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Randomness in Evolution: Valid and Invalid Usage

I can summarize this entire thread in a single sentence:

Evolution is randommijo.

Next thread: can anyone think of anything that isn't randommijo? Does anyone care?
 
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sol invictus said:
I can summarize this entire thread in a single sentence:

Evolution is randommijo.

Next thread: can anyone think of anything that isn't randommijo? Does anyone care?
Click to expand...

I care, insofar as I get to use phrases like "iced lightning burn". Now some lucky fellow is going to google "iced lightning burn" and be struck in the head with this wooery./sarcasm lol
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
So what is Mijo's full description of evolution? Perhaps I missed it.
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You most certainly did. Perhaps you should go back read more of my posts, starting with these:
mijopaalmc said:
You can't possibly be serious:eye-poppi. This comment implies that you have not actually read anything that or anyone else who claims that evolution is random has written. I specifically cited Split from: I'm reading "The God Delusion" - a review in progress because there are several posts that give dictionary definitions of "random" (#47, #49) and discuss why all but the mathematical and statistical definition do not describe evolution (#65, #69, #71, #73,
#75). I also made it quite clear that I favored "stochastic" or "probabilistic" over "random" because they have very specific definitions that avoid the common associations and therefore misinterpretations of "random" (#103, #189, #234, #252). Furthermore, I explained in great detail several times in this thread exactly why evolution is probabilistic or stochastic (#158, #230).
Click to expand...
 
zosima said:
I care, insofar as I get to use phrases like "iced lightning burn". Now some lucky fellow is going to google "iced lightning burn" and be struck in the head with this wooery./sarcasm lol
Click to expand...

You have no idea what "woo" is then. I haven't proposed anything that is unfalsifiable or has been falsified. Furthermore, the onus is actually upon those who claim that evolution is non-random to provide evidence as such because they are claiming that it is a deterministic system which is easily falsifiable.

By the way, your citations of the authors intention seem to be contradicted by the fact that the examples section gives an example of an almost sure event on a finite and countably infinite probability space.
 
Dear god - how long has this been going on??

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82155
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80924
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50550

What a monumental waste of time.

I know (from reading some of his other posts) that T'ai Chi is a creationist. His posts in those threads are pretty much identical to mijo's. So I guess there are three possibilities:

1) mijo is a creationist
2) mijo is an uber-troll
3) all of the above

Votes?
 
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Earthborn said:
I don't think anyone "needs" evolution to be random, it is just that some people understand "randomness" in such a way that it simply is.

You claim that many of the people who understand evolution consider it non-random because that supposedly leads to less misunderstanding of evolution. I disagree; calling it "non-random" instead of "random" does not make it more likely that people understand evolutionary concepts.

When you said: "--just as there is no one who teaches people how to play poker that would describe the game as random." you missed an important issue. Poker is considered non-random (despite random elements) because it involves intelligent decision makers, working towards a specific goal. Intelligent designers in other words.

For all the confusion the word "random" causes, I think the word "non-random" is even more problematic when discussing evolution. "Non-random" is often understood to mean "pre-planned by intelligent decision makers" instead of letting things just run their natural course. I choose to conceptualise evolution as "random", because if you can explain how certain patterns can arise from random influences, one does not need to assume any intelligence behind it.

You asked "if one wanted to be understood, why wouldn't one use the definitions of those who ARE understood?" To that I say, that I would use such definition if there was one, but there isn't. Whether one calls evolution "random" or "non-random" makes no difference when trying to explain evolutionary concepts to people who have no prior understanding of them. With either you'll still have to explain very carefully what you mean by it.
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Well, let's see... you, Mijo, Behe, maybe meadmaker, jimbob, and assorted creationists and maybe Walter Wayne and T'ai call evolution random...rather they mischaracterize scientists as calling evolution random. Scientists don't. And if you don't understand why by now, it's hopeless. Now are there any people on this planet who think you are good or clear or have a clear understanding of evolution...? Does anyone think that the people above sound particularly clear or as smart as they seem to think they sound? Does any one think the people above have a clear way of conveying understanding about evolution? It truly is on par with calling a smoke alarm random.

