Over at Evolution News, Dr. Douglas Axe argues that merely by using very simple math, we can be absolutely certain that life was designed: it’s an inescapable conclusion. To illustrate his case, he uses the example of a rugged block of marble being transformed by natural weather processes into a statue of a human being. Everyone would agree that this simply can’t happen. And our conclusion wouldn’t change, even if we (i) generously allowed lots and lots of time for the statue to form; (ii) let each body part have a (discrete or continuous) range of permitted forms, or shapes, instead of just one permitted shape; (iii) relaxed the requirement that all body parts have to form simultaneously or in sync, and allowed the different parts of the statue to form at their own different rates; and (iv) removed the requirement that the different parts have to each form independently of one another, and allowed the formation of one part of the statue to influence that of another part.
In his post, Axe rhetorically asks: if we’re so sure that a rugged block of marble could never be transformed by the weather into a human statue, then aren’t we equally entitled to conclude that “blind natural causes” could never have “converted primitive bacterial life into oaks and ostriches and orangutans”? In each case, argues Axe, the underlying logic is the same: when calculating the probability of a scenario which requires many unlikely things to happen, small fractions multiplied by the dozens always result in exceedingly small fractions, and an event which is fantastically improbable can safely be regarded as physically impossible.
In an attempt to persuade Dr. Axe that his logic is faulty on several grounds, I’d like to put eight questions to Dr. Axe, and I sincerely hope that he will be gracious enough to reply.
My first question relates to the size and age of the universe. As I understand it, Dr. Axe, you define “fantastically improbable” as follows: something which is so improbable that its realization can only be expected to occur in a universe which is much bigger (or much older) than our own. Indeed, on page 282 of your book, Undeniable, you further stipulate that “fantastically improbable” refers to any probability that falls below 1 in 10116, which you calculate to be the maximal number of atomic-scale physical events that could have occurred during the 14-billion-year history of the universe. You calculation requires a knowledge of the age of the universe (14 billion years), the amount of time it takes for light to traverse the width of an atom, and the number of atoms in the universe. So here’s my first question for Dr. Axe: how is the design intuition supposed to work for an ordinary layperson who knows none of these things? Such a person will have no idea whether to set the bar at one in a million, one in a billion, one in 10116 , or even one in (10116)116. I should also point out that the figure you use for the number of atoms in the universe refers only to the observable universe. Astronomers still don’t know whether the size of the universe as a whole is finite or infinite. And it gets worse if we go back a few decades, in the history of astronomy. Until the 1960s, the Steady State Theory of the universe was a viable option, and many astronomers believed the universe to be infinitely old. How would you have argued for the design intuition back then?
My second question relates to functional coherence. You make a big deal of this in your book, Undeniable, where you managed to distill the case for Intelligent Design into a single sentence: “Functional coherence makes accidental invention fantastically improbable and hence physically impossible” (p. 160), where functional coherence is defined as a hierarchical arrangement of parts contributing in a coordinated way to the production of a high-level function (p. 144). The problem with your statue illustration should now be apparent. A statue has no functions. It just sits there. Consequently, whatever grounds we may have for rejecting the supposition that ordinary meteorological processes could transform a block of marble into a statue, they obviously have nothing to do with the argument you develop in your book, relating to functional coherence and whether living things could possibly be the product of unguided natural processes. So my question is: will you concede that the marble block is a bad illustration for your argument relating to functional coherence?
My third question relates to the identity of the object undergoing transformation. In your statue illustration, you ask whether “a rugged outcrop of marble would have to be altered by weather in only a few reasonably probable respects in order to convert it into a sculpted masterpiece.” Obviously, the answer is no: the number of steps would be extremely large, and the steps involved would be fantastically improbable. You then compare this case with the evolutionary claim that “blind natural causes converted primitive bacterial life into oaks and ostriches and orangutans.” But there is an obvious difference in the second case: the primordial bacterium itself is not being changed into an orangutan. Its very distant embryonic descendant, living about four billion years later, is developing into an orangutan. Its ancestors 20 million years ago were not yet orangutans. Self-replication, along with rare copying mistakes (mutations), is required in order for evolution to work. So I’d like to ask: why do you think it’s valid to infer from the fact that A’s changing into B is a fantastically improbable event, that A’s distant descendants gradually mutating into B is also fantastically improbable?
