Re your post here:
- If you came across a table on which was set 500 coins (no tossing involved) and all 500 coins displayed the “heads” side of the coin, how on earth would you test “chance” as a hypothesis to explain this particular configuration of coins on a table?
Even if the observer was not party to the information that there was “no tossing involved”?
The reason I ask, is that you seem to have revealed an conceptual error that IMO bedevils much discussion about evolution as an explanation for the complexity of life.
Chance is not an explanation, and therefore cannot be rejected, or supported, as a hypothesis.
Some explanatory hypotheses are stochastic, meaning that they invoke a mechanism that is indeterminate in some way. One such hypothesis might be “fair coins were fairly tossed”, where “tossing” is itself a stochastic process with a known probability distribution – but we can reject this hypothesis in this case, either because we know, a priori, that there was “no tossing involved”, or because the pattern is vanishingly unlikely under the hypothesis of “fair coins, fairly tossed”.
This is not because we “reject chance as a hypothesis” but because, under the null hypothesis of “fair coins, fairly tossed”, there is a very small chance aka probability that they would all land heads.
So can we please jettison this canard that “Darwinists” propose chance either as as an explanation for the complexity of life, or even as the explanation for an unfeasibly long string of tossed heads?
Statistics is all about chance and chance is crucial to hypothesis testing, but it is never an explanatory hypothesis. In fact, it’s to what we attribute the portion of the variance of the data our model does not predict. It is also intrinsic to the probability distributions we propose for our data both under our null and under our study hypothesis.
And it is also crucial to the concept of sampling: if sample data as, or more, extreme than our data are very unlikely i.e. have a very slim chance, under our null we can reject our null.
But chance itself explains nothing. It is the exact reverse: Chance is what we call the part of our data we can’t explain.
What we can use to explain our data are processes with a specific probability distribution, whether those processes are intelligent, intentional, or the results of physical and chemical interactions. The more complex the processes (e.g the forces acting on a spinning, arcing coin), the greater the combinatorial possibilities, and so the the greater the spread of the probability distribution.
And if I say “I met so-and-so by chance yesterday”, in no sense do I mean that either of us was acting in a non-intentional, or non-intelligent manner (though we might have been). All we mean is that we did not predict that our intentions would result in our meeting. What caused that meeting was a highly complex multiplicity of events and processes, many of them intelligent and intentional.
What was chance about our encounter was not its cause but its unpredictability.
Or, analogously:
If “thinking like scientists” means “avoiding the obvious in service of a materialist ideological commitment”, then otay. Meaning, there might well be a non-agency explanation for lightning, but in the world of sane people, the non-agency explanation is not the go-to explanation, and you really don’t spend a lot of time attempting to find a non-agency answer unless you are curious.
Poor old Murray. Can change the world with his mind-powers, still has to put his pants on one leg at a time.
I have no problem with the idea of seeking, or seeking to reject, a “non-agency” answer.. The issue I raise in this post is nothing to do with agency, but with the fallacy positing “chance” as a causal hypothesis, and attempting to reject it as the null.
This is the point IDists repeatedly miss, and this apparently includes you!
This is simply false, William. Scientists willingly seek “non-agency” explanations for exactly the same reasons as IDists do – i.e. if agency seems like a better explanation than some other explanation. But “chance” does not mean “not the result of an intentional agent” – usually, when we toss coins, we do so intentionally. Similarly, we might find an expanse of well-sorted pebbles on the beach (not the result of an intentional agent) and intentionally mix them up. In fact we can often tell that an intentional agent has been around, because we find a random arrangement where non-intentional causes would tend to produced a systematic one. Intentional agents frequently mess things up.
No, they don’t. For a start, the coin analogy is an appalling one because tossed coins are tossed by intentional agents.
You (and Barry) are attempting to make a general rule where none exists. Scientists, like IDists, would in general seek an intentional agent as the cause of any coin arrangement because the only usual coin arrangers are intelligent agents, and one of the things they do with coins is toss them.
The reason scientists reject intelligent agent as the cause of interesting patterns in nature has nothing to do with not wanting to find intelligence agency and everything to do with having no evidence for such an agent, and plenty of evidence for highly ordered arrangements that arise from non-intelligent processes.