Do you see the problem? You are jumping tenses mid game to keep the definition random. The randomness of mutation is not the randomness of selection... you are talking about two different things... one is a process... the other is a single event. Just like the smoke detector example. And there are no teachers of evolution who would ever describe it as random, because it is as informative and incorrect as calling a smoke detector or the game of poker random. It conveys no information. Nonrandom includes all the things in the world that are not truly random-- so most anything, except that which is truly random, can accurately be described as non random. When you call evolution random, it makes it sound like you haven't got a clue about natural selection-- THE KEY COMPONENT in evolution... the part people have trouble with... the brilliance of Darwin. Randomness isn't necessary for evolution to happen... just variation and a selection process! Nobody intelligent or in the field uses random the way the above people do. Nobody.

The most simple explanation for evolution is random mutation coupled with nonrandom selection... and even mutations aren't entirely random... they are just indifferent in that they happen whether tey benefit the organism their in or not. And then a game is played and the environment picks the winners and culls the losers and another round is played. Is a tennis tournament random?

When someone wins a gold metal-- it isn't "random". Random is perhaps more akin to someone winning the lottery. Everyone I know who uses random to describe evolution appears to have religious reasons for doing so. You can do whatever you want. If you want to sound like Behe and T'ai be my guest. But if you want to sound like people who actually teach it (and I do)-- as do all the people I quoted... successfully... you might try using their words-- like at Talk Origins. If your goal is to feel like you are smarter than those people while we roll our eyes at your daftness-- then keep insisting that "evolution is random".

If that's the case... then so are whether seat belts save lives... so are you... so is birth... so is cooking... by that loose definition-- everything IS random... and thus the word is uselessly vague... except of course to obfuscate understanding and to make creationists feel like they are smarter than the experts.

If your goal is to communicate with others, you fail--just like the people mentioned above... if the goal is to convince yourself you're right... then all you need to do is get the last word and your delusion will stay alive. It really isn't the rest of the world that isn't understanding this. It's you.

But I am ever amused.
 
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sol invictus said:
Dear god - how long has this been going on??

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82155
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80924
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50550

What a monumental waste of time.

I know (from reading some of his other posts) that T'ai Chi is a creationist. His posts in those threads are pretty much identical to mijo's. So I guess there are three possibilities:

1) mijo is a creationist
2) mijo is an uber-troll
3) all of the above

Votes?
Click to expand...

I'm totally certain he is a creationist who, like Behe, denies being a creationist. But he gets mad when I say that, because he denies it. But who else "needs" to describe evolution as "fundamentally random"? Who needs to pretend that others are too stupid to follow them, when the people on this forum (except maybe for T'ai) are really a smart group of people-- whom he never even asks the experiences of (who imagines they are smarter than Dawkins or Gould or the people who teach this stuff and publish in peer review?)-- only a creationist. He started 2 posts right when he started here without reading much of anything with 2 of the top creationists strawmen.... culled from the top 5- http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html and totally ignored the massive amount of help and evidence and support people here gave him. In fact he craps on those who really try to help him.

He only reads and absorbs enough to find evidence that "evolution is random" (whatever the hell that means)-- he won't budge... it must be able to be described that way... he wants to believe that scientists think this all came about randomly. And he's nasty to those who try and help. After a while the technique just blinks it's ugly neon. The same people, never yield... they imagine themselves as having more expertise while the people who have expertise (zosima) are far more humble. When I see a science story that says "evolution is not random" or "evolution is determined"--

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071119123929.htm

I post it just to watch Mijo do his semantic dance. He is so predictable. The same people arguing the same fuzzy way are predictable... and no amount of evidence ever seems to get them to yield a point. They don't want to understand what others know... they believe they have something important to teach. (or preach.)

If you can obfuscate understanding of evolution-- than it seems impossible. If you understand natural selection... god starts to look less likely. I submit that that is the reason for the semantics.

By the way, for those feeling protective of Mijo... let me assure you, he's said much worse about me. :)
 
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sol invictus said:
Dear god - how long has this been going on??

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82155
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80924
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=50550

What a monumental waste of time.

I know (from reading some of his other posts) that T'ai Chi is a creationist. His posts in those threads are pretty much identical to mijo's. So I guess there are three possibilities:

1) mijo is a creationist
2) mijo is an uber-troll
3) all of the above

Votes?
Click to expand...

