The Inevitability of Improbability

what is information is missing? how much accurate is accurate?

I would like you to answer my questions. Science doesn’t work in the way that you are using it. You’re supposed to integrate all of the relevant data before you read a conclusion, and you obviously haven’t done that.

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I am not writing scientific paper here, if you know something bring it up, i have not written a paper, and gave for a review here

I already did. Catalytic antibodies. There are a couple of threads on this board about them.

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But you don’t know that there are no other proteins that could perform a similar function. If the claim is that some organism requires a specific function to be performed to be alive, then you need to determine how many different proteins are capable of performing that function.

Just because the organism uses some particular protein to perform that function does not tell you that that protein is the only possible one that can perform that function. I don’t know how you could even hope to begin to assess that without some extremely large and practically infeasible experiments. So since you can’t actually claim to possess the very knowledge that you would need to make the calculation you are attempting, your argument here is hopeless.

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@Edgar_Tamarian, I was absent for a while when you first described yourself on an introduction thread. So this is my belated welcome to you for joining Peaceful Science.

In order better to understand where you are coming from, I just now re-read that introduction thread in which you wrote this:

Am I understanding you correctly? It sounds like you said that you are self-taught and “understand all the concepts in biology”—and that you understand “whose arguments are strong.” I took multiple courses in biology (long ago) and have been reading a lot of biology papers, books, and tutorials in the roughly half-century since my formal coursework. Yet, I feel like I understand only a very small fraction of “all of the concepts in biology.” Yes, I can often determine the stronger argument when I observe discussions and debates between people of widely different academic credentials and professional biological research experiences (e.g., between an evolutionary biology professor and a family practice physician.) On the other hand, when the parties are much better matched, I often can’t personally evaluate the merits of their arguments. Some of those technical topics go too far beyond my limited knowledge. Thus, based upon my own personal experiences, I found your aforementioned post surprising.

Even in my own fields of linguistics and Biblical theology, I certainly don’t understand “all of the concepts.” This is especially true for developments in those fields since my retirement. So I just wanted to ask: Did I perhaps misunderstand you?

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Thanks for the welcome.

Yes, misunderstood me, but it was not your fault. It was my fault that what I wanted to say in English sounds BOLD CLAIM, Even experts of any field do not understand all, and science is about a thing that humanity as whole understands a tiny fraction of Nature, perhaps it was my English sounds bad, I am not native speaker

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Whom you are blaiming for calculating probabilites Hubert P.Yockey? was he ID proponent or was he creationist?

Hubert P.Yockey «A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory» [Journal of Theoretical Biology] [Vol 67, Issue 3] (1977), pp. 377-398

But wasn’t their probability of winning p=0.0?

I think that proceeds from the argument that is being put forth here that the probability of an event that has occurred is p=1.0. It follows that the probability of an event that did not occur is 0.0. You have to add up the individual probability and they have to equal 1.

You might even say that it is inevitable that these proteins would not exist. :slight_smile:

Usually probabilities are expressed as a number between 0 and 1. If the odds of it occurring were 1 in 1 then it was the only possible outcome. Is that what you intended to say?

Perhaps it does help to work this backwards. If the probability of an event is 1.0 then that event is the only possible outcome in the probability space. But you are saying there are other possible outcomes in the probability space. If there are other possibile outcomes that would be a different probability space.

@nwrickert can you help us out here?

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I suspect there has been some miscommunication.

Best practice is to construct a mathematical model first. And then you carry out experiment (or theorize about the thought experiment). In an actual experiment, all of the events have occurred by the time you analyze the data. But you continue to use the probabilities from the model which was built before the events have occurred.

If somebody already won the lottery, you can talk about the probability of that. But you need to be clear that you are modeling a hypothetical situation before the winning ticket was drawn. And you need to be clear what the model is.

And then there’s the question of conditional probability. That’s where a lot of probability arguments from ID proponents go wrong.

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Seems a reasonable hypothesis.

If I bought a ticket, and the draw was last night but I do not know the results, is it reasonable for me to wonder about the probability I won before I do find out the results

We do assign probabilities to retrodictions in science, I believe.

I think the issue is not when an event occurred, but the state of knowledge about the event.

Seems to me we have been through these issues in another thread, possibly the random mutations thread. I’d assign high probability to that myself…

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You would need a carefully specified mathematical model. And it should be an open model so that others can see whether any inappropriate information was smuggled in.

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Can you give a specific example of this?

The easy example would be the probability of life originating.

We can look at the probability that life originated somewhere (but we don’t know where). Then to make use of that, you need to know a lot more about how many planets there are in the entire cosmos where life could have originated.

If you want to be specific about life on earth, then you need to look at the conditional probability:

Probability(life originated on earth given the condition that it life is known to exist on earh). It’s not easy to estimate that probability either, but that conditional probability might be close to 1.

Many of the bad arguments coming from critics of evolution are based on estimating absolute probabilities, where conditional probabilities should be used.

Could you explain in more detail, what you mean ‘‘life originated on earth given the condition…life is known to exist on earh…but that conditional probability might be close to 1’’

why?

I wrote a post on the time element that commented on in the OP but decided to not post it. From the OP:

Improbable events must happen because time is moving forward.

I’d like to highlight the following from the linked wikipedia article.

All the events in {\displaystyle {\mathcal {F}}}{athcal {F}} that contain the selected outcome {\displaystyle \omega }mega (recall that each event is a subset of {\displaystyle \Omega }mega) are said to “have occurred”.

They “have occurred,” but their probability is not 1.0.

If you think that the absolute probability of life originating on earth is miniscule, then the absolute probability that life exists on earth should also be miniscule. But that latter miniscule number appears in the denominator when you calculate conditional probability.

Or, looked at the other way, if life on earth did not originate here then it came from elsewhere. And, at present, there is no evidence to support this possibility.

So, what motivates you to think that the absolute probability of life originating on earth is NOT minuscule.

This isn’t actually relevant to the conditional probability.

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