My fourth question relates to chemistry. Let me return to your original example of a block of marble being transformed by weather events into a human statue. I think we can all agree that’s a fantastically improbable event. However, the probability is not zero. I can think of another event whose probability is much, much lower: the likelihood of weather processes transforming a block of diamond, of adamantine hardness, into a human statue. What’s the moral of the story? Chemistry matters a lot, when you’re calculating probabilities. But the average layperson, whom you suppose to be capable of drawing a design inference when it comes to living things, knows nothing about the chemistry of living things, beyond the simple fact that they contain atoms of carbon and a few other elements, arranged in interesting structures. An ordinary person would be unable to describe the chemical properties of the DNA double helix, for instance, even if their life depended on it. So my question to you is: why do you think that a valid design inference can be made, without knowing anything about their underlying chemistry?
My fifth question relates to thermodynamics. I’d like you to have a look at the head of Aphrodite, below (image courtesy of Eric Gaba), known as the Kaufmann head. It’s made of coarse-grained marble from Asia Minor, and it dates back to about 150 B.C.
You’ll notice that her face has worn away quite a bit, thanks to the natural weather processes of weathering and erosion. This is hardly surprising: indeed, one might see weathering and erosion as an everyday manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: in an isolated system, concentrated energy disperses over time. Living things possess an unusual ability to locally decrease entropy within their
highly organized bodies as they continually build and maintain them, while at the same time increasing the entropy of their surroundings by expending energy, some of which is converted into heat. In so doing, they also increase the total entropy of the universe. But the point I want to make here is that a living thing’s highly useful ability to locally decrease entropy is one which a block of marble lacks: its thermodynamic properties are very different. So my question to you is: why would you even attempt to draw an inference about the transformations which living things are capable of over time, based on your observations of what happens to blocks of marble? And why would you encourage others to do the same?
My sixth question relates to your probability calculations. In your post, you explain the reasoning you employ, in order to justify a design inference: “it takes only a modest list of modestly improbable requirements for success to be beyond the reach of chance.” You continue: “Once again, the reasoning here is that small fractions multiplied by the dozens always result in exceedingly small fractions.” Now, this kind of reasoning makes perfect sense, if we are talking about dozens of improbable independent events: all you need to do is multiply the probability of each event, in order to obtain the probability of the combination of events. But if the events are not independent, then you cannot proceed in this fashion. Putting it mathematically: let us consider two events, A and B. If these events are independent, then P(AB) is equal to P(A) times P(B), and if both individual probabilities are low, then we can infer that P(AB) will be very low: one in a million time one in a million equals one in a trillion, for instance. But if A and B are inter-dependent, then all we can say about P(AB) is that it is equal to P(A) times P(B|A), and the latter probability may not be low at all. Consequently, in an inter-dependent system comprising dozens of events, we should not simply multiply the small probability of each event in order to compute the combined probability of all the events occurring together. That would be unduly pessimistic. And yet in your post, you attempt to do just that, despite your earlier statement: “Do I assume each aspect [of the statue] is strictly independent of the others in its formation? No.” So I’d like to ask: if you’re willing to grant that the even the formation of one aspect of a statue may depend on the formation of other aspects, thereby invalidating the method of calculating the probability of the forming the whole statue by multiplying dozens of “small fractions,” then why do you apply this invalid methodology to the formation of living things?
My seventh question relates to the vast number of possible pathways leading to the formation of a particular kind of living thing (such as an orangutan) from a primordial ancestor, and the even vaster number of possible pathways leading to the formation of some kind of living thing from the primordial ancestor. The point I want to make here is a simple one: this or that evolutionary pathway leading to an orangutan may be vanishingly improbable, yet if we consider the vast ensemble of possible pathways leading to an orangutan, the probability of at least one of them being traversed may not be so improbable. And even if we were to agree (for argument’s sake) that the likelihood of an orangutan evolving from the primordial ancestor is vanishingly low, when we consider the potentially infinite variety of all possible life-forms, the likelihood of evolutionary processes hitting on one or more of these life-forms may turn out to be quite high. It is this likelihood which one would need to calculate, in order to discredit the notion that all life on earth is the product of unguided evolutionary processes. Calculating this likelihood, however, is bound to be a very tricky process, and I doubt whether there’s a scientist alive today who’d have even the remotest idea of how to perform such a calculation. So my question is: what makes you think that an untutored layperson, with no training in probability theory, is up to the task? And if the average layperson isn’t up to it, then why should they trust their intuition that organisms were designed?
