What evidence is there for evolution being non-random?

[articulett]

You seem to just be making unsupported assertions in place of arguments. What evidence do you have that given exactly the same input evolution wouldn't yield the same output like the weather. How do you know, giving the exact same input, that exactly the same creatures wouldn't live and mate, or get eaten, run over, etc? What definitively removes evolution from the realm of chaotic systems and places it in the truly random category?

You seem to be saying that if we went back in time and put every particle of the universe exactly where it was so long ago. That every thunderstorm or other weather that ever happened will happen exactly the same way, in the same place, at the same time as it happened the first time, but evolution wouldn't follow the same course this time around. Why? What evidence supports this? As far I know, the debate over whether or not the universe is determined has yet to be definitively resolved. Perhaps you can clear that up quick before moving along.

He won't because he switches as he goes. He talks about two organisms of the same "fitness". But that cannot be. If they are the same "fitness" they are the same organism in the same place at the same time. Every thing is the same. The environment selects and you can't change the position of the environment mid definition and then say--"see, you couldn't predict" which one would live. He uses a human definition of fitness while using the general theoretical definition of evolution. But fitness includes everything in the environment--even luck, placement, and the like. If everything is exactly identical...then exactly identical it would be. And if Hitler's mom hiccupped during sex and conceived a different child--this would be a different world with different people living and dying and marrying and mating and inventing and describing history. And we can never know how.

When it comes to Mendelian genetics--we can predict probability distributions very precisely. But just because recessive traits show up in one family more often than chance (4 albinos out of 4 kids born to non-albino parents)--doesn't mean that recessive inheritance isn't determined or that it suddenly becomes random. He's mixing his definitions to get a conclusion he wants that isn't saying anything about evolution and making natural selection harder to grasp from what I can tell. He is supposedly trying to be precise in describing evolution as a "stochastic process" but he's very imprecise as to the definition he's using for that word and for the word fitness and he muddles it further with hypothetical exceptions while failing to grasp the basic principle. Fittest according to who? Equally fit in what way? He's talking anthropomorphically. He's not thinking about fitness being "that information which gets copied the most and added to the most". Fittest at what? FITTEST AT GETTING COPIED. According to what? ACCORDING TO THE ENVIRONMENT--NATURAL SELECTION (which includes all environmental factors, sexual selections, defenses, hidden tricks, etc.).

 

[whiteyonthemoon]

No matter how accurately you frame the other side of a dialogue, expect for someone to say you are using the straw man technique. Sad.

The numbers in the lottery represent the circumstances under which an organism will pass on its genes. You never know what circumstances will arise, in life or in the lottery.

 

[Meadmaker]

Looks like you thought of a straw man to me. The analogy has nothing to do with evolution. There is no predetermined outcome that evolution is aiming for, there are no winning numbers.

Blame Dawkins. Why do you suppose it is the "Methinks it is a weasel" Lottery? It's from "The Blind Watchmaker", but I added two guys arguing about whether it was random, and a bit of window dressing to make it more lottery-like.

(ETA: I think the actual quote from Hamlet used by Dawkins was "Methinks it is like a weasel".)

 

[Meadmaker]

No matter how accurately you frame the other side of a dialogue, expect for someone to say you are using the straw man technique. Sad.

It's a meme that has found a very fertile environment on JREF.


I quite liked my lottery analogy, although it has some limitations, like all analogies.

 

[articulett]

No matter how accurately you frame the other side of a dialogue, expect for someone to say you are using the straw man technique. Sad.

The numbers in the lottery represent the circumstances under which an organism will pass on its genes. You never know what circumstances will arise, in life or in the lottery.

True. But you know for certain that each step will be based on what happened before.

This reminds me of when I was trying to explain "X" in as a variable to my son when he was taking algebra.

"But what is X?"
"X is any number"
"but what number is it?"
"It's not a specific number"
"I know it's not a number--it's a letter."
"But it represents a number"
"What number?"
"That's what you have to figure out."
"But I thought you said it wasn't a specific number"...
etc.

