Re: [asa] CSI Forensics WAS Staggering drunk WAS Romans 1:20

Iain,
I think you've made two errors. First, you changed my approach to
allowing any order of hands. Your approach implied that the four hands of
a single suite is the same whether cdhs or shdc, or any of the other
orders among players. I assumed that the order among players counted.
Second, you ignored the fact that chromosomes are not simply transferred
as wholes but reassort the genes during meiosis. Unfortunately, I do not
remember seeing a figure of the much larger possible number of different
genomes thereby allowed. Then there's the possibility of miscopying.
There are probably other factors that geneticists can add. Happy
computing.
Dave (ASA)

On Fri, 23 Nov 2007 09:03:46 +0000 "Iain Strachan"
<igd.strachan@gmail.com> writes:
Why oh why do certain members of this list keep on making the same
fallacious straw-man argument over and over again despite my many
attempts to explain it? It seems to me that any mention of the word
"probability" on this list results in yet another excuse to bash ID. I
believe the correct response to ID is to point out that events that seem
unlikely may well turn out to be highly likely once we've understood the
processes involved.

But this silly "low probability events happen all the time argument" is
completely vacuous. Sure, if four players sit down at a bridge table and
deal the cards, then the chance of them getting that set of four hands is
one in 5.36x10^28 (The impressive figure given by D.F. Siemens in all its
67 digit glory in an earlier post turned out to be too big by a whopping
39 orders of magnitude, because he failed to take into account that the
same bridge hands arise independent of the order in which the 13 cards in
each hand are dealt). Nonetheless the 5.36e28 number is pretty
impressive, but it doesn't surprise us because any set of hands has the
same chance. But what if you shuffled the deck and dealt out the cards
again and got the same set of four hands? Then you would be surprised,
because it conforms to a specified target (it matched the previous hand).

Likewise consider the case when two parents have a child by the usual
means. Each sperm has 23 chromosomes, each one chosen at random from
each chromosome pair. The same goes for each egg cell. Hence when I was
born, I was one of 2^46 possible individuals that could have been
conceived. Therefore God? as Dick would say. Of course that's a silly
statement, but the point is that no one in the ID camp would make that
claim. Dick's argument is just a straw man. But suppose my parents had
a second child after me by the usual means and it turned out to be an
identical twin genetically? At this point the 1 in 7x10^13 chance is
significant because it conforms to a target (ie it's the same as me).

Honestly, until you start to grasp this elementary point your arguments
look every bit as foolish as some of the stuff coming out of RATE. Are
you going to get it this time?

Iain

On Nov 22, 2007 11:34 PM, Dick Fischer <dickfischer@verizon.net> wrote:

Hi John:

It's simply smoke and mirrors, John. All the particles that composite
you and me emanated ultimately from the Big Bang. The sheer likelihood
that the specific particles that ended up being you and the specific
particles that would wind up being me is so low that it is nearly
impossible that you and I exist and are having this conversation.
Therefore, God? Where is the leap from likelihood of events to the
conclusion that God has to do it all? Please send this on to your
forensic specialist. Maybe he has some evidence we don't know about.

Dick Fischer
Dick Fischer , Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of John Walley
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2007 5:45 AM
To: 'Randy Isaac'; asa@calvin.edu

Subject: [asa] CSI Forensics WAS Staggering drunk WAS Romans 1:20

> The absence of being "fully" random is not the sign of divine guidance.

I have this one last niggling ID doubt. I have trouble accepting the
above. This is where the ID forensic argument comes in and I have to
admit it is somewhat convincing.

For instance, in our RTB Chapter in Atlanta, one of our scientists is a
Forensic Toxicologist that works for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
He analyzes tissue samples for the presence of certain drugs and
testifies as an expert witness for the state in court cases. His work
involves mostly DUI, cocaine and methamphetamine, but occasionally he
gets the bizarre and recently got some local black widow type woman that
had a penchant for poisoning her husbands and he had to find the trace
evidence of whatever it was that she used in order for the state to
prosecute her. Since a couple of her previous husbands had died as well
now they suspect she poisoned them too.

This is the real CSI stuff. He took me down to the GBI lab one time and
gave me a tour of all the departments and I met all the people and it was
really fascinating. In addition to his toxicology lab they have a
ballistics dept where they analyze all the different types of guns and
bullets and a document and forgery dept that analyzes all the different
kinds of document fraud several other depts and a DNA lab. In fact I met
the two girls that run the DNA lab and their work was recently in the
news that you may have seen since the GBI just did a paternity test on
Atlanta megachurch pastor Earl Paulk and determined that his 34 year old
nephew who had replaced him as pastor was really his son through an
illicit affair with his brother's wife. Talk about bizarre.

They also have a synthetic fiber analysis dept and I met the guy that was
one of the ones that actually analyzed the carpet fibers in the famed
Wayne Williams serial murder case in Atlanta back in the 70's. The guy I
met was retiring that week and he had come on as an intern almost 30
years ago when the GBI was conducting that investigation.

Anyway my friend is a strong ID advocate and he uses his knowledge and
experience of forensics in his presentation on ID and last I heard he was
even writing a book about it. One example he uses is the Wayne Williams
case mentioned above. In fact Wayne Williams was the first capital murder
case conviction ever won on the basis of forensic evidence. They
basically identified carpet fibers found on several of the bodies to the
carpet in Wayne Williams' house and car and it turns out the particular
carpet found in his home was a certain type from a certain small
manufacturer of a certain odd color that was made in a certain small lot
size and only sold in the Atlanta area be a few retailers for a certain
small period of time. The prosecution's case was basically massive
circumstantial evidence and came down to what are the chances that all
these victims would have that carpet fiber on them if they hadn't all
been in Wayne Williams house before they were murdered?

