Running A Negative Control on ID Math

The problem is that significance is determined after the protein sequence emerges. This is called drawing the bulls eye around the bullet hole.

It isn’t that rare at all. People win the lottery all of the time. Before a drawing, the ticket that ultimately wins is no different than any other ticket, and it is only given significance after the drawing.

To push this analogy a bit further, we could look at the probability of 5 specific people winning the lottery. Let’s say that the odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 200 million, there are 200 million tickets sold for each drawing, and there is 1 winner for each drawing. The winners are John, Susy, Tom, Leslie, and Dawn. The odds of those 5 people winning was 1 in 200 million to the 5th power, which is a pretty big number.

This is where the ID smoke and mirrors comes in. ID supporters would claim that the odds of those people winning is too astronomical, and therefore there had to be a designer who helped things along. They would also claim that these are the only possible winners since these are the winners we see. @stcordova would call it a violation of large numbers. However, with the conditions we set out, 5 winners are inevitable. Whatever 5 winners we end up with will be exeptionally improable, but still inevitable.

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