Nobody is denying the obvious here. Clearly, a table top full of coins heads-up was not the result of an intelligent agent tossing coins. It was probably the result of an intelligent agent laying them heads-up on the table.
This is a straw man. But it’s not the straw man I am tackling in this OP – in the OP I am tackling an even more egregious straw man, namely that “chance” can ever be tested as an explanatory hypothesis. When we take the coin problem we are not testing “chance” vs “intelligent agent” we are testing “intelligent agent tossing coins” vs “intelligent agent laying them down face up”. And if all the coins are face up, clearly the latter is the more likely (but not the only) explanation.
nor would any scientist have any such trouble. You are defaming all scientists here, William.
“Such configurations”? So is a beach in which the pebbles are exquisitely sorted in size over 18 miles from pea size at one end to football sized at the other “obviously the product of deliberate intervention”? And if you find a patch of that beach where the sorting has gone awry, what quality of that patch would you ascribe to “natural” agency, and can you see why you would be probably wrong?
This is a dead horse that really needs to stop being beaten. Non-intelligent processes can produce both exquisite order and incomprehensible chaos. So ca can intelligent processes. “Configurations” are an extremely poor guide to whether an intelligent agent was involved. A far better guide is whether you can find any trace of an intelligent agent doing the configuring.
And they are wrong. Of course highly ordered and highly complex configurations exist, as do highly disordered and extremely simple configurations. Nobody disputes this – indeed many scientists devote their careers to investigating such configurations and what causes them.
Where IDists have a totally fallacious bee in their bonnets is in thinking that the configuration is an indication of intentional intelligent agency. They aren’t. If you want to detect intentional intelligent agency, you have to do a lot better than squint at the configuration and say “that looks designed”. You have to find out how the configuration actually came about, and whether there is any evidence that it was configured intentionally.
Lizzie,
Bravo, bravo.
WJM,
Earth, as many UDers seem to believe, is such a unique planet (1 in a Universe) that the odds indicate it must have been intelligently design. Yet many OECs, like those at UD, have no theological or scientific problem with natural forces – without the aid of divine intervention – bringing about our privileged planet.
Do you have any insights to explain these contradictory beliefs? And if you don’t mind answering, what do you believe is the best explanation for our planet’s origin?
Right. “Alone” is not there. That post of Barry’s was so incoherent it’s like a tarot card. What they think it means depends on what they bring to the reading. IDists are falling all over each other claiming they have the “obvious” interpretation, the only “sane” interpretation … but they all have to bring in words/concepts that weren’t in the original. If not, the original remains incoherent.
William J. Murray,
Since we seem not to be really talking about coins at all, but about some assumed ‘improbable’ multi-state configuration in nature, then it is entirely appropriate to consider alternative explanations. The ‘coin’ picture becomes a test ground for approaches to a question, and the fact that person-or-persons-unknown is the likeliest explanation in that case does not make it the likeliest in any other, nor invalidate the consideration of other explanations (a useful intellectual exercise, at the very least).
If you had a room and there were coins on a table in a configuration you decide is most likely produced by an agency, then yeah, an agency is the likeliest explanation there. Big Fat Hairy Deal.
But this is all-about-ID. We know a bait and switch when we see one.
Clearly, it was never only about coins on a table, even as posed (or, it’s the dullest question ever). My guess is it’s going to be about chirality, and that’s something you can’t import your coins-and-agents intuition about. Other causes matter, is the point people are trying to get across. What those other causes can be depends on the properties of the objects you are considering, and the way they interact with each other and their environment. Something you can’t get at with simplistic ‘it’s-obvious-or-you’re-nuts’ posturing.
That’s where you get into trouble, when you dodge and weave and obfuscate because of where you believe the point is going. If an argument moves from coins (where you should admit that the best explanation is ID) to something else, then it is up to you to then make the case that what is acceptable for the coins is not acceptable elsewhere.
IMO, the only point Mr. Arrington was attempting to make in this particular thread (where he calls out Nick) had nothing to do with ID whatsoever, but rather the intransigent refusal of anti-ID advocates to admit to even the trivially true and obvious because of where they fear it might lead. A point you just validated.
No, I have no insights. I have no particular beliefs about the origin of the planet.
William J. Murray,
No, that’s not solely what has been proferred as alternatives. The coins fell as minted was my suggestion; there have been numerous others.
