Randomness in Evolution: Valid and Invalid Usage

[Reality Check]

For instance, thick winter coat or layer of blubber is favorable to warm blooded animals who live in cold climates with long winters, because they don't have to consume as much energy keeping themselves warm. Therefore, we can reasonably expect to see animals evolve these and other energy conserving strategies (e.g., hibernation), if their environment get colder and has progressively longer winters.

Nothing per se is favoring these traits; it just that individual who possess them are more likely to survive and reproduce in the spring.

So you agree that this is evidence that evolution is non-random?
Since similiar environments cause evolution of similiar traits then evolution is not random.

[mijopaalmc]

So you agree that this is evidence that evolution is non-random?
Since similiar environments cause evolution of similiar traits then evolution is not random.

No, just because an environment favors the development of a trait doesn't mean evolution is non-random. All the descriptions I have read of natural selection say that better-adapted individuals have a high probability of surviving than others. That is a description of a stochastic process.

[mijopaalmc]

Central limit theorum applies to independent variables, each with the same distribution. The probability of a specific mutation happening is dependent on the current genomes. For example, mutation at a site from A->C might be very unlikely, but from B->C might be more likely.

If that is the case, then the likelihood of C arising is dependent on the gene frequencies in the previous generation. The central limit theorem will not apply to long term evolution in your hypothecal, unbias selection.

Walt

P.S. It's late so I can't really get to other posts. Another time.

There are several central limit theorems that extended the convergence to normality variables that are dependent on each other.

[Reality Check]

No, just because an environment favors the development of a trait doesn't mean evolution is non-random. All the descriptions I have read of natural selection say that better-adapted individuals have a high probability of surviving than others. That is a description of a stochastic process.
Then this is a matter of semantics. When you say "non-random" you mean deterministic. When I say "non-random" I mean not random.

[mijopaalmc]

Then this is a matter of semantics. When you say "non-random" you mean deterministic. When I say "non-random" I mean not random.

That is a distinction without a difference. Something that is non-random is deterministic and vice versa.

[zosima]

I've got a few thoughts.

1. Regression of the mean works in opposition to evolution. It was one of the central reasons that lamarckian genetics was rejected. If everything could mix evenly any variation would regress back to the mean. Ie not net change over time. But in the discrete system of mendelian genetics that change cannot always regress. I may be explaining this point poorly so I encourage you to read about the history of the debate between the two.

2. I think macroscopic traits and complexity are often different things.
a. Evidence from the genome shows that we collect a lot of information in the genome, and the amount of information increases with time(just more junk in the genome). Evolution removes this sort of stuff, so it certainly decreases the complexity of the species(or gene pool) over time.(with a very strict definition of complexity)
b. Macroscopic traits like intelligence say very little about complexity. The way that we ended up being intelligent is probably not the simplest way to create a creature of equivalent complexity nor the most complex way. In other words evolution has a lot of appendices, this is particularly true in cognition, where we have newer layers of brain(in the evolutionary sense) layered on top of older ones and it seems a lot of those underlying layers do very little processing in humans. So a lot of extra complexity but very little extra intelligence.

3. Randomness is absolutely not necessary for evolution, but what you do need is variation. To have evolution in the way we generally think of it(ie not directed by things other than best fit to environment) that variation should be a good approximation of uniform variation. Luckily one of the constraints humans place on random variables(both intuitively and explicitly) is that those variables have a uniform distribution.

4. I personally think that the world is deterministic all the way down. As I understand quantum mechanics, the issue with hidden variables isn't that they are necessarily random, they can be non-random if they are non-local. I'm fine with non-locality, everything is connected, cool.

5. Given that, a fundamental question here is the definition of random. I think things are random if they appear random even if they have underlying deterministic behavior. If you disagree okay, but I think its a matter of opinion, or convention, if you will. I think once we finally define our terms this is a non-issue.

6. Finally there is a more interesting question beyond this. Does evolution necessarily converge on different forms? I can't say for any particular case, but what I can say for sure is that evolution is essentially a hill climbing algorithm(also often called simulated annealing). Which means it can only change from one form to another by small steps(or local variation). This precludes certain possibilities. So despite the fact that our brain is designed (I say designed only in the sense that I am anthropomorphizing an inanimate and non-directed process) by piling on layers, that now represent inefficiencies, it seems very likely that we couldn't have done it any other way. Any other intelligent evolved creatures in our universe would necessarily have their histories "built in" to their architecture, even if they end up doing it in a different way. It will never converge on the best way, because those intermediate steps are inseparable from the process( or algorithm). If you look at developmental biology all creatures on earth share this developmental commonality(and incidentally a common ancestor)

tl;dr

I'd just like to conclude with an interesting tangentially related thought. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram claims there are actually 3 kinds of randomness rather than the two mentioned above.(This is actually the central claim of the book)

Specifically there are systems that don't have complexity built into their initial conditions(ie not chaotic systems), they don't have any "true" randomness, but instead they are systems that generate randomness.

They have simple homogeneous initial conditions and simple rules, but because they pass some incredibly low computational threshold they generate randomness. It's quite amazing.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule30.html
A 6 rule cellular automaton on a simple 1-d binary grid can generate a pattern that never repeats starting from a single black square. It is also proven that this system is a universal Turing machine. wow.

[Reality Check]

That is a distinction without a difference. Something that is non-random is deterministic and vice versa.
That is what I said: you say non-random instead of deterministic. I say non-random instead of not random.

[mijopaalmc]

That is what I said: you say non-random instead of deterministic. I say non-random instead of not random.

So are "non-random" and "deterministic" interchangeable in all cases?

[Reality Check]

So are "non-random" and "deterministic" interchangeable in all cases?
Your interpretation seems to be yes.
My interpretation is that a non-random process = everything that is not a random process. A deterministic process is a non-random process. A stochastic process is not a random process and so is a non-random process. Thus non-random" and "deterministic" are not interchangeable in all cases.

[mijopaalmc]

Your interpretation seems to be yes.
My interpretation is that a non-random process = everything that is not a random process. A deterministic process is a non-random process. A stochastic process is not a random process and so is a non-random process. Thus non-random" and "deterministic" are not interchangeable in all cases.

Unfortunately, a stochastic process is by definition a random process. If you are interested in learning the basics of what a stochastic process is, you should go to Wolfram MathWorld (http://mathworld.wolfram.org) or PlanetMath (http://planetmath.org) an read the entries on stochastic process and follow the links to the terms you don't understand. Basically, any process that develops in time and is based on probabilities is a stochastic process.

The problem in discussing evolution by natural selection as a stochastic process is that there s very little evidence that demonstrates that individuals with identical phenotypes must all reproduce, making it a deterministic process. Most often individuals in evolution by natural selection are described as having a probability of reproducing, which is a description of a stochastic process.

[cyborg]

Assertions, assertions, assertions. All I see is assertions from cyborg.

Why don't you google natural selection and seen how it's explained, cyborg?

Because I am perfectly consistent even if you fail to be.

So, for the record:

Natural selection defines that the nature of genetic propagation is survival. It is not biased towards any particular gene surviving.

The environment defines the bias for any particular gene.

FAIL as usual from you.

[mijopaalmc]

So, for the record:

Natural selection defines that the nature of genetic propagation is survival. It is not biased towards any particular gene surviving.

The environment defines the bias for any particular gene.

Epic fail for cyborg, yet again.

The events in the environment are what comprise natural selection. Since the environment defines the bias, natural selection is inherently biased. Natural selection does not exist outside the environment.

[articulett]

Will you look at that... another biologist that asserts that selection is not random"
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/i_get_email_13.php#more
Mr Armitage was shocked? Why? Look at the date on this paper:

H. J. Muller (1939) Reversibility in Evolution Considered from the Standpoint of Genetics. Biological Reviews 14: 261-80.

You know, "stochastic, mechanistic random shuffling of genes" certainly will produce amazing amounts of complexity, far more than we see in organisms. Fortunately, we also have this non-random process called "selection" that constrains rampant randomness to a more limited functionality. That was an idea that was figured out in 1859. Maybe Mr Armitage needs to work a little harder on keeping up with the contemporary literature.

And that's from today!

He's reviewing a creationist "paper"...
Let's see, that is not unlike Dawkins reviewing Behe's book:

http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/dawkins/inferior_design140707.htm
I]The crucial passage in "The Edge of Evolution" is this: "By far the most critical aspect of Darwin's multifaceted theory is the role of random mutation. Almost all of what is novel and important in Darwinian thought is concentrated in this third concept."

What a bizarre thing to say! Leave aside the history: unacquainted with genetics, Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a "modest" idea, nor is descent with modification. [/I]

I've also posted peer reviewed papers and science articles saying as much. But some self appointed experts think they are clearer and smarter than Biologists, Talk Origins, those who actually teach the subject to others, Science magazines, etc. Nobody gives them the idea that they are, but in their head they insist that "evolution is not nonrandom"... they will never concede that otherwise. The same people... the same obfuscating nothingness... the same non points--

Now why in the world would people what to do this when, as illustrated above, it is unclear and is identical to the obfuscation of creationists? Why wouldn't someone interested in conveying information aim to sound like those who actually do convey information?

And how much do you want to bet that these same people will never ever say that evolution is not random no matter how much explaining you do or how much evidence there is or how many peer reviewed papers say exactly that? Does it matter to them that no respectable scientist anywhere is using random the way they are or describing evolution the way they are? Nope, because in their own head, they are smarter than them. They are smarter than you. In their head they it's almost impossible to find the point in their writings.

Randomness is not essential for things to evolve-- only reproduction and a selection process. Even with cloned animals as identical as can be-- some animals will preferentially survive and have more offspring... and these will be the founders of new populations and future genomes. Unless every member of a species fails to reproduce, you will have evolution. If they all die out, you have extinction.

[cyborg]

Natural selection does not exist outside the environment.

I can certainly define a nature without an environment where selection is biased to a particular form.

[MG1962]

Evasion noted, while chimps kill small animals, I don't recall that they and the other apes wipe each other out. Whatever, modern society can engage in efficient warfare.

Pony up your evidence for hs sapiens 'wiping out' hs neandethalis. Large piles of neanderthal skeletons with stone tool wounds? Stone arches with 'Arbeit macht frei' written on them? (Sorry that is undue sarcasm)

And then tell me about how homo sapiens sapiens wiped out the large mega fauna in north america while you are at it.

Seeing you ducked the question the first time, I will ask again. Do you agree that there is anthropological evidence that man and neanderthals range in Europe over lapped?

[Reality Check]

...The problem in discussing evolution by natural selection as a stochastic process is that there s very little evidence that demonstrates that individuals with identical phenotypes must all reproduce, making it a deterministic process. Most often individuals in evolution by natural selection are described as having a probability of reproducing, which is a description of a stochastic process.
You keep on talking about all individuals with identical phenotypes. Natural selection does not stop the reproduction of all individuals with identical phenotypes.
The whole point of natural selection is that not all individuals with identical phenotypes reproduce. Some do and some don't. The ones with a phenotype that the selection favours reproduce more than the ones that that the selection does not favour.

[mijopaalmc]

You keep on talking about all individuals with identical phenotypes. Natural selection does not stop the reproduction of all individuals with identical phenotypes.
The whole point of natural selection is that not all individuals with identical phenotypes reproduce. Some do and some don't. The ones with a phenotype that the selection favours reproduce more than the ones that that the selection does not favour.

Well, that is by definition a stochastic process. The "direction" we perceive in evolution by natural selection is a result of multiple rounds of natural selection expressing this "favoritism".

[Reality Check]

Seeing you ducked the question the first time, I will ask again. Do you agree that there is anthropological evidence that man and neanderthals range in Europe over lapped?
I can answer this - basically yes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_interaction_with_Cro-Magnons) but there is no credible evidence of interaction between the two. There is a good article on Neanderthal extinction hypotheses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction_hypotheses).

[Belz...]

I just explained that in the post above.

No, you didn't. You claimed it.

So, how ? If every mutation has equal chance of being passed on, aren't we looking at a non-evolution ?

[Belz...]

Something that is non-random is deterministic and vice versa.

Crap, I actually agree with you!

[sol invictus]

Crap, I actually agree with you!

Really?

Come back to my example of the molecule of gas in a box. Ignoring quantum mechanics, the dynamics of those molecules is completely deterministic. And yet it is utterly impossible - even in principle - to predict the location of any of the molecules a significant amount of time - like an hour - later. I think I can show it would require a computer much larger than the observable universe to do so.

So the position of that molecule is unknowable, and there's a perfectly valid and mathematically rigorous sense in which, after an hour, it's equally likely to be anywhere in the box*. You wouldn't call that random?


*Basically if you allow just a little uncertainty in the initial position or velocity of any of the molecules, the position where any particular one ends up mixes and spreads equally over the volume.

[Dancing David]

No, just because an environment favors the development of a trait doesn't mean evolution is non-random. All the descriptions I have read of natural selection say that better-adapted individuals have a high probability of surviving than others. That is a description of a stochastic process.


The only adaptation that matters is ability to reproduce, survive to reproduce, not just surviving.

Reproduce.

[Dancing David]

That is a distinction without a difference. Something that is non-random is deterministic and vice versa.

I think again that is rather a blanket satement, we can have deterministic processes that prodeuc eresults that are indistinguishable from random. We can have mixes: totaly causal and deterministic (where the same conditions will always produce the same results), causal deterministic with variable inputs (where same conditions will not always produce the same results, but might) and totaly acausl/non-deterministic (where there is a probability that same conditions will produce the same results).

If I understand correctly

(same conditions, same results) is what you are calling determined

(same conditions, variable inputs) you are calling random/ some say stochastic.

(same conditions, probable distribution) you are calling random.

Is this an accurate summation?

[Belz...]

So the position of that molecule is unknowable, and there's a perfectly valid and mathematically rigorous sense in which, after an hour, it's equally likely to be anywhere in the box*. You wouldn't call that random?

It's still deterministic. The problem is that "random" is being used in different ways. I'd rather still with one definition.

[sol invictus]

It's still deterministic. The problem is that "random" is being used in different ways. I'd rather still with one definition.

OK, but then you've defined the word in such a way that the distinction between determinism and randomness is operationally meaningless.

And let me point out again that to the best of our knowledge all fundamental interactions in the physical world are truly random, because of quantum mechanics, so these deterministic models exist only as abstract mathematical models, not as physical processes (like evolution).

I think it's clear that your (and mijo's) definition is bad, because it doesn't correspond to anything with any operational meaning. Some aspects of true random systems are almost perfectly predictable - for example, I can predict the pressure in a real box of gas like that with extreme precision - and some aspects of deterministic systems are totally unpredictable - like the position of the molecule in the thought experiment we are discussing.

What we really care about (apart from semantic or academic debates such as this one) is predictability, and nearly all the definitions of "random" I have found in sources - including technical ones - agree on that. "Random" means "unpredictable", and that is not synonymous with "non-deterministic".

[Taffer]

Um, yes.

Even if every phenotype has a equal probability of reproduction, the generalization of the central limit theorem still apply.

If that is true, then all of population genetics is wrong. Is that what you are claiming?

[Taffer]

I've got a few thoughts.

1. Regression of the mean works in opposition to evolution. It was one of the central reasons that lamarckian genetics was rejected. If everything could mix evenly any variation would regress back to the mean. Ie not net change over time. But in the discrete system of mendelian genetics that change cannot always regress. I may be explaining this point poorly so I encourage you to read about the history of the debate between the two.

2. I think macroscopic traits and complexity are often different things.
a. Evidence from the genome shows that we collect a lot of information in the genome, and the amount of information increases with time(just more junk in the genome). Evolution removes this sort of stuff, so it certainly decreases the complexity of the species(or gene pool) over time.(with a very strict definition of complexity)
b. Macroscopic traits like intelligence say very little about complexity. The way that we ended up being intelligent is probably not the simplest way to create a creature of equivalent complexity nor the most complex way. In other words evolution has a lot of appendices, this is particularly true in cognition, where we have newer layers of brain(in the evolutionary sense) layered on top of older ones and it seems a lot of those underlying layers do very little processing in humans. So a lot of extra complexity but very little extra intelligence.

3. Randomness is absolutely not necessary for evolution, but what you do need is variation. To have evolution in the way we generally think of it(ie not directed by things other than best fit to environment) that variation should be a good approximation of uniform variation. Luckily one of the constraints humans place on random variables(both intuitively and explicitly) is that those variables have a uniform distribution.

4. I personally think that the world is deterministic all the way down. As I understand quantum mechanics, the issue with hidden variables isn't that they are necessarily random, they can be non-random if they are non-local. I'm fine with non-locality, everything is connected, cool.

5. Given that, a fundamental question here is the definition of random. I think things are random if they appear random even if they have underlying deterministic behavior. If you disagree okay, but I think its a matter of opinion, or convention, if you will. I think once we finally define our terms this is a non-issue.

6. Finally there is a more interesting question beyond this. Does evolution necessarily converge on different forms? I can't say for any particular case, but what I can say for sure is that evolution is essentially a hill climbing algorithm(also often called simulated annealing). Which means it can only change from one form to another by small steps(or local variation). This precludes certain possibilities. So despite the fact that our brain is designed (I say designed only in the sense that I am anthropomorphizing an inanimate and non-directed process) by piling on layers, that now represent inefficiencies, it seems very likely that we couldn't have done it any other way. Any other intelligent evolved creatures in our universe would necessarily have their histories "built in" to their architecture, even if they end up doing it in a different way. It will never converge on the best way, because those intermediate steps are inseparable from the process( or algorithm). If you look at developmental biology all creatures on earth share this developmental commonality(and incidentally a common ancestor)

tl;dr

I'd just like to conclude with an interesting tangentially related thought. In A New Kind of Science, Wolfram claims there are actually 3 kinds of randomness rather than the two mentioned above.(This is actually the central claim of the book)

Specifically there are systems that don't have complexity built into their initial conditions(ie not chaotic systems), they don't have any "true" randomness, but instead they are systems that generate randomness.

They have simple homogeneous initial conditions and simple rules, but because they pass some incredibly low computational threshold they generate randomness. It's quite amazing.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule30.html
A 6 rule cellular automaton on a simple 1-d binary grid can generate a pattern that never repeats starting from a single black square. It is also proven that this system is a universal Turing machine. wow.

Well said!

[Belz...]

OK, but then you've defined the word in such a way that the distinction between determinism and randomness is operationally meaningless.

And let me point out again that to the best of our knowledge all fundamental interactions in the physical world are truly random, because of quantum mechanics, so these deterministic models exist only as abstract mathematical models, not as physical processes (like evolution).

I was under the impression that those random fluctuations averaged out at our scale ?

I think it's clear that your (and mijo's) definition is bad, because it doesn't correspond to anything with any operational meaning. Some aspects of true random systems are almost perfectly predictable - for example, I can predict the pressure in a real box of gas like that with extreme precision - and some aspects of deterministic systems are totally unpredictable - like the position of the molecule in the thought experiment we are discussing.

Are you arguing that "deterministic" should mean "predictable" or am I misunderstanding you ?

[Earthborn]

What we really care about (apart from semantic or academic debates such as this one) is predictability, and nearly all the definitions of "random" I have found in sources - including technical ones - agree on that. "Random" means "unpredictable", and that is not synonymous with "non-deterministic".From one your own links (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance/chance.html):In ordinary English, a random event is one without order, predicatability or pattern. The word connotes disaggregation, falling apart, formless anarchy, and fear. Yet, ironically, the scientific sense of random conveys a precisely opposite set of associations. A phenomenon governed by chance yields maximal simplicity, order and predictability--at least in the long run. ... Thus, if you wish to understand patterns of long historical sequences, pray for randomness.

[sol invictus]

From one your own links (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance/chance.html):

That is precisely the point I was making above - many "truly random" processes are highly predictable, or at least have aspects which are. In fact if that weren't the case all of science would be an abject failure, because all physical processes are quantum mechanical.

But to say something like, "the day/night cycle is random" is just not even wrong, because that's not how the word is ever used (even in science).

[sol invictus]

I was under the impression that those random fluctuations averaged out at our scale ?

Right - they do. That's why some "random" processes are actually highly predictable.

Are you arguing that "deterministic" should mean "predictable" or am I misunderstanding you ?

The word "deterministic" is usually applied to mathematical models for the world in which every interaction is precisely predictable given exact knowledge of the initial conditions. However such models are often chaotic and therefore totally unpredictable if you don't have an infinitely big computer with infinite precision and infinitely precise knowledge of the initial conditions. Since you never do, such systems are never predictable, despite being technically deterministic.

So "random" can be predictable, and "deterministic" can be unpredictable. That's why you cannot simply say "evolution is random" and then stop - it's just not that simple, and the statement is either meaningless (but correct using a naive definition of "random") or simply wrong.

Why are we still discussing this? Does anyone (other than mijo) actually disagree with anything I'm saying here?

[Earthborn]

That is precisely the point I was making above - many "truly random" processes are highly predictableSo when you said "Random means unpredictable" you meant to say "Random means highly predictable" ? :boggled:

[Wowbagger]

I figured it was time I chimed in here. I have NOT had time to read every post in here, since my last post in here. But, I think it is time we tried to establish some common ground, and see if we can spot where our disagreements stem from.

First question: Do we all agree that not all definitions and usages of "Random" apply to describing and studying Evolution? We might not all agree on which ones are which, but at least we can agree that, in general, there are some that do, and some that do not?

Good.

Now, here's the key challenge: We should try to establish some way to figure out which definitions are valid and invalid, for Evolution, that we can all agree on, and then see how each definition and usage stacks up against those standards.

My suggested method is simple: The scientific method. Mathematical constructs are good and all, but it is really in the testing and observing that we find out if things are useful for obtaining scientific knowledge or not.

When arguing about these matters, ask yourself: How does this help us gain more knowledge about life forms?

Unless someone thinks they have a better idea.

[sol invictus]

So when you said "Random means unpredictable" you meant to say "Random means highly predictable" ? :boggled:

*Sigh*. No, that's not what I meant and not what I said.

I really don't see how to re-phrase what I already said in any way that will make it easier for you to understand, so I'm not going to try. If you're actually interested in this topic rather than just trolling, I suggest you re-read my posts and see if there's anything you actually don't understand.

The world is an interesting and complex place, and the words we use to describe it are often imprecise. Sorry about that.

[zosima]

man I had the best post on this and I thought I hit the post button before I left work, I hope its still in my browser tomorrow.

So when you said "Random means unpredictable" you meant to say "Random means highly predictable" ? :boggled:

The short answer is that while any n+1th value of a random variable must be unpredictable, by definition, but the statistics of a random variable are very regular, and insofar as they serve as input to an algorithm they can produce very regular results. A moment of a particle distribution like temperature, pressure, density, velocity, is really a statistical statement.

But I think the confusion here results more from the conflation of a random variable and a random variable dependent process or an algorithm that takes a random variable as an input. These sorts of things are part of the probabilistic polynomial complexity class in computer science, and the algorithms that are studied, taken to the limit, are deterministic.

[Belz...]

The word "deterministic" is usually applied to mathematical models for the world in which every interaction is precisely predictable given exact knowledge of the initial conditions. However such models are often chaotic and therefore totally unpredictable if you don't have an infinitely big computer with infinite precision and infinitely precise knowledge of the initial conditions. Since you never do, such systems are never predictable, despite being technically deterministic.

Thanks. I think I understand what you're getting at.

[zosima]

Here's the rad post I forgot to post.

*Sigh*. No, that's not what I meant and not what I said.

I really don't see how to re-phrase what I already said in any way that will make it easier for you to understand, so I'm not going to try. If you're actually interested in this topic rather than just trolling, I suggest you re-read my posts and see if there's anything you actually don't understand.

The world is an interesting and complex place, and the words we use to describe it are often imprecise. Sorry about that.

I think the way to say it is statistics of random variable are highly predictable. In computer science, random variables have uniform distribution, and this is imho the purest definition of random. In science random variables often
follow other distributions(Gaussian, Boltzmann). This is a slight deviation from truly random, because we can say with confidence greater(or less) than the_length_of_some_interval/the_range_of_our_variable whether a variable will fall in some interval. That said, since we cannot predict the exact value any better than in a uniform distribution, this too is a very good definition of random.

Much of this discussion is conflating random variables and processes that take a random variable as an input. Such a process can take a random variable as an input and still be highly predictable. Chaotic processes are processes for which this is not the case, but these processes are not the norm.

As to whether the path of evolution is random, well thats tricky, and I have a bunch of conflicting thoughts on the issue. One thing is for sure, not all phenotypical changes are equally likely, this means that random variable serving as input to the process has a non-uniform distribution, so it isn't random in the broadest possible sense. (If the change requires two mutations, it will be much less probably than one)

[jimbob]

Indeed wowbagger.

I would define an outcome as "random" if identical starting conditions could lead to significantly different outcomes. I think this would mean that any cahotic physical system would be random by this description, as the infinite precision would mean that quantum fluctuations would eventually have a significant difference, in a way that isn't the case for non-chaotic systems. ETA: Sol, is that still the understanding? IIRC it was when I was an undergrad, but I tended to concentrate on solid-state physics...

I agree that there are situations where, despite the inherently random nature of the process, there are aspects that are highly predictable.

Talking about the process, mutation is essentially "undirected" with respect to the direction of evolution. It is needed as a source of variation, but the "clever" part is natural selection.

I have posted many times before why I think natural selection is a random process, in a similar way as a bent game of dice is random. Basically traits modulate the chances of reproducing, but for any individual trait, the odds are still stacked against it surviving the first generation. I don't just believe that there are chaotic systems involved that affect natural selection, e.g. the weather, but that these chaotic systems are also affetced by truly random quantum events.

Furthermore I would say that as organisms affect the selective environment for other organisms in their ecosystem, then there are complex feedback loops in place which depend on random events. To me this implies that if you were able to have universes with identical starting conditions, the course of evolution in each "Earth" would be different. Looking at the diversity in life just tens of millions of years after each large extinction event, and the differences between each one, I would say that not only was humanity just a lucky accident, which only seems special to us, but that it was only pretty recently when it became inevitable that our ecological niche would be filled (Neanderthals being an obvious alternative candidate tjhat could fill "our" niche).


If there is not any inevitibility about what would evolve, and indeed whether some of the less probable* niches are filled, then I would say that it is perfectly valid to talk about the results evolution as being "not-predetermined"**.


