Chance v. Design Part 4 (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, July 01, 2009, 14:54 (5422 days ago) @ dhw

dhw, - Well, I'll tackle the more "natural" idea first. Firstly, the random part of mutation happens often enough that population geneticists can actually calculate the background mutation rate for a given species. Drugs actually abuse this mutation rate, some drugs mess with the mutation rates of virii so that mutations start happening faster than the information can be transferred from capsid to capsid, thus propagating rapid errors. - My chance primer should help with part of what you're talking about. I'll give part of it away. You're probably familiar with how dice work. Chance has built-in perspectivism, and is an incredibly tricky area to work in. (This is why you should always treat commercials with statistics as specious.) - Take one dice, it is red. The odds of rolling it and getting any number is 1/6. Take a second dice. Color it blue. What are the odds of rolling the pair, and red delivering a 5, and blue delivering a 2? (This is a "trick question," actually.) - Technically, with 2 dice, the answer is 1/36, even though you would be well aware that 7 is the most likely result when rolling two dice (6/36 die rolls will be a 7, Craps abuses this to no end.) But the question is, the red dice being 5 and the blue dice being 2. The odds of this are 1/36 because each dice has a 1/6 chance of rolling any specific number. The first law in probability that people learn, is that you multiply each successive event together. In this case, there is only two events. 1/6 * 1/6 = 1/36 - So briefly, it seems improbable that you'd roll a 7 given this information, yet it isn't. 7 pops up much more frequently than any other die roll. It should be rare, but its not. Part of the rarity is in the type of question you're asking about the system. To me, when someone says that life is too complex to have come about by chance, I think about this system and pull on the brakes. What this shows to me that they're spending too much time looking at one specific example and not studying the system at large. They're asking about a red dice being 5 and a blue dice being 2, and not looking at the larger picture which dictates that you'll roll a 7 more often than any other sum. This is a crude introduction to why emergence is necessary when studying life. (Reductionism vs. emergence.) - As to arguments for a creator, I'm afraid I'm as much at a loss as yourself. The only plausibility to me lies in "something" does not come from "nothing." And to me... that's not enough.