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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

I don't really like the word "deterministic" to describe the process of evolution. No one can be sure what adaptions a species will make over thousands of years.

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Will anyone mind if I express the obvious?
And do so without reading whatever is at the other end of the link?

The latter 2/3 of that statement is pretty much what Darwin said
in his original thesis, I think, in 1842... except that evolution is
a random process which is guided by the natural selection of
successful traits. Saying that it is not random is like saying
that rainfall is not determined by water content of the air, but by
temperature changes. Duh.

Do the findings of this international team actually demonstrate
something about evolution? Did the findngs evolve in a way which
was independent of random events, but rather occurred through the
natural selection of successful traits? If so, I retract my objections.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Perhaps I can explain this silliness. Darwin came up with natural selection that operates on random variation in a population, which was all well and good. Then when people began to be able to actually examine DNA and see what was going on with it in detail it was discovered that most mutations had no effect on phenotype, that is, they caused no change in an organism. This is because almost all organisms have a lot of junk DNA that isn't used. Since these areas aren't used they are free to mutate and do so randomly. With this discovery some people got a little carried away and said, "Look, most mutations aren't selected for and can change randomly in any direction from generation to generation! Since most mutations are aren't selected for, to a first approximation no mutations are selected for, therefore there is no natural selection!" To me this makes as much sense as conlcluding that a thousand foot fall is harmless because out of those thousand feet, nine hundred and ninety-nine of them are harmless. The mutations that do affect the organism are selected for and are important. I don't think this this study is so much science as just an attempt to make idiots shut up.

Natural selection is dependent upon random events.

Thank you for the summary. I wonder who they think is the larger problem though-- flake scientists who think that evolution is not selected and therefore completely random, or non-scientists who think that evolution is guided by a cosmic hand, and therefore nonrandom? Do they realize the problems with fighting the wrong battle here?

seems to me that they had to come up with SOMETHING to justify the grant money they got to do the research, and to be sure they get more funding for more "studies" later on.
their next study will be on why water makes you feel so wet when you submerse yourself in it.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

I think the debate was a molehill that some people tried to make a mountain out of. It's nice to have one less molehill, but I don't think it will make much difference for the usual suspects. These sorts of people will take an arguement between two biologists over whose turn it is to pay for lunch and portray it as a disaster for evolutionary theory. "If scientists can't decide who paid for lunch last week, how can they know anything?"

No.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

It must be hard to work in that area, and have to worry how every scientific result you honestly come to might be twisted to serve some agenda. Here we have a headline that Darwin is "confirmed", but also that evolution is "not random". Pretty easy stuff to cherry pick if you are an IDer.

This study seems like it's a candidate for this thread.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

I sure like the anology.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Isn't that the very definition of evolution?


And the traits selected for come from...? Random mutations, that's right!

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

There are some folks seriously confused about this over at the JREF forums.

It's clear to me now that that there's some kind of anti-creationist subtext here, confusing the issue for everyone.

At the risk of being attacked again for knowing the meaning of "random", I'll just come out and say it: yes, Virginia, of course evolution is random.

Frog March put it excellently:

Or two weeks from now. Yes, than means "random".

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

I think some important distinctions in terminology are not being made, confusing the issue. The basic issue, as I see it, is that there are really three dimensions of interest here, randomness, selection, and cause. Some things can happen purely randomly, others happen with a combination of random phenomena and natural selection pressures, and others are manifestly caused. For example, if you open a door and see a room filled with coins all showing "heads", either you could be looking at a very rare random event, or some process could have removed all the tails, leaving the heads, or a person could have gone through and turned all the coins to heads. So there's the randomness of the flipping process, and also the presence or absence of selection pressures. "Natural" selection pressures are still not random, nor do they exhibit an intelligent hand-- there really isn't the word for them that clarifies how the context affects the result.

I think the problem is that the word "random" is really not descriptive enough-- for example, it is equally untrue to claim that random processes are unpredictable. Sometimes, the more random the process, the more predictable it becomes-- as in some of the macroscopic properties in the thermodynamics of large numbers of microscopic particles.

When you say "purely randomly", what are you referring to? Quantum mechanics?

That's intentional.

Define "predictable".

Define "more random".

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

If I flip a "honest" coin, any single flip is unpredictable. The more times I flip it, the closer the number of heads gets n/2!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

BREAKING NEWS: Sun to shine tomorrow.