I think the random, yet somewhat predictable nature of natural selection is important as I have heard some people (not sure if they were sincere or creatinists) asking whether all animals that "survive" are "fitter" than all that don't. My answer is no, because it is like a loaded dice game, but over time the odds will out.


*Given the timescales, and the length of time that there have been large mammals, it could be argued that our niche (as a, "fire-using social animal") might have been potentially fillable for some time before it was.


**I do agree that describing evolution as "random" is misleading, due to the connotations, unless you try to explain what is meant by this. However, I also think that "nonrandom" is also misleading, and probably even more wrong, but then I am happy talking about random events being highly predictable in certain fashions...

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I do agree that describing evolution as "random" is misleading, due to the connotations, unless you try to explain what is meant by this. However, I also think that "nonrandom" is also misleading, and probably even more wrong, but then I am happy talking about random events being highly predictable in certain fashions...
How about "nonrandom with respect to the current environment"?

Really, that's what it is.

~~ Paul

[mijopaalmc]

How about "nonrandom with respect to the current environment"?

Really, that's what it is.

~~ Paul

No, it is "biased with respect to the environment". Bias does not actually imply non-randomness.

[jimbob]

How about "nonrandom with respect to the current environment"?

Really, that's what it is.

~~ Paul

Yees sort of...

I'd prefer a longer statement that where selective pressures are constant, then there will be optimisation to that environment.

My quibble with your statment is that it could be read as saying that in a constant environment, optimistion will always happen in the same manner.

What is determined is that "the problem will be solved". What form of "solution" isn't predetermined, even in a constant environment. Convergent evolution shows that similar "solutions" do reoccur, but other "solutions" can also be viable and occur.

This also depends on the resolution.

In the link about cool-adapted bacteria evolution, all 12 flasks did demonstrate evolution and adapt to the cold. However different biochemical solutions were used, as some were also did better than the parent strain in the warm, whilst others did worse.

[Meadmaker]

That's why you cannot simply say "evolution is random" and then stop - it's just not that simple, and the statement is either meaningless (but correct using a naive definition of "random") or simply wrong.

Why are we still discussing this? Does anyone (other than mijo) actually disagree with anything I'm saying here?

I agree. The issue, for me, is that even if you don't stop, there are people who draw unwarranted inferences from the comment.

During the Dover trial, it came out that Miller's biology textbook, in one edition, had the phrase, "Evolution is random" in it. (IIRC the exact phrase was "Evolution is random and unpredictable". It was "evolution is random and ..." something.) Miller explained that he thought it was very unfortunate, and that the phrase had simply been slipped in by a collaborator and not caught in editing.

I thought Miller's response was unfortunate. The biology book contained all the context necessary to understand the phrase as written, and to realize that the author was emphasizing that there was no plan or design. For that purpose, and with the context to make it clear, "random" is quite a good word for it. We shouldn't be afraid of it. I think he should have left it in the later editions as well.

Oh, but wait. It's THEIR word, and they will undoubtedly twist it, and blah, blah, blah.

[zosima]

If we believe Stephen J Goulds claims on punctuated equilibrium I think that would suggest that evolution is highly non-random, or at least non-random given the environment.

His claim is that species and the distribution of genes in a gene pool don't change for millions,sometimes billions of years.. When they do change it is because something in the environment is putting pressure on the environment of the species. For example,there is a mass migration, an abrupt climate change, an invasive species, or an asteroid impact. All the sudden the species more quickly(in 1000s to tens of thousand of years, some argue less) to another equilibrium in their gene pool. Basically the rate of mutation is fast enough, by far, and sexual selection misses genes quickly enough, that any consequence of them averages right out.

That would imply a good analogy between a species and a gas. A gas in a closed container at equilibrium, has energy added, it quickly shifts to a new equilibrium, the size of the container increases or decreases and again a quick shift to a new equilibrium. A land bridge forms and a population quickly moves to a new and deterministic distribution of genes, but what genes the offspring of any single creature will end up with is as difficult as predicting the location of a particle in a gas.

Of course not all evolutionary biologists agree with punctuated equilibrium, but if you do, then evolution is random in the same way PV=nRT is random.

[mijopaalmc]

Of course not all evolutionary biologists agree with punctuated equilibrium, but if you do, then evolution is random in the same way PV=nRT is random.

But that doesn't mean that evolution by natural selection is not fundamentally random.

[zosima]

But that doesn't mean that evolution by natural selection is not fundamentally random.

I'm really not sure what you mean by fundamentally random. I stated in a previous post that I believe random a good definition is unpredictable and uniformly distributed. I also stated that I don't believe any phenomenon in the universe is really random, not even quantum physics. I'm perfectly comfortable with a non-local hidden variable theorem or a super deterministic theory, which excludes random behavior.

By my definition a gas should be called fundamentally random, because we describe it probabilistically. We can't prove that all the gas won't migrate into a single part of a container, and my positions on the quantum physics don't exclude that possibility. However, its just not significant because it is just so improbable.

[articulett]

I'm really not sure what you mean by fundamentally random. I stated in a previous post that I believe random a good definition is unpredictable and uniformly distributed. I also stated that I don't believe any phenomenon in the universe is really random, not even quantum physics. I'm perfectly comfortable with a non-local hidden variable theorem or a super deterministic theory, which excludes random behavior.

By my definition a gas should be called fundamentally random, because we describe it probabilistically. We can't prove that all the gas won't migrate into a single part of a container, and my positions on the quantum physics don't exclude that possibility. However, its just not significant because it is just so improbable.

Mijo has a very strong need to see evolution as random He cannot cede that it might not be useful or informative to say otherwise. Your explanations are patient and stellar. But I suggest you read this thread http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82155&page=65 or at least pieces of it... because all the people who insist that evolution is "not nonrandom" appear there and have the same non arguments. All biologists, and people who actually teach and explain evolution to others recognize that your explanation is correct and useful and clear... as is Dawkins whom mijo imagines he's more of an expert than (he has no expertise in evolution at all as one can see by any of his posts here, but he appears to imagine himself as having expertise in both evolution and probability.) So it's not you.

Any thread where anyone says "evolution is not random"-- the same people appear saying the same things trying to convince someone or themselves that it really is. Every one tries to explain very carefully thinking that they might make progress, but it never happens. This thread from over a year ago will show you how the same people have identical "non arguments" to support the same garbled way of obfuscating understanding. Interestingly, it's the very same technique used by creationists to obfuscate understanding of natural selection by claiming that scientists think "all this life stuff just came about randomly"

Yes, there is no plan--no designer needed... but it's far from "random"-- it's a progressive accumulation of the best reproducing DNA over time... a long, long time. Darwin's theory was about natural selection... he had no way to know if the variations in pheontype were "random" or not. They don't need to be "random" for evolution to work.

[cyborg]

I see no one read the paper I linked to.

[mijopaalmc]

I see no one read the paper I linked to.

And I'm guessing that it said that evolution by natural selection was not random because it was "biased", "causal", "constrained", "directional", "equiprobable", or "predictable".

When will you learn that you are just proposing straw men or succumbing the way in which the creationists use random?

[cyborg]

And I'm guessing that it said that evolution by natural selection was not random because it was "biased", "causal", "constrained", "directional", "equiprobable", or "predictable".

No.

When will you learn that you are just proposing straw men or succumbing the way in which the creationists use random?

When will you learn something about the words you are using? Never if you refuse to read.

[zosima]

Actually, the problem seems to be that the majority of the phenomena that people who argue that evolution is non-random are not in and of themselves random, so the fact that we observe them in evolution by natural selection does not make it inherently non-random. By the way, my original argument, which seems to have been lost in the recesses of time, was that there is no evidence that evolution is non-random. Such a lack of evidence does not mean that evolution is therefore random, but my main point of confusion was why people were so adamant that evolution was non-random when the evidence they cited said nothing of the sort.

I cited evidence that evolution is non-random. Whether it is random or not depends on the evidence supporting punctuated equilibrium. There is plenty of evidence supporting punctuated equilibrium, but then again if you want you can always argue about the fossil record.

[zosima]

Mijo has a very strong need to see evolution as random He cannot cede that it might not be useful or informative to say otherwise. Your explanations are patient and stellar. But I suggest you read this thread http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82155&page=65 or at least pieces of it... because all the people who insist that evolution is "not nonrandom" appear there and have the same non arguments. All biologists, and people who actually teach and explain evolution to others recognize that your explanation is correct and useful and clear... as is Dawkins whom mijo imagines he's more of an expert than (he has no expertise in evolution at all as one can see by any of his posts here, but he appears to imagine himself as having expertise in both evolution and probability.) So it's not you.

Any thread where anyone says "evolution is not random"-- the same people appear saying the same things trying to convince someone or themselves that it really is. Every one tries to explain very carefully thinking that they might make progress, but it never happens. This thread from over a year ago will show you how the same people have identical "non arguments" to support the same garbled way of obfuscating understanding. Interestingly, it's the very same technique used by creationists to obfuscate understanding of natural selection by claiming that scientists think "all this life stuff just came about randomly"

Yes, there is no plan--no designer needed... but it's far from "random"-- it's a progressive accumulation of the best reproducing DNA over time... a long, long time. Darwin's theory was about natural selection... he had no way to know if the variations in pheontype were "random" or not. They don't need to be "random" for evolution to work.

Thanks for the tip, on your advice, unless (s)he presents something substantive, I'm out.

[jimbob]

zosima,

a quick "heads up" about articulett: (ETA she ikes using the phhrase "heads up" about people she cionsiders to be her oponents, and doesn't read what they say either..)

She has a strong need to see everything in black and white, and also to denegrate other people who she thinks is on "the other side".

She has consistently accused miojo of being a creationist, when there is no evidnce of that in his posts.

I suggest you read what people are catually saying and ignore articulett's interpretation of what they say.

(I'd also recommend missing out most of the esoteric discussion about who knows what about statistics ...)

Anyway:

There is more consensus than articulett would suggest:

As far as I am concerned there is a slight difference in emphasis;

Here is an example discussion about natural selection on another thread, hidden for brevity...

My expansion on the other thread below:

If identical conditions do not lead to the same outcome every time, then I would consider that to be a working definition of "random".

Agreed.

I would argue that a quantum decay event is the archetypal "random event".

Also agreed.

In the context of evolution, I would argue that because weather is a highly nonlinear system, quantum events can be magnified to have a significant effect on the weather. If this is the case, then there is going to be a random element in natural selection. I would also argue that the relationships between organisms is even more nonlinear than the weather, and a chance mutation happening befoore anonther could alter the selective pressures on other organisms within the ecosystem, and thus alter the "direction" of evolution in the ecosystem.

If we assume weather to be affected at a significant level by quantum events, I would agree with you. I also agree that interorganism interactions are very complex, and specific mutation events are boardering on quantum randomness. Of course, we don't know that for certain, but so far that is how it looks.

This means that should one have the luxury of creating identical universes just before the KT impact, the course of evolution in each of these initially identical universes would diverge.

Agreed.

Given the low chance of any individual organism managing to have reproducing offspring, I would contend that there was noting inevitable about the emergence of hominids, until some time after the last common ancestor with apes.

Agreed.

Evoulution would happen in all the other cases, it is just that the species mix, and indeed occupied niches would probably differ in each case. There is nothing special abut the emergence of humanity, except to us...

Yep, couldn't put it better myself.

Walter Wayne, this is a perfect example of what I asked for.

Do you actually disagree with anything in my post below, or is it made up of "non-arguments"?

Hidden for brevity:
Indeed wowbagger.

I would define an outcome as "random" if identical starting conditions could lead to significantly different outcomes. I think this would mean that any cahotic physical system would be random by this description, as the infinite precision would mean that quantum fluctuations would eventually have a significant difference, in a way that isn't the case for non-chaotic systems. ETA: Sol, is that still the understanding? IIRC it was when I was an undergrad, but I tended to concentrate on solid-state physics...

I agree that there are situations where, despite the inherently random nature of the process, there are aspects that are highly predictable.

Talking about the process, mutation is essentially "undirected" with respect to the direction of evolution. It is needed as a source of variation, but the "clever" part is natural selection.

I have posted many times before why I think natural selection is a random process, in a similar way as a bent game of dice is random. Basically traits modulate the chances of reproducing, but for any individual trait, the odds are still stacked against it surviving the first generation. I don't just believe that there are chaotic systems involved that affect natural selection, e.g. the weather, but that these chaotic systems are also affetced by truly random quantum events.

Furthermore I would say that as organisms affect the selective environment for other organisms in their ecosystem, then there are complex feedback loops in place which depend on random events. To me this implies that if you were able to have universes with identical starting conditions, the course of evolution in each "Earth" would be different. Looking at the diversity in life just tens of millions of years after each large extinction event, and the differences between each one, I would say that not only was humanity just a lucky accident, which only seems special to us, but that it was only pretty recently when it became inevitable that our ecological niche would be filled (Neanderthals being an obvious alternative candidate tjhat could fill "our" niche).


If there is not any inevitibility about what would evolve, and indeed whether some of the less probable* niches are filled, then I would say that it is perfectly valid to talk about the results evolution as being "not-predetermined"**.


I think the random, yet somewhat predictable nature of natural selection is important as I have heard some people (not sure if they were sincere or creatinists) asking whether all animals that "survive" are "fitter" than all that don't. My answer is no, because it is like a loaded dice game, but over time the odds will out.


*Given the timescales, and the length of time that there have been large mammals, it could be argued that our niche (as a, "fire-using social animal") might have been potentially fillable for some time before it was.


**I do agree that describing evolution as "random" is misleading, due to the connotations, unless you try to explain what is meant by this. However, I also think that "nonrandom" is also misleading, and probably even more wrong, but then I am happy talking about random events being highly predictable in certain fashions...

[mijopaalmc]

Thanks for the tip, on your advice, unless (s)he presents something substantive, I'm out.

Do you actually have any evidence of individuals of a certain group of phenotypes all surviving while all individuals of the other group of phenotypes don't?

[zosima]

zosima,

a quick "heads up" about articulett: (ETA she ikes using the phhrase "heads up" about people she cionsiders to be her oponents, and doesn't read what they say either..)


Thats fair, thats why I wasn't willing to jump thread on her recommendation only.


There is more consensus than articulett would suggest:


Cool cool, I think some people believe evolution is random, rightly, because of a different reading of the evidence. I also think many people believe it is random because they misunderstand evolution. The fact that there is consensus does not surprise me.



Do you actually disagree with anything in my post below, or is it made up of "non-arguments"?



Well I've stated that I believe a somewhat non-standard interpretation of quantum physics that allows the world to be deterministic, but can have some pretty weird other consequences. (ie superdeterminisitic or non-local hidden variable, if you care to read up.)
So I don't agree with the quantum physical claims, but it is purely a matter of opinion, which is why I defined random as unpredictable, but I don't think that disagreement is consequential to the argument at hand.

It seems like what you are claiming is that evolution is a chaotic system. You make an analogy to weather, which I would agree weather is chaotic. It is common for people to look at evolution this sort of way, because they 1. note that the process of evolution is dependent on many random mutations, 2. observe that it is a high level process that we are poor at modeling. 3. Deduce that it is a chaotic system.

First I'm not saying that this is not the case, all I'm saying is that there is some strong evidence that indicates otherwise(punctuated equilibrium), but if you don't buy punctuated equilibrium, then the claim has no premise to stand upon. A chaotic process isn't really an equilibrium process it is violent and arbitrary it swings all over the place. The counter claim to my claim, would be to say that without some pivotal environmental change driving it, a new species spontaneously emerges from an old one. I'm saying the fossil record does not bear out this interpretation. It shows a species staying at a stable equilibrium until an external process applies pressure, then it moves quickly and directly to a new stable form. So I'm saying evolution is only random insofar as history is random.

Since we're on the topic there is a second new claim I would like to make, namely evolutionary convergence. That structures evolve over and over again. Where different unrelated(technically distantly related) species arrive on the same solution to a problem. The canonical example is the lens of the eye. It has evolved independently at least twice and basically the same result is produced.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution
This evidence directly refutes your claim of "same situation different results".

The beauty of these evidentiary claims, is that I don't really have to worry about the specifics of your model of non-linear evolution or feedback loops. The evidence says that whatever the case, it doesn't end up working out that way. (*If* you believe the evidence. I keep adding these caveats because there is nothing more tedious than arguing over facts.)

Do you actually have any evidence of individuals of a certain group of phenotypes all surviving while all individuals of the other group of phenotypes don't?

Punctuated equilibrium doesn't require all the individuals disappearing in a single generation, just quickly. I claimed that it happens in 1000s or 10000s of years(which in evolutionary terms is very very fast). Unless you know a lot of species that live 1000s of years, you could deduce that it happens over at least several generations.

Actually, as we find more evidence of evolution that isn't just from the fossil record, its suggesting that scales like 100s to 1000s of years are likely in long lived species like humans, and far less than that in short lived species, but that evidence is still very preliminary.

That said, it certainly does happen in single generations, sometimes. We can't see this in the fossil record, because the time resolution of fossil evidence doesn't get that good. But we see it in our world all the time. Here's a very common example. Penicillin is applied to a Staphylococcus Aureus population, and all the bacteria that don't have penicillin resistance die in a single generation. I don't think knowledge of this fact is really all that persuasive one way or the other, Its missing the point.

If you want evidence, read "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" by Stephen J. Gould, he lays it all out in as much detail as you could possibly want.

[jimbob]

zosima, pretty much a correct reading of my POV, some slight clarifications:

I am arguing that because of the chaotic nature of factors affecting selection i.e. survival and reproduction (e.g. weather) these will themseslves be significantly affected by random quantum events, which would make natural selection not predetermined, but probabilistic. In other words traits would "load the dice" but not determine which organism survived.

I think it is fair to Cyborg and articulett that thay are claiming that there is nothing random in the process of natural selection. That is where I am arguing that this is wrong and that it would imply that every beneficial trait would survive at the expense of every deleterious trait. I view selection more as a percentage game, where the odds are against any individual trait surviving more than one generation, just that they are stacked far heavier against deleterious traits, and obviously the odds are in favour of some individuals and their traits surviving.

I seem to have misemphasised the bit about "different solutions to the same problem".

Talking about the convergent evolution of the eye is a good one, because it seems to have evolved many more times, sometimes two different times on the same animal.

I would interpret this as showing that there is a great selective advantage in being able to sense and respond to distant stimulii; thus a selective "pressure" towards sight. Because of the electrochemical nature of reactions, light-sensitive mutations must be not that uncommon. Evolution of the eye is thus a probable event.

Sight is a common solution, but this can take different forms, the retina can have the blood vessels in front of the light-sensing cells (doh, mammals) or the other way round, the "better" solution (e.g. octopodes).

I am thinking about your punctured equilibrium argument:

I believe that river drainage systems patterns are fractal, which, (IIRC) is indicitive of a chotic system. These move about, but do also have some form of stability, because eroding the valleys is a positive feedback loop, making the water more likely to flow in the eroded valley. However significant events can also push the rivers out of these patterns and into a new set of ones.

I am not saying that evolution is like a river system, but that to me this seems that there are "quasi-stable" chaotic systems that can be aslo subject to major sudden change.

I do think the maths does explain or predict punctured equilibrium, and I would say a probabilistic analysis does especially, I'll try to dig up some of my other posts on this should you be interested in that part of the conversation.

[jimbob]

ETA:
Cool cool, I think some people believe evolution is random, rightly, because of a different reading of the evidence. I also think many people believe it is random because they misunderstand evolution. The fact that there is consensus does not surprise me.

And semantics as to what "random" means.

To me it means that identical, i.e at the quantum level starting stuations could give significantly different outcomes, in other words, if we could have identical universes each containing an Earth at the time of the KT impact, then there would be no inveitibility that every Earth would have a fire-using social animal 65-million years later. Not just no humanity, but possibly nothing occupying the ecolgical niche occupied by us...

[articulett]

Here's a geneticist, Jerry Coyne, discussing Behe's book--the ambiguity of "random"--the need to distinguish--and the fact that what we see in various species did not come about "randomly"...

On the basis of much evidence, scientists have concluded that mutations occur randomly. The term "random" here has a specific meaning that is often misunderstood, even by biologists. What we mean is that mutations occur irrespective of whether they would be useful to the organism. Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication. Most of them are harmful or neutral, but a few of them can turn out to be useful. And there is no known biological mechanism for jacking up the probability that a mutation will meet the current adaptive needs of the organism. Bears adapting to snowy terrain will not enjoy a higher probability of getting mutations producing lighter coats than will bears inhabiting non-snowy terrain.

What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful. Evolution by selection, then, is a combination of two steps: a "random" (or indifferent) step--mutation--that generates a panoply of genetic variants, both good and bad (in our example, a variety of new coat colors); and then a deterministic step--natural selection--that orders this variation, keeping the good and winnowing the bad (the retention of light-color genes at the expense of dark-color ones).

It is important to clarify these two steps because of the widespread misconception, promoted by creationists, that in evolution "everything happens by chance." Creationists equate the chance that evolution could produce a complex organism to the infinitesimal chance that a hurricane could sweep through a junkyard and randomly assemble the junk into a Boeing 747. But this analogy is specious. Evolution is manifestly not a chance process because of the order produced by natural selection--order that can, over vast periods of time, result in complex organisms looking as if they were designed to fit their environment. Humans, the product of non-random natural selection, are the biological equivalent of a 747, and in some ways they are even more complex. The explanation of seeming design by solely materialistic processes was Darwin's greatest achievement, and a major source of discomfort for those holding the view that nature was designed by God.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,12...e-New-Republic

[articulett]

Per a peer review papered as requested and ignored by Mijo and Jim-Bob in the prior thread: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/suppl_1/8567

Natural selection accounts for the "design" of organisms because adaptive variations tend to increase the probability of survival and reproduction of their carriers at the expense of maladaptive, or less adaptive, variations. The arguments of intelligent design proponents that state the incredible improbability of chance events, such as mutation, to account for the adaptations of organisms are irrelevant because evolution is not governed by random mutations. Rather, there is a natural process (namely, natural selection) that is not random but oriented and able to generate order or "create." The traits that organisms acquire in their evolutionary histories are not fortuitous but rather determined by their functional utility to the organisms, designed, as it were, to serve their life needs.


But why, of course, would anyone look to the experts for the best way to convey understanding?

[articulett]

And Dawkins review of Behe's book... posted multiple times.

http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/dawkins/inferior_design140707.htm

Darwin set no store by randomness. New variants might arise at random, or they might be acquired characteristics induced by food, for all Darwin knew. Far more important for Darwin was the nonrandom process whereby some survived but others perished. Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. Whatever else it is, natural selection is not a "modest" idea, nor is descent with modification.

I don't know why some people think that all these folks are wrong and that they (with whatever limited training they have)--know a "better" way of explaining evolution when no one but themselves seems to think so. Why don't they hear anyone tell them that they are sounding garbled and confused in their explanations? Why do they keep insisting every time this subject comes up that their garbled definitions are better or more right than the experts who actually teach the subject to others? What makes them need to believe that "evolution is random"-- whatever the hell that means.

Having random components, does not a random process make. (Except to some people who need evolution to be random for some unspoken reason.)

If you are describing evolution as random, you either don't understand natural selection, cannot convey natural selection, or are missing the most important component of evolution in your in your bizarre persistence in describing evolution as "random".

[articulett]

Dawkins again:

You rightly say that random mutation is NOT a good explanation for the evolution of giraffes' necks or, indeed, of anything else! Fortunately, nobody has ever suggested that it IS a good explanation. The correct explanation -- and it is indeed an excellently satisfying one -- is Darwinian natural selection. Darwinian natural selection is emphatically NOT the same thing as random mutation. Although random mutation does play a role in the theory, natural selection itself is the most important ingredient, and natural selection is the exact OPPOSITE of random.

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/FAQs.shtml

This has all been explained patiently and many times to these same people... the reward they return for these detailed and patient explanations is attack upon the messenger, as they realize the messenger won't confirm their delusion that they are conveying evolution with some degree of clarity. You have to cede that, per their definition (whatever the hell it is), evolution is, indeed, "random" (whatever the hell that means.) I can tell you each and every one their "sticking points"-- exactly how much they'll cede in regard to the above explanations and where they will stop. None will concede that any of the above are clear as they imagine themselves to be much more so.

You can play all you want, Zosima, I'm just warning you so that you don't set your expectations too high or get frustrated. I have become their enemy for giving them the very information they pretended to want. Don't take my word-- we have the words of multiple experts-- but some people envision themselves as having more expertise than those who actually convey understanding to many. We have many experts including yourself on this very thread. Just not the ones who imagine themselves "the experts".

Try and find out why they think any of the above explanations are wrong and why they think theirs is better. Go ahead... learn what I'm talking about. We have some very predictable forum members here.

[cyborg]

I think it is fair to Cyborg and articulett that thay are claiming that there is nothing random in the process of natural selection.

Then you haven't understood a single word of what I've said.

[UnrepentantSinner]

zosima, {snip}

You're just saying all this because you're an apologist! :p

[zosima]

ETA:

And semantics as to what "random" means.

To me it means that identical, i.e at the quantum level starting stuations could give significantly different outcomes, in other words, if we could have identical universes each containing an Earth at the time of the KT impact, then there would be no inveitibility that every Earth would have a fire-using social animal 65-million years later. Not just no humanity, but possibly nothing occupying the ecolgical niche occupied by us...

If you use that definition and believe the standard interpretation of quantum physics then everything is random so it renders the statement that evolution is random trivial. Also, if you believe that it is random because it is dependent on unpredictable events things like asteroid impacts and all the other crazy stuff that happens in history, the idea that evolution is random becomes pretty trivial, because it is reducing to saying history is random.
Or at least it breaks down to saying things like "evolution is random because if the dinosaurs hadn't been killed in a highly improbably asteroid impact humans wouldn't exists". I would agree with that, but it is the asteroid that is random not the evolution.

I submit this definition, which I think could bear out either claim. If two situations are experimentally identical and a different result obtains, then the processes observed were random. By experimentally identical, I mean all the variables that your model deems important are the same within some decided degree of experimental error. We can debate which variables are important, and indeed this reduces the entire argument to something empirically testable. We simply ask how close must the relevant variables be to produce identical results.

