Yes, yes, I know all that. But you ignore the quantum world, in which genuine randomness exists, events are uncaused, and it’s not just our lack of knowledge that makes us unable to predict them. Unless you subscribe to some hidden variable theory. Do you?
Does it? It would seem to me that it’s quite compatible with a deistic view. If indeed there is no true randomness unattributable to lack of knowledge, then God can know the full result of his initial conditions. If there’s true randomness, he can’t, but perhaps statistical knowledge is sufficient for his purposes. Or perhaps he finds it necessary to intervene from time to time, which according to scripture he does.
I would just like to congratulate everyone here for having a discussion about randomness for 60 comments without bringing up quantum woo. “Comments without referencing quantum woo” counter resets to zero.
It follows that if greater understanding has been achieved on our part, that would always mean moving away from random models.
As I understand quantum theory, quantum events have no cause within the physical system. I don’t know enough to say whether that excludes Heisenberg’s view that non-local influences (he speaks about “the world”) influence them. But in any case, absence of physical causation, does not preclude causes outside of physics, if God is outside physics.
But if we suppose they are actually uncaused, then I would expect that there can be no constraints whatsoever upon their outcomes, because that would constitute causation. How can an event be uncaused if it follows statistical rules similar to those which in every non-quantum case indicate orderly causes rather than an imposed statistical pattern?
If, though, they are not uncaused but statistically constrained so that, for example, radioactive decay always occurs according to the half-life of specific elements, where and what are these statistical laws, and how do they act on matter? Can they be demonstrated other than by their effects, which would be equally explicable by divine action (volitional acts also commonly being summable to statistical patterns - randomness cannot be formally distinguished from intentional acts)?
I drop something. So I use a flashlight to search for it. The flashlight works by spraying a random stream of photons.
The sun is spraying a random stream of photons on us. The blue sky is due to the random scattering of light by the atmosphere. The weather appears to be partly random. Traffic patterns on highways are partly random. Insurance companies use models of randomness to build their actuarial tables.
Life is full of contingencies.
There is apparent randomness everywhere. Apparent contingencies show up everywhere. Nobody thinks this is a theological problem. But as soon as randomness is mentioned in regard to evolution, people worry about theological implications.
Honestly, this does not make any sense. It is hugely inconsistent. If we can accept apparent randomness, and take it in our stride, for everything else in life, then we ought to also be able to accept it in evolutionary theory.
I don’t understand that argument either. What does lack of causation have to do with there being a distribution of events? It’s impossible for there not to be a distribution. Even a uniform distribution is a distribution. At any rate, you should ask this question of physicists. I think you have an odd view of physics, as if physical laws are some kind of real causal force rather than simply descriptions of how things behave.
Now of course God could easily be directly causing every quantum event for his own obscure purposes. If so, there’s no point in trying to do science, since there is no necessary regularity, and all the air molecules in a room really could rush into the upper left corner at any time.
False. He did not measure activity in any way, despite the fact that it only costs $7/assay.
That’s why the paper is laughably weak.
Definitely, as I’ve offered to show you. Nor activity. The term “fold” is misused, by the way. “Fold” is a structural classification.
Whatever. You’re still eliding the fact that Axe never bothered to measure activity, which alone should have resulted in its rejection regardless of its conclusions.
Unfortunately, I know enough about microbiology to know that the way he used beta-lactamase activity to detect whether or not the protein was doing its job is completely legitimate and in fact a very trivial scientific technique. Experiments like this are done in undergraduate microbiology labs. It is completely legitimate to, for example, test for successful viral vector transformations by plating your bacteria and grow them in the presence of an antibiotic knowing that the vector has the resistance gene on it.
Not so - laws, as you rightly say, are derived from the way things are observed to be. If they are governed by God or by something else makes no difference to the fact that they are regularly observed. As Hume pointed out, we have no guarantee that the lack of air molecules congregating in one corner of the room except that they never have so far. In theism, the faithfulness of God is a reason for confidence that past experience will continue to be relevant.
What exactly is it that guarantees that an underlying ontological randomness won’t suddenly change to status quo, given that (as you rightly say) laws are only descriptive, not predictive? It can’t be underlying laws of nature if they are observational only. Is it just a brute fact that the universe is (to paraphrase Einstein) incomprehensibly comprehensible?
For my part i don’t see why true randomness should follow any distribution at all - why shouldn’t a causeless event be more likely to be the emission of a particle rather than the appearance of a unicorn?
But it makes a big difference to the possibility that they may not always be so observed and may not be regularly observed in the future. Whatever God feels like, right?
It’s interesting how God’s plans are predictable when you want them to be but not when you don’t.
Not so. We know how air molecules work as well as why they work that way. Of course the knowledge is statistical. But we have more than “they never have so far”.
