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Does evolution have a chance?
- Thread starter Micaiah
- Start date
Well, that's not even his argument either. His argument is that because the probability of one certain outcome of evolution is low, evolution is impossible. The flaw is easily seen when comparing it to (for example) a lottery. Imagine that I set up a lottery for whole the worlds population. Everyone in the world drops puts in one eurocent, and I will draw one winner. Now, even though the probability of one certain person winning the lottery is low, the probability of someone winning the lottery is 1.Alchemist said:
The same here. Even though the probability of evolution giving rise to one certain outcome is increasingly low (and getting lower and lower with time), this does not mean that that outcome is the only possible outcome. The probability of evolution occurring has nothing to do with the probability of one certain outcome occurring.
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J
Jet Black
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exactly which point 3 are you on about?Micaiah said:
way to go ignoring my request. can you pair the respective parts of your analogy with the real world? If all you wanted to show is that the current outcome is not inevitable well then you have just bested sherlock holmes in stating the obvious.
But that is just the problem, it makes almsot no sense in the sentence you have put forth. can you explain them rather than just tell me I should know them? sometimes communication is not incredibly clear over the internet.
again, this doesn't help me alot.
you don't really think that point mutations are the only sort of mutations do you? there are translations, translocations, inversions and several more. there is even more than one type of point mutation, insertions and deletions leading to frame shift mutations and replacements.
what? you don't seem to be getting the point I am making here. Spetner is focussing purely on point mutations and implying that evolution occurs point mutation by point mutation, and that there is a single path leading to his conclusion.
not to you no, but then you have yourself admitted you don't know much about biology and genetics. I think most people with an education would be quite clear in what I am talking about.
then why the pointless attachment to particular point mutations? why is spetner assuming that this convergence occurs only through point mutations and that there is only a single path in each line to the eventual outcome?
no, I don't think you do understand it.
you don't need to tell me this.
err no, I know very well about the tenets of the modern synthesis. my bookshelf is heaving with books on biology and evolution that I have actually read, right from the complex books like Futuyama's "Evolutionary Biology", Molecular Biology of the Cell, through Maynard Smith's "The Theory of Evolution" down to more pop science books from the likes of Dawkins and Gould. I don't care what Spetner cites, because from what you have demonstrated, he doesn't actually understand what he has read. All I can see at the moment is that Spetner is an ignoramus, and you've been sucked into his drivel.
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J
Jet Black
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Miciah, have you ever tried calculating the probability of you existing, given the fact that your ancestors existed at the time of Christ and there is a continual unbroken chain of breeding from then until now? I tell you what, I'll let you assume no mutations at all, no crossing over and a generation time of 20 years. the only factor I want you to include is that the chances of any particular chromosome being handed from a parent to a child is 0.5, meaning that each chromosome pair has a probability of 0.25 of existing in each generation. I don't want tou to include the odds of a particular pair of people meeting, since that will only make the odds longer, and I'll be kind and let all your ancestors be hemaphrodites so your ancestral line is not destroyed by a boy only or a girl only generation.
what are the odds of you existing?
what are the odds of you existing?
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Alchemist
Seeking in Orthodoxy
That's nice, but it isn't true. Even if evolution of the wing of a bird was similar to "rolling a dice" [sic] 3855 times in a row, the number of years your source calculated is not the length of time it would take for the wing of a bird to evolve.Micaiah said:
After all, on the first trial, you may roll 3855 sixes, in which case (according to your calculations), the wing would have evolved in 5.4 hours. Or, you may roll 3855 sixes the 2nd time you tried it, in which case the wing would have evolved in 10.8 hours. The only time it would take your proposed 10^2997 hours is if every trial failed, except for the very last trial where it was successful; in other words, the maximum length of time that the wing would take to evolve (assuming each combination of 3855 dice occured only once).
So yes, 10^2997 years is a long time. But it has nothing to do with how long the wing will take to evolve, especially considering there is a chance that the wing would take only 6 hours to do so...
Peace,
Nick
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J
Jet Black
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Alchemist said:
what's worse is that the analogy is rubbish anyway. see the way evolution works is that starting from a bunch of sets of dice, the ones with the best score are picked the rest discarded, and the next bunches copied from the previous bunches, with a few of the dice rolled. from all those, the best are kept, the rest discarded and so on.
The following applet demonstrates this:
http://www.cs.laurentian.ca/badams/evolution/EvolutionApplet102.html
while of course the final sequence is inserted into the applet initially, the point of the applet is to demonstrate that if you have a system whereby each generation is a slight modification of the previous one, as opposed to a completely new start each time, you converge very rapidly on better examples.
