My knowledge of statistical analysis is rudimentary, so help me alone. I understand that P< 0.05 corresponds to essentially a 95% probability that the result is significant, to restate it in laymen’s terms. Is that roughly correct?
It is a belief that God exists and God created. Science itself is agnostic. Evolution is a scientific theory on the origin of species and the origin of the designs we see in living organisms. There is massive data that evolution happened/is happening and that natural selection is the direct cause of the designs in living organisms.
The Christian belief is that God uses “secondary causes”. Gravity to hold the planets in orbit. Nucleosynthesis in stars to make elements. The belief of theistic evolution is that evolution is the “secondary cause” by which God created/creates species. There is not going to be any biological evidence that the “theistic” part of theistic evolution is correct. Equally, there is not going to be any biological evidence that the “atheistic” part of atheistic evolution is correct.
You are not going to find “proof” of God in science. Evidence of deity is in personal experience that is not part of science.
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Phil, roughly but misleading. Pardon me, I am going to lecture for a bit. (and yes, I have done statistics for ortho residents and biomedical grad students).
A population is every instance throughout all of time. Say we are studying fracture healing with cast vs rod for femur fractures. The population is everyone who has ever had or ever will have a femur fracture treated with a cast or treated with a rod. You can’t analyze populations. So you take samples. Individuals vary. So the time to healing (union) for fractures is going to vary from individual to individual, often on a bell shaped curve.
Say we do a study with 20 fractures treated with a cast and 20 with a rod and measure the time to union (via x-ray). The experimental hypothesis is: treatment with rods will result in faster time to union than with a cast. But the statistical question is: did we draw our samples from the bell-shaped curve of one population or are their actually 2 different populations? IOW, maybe we drew most of the cast samples – by chance – from the left side (longer healing) of the curve and the rod samples – again by chance – from the right side (shorter healing) of the curve?
The p value is an estimation of the odds that there was one population and our sample difference is due to chance. p < 0.05 says that there is a 5/100 = 1/20 chance that the samples came from a single population instead of 2 different populations. In our example, it means that there is a 1/20 chance that rods do NOT shorten time to union. We got the results by chance.
We get to decide how much risk of chance we are willing to take. Is it 1/10, 1/50, 1/100? The scientific community – as a community – has decided that a 1/20 risk is acceptable. Thus, we say that p < 0.05 means that the samples came from 2 different populations and not from chance. THIS is what is “significance”.
What Kai has done is look at when you make independent comparisons on the same samples. Say we not only measured time to union, but also infection rates, calcium density, etc. If you make 20 such independent variable measurements, then a p < 0.05 or 1/20 risk means it is certain that ONE of those variables will be less than p < 0.05 by chance. The correction here is that you modify the p value by what is called the Bonferroni correction. You divide you chosen p value by the number of comparisons. If you have 10 comparisons, then you divide 0.05 by 10 and get p < 0.005. That becomes your new risk and your new level of significance.
Kai is mistaken. 3 is high enough to calculate standard deviation, which is measurement of the bell shaped curve. You can do statistical analysis on samples of 3 But I wasn’t talking about statistical analysis of 3. Instead, I was talking about repeating the entire experiment. In each experiment, each group had 10 samples. 10 samples per group was sufficient in this instance. But the repetition is that each experiment had very similar numbers and the same differences between groups.
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P = 0.05 means the null hypothesis (hypothesis of no effect) has a 5% chance of being true. So if one concludes that there is a significant difference or trend based on this threshold probability, you have a 5% chance of being “wrong” but a 95% chance of being correct.
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Thanks guys. Nothing is simple, it seems, but that helps. And points out the fallacy of “proofs” as as we really just deal with probabilities, even though they can come close enough for all intents and purposes.
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I think that this is accepting evolution and a bit of hand waiving regarding a theological understanding of the Creation (response also to @knor ). Your analogy with medical treatments is fine and I do not get bothered with believing God is invoked, since we believe He sustains all - in the same context, we tend to thank God for a fine day, a pleasant view, and so on. However, as a Christian, my theology commences with "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…"and the theology continues. Theological evolution IMO commences with “Darwin postulates variety and natural selection … and everything continues from this.”
