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

As the risk of pouring onto the fire oil derived from leftover thanksgiving turkeys!

I am very sceptical of all the probability arguments against evolution. So many have emanated from anti-evolutionists with an axe to grind.

From my limited maths these calculations are only as good as the information they are based on. We have a limited knowledge about living forms and basically know the order of appearance of life (throughout the 4.6 by) but not the mechanism. Hence the maths and even Dembski's maths may be flawless but if the information is inadequate then any calculations are meaningless. Dembki's argument I find meaningless.
Is 4.6 by enough time for evolution? Probably. I reckoned that the age of the earth of Kelvin 100/24my was not sufficiently long and that explains why some like GF Wright turned against evolution or could postulate a guided evolution (with God giving a shove) or Gaps which God jumped into.

So on these things I am an agnostic, but I regard the geological account of the history of life as all but irrefutable. It gives us what we have got to play with.

Michael
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Iain Strachan
  To: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
  Cc: dickfischer@verizon.net ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 9:15 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] CSI Forensics WAS Staggering drunk WAS Romans 1:20

  David,

  I'll concede on the meiosis point, ok the possibilities are much higher as you suggest.

  However, the point about the cards stands. It's not the order among players that is the point - it is the number of ways the exact same hand could be dealt to a single player that you failed to account for. The number you gave is 52! ( factorial 52). If you had said that if you deal out the cards of a pack one after the other and observed the sequence, then your figure would indeed be correct. However, you talked about four bridge hands. The 13 cards dealt to, say the first player would be in positions 1,5,9,13,... in the pack. But those thirteen in those positions could be in any permutation and the player would get exactly the same hand. Hence for one player, there are 13! ways to get the same hand. For all four you get (13!)^4 and they are all the same set of hands. That's about 10^39 ways.

  My point that it was a silly straw-man argument about low probability still stands. I do wish people like you and Dick would stop making this argument. While I agree that low probability doesn't prove God, it pays not to make foolish arguments to back this up.

  Iain

  On 11/23/07, D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:
    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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      After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.

      - Italian Proverb
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  After the game, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.

  - Italian Proverb
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Received on Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:08:30 -0000