My eighth and final question relates to algorithms. Scientific observation tells us that every living thing, without exception, is put together by some kind of biological algorithm: a sequence of steps leading to the formation of an individual of this or that species. The algorithm can thus be viewed as a kind of recipe. (Contrast this with your illustration of a statue being formed by blind meteorological processes, which bears little or no relevance to the way in which a living thing is generated: obviously, there’s no recipe in the wind and the rain; nor is there any in the block of marble.) In order for “blind natural processes” (as you call them) to transform a bacterial ancestor into an orangutan, the algorithm (or recipe) for making an ancient bacterial life-form needs to be modified, over the course of time, into an recipe for making an orangutan. Can that happen?
At first blush, it appears fantastically unlikely, for two reasons. First, one might argue that any significant alteration of a recipe would result in an unstable hodgepodge that’s “neither fish nor fowl” as the saying goes – in other words, a non-viable life-form. However, this intuition rests on a false equivalence between human recipes and biological recipes: while the former are composed of letters which need to be arranged into meaningful words, whose sequence of words has to conform to the rules of syntax, as well as making sense at the semantic level, so that it is able to express a meaningful proposition, the recipes found in living things aren’t put together in this fashion. Living things are made of molecules, not words. What bio-molecules have to do is fit together well and react in the appropriate way, under the appropriate circumstances. Living things don’t have to mean anything; they simply have to function. Consequently, the recipes which generate living things are capable of a high degree of modification, so long as the ensembles they produce are still able to function as organisms. (An additional reason why the recipes found in living things can withstand substantial modification is that the DNA found in living organisms contains a high degree of built-in redundancy.)
Second, it might be argued that since the number of steps required to transform a bacterial ancestor into an orangutan would be very large, the probability of nature successfully completing such a transformation would have to be fantastically low: something could easily go wrong along the way. But while the emergence of an orangutan would doubtless appear vanishingly improbable to a hypothetical observer from Alpha Centauri visiting Earth four billion years ago, it might not seem at all improbable, if the Alpha Centaurian also knew exactly what kinds of environmental changes would befall the Earth over the next four billion years. The probability of evolution traversing the path that leads to orangutans might then appear quite high, notwithstanding the billions of steps involved, given a suitably complete background knowledge of the transformations that the Earth itself would undergo during that period. In reality, however, such a computation will never be technically feasible: firstly, because we’d probably need a computer bigger than the cosmos to perform the calculation; and second, because we’ll never have the detailed knowledge of Earth’s geological history that would be required to do such a calculation. So my concluding question to you is: given that the probability of nature generating an orangutan from a bacterial ancestor over a four-billion-year time period is radically uncomputable, why should we trust any intuitive estimate of the probability which is based on nothing more than someone eyeballing a present-day bacterium and a present-day orangutan?
Over to you, Dr. Axe. Cheers.
Entropy,
The “what else could it be” is not a scientific claim. It’s an emotional claim of materialist philosophy of which you have definitely bought into.
So, again, the you don’t know how to do math canard. My math background is probably at least equal to Axe’s as we attended the same university and my major like his included applied math. In my opinion he is making very conservative estimates. Were making estimates just like the secondary fold estimate. You need to show this estimate is not conservative or you are again just asserting. Axe’s point is the math problem is so extraordinary that it backs up intuition every time. He is right 10^190 is 140 orders of magnitude greater then the number of evolutionary trials since the beginning of time. This only starts the process of building a spliceosome. The sequential nature of DNA and proteins kills the theory. Its time for you guys to wake up and smell the coffee 🙂
J-Mac,
When the sequential nature of DNA was discovered this theory should have been killed. Materialist philosophy is proving to be poison for science. The scientists and other professionals in my circle all now believe the theory is ridiculous including the non theists.