Why so grumpy ‘cos we’re not playing the game by your rules? Give people an opportunity to indulge a little lateral thinking and, if they have a certain intellectual bent, they will grab it both-fisted. Restrict the conditions so that nothing but agency remains, then the question becomes trivial. Leave some latitude, and people will explore it. It is interesting only for the presence of alternatives, even while nobody pretends they are the MOST likely if you draw the scenario tightly enough to ensure that.
My post was about general cases, about situations NOT involving human artefacts like tables and coins and potential shadowy figures, yet your response reads as if you read me as insisting that even with coins-in-rooms I prefer to avoid agency if I can. Which is preposterous; of course I don’t. ‘We’ are all treating the coins-in-rooms as a metaphor for things that don’t involve coins in rooms, and hence introduce the exploration of possibilities as germane to the questions for which this is but a metaphor. Are you are saying this is only about coins in rooms, and we’re being silly?
The only straw men here are the ones you and others erect by imagining what point Mr. Arrington is going to try to make in the future.
I believe you’ve said exactly the opposite on this site before, that some configurations or matter are recognizable as the product of ID (a battleship, for example, orabandonedf architecture on an otherwise desolate planet humans have never been to) and there might be some way to scientifically distinguish some of them as such (even if current ID metrics are problematic).
Should I start scouring where you said this on this site?
Actually, everyone here is. The answer to Mr. Arrington’s question is obvious; it is only by imagining what future point he may try to make that the answer becomes obfuscated. The answer is: the best explanation for the coin arrangement is ID. Any other aswer is denying the obvious to protect against some potential future point.
William J. Murray,
Of course not. 500 bits has no significance whatsoever to ID. Nor do agency or ‘best explanation’. None.
What do we fear? You keep saying this, but never back it up. How do YOU manage to avoid the horrors associated with such an admission?
I have no particular beliefs about the origin of the planet.
Does that mean you do not believe that the Earth must be an incredibly rare kind of planet, and that those who have calculated the seemingly impossible odds for its existence may in fact be wrong? If so, how can you be dogmatic about ID in regards to life’s evolution and yet be agnostic in regards to life’s home?
No, I’m pretty sure that if you want to apply a conclusion from one type of object to another very different type of object, it’s up to you to make the case that the conclusion has any validity there at all. There are an endless number of analogies available for any process, and most of them are useless.
It’s not “dodge and weave” William – for a start, as I said above tossing coins is the act of an intelligent agent. If we reject “fair coins fairly tossed” we are rejecting intelligent agency!
Of course deciding that a table top full of heads-up coins, or possibly a table top with coins sorted by date, is a different issue from, say, an 18-mile beach of pebbles exquisitely sorted by size. It isn’t “dodging and weaving” to say so. It is merely to point out that the ordering isn’t what tells you what caused the arrangement. In the first case we can infer intelligent agent. In the second case, we don’t.
And if the coins are later found muddled – we might blame an earthquake, or we might blame an intentional two-year-old. Ditto for the pebbles.
I would like to see where anyone has refused to “admit” that a table-top covered with heads-up coins imply something other than a series of random coin flips as the cause.
That is straw man number one.
But he inadvertently re-erected a second, which is the idea that “chance” is the hypothesis we reject in such circumstances. It isn’t.
“Chance” is not a causal hypothesis. It’s the absence of one.
Oh, boy, I’d forgotten about the magic “500 bits”.
Sheesh, I’d reject the hypothesis that they were fair coins fairly tossed if there were 50 of them.
Straw man number three.
Have Barry, and the rest of the ID crowd, forgotten that the standard for a “discovery” in physics is 5 sigma? I think that’s about 23 bits, isn’t it?
I really dislike the abstraction of the 500 bit argument, especially when it begs to be empirically tested on actual genes and yet ID researchers have not done so. (see related comment)
I notice a post by William on the ID thread:
Precisely. And IDists seem totally ideologically committed to not understanding that chance is not a causal hypothesis.
The theory of evolution is NOT the theory that “chance did it”.
But then, if a person is committed to not understanding that fact, then I guess that person never will.
I haven’t been keeping up with the parallel thread here. Lizzie has absolutely nailed it as usual. I should have just referred everyone on UD to here.