4) You need to re-examine some of you basic knowledge and not resort to personal attacks

5) You need to present evidence of your claims other than a superficial similarity of my posts to another other poster's post
 
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mijopaalmc said:
You have no idea what "woo" is then. I haven't proposed anything that is unfalsifiable or has been falsified.
Click to expand...

Except for the completely false statement you made in the last post. But other than the false statement no nothing you have said has been falsified. ..by me, in the last post. But with those caveats, I totally agree with you.

I'll get to woo at the bottom.

Furthermore, the onus is actually upon those who claim that evolution is non-random to provide evidence as such because they are claiming that it is a deterministic system which is easily falsifiable.
Click to expand...

Well articulett has posted a bunch of direct quotes from people in the scientific community who study this phenomenon, who disagree with you. So I would say that the onus is on you, to overturn the burden of the scientific community. But if there is reason to believe that there is reasonable dispute in the scientific community , then the burden of proof is shared. Oh wait did I just disprove another thing you said? Hot dang I'm on a roll! (j/k that won't count toward your overall score)

But seriously, this is an internet forum unless both sides are willing to discuss civilly, consider each others points, admit the possibility that they could be wrong,
and even once in a while admit that they are wrong, there is no proving anything to anyone. As you can see, as I've realized that this isn't really the case in this discussion, my decorum has dwindled.

By the way, your citations of the authors intention seem to be contradicted by the fact that the examples section gives an example of an almost sure event on a finite and countably infinite probability space.
Click to expand...

Are you sure? I think you're just embarrassing yourself now. Or are we redefining set theory? The first example, the dart board, is talking about an uncountably infinite set. The Cartesian plane is generated by taking the Cartesian product of the real numbers(R x R). The real numbers are an uncountably infinite set, even if we're talking about a non-empty interval on the real numbers.(see Cantor's theorem.)

For the case with the coin flip, if you bothered to read the fine print. They say that almost surely only applies if you keep flipping until infinity(only if the number of flips is not a finite set). I agree that this does not correspond to the statement in the comments, but we are talking about Wikipedia here so there is no reason to believe that the article has not made a mistake.

If we take the wikipedia article as its word, we are still left with the claim that as long as there is a finite set of outcomes, "almost surely" does not apply and if any of those probabilities are zero(or 1) they are exactly 0(or 1)(meaning not random).

To state the claim formally(the weaker wikipedia article claim):
The probability of an outcome is inexact if that outcome is from an infinite set of outcomes.

Lets look at what you said....
mijopaalmc said:
A sure event (e.g., hitting the dart board universe) is deterministic, because one, and only one, outcome exists). An almost sure event (e.g., hitting a specific point or line the dart board universe) is random, because strictly more than one outcome exists. You can never not hit the dart board universe (deterministic event), but you could get really lucky and hit a specific point or line on the dart board universe (random event)
Click to expand...

Wow that sure looks like you're wrong. But I can't wait to see how you explain your way out of this one.

In fact, the minimum number statement that have been proven wrong in your last two posts is 3:
1. Claim about what constitutes sure and almost sure
2. Claim that the Cartesian plane is not an uncountably infinite set.
3. Claim that you've never proposed anything that has been falsified(by virtue of 1 & 2)

So why is this woo? Because it is based on false statements and vacuous definitions. It's about as productive as arguing over .9999.... = 1 (lemme guess you think it doesn't) Which happens to be notorious, and equally delicious.
 
mijopaalmc said:
You have no idea what "woo" is then. I haven't proposed anything that is unfalsifiable or has been falsified. Furthermore, the onus is actually upon those who claim that evolution is non-random to provide evidence as such because they are claiming that it is a deterministic system which is easily falsifiable.

By the way, your citations of the authors intention seem to be contradicted by the fact that the examples section gives an example of an almost sure event on a finite and countably infinite probability space.
Click to expand...

No, they're &*@^%ing not, for the umpteenth time. No one claims that it is a deterministic system, unless everything in the natural world is deterministic.

We are claiming that random doesn't apply to "evolution" for the same @#&$*@&% reason that gas laws and smoke detectors are not random.

Stop looking at the @#$%*&#*& molecules and look at the system, for chrissakes. That is where you find 'evolution', not in the organisms themselves. They do all the living and dying. They are not evolution. Evolution is the friggin' abstraction created by our brains to describe what happens when they do all the living and dying.

