Turns out Random is Better (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, February 21, 2010, 22:38 (5387 days ago) @ David Turell

David
> > All this boils down to, if a design hypothesis is valid, we must be able to differentiate it from chance, which becomes harder and harder to do the more randomness allowed in a given scenario, and the more restriction faced via degrees of freedom, the harder to argue intelligence over chance. (Or chance over intelligence.) 
> 
> I would state just the opposite,. Degrees of freedom limit the probabilities that chance alone can get the evolution process from inorganic material to us. If DNA is designed to push forward, with all the layers of epigenetic help that have turned up, in place, that solves the problem of limited time. Darwin and Einstein thought the universe was eternal. Hubble changed all that. The Darwin theory developed against that background of belief. George's recent post indicating that eukaryotic cells (with nucleus) developed at 3.2 billion years ago, is startling, a tremendous speed in covering that step toward multicellar organisms. I still find the Cambrian Explosian even more startling. Both points support my idea of a driving force behind evolution built into the genome, that is, design.-This might be considered semantic, but as you stated that you aren't a "great statistician" I feel I need to make this point. First, constraints make things more likely to happen, not less. In ANY system of probability, the more narrow your set of choices the more likely you are to get one of them to happen. This is a mathematical property of randomness that is independent of any and all systems. When you bring in Bayesian probability as you are, and you say "We are at state A. What are the chances given A that we'll get B?" You ignore all the previous probabilities that lead to A as it is out of scope of the hypothesis of "If A then B." There is also another VERY important distinction that I never made with you here--but it is absolutely important as I've yet to see a formal statistical treatment on the odds that you use all the time. -Statistics works via a NULL hypothesis, whereas in natural science you usually make the hypothesis, "if A, then B" and then conduct experiments to support this claim, in statistics things are much more, ahem, "probable." We'll assert "if A, then NOT B," and assert "if A then B" as our null. If the data looks reasonable under the null hypothesis, then no conclusion is made. I cannot stress this enough. It is accepted purely as a default position and no more statement need be said about its nature of truth/untruth. If it turns out that "if A then NOT B" is TRUE, then and only then we reject the null and search for a new hypothesis. There is no automatic acceptance of alternates (although you will see political scientists do this all the time.) -Going back to Bayes, if "A" is a completely random event, all future probabilities calculated from B onward will exponentially increase the influence of the random event on the whole calculation, and it therefore becomes impossible to separate random from nonrandom causation. Therefore, if you cannot specifically separate the random element and track it through the rest of the system, you cannot make the claim that the entire system "couldn't be a random event." The randomness needs to be evaluated through its entire path through the system. -The two pieces of evidence you provide simply state that evolution can happen incredibly quickly--there is no formal justification to make the kind of conclusion that you make here. You need to do more than state that the current explanation is incomplete, you need to detect the intelligence you claim, otherwise it's a "lazy induction." What other processes in the world do we accept claims with as little direct evidence?

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