Right, it’s not that they’re not intelligent enough to understand the facts (well, most of ’em, anyways); it’s that they refuse. Too bad for them.
Still, sometimes you get an impulse to post one of your enlightening explanations of the science. And then at least someone, me for example, is learning from your words. Thanks!
It’s a trick question. The fact that the objects are coins, and not pebbles or trilobites, is what allows the invocation of ID. Coins are produced by intelligent agency, therefore, intelligent agency is already among the list of likely factors in their arrangement.
If the question had been about trilobites, the discussion would be much more productive.
I wish my life right now permitted me more than the chance for a quick browse. I don’t bother to write because I couldn’t do justice to anything. This I believe I can answer.
So all we have to do is demonstrate why a pile of coins on a table is not like a living thing? Is that all it will take? Are you promising? Ok.
Here is the difference:
If you put a pair of tables in a room together each with some arrangement of coins on top and urge them to get it on they will never make babies. If you put an appropriate pair of living things into a room you usually won’t even have to urge them on. They will make babies just fine all on their own.
Tables of coins can’t reproduce. Now acknowledge that.
ETA:
Mike Elzinga has in the past pointed out another way differences between subjects of science and useless analogies from ID creationists exist.
Coins are inert lumps of metal that are incapable of doing anything, except maybe corroding.
Atoms(wrt OoL) are active little things that are capable of a fantastic yet fixed variety of interactions. And like a pair of living things they do their thing unbidden by any intent.
Aardvark,
What if the coins had vasectomies?
It means I have no particular or significant beliefs about the origin of the planet. I have no significant idea if a planet like earth is unlikely or not. I have no idea if life in the universe is rare or not.
Where have I been dogmatic about ID in regards to life’s evolution? Please provide a quote and a reference.
No, it’s really not. If Mr. Arrington was to take an answer and then try to make it imply something else, then all you’d have to do is explain why the answer to the coin question doesn’t apply to whatever secondary point he might attempt to make.
But, at this point, I’m pretty sure the only point Arrington is making is that you guys won’t give a straight answer to even the most trivial and obvious questions. You’re just demonstrating his point, over and over and over.
llanitedave,
I tried! Barely a nibble. Obfuscation, apparently. ‘It’s obvious’ no-one goes round turning them all the right way up after they have randomly tossed themselves. As it were.
That’s exactly what it is, over and over and over.
Hey William. Why not apply the some of that scrutiny to ID mechanisms? It’ll give you a break from strawmaning chance.
William J. Murray,
You’ve had your answer numerous times. Agency is most likely. No-one has said otherwise. ‘Rejecting chance’, however, requires a little more exploration. That’s how the question was framed.
Could I have a straight answer from you regarding what it is we fear?
William J. Murray,
Anyway, I think you are being disingenuous. The question came from Sal Cordova, who has made very much the same extended points here, and expanded to such matters as chirality and Hoyle’s probability calculations re: proteins. 500 bits is due to Dembski. The question may be claimed trivial and obvious on its face (heh heh), but it’s not just anti-IDers who see it as aiming at something much less trivial and obvious.
see KF, and SteRusJon, on ‘your’ side:
I’m inclined to think the evolutionists were a bit unreasonable in this discussion. I understand you guys are wary of getting bogged down in nonsense but I think the immediate reply to the question should have been ‘someone placed the coins…of course’. Then, when the IDers make the ridiculous connection to protein sequences etc that’s were you get into it and show the faulty assumptions. This whole exercise in untossed coins is so tangential to what most of us are here for.
I am happy to admit that tornadoes do not assemble 747s in junkyards. Of course Hoyle was brave enough to proffer a real mechanism, “tornadoes”, which is why the idea was ridiculed so quickly. Of course creationism evolves (hello ID!) so we’re now at the point where we don’t talk about the mechanism, just mumble vague generalities about chance. ID is so intellectually impoverished that it is creationism with some of the more scientific parts removed.
IDists continue to argue that the probability of N D-amino acids forming a polymer is 1 / 2^N, simply because no one has ever explained to them that “the answer to the coin question” does not apply to the polymerization of amino acids.
Oh, err…nevermind
Arrington is a lawyer, vainly “pounding the table”. His question is not “trivial and obvious”. It is badly worded. Intentionally.