Sometimes you just have to lay the groundwork. first. And sometimes some connections just aren't in place for conveying understanding.

And here is what I find sad. You never frame anything you say with accuracy, and so you are the king of straw men. Witches? Accusing me of advocating the death of creationists? Dawkins doesn't explain anything to anyone? Does anyone ever tell you that you ARE making sense to them? When people tell you you are creating a strawman it's because you are creating a strawman. An analogy clarifies. A strawman stands in place of the actual argument and is attacked as if it were the argument even though the details of the issue at hand are not a part of the "analogy" or straw man or representation.

Meadmakers argument was a strawman. It has nothing to do with the OP question nor how natural selection builds complexity through time nor explaining evolution with clarity. It doesn't convey any understanding of any kind to the discussion. It doesn't explain why he thinks it's explanatory to say things like "evolution is random" or "mate selection is random"--when he means that it's purposeless. Or that it has chance elements. Or that by some technical definition that no one seems to lay out very well or agree upon that it's a "stochastic process" and that conveys understanding in a way that's somehow better than the way Dawkins et. al. explain it.

The way you guys seem to want to describe evolution seems boring and vague at best. Plus it misses the key issue that people seem to need to understand to "get it"--natural selection. Yes, random factors can influence natural selection--but that does not make the selection process nor the assemblage of genomes "random". Moreover, the anthropomorphic definition of fitness just clouds the issue. The only info. that is fitter is the info. that gets copied and added to through time. Survival of the fittest and social Darwinism are common obfuscating techniques that have nothing really to do with the theory of evolution--the basic principle. Just like saying like "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" doesn't have anything to do with the theory of gravity. It's tangential. Creationists use these terms to obfuscate a fairly simple process--natural selection (or to demonize atheists.)

 

[Meadmaker]

So, here we are. Points to keep in mind. We aren't trying to find the best description of evolution. Someone else has presented us with a description, and we have to respond. They say, "evolution is random, and a random process can't create us".

The question before us is, is it a good idea to say, "No. Evolution is not random."

I say it is not a good idea. It doesn't address the problem. It often substitutes a straw man (saying random = 747 in a junkyard). Saying selection makes it non-random actually makes the problem harder instead of easier. It just isn't an effective response.

So what's its appeal?

I said earlier the appeal was emotional. Theist or atheist, we don't like to think we came about by chance. We like to think there's a purpose, or at least "something bigger". Dawkins went on at length about it in chapter 10 of TGD. Sagan was brilliant in making that seem real, and important, to people. It just wouldn't have sounded nearly as impressive to say, "The universe, with its billions and billions of stars, and the amazing diversity of life on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos is a vast storehouse of knowledge. Science can be used as the tool to open your mind to these wonders. Of course, it's all coincidence and doesn't mean anything, but it's still cool."

 

[articulett]

Does anyone understand Meadmakers "analogy"?

To me it's so tangential. Mijo starts a thread asking how evolution is non-random. It's not unlike his thread asking about the discontinuity of the fossil record. Both sound very much like the top known creationist obfuscations.

from talk origins. On top of that, he resists all answers to his question and repeatedly sums up his conclusion--it's some variation of this "evolution isn't non-random...it's stochastic...which is a synonym for random because "equally fit" individuals don't always survive and reproduce equally.

Which is all well and good and not completely untrue. And everyone agrees that "randomness" plays a role in the evolutionary process. But to fail to explain the "de-randomizer"--natural selection...how it assembles complexity through time and culls from the random--is just bizarrely uninformative. Especially when we know how many different interpretations there are for random and synonyms thereof (and this thread just proves it.) If the goal was to actually understand how evolution is non-random (the OP question)--then the peer reviewed scientists answer such as Dawkins should have been the answer. Evolution is not random because natural selection is a process which may have random components but it brings order to the randomness--or rather acts as a force that builds complexity from the many random pieces through TIME. Lots of time. And lots and lots of experiments to cull from. You can twist all that and say, yeah, but it's till "Random" because it's purposeless or we can't predict it or because it contains random elements...or because from a physics POV or because of non-uniform distributions or something about inputs and outputs--....or whatever-- But why would you?