Anthropic principle, more or less. If the universe were unstable, we wouldn’t be here. There’s an interesting Jack Vance story about that.
It’s impossible for there not to be a distribution.
That’s good to know of your familiarity with some microbiological assays, @BenKissling. You surely are aware that strains of E. coil can grow on low concentrations of ampicillin (comparable to those used by Axe in his experiments) at low temperatures without any capability of producing beta-lactamases. This is common knowledge, and any undergrad who has left amp plates out on the bench would attest to the abundant background growth that sometimes occurs.
Axe hisself has shown this to be the case, in this study. You might want to dig into the details, and see how he shows that it is hard to distinguish between control and experimental cultures under his conditions.
Bottom line - @Mercer’s criticisms are quite valid.
I know enough about biochemistry to know that enzymatic activity is a continuous, not a binary, variable.
Why do you think that Axe didn’t bother to measure activity at $7 per assay?
I don’t know of any undergraduate microbiology lab that bills this as a measurement of activity. Would you please show me one if you disagree?
It is. What isn’t legitimate is to use plating efficiency as an actual measurement of enzymatic activity, particularly when a commercial assay is readily available from Sigma, and then draw a global conclusion from it.
Why hasn’t Axe tested this extrapolation with any other enzymes?
Why did you only cite Axe, and not any of the other papers in the field that included far more rigorous experiments?
I’m trying, but having difficulty, following your logic here - but then logic has to do with cause and effect, and you have told me quantum effects have no cause.
“Impossible” implies the necessity for a pattern of distribution of these uncaused random events. But necessity arises from necessary causation, and here there is, on your model, none. Where dos the necessity of a distribution arise, since it cannot be from the cause of the event?
So on what rational principle do causeless events, of necessity, produce particular probability distributions? Perhaps it would help to draw analogies from similarly causeless events in the macro world - but I can’t think of any, because at the macro scale, where there are no causes, there are no effects, and therefore no probabilities.
In fact, basic logic would suggest that without any cause, there are no possibilities, let alone inevitabilities. How does the quantum world circumvent that logic?
The one paper you have cited thus far was off by 68 orders of magnitude.
You may think that, but the evidence demonstrates otherwise. The genetic differences between species are consistent with the same processes that create mutations in the present.
Our current knowledge of the biochemistry behind mutations is included. It just so happens that the experiments run in the 1940’s are still around, and it is those experiments that defined what random means with respect to mutations. The knowledge we have gained since the 1940’s has only confirmed those original findings.
We don’t know that. Mutations are not random with respect to their position. A cytosine upstream of a guanine has a much higher probability of being mutated than a cytosine upstream of the other two bases, as one example. However, mutations are random with respect to fitness which is why randomness is defined as such.
That’s because many people are wrong about the definition of random mutations.
But they don’t. Some bases have a much higher chance of mutating than others.
Then you would need to explain:
Why transitions outnumber transversions when we compare the genomes of different species, and why CpG mutations occur at a much higher rate.
You would also need to explain the nested hierarchy
You would need to explain why there are more differences in introns than in exons when we compare the genomes between different species.
That’s just 3 off the top of my head. I have yet to see YEC explain these observations.
I think the logic here is that every random variable follows a distribution. We may not know in advance what that distribution will be, we may not ever know why it follows that distribution, it may not even a distribution that has ever been documented before. But the only alternative option to not following a random distribution is not being random, in which case the (non-random) ‘distribution’ is for the ‘variable’ to always return the same fixed value.
If the value varies it must give different results. Tabulating those different results gives you a sample distribution, from which you can estimate the population distribution (in term of its mean, variance, skew, etc).
I believe you are making a category error there, or perhaps a joke. Not sure.
On the principle that a distribution is merely a description of the observed events. No matter how lacking in smoothness, what you see is a distribution, by definition. Further, why wouldn’t the central limit theorem apply to causeless events?
You are going to have to explain your basic logic in a little more detail.
Then I guess God could specifically guide mutations if God has a specific goal in mind. I don’t pretend to know what God’s plan is.
That is the gist of what I have seen in these types of discussions. People want to feel like they are an intended and specific outcome, and I can understand the psychology behind it. I can also see how people would ignore the other problems that such a view brings with it. For example, if God is actively guiding all of these mutations then God is directly responsible for given children cancer, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
That’s entirely consistent with both ID and YEC, since neither argues that species are immutable.
And it just so happens that I never said those experiments were incorrect. Rather, as I have already said, the old definition is correct but not precise enough.
Until you can show that these probability differentials are enough to traverse the sequence space between all fitness peaks than you have exactly nada. You are still depending upon mutations that are random with respect to their position. Slightly different rates in different areas of the genome don’t get you precise sequences down to the last residue being exactly correct.