I think my simple statements make the contrast clear. I can make similar criticisms of other crude outlooks, such as YEC and so on. Nor do I question the data biologists use by and large, although I have many doubts on the philosophy of science treatment of Darwinian biological evolution.
Hi, You must be responding to the wrong person. I never wrote anything about medical treatments…
It definitely is that and I liked what you quoted Gould as saying:
My favorite philosopher of consciousness is Iain McGilchrist and I just came across this video in which starting at about the 2:10 mark and continuing about a minute and a half he addresses this very point:
When we say what is real we appear to be asking the question what is really the case if I stopped having a relationship with it but that would immediately invalidate its being real because things are only real as much as they are relational.
What we can do though is inhabit many different viewpoints. So what is objectivity? It’s not inhabiting a very odd viewpoint which is one in which you pretend that you actually have no responses no feelings about whatever it is you’re looking at, something that actually no human being has ever been able to achieve and wouldn’t really be desirable as a way of securing truth.
In most cases if I I’m asked about something I need to enter into some sort of relationship to find out what it is. Otherwise I’m in the position of a martian looking at something that I completely don’t understand which is utterly alien to me and trying to make sense of it. So instead of objectivity being an idea of an unrealizable and indeed undesirable detachment, it’s about varying one’s point of view as fairly as one can to take in as many points of view as seem valuable in contributing something to this picture. So the mind of the objective person is not one in which all other viewpoints other than one very peculiar cold clinical way of thinking is active but the exact opposite, a kind of meditation in which all kinds of perspectives are being entertained and tried out to see which ones are most revealing.
oops, my mistake.
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Yes, in most scientific problems, we deal with probabilities. There are problems where mathematical calculations can give certain answers (assuming that the basic assumptions are correct) but with questions dealing with life, it is mostly statistical probabilities.
That is a perspective that many have difficulties to understand. People demand from scientists certain (true or false with a 100% probability) answers but in many questions, that is impossible to tell unless you have God-like (not scientific) knowledge.
A counterreaction to working with probabilities is to say that you cannot know anything, you have just guesses or opinions. That is not true. Even if we do not have 100% certainty, we may have very likely answers (for example, a probability of 99.999) and we may have theories that can explain all observations. In theory, there could be an alternative theory that can also explain all observations. Until someone suggests such an alternative explanation, the theory that can explain all observations is treated as valid, although it cannot be shown to be true with a 100% certainty.
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Thanks for the comment where you explained the basic idea behind the statistical analyses.
You could calculate the standard deviation with a sample size of 3 but how reliable would that figure be? I would not trust it although it would be indicative.
I have noted that the philosophy or practice of making statistical analyses seems to be slightly different in medical sciences compared to ecology. Something that would be shot down by reviewers in ecological journals may be accepted in medical journals. I accept the explanation @T_aquaticus gave to this difference as the ethical and practical viewpoints should be taken into account:
Ethics is also an important tenet of this work since mice are killed as part of these experiments, so you don’t want to use more mice than you need to. The thought is if you don’t see a significant difference with 20 mice then the effect is either absent or is too insignificant to matter. A lot also hinges on experimental design and how it relates to the hypothesis.
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Medical studies are full of complications as people are complex as subjects. You see studies shut down early as soon as benefit is seen in a treatment arm, as it would be unethical to deny the control group treatment, people drop out of placebo arms due to intolerable side effects, and poor compliance with treatment and lying about it among other things.
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Incidentally, as a fellow ecologist, I agree with your perspective of a sample size of 3… This is a funny quip I heard at a thesis defense long ago–the examiner was making a point (in a wry and humorous way) about the lack of statistical rigor to back up a claim in the thesis.
" The optimal sample size is three. You need 2 points to draw a straight line between and one to throw out as an outlier".
That made me chuckle.
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This is like saying that because there is a painter then portraits were done without paint or brush. It is confusing the user with the tool.
When you exclude the tool, no explanation is possible.
Which put in Richard-level terms is asking why if we’re positing a perfect being why does the result of his work look like a bad paste-up job with half of what should have gone in the waste bin still there in the product?
Which ‘being translated’ means why do all the scrap pieces left over after turning out one product show up in other projects, as though they came from the same process?