You need a wider circle.
Allan Miller,
Wide enough to reach the hard core materialists 🙂
Even wider to encompass human imagination.
Hi Mung,
Certainly it is possible to read Axe as arguing in the way you propose, in the post I linked to in my OP. But if you look at his book, Undeniable, a different picture emerges. On pages 158 to 160, Axe carefully explains what lies behind the universal design intuition. On page 158 he formulates it as follows:
Then on page 159, he explains why, with reference to the specific task of making an omelet. Accidents, he says, are no match for the set of skills we need to master, in order to make an omelet:
From the passages I’ve highlighted in bold, it should be clear that mathematics is absolutely crucial to the underlying logic of Axe’s universal design intuition. It is not something which merely backs up the intuition. The mathematical argument is very simple: there’s a staggeringly large number of ways of getting things wrong, and only a very small number of ways of getting things right, ergo: success is fantastically improbable. On page 160, Axe wraps up his argument with a one-sentence formulation of his universal design intuition:
(“Functional coherence” is defined on page 144 as a hierarchical arrangement of parts contributing in a coordinated way to the production of a high-level function.) The use of the term “fantastically improbable” once again shows that we are dealing with a mathematical intuition here.
In any case, even if we consider Axe’s first, non-mathematical expression of the universal design intuition (UDI) on page 158, it is easy to spot the flaw in his logic. Recall that Axe there expressed the UDI as follows: “Tasks that we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.” I exposed the flaw in Axe’s logic in my original critical review of Axe’s book, which I wrote back in 2016:
In short: Axe’s universal design intuition rests on a flawed insight (see above quote) and flawed mathematics (see my OP).
vjtorley,
Just to point out being right or wrong is to misunderstand evolution. Being better than the competition is the point.
Hi colewd:
Your argument presupposes that the components of the spliceosome are “discrete combinatorial objects” (to use the terminology of Axe’s interlocutor, Hans Vodder), which, if true, would then make it easy to argue in favor of design. However, in his post, Axe explicitly disavows that assumption, with reference to his statue illustration:
He even adds: “I keep providing examples to demonstrate that my reasoning doesn’t use the artificial assumptions Hans is concerned about.”
In my critical review of Axe’s book, Undeniable, I also examined Axe’s mathematical argument that functional proteins consisting of 150-odd amino acids (which are required by all living things) are extremely isolated in sequence space (1 in 10^74 is the figure he quotes in his book). I quoted experts in the field, explaining why that figure was almost certainly wrong.
I’m afraid Axe’s math doesn’t stack up.
Good point. I’ve been saying that for years.
I don’t think you understand the issue here Colewd…
It doesn’t matter whether the mechanism of evolution is known or unknown, whether the math supports evolution or not…If evolutionary theory were never proposed, or it would appear ludicrice, as it does now, materialists would have come up with something else, like panspermia or alienism or fifth-dimensionism or anything else other than what’s obvious…
It is an ideology and not science…Just like Nazism or Communism or any other, ideologies contain no real substance… It’s a belief system that ignores reality and concentrates on the utopia …Neo-Darwinism is no different… It’s supporters ignore the evidence against it and concentrate on what they think support for their scientific theory is…It’s a cliché…
The much deeper question remains: Why would people do that? I have read about the greatest inventors and supporters of ideologies, such Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Lenin, Marx… I still don’t get why those men believed so deeply in their ideologies…
vjtorley,
Vincent,
The wiggle room of 150 orders of magnitude takes care of any combinatorial assumptions also given this is one of 200 proteins. This is the key to Dougs argument. Again the observation of the sequence kills the theory.
All estimation requires assumption. The argument that the math isn’t perfect so I won’t try shuts down science.
I afraid you don’t understand the experiment and why he came to the number he did. Other experiments according to Art Hunt have similar results. I believe the number is much worse then Axe’s number is because is measuring a point that has many more solutions then the wild type. I will read your argument that you linked again but this is currently my opinion.
J-Mac,
If you read the book Sapiens it explains this rational. Ideology gets people rowing the boat in the same direction even if it is wrong. Thats the rationality around cumulating power.
Good point!
Thanks.