I think this is a good definition, no matter how you feel about quantum physics, because realistically, even by the time you get up to the scale of atoms and molecules quantum effects have pretty much been averaged out and the world starts acting more like billiard balls. Then on top of that most stochastic processes(like chemical processes) remove any remaining "quantum randomness". The chemical processes in organisms are non-random enough that a cell can be reproduced identically many of times more than it is not. A universe with quantum mechanical roots doesn't automatically turn chaotic. We can talk about that randomness, while completely ignoring quantum effects. We can frame the argument, scientifically in terms of rates of mutation, and distribution of genes and therein come to an agreement on the validity of a scientific statement, rather than stray into philosophy(which I consider to be quite boring).

I hope we can agree on that, so now lets talk about the neat stuff.

That is where I am arguing that this is wrong and that it would imply that every beneficial trait would survive at the expense of every deleterious trait.

I totally agree. Evolution is often suboptimal because it can only take small steps and because sometimes a deleterious trait is either fundamentally or structurally linked to a beneficial trait. I would differ in that If a deleterious trait survived, this would be because it was necessarily so. An example of a fundamentally linked deleterious and beneficial trait is sickle cell anemia. It confers a resistance to malaria but also significantly shortens life. You just can't get one without the other.

If we examine the "its in the dice" example you make. Lets say we have a deleterious trait that is not linked to a beneficial one. Lets say it kills you before you procreate 50% of the time. Then sure you might make it one generation, but your children will die, or theirs will die, The probability that a gene survives in a single indiviual situation like this is (1/2)^n where n is the number of generations. 5 generations, which in humans is about 100 years, is only 3%. Or 3 in 100, thats not even close to geological time. You might argue that they may have more than one child, but they need to live even long than that, so more often than not they won't make it that far. Also, we need to remember that sexual selection plays a huge factor, the fact that they breed children that may die before reproduction makes them less desirable as mates....further driving down their likelihood of surviving. In other words the algorithm produces deterministic results at the temporal limit.


Talking about the convergent evolution of the eye is a good one, because it seems to have evolved many more times, sometimes two different times on the same animal.


First, the eye only evolved twice and was passed down to future generations. One of the properties of evolution is that it saves previous solutions, for the most part, and I am unaware of it ever evolving twice in one organism. It probably was developed on both sides of the organism simultaneously due to bilateral symmetry. To use the term like you are using it above is either very imprecise or incorrect.


I would interpret this as showing that there is a great selective advantage in being able to sense and respond to distant stimulii; thus a selective "pressure" towards sight. Because of the electrochemical nature of reactions, light-sensitive mutations must be not that uncommon. Evolution of the eye is thus a probable event.


I would certainly agree that it is advantageous, but a trait being advantageous does not imply a trait is probable.
It seems to me that there are numerous different ways you could build a light sensing organ; multiple lenses, non-spherical shapes, retinal reformation rather than lens deformation. To examine the probability of it just showing up randomly, lets assume an eye is just a beneficial trait that any organism would want and that the probability of any part of the full eye showing up in an organism randomly is 1% every year(which I think is incredibly generous) and that the eye we're talking about has 5 parts(also very generous, say... cornea,retina,light sensitive neurons,brain capable of processing image, and its spherical compartment.). Then the probability of it showing up twice is: (.01^5)^2=.01^10= 10^-20 = 10^18% change every year. Or in other words we wouldn't expect it to happen twice for over 100 billion billion years. Earth has only been around for 4.5 billion years, which isn't even close.
The bottom line is that the math does not support this belief that evolution could not produce complex forms like this in a way that is similar twice, even with very generous estimates, if the model is that evolution is just plodding along accumulating desirous traits. It must be highly directed by the needs of its environment.


Sight is a common solution, but this can take different forms, the retina can have the blood vessels in front of the light-sensing cells (doh, mammals) or the other way round, the "better" solution (e.g. octopodes).


Well I could just answer this by modifying the equation above. IE they only share 4 components. Giving us a result of (.01^4)^2 = 10^-16 or it would develop twice once in 10 million billion years, still far too low a probability.

But there is a more important point here. While the solutions are different, and the mammalian solution has a blind spot, which poses a small disadvantage in sensation. Cephalopods like the octopus are invertebrates and the other branches of creatures with the type of eye we're discussing are all vertebrates. Being a vertebrate means that we have a very different developmental process. If vertebrates were to develop the everted retina of cephalopods rather than their traditional inverted retina, it would come at a huge expense in terms of the complexity of the developmental process, the amount of energy required to develop, and the time required. Which would mean if vertebrates were to get an everted eye, they would either have to give up the stuff that makes them vertebrates or have more miscarriages, need more food during pregnancy, and have to carry the baby much longer. Better to have unnoticeably worse vision than likelihood of being tiger food. In other words these traits are linked and they couldn't be built efficiently in any other way.


I am thinking about your punctured equilibrium argument:


Its called PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM not PUNCTURED EQUILIBRIUM.
The name explains the phenomenon, long periods of equilibrium where the species is unchanging, punctuated by quick bursts of change. It is not my argument it is Stephen J Gould's argument. I'm just trying to do my best to explain it. You should really read the primary source.


I believe that river drainage systems patterns are fractal, which, (IIRC) is indicitive of a chotic system. These move about, but do also have some form of stability, because eroding the valleys is a positive feedback loop, making the water more likely to flow in the eroded valley. However significant events can also push the rivers out of these patterns and into a new set of ones.

I am not saying that evolution is like a river system, but that to me this seems that there are "quasi-stable" chaotic systems that can be aslo subject to major sudden change.


I'm not clear where the feedback loop shows up in evolution, maybe in ecology but ecology!=evolution.

Without getting into the details, I don't think this analogy is very good. It's not very precise, what events? The patterns are apparently fractal, but not necessarily. Is the flow constant or inconstant in this river? What variables do we care about? What sort of external events? These questions are intended to show you the analogy is poor, I'd prefer you find something clearer rather than try to pack this one up, so don't feel obligated to answer those.

But let me say it one more time. The inability to model evolution is terms of species does not imply the system is chaotic. Why do you think that evolution is chaotic?

But here are some general points.
1. As far as the fossil record shows us new species don't just pop up without cause. Its not like things like the eye just appeared one calm sunny sunday, new species show up during periods when external stress is applied.

2. The rate of speciation is very inconstant, sometimes new species are generated very very slowly, then conditions change to necessitate the development of new traits and those traits are developed.

3. Species at equilibrium have a broad gene pool, most of the diversity between generations in sexual species is from sexual mixing and chromosomal rearrangement, a very small portion of it is provided by traditional mutation, although this will accumulate and stay latent in the gene pool

4. During the brief periods of stress and evolution. The diversity of the gene pool drops down due to die offs, a new species(es) is formed by recombining genes available from the gene pool(it happens too quickly for mutation at that moment to even be significant). When the stress decreases and equilibrium is reestablished the breadth of the gene pool increases again.

p.s. The retinal of the eye is ironically one of the few biological structures in which quantum effects may play a significant part. The excited state in retinal that occurs post interaction with a photon may be a quantum mechanical effect.

[zosima]

You can play all you want, Zosima, I'm just warning you so that you don't set your expectations too high or get frustrated. I have become their enemy for giving them the very information they pretended to want. Don't take my word-- we have the words of multiple experts-- but some people envision themselves as having more expertise than those who actually convey understanding to many. We have many experts including yourself on this very thread. Just not the ones who imagine themselves "the experts".


I think I'm about tapped out after this last post.

Although the arguments between Dawkins and Gould are pretty interesting as well, and actually both scientifically valid. So I don't really mind writing out the theory as I understand it. This forces me to think the theory through and really make sure I get all the details. I don't think I would call myself an expert by any means, maybe enthusiastic amateur. Which means to me that I've read quite a few texts in the field and have a decent enough grasp of math.

[jimbob]

zosima, what about compound eyes?

several types

Lobster eye...

ETA:

Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllopoda#Head) is the organism that I was thinking about (one of the "eyes", is more of a light sensor...)

The head bears a pair of dorsal compound eyes that lie close to each other, and are nearly fused together. The compound eyes are generally sessile (not stalked). In addition, there is a naupliar ocellus in between. The compound eyes are on the surface of the head, but the ocellus is deep within the head. All the eyes, however, are easily visible through the shell covering of the head.

[jimbob]

I have just realised that you have completely misunderstrood me.

Random, but not haphazard.

Originally Posted by jimbob
ETA:

And semantics as to what "random" means.

To me it means that identical, i.e at the quantum level starting stuations could give significantly different outcomes, in other words, if we could have identical universes each containing an Earth at the time of the KT impact, then there would be no inveitibility that every Earth would have a fire-using social animal 65-million years later. Not just no humanity, but possibly nothing occupying the ecolgical niche occupied by us...
If you use that definition and believe the standard interpretation of quantum physics then everything is random so it renders the statement that evolution is random trivial. Also, if you believe that it is random because it is dependent on unpredictable events things like asteroid impacts and all the other crazy stuff that happens in history, the idea that evolution is random becomes pretty trivial, because it is reducing to saying history is random.
Or at least it breaks down to saying things like "evolution is random because if the dinosaurs hadn't been killed in a highly improbably asteroid impact humans wouldn't exists". I would agree with that, but it is the asteroid that is random not the evolution.


Not everything.

Quantum events might conceivably affect the Earth's orbit, but not significantly (or even measurably). A slight change in the wind direction due to a difference at the quantum level several weeks earlier could very easily affect the survival or otherwise of a particular trait.

The feedback loops I am talking about is because an organism alters the fitness landscape for other organisms in its ecosystem. Which mutation occurs first in which organism would help define the fitness lancdscape for the other organisms.

I dispute that it is trivial. When discussing with other people, most would consider it to be a significant difference whether anything was filling our ecological niche. In fac, given our effect on the evolution of other organisms, this is probably true.

Mamoths, passenger pigeons, dodos, moas, rats, TB, would all have had different evolutionary histories without mankind.

If this depended on random events, as well as nonrandom but unpredictable events, then I can see it is valid to talk about randomness in evolution. It is also valid to talk about inevitibility in evolution too, for example the loss of flight in birds on isolated islands with no predators.

[sol invictus]

I would define an outcome as "random" if identical starting conditions could lead to significantly different outcomes. I think this would mean that any cahotic physical system would be random by this description, as the infinite precision would mean that quantum fluctuations would eventually have a significant difference, in a way that isn't the case for non-chaotic systems. ETA: Sol, is that still the understanding? IIRC it was when I was an undergrad, but I tended to concentrate on solid-state physics...

Yes, that is still the understanding, and that alone makes your definition (and mijo's) not very useful.

But actually (as I keep trying to explain) quantum randomness is pretty much a red herring in this discussion. Even if it didn't exist and the system was classically deterministic at the level of microscopic interactions, the presence of chaos makes it totally unpredictable. You can never measure the initial conditions with perfect accuracy even in a world without QM, and if the system is chaotic the uncertainty will grow exponentially (that's the definition of chaos), meaning - as in my example of the red gas molecule - you have no information at all after a relatively short time.

[sol invictus]

I'm amazed this thread is still going. As far as I can tell, (nearly?) everyone agrees on the following facts:

1) the fine details of evolution - like precisely which species will evolve - are extremely unpredictable.

2) some macroscopic features are extremely predictable. For example, if you expose a population of bacteria to an antibiotic, it will either become extinct or evolve resistance. You can repeat that experiment 100 times with 100 different petri dishes of bacteria and get the same results each time.

If you agree with that, the only argument is over the definition of the word "random". But many different definitions are in use, both among scientists and laypeople, so there is no answer to that. Furthermore finding a definition which encompasses both 1) and 2) will mean the definition is so broad it includes everything, making it not very useful.

[kjkent1]

I'm amazed this thread is still going. As far as I can tell, (nearly?) everyone agrees on the following facts:

1) the fine details of evolution - like precisely which species will evolve - are extremely unpredictable.

2) some macroscopic features are extremely predictable. For example, if you expose a population of bacteria to an antibiotic, it will either become extinct or evolve resistance. You can repeat that experiment 100 times with 100 different petri dishes of bacteria and get the same results each time.

If you agree with that, the only argument is over the definition of the word "random". But many different definitions are in use, both among scientists and laypeople, so there is no answer to that. Furthermore finding a definition which encompasses both 1) and 2) will mean the definition is so broad it includes everything, making it not very useful.You shouldn't be "amazed." True randomness is ultimately unprovable, just as is intelligent design.

Can it be proved that some piece of basalt lying on the sea shore owes its present state as the product of random chance? Can it be prove that the rock was placed in said state by an intelligent guiding force?

Nope. No way -- no how. This makes arguments about the ultimate cause of evolution a perfect vehicle for argument -- especially on the internet, where no one need maintain a personal stake in his/her viewpoint.

Thus, the argument rages on forever without abatement or resolution. It will never end -- so you may as well enjoy the ride.

[jimbob]

I would define an outcome as "random" if identical starting conditions could lead to significantly different outcomes. I think this would mean that any cahotic physical system would be random by this description, as the infinite precision would mean that quantum fluctuations would eventually have a significant difference, in a way that isn't the case for non-chaotic systems. ETA: Sol, is that still the understanding? IIRC it was when I was an undergrad, but I tended to concentrate on solid-state physics...

Yes, that is still the understanding, and that alone makes your definition (and mijo's) not very useful.

But actually (as I keep trying to explain) quantum randomness is pretty much a red herring in this discussion. Even if it didn't exist and the system was classically deterministic at the level of microscopic interactions, the presence of chaos makes it totally unpredictable. You can never measure the initial conditions with perfect accuracy even in a world without QM, and if the system is chaotic the uncertainty will grow exponentially (that's the definition of chaos), meaning - as in my example of the red gas molecule - you have no information at all after a relatively short time.

True: some people seemed to present a laplacian viewpoint at one time that it was uncertain but predetermined, and there wasn't any randomness at all, i.e. sufficient knowledge of the initial conditions could allow prediction to an arbitary distance into the future. This was what I was arguing against.

I am slightly puzzled by your statement:Yes, that is still the understanding, and that alone makes your definition (and mijo's) not very useful.

If this defintion made everything "random", then I would agree with you, but it doesn't: the Earth's orbit, for example isn't significantly affected even by cometry impacts . (I would be interested to know if there is any assessment on the potential effect of the Mars-sized body that helped create the moon...)

This ultimately random aspect of chaotic systems would mean that a probabilistic treatment for natural selection isn't just a good model, but does fundamentally reflect what happens... Belz, for example had been arguing agianst that (IIRC). And Articulett refuses to acknowledge that natural selection can be anything other than "nonrandom". I suggested, "probabilistic but not haphazard", and was accused of being wishy-washy and unclear.

As has been said before, creationists like to pretend that evolution is haphazard, and that this is what scientists mean by random.

[Earthborn]

For example, if you expose a population of bacteria to an antibiotic, it will either become extinct or evolve resistance.Or it will thrive, using the antibiotic as food (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5872/100).

Furthermore finding a definition which encompasses both 1) and 2) will mean the definition is so broad it includes everything, making it not very useful.I fail to see why a definition of "randomness" that excludes evolution is more useful than one that includes it.

[articulett]

Or it will thrive, using the antibiotic as food (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5872/100).

I fail to see why a definition of "randomness" that excludes evolution is more useful than one that includes it.

Did you bother reading the posts on the previous page of the people who actually teach the subject and convey understanding to many people? I posted Dawkins, Coyne, and Ayala... and before that, PZ Meyers... I don't think there's any biologist in the world that would describe evolution as random --just as there is no one who teaches people how to play poker that would describe the game as random.

Having random components does not make a process itself random. The most important part in regards to understanding evolution is the part that is decidedly non random-- the derandomizer, if you will... natural selection.

Perhaps degrees of randomness could be useful for one needing to see evolution as random... but why would anyone seek to describe evolution in a way that leads to the very misunderstanding promoted by intelligent design proponents when those who actually educate others give us a much more elegant way to describe the process.

Your failure to understand just reflects your failure to understand... not any evidence that anyone finds describing evolution as "random" useful or informative on any level. Moreover, if one wanted to be understood, why wouldn't one use the definitions of those who ARE understood? That's what stymies me. Why are those who show no evidence of being able to convey understanding about natural selection to anyone imagining that somehow they are being more clear than all the experts who actually explain the process eloquently to many? Why the imagined expertise on a subject that no one but they seem to think they understand? Why would you think your failure to understand conveys something about how evolution should be described or that Dawkins is "wrong" rather than just ignorance on your part?

[mijopaalmc]

As has been said before, creationists like to pretend that evolution is haphazard, and that this is what scientists mean by random.

This is incontrovertibly true for Ayala, the author of the PNAS article artculett cites as saying evolution is non-random:

The fossil record shows that life has evolved in a haphazard fashion. The radiations of some groups of organisms, the numerical and territorial expansions of other groups, the replacement of some kinds of organisms by other kinds, the occasional but irregular occurrence of trends toward increased size or other sorts of change, and the ever-present extinctions are best explained by natural selection of organisms subject to the vagaries of genetic mutation, environmental challenge, and past history. The scientific account of these events does not necessitate recourse to a preordained plan, whether imprinted from the beginning or through successive interventions by an omniscient and almighty Designer. Biological evolution differs from a painting or an artifact in that it is not the outcome of preconceived design. The design of organisms is not intelligent but imperfect and, at times, outright dysfunctional.(emphasis added)

I realize that Ayala says that evolution is "not random" several times, but that is a curiously contradictory statement given the passage above and the fact that "random" and "haphazard" are actually synonyms.

The passage also seems to make kjkent's post nonsensical, as kjkent says you can prove neither randomness nor its opposite, design.

[sol invictus]

I am slightly puzzled by your statement:

My bad - I missed your "significantly", which was rather crucial! In that case, while I still prefer my definition (predictable versus unpredictable, at least in the context of broad phenomena), I more or less agree.

[mijopaalmc]

My bad - I missed your "significantly", which was rather crucial! In that case, while I still prefer my definition (predictable versus unpredictable, at least in the context of broad phenomena), I more or less agree.

So the fact that radioisotopes have a fixed have life is non-random despite the fact that radioactive decay is itself a random process?

[zosima]

zosima, what about compound eyes?

several types

Lobster eye...

ETA:

Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllopoda#Head) is the organism that I was thinking about (one of the "eyes", is more of a light sensor...)

I don't doubt that there are other types of eyes, but they don't matter for the point I'm making. I would think they're probably optimizing for other constraints, but I don't care if you believe that. If you looked at the numerical argument that I made, if we look at some very generous numbers for a random evolution argument. The probability of two very similar eyes evolving twice is so astronomically low that it effective eliminates the possibility of a random evolution theory. 10 million billion years is well shorter than the total life of the earth and shorted than the length of the universe so far, this is one of those "we're getting close to heat death of the universe" numbers.
Thus, The process must be highly directed and repeatable because the fossil record shows these improbably events happening over an over again, and we don't see it happening over long periods of time. We see long periods of no change and short periods of huge change.

[sol invictus]

So the fact that radioisotopes have a fixed have life is non-random despite the fact that radioactive decay is itself a random process?

Excellent example!

You tell me - is it random that a smoke detector (http://home.howstuffworks.com/smoke2.htm) will go off when the room it's in fills with smoke?

[articulett]

Excellent example!

You tell me - is it random that a smoke detector (http://home.howstuffworks.com/smoke2.htm) will go off when the room it's in fills with smoke?

Let me guess...

Mijo won't say...

"Ah... I finally see your point!" Nor will Jim-Bob. Nor any of the same people who imagine themselves as having more expertise than the actual experts.

[mijopaalmc]

Excellent example!

You tell me - is it random that a smoke detector (http://home.howstuffworks.com/smoke2.htm) will go off when the room it's in fills with smoke?

I understand what you are trying to get at here, but I would say that the orderly operation of the ionizing smoke detector arises from many random decay of americium-241 nuclei, which causes a nearly steady current across the ionization gap. Calling something "non-random" simply because it displays orderly behavior is confusing and misleading, especially when the underlying mechanism is random.

[zosima]

have just realised that you have completely misunderstrood me.

Random, but not haphazard.


I think I understand you. Your view of evolution is not uncommon in the mainstream. I wasn't really imagining that you think it is haphazard. What I and articulett are trying to tell you, is that the evidence and the math does not bear your argument out, that no evolutionary biologists would agree with what you are saying. What I find funny is that articulett favors quoting dawkins, while I favor gould. Two separate schools of evolution, who come to the same conclusion regarding randomness, by different means.



Not everything.

Quantum events might conceivably affect the Earth's orbit, but not significantly (or even measurably). A slight change in the wind direction due to a difference at the quantum level several weeks earlier could very easily affect the survival or otherwise of a particular trait.

I'm suspicious that it could even change the direction of the wind in a way that would be significant. Just because someone can generate a "butterfly flapping its wings" argument to show that small effects can be significant doesn't mean that they ever are. There are always significant stabilizing effects. While wind may appear complex that is no reason to automatically assume that its behavior hinges upon the behavior of quarks and leptons.

The reason quantum physics is a modern theory, why scientists for many many years thought that the universe was a very ordered and regular place, is because on all scales that effect processes above the atomic level it is very very regular. The discovery of quantum physics does not invalidate those results.

I've noticed that it is not uncommon for the wooish arguments to hinge on the infinitesimally improbably, so imo this line of reasoning seriously undermines your argument. As I've stated before, it also makes it very different to talk about the science.


The feedback loops I am talking about is because an organism alters the fitness landscape for other organisms in its ecosystem. Which mutation occurs first in which organism would help define the fitness lancdscape for the other organisms.

I dispute that it is trivial. When discussing with other people, most would consider it to be a significant difference whether anything was filling our ecological niche. In fac, given our effect on the evolution of other organisms, this is probably true.

Mamoths, passenger pigeons, dodos, moas, rats, TB, would all have had different evolutionary histories without mankind.

If this depended on random events, as well as nonrandom but unpredictable events, then I can see it is valid to talk about randomness in evolution. It is also valid to talk about inevitibility in evolution too, for example the loss of flight in birds on isolated islands with no predators.


You can dispute it. I think I've laid out my argument in excruciating detail. Your argument either reduces to the claim that history is random or is very wrong. Either way you aren't talking about evolution. But as I've stated several times, the argument I'm making is based in large part on the evidence, and I've recommended you go to the primary sources. So if you choose to dispute it without examining those sources, you chose to dispute it via ignorance* not argument.

With that I'm out.

*p.s. I'm not trying to be rude, by saying that it is an ignorant position, I'm trying to impress upon you the importance of reading some of the work in the field, before you assert that it is false.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

So the fact that radioisotopes have a fixed have life is non-random despite the fact that radioactive decay is itself a random process?
I should hope so. If we're going to call a measurement random even when it is very close over an arbitrarily large number of samples, then, as people have noted before, the word random becomes useless.

A coin flip is random. However, would you call it random that a large number of coin flips tends to be 50% heads?


Calling something "non-random" simply because it displays orderly behavior is confusing and misleading, especially when the underlying mechanism is random.
Calling it "nonrandom, full stop" is misleading, but not even close to being as misleading as calling it "random, full stop." You have to distinguish between individual events and probabilistic trends.

~~ Paul

[sol invictus]

I understand what you are trying to get at here, but I would say that the orderly operation of the ionizing smoke detector arises from many random decay of americium-241 nuclei, which causes a nearly steady current across the ionization gap. Calling something "non-random" simply because it displays orderly behavior is confusing and misleading, especially when the underlying mechanism is random.

Is the smoke detector random, mijo? Yes or no?

[mijopaalmc]

Calling it "nonrandom, full stop" is misleading, but not even close to being as misleading as calling it "random, full stop."

But I have never done that or advocated doing that.

You have to distinguish between individual events and probabilistic trends.

Probabilistic trends ares still mathematically random. They are, however, not random according to another definition, as is the mathematical framework of probability theory.

[mijopaalmc]

Is the smoke detector random, mijo? Yes or no?

False dichotomy. It's order operation arises from random processes.

[sol invictus]

False dichotomy. It's order operation arises from random processes.

"False dichotomy"? What delicious hypocrisy, coming from someone that maintains that "evolution is random".

Answer the question, mijo - yes or no?

[mijopaalmc]

"False dichotomy"? What delicious hypocrisy, coming from someone that maintains that "evolution is random".

Where have I proposed a false dichotomy?

Answer the question, mijo - yes or no?

It's not a question with a yes or no answer.

[articulett]

"False dichotomy"? What delicious hypocrisy, coming from someone that maintains that "evolution is random".

Answer the question, mijo - yes or no?

As if.

Mijo must have the last word and the last word must convince himself that somehow in some way it is meaningful to call evolution random... much more meaningful than anything any one else is saying. This is a guy who began posting relatively recently with an opening post wondering about "discontinuity" in the fossil record. He brings up the top straw men of creationists again and again and cannot understand any explanation whatsoever as to why they are straw man... but he is angry that I might suggest that he is a creationist. He will soon be thanking you in a similar manner for all your patient time spent trying to convey understanding to him.

IMO, he is not an honest person. He is not honest with himself or anyone else. And he is the first to lay accusations such as that upon others when they are far more fitting of himself. I have long had him and his ilk on ignore. Your explanations will not go unpunished, I assure you.

[sol invictus]

Where have I proposed a false dichotomy?



It's not a question with a yes or no answer.

Do you truly fail to realize how ridiculous your position is? You claim that evolution - an extremely complex process involving a rich set of phenomena, some predictable, some not - is random, and yet when I ask about a smoke detector you call it a false dichotomy with no answer?

[articulett]

If nothing else, I appreciate the delicious irony, sol.

[mijopaalmc]

Do you truly fail to realize how ridiculous your position is? You claim that evolution - an extremely complex process involving a rich set of phenomena, some predictable, some not - is random, and yet when I ask about a smoke detector you call it a false dichotomy with no answer?

You are completely missing the point: the long-term predictability of a system says nothing about its short-term structure. If random processes (e.g., radioactive decay) could not produce long-term predictability, not only would an ionization smoke detector not work, but the universe probably would not exist at all (if we assume that quantum mechanics is really random).

[sol invictus]

Yes or no, mijo?

[sol invictus]

If nothing else, I appreciate the delicious irony, sol.

Yeah - it really doesn't get much better than that...

[zosima]

Yeah - it really doesn't get much better than that...

This thread just exploded with funny today. :p

[Belz...]

Do you actually have any evidence of individuals of a certain group of phenotypes all surviving while all individuals of the other group of phenotypes don't?

Err... aren't you arguing for a strong bias in evolution, now ? Doesn't that kinda make it non-random ??

[Belz...]

