NationStates Jolt Archive

ID supporters often say that the chances of complex life coming about by random chance are almost impossible. They are right. But complex life didn't come about by random chance, it came about by natural selection, but in their arguments ID supporters continually speak as if natural selection doesn't exist. The following story attempts to illustrate the difference between the two.

Imagine a (boring) game where the object is to get a line of one hundred coins to all be heads. Currently all the coins are all tails. The only rule is that the only way you are allowed to change the coins is by flipping them. ID supporters immediately start trying to flip all one hundred coins at once. They start to loudly complain that it is almost impossible for all the coins to come up heads, that the odds against it happening are astronomical. Indeed, they say the only way it could happen is if God or some other powerful entity intervened to make it happen.

At the other end of the room someone who understands natural section starts playing the game with another row of one hundred coins that are currently all tails. She flips one coin until it comes up heads and then moves onto the next coin, flips it until it comes up heads and so on. Eventually, after about an hour, she is finished and all the coins are heads up. Then, instead of looking sheepish and saying, "Well, why didn't I think of that?" the ID supporters start loudly complaining that the rules insist that all one hundred coins be flipped at once, when actually the rules say no such thing.

The ID supporters were operating on the random chance model, while the person who understood natural selection was making small changes and keeping those that helped succeed in the game, just as small changes that help organisms survive in the game of life are kept.

Exactly.

Evolution is not random. Mutation is random. Evolution is a process of positive feedback. But somehow I don't think the "intelligent design*" camp understands positive feedback, or else they wouldn't continue to misrepresent and misunderstand evolution.


*the neo-PC word for "creationist"

ID supporters often say that the chances of complex life coming about by random chance are almost impossible. They are right. But complex life didn't come about by random chance, it came about by natural selection, but in their arguments ID supporters continually speak as if natural selection doesn't exist. The following story attempts to illustrate the difference between the two.

Imagine a (boring) game where the object is to get a line of one hundred coins to all be heads. Currently all the coins are all tails. The only rule is that the only way you are allowed to change the coins is by flipping them. ID supporters immediately start trying to flip all one hundred coins at once. They start to loudly complain that it is almost impossible for all the coins to come up heads, that the odds against it happening are astronomical. Indeed, they say the only way it could happen is if God or some other powerful entity intervened to make it happen.

At the other end of the room someone who understands natural section starts playing the game with another row of one hundred coins that are currently all tails. She flips one coin until it comes up heads and then moves onto the next coin, flips it until it comes up heads and so on. Eventually, after about an hour, she is finished and all the coins are heads up. Then, instead of looking sheepish and saying, "Well, why didn't I think of that?" the ID supporters start loudly complaining that the rules insist that all one hundred coins be flipped at once, when actually the rules say no such thing.

The ID supporters were operating on the random chance model, while the person who understood natural selection was making small changes and keeping those that helped succeed in the game, just as small changes that help organisms survive in the game of life are kept.
Good post. There's definitely a few folk here who should consider this carefully.
*bows*

ID supporters often say that the chances of complex life coming about by random chance are almost impossible. They are right. But complex life didn't come about by random chance, it came about by natural selection, but in their arguments ID supporters continually speak as if natural selection doesn't exist. The following story attempts to illustrate the difference between the two.

Imagine a (boring) game where the object is to get a line of one hundred coins to all be heads. Currently all the coins are all tails. The only rule is that the only way you are allowed to change the coins is by flipping them. ID supporters immediately start trying to flip all one hundred coins at once. They start to loudly complain that it is almost impossible for all the coins to come up heads, that the odds against it happening are astronomical. Indeed, they say the only way it could happen is if God or some other powerful entity intervened to make it happen.

At the other end of the room someone who understands natural section starts playing the game with another row of one hundred coins that are currently all tails. She flips one coin until it comes up heads and then moves onto the next coin, flips it until it comes up heads and so on. Eventually, after about an hour, she is finished and all the coins are heads up. Then, instead of looking sheepish and saying, "Well, why didn't I think of that?" the ID supporters start loudly complaining that the rules insist that all one hundred coins be flipped at once, when actually the rules say no such thing.

The ID supporters were operating on the random chance model, while the person who understood natural selection was making small changes and keeping those that helped succeed in the game, just as small changes that help organisms survive in the game of life are kept.

That's possibly the single most intelligent post I have ever seen here. Have a cookie. No, have two cookies.

very good post! i disagree with you on a few things, but only in that the way you worded it sounds funny, not the actual content or meaning. but then again, english grammar annoys me all the time...you people should start speaking yopensa or spanish or something.

excellent post. will have to link back to this for other ID threads.