Yawn.
On a more interesting note, I really appreciate Liz’s point that if one found a region of Chesil Beach where pebble sizes were randomly distributed, one might infer agency, but might also wish to consider alternative explanations such as an earthquake or (Oh!, the irony) a tornado…
Where have I been dogmatic about ID in regards to life’s evolution? Please provide a quote and a reference.
Fair enough. I should have said you have been dogmatic about the impossibility of life’s evolution by natural mechanisms alone.
(Am I correct that you are the head of the RFC and son of ‘the most hated woman in America’? — the same person who said in an interview that, ‘evolution makes absolutely no sense in the face of the Word of God‘ ?)
Well, it’s okay when they do it, because they’re on god’s side. It’s not okay when you notice their dishonest gotcha tactics, because you’re the “stupid Darwinist” and you’re supposed to walk into their slimy traps.
They’ll try the exact same thing and be equally flummoxed in the future: but, but, but, “Darwinists” are stupid — how could they be on to our tricks?!?
WJM is reduced to claiming – against all evidence and all previous experience (Inference to Best Explanation, anyone?) – that, no, this time it’s really not a trick, really, cross his heart it’s not.
Hee hee. Pull the other one, Billy boyo.
Well, obviously you think so, but saying it, “over and over and over” doesn’t make it so. As I demonstrated with a very clear example, which you have not even attempted to address.
Non-intelligent processes often produce highly ordered and intricate patterns. Intelligent processes sometimes do the opposite.
What part of that is “dodging and weaving”? Do you dispute that my claim above is true?
If so, on what grounds? I
If not, then what stops you from understanding that rejecting “fair coin, fairly tossed” as a hypothesis for a table covered in coins laid in order of date is different from rejecting “laid in size order by an intelligent agent” as a hypothesis to explain the pebbles of Chesil Beach??
I assume you do reject intelligent design as hypothesis for Chesil Beach? If so, on what grounds?
No, our William is a different William J Murray.
Barry’s question is statistically inept. But I will gladly (and have) give a straight answer to the question he should have asked, which is: “did this configuration result from fair coins being fairly tossed”?
No, they did not.
However, the question he actually asked was:
And the answer is that I wouldn’t even consider “chance” as a “hypothesis” in the first place.
Even if the coins were a roughly equal mixture of heads and tails.
For the simple, but somewhat subtle reason that chance is not a hypothesis
Do you understand this now, William?
Two men named William J. Murray opposed to evolutionary theory. Chance or design? Jokes aside, my apologies to WJM for confusing him with another.
Even Barry made that mistake recently!
I do find it astonishing that a group of people so hot on the idea of probability and chance should be so statistically uninformed.
It’s partly because statistics is often badly taught, I think, at least within maths (it’s taught much better within empirical sciences, including social science), where it tends to be centred on combinatorics rather than sampling, but it also seems to be because people seem to think that if they have a grasp on p0ker they understand p values.
Everyone who invokes chances as a causal hypothesis should have to compute a residual first, and explain what it measure.
(Yeah, the reason I’ve been busy lately is because I’ve been up to my ears teaching quantitative methodology! Just the lab reports to mark now…)
Mostly they don’t 🙁
Barry isn’t intelligent enough to do it intentionally.
I don’t want to dispute Excel’s results despite its notoriety as far as statistical results is concerned (I have no idea what algorithm the website cited uses) because MMA and Maple give a HIGHER probability – which just strengthens your argument that coin will take some configuration ! But since you accept 2.3% , let me put it in a different way, would you bet $10,000 that tossing 1013 coin will result in 500 Heads up given the probability ? If you say yes, then I will definitely be dumbfounded !
Here’s another approach: If we are to obtain 500 coins in heads up position in a row by chance, the number of tossing required would be 6.54 x 10^150 ! [1-p^a]/ [p^a (1-p)], where probabilty p=0.5 and required heads in row ,a =500.
I’ve understood your self-deception for quite a while now, Liz.
No he didn’t. I was just making it clear that is what I understood based on Barry’s question.
You’re a rude bastard, Billy boyo.
rhampton,
See, that is what happens when you make uninformed assumptions. Now please direct me to where I ever said or implied I was opposed to “evolutionary theory”.