Here's a geneticist, Jerry Coyne, discussing Behe's book--the ambiguity of "random"--the need to distinguish--and the fact that what we see in various species did not come about "randomly"...

On the basis of much evidence, scientists have concluded that mutations occur randomly. The term "random" here has a specific meaning that is often misunderstood, even by biologists. What we mean is that mutations occur irrespective of whether they would be useful to the organism. Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication. Most of them are harmful or neutral, but a few of them can turn out to be useful. And there is no known biological mechanism for jacking up the probability that a mutation will meet the current adaptive needs of the organism. Bears adapting to snowy terrain will not enjoy a higher probability of getting mutations producing lighter coats than will bears inhabiting non-snowy terrain.

What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful. Evolution by selection, then, is a combination of two steps: a "random" (or indifferent) step--mutation--that generates a panoply of genetic variants, both good and bad (in our example, a variety of new coat colors); and then a deterministic step--natural selection--that orders this variation, keeping the good and winnowing the bad (the retention of light-color genes at the expense of dark-color ones).

It is important to clarify these two steps because of the widespread misconception, promoted by creationists, that in evolution "everything happens by chance." Creationists equate the chance that evolution could produce a complex organism to the infinitesimal chance that a hurricane could sweep through a junkyard and randomly assemble the junk into a Boeing 747. But this analogy is specious. Evolution is manifestly not a chance process because of the order produced by natural selection--order that can, over vast periods of time, result in complex organisms looking as if they were designed to fit their environment. Humans, the product of non-random natural selection, are the biological equivalent of a 747, and in some ways they are even more complex. The explanation of seeming design by solely materialistic processes was Darwin's greatest achievement, and a major source of discomfort for those holding the view that nature was designed by God.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,12...e-New-Republic

Excellent link, Articulett. Bravo!

[Belz...]

Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us. [/I]

And the idea even explains the spread of all other forms of information, as we discussed in the Intelligent Evolution thread.

[Belz...]

False dichotomy. It's order operation arises from random processes.

:id:

[Dancing David]

But that doesn't mean that evolution by natural selection is not fundamentally random.


Random is some respects but contrained by enviroment and contingent history.

[mijopaalmc]

I don't see the problem with my saying that the fundamental operation of a process is random but its overall behavior is orderly. If this weren't the case, inferential statistics would be meaningless and you would have to poll a whole population to find out its demographic information. In essence, the description of a system as "random" or "non-random" depends on its micro-level behavior and not its macro-level behavior.

[Ichneumonwasp]

I don't see the problem with my saying that the fundamental operation of a process is random but its overall behavior is orderly. If this weren't the case, inferential statistics would be meaningless and you would have to poll a whole population to find out its demographic information. In essence, the description of a system as "random" or "non-random" depends on its micro-level behavior and not its macro-level behavior.

Then why don't you just say that a smoke detector is fundamentally random?

You do see the parallel/relationship with evolution do you not?

You do realize that you have just called Boyle's law fundamentally random?

[jimbob]

have just realised that you have completely misunderstrood me.

Random, but not haphazard.


I think I understand you. Your view of evolution is not uncommon in the mainstream. I wasn't really imagining that you think it is haphazard. What I and articulett are trying to tell you, is that the evidence and the math does not bear your argument out, that no evolutionary biologists would agree with what you are saying. What I find funny is that articulett favors quoting dawkins, while I favor gould. Two separate schools of evolution, who come to the same conclusion regarding randomness, by different means.

I would beg to differ on your interpretation of Gould's work.

Wasn't his point in Wonderful Life that chance played a large part in altering the course of evolution? A slightly different subset of organisms surviving, and a different set of parent species leading to a completely different ecology, and inhabitants of that ecology. I realise that since the publication of this book, osme of the fossil evidence has been re-interpreted, but I would say that the original point is still valid.





Not everything.

Quantum events might conceivably affect the Earth's orbit, but not significantly (or even measurably). A slight change in the wind direction due to a difference at the quantum level several weeks earlier could very easily affect the survival or otherwise of a particular trait.

I'm suspicious that it could even change the direction of the wind in a way that would be significant. Just because someone can generate a "butterfly flapping its wings" argument to show that small effects can be significant doesn't mean that they ever are. There are always significant stabilizing effects. While wind may appear complex that is no reason to automatically assume that its behavior hinges upon the behavior of quarks and leptons.

I'd imagine that it woldn't have taken much to alter the evolutionary history of Darwin's Finches. A slightly differnt wind direction, and the founder population doesn't make it to the Galaopgos

The reason quantum physics is a modern theory, why scientists for many many years thought that the universe was a very ordered and regular place, is because on all scales that effect processes above the atomic level it is very very regular. The discovery of quantum physics does not invalidate those results.

I've noticed that it is not uncommon for the wooish arguments to hinge on the infinitesimally improbably, so imo this line of reasoning seriously undermines your argument. As I've stated before, it also makes it very different to talk about the science.

My point was that it seems that chaotic systems are truly random, as opposed to merely unpredictable, far enough in the future. Non-chaotic systems aren't. Several people have been arguing that natural selection is not random, whilst I would say it is better to think of it as a bent dice game - over time the winnerr will be fixed, but by how much isn't determined, and can still lose in the short term.



The feedback loops I am talking about is because an organism alters the fitness landscape for other organisms in its ecosystem. Which mutation occurs first in which organism would help define the fitness lancdscape for the other organisms.

I dispute that it is trivial. When discussing with other people, most would consider it to be a significant difference whether anything was filling our ecological niche. In fac, given our effect on the evolution of other organisms, this is probably true.

Mamoths, passenger pigeons, dodos, moas, rats, TB, would all have had different evolutionary histories without mankind.

If this depended on random events, as well as nonrandom but unpredictable events, then I can see it is valid to talk about randomness in evolution. It is also valid to talk about inevitibility in evolution too, for example the loss of flight in birds on isolated islands with no predators.


You can dispute it. I think I've laid out my argument in excruciating detail. Your argument either reduces to the claim that history is random or is very wrong. Either way you aren't talking about evolution. But as I've stated several times, the argument I'm making is based in large part on the evidence, and I've recommended you go to the primary sources. So if you choose to dispute it without examining those sources, you chose to dispute it via ignorance* not argument.

With that I'm out.

*p.s. I'm not trying to be rude, by saying that it is an ignorant position, I'm trying to impress upon you the importance of reading some of the work in the field, before you assert that it is false.

Yes, I do think that history is affected by random events. So is evolution.

I am syaing that there are situations especially over long enough timescales, or rapidly changing environments when random events play important roles in the course of evolution. On other occasions it is more predictable.

Convergent evolution happens on occasion, because some sets of outcomes are likley. Others are not. Given that large mammals existed for at least 30-odd million years before the arising of humanity, anfd that large animals had been around for far longer, would provide circumstantil evidence that humanity's niche is one that is not as likely to be filled as that of a large plains-dwelling hearding herbivore.

Humanity is probably the species that has had the biggest effect on the evolution of other organisms. If it wasn't inevitable that humanity or anything like it evolved, then that is another significant difference on many species evolutions. In fact humanity is a classic example of a species that arises and a;ters the fitness landscape for surrounding organisms.

When these happen, and how, is random.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

But I have never done that or advocated doing that.
Then you should word your responses more carefully, because you've convinced pretty much everyone here that you are calling evolution "random."

I think this conversation would be a lot clearer if people would use "nonrandom with respect to ..." alot more often. :D


I don't see the problem with my saying that the fundamental operation of a process is random but its overall behavior is orderly. If this weren't the case, inferential statistics would be meaningless and you would have to poll a whole population to find out its demographic information. In essence, the description of a system as "random" or "non-random" depends on its micro-level behavior and not its macro-level behavior.
I think we'd be okay if you said mutations are fundamentally random. But there's too much to evolution that is nonrandom to countenance saying that evolution as a whole is fundamentally random.

~~ Paul

[mijopaalmc]

Then you should word your responses more carefully, because you've convinced pretty much everyone here that you are calling evolution "random."

I think this conversation would be a lot clearer if people would use "nonrandom with respect to ..." alot more often. :D


I think we'd be okay if you said mutations are fundamentally random. But there's too much to evolution that is nonrandom to countenance saying that evolution as a whole is fundamentally random.

The problem is that no-one has presented evidence that evolution by natural selection is "nonrandom with respect to (blank)". The fact that a given phenotype is more likely to reproduce than others because individuals who possess it can access resources in the environment more efficiently as others does not make it nonrandom with respect to the environment (which is what I think your are referring to when you say that "there's too much to evolution that is nonrandom to countenance saying that evolution as a whole is fundamentally random").

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

The problem is that no-one has presented evidence that evolution by natural selection is "nonrandom with respect to (blank)".
I think it goes without saying that selection is nonrandom with respect to the current environment, by the very definition of the word selection.

The fact that a given phenotype is more likely to reproduce than others because individuals who possess it can access resources in the environment more efficiently as others does not make it nonrandom with respect to the environment
Please explain how you come to this conclusion.

~~ Paul

[Ichneumonwasp]

The problem is that no-one has presented evidence that evolution by natural selection is "nonrandom with respect to (blank)". The fact that a given phenotype is more likely to reproduce than others because individuals who possess it can access resources in the environment more efficiently as others does not make it nonrandom with respect to the environment (which is what I think your are referring to when you say that "there's too much to evolution that is nonrandom to countenance saying that evolution as a whole is fundamentally random").

Yes, we have presented such evidence, more than once. Paul has specifically stated -- more than once -- that evolution by natural selection is non-random with respect to the environment. When the entire system is considered, as has been mentioned more than once, it is clear that adaptation to the environment is what falls out. That is non-random in the same way that pressure is non-random when volume, heat, and the amount of a gas are considered. One of the problems is that too many folks are concentrating on the details of evolution, on the organisms themselves -- which is analagous to the molecules in a container, not the system as a whole.

So, let's look at natural selection. It is random which organisms survive. It is not random that not all organisms will survive given limited resources. It is random what sorts of variations will appear. It is not random that variations will appear. It is random what types of traits will survive. It is not random that certain traits will survive and be passed along.

That is what people mean when they say that evolution is not random.


ETA:
Dang, Paul already said it again.

[mijopaalmc]

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos and Ichneumonwasp-

The way I define "random" requires that individuals with identical phenotype always all reproduce or never reproduce at all. If some individuals with identical phenotypes reproduce while others don't, the process is by definition random.

jimbob has presented evidence to this effect here (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=3382464#post3382464).

[Reality Check]

The problem is that no-one has presented evidence that evolution by natural selection is "nonrandom with respect to (blank)". The fact that a given phenotype is more likely to reproduce than others because individuals who possess it can access resources in the environment more efficiently as others does not make it nonrandom with respect to the environment (which is what I think your are referring to when you say that "there's too much to evolution that is nonrandom to countenance saying that evolution as a whole is fundamentally random").
My 2 cents worth: Evolution by natural selection is nonrandom because similar inputs give similar results. Remember that we are talking about the entire process of evolution where the effects of natural selection dominate the effects of variation.

A few examples from my small knowledge of biology:

If you put bacteria in an environment containing antibiotics then the bacteria will develop resistance to the antibiotics. The species of the bacteria does not matter so long as the antibotic affects it.
If you add a predator to an environment then its prey will develop strategies to avoid predation, e.g. speed. See cicadas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicadas).
If you add a parasite to an envronment then its hosts will develop strategies to cope with the parasite.
If there is an extinction event that removes animals from environments then other animals will evolve to fit the environments.However if your definition of random process is any process where the same inputs give outputs that are not identical then by that definition evolution by natural selection is random. But this definition does not stop evolution from being predictable since the outputs are a small subset of all possible outputs.
That defintion has problems in other areas, e.g. it makes statistical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics "random".

[Ichneumonwasp]

I went back to see how this whole conversation began. And like most internet arguments it began in equivocation.

It started in Meadmaker's thread about "The God Delusion". He chastised Dawkins for arguing against "chance" in evolution. But Dawkins didn't do so in the way it is being taken here.

I hadn't read the book until just recently -- right now actually. Today I happened on the chapter in question -- chapter 4. In it, Dawkins argues against the idea that evolution happened by "chance" because he was examining a tract put out by the JWs in which they repeatedly stated that the intense beauty and complexity of organisms "couldn't have happened by chance." The Watchtower piece clearly uses the word "chance" in its colloquial sense, and Dawkins continues to use it in that way.

Meadmaker introduced the mathematical sense of 'random' into this conversation -- as a way to criticize Dawkins. But Dawkins makes it very clear that he does not speak of 'chance' in that way. He maintains a single use of the word -- the colloquial use -- throughout the chapter. And he clearly encodes the idea that evolution contains random elements and that it is random in the technical sense of the term.

Let's look at what he actually does say:

"What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event. He doesn't understand the power of accumulation."

Dawkins clearly uses the idea of 'random' as has been proposed here -- described by a probability distribution -- so the entire original chain of posts was based on a mischaracterization of his position from the get-go.

While all of the little steps that lead to the formation of new organisms may be random -- random mutations (not complete chance, mind you, because crossing over occurs in particularly prone areas and copying errors tend to be more likely in certain stretches of DNA, etc.) and the historical contingencies that result in natural selection -- the process will lead to changes over time. That is not in doubt. Those changes that leave behind more offspring will tautologically leave behind more offspring. That is not random.

[Ichneumonwasp]

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos and Ichneumonwasp-

The way I define "random" requires that individuals with identical phenotype always all reproduce or never reproduce at all. If some individuals with identical phenotypes reproduce while others don't, the process is by definition random.

jimbob has presented evidence to this effect here (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=3382464#post3382464).

Stop looking at molecules. From that vantage everything is random. Look at the whole container with all the molecules. That is how, where, and why the process is non-random. No one argues that we can predict the course of molecules in a balloon, only that we can reliably measure the pressure of the system, given certain inputs.

[articulett]

But Mijo HAS to prove to himself that it makes sense to say evolution is random. And he can only do this if you let him have the last word... otherwise this thread will go on forever. He has a need to use that word-- no matter how vague or misinforming it may be. He will use it, no matter how many actual experts say it's misleading... he will insist it makes sense no matter how he is told that it is the number one ways that intelligent cdesign proponentists obfuscate understanding of natural selection-- the core teaching of evolution. He will use it and must use it because, to mijo, it can't be right to call evolution nonrandom. Dawkins must be wrong. He must be "right".

To mijo, anything (except apparently a smoke alarm) that has randomness IS random--especially evolution which is "fundamentally" random.

It's the craziest thing... but he's just so predictable. As are his few cohorts on this thread. Why does anyone "need" evolution to be "random"? Why do people who can't convey information to the people on this forum imagine that they are so much smarter than those who teach the subject to many? Your hypothesis is as good as mine.

[Ichneumonwasp]

But Mijo HAS to prove to himself that it makes sense to say evolution is random. And he can only do this if you let him have the last word... otherwise this thread will go on forever. He has a need to use that word-- no matter how vague or misinforming it may be. He will use it, no matter how many actual experts say it's misleading... he will insist it makes sense no matter how he is told that it is the number one ways that intelligent cdesign proponentists obfuscate understanding of natural selection-- the core teaching of evolution. He will use it and must use it because to mijo, it can't be right to call evolution nonrandom

To mijo, anything (except apparently a smoke alarm) that has randomness is random.

It's the craziest thing... but he's just so predictable. As are his few cohorts on this thread. Why does anyone "need" evolution to be "random"? Why do people who can't convey information to the people on this forum imagine that they are so much smarter than those who teach the subject to many. Your hypothesis is as good as mine.



Don' know. Mongo only pawn in game of life.

[zosima]

It seems like our opinions are starting to converge enough that our argument is getting semantic, which IMO is good, but here's my next volley. (-:

I would beg to differ on your interpretation of Gould's work.

Wasn't his point in Wonderful Life that chance played a large part in altering the course of evolution? A slightly different subset of organisms surviving, and a different set of parent species leading to a completely different ecology, and inhabitants of that ecology. I realise that since the publication of this book, osme of the fossil evidence has been re-interpreted, but I would say that the original point is still valid.



I've never read this, but when you mentioned it I looked it up, and found this quote on wikipedia:
"Most of the book's conclusions were deemed controversial at publication and some of Gould's examples were soon shown to be incorrect. However, the ultimate theme of the book is still being debated among evolutionary thinkers today."
And debated right here on JREF (-:

I've read some of his older work(like Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toe's) and I've read his last work The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Which seemed to support a much more deterministic view of evolution.


I'd imagine that it woldn't have taken much to alter the evolutionary history of Darwin's Finches. A slightly differnt wind direction, and the founder population doesn't make it to the Galaopgos

Over a geological instant, all different wind directions and magnitudes and combinations therein would have been tried many different times. So unless this happened to be a very unlikely statistical setup(where the probabilities of two different populations arriving at the Galapagos was nearly equal) then it could have happened no other way.


My point was that it seems that chaotic systems are truly random, as opposed to merely unpredictable, far enough in the future. Non-chaotic systems aren't. Several people have been arguing that natural selection is not random, whilst I would say it is better to think of it as a bent dice game - over time the winnerr will be fixed, but by how much isn't determined, and can still lose in the short term.


I can see how to you think that and I don't consider that entirely unreasonable.
But it is a question of very marginal probabilities. I don't dispute that there could be a situation where the fate of an entire species depended on whether a butterfly flaps its wings, but that is incredibly unlikely, to the point that it isn't a significant consideration as far as the theory of evolution goes, especially because the study of evolution does not work on human time. It works on quite long time scales, by human standards. I think this for a couple reasons.

1. Generally if a population is in a precarious situation, where the fates of one or two individuals determine the fate of the species, they just die, the gene pool is way too narrow in such a case. Really these "chaotic systems determine fitness" arguments depend on imagining that these situations can and do happen.
2. The probability of a characteristic of just about any chaotic system on earth becomes either 1 or 0 on scales of 10-100 years, which is generally shorter than evolutionary timescales. So all different possible combinations get tried on geological time(like your wind example). Chaotic systems are only chaotic on short time scales, for example the earth's climate is moving to a very predictable higher temperatures, they don't get more chaotic with more time, but less chaotic. But I will concede that, like a gas, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what the behavior of any specific component will be doing as time increases. (by component I mean something like the minimum component of the chaotic system, in the cases we're often discussing, a molecule).
3. The randomness of the behavior of a chaotic system is often overblown. The sort of argument whereby the global weather could be effected by the flapping of a butterflies wings, is an interesting mathematical construction, but it is a highly contingent sort of Rube Goldberg machine, where every little piece of the argument has to be in just the right place, for a significant effect to be noticed. Practically, this is never true. People like to assume that because chaotic systems can behave in ways that fluctuate wildly on the minimum behavior of a single variable that natural systems that can exhibit chaotic behavior, always will. For example, if we want our metaphorical butterfly to change the weather, all the other butterflies have to be flapping their wings just enough that our little butterfly will push the system over the tipping point. In 99.9999999% of the cases, the average butterfly flapping is enough that it is either well above the tipping point or well below. In the language of differential equations we would say that phase diagram of the system has to be centered exactlyupon a critical point, and that the probability of this occurring is essentially(but admittedly not exactly) 0.
4. Some will also assume that evolution is random and ecological systems are random by conflating our models with reality. It is true that computational our models can predict many possible outcomes and that we can't often be sure which result is correct. That is because our models are inaccurate and they have too many free variables. But given any specific set of variables they predict a single specific answer, and our inability to measure variables in the past says nothing about the nature of any phenomenon.
5. It is also common to assume a reductionist standpoint, that since quantum physics dictates the behavior of particles at very small scales or very high energies, that the whole world is somehow fundamentally random. I've already addressed this. But let me be clear, quantum phenomena really really don't have any effect on our lives. It's useful for understanding radioactive decay, on the short term(short time scale), the path of a single photon(small space scale), or the nature of the big bang(big energy scale and small time/space).
6. The fossil record tends to support this conclusion. When causes are seen so are effects, species wax then they wane, but very very rarely do they change spontaneously or become dominant in an ecosystem, lose that dominance, and then return to dominance by some luck of the draw.
7. One might argue that the probabilistic argument comes in because the species has to get just the right mutation at the time its environment is changing or it will fail. But that is the very argument that punctuated equilibrium addresses. What it says is that the rate of mutation is low and that over the time scales that things change the right mutation will never enter the gene pool right when its needed. What its saying is the mutations accumulate over the stable periods of equilibrium, in times of plenty the gene pool's standard deviation increases until most every non-fatal mutation is floating around doing its thing. Then when times become thin, those mutations can become dominant by recombining through sexual selection, which will exchange all relevant genes to create all combinations in very short periods of time. Sudden pressure is applied and given the very predictable distribution of genes in the gene pool a modified species emerges.


Yes, I do think that history is affected by random events. So is evolution.

I am syaing that there are situations especially over long enough timescales, or rapidly changing environments when random events play important roles in the course of evolution. On other occasions it is more predictable.

I get that and I'm not completely excluding the possibility, but I'll say it again: Its not significant.
Here are some responses:

1. Often things like the KT impact are considered random, but something like the KT impact was anything but random. It's just hard for us to predict now, given that it happened so long ago and our techniques for probing the distant past are so
weak that we can't predict it well. So I think its fair to exclude large things like that , which are only unpredictable in retrospect.
2. If we exclude unpredictable determinate things, then we're stuck with the smaller things that you label chaotic. The behavior of individuals, winds, currents, etc...The point I was making above, said explicitly, is that as things get smaller, as their effects become more contingent, then the probability that they alter evolution on a geological timescale becomes 0. When we talk about things orders of magnitude smaller than the scale of our phenomenon, then they are orders of magnitude less likely to be significant. Thus, we can exclude them, just like we can exclude the possibility that I will instantaneously quantum tunnel through my keyboard.
3. From these previous points, we can deduce that If we don't take the argument that evolution is non-random seriously then we are basically saying complex systems that we don't currently understand are not understandable. Which I'll admit is something that I'm just not comfortable defending.


Convergent evolution happens on occasion, because some sets of outcomes are likley. Others are not. Given that large mammals existed for at least 30-odd million years before the arising of humanity, anfd that large animals had been around for far longer, would provide circumstantil evidence that humanity's niche is one that is not as likely to be filled as that of a large plains-dwelling hearding herbivore.


I'm not sure I understand your counter example, so I'm not going to address it. What you did not do is address the logic of my numerical argument against the "convergent evolution is probable" point you made in your previous 2 posts. I showed how if we take it to be just rolling some dice, even with very reasonable and generous numbers, it shows that convergent evolution is extremely improbable. You also did not address my argument, that if it is just a probable event, why we don't see eyes appearing and disappearing throughout history.
Another way to look at what I'm saying, is that for your theory to correspond to our world all the probabilities for all the examples of convergent evolution have to be very precisely tuned to the specific values that make your theory correct. For all the other values, my theory is correct, and for all the reasonable values, my theory is correct.

But to be fair let me state my model clearly in Bayesian terms. What I'm saying is: P(H(t)) = [1,0] (The probability of history* at a given time t is some number between 0 and 1) P(S(t)) = [1,0] (The probability of a species or trait at a given time is some number between 0 and 1) but that P(S(t)|H(t)) => 1 or 0 as t=>G (The probability of a species or trait given history approaches 1 or 0 at we reach a geological timescale) The important thing to recognize is that it is not only a model that can account for the numerical argument I gave in my previous post, but because of the decreasing probability of multiplied contingencies it necessarily excludes the alternative.

*We should note that once a major historical event occurs its probability approaches 1.


Humanity is probably the species that has had the biggest effect on the evolution of other organisms. If it wasn't inevitable that humanity or anything like it evolved, then that is another significant difference on many species evolutions. In fact humanity is a classic example of a species that arises and a;ters the fitness landscape for surrounding organisms.

When these happen, and how, is random.

1. I will concede that humans have changed the game, I think with humans all bets are off, because the fates of many species are dependent on our inherently unstable social systems. That said, it may very well turn out that in geological time, we weren't as irregular as we would like to think, and the fact that humans may make an exception to the rule, hardly seems to be salient to the discussion at hand. That said, even if you disagree with me, we should discuss humanity in another thread, but if your only data point is humanity, I think we can agree that your argument is on flimsy footing.
2. Generally ecosystems are not wildly fluctuating, they are extremely stable, and actually have many buffers to counteract perturbation. The only time an ecosystem fluctuates is due to some external effect, and even then they follow precise rules. To claim that these systems are hopelessly chaotic, that they don't eventually reach a specific equilibrium is to disregard a large amount of good science done in epidemiology and ecology.
3. I will concede that there was nothing inevitable about human evolution if you assume the major historical events were different, but if they were the same then it was just as deterministic as a steamroller.

To Conclude:
If you mean that evolution is random because there are a lot of unpredictable historical events, things like the KT impact, or volcanic eruptions, then I think we're really saying the same thing. If however you're saying that butterflies and tiny quantum fluctuations, individual gusts of wind, and ocean currents, are significant in evolution, then you are dead wrong. Any scenario that imagines those being significant quickly is so convoluted and contingent, that its probability of being significant quickly approaches zero on a geological timescale. The view of evolution I support has major things like cometary impacts, changes in solar output, continents coming together to make predictable changes on the gene pool driving the contingent(p(a|b)) probabilities of given traits and species survival to 1 or 0. This has happened so many times over so long that people often assume that it must be random. Or sometimes people find that this deterministic view of evolution contrasts too much with their own day-to-day experience of human interaction with nature, ecology, and their own capacity to make prediction in a very complex world.

I'll end with one observation. If we are to consider an historical system that is governed by large scale events iterated over long periods of time; things like the motion of continents and cometary impacts to be random, then we might as well call geology or the evolution of the universe random. Each of these has tons of small scale "chaotic" behavior. We don't know which rock is going to fall or even which stars in a galactic intersection will actually collide(if any). We could even imagine elaborate scenarios where those things would actually matter, but the fact that we call these things deterministic, but that some people insist on calling evolution random suggests very strongly that it is human anthropocentrism and not human logic that is making us think so.

If the above doesn't convince you, jimbo, then I doubt anything will.

[mijopaalmc]

Stop looking at molecules. From that vantage everything is random. Look at the whole container with all the molecules. That is how, where, and why the process is non-random. No one argues that we can predict the course of molecules in a balloon, only that we can reliably measure the pressure of the system, given certain inputs.

Are you claiming that PV=nRT is all you need to know about gases?

Why is statistical mechanics such an important part of basic physical chemistry?