It conveys no meaning. Just like meadmakers "example". Or maybe it has meaning for somebody. What was it conveying? Meadmaker seems to miss the argument completely. The biologists aren't the ones using vague terminology with multiple meanings to convey a simple but essential principle.
Mijo is. So is Meadmaker. And I can't make sense of Whitey or Walter--but for different reasons. Whitey just reminds me of T'ai. or "The Atheist". I mean why beat your head on that wall? And Walter is a nicer non-theistic Kleinman--I just can't follow. Can others?

Do the other randomites understand why Dawkins and other biologists think that it's misleading to call evolution random because natural selection is more like the "opposite" of random? Doesn't that answer the OP question? Isn't this thread supposed to be about the "non-random" aspects of evolution and why biologists would say selection is non-random? Or was it just a strawman for mijo and others to say "I'm not unconvinced that evolution is non-random"? and other stellar phrases like "scientists don't know enough to say whether evolution is random or not".

I do hope that someone browsing these pages who was actually curious about the question has the opportunity to learn the answer even if mijo does not. The same goes for his discontinuous fossil thread. And I also hope a careful reading of both threads and anything by kleinman (or Behe) will clue people into the twilight zone obfuscation talk of creationists. It's just so "off" but not in any way they let you pin them down on. As soon as you nail them with a definition, they shift the goal post so that the conversation becomes about something else.

 

[articulett]

So, here we are. Points to keep in mind. We aren't trying to find the best description of evolution. Someone else has presented us with a description, and we have to respond. They say, "evolution is random, and a random process can't create us".

The question before us is, is it a good idea to say, "No. Evolution is not random."

I say it is not a good idea. It doesn't address the problem. It often substitutes a straw man (saying random = 747 in a junkyard). Saying selection makes it non-random actually makes the problem harder instead of easier. It just isn't an effective response.

So what's its appeal?

I said earlier the appeal was emotional. Theist or atheist, we don't like to think we came about by chance. We like to think there's a purpose, or at least "something bigger". Dawkins went on at length about it in chapter 10 of TGD. Sagan was brilliant in making that seem real, and important, to people. It just wouldn't have sounded nearly as impressive to say, "The universe, with its billions and billions of stars, and the amazing diversity of life on Earth and elsewhere in the cosmos is a vast storehouse of knowledge. Science can be used as the tool to open your mind to these wonders. Of course, it's all coincidence and doesn't mean anything, but it's still cool."

Yes, but knowledge and understanding evolves. And nobody just says "no, evolution is not random". What the biologists say is "mutations are relatively random, but what survives and reproduces amongst those trillions of mutations, recombinations, etc. is not. Natural selection is the key to "climbing mount improbable".

Yes it's cool that it's "random" or unplanned. But it's also cool to understand how this amazingness can come from chaos. And that is what explaining natural selection does. None of us have said, "nope it's not random" and left it at that. We've just said that calling it "random" is vague and leaves out the force of natural selection--the power--the way it hones through time. It is what makes species into species. It is the power behind the randomness. It is the way great design can be built from the bottom up...just as the internet is built from the bottom up--no pre planning. But random just doesn't capture the force and how it connects an evolving system through time.

Understanding evolution come slowly. The fact that it's unplanned or that we are here by chance doesn't occur to everyone. But understanding natural selection leads their thinking backwards... just like the way everything is moving away from each other allows us to extrapolate to the big bang. There is no need to put the "scary conclusion" on the front. When you climb mount improbable from the back in slow increments, the peak doesn't seem so scary...in fact, it can be liberating. I'm not against addressing it. But what makes it cool and profound is understanding how-- realizing that we WERE designed from the bottom up--we are the result of eons of successful reproductions when the vast majority of life forms died out or never got the chance to be. And there is no-one in charge.

