept dogma - and not question it - by repeating it over and over and over again.

 

[Vorticity]

Stephen Jay Gould - certainly not one who would avoid explaining Evolution, had this to say about randomness.

From the link:

...
STEPHEN JAY GOULD: So in its random motion back and forth occasionally a species staggers over towards greater complexity, but it arises within an effectively random system.
...

The "system" Gould refers to here is the process of evolution itself. With his drunkard's walk analogy, he is actually reiterating the very point that the "randomites" in this thread have been making: Just because a process is random does not preclude some (or even most!) aspects of its behavior from being predictable. In the same way, just because some aspects of a process' behavior are predictable does not necessarily make it a non-random process.

Look again at Gould's description of the drunkard's walk:

...
DAVID GERGEN: You used an analogy, which I found quite helpful to me, in thinking about the randomness of it all. You talked about the drunk coming out of a bar and staggering. Could you--

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: Yeah. It’s an old statistical paradigm called the drunkard’s walk, which is a wonderful way of illustrating how you can get directional and predictable motion within a totally random system. All right. Here’s the story. A drunk staggers out of a bar. Here’s the bar, and he’s leaning right against the wall of the bar. Now, he’s staggering completely at random, back and forth. There’s a gutter 30 feet away. He staggers five feet every time he staggers, completely at random, goes towards the bar as often as he goes away, except if he hits the bar wall, he can’t go through it, so he just stands there until he staggers away. Now, where does he end up every time? Of course, he ends up in the gutter. He falls down in the gutter, the thing’s over. We understand that very easily.

DAVID GERGEN: Right.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: He’s going to lend up in the gutter every time.

DAVID GERGEN: Right.
...

Now if we imagine the data set which consists of the drunkard's position as a function of time, this data set clearly describes a random process (by construction). However, we can impose a "filter" on the data which yields a deterministic outcome. In Gould's example the filter would be the "Where the drunkard winds up" filter. With probability 1, this filter always yields "gutter". And yet the original process itself is still random. I can design other filters that yield a random outcome from this data set. For example the "How many steps until the drunkard ends up in the gutter" filter, or the "How many times does the drunkard hit the wall" filter.

Despite the fact that we can construct a non-random filter on the drunkard's walk process does not make it "the exact opposite of random".

 

[jimbob]

Stephen Jay Gould - certainly not one who would avoid explaining Evolution, had this to say about randomness.

It is false to say that Evolution is random, period.

We've been over this, again and again. Repetition of a falsehood does not make it true; It is only done because it works: The same way people are indoctrinated within religious circles and totalitarian societies, the same way it is hoped that we will simply accept dogma - and not question it - by repeating it over and over and over again.

From your link.

I don't think I am taking him out of context:

As far as they’re concerned, we’re just little islands of mobile resources which they can exploit for a while. They’re happy to let us strut this little hour on the stage because they’ll still be here when we’re gone. But, you see, you don’t see that unless you’re willing to look at the history of life as the full range of its variation through time. I mean, it is true the most complex thing has gotten more complex. Once there were only bacteria. Now there are humans, but that’s not the result of an intrinsic defining central drive. It’s just a kind of random movement away from a necessary beginning at maximal bacterial simplicity. That’s all it is.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: So in its random motion back and forth occasionally a species staggers over towards greater complexity, but it arises within an effectively random system.

I agree it is misleading to talk about random as if that meant that everything was equally possible, but it doesn't usually mean that. I would prefer to say Natural Selection is not haphazard. But technically I would say it is random.

It is certainly not nonrandom.

If it was nonrandom, then all Lenski's results in the Long Term Evolution Experiment would produce cultures with only insignifcant differences, as the external environment differed insignificantly*.

We know that they haven't and that the differences between the ewternally imposed environment were insignificant, so the differences in the outcome must be due to the differences that arose within the bacteria themselves.

It is a classic example of what I have been arguing, that it is inevitable that adaptations will occur, but as changes in organisms affect the evolutionary landscape for other organisms, it is possible for rare events to totally disrupt the selective landscape for other organisms. A chance mutation in HIV could have a vast effect on selective pressures in many populations. Without medicine such mutations would have even greater effects.

Remember that the Long Term Evolution experiment is in a pretty simple environment, most of the competition comes from descendants of the original culture, there are not really other organisms in a dynamic ecological equilibrium within these jars. As soon as these are added into the equation (in a more complex environment or over billions of years), then the scope for random mutations affecting the fitness landscape becomes far greater.


*We know this because Lenski kept freeze-dired cultures at different stages, and can identify which strain developed the initial "facilitating" mutation even though citrate metabolism didn't evolve until thousands of generations later.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

From your link.

I don't think I am taking him out of context:







I agree it is misleading to talk about random as if that meant that everything was equally possible, but it doesn't usually mean that. I would prefer to say Natural Selection is not haphazard. But technically I would say it is random.

It is certainly not nonrandom.