That process occurs through many random changes that accumulate over time to produce CHANGE that appears directed. It doesn't matter that all the gas molecules flit about randomly -- insert rabbits and trilobytes here -- Boyle's law is still Boyle's law. And the smoke detector at my mother-in-law's house still blares away strangely every friggin' time I visit and blow smoke up at it.
 
Ichneumonwasp-

It is through the "living and dying" of the individuals within a population that evolution takes place. You have to understand how randomness gives rise to order in order to understand evolution.

By the way macroscopic gas laws may be very good at describing the thermodynamics of a system but they are not do good at all for describing reaction kinetics. Thus, you can have a thermodynamically favorable reaction that takes place very slow and the microscopic gas laws will not explain the behavior of such a system very thoroughly. For such an explanation, you need to understand statistical mechanics, which does describe the partition of microstates in a gas by a probability distribution.
 
sol invictus said:
Mijo: are smoke detectors random?

Yes or no?
Click to expand...

There overall operation is orderly, but the underlying mechanism of operation is random.

Note: "Orderly" is not the same as "non-random". Very simple random systems (e.g., coin tosses or dice rolls) have long-term orderly behavior (e.g., head or tails half the time or each number one sixth of the time). I am fine with calling evolution by natural selection an orderly process (if that increases understanding), but I think that calling it non-random is fraught with just as many (if not more) problems as calling it random, because its underlying mechanism is random.
 
Shoot... he asked for a peer review article in his last inane thread... and even that, didn't change his mind. He thinks he's smarter than peer reviewed scientists... even though he can't fathom why there's such "discontinuity" in the fossil record (nor does he show any interest in any current information on the topic... nor on evolution.)
 
mijopaalmc said:
There overall operation is orderly, but the underlying mechanism of operation is random.

Note: "Orderly" is not the same as "non-random". Very simple random systems (e.g., coin tosses or dice rolls) have long-term orderly behavior (e.g., head or tails half the time or each number one sixth of the time). I am fine with calling evolution by natural selection an orderly process (if that increases understanding), but I think that calling it non-random is fraught with just as many (if not more) problems as calling it random, because its underlying mechanism is random.
Click to expand...

YES or NO?
 
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Ichneumonwasp said:
No, they're &*@^%ing not, for the umpteenth time. No one claims that it is a deterministic system, unless everything in the natural world is deterministic.

We are claiming that random doesn't apply to "evolution" for the same @#&$*@&% reason that gas laws and smoke detectors are not random.

Stop looking at the @#$%*&#*& molecules and look at the system, for chrissakes. That is where you find 'evolution', not in the organisms themselves. They do all the living and dying. They are not evolution. Evolution is the friggin' abstraction created by our brains to describe what happens when they do all the living and dying.

That process occurs through many random changes that accumulate over time to produce CHANGE that appears directed. It doesn't matter that all the gas molecules flit about randomly -- insert rabbits and trilobytes here -- Boyle's law is still Boyle's law. And the smoke detector at my mother-in-law's house still blares away strangely every friggin' time I visit and blow smoke up at it.
Click to expand...

You blow smoke at it?

See Mijo, now you've gone and pissed of Ich... one of our calmest members and a long time advocate defending you against my "harsh" accusations of being a creationist. You really ought to at least pretend to hear what other people say on occasion. I guarantee that everyone here finds Ich more intelligent and comprehensible than you... no doubt, better educated. And he's a hell of lot more patient than I could be.
 
sol invictus said:
YES or NO?
Click to expand...

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection. Mutation and natural selection (or radioactive decay) are both random because they operate on probabilities, but they lead to the ordrely adaptations that we see in evolution by natural selection (or the function of a smoke detector).

What is you're problem with that description?
 
sol invictus said:
I can summarize this entire thread in a single sentence:

Evolution is randommijo.

Next thread: can anyone think of anything that isn't randommijo? Does anyone care?
Click to expand...
I would hope that the summary would go farther than that. The article about sunflowers that evolved in parallel, the article about species adapting to cold temperatures, but in different ways that affect how well they can handle higher temps, the (admittedly short) discussion of whether complexity is a real trend or not ...

Sometimes even a boring sports match has a few highlights.

Walt

Edited to add: as good a forum as this can be for discussion, one strike against is the obstacle of sometimes discussing around other people.
 
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