 

[whiteyonthemoon]

I think I understand what Meadmaker was saying. I really liked the analogy, it reminded me of Hofstadter's dialogues in Godel Escher Bach.

He's saying in a longer form something I was going to say. If I were to try to frame evolution in terms of what it has to do with randomness, and I had six words to do it, I wouldn't say "Evolution is random", nor "Evolution is not random", but "Evolution is a game of chance". I think we can all agree on that. As to whether a game of chance is random or not, well it depends on the game and who you ask. Articulett wouldn't call the game of chance known as evolution random. I would. I would say the stock market is random, some would not. It depends on the game, and who you ask. Hard determinists would say there is no such thing as a game of chance, I would disagree. For me, evolution has enough randomness (introduced in many forms at every step) that I call it random.

 

[Meadmaker]

I think I understand what Meadmaker was saying. I really liked the analogy, it reminded me of Hofstadter's dialogues in Godel Escher Bach.

Now that's high praise. Thanks.

 

[articulett]

This is from the Dover transcript--Behe on "random" and there is pages of this same type of obfuscation:

Q. Now, you on Monday showed the court, or maybe it was Tuesday you showed the court that you had done a literature search of articles on the immune system looking for the words "random mutation," correct?

A. Yes.

Q. But you didn't search for transpositions, is that correct?

A. That's correct.

Q. And that word appears in a number of the titles here?

A. It does, but the critical difference is the word random. There's lots of mutations, and it's entirely possible that intelligent design or some process of the development of life can occur by changes in DNA, but the critical factor is are such changes random, are they not random, so just there are also many occurrences of the word mutation, but it was not just mutation that is the critical element of Darwinian theory. It is random mutation.

Q. But in modern Darwinian theory transposition is one of the kind of mutations that natural selection acts upon, correct?

A. It is a mutation, and natural selection can act upon it.

Q. So the word mutation didn't show up, or random mutation, but a form of mutation that natural selection can act upon appears throughout these articles, correct?

A. Yes, that is right.

Q. And you also noted that natural selection does not appear in these articles?

A. That's correct.

Q. The selectability of the immune function, that's not really a controversial proposition, is it?

A. I'm sorry? What do you mean?

Q. The selectability of the immune system that that is a selectable function, I mean that's not very controversial, is it? It's a good thing, right?

A. If you mean is it beneficial for an organism to have one, I'm going to have to say that it's general, it's good for systems that, for organisms that depend on it to have one. But when you're thinking about evolution, one of the things you have to think about to have a rigorous understanding of it is what it is changing from and what is it changing to. The question is is a particular mutation that happens going to have a net beneficial effect or a net detrimental effect is an open question, and in any step one can look at, that question arises very pointedly, is this going to help or is it going to hurt.

I'm not saying any words can fix this mindset--but understanding natural selection can keep it from getting so entrenched. And this really is an issue with creationists, Meadmaker. I don't know what more evidence you would need. Words like "random" and "free will" and "survival of the fittest" and so forth are words ripe for semantic abuse and murkiness rather than clarity. For more of this godawful exampl eof creationist thick talk:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day12pm.html#day12pm2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District_trial_documents

I don't think Behe is fixable. But would you want him or someone like him trying to teach your kids about evolution?

Those who can state the principle simply, teach it the best. There are time for details and nuances later. When you use random you are no more clear than Behe using random in the answers to a cross examination above. What the hell is he talking about. Anyone's guess is as good as any other, because he just isn't saying anything. And believe me, it gets worse. If you think Kleinman is bad...