“A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
I also think it’s time to question the view that the correct way to determine whether something is possible is to assume that if we can assign a probability to the event that the event must be possible.
There’s a 0.000000000000001 chance that pigs can fly. Therefore it is possible that pigs can fly. That’s just looney.
Just like letters, and words, and sentences, and paragraphs.
vjtorley,
From your critique of Axe’s book.
This is the evolutionary argument but I think it is deeply flawed. If you start with the protein PRPF8 on your way to a spliceosome that next protein cannot be just anything it has to bind to PRPF8 and perform a function. If you look closely at Doug’s experiment he is modifying only half the enzyme as the other half is separately transcribed. So the enzyme he is modifying not only performs the enzyme function it has to bind to another protein prior to performing the function. So the sequence cannot be just any sequence it has to bind to its alpha or beta partner.
But there’s a higher chance that pigs can evolve wings… Therefore it is just as good as it has already happened… All you do is put the pigs under an extreme selective pressure, like making them jump of the cliff and if you have enough time pigs will develop wings to fly… You can forgot about the intermediates though because if the gradual evolutionary steps were the way of evolution, we would have 10 billion species on earth today going through the intermediate stages of evolution, including you and me…as per Joe Felsenstein assumption of population genetics…Unfortunately…
Didn’t we have several OPs by Tom English entitled Evolution is not search?
Go figure…evolutionists can’t seem to agree on anything….
Why would we assume it might just be wind when they’re the sorts of things humans are known to make?
IDcreationists keep getting this simple inference wrong.
Anthropologists or archeologists don’t go around calculating probabilities when trying to determine whether some object was made by humans in ancient history. It has nothing to do with probability. What is the probability of the Mt Everest being created by erosion and plate tectonics? Or any particular rock?
It has to do with knowing something about the mindset of the human builders who make these objects, already collected knowledge about the cultural and technological achievements of the civilizations and the time, what they were trying to achieve, and what kinds of tools and technology they had available to them. These are the kinds of knowledge that make it possible to some times distinguish designed from non-designed objects. What is it made of? What process was used to create it? Does it have toolmarks, does it fit into our knowledge of human culture and history, is it the sort of things humans would have made to achieve something?
It is through answering questions such as these that designed are distinguished from non-designed objects. Even so, that can’t always be done.
What is the probability that a large iceberg will rip itself loose from polar icecap and form a nearly perfect rectangle?
Evolution is not a search. Anyone disagree?
So what? You’re not making an argument, just stating some obscure factoid.
What experiment are you referring to specifically? Axe has done several different experiments, and made separate conclusions from each.
So what? Again you’re not even making any sort of argument. It is not clear what we should think follows from your stating this mere claim.
There’s nothing emotional about it. Why is it that you jump over the whole point and center on these phrases never to check the scientific explanations?
In order to go beyond “materialistic philosophy” I need something to convince me that there’s a way to get there. What is it again, if not your a priori, ahem, emotionally attached, religious beliefs?
So, how about you help me out with something firm to hold against that “materialistic philosophy”? Because what I can tell you is that it’s not a philosophy, it’s all I’ve been able to check, therefore a conclusion. Anything else I’ve seen is fallacious, poor thinking, emotional rhetoric, religiously-motivated bullshit. Do you have something better than that?
This was the first time I told you that. So that’s with this “again”?
I know that’s your opinion, but your math background doesn’t help (I wonder what makes you think that I’d be impressed that you went to the same school as Axe, if he can get it that wrong, what good is the school and the math if you don’t know how to apply it properly?). I explained why that math was wrong. Did you try and follow on my explanation? Did you check the links? Do you really think that that protein is a 2500 aa-long alpha-helix? Here it goes again: even before thinking of evolutionary phenomena, we should expect to see alpha-helices, turns, loops, beta-strands, more alpha-helices, more loops, more turns, etc. After all, the aas have a tendency to take some shape or another. So, using just the probability of an alpha-helix, rather than thinking what to expect of a 2500 aa-long protein is where you make the mistake. Thinking in all-or-nothing terms is your other mistake. Clear enough now? If not, do me a favour and ask for clarifications, rather than assume or pretend that I didn’t explain anything.
Which is wrong-headed as I demonstrated twice now. How about now you think about it?
