Have you been following along?
Essentially all mutations (and just about all processes) are random and ordered at the same time. It is merely a matter of degree. The one exception I can imagine is a boundary case, a Dirac function, which is deterministic with no randomness.
Shapiro is entirely incorrect when he says that mutations are “not random” and then justifies this with evidence order. There is always order to random ones, so this an absurd argument against randomness, because both are usually true at the same time.
There was never a point to concede because I’ve been saying it all along. This is nothing novel, but visible in introductory texts in statistics and probability, and also in the literature too. Remember that @Perry_Marshall just learned that there is order in randomness, including in his field of electrical engineering. He claimed initially that random meant there was no order. I am glad he is catching up.
@Perry_Marshall and Shapiro’s argument appears to amount to arguing that a half full glass actually contains no water, because half the glass is empty. At this point they have a very large bar to clear. It might be better to just walk away.
To be clear, I’m fairly certain the flagellum is not self assembling, so your though experiment would not yield a functional flagellum. It is nearly trivial, however, to demonstrate:
- The flagellum is assembled in a process that includes randomness and order.
As to it’s function itself, you may be surprised to learn:
- The most detailed and effective model of protein dynamics is a Markov state model, a random model. What ever the superficial similarity to a turbine, that is not how a flagellum works.
As for Behe’s IC argument: Which Irreducible Complexity?
I never attributed this to the power of natural selection. Think again. Nor did I say it was due to white noise.
Did you know we use randomness to model free choice of intelligence too? Randomness could be precisely where God directions appear in our equations. It is merely the part of the distribution we cannot predict.
For example, I can model my wife’s preferences for dinner tonight as a random variable. She is pregnant, so her choices are far from deterministic, not even normally she is a grand unknown. There is perhaps 50% chance we will stay in. Perhaps 50% we will eat out. So my wife is a coin flip. Not that we have adequately modeled my wife with a random variable, it seems we have demonstrates she has no mind and is purposeless.
Or so does the logic of your objection goes…
As I said deterministic processes onstensibly have no randomness. In practice there is always a gap of randomness between deterministic models and reality. This means reality is full of randomness.
@mark, are you falling prey to the idol of the marketplace (see Bacon)?