[zosima]

I was just looking at my post, and I think I wasn't clear what I mean when I said "The only time an ecosystem fluctuates is due to some external effect".
I'll agree that taken literally that statement is clearly wrong.

What I mean is that the population dynamics of an ecosystem tends to be stable in absence of perturbation. So you can view an ecosystem as an energy economy(as far as I know, it is always pyramidal), and the number of creatures(or more accurately the total biomass) on each tier of predation will maintain the same ratio over time, and those ratios are generally stable solutions to a game theoretic problem(Nash Equilibrium). Dawkins talks about this a lot in his books. As seasons vary the numbers of individuals on all levels will vary. Although on higher levels, the weights of the creatures will vary more than the number. The geographic distribution of creatures stays quite constant as well, creatures stick to their own ecosystem, that is why introduction of species is traumatic. I figured I'd better clarify before I get accused of some quackery. :D

[zosima]

Are you claiming that PV=nRT is all you need to know about gases?

Why is statistical mechanics such an important part of basic physical chemistry?

At the risk of getting sucked into the other dispute on this post. PV=nRT is an approximation. You can get better results by calculating the moments of the particle energy distribution, which generally follows a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. That doesn't mean the behavior of the gas becomes any less reliable than the first order approximation.

[Ichneumonwasp]

Are you claiming that PV=nRT is all you need to know about gases?

Why is statistical mechanics such an important part of basic physical chemistry?


Good God, no. How in the world could you ever come to that conclusion? You asked for examples of how evolution can be viewed as non-random. We view smoke detectors as non-random because we do not focus on the details of how they work normally -- that they will blare in the presence of smoke is non-random. We do not view pressure-volume gas relationships as random because we do not focus on the details of how that relationship arises normally. The same is true of evolution. That is the sense in which we have always been speaking of it being non-random -- from the big vantage.

You are focusing on the organisms themselves. On the gas molecules, smoke particles and americium decay. At that level everything is random.

What we've been trying to get you to see is that there are other levels of description.

Again, what started this whole fiasco was a misreading of Dawkins. Dawkins was arguing against JWs who characterized natural 'ranodm' processes as necessarily occurring in a one-off process, all-or-none. He rightfully corrected that misperception by relating the story of Mt Improbable -- small 'random - improbable' changes that amass into one huge improbability. At the level of individual organisms and species no one that I know argues that the process is anything but chance. But when the system as a whole is examined -- like looking at a gas container -- we do not describe it as 'random' because our interest at that level is in the predictions we can make from it.

[Belz...]

The way I define "random" requires that individuals with identical phenotype always all reproduce or never reproduce at all.

And why in the blue hell do you have this definition ?

And didn't you just define evolution as non-random ?

[Ichneumonwasp]

The way I define "random" requires that individuals with identical phenotype always all reproduce or never reproduce at all.

I wasn't originally going to respond to this directly, but perhaps this might help?

What you are describing is more properly placed under "the struggle for existence", one of Darwin's chapters. That is not evolution.

Evolution is an abstraction. It is the grand abstraction concerning all the interactions of various individuals -- the big grand process of changing allele frequency over time. Those individuals act 'randomly', or suffer the slings and arrows of 'random chance'. But that level of description is not evolution. It is a part of what comprises evolution. Evolution is a high level abstraction.

While the quarks that comprise a billiard ball function 'randomy', when we describe the billiard ball we do not call it random.

Last brief comment -- this is not a zero-sum game.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

The way I define "random" requires that individuals with identical phenotype always all reproduce or never reproduce at all. If some individuals with identical phenotypes reproduce while others don't, the process is by definition random.
Yes, yes, I agree that evolution is a stochastic process. But your definition is worthless. One organism with an identical phenotype to another might get squashed by my shoe or blown away in a tornado, but that does not negate the fact that the survival of phenotype is not purely random with respect to the environment. In fact, those two accidents might be entirely deterministic. Instead, the survival of phenotype is clearly nonrandom with respect to the environment by the very definition of the selection process. Otherwise the surviving organisms would be arbitrarily chosen and evolution would not work.

Another way to put it is that the survival probability distribution is highly skewed toward those individuals more fit for the current environment. The more highly skewed it is, the more we are justified in saying the process is nonrandom. Is that acceptable?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

How about this:

heads 0.5, tails 0.5: pure random

heads 1.0, tails 0.0: nonrandom, deterministic

heads 0.95, tails 0.05: nonrandom with respect to whatever is causing the skew

Does that work for people?

~~ Paul

[Ichneumonwasp]

How about this:

heads 0.5, tails 0.5: pure random

heads 1.0, tails 0.0: nonrandom, deterministic

heads 0.95, tails 0.05: nonrandom with respect to whatever is causing the skew

Does that work for people?

~~ Paul

Works for me, but I tried that strategy a few months ago and only got back -- if it's a probability distribution, then it's random.

[Walter Wayne]

How about this:

heads 0.5, tails 0.5: pure random

heads 1.0, tails 0.0: nonrandom, deterministic

heads 0.95, tails 0.05: nonrandom with respect to whatever is causing the skew

Does that work for people?

~~ Paul
heads 0.5, tails 0.5

Pseudo-random number generators get this ratio perfect, but are not random. The sequence where each term is the opposite of the term before it also has this ratio.

heads 1.0, tails 0.0: agreed

heads 0.95, tails 0.05: it is non-random if the condition causing the skew correlates with the result. i.e. If 95% of my coin flips I begin with the coin heads-up on my finger, and all of those come up heads then it is non-random, period.

As a side note, a pet-peeve of mine is the term "(non)random with respect to" phrase. We already have terms for this in english language; dependence, when some sort of causal relation is suspected, and correlated when the physical relation is unknown.

What that doesn't address is when you have more than two outcomes possible. What if you have many outcomes with odds ranging from 1% to 15%. This is obviously skewed. In this case the most-likely result (at 15% chance) is still and unlikely result. Do you call that random?

Walt

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

heads 0.5, tails 0.5

Pseudo-random number generators get this ratio perfect, but are not random. The sequence where each term is the opposite of the term before it also has this ratio.
Agreed. I was thinking of a situation where we know there is no deterministic process behind the coin tossing. There is a problem with knowing this, of course.


As a side note, a pet-peeve of mine is the term "(non)random with respect to" phrase. We already have terms for this in english language; dependence, when some sort of causal relation is suspected, and correlated when the physical relation is unknown.
Those phrases do eliminate the problem word, random. "Selection is dependent on the environment." However, in this thread the whole point is to rant about the word random.


What that doesn't address is when you have more than two outcomes possible. What if you have many outcomes with odds ranging from 1% to 15%. This is obviously skewed. In this case the most-likely result (at 15% chance) is still and unlikely result. Do you call that random?
If the probability distribution is largely determined by the environment, then calling it simply "random" is misleading, I think. The probability distribution is dependent on the environment.

~~ Paul

[zosima]

heads 0.5, tails 0.5

Pseudo-random number generators get this ratio perfect, but are not random. The sequence where each term is the opposite of the term before it also has this ratio.

heads 1.0, tails 0.0: agreed

heads 0.95, tails 0.05: it is non-random if the condition causing the skew correlates with the result. i.e. If 95% of my coin flips I begin with the coin heads-up on my finger, and all of those come up heads then it is non-random, period.

As a side note, a pet-peeve of mine is the term "(non)random with respect to" phrase. We already have terms for this in english language; dependence, when some sort of causal relation is suspected, and correlated when the physical relation is unknown.

What that doesn't address is when you have more than two outcomes possible. What if you have many outcomes with odds ranging from 1% to 15%. This is obviously skewed. In this case the most-likely result (at 15% chance) is still and unlikely result. Do you call that random?

Walt

I really like the approach of boiling it down to how we interpret coin flips, and I think the discussion ya'll are having is adding a lot clarity.

I think in populations, you don't really get things that are that discrete where the winner of this spectral coin flip ends up winning, at least not very frequently. (I wouldn't exclude it entirely)

Its more like we have equal populations(say 200) of two species(or more). In the first round, 2 of the species at 1% survive and 30 of the species at 15% survive. In round two the species @15% does much better; its percentage goes up and the species @1% does much worse; its percentage goes down. So as long as we are making a lot of coin flips, the top percentage quickly becomes dominant.

The only time, I can really think of, where you really have a single flip effecting the entire fate of a species, is like when you have a cometary impact or a volcanic eruption. For sure depending on what time of day it is when it hits, that will have a huge effect on which species die, because that will determine point of impact, but I don't see that as particularly random.

[zosima]

I really like the approach of boiling it down to how we interpret coin flips, and I think the discussion ya'll are having is adding a lot clarity.

I think in populations, you don't really get things that are that discrete where the winner of this spectral coin flip ends up winning, at least not very frequently. (I wouldn't exclude it entirely)

Its more like we have equal populations(say 200) of two species(or more). In the first round, 2 of the species at 1% survive and 30 of the species at 15% survive. In round two the species @15% does much better; its percentage goes up and the species @1% does much worse; its percentage goes down. So as long as we are making a lot of coin flips, the top percentage quickly becomes dominant.

The only time, I can really think of, where you really have a single flip effecting the entire fate of a species, is like when you have a cometary impact or a volcanic eruption. For sure depending on what time of day it is when it hits, that will have a huge effect on which species die, because that will determine point of impact, but I don't see that as particularly random.

I don't mean to imply that there are not other interpretations of the spectrum percentage you gave. I think often what happens is that, the probability ends representing a stable solution. So that the equilibrium population is 15% species 1, 13% species 2,...1% species n.

But its hard to construct a situation where we're talking about the probability of the fate of a species and have that situation be one that we think of as random.

[jimbob]

Yes, yes, I agree that evolution is a stochastic process. But your definition is worthless. One organism with an identical phenotype to another might get squashed by my shoe or blown away in a tornado, but that does not negate the fact that the survival of phenotype is not purely random with respect to the environment. In fact, those two accidents might be entirely deterministic. Instead, the survival of phenotype is clearly nonrandom with respect to the environment by the very definition of the selection process. Otherwise the surviving organisms would be arbitrarily chosen and evolution would not work.

Another way to put it is that the survival probability distribution is highly skewed toward those individuals more fit for the current environment. The more highly skewed it is, the more we are justified in saying the process is nonrandom. Is that acceptable?

~~ Paul

I'd agree, and have been comparing natural selection to a bent dice game...

[zosima]

I'd agree, and have been comparing natural selection to a bent dice game...

But its not a single roll. Its like we play a dice game all day with the dice bent in your favor. By the end of the day you're going to have all my money.

[DeiRenDopa]

Important caveat: I'm jumping into this thread late, and have not (yet) read it through, and - more importantly - have not absorbed or understood what has already been said.

Question re randomness etc: given genetic drift (and a moderately small population with a very narrow ecological niche), given that fixation one way spells extinction (no accessible genetic path to an adaptation that leads to survival/speciation) but the other leads to survival/speciation, how could this not be (or lead to) a (potentially) purely contingent history? The variation that is fixed, one way or the other, is selectively neutral.

ETA: intended principally as a question for zosima.

[Dancing David]

I would beg to differ on your interpretation of Gould's work.

Wasn't his point in Wonderful Life that chance played a large part in altering the course of evolution? A slightly different subset of organisms surviving, and a different set of parent species leading to a completely different ecology, and inhabitants of that ecology. I realise that since the publication of this book, osme of the fossil evidence has been re-interpreted, but I would say that the original point is still valid.



.

Um, chance is there but i thought the key phrase was 'contingent history' (It has been a while since I have read it.) first explored in The Panda's Thumb.

[mijopaalmc]

Um, chance is there but i thought the key phrase was 'contingent history' (It has been a while since I have read it.) first explored in The Panda's Thumb.

As Walter Wayne has already mentioned, statistical dependence (what you call "contingent history") does not imply non-randomness.

[sol invictus]

And why in the blue hell do you have this definition ?


That is a good question - but in the realm of psychology, not biology of math.

It's rather ironic that mijo doesn't realize that even when the probabilities are 1 or 0, that is STILL random by his definition, since those are perfectly good probability distributions. :)

[sol invictus]

Works for me, but I tried that strategy a few months ago and only got back -- if it's a probability distribution, then it's random.

Heads 1.0, tails 0.0 is a probability distribution too. :eek:

[mijopaalmc]

That is a good question - but in the realm of psychology, not biology of math.

An equally interesting question is why you continue to deny that the definition I give is not a real definition, even thought it is in any probability theory text book that includes the measure-theoretic basis for the field.

It's rather ironic that mijo doesn't realize that even when the probabilities are 1 or 0, that is STILL random by his definition, since those are perfectly good probability distributions. :)

Again, this show that you do not understand the definition that I have given. In order for a event to exist its opposite must also exist (see: almost surely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely)).

[sol invictus]

An equally interesting question is why you continue to deny that the definition I give is not a real definition, even thought it is in any probability theory text book that includes the measure-theoretic basis for the field.

I do indeed deny that the definition you gave is not a real definition. ;)

But what's relevant not whether it's "real", but whether it's useful, appropriate, or even correct in the statement "evolution is random".

Again, this show that you do not understand the definition that I have given. In order for a event to exist its opposite must also exist (see: almost surely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely)).

That page - so far as it's relevant at all - supports my (correct) statement that probability 1.0 for heads and 0.0 for tails is a perfectly valid probability distribution for the results of a coin flip.

[mijopaalmc]

I do indeed deny that the definition you gave is not a real definition. ;)

Funny, it appears in several dictionary and is easily derived from from the measure-theoretic descriptions given in probability theory textbooks.

But what's relevant not whether it's "real", but whether it's useful, appropriate, or even correct in the statement "evolution is random".

Look, calling evolution "random" is a simple statement that you can't simply take a phenotype and say that an individual possessing it is guaranteed to reproduce.

That page - so far as it's relevant at all - supports my (correct) statement that probability 1.0 for heads and 0.0 for tails is a perfectly valid probability distribution for the results of a coin flip.

Then you didn't read the dart board example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely#Example:_Throwing_a_dart). It made a really clear distinction between a sure event and an almost sure event.

[jimbob]

mijo: don't forget to not fail to count the number of negatives in Sol's post

[Ichneumonwasp]

Look, calling evolution "random" is a simple statement that you can't simply take a phenotype and say that an individual possessing it is guaranteed to reproduce.




Well, then you are not using words correctly, because looking at a single phenotype and noticing that an individual is not guarunteed to reproduce is not evolution. That is the struggle for survival/reproduction.

[sol invictus]

Funny, it appears in several dictionary and is easily derived from from the measure-theoretic descriptions given in probability theory textbooks.

Looks like even you can't not misunderstand your own words.

Then you didn't read the dart board example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely#Example:_Throwing_a_dart). It made a really clear distinction between a sure event and an almost sure event.

The dartboard example is perfect - it makes my point precisely. The odds of a (n infinitely thin) dart hitting the precise center are zero, and yet that's obviously a perfectly good probability distribution.

The only distinction they're drawing there is whether the other option is possible to consider. Obviously we can consider coins with odds other than 0 for tails - indeed, we might have a set of coins, some of which have 0 odds of tails and some which have 1/2. According to you, all of them are random.

[zosima]

Important caveat: I'm jumping into this thread late, and have not (yet) read it through, and - more importantly - have not absorbed or understood what has already been said.

Question re randomness etc: given genetic drift (and a moderately small population with a very narrow ecological niche), given that fixation one way spells extinction (no accessible genetic path to an adaptation that leads to survival/speciation) but the other leads to survival/speciation, how could this not be (or lead to) a (potentially) purely contingent history? The variation that is fixed, one way or the other, is selectively neutral.

ETA: intended principally as a question for zosima.

I'm not entirely clear about the details of your situation. Why is there drift? Why do you presuppose that the species must bifurcate in a single direction? What causes the bifurcation?

To be clear:
I've really been taking two different tacks in my previous post a sort of strong determinism, based on punctuated equilibrium, and a weaker one.

Weak:
I guess it would depend on what is causing the drift. I would argue that directed drift does not occur spontaneously. When people talk about mutations being indifferent, they're essentially saying that in absence of selection the gene pool drifts in all directions(ie the standard distribution of the gene pool increases to the limits allowed by the niche, but the median stays fixed.) So if you postulate that the median of the gene pool is shifting, then I would assert that this is either because some external cause made it possible for the species to enter a new niche and the species adjusting to a new equilibrium or that some external selective pressure has been applied to the species in its current niche and this is causing the species to adjust to the new pressure.

Strong(which assumes everything the weak position does):
Punctuated equilibrium suggests that as far as our evidence is concerned, we don't see drift, we see discrete changes. So one species, pivotal event, new species. This may be because drift never occurs or it may be because the scales of evolution and our evidence is so many orders of magnitude larger than the time scale of genetic drift that it is highly improbable that we'll see a smooth continuum of transitions. Either way, this sort of drift is not significant to the theory of evolution. All that needs to be considered is the characteristics of a species at ecological equilibrium, just like the macroscopic study of a gas.

[zosima]

An equally interesting question is why you continue to deny that the definition I give is not a real definition, even thought it is in any probability theory text book that includes the measure-theoretic basis for the field.



Again, this show that you do not understand the definition that I have given. In order for a event to exist its opposite must also exist (see: almost surely (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely)).

Fine, for the sake of discussion, I will take your "almost surely" definition of random to be true. Anything that can be described with a probability distribution, regardless of the values taken by the distribution, is random.

Can you name one system that isn't random by that definition?

[mijopaalmc]

Fine, for the sake of discussion, I will take your "almost surely" definition of random to be true. Anything that can be described with a probability distribution, regardless of the values taken by the distribution, is random.

Can you name one system that isn't random by that definition?

Ballistics.

You, like sol invictus, are relying on uncertainty in the initial conditions to declare that my definition is meaningless. However, my point is that, in the case of a stochastic process, each possible value in the distribution of initial condition yields at least two distinct outcome, not just one, as would be the case with a deterministic system.

[zosima]

Ballistics.

ROFLCOPTER! :D Are you really serious? Ballistics is deterministic by your definition? I'm going to request that you be clearer as to how that is the case.

The following is the definition of ballistics from the wikipedia page on ballistics:

"Ballistics (gr. βάλλειν ('ba'llein'), "throw") is the science of mechanics that deals with the motion, behavior, and effects of projectiles, especially bullets, gravity bombs, rockets, or the like; the science or art of designing and accelerating projectiles so as to achieve a desired performance."

Just one post ago you were claiming that the landing location of a dart on a dart board is a perfect example of random behavior. You do understand the path(and landing point) of a dart thrown at a dartboard is a classic example of ballistics? Right? See how it says from the greek "to throw", as in throw a dart?

Even you must admit that that is a clear contradiction ya?


You, like sol invictus, are relying on uncertainty in the initial conditions to declare that my definition is meaningless. However, my point is that, in the case of a stochastic process, each possible value in the distribution of initial condition yields at least two distinct outcome, not just one, as would be the case with a deterministic system.

I've done nothing of the sort. I simply asked you if your definition of random applied to everything. Being as broad as it is, it appears to.

[Walter Wayne]

...

If the probability distribution is largely determined by the environment, then calling it simply "random" is misleading, I think. The probability distribution is dependent on the environment.

~~ Paul
True, but simply calling it "non-random" is also misleading, and I would go so far as to ay that non-random is in fact wrong. Of course, wether random or non-random is more descriptive, nobody I recall in this thread has left the statement and just random or just non-random.
I don't mean to imply that there are not other interpretations of the spectrum percentage you gave. I think often what happens is that, the probability ends representing a stable solution. So that the equilibrium population is 15% species 1, 13% species 2,...1% species n.

But its hard to construct a situation where we're talking about the probability of the fate of a species and have that situation be one that we think of as random.
True, the fate of a species may be the result of more than one "coin-toss" but that doesn't necessarily make the situation more predictable. We are used to thinking of the casino analogy, where the casino relies on large numbers of trials to make a profit. But that doesn't reflect the evolutionary process accurately.

You may look at a species, and think even though they individually have a high mortality rate before maturity, through the benefit of large numbers, some will make it there to reproduce. From the gamblers perspective, if I told him he had a 100 tries to draw the Ace of Spades from a deck of cards he'd love this game. He's virtually guaranteed to win.

But then look at the long term. The survival of a species depends on a long chain of events happening. When looked at from the perspective of a chain of events, we can see uncertainty arise. Each time we see significant environmental change, a species has an almost certain chance of surviving. The odds of lossing are tiny, but the cost is life. The odds of winning are huge, but the prize is ... getting to play again. Now if you have a 99.9% chance of winning, but lossing costs you everything, do you want to play a thousand times?

That unbroken chain each species has going back may be a huge number of highly probably events. But the odds of all those events happening is very low.

Walt

[Earthborn]

Why does anyone "need" evolution to be "random"?I don't think anyone "needs" evolution to be random, it is just that some people understand "randomness" in such a way that it simply is.

You claim that many of the people who understand evolution consider it non-random because that supposedly leads to less misunderstanding of evolution. I disagree; calling it "non-random" instead of "random" does not make it more likely that people understand evolutionary concepts.

When you said: "--just as there is no one who teaches people how to play poker that would describe the game as random." you missed an important issue. Poker is considered non-random (despite random elements) because it involves intelligent decision makers, working towards a specific goal. Intelligent designers in other words.

For all the confusion the word "random" causes, I think the word "non-random" is even more problematic when discussing evolution. "Non-random" is often understood to mean "pre-planned by intelligent decision makers" instead of letting things just run their natural course. I choose to conceptualise evolution as "random", because if you can explain how certain patterns can arise from random influences, one does not need to assume any intelligence behind it.

You asked "if one wanted to be understood, why wouldn't one use the definitions of those who ARE understood?" To that I say, that I would use such definition if there was one, but there isn't. Whether one calls evolution "random" or "non-random" makes no difference when trying to explain evolutionary concepts to people who have no prior understanding of them. With either you'll still have to explain very carefully what you mean by it.

[mijopaalmc]

ROFLCOPTER! :D Are you really serious? Ballistics is deterministic by your definition? I'm going to request that you be clearer as to how that is the case.

The following is the definition of ballistics from the wikipedia page on ballistics:

"Ballistics (gr. βάλλειν ('ba'llein'), "throw") is the science of mechanics that deals with the motion, behavior, and effects of projectiles, especially bullets, gravity bombs, rockets, or the like; the science or art of designing and accelerating projectiles so as to achieve a desired performance."

Just one post ago you were claiming that the landing location of a dart on a dart board is a perfect example of random behavior. You do understand the path(and landing point) of a dart thrown at a dartboard is a classic example of ballistics? Right? See how it says from the greek "to throw", as in throw a dart?

Even you must admit that that is a clear contradiction ya?

No, you didn't actually read what I wrote or what I referred to (which seems to be a huge problem with those who argue that evolution is non-random.

A sure event (e.g., hitting the dart board universe) is deterministic, because one, and only one, outcome exists). An almost sure event (e.g., hitting a specific point or line the dart board universe) is random, because strictly more than one outcome exists. You can never not hit the dart board universe (deterministic event), but you could get really lucky and hit a specific point or line on the dart board universe (random event)

Do try and actually read before you post.

[Ichneumonwasp]

True, but simply calling it "non-random" is also misleading, and I would go so far as to ay that non-random is in fact wrong. Of course, wether random or non-random is more descriptive, nobody I recall in this thread has left the statement and just random or just non-random.


Walt


You know, I think this sums it up for many people. I don't think many are comfortable with random or non-random. Why must we choose between the two?

Really, when it comes down to it, 'evolution' being an abstraction, does either word apply?

I think it unquestionable that random applies to what occurs at the level of organisms and species (the real stuff). But does it apply to 'evolution', which is really just a description of allele change over time? Allele change is so thoroughly assured that I don't think the word random applies even though all the lower level changes are clearly random (is Boyle's law random?). What alleles? Evolution doesn't care. It is the accumulation of change that will occur where most folks don't like the word 'random' applied. It is too often used to mean -- one-stop random jump.

I still think this is all much ado about nothing.

[zosima]

No, you didn't actually read what I wrote or wqhat I referred to (which seems to be a huge problem with those who argue that evolution is non-random.

A sure event (e.g., hitting the dart board universe) is deterministic, because one, and only one, outcome exists. An almost sure event (e.g., hitting a specific point or line the dart board universe) is random, because strictly more than one outcome exists. You can never not hit the dart board universe (deterministic event), but you could get really lucky and hit a specific point or line on the dart board universe (random event)

Do try and actually read before you post.

I did read it. You didn't say "my contrived dartboard example" you said ballistics and I took you literally. I have no idea what you meant. But if your only example of a non-random event is when there is a single entity(or two if you want to get technical), it really is completely devoid of meaning.

While we're at it, I'll one up you, I'll argue there are two outcomes in your dartboard world too. With a probability of 1 the dart hits the board and with a probability of 0 the dart hits nothing. By your definition this is a probabilistic system. Thus, all examples proposed,so far, are random under your definition, and we can conclude the definition is useless and unrealistic. Also, its not at all how the author's intended the almost surely article to be used.

[zosima]

Do try and actually read before you post.

While we're goin at it, before you ask me how I know what the authors on the "almost_surely" article were thinking. I'll let you know. I read the discussion page and you wouldn't believe what I found.

Statement one:

I think it should be mentioned on this page that the need for perplexing terminology only arises if probability is defined as the limit of frequency. However, there is no need to define probability in terms of infinite sets (cf. Cox's derivation of probability theory, in his book "The Algebra of Probable Inference"). Given a finite set of propositions, probability 0 always implies a false proposition ("an impossible event" in your terms) and vice versa, and probability 1 always implies a true proposition ("a certain event"). If you wish to consider what happens with probabilities when a set of propositions (events) becomes infinite, you should pass to the limit in a well-defined fashion. "Well-defined fashion" requires specifying the operation by which you extend the originally finite set to approach infinity. Better yet, restrict yourself to finite sets of propositions in your applications and avoid the need for metaphysical terminology altogether.

Statement two:

Two comments: Almost sure is a concept that is valid whether you define probabilities based on "limits of frequency" or from a purely mathematical/topological viewpoint. Second, "probability 0" and "impossible" are synonymous in countably infinite sets as well as finite. The issue only arises when we have a space that is larger. - grubber 17:22, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Any now your claim:

A sure event (e.g., hitting the dart board universe) is deterministic, because one, and only one, outcome exists). An almost sure event (e.g., hitting a specific point or line the dart board universe) is random, because strictly more than one outcome exists.

:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:jaw-dropp:

It sounds like you just said that the cardinality of the set of outcomes in a system must equal one to be non-random. But these guys(the guys that have written the article you are citing so vigorously), seem to claim that actually the set of outcomes can have many outcomes, in fact infinitely many outcomes, just as long as its not uncountably infinite. And they provide a reference, Ouch! Thats a sick burn huh? It's like an iced lightning burn.
:p
So guess what? If we can map a set of probability relations to a countable infinite set, then that has nothing to do with your silly silly dart board. And we can talk about impossible and inevitable as much as our merry little hearts desire without that system being random.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

True, but simply calling it "non-random" is also misleading, and I would go so far as to ay that non-random is in fact wrong. Of course, wether random or non-random is more descriptive, nobody I recall in this thread has left the statement and just random or just non-random.
I think "nonrandom full stop" is better than "random full stop," but I agree that we should not use either of these simplistic terms, and certainly not in a serious discussion of evolution.

So what is Mijo's full description of evolution? Perhaps I missed it.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I still think this is all much ado about nothing.
Yeah, but it's fun, random ado about nothing.

~~ Paul

[zosima]

Yeah, but it's fun, random ado about nothing.

~~ Paul

Ya I can think of one thing that is not random

P(me taking this thread seriously) => 0 as time approaches infinity.

[sol invictus]

I can summarize this entire thread in a single sentence:

Evolution is randommijo.

Next thread: can anyone think of anything that isn't randommijo? Does anyone care?

[zosima]

I can summarize this entire thread in a single sentence:

Evolution is randommijo.

Next thread: can anyone think of anything that isn't randommijo? Does anyone care?

I care, insofar as I get to use phrases like "iced lightning burn". Now some lucky fellow is going to google "iced lightning burn" and be struck in the head with this wooery./sarcasm lol

[mijopaalmc]

So what is Mijo's full description of evolution? Perhaps I missed it.

You most certainly did. Perhaps you should go back read more of my posts, starting with these:
You can't possibly be serious:eye-poppi. This comment implies that you have not actually read anything that or anyone else who claims that evolution is random has written. I specifically cited Split from: I'm reading "The God Delusion" - a review in progress (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=80924) because there are several posts that give dictionary definitions of "random" (#47 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2568546#post2568546), #49 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2568732#post2568732)) and discuss why all but the mathematical and statistical definition do not describe evolution (#65 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2571760#post2571760), #69 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2571807#post2571807), #71 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2571872#post2571872), #73 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2571994#post2571994),
#75 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2572320#post2572320)). I also made it quite clear that I favored "stochastic" or "probabilistic" over "random" because they have very specific definitions that avoid the common associations and therefore misinterpretations of "random" (#103 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2598575#post2598575), #189 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2606912#post2606912), #234 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2609996post2609996), #252 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2611299#post2611299)). Furthermore, I explained in great detail several times in this thread exactly why evolution is probabilistic or stochastic (#158 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2606116#post2606116), #230 (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=2609885#post2609885)).

[mijopaalmc]

I care, insofar as I get to use phrases like "iced lightning burn". Now some lucky fellow is going to google "iced lightning burn" and be struck in the head with this wooery./sarcasm lol

You have no idea what "woo" is then. I haven't proposed anything that is unfalsifiable or has been falsified. Furthermore, the onus is actually upon those who claim that evolution is non-random to provide evidence as such because they are claiming that it is a deterministic system which is easily falsifiable.

By the way, your citations of the authors intention seem to be contradicted by the fact that the examples section gives an example of an almost sure event on a finite and countably infinite probability space.

[sol invictus]

Dear god - how long has this been going on??

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82155
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=80924
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=50550

What a monumental waste of time.

I know (from reading some of his other posts) that T'ai Chi is a creationist. His posts in those threads are pretty much identical to mijo's. So I guess there are three possibilities:

1) mijo is a creationist
2) mijo is an uber-troll
3) all of the above

Votes?

[articulett]

I don't think anyone "needs" evolution to be random, it is just that some people understand "randomness" in such a way that it simply is.

You claim that many of the people who understand evolution consider it non-random because that supposedly leads to less misunderstanding of evolution. I disagree; calling it "non-random" instead of "random" does not make it more likely that people understand evolutionary concepts.

When you said: "--just as there is no one who teaches people how to play poker that would describe the game as random." you missed an important issue. Poker is considered non-random (despite random elements) because it involves intelligent decision makers, working towards a specific goal. Intelligent designers in other words.

For all the confusion the word "random" causes, I think the word "non-random" is even more problematic when discussing evolution. "Non-random" is often understood to mean "pre-planned by intelligent decision makers" instead of letting things just run their natural course. I choose to conceptualise evolution as "random", because if you can explain how certain patterns can arise from random influences, one does not need to assume any intelligence behind it.

You asked "if one wanted to be understood, why wouldn't one use the definitions of those who ARE understood?" To that I say, that I would use such definition if there was one, but there isn't. Whether one calls evolution "random" or "non-random" makes no difference when trying to explain evolutionary concepts to people who have no prior understanding of them. With either you'll still have to explain very carefully what you mean by it.

Well, let's see... you, Mijo, Behe, maybe meadmaker, jimbob, and assorted creationists and maybe Walter Wayne and T'ai call evolution random...rather they mischaracterize scientists as calling evolution random. Scientists don't. And if you don't understand why by now, it's hopeless. Now are there any people on this planet who think you are good or clear or have a clear understanding of evolution...? Does anyone think that the people above sound particularly clear or as smart as they seem to think they sound? Does any one think the people above have a clear way of conveying understanding about evolution? It truly is on par with calling a smoke alarm random.

Do you see the problem? You are jumping tenses mid game to keep the definition random. The randomness of mutation is not the randomness of selection... you are talking about two different things... one is a process... the other is a single event. Just like the smoke detector example. And there are no teachers of evolution who would ever describe it as random, because it is as informative and incorrect as calling a smoke detector or the game of poker random. It conveys no information. Nonrandom includes all the things in the world that are not truly random-- so most anything, except that which is truly random, can accurately be described as non random. When you call evolution random, it makes it sound like you haven't got a clue about natural selection-- THE KEY COMPONENT in evolution... the part people have trouble with... the brilliance of Darwin. Randomness isn't necessary for evolution to happen... just variation and a selection process! Nobody intelligent or in the field uses random the way the above people do. Nobody.

The most simple explanation for evolution is random mutation coupled with nonrandom selection... and even mutations aren't entirely random... they are just indifferent in that they happen whether tey benefit the organism their in or not. And then a game is played and the environment picks the winners and culls the losers and another round is played. Is a tennis tournament random?

When someone wins a gold metal-- it isn't "random". Random is perhaps more akin to someone winning the lottery. Everyone I know who uses random to describe evolution appears to have religious reasons for doing so. You can do whatever you want. If you want to sound like Behe and T'ai be my guest. But if you want to sound like people who actually teach it (and I do)-- as do all the people I quoted... successfully... you might try using their words-- like at Talk Origins. If your goal is to feel like you are smarter than those people while we roll our eyes at your daftness-- then keep insisting that "evolution is random".

If that's the case... then so are whether seat belts save lives... so are you... so is birth... so is cooking... by that loose definition-- everything IS random... and thus the word is uselessly vague... except of course to obfuscate understanding and to make creationists feel like they are smarter than the experts.

If your goal is to communicate with others, you fail--just like the people mentioned above... if the goal is to convince yourself you're right... then all you need to do is get the last word and your delusion will stay alive. It really isn't the rest of the world that isn't understanding this. It's you.

But I am ever amused.

[articulett]

Dear god - how long has this been going on??

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82155
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=80924
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=50550

What a monumental waste of time.

I know (from reading some of his other posts) that T'ai Chi is a creationist. His posts in those threads are pretty much identical to mijo's. So I guess there are three possibilities:

1) mijo is a creationist
2) mijo is an uber-troll
3) all of the above

Votes?

I'm totally certain he is a creationist who, like Behe, denies being a creationist. But he gets mad when I say that, because he denies it. But who else "needs" to describe evolution as "fundamentally random"? Who needs to pretend that others are too stupid to follow them, when the people on this forum (except maybe for T'ai) are really a smart group of people-- whom he never even asks the experiences of (who imagines they are smarter than Dawkins or Gould or the people who teach this stuff and publish in peer review?)-- only a creationist. He started 2 posts right when he started here without reading much of anything with 2 of the top creationists strawmen.... culled from the top 5- http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html and totally ignored the massive amount of help and evidence and support people here gave him. In fact he craps on those who really try to help him.

He only reads and absorbs enough to find evidence that "evolution is random" (whatever the hell that means)-- he won't budge... it must be able to be described that way... he wants to believe that scientists think this all came about randomly. And he's nasty to those who try and help. After a while the technique just blinks it's ugly neon. The same people, never yield... they imagine themselves as having more expertise while the people who have expertise (zosima) are far more humble. When I see a science story that says "evolution is not random" or "evolution is determined"--

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071119123929.htm

I post it just to watch Mijo do his semantic dance. He is so predictable. The same people arguing the same fuzzy way are predictable... and no amount of evidence ever seems to get them to yield a point. They don't want to understand what others know... they believe they have something important to teach. (or preach.)

If you can obfuscate understanding of evolution-- than it seems impossible. If you understand natural selection... god starts to look less likely. I submit that that is the reason for the semantics.

By the way, for those feeling protective of Mijo... let me assure you, he's said much worse about me. :)

[mijopaalmc]

Dear god - how long has this been going on??

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=82155
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=80924
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=50550

What a monumental waste of time.

I know (from reading some of his other posts) that T'ai Chi is a creationist. His posts in those threads are pretty much identical to mijo's. So I guess there are three possibilities:

1) mijo is a creationist
2) mijo is an uber-troll
3) all of the above

Votes?

4) You need to re-examine some of you basic knowledge and not resort to personal attacks

5) You need to present evidence of your claims other than a superficial similarity of my posts to another other poster's post

[zosima]

You have no idea what "woo" is then. I haven't proposed anything that is unfalsifiable or has been falsified.

Except for the completely false statement you made in the last post. But other than the false statement no nothing you have said has been falsified. ..by me, in the last post. But with those caveats, I totally agree with you.

I'll get to woo at the bottom.


Furthermore, the onus is actually upon those who claim that evolution is non-random to provide evidence as such because they are claiming that it is a deterministic system which is easily falsifiable.

Well articulett has posted a bunch of direct quotes from people in the scientific community who study this phenomenon, who disagree with you. So I would say that the onus is on you, to overturn the burden of the scientific community. But if there is reason to believe that there is reasonable dispute in the scientific community , then the burden of proof is shared. Oh wait did I just disprove another thing you said? Hot dang I'm on a roll! (j/k that won't count toward your overall score)

But seriously, this is an internet forum unless both sides are willing to discuss civilly, consider each others points, admit the possibility that they could be wrong,
and even once in a while admit that they are wrong, there is no proving anything to anyone. As you can see, as I've realized that this isn't really the case in this discussion, my decorum has dwindled.


By the way, your citations of the authors intention seem to be contradicted by the fact that the examples section gives an example of an almost sure event on a finite and countably infinite probability space.

Are you sure? I think you're just embarrassing yourself now. Or are we redefining set theory? The first example, the dart board, is talking about an uncountably infinite set. The Cartesian plane is generated by taking the Cartesian product of the real numbers(R x R). The real numbers are an uncountably infinite set, even if we're talking about a non-empty interval on the real numbers.(see Cantor's theorem.)

For the case with the coin flip, if you bothered to read the fine print. They say that almost surely only applies if you keep flipping until infinity(only if the number of flips is not a finite set). I agree that this does not correspond to the statement in the comments, but we are talking about Wikipedia here so there is no reason to believe that the article has not made a mistake.

If we take the wikipedia article as its word, we are still left with the claim that as long as there is a finite set of outcomes, "almost surely" does not apply and if any of those probabilities are zero(or 1) they are exactly 0(or 1)(meaning not random).

To state the claim formally(the weaker wikipedia article claim):
The probability of an outcome is inexact if that outcome is from an infinite set of outcomes.

Lets look at what you said....

A sure event (e.g., hitting the dart board universe) is deterministic, because one, and only one, outcome exists). An almost sure event (e.g., hitting a specific point or line the dart board universe) is random, because strictly more than one outcome exists. You can never not hit the dart board universe (deterministic event), but you could get really lucky and hit a specific point or line on the dart board universe (random event)

Wow that sure looks like you're wrong. But I can't wait to see how you explain your way out of this one.

In fact, the minimum number statement that have been proven wrong in your last two posts is 3:
1. Claim about what constitutes sure and almost sure
2. Claim that the Cartesian plane is not an uncountably infinite set.
3. Claim that you've never proposed anything that has been falsified(by virtue of 1 & 2)

So why is this woo? Because it is based on false statements and vacuous definitions. It's about as productive as arguing over .9999.... = 1 (lemme guess you think it doesn't) Which happens to be notorious, and equally delicious.

[Ichneumonwasp]

You have no idea what "woo" is then. I haven't proposed anything that is unfalsifiable or has been falsified. Furthermore, the onus is actually upon those who claim that evolution is non-random to provide evidence as such because they are claiming that it is a deterministic system which is easily falsifiable.

By the way, your citations of the authors intention seem to be contradicted by the fact that the examples section gives an example of an almost sure event on a finite and countably infinite probability space.

No, they're &*@^%ing not, for the umpteenth time. No one claims that it is a deterministic system, unless everything in the natural world is deterministic.

We are claiming that random doesn't apply to "evolution" for the same @#&$*@&% reason that gas laws and smoke detectors are not random.

Stop looking at the @#$%*&#*& molecules and look at the system, for chrissakes. That is where you find 'evolution', not in the organisms themselves. They do all the living and dying. They are not evolution. Evolution is the friggin' abstraction created by our brains to describe what happens when they do all the living and dying.

That process occurs through many random changes that accumulate over time to produce CHANGE that appears directed. It doesn't matter that all the gas molecules flit about randomly -- insert rabbits and trilobytes here -- Boyle's law is still Boyle's law. And the smoke detector at my mother-in-law's house still blares away strangely every friggin' time I visit and blow smoke up at it.

[mijopaalmc]

Ichneumonwasp-

It is through the "living and dying" of the individuals within a population that evolution takes place. You have to understand how randomness gives rise to order in order to understand evolution.

By the way macroscopic gas laws may be very good at describing the thermodynamics of a system but they are not do good at all for describing reaction kinetics. Thus, you can have a thermodynamically favorable reaction that takes place very slow and the microscopic gas laws will not explain the behavior of such a system very thoroughly. For such an explanation, you need to understand statistical mechanics, which does describe the partition of microstates in a gas by a probability distribution.

[sol invictus]

Mijo: are smoke detectors random?

Yes or no?

[mijopaalmc]

Mijo: are smoke detectors random?

Yes or no?

There overall operation is orderly, but the underlying mechanism of operation is random.

Note: "Orderly" is not the same as "non-random". Very simple random systems (e.g., coin tosses or dice rolls) have long-term orderly behavior (e.g., head or tails half the time or each number one sixth of the time). I am fine with calling evolution by natural selection an orderly process (if that increases understanding), but I think that calling it non-random is fraught with just as many (if not more) problems as calling it random, because its underlying mechanism is random.

[articulett]

Shoot... he asked for a peer review article in his last inane thread... and even that, didn't change his mind. He thinks he's smarter than peer reviewed scientists... even though he can't fathom why there's such "discontinuity" in the fossil record (nor does he show any interest in any current information on the topic... nor on evolution.)

[sol invictus]

There overall operation is orderly, but the underlying mechanism of operation is random.

Note: "Orderly" is not the same as "non-random". Very simple random systems (e.g., coin tosses or dice rolls) have long-term orderly behavior (e.g., head or tails half the time or each number one sixth of the time). I am fine with calling evolution by natural selection an orderly process (if that increases understanding), but I think that calling it non-random is fraught with just as many (if not more) problems as calling it random, because its underlying mechanism is random.

YES or NO?

[articulett]

No, they're &*@^%ing not, for the umpteenth time. No one claims that it is a deterministic system, unless everything in the natural world is deterministic.

We are claiming that random doesn't apply to "evolution" for the same @#&$*@&% reason that gas laws and smoke detectors are not random.

Stop looking at the @#$%*&#*& molecules and look at the system, for chrissakes. That is where you find 'evolution', not in the organisms themselves. They do all the living and dying. They are not evolution. Evolution is the friggin' abstraction created by our brains to describe what happens when they do all the living and dying.

That process occurs through many random changes that accumulate over time to produce CHANGE that appears directed. It doesn't matter that all the gas molecules flit about randomly -- insert rabbits and trilobytes here -- Boyle's law is still Boyle's law. And the smoke detector at my mother-in-law's house still blares away strangely every friggin' time I visit and blow smoke up at it.

You blow smoke at it?

See Mijo, now you've gone and pissed of Ich... one of our calmest members and a long time advocate defending you against my "harsh" accusations of being a creationist. You really ought to at least pretend to hear what other people say on occasion. I guarantee that everyone here finds Ich more intelligent and comprehensible than you... no doubt, better educated. And he's a hell of lot more patient than I could be.

[mijopaalmc]

YES or NO?

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection. Mutation and natural selection (or radioactive decay) are both random because they operate on probabilities, but they lead to the ordrely adaptations that we see in evolution by natural selection (or the function of a smoke detector).

What is you're problem with that description?

[Walter Wayne]

I can summarize this entire thread in a single sentence:

Evolution is randommijo.

Next thread: can anyone think of anything that isn't randommijo? Does anyone care?
I would hope that the summary would go farther than that. The article about sunflowers that evolved in parallel, the article about species adapting to cold temperatures, but in different ways that affect how well they can handle higher temps, the (admittedly short) discussion of whether complexity is a real trend or not ...

Sometimes even a boring sports match has a few highlights.

Walt

Edited to add: as good a forum as this can be for discussion, one strike against is the obstacle of sometimes discussing around other people.

[sol invictus]

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection.

:dl:


Are we done now?

[mijopaalmc]

Are we done now?

Not really, because the terminology "non-random" is an inaccurate description of evolution by natural selection. The individual events of evolution are governed by probability, which over many repetitions leads to the orderly development of adaptations. In other words, its order proceeds directly from its randomness, not some underlying deterministic framework.

[zosima]

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection. Mutation and natural selection (or radioactive decay) are both random because they operate on probabilities, but they lead to the ordrely adaptations that we see in evolution by natural selection (or the function of a smoke detector).

What is you're problem with that description?

I think thats probably as good as we're going to get and its pretty close to the initial claim "that we could replace random with indifferent". I would say I accept that description, although I would word it differently. And that we'll just have to agree to disagree on the more fundamental issues. I would hope we understand each other's arguments thoroughly, whether we agree or not.

What does everyone else think about that?


Not really, because the terminology "non-random" is an inaccurate description of evolution by natural selection. The individual events of evolution are governed by probability, which over many repetitions leads to the orderly development of adaptations. In other words, its order proceeds directly from its randomness, not some underlying deterministic framework.


Yes,yes mijo all physical phenomena are random. All those silly people who thing otherwise are quantum tunneling through our seats right now.

It seems like this post is a step in the wrong direction...we may have passed our high point.

[articulett]

moreover, evolution proceeds whether there is "randomness" or not. You could tweak all the DNA on purpose... and we do... and let the environment select the winners-- evolution can occur without randomness... but it sure as hell can't occur without selection of the "winners" and the culling of the losers over time.

But Mijo disagrees with anything and every Dawkins says--he thinks he's smarter than him. He thinks he's smarter than you zosima. I suspect he is the only one with such an elevated opinion of his "description" of evolution.

[sol invictus]

Not really, because the terminology "non-random" is an inaccurate description of evolution by natural selection. The individual events of evolution are governed by probability, which over many repetitions leads to the orderly development of adaptations. In other words, its order proceeds directly from its randomness, not some underlying deterministic framework.

So you've changed your mind? You no longer believe that "evolution is random"?

You certainly insisted on it before.

That's OK - there's no shame in being wrong and changing your mind. On the contrary, really.

[mijopaalmc]

Yes,yes mijo all physical phenomena are random. All those silly people who thing otherwise are quantum tunneling through our seats right now.

It seems like this post is a step in the wrong direction...we may have passed our high point.

Why do you insist on repeating this tired old straw man?

While we may not be able to directly test evolution by natural selection as a stochastic process by plugging in identical initial conditions, we should be able to make testable predictions about what we should observe if we assume that evolution by natural selection is a stochastic process as opposed to what we should observe if we assume that evolution by natural selection is a deterministic process given the empirical distribution of phenotypes within a population.

[mijopaalmc]

So you've changed your mind? You no longer believe that "evolution is random"?

You certainly insisted on it before.

That's OK - there's no shame in being wrong and changing your mind. On the contrary, really.

Where did I give you the impression that I no longer think evolution is random?

Just as the random decay of a radionucleide can lead to the orderly and predictable operation of an ionization smoke detector, the random events of mutation and natural selection can lead to the orderly and predictable adaptations observed in evolution by natural selection. However, orderly and predictable behavior is not "non-random", because it is simply based on probability.

Basically, I support the emphasis on the orderliness and predictability of evolution by natural selection but object to its inaccurate labeling as "non-random".

[Walter Wayne]

Articulett, your selection they you mention is self referential. Winners are those who are selected, losers those who are culled. What's more evolution would occur without selection. If every organism reproduced, there would still be evolution. Organisms of this generation would be very different from the originals, because any mutation was "accepted". If you don't understand that then you don't understand the role of natural selection in the process.

All that is required for evolution to occur is a source of change. What Darwin and those who follow tell us, is why the evolution we see looks the way it does. The answer was descent with modification (heredity with mutation) and natural selection. Sure evolution proceeds whether the change is random or not. The question is, is it? And if it is, does natural selection "suppress" the random nature, to make it as reliable as, say, gas laws?

And since we are talking about valid uses in general, another question arises: Whether the change is random or not, is selection sufficiently complex and interlinked enough that the result is random in the various laymen's senses of the word.

Walt

[zosima]

moreover, evolution proceeds whether there is "randomness" or not. You could tweak all the DNA on purpose... and we do... and let the environment select the winners-- evolution can occur without randomness... but it sure as hell can't occur without selection of the "winners" and the culling of the losers over time.

But Mijo disagrees with anything and every Dawkins says--he thinks he's smarter than him. He thinks he's smarter than you zosima. I suspect he is the only one with such an elevated opinion of his "description" of evolution.

Okay, rather than agree to disagree, I guess we'll have to disagree to disagree. ;)

I could really care less what Mijo thinks about me. Maybe Mijo does have evolution right and I've got it wrong but he certainly needs to work a whole lot on his set set theory.* :p

*I seriously doubt I'm ever gonna let that one go, its rare you catch someone in such a solid contradiction. ie A claims B by C's authority. A claims C really knows what they're talking about. Upon close inspection C claims ~B....Ouch!


Why do you insist on repeating this tired old straw man?


The reason I trot out the strawman, is because If I haven't been made it clear several times in the last couple of posts, I'm not taking this too seriously anymore and I was hoping we could reach some sort of impasse, but.....you just can't seem to quit. Okay...once more into the breach...


While we may not be able to directly test evolution by natural selection as a stochastic process by plugging in identical initial conditions, we should be able to make testable predictions about what we should observe if we assume that evolution by natural selection is a stochastic process as opposed to what we should observe if we assume that evolution by natural selection is a deterministic process given the empirical distribution of phenotypes within a population.


Like what testable predictions? I think part of the reason that people find your position so unreasonable is because it is completely untestable. You've stated that you believe that if a system that appears deterministic has any stochastic components that you consider the system to be random. You've stated(on the basis of a false premise) that even if a probability distribution has two values P(1) = 1, P(2) = 0 that you continue that to be a random system. So what test could I possibly perform? What observation could I possibly make? The only system that you could even name that was non-random by your definition was a theoretical system. A system that had only one outcome by virtue of the fact that you defined any outcome in that system to be the same outcome. You haven't given any example in the real world. So another reason the old strawman gets trotted out is because you are talking about the same sorts of marginal probabilities. Your definition of random was so broad that even if I'm as certain as I am that I'm not going to fall through my chair, your definition would still count the support of my chair as random.

So have you reconsidered your position? Can you name a real world example of a deterministic system? Otherwise your definitions are so restrictive that there is no sense in having a discussion.

[zosima]

I would agree this is the central question.
And if it is, does natural selection "suppress" the random nature, to make it as reliable as, say, gas laws?


The answer:
Yes.

There is no need to "suppress" the "random nature" in the same way that there is no need for a gas to "suppress" its "random nature". Populations and species are predictable like gases because the scales at which their characteristics change is much larger and slower than that of their constituents. Most species live at least hundreds of thousands of years, most individual creatures in a species live or die based upon decisions made on the order of minutes to seconds. Most species have between millions and billions of members, at their peak, yet the random elements are individuals or even the genes of these individuals. When you look comparative numbers there is no other way to see it.

Conservatively species work on a scale that is a billion times larger than their components(a high end estimate is probably more like 10^15, true its no 10^23....but when your numbers are that big does it really matter? )

[DeiRenDopa]

I'm not entirely clear about the details of your situation. Why is there drift? Why do you presuppose that the species must bifurcate in a single direction? What causes the bifurcation?

To be clear:
I've really been taking two different tacks in my previous post a sort of strong determinism, based on punctuated equilibrium, and a weaker one.

Weak:
I guess it would depend on what is causing the drift. I would argue that directed drift does not occur spontaneously. When people talk about mutations being indifferent, they're essentially saying that in absence of selection the gene pool drifts in all directions(ie the standard distribution of the gene pool increases to the limits allowed by the niche, but the median stays fixed.) So if you postulate that the median of the gene pool is shifting, then I would assert that this is either because some external cause made it possible for the species to enter a new niche and the species adjusting to a new equilibrium or that some external selective pressure has been applied to the species in its current niche and this is causing the species to adjust to the new pressure.

Strong(which assumes everything the weak position does):
Punctuated equilibrium suggests that as far as our evidence is concerned, we don't see drift, we see discrete changes. So one species, pivotal event, new species. This may be because drift never occurs or it may be because the scales of evolution and our evidence is so many orders of magnitude larger than the time scale of genetic drift that it is highly improbable that we'll see a smooth continuum of transitions. Either way, this sort of drift is not significant to the theory of evolution. All that needs to be considered is the characteristics of a species at ecological equilibrium, just like the macroscopic study of a gas..
Thanks for this zosima.