If it was nonrandom, then all Lenski's results in the Long Term Evolution Experiment would produce cultures with only insignifcant differences, as the external environment differed insignificantly*.

We know that they haven't and that the differences between the ewternally imposed environment were insignificant, so the differences in the outcome must be due to the differences that arose within the bacteria themselves.

It is a classic example of what I have been arguing, that it is inevitable that adaptations will occur, but as changes in organisms affect the evolutionary landscape for other organisms, it is possible for rare events to totally disrupt the selective landscape for other organisms. A chance mutation in HIV could have a vast effect on selective pressures in many populations. Without medicine such mutations would have even greater effects.

Remember that the Long Term Evolution experiment is in a pretty simple environment, most of the competition comes from descendants of the original culture, there are not really other organisms in a dynamic ecological equilibrium within these jars. As soon as these are added into the equation (in a more complex environment or over billions of years), then the scope for random mutations affecting the fitness landscape becomes far greater.


*We know this because Lenski kept freeze-dired cultures at different stages, and can identify which strain developed the initial "facilitating" mutation even though citrate metabolism didn't evolve until thousands of generations later.

That's because, unsurprisingly, Gould was talking out of his ass.

Describing bacteria as the simplest possible organisms is false. Bacteria are, in thunderf00t's words, "grizzled heavyweights." The "simple" bacterium has sophisticated mechanisms for coating itself, protecting itself, mobility, and digestion.

Complexity isn't a drunkard's walk, it's an emergent property and certain features of complexity are selected for or against at different times.

 

[jimbob]

From another thread to rerail both...

This is interesting discussion material jimbob. Feel free to start a thread and PM me, or set up a diversion here (beep beep!). Meantime, I'm a little confused as to what you mean by "usual scientific definition", "neither of the options Richard Dawkins stated" and "inputs"? See, you've already managed to obscure matters beyond the pre-existing confusion mentioned by Dawkins!

An update:

In this thread on his forum, Richard Dawkins has now stated that he is not using the technical definition for random

Words, as Twatsworth rightly says, often have more than one meaning, sometimes related meanings. Confusion, and even patronizing abuse, can result when somebody adopts one meaning and presumes that another person is using the same meaning. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives two definitions of the adjective 'random'. In this order:

1. Not sent or guided in a special direction; having no definite aim or purpose.

2. (statistics) Governed by or involving equal chances for each of the actual or hypothetical members of a population.

Meaning 2 is the one adopted by statistically-minded members of this Forum, not surprisingly since that is the technical definition used in their profession.

Meaning 1 is the one used and assumed by everybody except professional statisticians. It is the one I have consistently followed in all my books, and the one understood by the kinds of people I am trying to communicate with: the kinds of people who need to be convinced of the truth of evolution, or who need better comprehension of what evolution means.

The two halves of Meaning 1 are themselves open to confusion. Meaning 1b ('having no definite aim or purpose') is the meaning assumed by creationists, who therefore regard evolution by natural selection as random, because it has no definite aim or purpose (which they assume to mean intelligently designed aim or purpose). Meaning 1a ('not sent or guided in a special direction') is the meaning adopted by most biologists, who therefore regard natural selection, but not mutation or drift to fixation, as nonrandom because it sends or guides evolution in the direction of adaptive improvement. It has been a large part of my life's work to dispel the confusion between 1a and 1b. So engrossed was I in the battle between 1a and 1b, I was momentarily taken aback by a sudden outflanking manoeuvre from an unexpected source, namely Meaning 2 (which I was aware of but had largely ignored and even forgotten about).

After some reflection, I shall continue to use Meaning 1, and shall continue my efforts to disentangle the confusion between 1a and 1b. I might think about possible ways to clarify the side issue of the confusion with Meaning 2. I don't think it is unkind to say that the postings to this forum by partisans of Meaning 2 are not well-adapted to enlighten laypeople. I can't help wondering whether it would be wise even to attempt to explain Meaning 2 to laypeople, while the more important confusion between 1a and 1b remains the dominant barrier to general understanding of evolution.

And now, I don't know about the rest of you but I've had enough of this. I'm going back to work. Goodbye.

Richard

I would argue, as marios does four posts down, that it is still wrong and the usual scientific definition of a random event fulfills neither of the options Richard Dawkins stated, but that a random event is an event that is not predetermined, where where identical inputs do not produce identical outcomes. (This is what marios refers to as "meaning #3").

In other words the "opposite of random" is "predetermined", or "predestined", or "preordained"; thus using the incorrect definition of random so that claiming that natural selection is the opposite of random is claiming that natural selection is predetermined, so it doesn't matter what else happens, but that the evolution of particular collections of traits were inevitable as they were driven by an already predetermined natural selection, a bit like dropping marbles onto a slope with a track running along the bottom, where the marbles will all end up running downhill along the track, wherever they started.

Talking about natural selection as though it is preordained is (a) wrong, and (b) playing into the hands of ID proponents.