 

[articulett]

BTW, Behe's whole argument is that some things couldn't have come about by chance--it's akin to saying how could there be a body without a head or a head without a body--someone had to design them to go together. He's got a whole book of this blather out. http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/irreducible_complexity/

Review copies of Michael Behe’s new book The Edge of Evolution are now out – the book is officially coming out on June 5 – and now the reviews are starting. Mark C. Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math, has beat us all to the punch. I perceived many of these problems while giving The Edge of Evolution my own read-through, but it takes a mathematician to comment on Behe’s abuse of fitness landscapes and probability arguments with the appropriate sense of outrage.

more at: http://www.pandasthumb.org/

I think you should read it meadmaker, because I'm not sure you'd recognize a creationist if he bit you in the ass. I'm sure Behe would find your arguments and examples as compelling as whitey and mijo do.

 

[articulett]

Ooh, and this is good...
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/behes_the_edge_of_evolution_pa.php

Michael Behe is a former biochemist like mijo (say, Mijo, are you Behe?). He thinks that Scientists are saying that complexity arose from randomness and that he can prove that it couldn't have. In any case, he is very selective about what kinds of fine tuning in regards to evolution that he lets himself understand. I contend that mijo is most certainly doing the exact same thing.
He can only hear the answer that fits what he wants to hear.

Mijo, if you are not Behe--have you read Behe? Do you think you sound like him? Do you think you have a better way of explaining evolution? Does your understanding allow you to recognize the errors in his thinking? It's subtle, and he makes some ambiguous word choices and moves the goal posts so you never know where he's going. But that is what you are doing. You are making the same error in thinking about evolution that he is. And it may not be a coincidence that you both have the same background. Did you go to Lehigh college by chance?

And meadmaker, is Behe wrong? misguided? unclear? a liar? right? or to obfuscating to say? Can you sum up his position? State how Mijo's is different. Behe is someone who will deny being a creationist...but much is said by the questions he avoids, and he definitely is a proponent of "intelligent desgin". His obfuscations are directly related to those beliefs no matter how you slice it. If you think I'm seeing creationism where there is none...please point out the differences between mijo's understanding of evolution and Behe's.

 

[articulett]

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=123

More on Behe and random and the obfuscation of it all:

What if evolution is NOT (as Darwinists claim) a series of random mutations at the genetic level, but a process based on planned, coherent design? Would that revelation radically change how we see life (and, indeed, the entire natural world) in the same revolutionary way that Darwin’s theories did in the middle of the 19th century?

See...as long as evolution is just about randomness with obfuscating semantic games getting in the way of understanding "natural selection"--then the only other alternative is "intelligent design".

Just so long as mijo can somehow boil down evolution to the former vague definition like Behe, then he he can prevent himself and maybe even others from understanding natural selection. (BTW, creationists always have an unexplained hatred of Dawkins ...I am always suspicious of Dawkins criticizers who offer nothing better and are vague but visceral in their dislike.)

 

[jimbob]

I have no idea what you are talking about. Any system that deviates from a normal distribution is non-random.

As far as I can recall, quantum effects are truely random.

Depending on the type of particles that one is considering, these have different distributions of energies (for example).

To me, a random process is one where one can not say what any individual will be doing, but one can make statements about the population distribution in other words about the probabilities.

I know biologists, ecologists, and mathematicians who would agree with that definition. (Although the ones that I know are all British, so maybe there is also a cultural difference)

P.S. Whats this "POV of a physicist?" Who cares? We're not discussing physics, we're discussing evolution. Evolution is studied by ecologists, geneticists, botanists, and biologists, not physicists. How is a physicist's POV relevant?

ETA: Ok, maybe "who cares" is asinine. However, the usage of "random" in physics is entirely irrelevant to the usage of "random" with regards to evolution. You don't mix jargon across scientific fields.

From my conversations with British biologists/ecologists I would say that mine is actually the defintion of random that is used in the biological sciences too.

From your posts, you first imply that the poisson distribution is random, then later say that any non-Gaussian distribution is nonrandom. This is the crux of the whole debate.

Rolling a pair of dice is strictly a deterministic proces, but is generally considered to be random for normal usage.