As J. B Phillips put it in the title of a book, “Your God is too small”. You have God put in a box that keeps Him so small that He isn’t capable of producing a system that will accomplish what He wants from hydrogen atoms all the way to intelligent creatures. You have Him in a box where His work is so deficient that He constantly has to nudge it in the “right” direction.
To creatures, that is to created beings, God’s creation is full of surprises. Why should it be difficult to grasp that God would put together a universe that produces surprises?
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A rabbi I knew in grad school shook his head at this very idea, and essentially said, “God is never part of the process, God is all of the process: the hands of the doctor are the hands of God, and all the medical instruments are His”.
An Air Force colonel I met after he had retired and become a Lutheran priest/pastor said it’s like when you’re in command everything that happens is your fault/responsibility as though you did it all yourself – but with God it isn’t “as though”.
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Kind of like telling a marksman that if he didn’t hit the bullseye he didn’t hit the target.
I heard a similar statement but the number was four; the additional one was so you could tell if the graph was a line or a curve.
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At this point you logic is both flawed and false. I put not limits on God, but maybe you do.
I am not ignoring Evolutionary evidence, but as I continually said, I do not see God in ToE. Neither do I see Nature capable of making me without God.
I have never imposed where God must be in Evolution. I have made a few casual suggestions but never have I limited God, but you do. You claim God would set the Universe in motion and then sit back and watch. That is not the God I worship. He is not distant and impartial and uncaring. Neither is He the control freak that @mitchellmckain imposes onto my views.
God can include a latitude and uncertain element (s) into creation without stepping away completely for several million years. "Tinkering (nudge) is a human concept that insults God.
My God is beyond my comprehension. I do not ,limit Him at all. That includes being dogmatic about how He created me.
Richard
Why do you insist on a false distinction?
You constantly make claims about what He cannot do – that limits Him immensely.
That you think the second statement follows necessarily from the first shows that–
I claim that God is capable of setting up initial conditions that will result in what He intends. Why do you deny that He is that competent?
Then why do you constantly make dogmatic statements about how He (couldn’t have) created?
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What does a Vorlon have to do with this?
That is not ToE.
You promote ToE. God is not there.
You claim God set the parameters and then did nothing for several million years.
Is that the God you worship? The one who does nothing?
I do not claim God did (or did not do) anything other than create me. I have never specified the exact methodology, only that it includes the Evolutionary process (as opposed to ToE)
Richard
You have chosen to believe in the God who chooses power and control over love and freedom. Only that would have someone fabricating such an absurdly black and white choice focused on control alone. I believe in the God who has chosen love and freedom over power and control – ergo, it is not about control.
So… no. God is not in control. That would be contrary to His purpose of creation. It is human beings obsessed with power and control who imagine otherwise, and they are the ones who remake God according to their own obsession.
God has created for a relationship with others who make their own choices and learn for themselves. This is the essence of the process of life which consists of growth, learning, and choosing how to respond to the challenges the world gives. This is the whole point of creating the universe with laws of nature which support self-organizing processes.
But for there to be love and freedom, the laws of nature cannot be in control either. And they are not. Living organisms make their own choices but you cannot say they are in control either for their choices are limited. Not only that but the dictates of life and chance (or God, if you believe as I do) can say no to the choices they make, ending in failure and extinction.
When you stick to what is measurable only, then the description of this is the theory of evolution. The results are no more a fluke than the results of the laws thermodynamics. In fact, ALL the laws of nature ultimately come from probability distributions, and the random process involved do not make the laws of nature into nothing more than a fluke. On the other hand, neither are they a clockwork machinery, for while the mathematical laws of nature give us certainty about some things they also give us surprises which nobody can predict.
Indeed, it is more like all of creation shouts out this choice of God for love and freedom over power and control – it is all about relationship is the song which pervades all the universe. The only dissonant voices are the human beings who would stamp out all love and freedom for the sake of the power and control they covet.
I was surprised you only objected to his claim of what follows, and not to the first which says you claim God just sits back and watches.
I claim God is capable of creating a universe which is not determined by the initial conditions and that is also what the evidence tells us in the findings of science about the world in which we exist. Why do you imply competence requires control?