I really shouldn't have jumped in; there is a lot in the earlier posts you wrote in this thread, and for us to avoid talking past each other would take some time and patience.

Anyway, as the thread now seems to be about something quite different, I shall take my leave.

[Dancing David]

Ballistics.

You, like sol invictus, are relying on uncertainty in the initial conditions to declare that my definition is meaningless. However, my point is that, in the case of a stochastic process, each possible value in the distribution of initial condition yields at least two distinct outcome, not just one, as would be the case with a deterministic system.

Ballistics like what?

If we say that it is an imaginary shell travelling through imaginary space to hit an imaginary target. (I am not using imaginary to be a put down, I mean it in the sense of a 'math space' where reality is not modeled except in a very limited fashion.)

The same factors which say ballistics is deterministic but that outcomes are varied are the same things which say that evolution is deterministic but varied.

The trajectory of a shell is not an exact field, especially as the barrel gets worn.

Celestial mechanics gets even worse.

[Belz...]

An equally interesting question is why you continue to deny that the definition I give is not a real definition

Funny, it appears in several dictionary

So IS IT or IS IT NOT a real definition ???

Again, this show that you do not understand the definition that I have given. In order for a event to exist its opposite must also exist

?? It's opposite ?

Look, calling evolution "random" is a simple statement that you can't simply take a phenotype and say that an individual possessing it is guaranteed to reproduce.

And again this means that everything is random. Can't you understand your own words ?

[Belz...]

No, you didn't actually read what I wrote or what I referred to (which seems to be a huge problem with those who argue that evolution is non-random.

When you get to the point where you think that everybody who disagrees with you does so because they don't understand you, you might start considering that it is you who cannot communicate properly.

A sure event (e.g., hitting the dart board universe) is deterministic

Since when am I sure to hit the dart board, to say nothing about a specific point of it, when throwing darts at it ?

An almost sure event (e.g., hitting a specific point or line the dart board universe) is random, because strictly more than one outcome exists.

How is that "almost sure" ?

As zosima illustrated, you are arbitrarily ignoring possibilities in order to make your example deterministic, but it makes no sense to do so. A probability of 0 is still a probability. Now, if you want to argue that the probability needs to be non-zero, then do so.

[Belz...]

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection.

Where did I give you the impression that I no longer think evolution is random?

:rolleyes:

[Dancing David]

Ichneumonwasp-

It is through the "living and dying" of the individuals within a population that evolution takes place. You have to understand how randomness gives rise to order in order to understand evolution.



Not really, living and dying is not the goal, reproction is, living long enough to reproduce is all it takes.

I am shocked you keep getting away from the, it is not surviavl of the fittest, it is continuation of the fit enough to reproduce. It is not living and dying, it is living enough to reproduce.

I am curious why, for someone who is so knowledable about evolution, you keep making those particular mis-statements of the theory of evoltion.

[Dancing David]

It seems like this post is a step in the wrong direction...we may have passed our high point.


Long, long ago in a galaxy far away.

[Ichneumonwasp]

Ichneumonwasp-

It is through the "living and dying" of the individuals within a population that evolution takes place. You have to understand how randomness gives rise to order in order to understand evolution.

Yes, that is what we've been trying to tell you. You keep asking us to show you the evidence that evolution is not random. That is the evidence. Evolution is an emergent property that arises from the random acts of living and dying in an incredibly complex system. Emergent properties are called 'emergent' because they differ from the individual properties of the underlying system. Evolution -- the emergent property -- is not-random because it doesn't make any sense to apply that term to it. It isn't random. It isn't non-random. "Random" and "chance" shouldn't even enter into discussion of the emergent property.


By the way macroscopic gas laws may be very good at describing the thermodynamics of a system but they are not do good at all for describing reaction kinetics. Thus, you can have a thermodynamically favorable reaction that takes place very slow and the microscopic gas laws will not explain the behavior of such a system very thoroughly. For such an explanation, you need to understand statistical mechanics, which does describe the partition of microstates in a gas by a probability distribution.

Of course, but that is not what the discussion concerns. You asked how anyone could call evolution non-random. We don't say that it is specifically non-random (again, neither term -- random/non-random properly applies), but that it simply is not random. When we describe the emergent property we should not apply these terms. We can easily apply them to the underlying processes that 'create' the emergent property, and they are useful at that level of description. No one claims that there is only one level of description, however. Random (or chaos) is quite a good word for describing the molecules that comprise a large volume of gas; and it is helpful in describing the struggle for existence. The mistake arises from applying the word 'evolution' to this lower level description -- the struggle for existence. The struggle for existence is a part of 'evolution' and part does not equal whole.

[Ichneumonwasp]

Not really, living and dying is not the goal, reproction is, living long enough to reproduce is all it takes.

I am shocked you keep getting away from the, it is not surviavl of the fittest, it is continuation of the fit enough to reproduce. It is not living and dying, it is living enough to reproduce.

I am curious why, for someone who is so knowledable about evolution, you keep making those particular mis-statements of the theory of evoltion.

DD, I introduced the term 'living and dying' for ease of discussion. We all know that what is really at stake is 's/he who leaves behind the most babies, who then leave behind the most babies", but it gets tiresome typing that over and over. I know that Mijo knows that -- he is not trying to slip one in on you as far as I can tell.

"Living and dying" should be understood as a proxy for ease of discussion only.

[Dancing David]

Not really, because the terminology "non-random" is an inaccurate description of evolution by natural selection. The individual events of evolution are governed by probability, which over many repetitions leads to the orderly development of adaptations. In other words, its order proceeds directly from its randomness, not some underlying deterministic framework.


How do you knwo that apparent order does not arise from deterministic processes?

Seriously. If the random gave rise to order, could it not be that variation gives rise to variation and that deterministc process, which effect an individual in a pseudo random fashion provide the constraint which creates the apparent order?

Take the Brownian motion of ions in a inter cellular fluid, the motion of the ions is randomly based, yet the function of an ion channel is deterministic.

Is it the random motion that creates the difference in ionization across the cell membrane or the deterministic function of the ion channel?

[sol invictus]

Where did I give you the impression that I no longer think evolution is random?

You just said so, mijo:

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection.

Change your mind again?

You see, you used to constantly repeat "evolution is random", and that's what started this whole stupid set of threads. Now you've gotten so twisted up in knots trying to avoid admitting you were wrong, that you've been reduced to saying "evolution is not non-random" - which I doubt anyone would bother to disagree with.

[Ichneumonwasp]

All that is required for evolution to occur is a source of change. What Darwin and those who follow tell us, is why the evolution we see looks the way it does. The answer was descent with modification (heredity with mutation) and natural selection. Sure evolution proceeds whether the change is random or not. The question is, is it? And if it is, does natural selection "suppress" the random nature, to make it as reliable as, say, gas laws?

Walt

No suppression necessary, and that seems an odd way of wording it. Gas laws describe an emergent property of the interaction of gas atoms/molecules. You cannot see 'pressure' in any one atom or in any single interaction. It is the mass interaction that allows the emergent property of 'pressure' to arise. That can be measured accurately and reliably.

The same is true for 'evolution'. The change in allele frequency over time is a function of variation and selection; there are plenty of mathematical formulas describing different systems and at least one general formula. Taffer has posted it several times. That change is an emergent property as is pressure.

[sol invictus]

The fact that evolution is random doesn't effect the fact that all life...

Tell us, mijo: do you still agree with that? Is evolution random?

YES or NO?

If you won't answer, you've changed your mind (which is quite OK).
If you say yes, we're going to have a great time with it (since then so are smoke detectors).
If you say no, the thread is over.

:p

[Walter Wayne]

The answer:
Yes.

There is no need to "suppress" the "random nature" in the same way that there is no need for a gas to "suppress" its "random nature". Populations and species are predictable like gases because the scales at which their characteristics change is much larger and slower than that of their constituents. Most species live at least hundreds of thousands of years, most individual creatures in a species live or die based upon decisions made on the order of minutes to seconds. Most species have between millions and billions of members, at their peak, yet the random elements are individuals or even the genes of these individuals. When you look comparative numbers there is no other way to see it.

Conservatively species work on a scale that is a billion times larger than their components(a high end estimate is probably more like 10^15, true its no 10^23....but when your numbers are that big does it really matter? )
It looks like you are mistakenly applying characteristics of a large number of independent trials to a process which has heredity as one of its major components.

Sure species may peak at millions or billions of numbers. Consider that humans are above 6 billion now, but are thought to have number less than 10 thousand less than 100 thousand years ago. We suspect this because of how little genetic variation we have. What happened to that small population is inherited by us.

The article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26lab.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=evolution+bacteria&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin) that Jimbob linked to actually gave us a nice example of randomness. When lines of bacteria were allowed to adapt to cold temperatures, two-thirds of them did worse when returned to high temperature. And one third did as well or better. In a competitive environment, the strains would have different advantages should the environment change again.

The mechanisms for short term randomness are there, and heredity will cause such changes to leave an imprint on future generations.

Walt

[Walter Wayne]

No suppression necessary, and that seems an odd way of wording it. Gas laws describe an emergent property of the interaction of gas atoms/molecules. You cannot see 'pressure' in any one atom or in any single interaction. It is the mass interaction that allows the emergent property of 'pressure' to arise. That can be measured accurately and reliably.

The same is true for 'evolution'. The change in allele frequency over time is a function of variation and selection; there are plenty of mathematical formulas describing different systems and at least one general formula. Taffer has posted it several times. That change is an emergent property as is pressure.Well the use of the term suppress was probably a bad choice. What I meant was that the random properties of the actions are not reflect at the macro level.

So in gas laws, why do the underlying interactions manifest at the macro level as pressure which is vary consistent. It is not just that it is a mass interaction, it is the nature of those interactions. Mainly that collisions with the container are for the most part independent with each other. There is no heredity in the system. If heredity existed, say that molecule container collisions were mostly likely to occur where the previous collision happened, the emergent property wouldn't be a nice even reliable pressure, but a series of knocks concentrated at certain points.

The properties of molecular motion that leads to "pressure" are not the same properties of the processes that constitute evolution.

Walt

[Ichneumonwasp]

The properties of molecular motion that leads to "pressure" are not the same properties of the processes that constitute evolution.

Walt

Oh, yes, of course not. But that does not mean that the analogy does not hold. Both are describable at higher levels of abstraction where the random elements 'wash out' allowing the mathematical descriptions. I just think we all get lost in the details because it is easy to see molecules as random but the system as ordered, while with evolution the random elements occur at so many different levels -- at the level of DNA and the level of organisms -- that we tend to lose sight of the fact that the 'system' is 'evolution as a whole'.

Natural selection pushes the random elements of variation into a skewed alignment -- which is one reason why we tend to see (overall) the emergence of more complexity (though, not always).

[Walter Wayne]

Oh, yes, of course not. But that does not mean that the analogy does not hold. Both are describable at higher levels of abstraction where the random elements 'wash out' allowing the mathematical descriptions. I just think we all get lost in the details because it is easy to see molecules as random but the system as ordered, while with evolution the random elements occur at so many different levels -- at the level of DNA and the level of organisms -- that we tend to lose sight of the fact that the 'system' is 'evolution as a whole'.

Natural selection pushes the random elements of variation into a skewed alignment -- which is one reason why we tend to see (overall) the emergence of more complexity (though, not always).When the property that leads to the predictable of pressure (memoryless system vs. a hereditary one) then the analogy most definitely doesn't hold. I mentioned to Paul previously why a large biased doesn't necessarily lead to the result you think in systems that do have memory. Even if it is unlikely that a species may "lose", it plays the survival game many times.

Walt

[Ichneumonwasp]

When the property that leads to the predictable of pressure (memoryless system vs. a hereditary one) then the analogy most definitely doesn't hold. I mentioned to Paul previously why a large biased doesn't necessarily lead to the result you think in systems that do have memory. Even if it is unlikely that a species may "lose", it plays the survival game many times.

Walt

But that is not the analogy. In a large container with many different species of gas molecules we do not describe where the argon is going to be in relation to the chlorine when using gas laws. The analogy concerns the fact that there will be a change in allele frequency over time (so the analogy is between the fact there there will be a change in allele frequency over time and pressure). That is what evolution is. Which alleles win and which lose is all part of the randomness of the system, with most of that randomness (at least the selection part) existing simply because of our ignorace. Now, the winners and losers are not completely random since we can make plenty of short-term predictions with excellent accuracy because we know more about the randomness in our macro environment than we do about gas molecules shifting about.

[zosima]

It looks like you are mistakenly applying characteristics of a large number of independent trials to a process which has heredity as one of its major components.

Sure species may peak at millions or billions of numbers. Consider that humans are above 6 billion now, but are thought to have number less than 10 thousand less than 100 thousand years ago. We suspect this because of how little genetic variation we have. What happened to that small population is inherited by us.

10^5 at minimum is still many times larger than the individual, but the argument was just supposed to be demonstrative. Scientists use orders of magnitude
to determine which level of explanation is significant and to help make general arguments about where to look. The argument doesn't exclude heredity, in fact it subsumes all lowerer levels of explanation. It just says changes in the species happen with much larger numbers and on much longer time scales than the individual, so insisting that we have to constantly consider the individual is being, at best, incorrigibly reductionist.


The article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26lab.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=evolution+bacteria&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin) that Jimbob linked to actually gave us a nice example of randomness. When lines of bacteria were allowed to adapt to cold temperatures, two-thirds of them did worse when returned to high temperature. And one third did as well or better. In a competitive environment, the strains would have different advantages should the environment change again.

The mechanisms for short term randomness are there, and heredity will cause such changes to leave an imprint on future generations.

Walt

Short term randomness, what, huh? The article completely makes my point.
Lets start with the title:
"Fast-Reproducing Microbes Provide a Window on Natural Selection"
Thats right, to see natural selection on the human scale we had to watch microbes for 40,000 generations(a strong argument that change might be on the order of 10^5) and run the experiment for 18 years!

The specific example you talk about wasn't natural and it wasn't random. It was the equivalent of taking the microbes from one ecological niche to another. In nature there would be nothing random about going from 68 degrees to 102 degrees(sadly it doesn't say if we're talking F or C here...real scientific). On the other hand if you contend that this sort of temperature change is the result of weather variation, then it would happen seasonally. Also, non random
Also you could even make the argument in individualistic terms. You talked using the language of the level of explanation we've been advocating. You were talking about external pressures causing predictable changes on different proportions of a large population.

Not to mention the fact that the article doesn't mention the word "random" once.
In fact...(emphasis added)

scientists can now zero in on the precise genetic changes that unfold during evolution

Microbes can reproduce several times a day, and a billion of them can fit comfortably in a flask.

One striking lesson of the experiment is that evolution often follows the same path. “We’ve found a lot of parallel changes,” Dr. Lenski said.

Billions of individuals, thousands of generations, precise changes, parallel paths.

The example you gave with the hot and cold is the example of an advantageous trait being linked to a disadvantageous, and you are conflating the fact that the result was unexpected and previous not understood with random. It is absolutely not random, if scientists were to study the specific gene and protein that conferred resistance I'm sure they would find that there is no way it could confer an advantage to one without a disadvantage to the other. This sort of thing is what they're talking about when these say precise changes and parallel paths and it is exactly the crux of the position we are defending.

Were you just hoping I wouldn't read the article? It seems like every time a random evolution advocate links a supposed piece of evidence for their case, it involves a very selective reading of an article that as a whole completely rebuts their point.

[zosima]

.
Thanks for this zosima.

I really shouldn't have jumped in; there is a lot in the earlier posts you wrote in this thread, and for us to avoid talking past each other would take some time and patience.

Anyway, as the thread now seems to be about something quite different, I shall take my leave.

No stress :)
Ya if you want to have a calm and enlightened discussion or evolution, this probably isn't the thread to do it. Everyones been lobbing artillery in this thread for at least the last 5 or 6 pages.

[mijopaalmc]

zosima-

The journal article (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/suppl_1/8649.pdf) referred to the in the article that jimbob posted does in fact give an excellent example of what those on this thread who argue that evolution is random mean when they use the word random. While there was a general trend toward increased fitness at the temperature for which the strains were adapted, the actual change in fitness for the adapted strains varied widely and, in two cases was not even statistically significant, even though each of the six replicate strains was adapted to the same environment. In other words, that the strains became better adapted to their environment is indisputable and shows the orderliness and in that people like to call "non-random", but how the strains adapted to their environment demonstrates the essential randomness of the specific adaptation.

[Belz...]

Mijo... if evolution were random there'd be no evolution.

[mijopaalmc]

Mijo... if evolution were random there'd be no evolution.

The article I just citd demostrates that evolution by natural selection is random in the way that I have defined it and that it does occur.

Again, evolution can occur even without natural selection, in other words, if it is "random" as in "equiprobable".

[Walter Wayne]

10^5 at minimum is still many times larger than the individual, but the argument was just supposed to be demonstrative. Scientists use orders of magnitude
to determine which level of explanation is significant and to help make general arguments about where to look. The argument doesn't exclude heredity, in fact it subsumes all lowerer levels of explanation. It just says changes in the species happen with much larger numbers and on much longer time scales than the individual, so insisting that we have to constantly consider the individual is being, at best, incorrigibly reductionist.
I not considering the individual, I am considering the fact that the variation in early generations will determine the bias in much later generations.

Short term randomness, what, huh? The article completely makes my point.
Lets start with the title:
"Fast-Reproducing Microbes Provide a Window on Natural Selection"
Thats right, to see natural selection on the human scale we had to watch microbes for 40,000 generations(a strong argument that change might be on the order of 10^5) and run the experiment for 18 years!
Um, you realize that is a number of tests, not one done over 18 years.
The specific example you talk about wasn't natural and it wasn't random. It was the equivalent of taking the microbes from one ecological niche to another. In nature there would be nothing random about going from 68 degrees to 102 degrees(sadly it doesn't say if we're talking F or C here...real scientific). On the other hand if you contend that this sort of temperature change is the result of weather variation, then it would happen seasonally. Also, non random
If a the evolution of the strain show random characteristics in a predictable environment, it would be even stronger support that in less predictable situations the results will be random as well.
Also you could even make the argument in individualistic terms. You talked using the language of the level of explanation we've been advocating. You were talking about external pressures causing predictable changes on different proportions of a large population.
I'm not sure what you are refering to when you say "make the argument in individualistic terms." Actually I'm not sure what the paragraph is getting at.
Not to mention the fact that the article doesn't mention the word "random" once.
No it doesn't, it mentions that among 18 different lines, 12 showed one pattern, and 6 showed another. Do they need the word in there explicitly?

In fact...(emphasis added)
[quotes from article]
Billions of individuals, thousands of generations, precise changes, parallel paths.

The term precise genetic change doesn't say anything about randomness or not. The fact that I can spot a deletion at location X, doesn't mean that the change is predictable. Nothing special about seeing the precise result after the change has happened. Then look at the language you quote after that. "Evolution [b]often[/n] follows the same path," and "we've found a lot of parallel changes." Not Evolution follows the same path, or we found only parallel changes. Both statements were qualified.

Now the words "often" and "a lot" does indicate that the probabilities are indeed skewed. In the experiment I outlined that skew was about 2:1. If you have been following my argument, you'll note I specifically discussed the accumulation of skewed probabilities over time. We are the accumulation of many, highly biased events. Even though each change might have a most likely outcome, the odds of them all happening are incredibly small.

...It is absolutely not random, if scientists were to study the specific gene and protein that conferred resistance I'm sure they would find that there is no way it could confer an advantage to one without a disadvantage to the other.[quote]The fact is the strains developed (at least) two different ways of dealing with the change. Some developed one protein that confered one characteristic, and others developped a different protein that confered a different characteristic. That is a perfect example of unpredictability of changes at the gene level manifesting as significant variation at the phenotype level.

[quote]Were you just hoping I wouldn't read the article? It seems like every time a random evolution advocate links a supposed piece of evidence for their case, it involves a very selective reading of an article that as a whole completely rebuts their point.No, I was hoping you would read that, and consider it in conjunction with my previous arguments and realise that the unpredictability, even with a 2:1 bias, might actually manifest as significant variation when looking at evolution of an ecosystem. I thought I had explained some of the properties of systems with memory (heredity) and how they differ from system without. Apparently not well enough.

As for selective reading - how one gets from only a 2:1 bias after "thousands of generations" as you say, to evidence of non-randomness, I don't know.

Walt

[mijopaalmc]

It is also interesting to not that the Bennett and Lenski article was published in the very same PNAS issue from which articulett draws the Ayala article that says "evolution is not random". Their findings directly contradicts Ayala's statements.

[Ichneumonwasp]

It is also interesting to not that the Bennett and Lenski article was published in the very same PNAS issue from which articulett draws the Ayala article that says "evolution is not random". Their findings directly contradicts Ayala's statements.

Haven't read them, but that sounds like it was very likely a conscious editorial choice. Good observation.

[mijopaalmc]

Ayala: Darwin's greatest discovery: Design without designer (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/suppl_1/8567.pdf)

Bennett and Lenski: An experimental test of evolutionary trade-offs during temperature adaptation (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/suppl_1/8649.pdf)

[Ichneumonwasp]

Ayala: Darwin's greatest discovery: Design without designer (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/suppl_1/8567.pdf)

Bennett and Lenski: An experimental test of evolutionary trade-offs during temperature adaptation (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/suppl_1/8649.pdf)

Thanks.

I don't see any direct contradiction there, though. They are discussing different systems and different ideas. Ayala uses the word 'random' in a way different from the way you do (but he is quite specific about his definitions, so I don't see any problem there), and he discusses general trends not specific examples as in the Bennett and Lenski paper.

[mijopaalmc]

It seems that Bennett and Lenski were also discussing general trends:

We used experimental evolution to test directly the important and commonplace evolutionary hypothesis that adaptation, increased fitness within the selective environment, is accompanied by trade-off, a loss of fitness in other nonselective environments. Specifically, we determined whether trade-offs at high temperature generally and necessarily accompany genetic adaptation to low temperature. We measured the relative fitness increment of 24 lineages of the bacterium Escherichia coli evolved for 2,000 generations at 20°C and the relative fitness decrement of these lines at 40°C. Trade-offs at the higher temperature were examined for their generality, universality, quantitative relationship, and historical contingency. Considering all 24 lines as a group, a significant decline in fitness was found at 40°C (mean decline = 9.4%), indicating the generality of the trade-off effect. However, in a lineage-by-lineage analysis, only 15 of 24 showed a significant trade-off, and one lineage increased fitness at high temperature. Thus, although general, trade-offs were not universal. Furthermore, there was no quantitative association between the magnitude of adaptive fitness increment at 20°C and fitness decline at 40°C, and no effect of lineages' historical thermal environment on either their improvement at 20°C or the extent of their trade-off at high temperature. We do not yet know the underlying mechanisms responsible for the trade-off, but they are sufficiently prevalent to drive a general effect. However, approximately one-third of the experimental lineages achieved low-temperature adaptation without detectable high-temperature trade-offs; therefore, it cannot be necessary that every change conferring benefit in cold environments has a negative effect on function in warmer environments.

[sol invictus]

The fact that evolution is random doesn't effect the fact that all life...

Tell us, mijo: do you still agree with that? Is evolution random?

YES or NO?

If you won't answer, you've changed your mind (which is OK, really).
If you say yes, we're going to have a great time with it (since then so are smoke detectors).
If you say no, the thread is over.

:p

So??

[mijopaalmc]

sol invictus-

I have answered your questions several time. I still believe that evolution by natural selection is random. However, evolution by natural selection displays predictability and regularity; that doesn't make it non-random.

[sol invictus]

I still believe that evolution by natural selection is random.

Thanks.

So according to mijo, smoke detectors are random.

That is obviously a ridiculous position to take. There is no point in conversing with you, since we clearly have no common ground for communication.

[sol invictus]

I asked: "are smoke detectors random?"

You answered:

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection.

Then I asked: "is evolution random?"

You answered:

I still believe that evolution by natural selection is random.

Change your mind much?

I'm getting dizzy trying to keep track of the convulsions you're going through in your attempts to appear to be not wrong. You're like a fish out of water, flipping and flopping from one position to the next with each post.

[cyborg]

I'm getting dizzy trying to keep track of the convulsions you're going through in your attempts to appear to be not wrong. You're like a fish out of water, flipping and flopping from one position to the next with each post.

Mijo's position is random.

[Ichneumonwasp]

It seems that Bennett and Lenski were also discussing general trends:

Please, let's stop equivocating so much over word meanings and word choices. Ayala discussed the grand trends in evolution and used the word random in a very different sense, which he defined nicely. His 'generality' was the generality of evolution as a whole, making sweeping statements and his emphasis was on natural selection and not variability. Big picture.

Bennett and Lenski discussed a particular type of adaptation that can be used as a general survival strategy to deal with different conditions (thermal in this case) and examined it all in terms of trade-offs. Their emphasis was on variability, which is vitally important in understanding evolution and evolutionary theory. Little picture.


There is no contradiction between the two. They wrote their papers for different purposes with different emphases and necessarily discussed issues in different ways. One is an editorial piece, the other primary research. Where is the problem?

[mijopaalmc]

Thanks.

So according to mijo, smoke detectors are random.

That is obviously a ridiculous position to take. There is no point in conversing with you, since we clearly have no common ground for communication.

Nice straw man. I didn't say that at all. You are simply being a troll and putting words in my mouth.

[mijopaalmc]

I asked: "are smoke detectors random?"

You answered:

You're not going to get a yes or no answer because it simply doesn't exist for the smoke detector or evolution by natural selection.

Then I asked: "is evolution random?"

You answered:

I still believe that evolution by natural selection is random.

Change your mind much?

I'm getting dizzy trying to keep track of the convulsions you're going through in your attempts to appear to be not wrong. You're like a fish out of water, flipping and flopping from one position to the next with each post.

What don't you understand about random processes' leading to orderly result not meaning the processes themselves are non-random?

[mijopaalmc]

Please, let's stop equivocating so much over word meanings and word choices. Ayala discussed the grand trends in evolution and used the word random in a very different sense, which he defined nicely. His 'generality' was the generality of evolution as a whole, making sweeping statements and his emphasis was on natural selection and not variability. Big picture.