Evolution is less deterministic than dice rolling, bucause there are probably truely random features (radiation-induced mutations for example) that mean that one can not make predictions about the precise genetic makeup of any surviving offspring, and given enough generations, one would not be able to describe what the ecosystem itself would consist of. From 70 MY ago, it would have been impossible to predict the existance of humanity, or even any large great apes/hominids. Complex tool use (the modification of available materials) would also not be predicatable.


The point is that if you argue that evolution is nonrandom, then you are playing into the hands of shaguza et al. (I checked their other posts, and it dosen't seemto be a parody)...

mijo:
To clarify for my benefit, firstly do you argue:

a) that humanity evolved according to a random process, which has probability distributions, and certain laws making some forms extremely unlikely.

or

b)humanity only appeared because of an intelligent designer "guided" the evolutionary process (i.e. it is nonrandom)

or c)some other viewpoint.
​

I would attack the "tornado in a junkyard", rather than the random bit... I would also characterise ID as the noodly appendege breeding humanity from hominoids, as we breed dogs and then ask how this is supposed to happen, maybe Odin's Valkeries choose which animals are doomed to tread on a thorn and become lunch/starve.

Jim

 

[mijopaalmc]

You have not described a random process. You have described the very essence of a non-random system. If you insist on discussing statistics you must accept the statistical implications of the words "random" and "nonrandom."

Addendum to the above post: You are succumbing to the "no middle ground" fallacy. Systems that exhibit uncertainty are not automatically random.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Any system that deviates from a normal distribution is non-random.

Here are some definitions of "random" from various statistical dictionaries:


Statistical Dictionary of Terms and Symbols Kurtz and Edgerton (1939)

Chance, without bias, haphazard. Also called erratic.

Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms Dodge (2003)

This word is used in senses ranging from non-deterministic (as in random process)to purely by chance, independently of other events.

Dictionary of Statistics and Methodology Vogt (1993)

Said of events that are unpredictable because their occurrence are unrelated to their characteristics.

Dictionary of Statistics and Methodology Vogt (2005)

Said of events that are unpredictable because their occurrence are unrelated to their characteristics. The opposite of deterministic.

Cambridge Dictionary of Statistics Everitt (1998 and 2002)

Governed by chance, not completely determined by other factors. Non-deterministic.

The point is that even the experts (and I think that it is safe to assume that editors of statistical dictionaries are experts in statistics) don't agree on a single definition of random. In fact, one of them (Dodge 2003) even acknowledges that there is a range of meaning in the fields of statistics and probability theory, which happens to run the gamut of definitions provided by posters here in this thread. Thus, if we are to have a meaningful discussion, we need to all decide of which definition were are going to use.

I think we can all agree that evolution is a constrained and biased system, where, at the population level, genes that contribute favorably to an individual's phenotype will increase in frequency while those that contributed disfavorably will decrease in frequency through their being inherited or not inherited by the next generation.

The question therefore becomes: How is this system (non)random? Why is the specific definition of random being used?

 

[Meadmaker]

articulett-

From what I understand about numerical weather prediction, the difficulty in obtaining accurate long-term forecasts stems from the fact that the equations of fluid dynamics and physics used to describe meteorological systems cannot be solved exactly and that it is nearly impossible to obtain precise and detailed enough data.

It's not just "nearly impossible", it's impossible. At least, that's the general consensus.

I took one course that dealt with chaos theory, (the class was Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Michigan). It didn't go into great mathematical detail, but I'll pass along a bit of what I learned.

A chaotic system is one in which any uncertainty in initial conditions, no matter how small, will result in uncertainty in final conditions such that the possible final conditions can be found anywhere in a given range of state space.

The first example the professor gave was the "break" in a game of pool. Try to predict the position of the 8 ball after the break. It could end up anywhere on the table, so that's the final state space. Some spots are more likely than others, but it could be anywhere.