This is far from being an airtight case but they won the conviction. It
has been contested though from the beginning because Atlanta was sharply
polarized along racial lines at the time (Wayne Williams is African
American) and his defense attorney at the time (who happened to be my
scout master) released a famous quote that "Wayne Williams was convicted
on the law of averages instead of the law of the land". And still today
there are efforts underway to get his conviction overturned and prominent
local politicians continually call for that.

My friends point in his presentation is that here is an example of how
the govt uses science and probability arguments to convict a man of a
capital murder charge for which he could have been executed, so it is
therefore disingenuous for Dawkins and others in academia to deny design
in the universe in the face of the same massive amounts of circumstantial
evidence. Granted neither case is totally airtight and they both come
down to whether or not we can rationally infer a cause beyond a
reasonable doubt but we seem to have different criteria in play here. It
seems like Dawkins gets away with what Wayne Williams couldn't.

To me this has always seemed like a very reasonable argument. So Dawkins
want to make the metaphysical claim that evolution has no distant targets
so therefore he gets to throw out all the complexity and probability
evidence against him. How is this different than Wayne Williams
attempting to come up with some claim to get all the carpet evidence
against him thrown out that we would never buy? Why do we seem to allow
this theoretical scientific ideal in academia but in the real world of
the courts where people's lives are on the line, we don't?

Thanks

John

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu ] On
Behalf Of Randy Isaac
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 5:46 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] Romans 1:20 (disregard my last post)

Though the picture of a staggering drunk in a hallway isn't my favorite,
it does have somewhat of a crude picture of randomness with boundary
conditions. In a sense, we see that kind of bounded randomness at every
level of nature. At the microscopic level, it's definitely randomness
bounded by the distribution of the wavefunction. A little higher and it
is Brownian motion under the influence. Then random molecular collisions
and pressure. At the high end of the length scale it is galaxies
colliding, or not, and black holes forming, etc. And right in the middle
of it all is the development of living cells, a random process at the
core with some kind of bounded--or preferential--direction.

Note that Simon Conway Morris has been talking about the tendency for
convergence in evolution though no one knows what drives it. I think we
need to be careful to distinguish between bounds on randomness,
environmental factors that preferentially induce certain outcomes,
selection that happens at the molecular level instead of the organism
level, and the divine hand of the creator. The extent to which Dawkins
doesn't believe evolution is fully random, he does not refer to the last
option. We should not be induced to find divine guidance under the guise
of bounded or constrained randomness. The absence of being "fully" random
is not the sign of divine guidance.

A key point of "randomness" that Gould was famous for pointing out was
the observation that if you run the tape again, you wouldn't get human
beings with the specific genome that we currently have. You might get a
sentient species but with quite a different set. Morris thinks maybe you
would get the same. We really don't know. Rich's point, I think, is that
God can carry out his will through whatever process he chooses, be it
"purely" random or determistic or "miraculous" or whatever label we can
think of. At the moment it looks like he chose a process that is an
intriguing mixture of somewhat random mutations with natural selection.
How this led to a 'predestined' group of human beings is a mystery
indeed.

Randy

----- Original Message -----
From: John Walley
To: 'Rich Blinne'
Cc: 'asa'
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 11:00 AM
Subject: RE: [asa] Romans 1:20 (disregard my last post)

>BTW, no one including Richard Dawkins believes that evolution is fully
random.

Ok, now it is getting interesting. Another Eureka moment for me.

If Dawkins doesn't believe that evolution is fully random then does that
mean he concedes some kind of guiding process or law embedded in life?
Remember we discussed on this list Gould's analogy of a staggering drunk
in a hallway making forward progress but by the hardest? Would Dawkins
accept this thought as well?

If so, then the question turns on the existence of the analog of the
hallway in nature that constrains life to make forward progress. What
would that be? Maybe if that is ever understood then it would not be as
easy for Dawkins to consider it as being self-existent.

To me this "hallway" is some divinely embedded algorithm in the
primordial epigenome that guided it ultimately to where we are today. I
guess that is subjective and the same philosophical impasse we have with
Dawkins on the source of evolution today. But if you tell me he at least
acknowledges its possible existence that is news to me but I am glad to
hear that.

I have long thought that the best way to defend the faith was by falling
back to line of defense of an embedded algorithm because it seems most
consistent with what we see in cosmological ID and less likely to be
disproven like the bacterial flagellum and junk DNA arguments.

But now we are back full circle to the thorny question that started this.
If evolution was guided by a divine embedded algorithm then you can
almost understand ID's assertion that it was not random. Maybe we could
bridge this gap between ID and TE if they instead argued it was not
self-existent instead of not random? They like me have a hard time
distinguishing the difference in these terms. And this embedded algorithm
is what I mean by ID in biology.

If ID, TE and Dawkins all agree on Gould's hallway analogy then I don't
see what all the fuss is about other than language and miscommunication.
Dawkins will look at it and conclude self-existence and we will look at
it and conclude God but if the impasse is purely philosophical then all
the science gets factored out and this becomes real simple.

Thanks again,

John

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