Bennett and Lenski discussed a particular type of adaptation that can be used as a general survival strategy to deal with different conditions (thermal in this case) and examined it all in terms of trade-offs. Their emphasis was on variability, which is vitally important in understanding evolution and evolutionary theory. Little picture.

You don't seem to understand that Bennett and Lenski have demonstrated that the specific survival strategies adopted by different populations cause very different variations in fitness. This happen despite the populations being identical at the time of separation and the subsequent environment in which the six replicate population evolved after their separation being identical.

There is no contradiction between the two. They wrote their papers for different purposes with different emphases and necessarily discussed issues in different ways. One is an editorial piece, the other primary research. Where is the problem?

The editorial does not reflect the facts that are borne out in the primary research.

[Ichneumonwasp]

You don't seem to understand that Bennett and Lenski have demonstrated that the specific survival strategies adopted by different populations cause very different variations in fitness. This happen despite the populations being identical at the time of separation and the subsequent environment in which the six replicate population evolved after their separation being identical.

Oh really. I don't understand it, hmm? OK, so let's examine that. I specifically stated that they were looking at differences involving varibability and the effect on survival. Hmmmm, how do I not understand it?

What they showed was simply that there are trade-offs that certain organisms assume. Some might be highly adapted for warm conditions and put all their energy into that. Others might be highly adapt to cold conditions. Others will trade off and not grow as rapidly in either of those conditions but will assume other characteristics that allow them to survive in both. Now, they did not see a direct correlation between growth at low temp and high temp in all lines interestingly enough. Some of the strains that grew well in cold also grew well in the hotter environment, though most of them tanked in the heat. But the bottom line is that they were examining survival primarily based on variability -- that is the entire focus of that paper, to examine the variability inherent in that bacteria even when strains are selected for cold environments (because environments in this world change). They did not use very extreme conditions -- they could have grown the initial strains at even lower temperatures (if they could have gotten any to survive that low of a temp) and then put them into 60 C environments. This shows how adaptable E. coli is. Ooh, news flash.

Cut out the BS, Mijo, and deal with the real issues. This is a minor paper examining a small little slice of the evolutionary landscape. Stop looking at the molecules and stop accusing people of not understanding what is written in plain English.



The editorial does not reflect the facts that are borne out in the primary research.

It's discussing a completely different set of issues (although it clearly discusses variability as well), not a localized scenario. How do you fail to understand that?

[articulett]

and the only time randomness is mentioned in the paper he quotes is "in respect to trade offs"-- they're not saying evolution is random... they are still focusing on the "mutation" aspect. Mijo is all too adept at extracting the meaning he wants out of the words that are... and pretending that it's everyone else who doesn't understand the article.

I am fairly adept at reading scientific articles and understanding them... I cannot understand Mijo... I think he has the most bizarre interpretation of articles that I've ever seen and they are designed to support his need to believe that it makes sense to call evolution random.

Nobody, but creationists are calling evolution random...

No peer reviewed article is calling evolution random-- but mijo can do all sorts of semantic gymnastics to convince himself that is what they are really saying... --and per his loose definition of random... I guess that could be conceivable.

[Ichneumonwasp]

and the only time randomness is mentioned in the paper he quotes is "in respect to trade offs"-- they're not saying evolution is random... they are still focusing on the "mutation" aspect. Mijo is all too adept at extracting the meaning he wants out of the words that are... and pretending that it's everyone else who doesn't understand the article.

I am fairly adept at reading scientific articles and understanding them... I cannot understand Mijo... I think he has the most bizarre interpretation of articles that I've ever seen and they are designed to support his need to believe that it makes sense to call evolution random.

Nobody, but creationists are calling evolution random...

No peer reviewed article is calling evolution random-- but mijo can do all sorts of semantic gymnastics to convince himself that is what they are really saying... --and per his loose definition of random... I guess that could be conceivable.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think it might be time for me to bow out of this whole fiasco once again since it's beginning to look like the same **** different chapter.

Heck, I'm just repeating arguments that Schneibster, Cyborg, and Myriad originated months ago (and you probably tried before they even got involved). It's almost like these arguments work to quarantine the virus for a while, but once the topic drifts the slightest bit, the virus escapes and re-infects the system.

ETA:

But, before I go, I just gotta say to Sol Invictus -- great job. That smoke detector gambit is superb. Wish I'da thunk of that.

[zosima]

So mijo, I guess you're not willing to try to at least accept a reasonable definition of random? Did you miss that post? Essentially you're conceding that your definition is completely unrealistic. So let me say this, you're not willing to budge even when your evidence is shown to be in exact contradiction to your conclusion, you've demonstrated you don't understand the math behind the claims, you're demonstrated you don't have even basic science competency, and obviously have no understanding of evolution in specific. Really all you know is that you're sure, no matter what anyone says, that evolution is random.

zosima-

The journal article (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/suppl_1/8649.pdf) referred to the in the article that jimbob posted does in fact give an excellent example of what those on this thread who argue that evolution is random mean when they use the word random. While there was a general trend toward increased fitness at the temperature for which the strains were adapted, the actual change in fitness for the adapted strains varied widely and, in two cases was not even statistically significant, even though each of the six replicate strains was adapted to the same environment. In other words, that the strains became better adapted to their environment is indisputable and shows the orderliness and in that people like to call "non-random", but how the strains adapted to their environment demonstrates the essential randomness of the specific adaptation.

First let me say, as I mentioned above, this is one article and even this one article is terribly misinterpreted. We already have the quotes of the scientist who actually performed the experiment disproving your claims, but I guess you think you can interpret the study better than he can? I would trust his opinion and expertise in the field over your lack thereof, but if we're going to be interpreting this guy's data for him its not difficult to show that you don't know what you're talking about.

You assert that there is some random variable in this experiment, but if you read the experimental methods you would realize that the are lineages constructed in such a way as to maximize phylogenetic dissimilarity between them. The whole point of this guy's study was that he wanted to show that populations with a very different distribution of genes in the gene pool will adapt in the same way to a similar situation. While his evidence wasn't 100% conclusive the fact that he showed convergence of solution is very interesting. Put in terms that you can understand, many different lineages converged on only two different solutions. Different starting points, similar finishing points. This certainly doesn't support your conclusion that this is random.

Bennet and Lenski explain in their experimental methods that they separated the lines and diluted by a ratio of 1:100 in every single step. By the author's own words. this technique ensures

they have not shared a common ancestor for 4,000 generations and are
therefore phylogenetically separated from each other by 8,000
generations.


They took the variability that preexisted in the strain and maximized it for 24 different strains and yet the end behavior only demonstrated a handful of different responses. There is nothing random about this.

This just created greater variation between the different lineages, so some had more cold strong/hot weak and fewer cold strong/hot strong, while others had fewer stong/weak and more strong/strong. If we assume they only changed the distribution of genes and didn't completely eliminate some then given sufficient time all the populations would consist of strong/strong.

That said, we should also note that this is nothing like the natural world where you would never have a 1:100 dilution every day and I would assert that this non natural dilution step is the only random step in the whole process. In each line when they selected the single part that they were going to dilute they indubitably selected a part with a different distribution of genes for each line.

Plus the study admits they did not identify which genes contributed, so your assumption that a random mutation showed up over the course of the study by some sort of random mutation is dead wrong.

LET ME BE PERFECTLY CLEAR VARIATION DOES NOT EQUAL RANDOMNESS

I mean seriously if we took your ancestors and sol's ancestors 2000 years from now, I'd be very surprised if sol's ancestors didn't demonstrate better higher reasoning skills...but I can see why you'd be motivated to say that this was just dumb luck. (dumb luck, get it,ha ha ha)


I not considering the individual, I am considering the fact that the variation in early generations will determine the bias in much later generations.


Cool great, no one is arguing that this variation isn't as a result of mutations that are indifferent to the point of mutation, but given evolutionary time scales all the mutations will occur equally. In terms of survival of the population, the percentage of the population with a given gene that survives will exactly match the probability that any individual with the gene will survive. Both of these are examples of the law of large numbers. My argument from magnitude guarantees that the law of large numbers will apply. Thus the population dynamics in any generation and over time is determinate. I'm getting the feeling that all you random evo folks don't understand the law of large numbers very well.


Um, you realize that is a number of tests, not one done over 18 years.


Of course, but it took him 18 years of experimentation to get the rather modest result he has now. Its not like I didn't address the huge number of generations or the billions of microbes. If this is the best you've got you're really grasping at straws. That said we're already been over how the author completely disagrees with you and exactly what the flaws are in any hamhanded attempt to reinterpret his data for him.


I'm not sure what you are refering to when you say "make the argument in individualistic terms." Actually I'm not sure what the paragraph is getting at.

If you use the population level of explanation the law of large numbers applies and the system behaves deterministically, even within any single generation. You seem to claim that since there is inheritance that this somehow invalidates the result, but this would only be true if we were talking about a single individual. Heredity would only invalidate the law of large numbers if there were some sort of lateral heredity between individuals within a single generation, but this is nonsense, heredity is only passed down generations. This means that each generation is completely determined by the distribution of genes in the previous generation under influence of the environment. Do not conflate the complexity of prediction along large timescales with a random process, they are completely different.


No it doesn't, it mentions that among 18 different lines, 12 showed one pattern, and 6 showed another. Do they need the word in there explicitly?

Yes, again variation does not mean random as much as you would like it to.


The term precise genetic change doesn't say anything about randomness or not. The fact that I can spot a deletion at location X, doesn't mean that the change is predictable. Of course it does. A precise change is exactly the opposite of a random change. In the same way that you conflate randomness and prediction, now you conflate precision of change with identification of change.


Then look at the language you quote after that. "Evolution [b]often[/n] follows the same path," and "we've found a lot of parallel changes." Not Evolution follows the same path, or we found only parallel changes. Their statements directly contradict your own. Their claim of parallel evolution despite variation is actually a stronger statement than the one that I'm making, but the scientist's statement does strengthen my own.


Both statements were qualified.

Trying to claim the opposite of what a scientist claims because they had the integrity to qualify their statements is a classic woo behavior. At this point you might as well give up.


Now the words "often" and "a lot" does indicate that the probabilities are indeed skewed. In the experiment I outlined that skew was about 2:1. If you have been following my argument, you'll note I specifically discussed the accumulation of skewed probabilities over time. We are the accumulation of many, highly biased events.
To recap from above the billions of microbes means the law of large numbers applies to any specific generation(where heredity is not accumulated only; constant). The many generations means the law of large numbers applies across many generations.


Even though each change might have a most likely outcome, the odds of them all happening are incredibly small.

Again you conflate an unpredictable outcome with a random one.
It's true the numbers might not be exact, in one generation 101,546,734,634 microbes with a given phenotype might survive and in the next 101,546,734,635
might survive, but that is exactly the type of variation that does not accumulate. I challenge you to provide any natural scenario where the fate of an entire species is determined by a single probabilistic event.



The fact is the strains developed (at least) two different ways of dealing with the change. Some developed one protein that confered one characteristic, and others developped a different protein that confered a different characteristic. That is a perfect example of unpredictability of changes at the gene level manifesting as significant variation at the phenotype level.

Your mistake is to assume that these characteristics developed over the course of the experiment. All the experiment did was magnify variation(by diluting and splitting lines) then modify the distribution of genes in the lines(by applying hot and cold.) There is no reason to believe anything random occurred. There is a strong bias against believing this without evidence as well. The reason is that mutation is micro organisms occurs very very slowly. That is why life on earth is 4.5 billion years old, and Eukaryotic life is 1.2 billion years old.


No, I was hoping you would read that, and consider it in conjunction with my previous arguments and realise that the unpredictability, even with a 2:1 bias, might actually manifest as significant variation when looking at evolution of an ecosystem. I thought I had explained some of the properties of systems with memory (heredity) and how they differ from system without. Apparently not well enough.
I've already explained these mistakes, look above to understand why.


As for selective reading - how one gets from only a 2:1 bias after "thousands of generations" as you say, to evidence of non-randomness, I don't know.


You seem to imply the thousands of generations is small. When they say "generation" they mean a serial dilution generation, this is not the same as saying "I'm a 3rd generation immigrant." This means they take a random subset of the culture,dilute the medium, then regrow it until the population consumes all resources. So this is many many many generations. How could they possible know precisely how many replications a microbe goes through? If you had read carefully you could have inferred this from the fact that they use exact numbers. They explain the process in their experimental methods.

So,okey dokey, if you still think I'm making this up and the scientist who wrote the study is misinterpreting his evidence, I challenge you to answer my question.
Name a scenario whereby the fate of an entire species is dependent on a probabilistic event.

[zosima]

It is also interesting to not that the Bennett and Lenski article was published in the very same PNAS issue from which articulett draws the Ayala article that says "evolution is not random". Their findings directly contradicts Ayala's statements.

Read my response=> You don't know what you are talking about. The reason the reviewers in the field didn't see a problem with this is because they are not saying inconsistent things.

[sol invictus]

Nice straw man. I didn't say that at all. You are simply being a troll and putting words in my mouth.

If you're NOT saying that (which I can't tell, since you flipflop and change your position randomly with each post), and you ARE saying evolution is random, your position is even more ludicrous than it already was.

If that's possible.

[mijopaalmc]

If you're NOT saying that (which I can't tell, since you flipflop and change your position randomly with each post), and you ARE saying evolution is random, your position is even more ludicrous than it already was.

If that's possible.

Evolution by natural selection is an orderly process that arises out of the random events of mutation and natural selection. There is nothing non-random about these events, but many repetitions lead tot he emergence of a pattern.

This is what I have always said about evolution by natural selection.

What is so hard to understand about that?

[zosima]

Evolution by natural selection is an orderly process that arises out of the random events of mutation and natural selection. There is nothing non-random about these events, but many repetitions lead tot he emergence of a pattern.

This is what I have always said about evolution by natural selection.

What is so hard to understand about that?

I'm absolutely convinced that is as good as things will get. At least we've learned something.

At any rate, I'm going to take a break from this thread for a while(maybe it will just die).

If anyone has any other questions, I'm sure they can just play choose their own adventure with the available supply of posts.

:)

p.s. Mijo as much as I think you're missing something fundamental, I apologize if I stepped over any lines with any ad hominems.

[Belz...]

The article I just citd demostrates that evolution by natural selection is random in the way that I have defined it and that it does occur.

Of course, since the way you define it makes everything random, presumably unless there is only one possible outcome. This makes pretty much everything random, still.

Again, evolution can occur even without natural selection, in other words, if it is "random" as in "equiprobable".

I didn't mention selection. If evolution was "random", then there'd be no direction to it. How could you call it "evolution", then, since there'd be no way to distinguish how things change over time ?

[Belz...]

Nice straw man. I didn't say that at all. You are simply being a troll and putting words in my mouth.

Or maybe you simply don't understand the implication of your words.

[Belz...]

Evolution by natural selection is an orderly process that arises out of the random events of mutation and natural selection. There is nothing non-random about these events, but many repetitions lead tot he emergence of a pattern.

So you're saying that there is NOTHING non-random about selection ? Selection is random ?

That's odd, because environmental pressures DO seem to drive evolution in very definite directions.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You most certainly did. Perhaps you should go back read more of my posts, starting with these:
I read those posts. I agree that evolution is a stochastic process. What I said was that I don't remember seeing your full description of evolution, so that we can tell what the hell you're on about.

You know, Mijo, when we say we don't understand what you're on about, it's because we don't understand.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Articulett, your selection they you mention is self referential. Winners are those who are selected, losers those who are culled. What's more evolution would occur without selection. If every organism reproduced, there would still be evolution. Organisms of this generation would be very different from the originals, because any mutation was "accepted". If you don't understand that then you don't understand the role of natural selection in the process.
If every organism reproduced ... statistically equally? I can't conceive of what the world would be like in that situation, but I'm not sure you would call it evolution.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

So you're saying that there is NOTHING non-random about selection ? Selection is random ?
If we insist on using the word random for every process except those that are 100% deterministic, then yes.

Do you find that confusing?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Evolution by natural selection is an orderly process that arises out of the random events of mutation and natural selection. There is nothing non-random about these events, but many repetitions lead tot he emergence of a pattern.
Would you be adverse to adding:

The pattern is statistically dependent on the inherited traits and the current environment.

If so, I think we can agree. Well, except that "nothing non-random" is misleading.

~~ Paul

[Belz...]

If we insist on using the word random for every process except those that are 100% deterministic, then yes.

Do you find that confusing?

No, just useless.

Random and deterministic need to mean something different, but they don't by Mijo's def.

[Wowbagger]

I'd like to thank all participants in making this my most popular thread, ever! :clap:

[mijopaalmc]

I'd like to thank all participants in making this my most popular thread, ever! :clap:

Well you certainly seem to know how to pick topics that spark lively debate, even if no-one concedes in the end. :D

[zosima]

Well you certainly seem to know how to pick topics that spark lively debate, even if no-one concedes in the end. :D

Think about it Mijo, you could concede, just ironically, and this debate would come to an end. You could bring a sense of resolution to literally 10s of lives!

lol
:p

[articulett]

But then, that would ruin my prediction that Mijo must have the last word on this topic so that he can win the conversation in his head.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

So Mijo, would you be adverse to adding:

The pattern is statistically dependent on the inherited traits and the current environment.


~~ Paul

[mijopaalmc]

So Mijo, would you be adverse to adding:

The pattern is statistically dependent on the inherited traits and the current environment.

I believe I have said something like that before, although it is a very vague recollection. However, statistical dependence (or conditioning) does not imply nonrandomness.

[zosima]

I believe I have said something like that before, although it is a very vague recollection. However, statistical dependence (or conditioning) does not imply nonrandomness.

I think we can resolve this right now. I think most of us just think of random in a slightly different way. For example random in the context of computer science is most often defined as, uniformly distributed, uncorrelated, and unpredictable*. That ends up corresponding to an unbiased coin flip. It seems like your definition of random doesn't include the idea of uniformity. In fact, it allows probability distributions that are very skewed to be accepted as random under the definition. This would correspond more to a biased coin. The problem I think people have with the latter definition is that large skews undermine the idea of unpredictability. For example if a coin is heads 9/10 of the time and tails 1/10 of the time, I can predict fairly accurately that the coin will come up heads.

Could we agree that if we were to use the first definition then the path of evolution wouldn't be random? Even though you don't agree with that definition? But under the second definition the path of evolution would be random? Even though most of us don't agree with that definition?

In either case, no one is saying that the path of evolution is 100% deterministic. However,there seems to be a sub-argument about how skewed the probability distribution in evolution is. Some people, including myself, would assert that evolution is very close to deterministic, maybe skewed so that one outcome will be favored over another 99% or more of the time while all other outcomes will fall into that less than 1%, but thats not actually *that* central to the question of whether we call it random or not. I think what is central is whether you accept the first definition or the second.

*Whether unpredictable follows from the first two premises, or is necessary in its own right, is a matter of some dispute, and seems to follow from how you define correlation.

[mijopaalmc]

zosima-

I have already agreed several time that evolution by natural selection is non-random in so far as it is biased, correlated and predictable. The problem is that statistical hypothesis testing (even in maximum parsimony methods, especially when the number of taxa is above 8) used in evolutionary biology has a much wider usage of random that the aforementioned one, and it is therefore inconsistent to state that evolution by natural selection is non-random while making the assumptions of randomness necessary to perform any number of statistical hypothesis tests.

[zosima]

Question:
Could we agree that if we were to use the first definition then the path of evolution wouldn't be random? Even though you don't agree with that definition? But under the second definition the path of evolution would be random? Even though most of us don't agree with that definition?

Answer:
zosima-

I have already agreed several time that evolution by natural selection is non-random in so far as it is biased, correlated and predictable. The problem is that statistical hypothesis testing (even in maximum parsimony methods, especially when the number of taxa is above 8) used in evolutionary biology has a much wider usage of random that the aforementioned one, and it is therefore inconsistent to state that evolution by natural selection is non-random while making the assumptions of randomness necessary to perform any number of statistical hypothesis tests.

I'm confused, is that a yes? Or is that a no? And could you elaborate on your point wrt, statistical hypothesis testing? 'Cause if you mentioned it before you haven't really emphasized it.

[mijopaalmc]

Again, I agree that using the definition of "random" as "equiprobable" makes evolution by natural selection non-random.

I disagree I agree that using the definition of "random" as "equiprobable" is consistent with all the statistical assumptions that evolutionary biologists make to demonstrate evolution.

[zosima]

Again, I agree that using the definition of "random" as "equiprobable" makes evolution by natural selection non-random.

I disagree I agree that using the definition of "random" as "equiprobable" is consistent with all the statistical assumptions that evolutionary biologists make to demonstrate evolution.

Cool beans,That seems like a good compromise to me. I'm not sure what you mean about the statistical assumptions that evolutionary biologists make. I don't really understand the claim you're making and it seems like a slightly different tack than you've taken previously. So can you elaborate?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I believe I have said something like that before, although it is a very vague recollection. However, statistical dependence (or conditioning) does not imply nonrandomness.
Agreed. However, the more skewed the probabilities, the more I think we're obliged to explain "evolution is random" in greater detail, so people understand in what way it is random. A die with a weight on the 4 side is not a "random die" in the sense that most people understand it.

Calling every naturalistic process "a stochastic process" does not reveal the true complexity of nature, even though it is true.

~~ Paul

[mijopaalmc]

Agreed. However, the more skewed the probabilities, the more I think we're obliged to explain "evolution is random" in greater detail, so people understand in what way it is random. A die with a weight on the 4 side is not a "random die" in the sense that most people understand it.

First off, bias is not the same thing as statistical dependence. Each roll of a weighted dies is independent of the rolls that come before and after it. The sum of a series of rolls of the same weighted die is dependent of the rolls that preceded it.

Second, I don't think the skew of the probabilities necessitate any longer an explanation than that of unskewed probabilities. For instance most people understand that, even though the probability of heads tossing a fair coin does not result in getting an exact 1:1 heads to tails ratio but that it is far more likely that the ratio will be between 1:.8 and 1:1.2 than it is to be between 1:.6 and 1:.8 or 1:1.2 and 1:1.4. Furthermore, they also understand that, as the number of tosses increases, it becomes more and more likely that the ratio will be between 1:.8 and 1:1.2 and less and less likely that it will be between 1:.6 and 1:.8 or 1:1.2 and 1:1.4. Thus the equidistribution of event probabilities does not guarantee the equidistribution of probabilities for the entire process.

Calling every naturalistic process "a stochastic process" does not reveal the true complexity of nature, even though it is true.

How does making a statement that, even if you can't be certain of every detail of a system, you can still describe it long-term orderly behavior not "reveal the true complexity of nature"?

[zosima]

The sum of a series of rolls of the same weighted die is dependent of the rolls that preceded it.


I'm confused as to what you're saying here. Are you saying we can't know the sum of a series of die rolls without knowing the outcome of each specific roll?
This seems trivially true. For sure we can determine the probability distribution of the sum of a series of rolls(weighted or unweighted).


How does making a statement that, even if you can't be certain of every detail of a system, you can still describe it long-term orderly behavior not "reveal the true complexity of nature"?
As with the previous statement, the idea that we can't be certain of every detail of any natural system is trivially true. I think people feel it is a poor way to phrase things because it is misleading. Particularly because on the level of description that is typically used in evolution many of those details we can't be sure of smear out. Do you understand why people feel this is a misleading statement?
For example the sum of a large number of weighted or unweighted die rolls is going to tend toward the expected value of those rolls times the number of rolls.
If we only care about the accuracy within say +-10% then we should be able to say what that sum is going to be with a very high confidence. This is often the case with the level of description in evolution. We can say with high confidence what the behavior of the variables we care about is going to be and the details we don't care about are inconsequential.

Also, you never clarified what you meant by "consistent with all the statistical assumptions that evolutionary biologists make to demonstrate evolution."
I still don't understand, what was the reasoning behind this statement? Did you miss my question or are you ignoring it? I meant it in earnest. It seems like you claimed that evolutionary biologists were making some major mistake but then failed to provide any reasoning for the assertion.

[mijopaalmc]

I'm confused as to what you're saying here. Are you saying we can't know the sum of a series of die rolls without knowing the outcome of each specific roll?
This seems trivially true. For sure we can determine the probability distribution of the sum of a series of rolls(weighted or unweighted).

For being such a trivial (or simple) truth, it sure has made people a lot of money in, for example, craps.

As with the previous statement, the idea that we can't be certain of every detail of any natural system is trivially true. I think people feel it is a poor way to phrase things because it is misleading. Particularly because on the level of description that is typically used in evolution many of those details we can't be sure of smear out. Do you understand why people feel this is a misleading statement?
For example the sum of a large number of weighted or unweighted die rolls is going to tend toward the expected value of those rolls times the number of rolls.
If we only care about the accuracy within say +-10% then we should be able to say what that sum is going to be with a very high confidence. This is often the case with the level of description in evolution. We can say with high confidence what the behavior of the variables we care about is going to be and the details we don't care about are inconsequential.

Also, you never clarified what you meant by "consistent with all the statistical assumptions that evolutionary biologists make to demonstrate evolution."
I still don't understand, what was the reasoning behind this statement? Did you miss my question or are you ignoring it? I meant it in earnest. It seems like you claimed that evolutionary biologists were making some major mistake but then failed to provide any reasoning for the assertion.

You have just summarized the essence of a statistical statement; you can say with a certain level of confidence, but not complete confidence, that a statement is true. This is the basis for all statistical tests (including those used by evolutionary biologists to confirm their hypotheses); a test statistic is generated for sample data and the compared to a distribution of test statistics to determine whether the differences within or among samples are dues to the inherent variability of the sample or due to fact that the samples really are different.

[zosima]

....

You ignored all my questions.
In lieu of answers, I assume:
1. You don't understand what anyone here is talking about.
2. That your claim about the use of statistics in evolutionary biology is made up and without merit.
3. That you are ignoring my questions about your claim because it is easier than admitting you made it up.

If you choose to correct my assumptions, I would appreciate it. Otherwise, I can sleep happy knowing this issue is settled.

[mijopaalmc]

You ignored all my questions.
In lieu of answers, I assume:
1. You don't understand what anyone here is talking about.
2. That your claim about the use of statistics in evolutionary biology is made up and without merit.
3. That you are ignoring my questions about your claim because it is easier than admitting you made it up.

If you choose to correct my assumptions, I would appreciate it. Otherwise, I can sleep happy knowing this issue is settled.

And you have ignored that I actually did answer your questions. Your assumption are therefore an reflection of your own unwillingness to attempt to understand.