Bumped, and saved to hard drive. Nice post.

<long, well thought-out, intelligent metaphor>

Incidentally, the exact probability of getting all 100 pennies heads on a given try is 1 in 1,267,650,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 nonillion, two hundred sixty-seven octillion, six hundred fifty septillion, six hundred sextillion), give or take fifty sextillion in the denominator.

That was possibly the best post on this subject I've read.

That's pretty good. Although I have read a similar mathematical debunking of Intelligent Design that accepted their term of randomness:

Say I take a regular deck of 52 cards, shuffle it thoroughly and deal out a regular 5-card poker hand. Now, being someone that understands simple probability, I can tell you that there are exactly 2,598,960 different possible hands (ignoring the order in which the cards were dealt). Consequently, it means that the probability of dealing exactly the hand that I just dealt would be, of course, one in 2,598,960. With me so far?

Well, then, if you agree with that (and you really have no choice), then you have to agree that I just did something amazingly improbable, don't you? Huh, you say? Sure, I say, based on only the math, I just dealt a poker hand whose chance of being dealt was a miniscule one in 2,598,960. Is that incredible or what? Man, talk about the odds of that! Are you impressed?

Of course not, you'll say, what's to be impressed with? Wait, I say, you don't think what I just did is an amazing statistical feat, it having the odds of about one in two and a half million? No, you'll say. At which point, I'll take all the cards, shuffle the deck again, hand it to you and say, all right, smartass, you do it.

In other words, from a thoroughly shuffled deck, if you're not impressed with what I just did, you do it -- deal out exactly the same 5-card hand. Not so easy now, is it?

Hold on, you'll complain, that's not fair. Why, yes, you're right -- it isn't fair. And why not? It's because, when I dealt my hand, I never made any predictions or put any conditions on the outcome beforehand. I just dealt the hand and, after the fact, went back to rationalize (in a totally meaningless way) the odds of that having happened.

When I shuffle the deck and hand it to you, though, I'm asking you to duplicate, at random, what I just did. And that's a whole new problem.

You can see the same statistical misunderstanding if you walk up to a bridge game, look at each of the players' initial hand of 13 cards, and calculate the incredibly low probability of a random dealing having come up with exactly that set of hands.

Finally, others have referred to this mathematical misunderstanding as the "blade of grass" fallacy, in which a golfer hits a ball onto the green, walks up to his ball and stands there marveling that, out of all of the blades of grass the ball might have come to rest on, it stopped on just that one. How amazing. How incredibly improbable. How thoroughly bogus, as I'm sure you're starting to understand by now.

The mathematical fallacy should now be obvious -- there's no point in calculating the odds of something happening if it's just being done after the fact and there were no pre-conditions to start with. And this is precisely what the creationists/ID proponents do with things like the structure of DNA.

Look, they'll say, DNA is so marvelously complex. It has exactly these components in exactly this order. What are the odds of that? To which the correct answer is, that question is meaningless. It might have been just as likely some other structure that worked equally well.

http://canadiancynic.blogspot.com/2005/09/deepak-chopra-and-atrocity-that-is.html

I take issue with the word "randomness". The definition of randomness would lead one to believe that no pattern exists. A more proper definition would be that no pattern can be determined. If I were to put out as a string of "random" numbers 14159265358979323846264338327950288419769399, there are some people that would perceive them as being random and another group that would recognize them as the decimal portion of pi.

The same thing with the solar system. If one were to insist that the sun was at the center, as Ptolemy did, the planets would "gyre and gimble in wabe" and nobody would be able to assign any order to them at all. By moving the Sun to the center, the planets would then appear to move in more or less elliptical orbits and then there would appear to be order.

As long as one insists on perceiving things in a certain way, there will always be processes that appear as "random". It may be that a euphemism for "random" would appear to be "God's will" since that doesn't make sense to anyone either.

Actually I'm gonna *BUMP* this.
Excellent posts, folks.

Another arguement like this is, "Could a monkey randomly beating on a typewriter ever write the works of Shakespeare?" The answer is of course YES--If it were done in the same way natural selection works. Every proper hit would be kept and every error would be erased (die out). Don't remember exactly how many letters there are in Shakespeare right now but I figured it out once and the monkey could hit one key per second/ 8 hrs per day/ 2 weeks vacation per year/ and accomplish it in 10 years. There are about 60 keys on a typewriter, so hitting one key per second would give an average of one correct hit per minute. As I said, in natural selection the good hits are kept, but the majority of hits are bad and are erased.