I did! I showed why it was wrong headed! What about you check it again?
All based on false premises, and mis-applied “probabilities”
Your lack of attention to the explanations would mean it’s time for you to smell the coffee. Give it a sip too, please.
ETA: added the link to the protein structure, and here’s the link to checking that there’s homologs in bacteria and archaea.
I agree. Evolution is not a search, and there are no targets. Pointing to some particular biological entity and then saying this is too unlikely to have evolved is a textbook example of the texas sharpshooter fallacy.
It’s like saying the Mt Everest is too improbable to have formed by erosion and plate tectonics.
So what? Explain why that is a problem.
The spliceosome is made mostly of duplicated proteins, with a core of RNA homologous to self-splicing group II introns, which are known to encode PRPF8-homologous proteins. What’s the problem?
You claim this, but you are terminally unable to show that this conclusion follows.
Yes yes bla bla. Any idiot can do this kind of “you don’t get it because of your biases”-gibberish.
It is time you let go of your in-group tribal loyalties, your personal internet pride, religious cognitive biases, and fear of death and no afterlife, fear of absense of “infinite” meaning, fear of gays and non-binary gender indentities, fear of loss of control of women, fear of having wasted most of your life spent on a belief that is false and clearly ridiculous, fear of the stigma of admitting you were wrong in front of other people you have had long arguments with, fear of loss of community and social rejection if you deconvert, fear of having to find your own meaning in life and having to work out difficult political and social issues by yourself. It is time you let go of all these fears so you will finally be able to reason.
Did you find that persuasive? Then don’t be shocked when we don’t find it persuasive when you do it either.
Just one more point on the “emotional claim of materalists” nonsense. It have to say I find it ironic how we are constantly told that materialism(or atheism) is void of purpose and meaning, and how basically all religious people find it nothing short of emotionally and philosophically repulsive, has all these terrible psychological and societal consequences, yet at the same time we are also told the only reason we don’t just come to terms with the design-arguments is because we WANT to be materalists/atheists.
Seems a wee bit contradictory to me.
Rumraket,
Not to you but most other neutral people eventually get it. Your Mt Everest false analogy signals you have a block against comprehending the problem.
What did you expect? For Rum to agree with you? He uses false analogies not to defend science but to defend an ideology…
Far from being a body blow to evolution, DNA sequence data provides confirmation of it in spades. And yet, everyone Bill Cole knows has decided it’s tosh. I find that mystifying.
Well, thanks to this agreement at least we have learned that the supposed refutation of D. Axe’s book was just another bluff by Darwinian Secret Service…
You can sleep well, Doug! The boys just got slashed by their own double edge sword…
Who needs comedy clubs? TSZ provides both entertainment and parody called Darwinian Babylon…lol Thanks guys!!!😂
You inability to see how the analogy applies signals you have a block against comprehending the problem.
Where do we go from here Bill? Perhaps you could begin by giving some sort of argument towards showing a problem with my analogy?
If all you’re going to do is sit back and blather about how we don’t agree with you because we’re biased then there’s no point having this conversation is there?
So let’s get back to your numerous statements that never lead to anything. Try to explain WHY the things you say are a problem, really are a problem. Can you do that?
You have this weird habit of listing or stating bare factoids (this protein would have had to also bind another protein… okay, and?), but never really tying them together into a coherent argument. You don’t proceed to reason from those factoids to a conclusion, so we are are just left with a list of claims that, apparently, you think constitute the death-knell of evolution.
Try to picture the reverse situation, which is basically what Allan Miller did in the post above. He says “Far from being a body blow to evolution, DNA sequence data provides confirmation of it in spades. “. That’s not an argument either, and he doesn’t explain HOW or WHY DNA sequence data provides confirmation of it in spades. He has done so in the past, but if all he ever did was repeat that claim over and over again, no wonder nobody would find it persuasive.
Suppose I said “I really think the fact that proteins are encoded in DNA sequences is what settles the deal gainst IDcreationism”. And then I act totally surprised and flabbergasted that this statement doesn’t convince you. You would say what the hell am I talking about? I haven’t at all shown what the problem is.
