Evolution Math for Matt (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 10:30 (4636 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: An article discussing calculating probabilities for mutations, evolution, etc. Pagliucci's objections are given. It is a clear presentation:
-http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/08/probability_and_evolution.php?utm_source=...-And here is an answer from an ID author. Id folks like to use probability calculations as a way to refute Darwin's concept of evolution.-http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evolution-and-probabilities-a-respons...-From my own standpoint, after many discussions with Matt re math considerations for probability calculations, I prefer to look at complexity. And not just the argument about irreducible complexity. I'll shortly discuss James Shapiro's book, 'Evolution', as I finish it, but the complexities he describes change the paradigm of Neo-Darwinism completely. Life's processes, and control feedbacks are so inter-twined that a blind searching mechanism which is finally mediated by natural selection does not seem capable of such a creation.-I shan't pretend to understand all the technicalities of these exchanges, but when the subject is innovation, the atheist evolutionist always falls back on Natural Selection as the get-out-of-jail card. That is why it is so essential to settle on a definition of NS. Matt will disagree, but all my references (books and websites) still define it in terms of the process that decides which adaptations/innovations will survive, i.e. those that best enable organisms to cope with their environment. NS, according to this still current definition, does not CREATE the innovations. How do you select from something that doesn't yet exist?-The one fact we can be sure of is that these innovations occurred. ID-ers claim that they are too complex to have occurred by chance, in which case either a UI intervened in the evolutionary process, or he devised a mechanism already capable of these immensely complex, "intertwined" operations. The atheist argument has to substitute chance for a UI: the innovations are the result of random mutations (Darwinism), the survival of which is determined by Natural Selection (not random), and chance created the original mechanism that was capable of these operations. Both sides may accept that the environment influences change, but the extent to which the changes are adaptations or innovations remains unclear, and in any case this has no bearing on the "probability" of chance creating the original mechanisms that enable adaptation.-As for "probability", as there are so many imponderables and no precedents, I can see no reliable basis for anyone's calculations. It all comes down to what you think is credible.