Suppose you knew "exactly" how hard the ball was hit, and "exactly" how level the table was, and "exactly" the spacing of the balls within the rack. Could you then predict where the ball would end up? No. According to my professor, even if you knew the position of every particle to the limits of the uncertainty principle, and had a dynamic model that was absolutely perfect, to the limit that quantum mechanics would allow, that would be enough uncertainty that you couldn't predict where the eight ball would go.

So it is with weather. The tiny fluctuations, like those caused by butterflies wings and even smaller disturbances, are magnified until you can't make exact predictions. You can say, with certainty, that it will rain more in Portland than in Baghdad, but it is quite impossible to say that a year from now on this date it will or will not rain in Portland.

Thus spake my professor. If you want proof, it will have to come from elsewhere.

 

[mijopaalmc]

It's not just "nearly impossible", it's impossible. At least, that's the general consensus.

I took one course that dealt with chaos theory, (the class was Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Michigan). It didn't go into great mathematical detail, but I'll pass along a bit of what I learned.

A chaotic system is one in which any uncertainty in initial conditions, no matter how small, will result in uncertainty in final conditions such that the possible final conditions can be found anywhere in a given range of state space.

The first example the professor gave was the "break" in a game of pool. Try to predict the position of the 8 ball after the break. It could end up anywhere on the table, so that's the final state space. Some spots are more likely than others, but it could be anywhere.

Suppose you knew "exactly" how hard the ball was hit, and "exactly" how level the table was, and "exactly" the spacing of the balls within the rack. Could you then predict where the ball would end up? No. According to my professor, even if you knew the position of every particle to the limits of the uncertainty principle, and had a dynamic model that was absolutely perfect, to the limit that quantum mechanics would allow, that would be enough uncertainty that you couldn't predict where the eight ball would go.

So it is with weather. The tiny fluctuations, like those caused by butterflies wings and even smaller disturbances, are magnified until you can't make exact predictions. You can say, with certainty, that it will rain more in Portland than in Baghdad, but it is quite impossible to say that a year from now on this date it will or will not rain in Portland.

Thus spake my professor. If you want proof, it will have to come from elsewhere.

It is important to note here that the above does not mean that weather is a stochastic system, because given the same initial conditions the equations used in numerical weather prediction will yield the same results every time. In a stochastic, system it is possible to get different results given the same initial conditions. In other words, the uncertainty of results in a deterministic system is only due to the uncertainty of the data fed into the system, which may itself fundamentally uncertain, and not the structure and nature of the system, whereas the uncertainty of results in a stochastic system is dues to the structure and nature of the system regardless of the uncertainty in the data.

 

[jimbob]

How does claiming evolution is nonrandom not play into the hands of shaguza et al?

or indeed the ID proponents?

Devil's Advocate: "If evolution is nonrandom, then it is directed.

If it is directed, then the designer could have set it off, knowing that eventually she would have some worshipers.
Not in six thousand years, but 4 billion...

OR

"Life itself was the guide that set us on the inevitable path from slime to Mankind"

"

There is possibly point in arguing with ID proponents, not with young-earth creationists. (Aside: are there any bristlecone pines etc. that are older than the Earth according to the Young Earth creationists?)

ID proponents do accept some evolution, but make a meaningless distinction between types. At least some of the more knowlegable must be able to remove "irreducible complexity" from various systems, and accept that we are the result of chance, but according to certain rules:

A weak hand can sometimes win in certain card games, and a strong one loose, but in general the stronger hand will do better. It is a pretty poor analogy, but should be understandable.

...And maybe more pithy than "Culling of the weakest, and random killing of the rest of the population too, and only the survivors breed, and repeated *billions* of times". (I am guessing that most generations occured whilst our ancestors were unicellular, but have no idea really...)

 

[mijopaalmc]

mijo:
To clarify for my benefit, firstly do you argue:

a) that humanity evolved according to a random process, which has probability distributions, and certain laws making some forms extremely unlikely.

That is a very succinct but no less true summation of my argument.