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I think your attacking the argument from a bad angle. The chances of wings forming exactly the way they are now are small, no matter what time period you put on it. However, there are several flaws that you should be focusing on.Alchemist said:
First of all, the formation of wings has happened, but it is not a necessary outcome. It is just one of the outcomes in a range of outcomes. If the evolution of wings would have never happened, then it would never have happened. Saying that evolution cannot have happened because the chances of a specific outcome are small is not an argument against evolution in any way (in the same way as my improbability of being born is not an argument against birth, as Jet explained in his post, and has been explained on this very thread in the same way with birth, dice and cards earlier).
Second, Micaiah wants to assume that 'a wing is a wing', and that those should have developed in the same way. But looking at the morphology of wings in nature shows us that this is not the case. There is a range of possibilities in which a wing can form, and we cannot presume that, if the current outcomes would not have been reached, other outcomes would not have either. Again, the error is in the assumption that the current is the only thing possible.
In both cases, what we would need is a calculation of the search space. To calculate the chances of evolution occurring and giving an outcome, we do not only need to look at presently existing outcomes, but at all possible outcomes. We cannot make such a calculation, but any calculation neglecting that is inherently flawed.
edited to add: and add to that what Jet Black said about the disregard of selection in the probability arguments.
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Jet Black said:
That is a bit like trying to compare the probability of a baby being conceived and born to the probability of one of the theorised point mutations occuring and becoming fixed in a population. I don't see any valid comparison. One is reality, the other is hypothesis.
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J
Jet Black
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Tomk80 said:
this is a very important point. When we look at the bat wing, It certainly seems like it has come from a gliding angle. Now we already know that folds of skin can form between the digits, because the skin between the digits is actually destroyed through apoptosis, which sometimes fails. I had a friend who had webbed toes because of this. other examples of failing apoptosis include human tails, manx cat tails and whale hind limbs.
this slight modification increases the surface area of the organism and so helps it to glide, perhaps in jumping from one tree to another. we see this sort of thing in flying squirrels. the recent discovery that theBMP2 gene in bats is activated in the hypertrophic region of the fingers but not in mice leads to the fascinating discovery, that if we activate this gene, mice grow long fingers. add this to the webbing though the failure of apoptosis and you are making the first steps towards flying through affecting only 2 genes that are already present.
Birds on the other hand are a completely different case. Recent discoveries have shown that theropod dinosaurs ancestral to even Tyrannosaurus Rex had a kind of downy covering, which would provide a possible precursor to feathers. The purpose of this downy coverage could be anything from insulation through to attracting mates (quite plausible since birds are well known for attracting mates through plumage) and this certainly seems to be the case in a number of the theropods that had long, but (for flying) useless feathers. these structures can then be co.opted into gliding and eventually flight. so there we have 2 totally different paths to flight. In the former case the fingers all remain and are lengthened and the type of flight is limited to short gliding and flapping flight, due to the lack of an aerofoil, whereas in the case of birds, you have all types of flight from quasi-insectoid flapping in the hummingbirds, through conventional flapping and gliding flight, taken to extremes in albatross and vultures. So the actual methods of flight are totally different, the structures for flying are totally different, and the genes regulating them are totally different. the only convergent thing about it is that they both fly.
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J
Jet Black
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Micaiah said:
no, we are talking about the probability of specific events occuring. you are focussing on the specific event of a specific point mutation and I am looking at the specific event of you being born given the starting conditions of the global population at the time of Christ.
You see, the claim you are making, as understood by me, is that the odds of a specific mutation becoming embedded in the population are very low, therefore it cannot happen. I'd just like to see if you can calculate the odds of you being born given those starting conditions, and determine whether they are high or low.
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It is very valid.Micaiah said:
The baby being conceived and born is one event in a range of possibilities, just as the chance of one specific mutation occurring and fixing is one event in a range of probabilities.
But probability of the occurrence of one specific event of a process tells us nothing on the possibility of that process occurring. Just as the validity of the processes of babies being conceived and born is not determined by the probabilty of one specific baby being conceived and born, the validity of the process of mutations occurring and being fixed (ie, evolution) is not determined by the probability of this occurring to one specific mutation.
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Alchemist said:
This is a good example of the kind of miscommunication that is occuring. I was trying to give a mental picture of the kind of numbers we're talking about, not claiming this is how long the wing takes to evolve.