Almost everything you write is of that sort of statement. You state some factoids (some of which you frequently get very wrong), and then you just declare how this is a big problem. But the connection between the fact and then the conclusion you state is never made clear.
I have not even seen an attempt to show how my analogy is false. It’s been more ignored than it has been argued against. It seems natural to conclude that you are unable to.
It’s not a false analogy, it’s just that you miss the point because it’s harder to understand how life is, like Mount Everest, one of many possible ways it could have gone. It just went the way it went. This is something you’d start understanding if you considered my explanations a bit more carefully.
Entropy,
I don’t see the analogy but I am willing to concede that I may need to spend more time with it. I honestly don’t think that the argument that evolution could have gone a number of ways is viable. Life requires functional information to form. Do you see Mt Everest having the same requirement. What is the analogy to DNA in forming Mt Everest? Where does natural selection fit in? I respect you and Rum, I just think this argument you guys are trying to pull of is really tough.
The analogy works in the sense of being an example where calculating “probabilities” after the fact, and without considering the phenomena behind the fact, is meaningless. Nobody is claiming that the analogy is supposed to stand for everything about evolution.
Again, start by checking my answer. Long polypeptide sequences (like your 2500 aa-long sequence) will acquire a bunch of shapes, some stretches will be prone to form alpha-helices, other segments will tend to form beta-sheets, other segments will be prone to form loops, turns, etc. So, calculating the probability that it would be a single 2500 aa-long alpha-helix is meaningless. Calculating the probability, after the fact, that it would be exactly six aas of alpha-helix, followed by seven in a loop, followed by a sheet, followed by another helix, followed by another loop, then another sheet, etc, is also meaningless, since it’s one of many possible forms, just like calculating the probability of the particular positions of dirt, half-tops, almost-vertical “walls,” etc, of Mount Everest, after the fact, is meaningless since they constitute one of many possible forms.
I leave you for now, hoping that you’ll think about it, rather than assume that I didn’t explain anything.
Good night.
Is it possible to expend so many words on this without ever mentioning selection ?
Is it possible to be this stupid ?
@Entropy
Exactly right. The analogy has two purposes. First is to show that after the fact probability calculations are meaningless, as the outcomes of the process were contingent on the circumstances at the time.
The second is to show that it isn’t any different for biological evolution when explaining how things came to be the way they are in the present, as a contingent outcome of historical events.
We have an in principle explanation for the Mt Everest, we don’t have a specific explanation for it. The principled explanation is plate tectonics and erosion.
To give a specific explanation for the Mt Everest we’d have to invoke some extremely unlikely combinations of wind, temperature and pressure to explain all it’s myriad attributes and features. Yet we have no problem accepting the fact that such a combination of forces really did play out and produce the mountain.
It is no different for evolutionary biology when invoked to give generalized in-principle accounts of biological entities. Whether they be flagella, spliceosomes or what have you. Rather than combinations of wind, pressure and temperature explaining particular rocks, in evolutionary biology particular entities are explained by combinations of particular mutations, selection pressures and population dynamics.
Just like we can say that some particular outcome in biology looks very unlikely after the fact (think of all the ways mutations could have caused a different trajectory), we can say the same about the Mt Everest. Think of all the ways the blowing of the wind could have been different, the fluctuations of temperature could have been different, and the forces in the crust and mantle could have been different.
Selection doesn’t seem to be the point of this discussion. As I read it, the point is that life is so incomprehensibly complex that the set of all organisms that COULD evolve is essentially infinite. Out of that uncountably vast space, what HAS evolved is a tiny subset — and from a standing start, the probability of ANY ONE organism evolving is infinitesimal.
(Think of shooting a bullet into the air. The question of where it will come down is quite different from the question of whether it will come down. It’s not a valid argument to say that since we cannot predict exactly where it will land, therefore it won’t land at all without the help of a purposeful invisible hand. But this is the creationist argument – that the probability of organism X is so tiny, evolution can’t happen without guidance).
So it’s not really meaningful to pick some arbitrary organism and try to calculate the odds of that particular one evolving. It’s not even meaningful to try to calculate how many different organisms might evolve given time. Despite this, we can say with a good deal of certainty that organisms unknown today WILL evolve over the next eon or so. No predicting exact what form they’ll take in detail, but we can say (for example) that all descendants of mammals will be mammals.