SCIENTISTS REPORT: Up Possibly Away From Ground

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

A good example is a slot machine: They are designed to be as random as technically possible; with highly predictible results: Most of us go home empty handed.

If a slot machine could evolve, would it be in its own best interest to pay off more or less often?

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

I mean the absence of selection pressure. In other words, if I say "choose a number from 1 to 10" at random, then your choice is random, but if I keep asking you to choose again until you choose 10, then it isn't-- even though your choices still are.
Specifiable reliably within some preset accuracy range. What I have in mind is, for example, the concept of density of air. The air in this room involves random molecular motions-- yet the density in any cubic centimeter is reliably predictable to high accuracy, expressly because it is so random that there's no trace left of the initial condition or history of the gas.
The less it can be influenced by initial conditions. For example, I can give a dice such a weak roll that I could strongly influence the outcome, or I could give it a strong roll and bounce it off a wall-- and have no controllable influence. The latter is more random, that's the standard meaning of the phrase. Another example would apply to a sequence of numbers, in which "more random" would mean less correlation between subsequent numbers in the list, as in a random number generator. It's all about decoupling a result from its history, its initial setup, and outside influences that could favor a particular result over its phase-space volume. A more random result is better predicted by its phase space volume. Natural selection means we do not have genes based on phase space volume, but rather on selection pressures. That's less random.

Right-- they are programmed to show no correlation, so people can't look for a "hot machine", but if you have enough of them in a room, the payout rate is highly predictable. Casinos can choose to compromise that predictability by using huge payoffs in rare cases, but that's their choice to do.
It's clear enough that any with a consistently positive payoff are rapidly retired. It's an interesting question what would be done with one with a consistently negative payoff-- presumably they would be retired too. There must be a science to what is exactly the right negative payoff to maximize action times loss rate. If I were inclined to be dishonest, I might program them to sense long layoffs which indicate a new player has entered, and then give some encouraging payoffs early, followed by a long dry spell to break the player.

Not around here. (No, to be fair, it's been clear the last few days. But we're probably going to get snow again for the weekend.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

But it has evolved and has replaced all the predecesors, but, since it has no self-reproduction capability, it can't evolve without ID.

Paying off a little too much or too little either way would probably end this model.

Btw, according to a prominent operator (not me), the odds for each unit are changed periodically. However, she does not have any verification of it.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

It could, of course, co-evolve with a symbiotic parner who collects the payoffs and splits the profits. In casinos, it happens all the time. Nearly every good scam is a team effort.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ah, I see now what you meant. I agree in principle with your sketch of three main avenues that produce evolution: random factors, deterministic factors, and factors that are a combination of both. However, when one considers evolution as a whole, it's simpler to just say that it's always a combination of both. But this is the same as saying that it's random, because randomness itself is always "a combination of both". Any random phenomenon, no matter how erratic, has deterministic aspects to it.

You'd be hard pressed to find an instance of evolution that is driven by purely deterministic forces. Even if one puts aside things like genetic drift and mutations, and the random variation between individuals, the selection pressures themselves are to some extent random, because they are subject to not-fully-predictable variations.

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"A witty saying proves nothing" Voltaire.
"All your bias are belong to us" Ara Pacis.

True, and I think it would be fair to say, using this meaning of "random", that science has no option at all except to invoke randomness. There simply isn't anything else that is science. But that's so general a meaning for "random" that it is scientifically tautological, expressly because science always must look for the random process by that definition. In order for the word to mean something scientifically, it is helpful to adopt a more stringent meaning, which I suggest is the meaning that "random" means "in proportion to the phase space volume corresponding to any result", where the phase space volume is found in a straightforward way from counting possible outcomes, without regard to selection pressures.

For example, if a die rolls one of 6 possible outcomes, the phase space volume for each outcome is 1/6, and that's the "random" result. If the person rolling the die is allowed a "do-over" every time, then the result will instead be influenced by whatever selection pressure that person is applying. The selection pressure could also be natural-- the die could be "weighted". You are saying that even a weighted die yields random results, but that depends on what you are comparing it to. The natural comparison is with an unweighted die, and in that case it does not yield random results, its results are "influenced".

I agree, and indeed I always get a chuckle when stock-market analysts feel compelled to "explain" every tiny dip and hop in stock indicators. They can never bring themselves to say "today's result is understandable as a purely random variation"-- they'd lose their jobs!That's why science has no option but to say that everything is random-- if the external influences arethemselves to be included in what is "natural".