Re: OT: Three Cheers!!!

On 11 Apr 2006 21:11:27 -0700, bvallely@xxxxxxx <bvallely@xxxxxxx> wrote:
It's not a matter of what is or isn't practical - it's the search for
the truth. How, exactly, does random chance build a strand of DNA
which contains more information than everything on the internet
combined?

You need to study statistics and probability. If you don't have a
real grasp of how probability works then it can seem impossible that
complexity can arise by chance. If you do understand probability
at a fundamental level then you understand that it's impossible for
complexity NOT to arise by chance. >>>

You need to study statistics and probability.

Echo.

When you acquire a
real grasp of how probability works then you will learn that events
whic seem impossible often really are exactly that.

Nonsense. An event is only impossible if it has a probability of
exactly zero. Any higher and it can happen.

It takes training and experience to understand randomness. Feelings
are a piss-poor guide to reality, and the fact is that most people's
gut feelings about randomness and probability are actually quite
wrong. You _need_ the training and experience, because your instincts
will invariably lead you astray.

Suppose you have a drunk leaning against a lamppost. He staggers off
in a random direction for one metre, then picks another direction at
random and staggers off for one metre, and so on. After he's walked
10,000 one metre steps in random directions how far is he likely to be
from the lamppost?

The naïve view says that because he's walking randomly he as likely to
go north as he is to go south, so his distance along a north-south
line will be zero. Similarly, he's as likely to go east as west so
his distance along an east-west line will be zero. So he's likely to
be right where he started. That's what most people's gut feeling
about randomness tells them.

Except he'll be about 100m away. What seems right isn't.

Another example of how "seems" is wrong. The chances of being killed
in a plane crash is about one in a million per passenger flight. If
there was a plan crash yesterday are you more at risk today, less at
risk, or is the risk the same? To most people it seems as though
you're less at risk: what are the chances of two planes crashing on
consecutive days?

Except the risk is unchanged. The planes don't know anything about
yesterday's crash, so their chances of crashing are just the same.

You clearly haven't studied probability because if you had you'd know
that your last statement above is undeniably false.

1,000,000,000 years may sound like a very long time - but if the odds
of an event are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to one, then it just
isn't going to happen - ever.

You _really_ need to learn more about probability. Just because
something is improbable doesn't mean it'll never happen. It just
means you need a lot of attempts.

For example, in the UK National Lottery the chance of winning the
lottery is one in approximately fourteen million. That's pretty
unlikely. But tens of millions of tickets are sold every week, and
although the probability of a particular ticket winning is low, the
large numbers of attempts made (called "trials" in probability theory)
means the probability of there being at least one winning ticket is
quite high. There are winners nearly every week.

When you scale up the numbers nothing changes. No matter how unlikely
an event may be, if the chance of it happening isn't exactly equal to
zero then given enough trials it will eventually happen. Given even
more trials it'll happen again. And again, and again. That's what
randomness and probability _means_.

That number you quoted -- 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 -- may seem
like a large number to you, but in terms of chemical reactions in the
primordial oceans an event of that probability would occur roughly
150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times a second.
(That's not a made-up figure.) You _really_ don't grasp the scale of
the numbers involved. Your number is _tiny_ in comparison.

It was grossly disingenuous of you to imply that because a fully
functioning heart is unlikely to appear spontaneously then that proves
it couldn't happen by chance. You know as well as I do that nobody
(apart from creationists) has ever made any such claim. The evolution
of life proceeded in steps: from inorganic molecules to amino acids,
from amino acids to protein-like structures, from proto-proteins to
self-replicating molecular complexes, and so on. Each stage is
simple -- some have been replicated in the laboratory, others have
been observed in nature -- and nobody who understands the chemistry
involved has any reason to think that, given the probability of each
stage occurring and the number of trials that were available, any of
those stages could not have occurred many times over by pure chance.
And you -- YOU, of all people -- think that in your complete and utter
ignorance of probability and randomness you have a better grasp of the
likelihood of the development of life than the experts. You're no
more equipped to judge evolutionary theory than a blind man is able
to judge the quality of a photograph. You just don't have the
necessary ability.

One of the central assertions of ID/creationism is that complexity
cannot arise by chance, but that assertion has been proven untrue over
and over again. We even make use of the ability of random action to
lead to complexity. Yet ID requires this incorrect assertion to be
true, and without it the entire edifice of ID starts looking distinctly
shaky. And all the ID people can do is close their eyes, stick their
fingers in their ears, and hope that the inconvenient reality goes away.

------------------

Four thousand years ago humans attributed everything they didn't
understand to the gods, and as they didn't understand much that meant
that an awful lot of things were considered to be divinely controlled.
The sun rose and set because of the gods, the seasons turned because
of the gods, the rain fell because of the gods, and so on. But then
we learned more, and discovered that the sun rose and set because of
the rotation of the planet, the seasons turned because of the axial
tilt of the same planet relative to its orbit, the rain fell because
as warm and moist air rose and cooled the water vapour it contained
condensed out and formed droplets. We no longer needed to assign the
cause of everything to our gods or God. But that didn't mean that
people lost their faith. Indeed, one of the greatest scientists who
ever lived, Isaac Newton, was a more prolific writer of religious
texts than he was of scientific ones. And it's still true today:
many scientists are deeply religious, and have no problem reconciling
their faith with their understanding of the real world.

But now, all of a sudden, it seems that the religious think that
a scientific explanation for something casts their faith into doubt.
They refuse to accept that God might not be the cause of everything.
They deny proven facts in order to try to defend their belief. How
weak must their faith be, that they have to spin a cocoon of fantasy
around themselves to keep their religion safe and secure.

There are many aspects of the world that have yet to be explained.
The masses of the fundamental particles. The strengths of the four
fundamental forces. Even the number of spacial dimensions we see:
if it were any different it would make life impossible, so why are we
so lucky as to have a universe with just the right number to provide
a stable environment for life? Why do the religious neglect the true
mysteries of the universe and insist on looking for God in things that
we already understand?

It's a delicious irony that those who have the strongest faith are
those who understand the world, while those who feel most threatened
are those who are ignorant of it. Only the weak of faith or the weak
of intellect are unable to cope with evolution.

------------------

Now some questions for you.

If Intelligent Design is so intelligent, why do humans have breathing
and digestive structures that are so badly designed that they intersect
each other, resulting in a risk of choking? That's bloody awful from
a design point of view.

Why do all chordates have only four limbs? It's not the best number.
Any chordate wanting to pick something up with its forelimbs needs to
learn the trick of balancing on two limbs to free the front limbs for
use. Birds are in an even worse position: using their rear limbs for
support and their front limbs as wings, they have to use their mouth
parts to manipulate anything. Extra limbs would be amazingly useful,
but they're not there. Evolution can explain that quite simply, but
Intelligent Design -- unfettered by the constraints of evolutionary
principles -- has to account for the fact that the more you look at
nature the more it looks like Dumb Design.

Eyes have the same problem. All chordates have to choose between two
front-facing eyes that offer the advantage of stereoscopic vision or
two side-facing eyes that offer near-all-round vision. Three or four
eyes would be far more useful, but no chordate has them. Why didn't
the Intelligent Designer allow any chordate to have extra eyes?

Then there are creatures like the panda. The panda is appallingly
maladapted and is barely capable of hanging on to its niche. The only
reason it isn't extinct by now is that there's not much that wants to
eat a panda. Why did an intelligent design result in a creature so
poorly adapted to survival? Where's the intelligence?

"Well, that's just the way God wanted it" is the usual answer, but
that just begs the question.

--
Matthew Winn
[If replying by email remove the "r" from "urk"]
.

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