Selection is an element of the process of evolution. It suggests part of how evolution happens, but also suggests that what CAN evolve is endless.
If the claim (by Axe) is that the formation of a head by weathering is very unlikely, well, of course it is, but then so what ?
But jeez this is just a stupid conversation. And VJT expends/wastes the usual umpteen squillion words on it.
Entropy,
The alpha helix is the simplest secondary structure so the result is a conservative approximation of random mutation creating a secondary structure.
Rumraket,
This is not about calculation of the probability of the event but to determine with a probability calculation if the mechanism of the predicted change is viable.
What does that mean? Explain yourself.
Rumraket,
So do you assume the ice rectangle was made by humans, since humans make lots of things?
Rumraket,
But wind also makes lots of things, so what do you mean when you say the sort of things ?
Humans make lots of stonehenge?
Hi Mung,
In response to my comment,
you replied:
1. Let’s suppose you’re right. In that case, why wouldn’t you say that bio-molecules are intelligent? I mean, if they can routinely create not only syntax but also semantics, then it would be churlish to deny them the attribute of intelligence.
2. Semantics is not just a matter of fitting together well. Think of the following well-worn illustration: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” You can’t explain why that sentence is nonsense, simply by appealing to notions of fitting together.
Not if quantum coherence, quantum entaglement and quantum tunnelling is taken into consideration…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11004390
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0009261471805869
Rumraket,
The scientific method is understanding cause which you know. Science is also about establishing confidence in the cause. The argument is not about the probability of the event as we know it occurred, it is about what caused the event. If we talk about the probability of exactly you forming it is improbable. The cause is not improbable as we know how children are conceived. The probability discussion is about the cause of event and not the event itself. If the cause of Mt Everest is different then the cause of the eukaryotic cell you are comparing apples and oranges.
vjtorley,
The bio-molecule stores the syntax in DNA like a piece of paper or a computer disc drive. The origin of the syntax is the issue.
Yeah, and we know the causes of mutations, and we know of natural selection. So what is the difference here? For example, gene duplications make more proteins, and those proteins can subsequently mutate apart, so then there’s two proteins where before there was one, and they are different from each other and different from their ancestor.
The causes of such mutations are understood. All that needs to happen for cellular or molecular complexity to increase is for such events, which we know happen by observation, to be favored by selection. That’s just ONE example of evolutionary causes of increases in molecular complexity and new information.
The causes are different Bill, (specific examples of molecular complexity is caused to exist by mutations and natural selection, while specific mountains are caused to exist by plate tectonics and erosion) but as you can see the underlying argument is the same.
How do you propose to show that he cause (mutations and natural selection) is unlikely to be the cause of some particular instance of molecular complexity, while simultaneously being able to show that the cause (plate tectonics and erosion) is likely to be the cause of some particular mountain? You would do some sort of calculation of the prior probability of getting “this specific result”. But in BOTH cases you would end up with some insanely low probability, yet you have no problem accepting that plate tectonics and erosion created the Mt Everest.
There’s no way out of this dilemma. The gig is up. You now either have to abandon your argument against evolution producing large increases in cellular complexity, or you have to ALSO abandon plate tectonics as having produced anything at all.
You seem to have missed my point, which was that a presumably very unlikely event was nevertheless observed to occur naturally.
Rumraket,
Yes, the causes of mutations are understood. Whats not understood is what the mutations can generate.
Plate tectonics forming a mountain and random change and selection forming a sequence are two very different problems. I can easily see plate tectonics forming a mountain what I cant see is plate tectonics forming a living organism or any mechanism driven by random change. Your gene duplication idea requires a similar gene to form. There are over 2000 unique gene families. With all due respect Rum this is not a strong argument. Again, you are confusing the event with the cause when you compare the probabilities.
-The earth moving and erosion creating a mountain is a non controversial hypothesis.
-Random change plus determinism (gene duplication etc) creating functional information is.
I am observing a very special mountain :-). Could tectonics and erosion be the cause…. likely yes.
I am observing an organism filled with functional sequences. Could random change plus determinism be the cause….likely no. The cause is reproduction a highly deterministic process.