I'm really not interested in going over this aspect any further, but would like to procede with other areas of the topic. If you want to join in fine. If you want to give the whole thing up as nonsense that is fine also. The posts are my take on what Spetner says, and I'm interested in feedback. I can see that evolutionsits find it hard to follow some of the arguments, and see some examples as not convincing. That is the kind of feed back I'm after. Thankyou. At the same time maybe you'll learn a few things as well.
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J
Jet Black
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hmm.. a question for Miciah:
Is the bird the only possible destination of the evolution of the theropod dinosaurs? If the environment had been different and different mutations had happened in the last few million years, along what other possible paths could the theropods have evolved?
Is the bird the only possible destination of the evolution of the theropod dinosaurs? If the environment had been different and different mutations had happened in the last few million years, along what other possible paths could the theropods have evolved?
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J
Jet Black
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Micaiah said:
yes, and you could get exactly the same sorts of incredibly large numbers from just calculating the odds of you being born. You see all you are calculating is the odds of a specific outcome occuring, and those are incredibly small. But there are an incredibly large number of possible outcomes. Assuming that the species that we start (analogous to the population at the time of Christ) with does not become extinct (analogous to no all boy or girl generations destroying your bloodline or your ancestors being variously shot, stabbed, hanged, involved in unfortunate accidents with armadillos and whatever else may happen to stop them concieving) then there will be an unbroken line of conceptions, with mutations under the pressure of natural selection. so something will be here. Just like the odds of you, a specific human with a specific stretch of DNA, being born are incredibly low, the odds of any particular outcome of evolution are very low, but given those conditions, something would be here. we happen to be looking at just one possible path that life has taken out of the countless trillions of other paths it could have taken. Your odds are meaningless, because while the odds of a particular case are small, the odds of a case out of all the possible cases occuring are 1.
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Another thing I think of now as per illustration. Suppose we are interested in the development of wings through evolution. We know the bird wing is different from the bat wing. Suppose the change of developing a bat wing is 1/10^30 and the development of a bird wing is also 1/10^30. Now, when we look at the probability of 'wings' developing, the chance on that is actually 2/10^30.
Correct calculation of the evolution of 'wings' would already show that the existance of multiple wing-'designs' increases the probability of 'wings' evolving, in stead of making it more unlikely.
If the existance of homology is used by Spetner to demonstrate the improbability of evolution, I think he really hasn't got a grasp on either evolution and mathematics.
Correct calculation of the evolution of 'wings' would already show that the existance of multiple wing-'designs' increases the probability of 'wings' evolving, in stead of making it more unlikely.
If the existance of homology is used by Spetner to demonstrate the improbability of evolution, I think he really hasn't got a grasp on either evolution and mathematics.
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You need to revise your high school probability here. How do you determine the probability of two sixes in the roll of a two dice. Note these events are said to be independent.
Enough mathematics for the night. Time for bed. Good night all.
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Let's take the probability of me being born, counting back one generation, and not taking into account the probability of my father and mother actually meeting each other.Micaiah said:
My mother was around 25 when I was born. Presuming that she has had her period since she was 15 years old, that means she has had her period for 10 years. That means that since then, 120 egg cells that could have become me have already been lost. She has even more egg cells in her body already by that time (as all of them have already developed partially since she was born), but lets take that number. Each egg cell is different. So the chance of me getting the genetic material from my mother is 1/120.
Healthy, fertile men ejucalate around 40 million sperm cells every time. Taking into account crossing over and mutations, each one is different from the other. Let's ignore that my father probably tried multiple times with my mother, and only take this number. The chance of me getting the exact genetic material I have now from my father is 1/40*10^6.
The chance of me getting the genetic material I have (and thus becoming me) is then 1/120 * 1/40*10^6 = 1/4.8*10^8
That is the chance in one generation, making extremely unjustified assumptions in ignoring almost everything that I should not have ignored (and would have increased the probabilities, like my father or mother meeting someone else, my father and mother having sex before I was conceived etc, etc). Now, to calculate the chances of me existing all the way back to (for example) Jesus' days will make an incredibly low probability. I will arive at a number that would not fit on earth if I would like to print it in paper.
Therefore, birth is impossible.
See the logical error in going from the calculations to my last argument. The same holds true for the requests you gave in your calculations. You ask for the probabilities of a specific event (for example, the development of wings or the chance of one specific mutation occurring and fixing). From this, you want to conclude that the process is not possible, ignoring that that specific event is not a necessary outcome of the process.. The argument is a non-sequitur.
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