It was said of Carl Woese - “Microbiology’s Scarred Revolutionary.”
In a web crawl Saturday I came across a rather interesting method of obtaining random numbers, something to do with cosmic rays and the directions they come from.
Thinking of engineers, my sister once suggested that to get truly random numbers they should put microphones in the company cafeteria and sample both volume and pitch.
That is a thought that takes a lot of semi-random pondering.
That sounds like you’ve crossed into chaos theory.
A worthy goal. 
← randomly chosen emoji
A question posed in the university lower mathematics study room: if you use a pseudo-random generator to provide a seed for another pseudo-random generator to provide a seed for a third such generator, is the result closer to true randomness?
Or something my younger brother used to do: count the prime numbers that appear on license places. It wasn’t much fun because he can do factors in his head almost without thinking, so he could tell within a couple of seconds if a four-digit number was prime while the only way the rest of us could do that was if it was a number we’d memorized.
That almost sounds interesting, though I’m not at all sure what you’re talking about!
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“What have we got to lose, boys? Roll them dice!”
You haven’t been around many AI nerds, have you? From my experience there’s a lot of “Hey, let’s see with this code will do!” happening, and then there’s the thing like that robot I’ve talked about that was told “Put the red block on the blue block” and it didn’t even have instructions on how to operate its arms or tracks; it’s only programmed instruction basically said to try things. Acting on random inputs to its limbs, it worked out its own set of control code, working its way from simple things like lifting an arm up to reaching out with a grasper to take hold of something, and then combined those movements to start interacting with the things around it.
The “Let’s see” approach provides no direction or input, it just provides possibilities. And for the robot, its self-teaching was supplemented only by an occasional input to help it figure out what a block was along with what “on” meant. It was getting at the kind of thing robots will need if we want to send some to Mars to build a base to be ready for when humans get there – they have to be able to encounter a problem, define it for themselves, and figure out how to handle it, so the first few expeditions to Mars may well be to deliver robots capable of learning how to do what’s needed.
I watched a video of the same thing in a room with hundreds of metronomes (not to be confused with Metro Gnomes); it took a long time and some false starts but they all ended up synchronized – fairly early in there were some spots where things were synchronized locally, and those ended up “competing”.
The resonances in the orbits of the planets in our solar system are related to this.
This one’s fun:
It’s been done with 2500 metronomes on a wooden floor; the process took hours.
I remember reading that last year. The experiment involving two people over a hundred miles apart was amazing.
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Just to recap . . .
Lamarck proposed acquired traits where use or disuse of an organ or feature would modify the organism, and this modification would be heritable. Darwin proposed natural selection of existing traits, or standing variation.
After Darwin, there was still a question of where that variation came from. In the case of bacteria, when they develop resistance to antibiotics is this variation a response to the presence of antibiotics or are there mutations happening in the background that creates variation independent of the environment. As it turns out, it is the latter. The Lederbergs were able to devise an experiment where they were able to isolate bacteria with mutations conferring antibiotic resistance without the bacteria ever coming into contact with antibiotics, as one example. Mutations are ticking away in the background independently (statistically speaking) of what the organism needs in a given environment. The shorthand for this process is random mutation with respect to fitness, or shortened to just random mutations.
On the philosophical/theological side, the theory of evolution makes no statements in these arenas. All the theory states is that there is no statistical correlation between the mutations the organism needs and the mutations it gets. The theory does not state what role God may have in the process, nor does it state there is not some grand plan or purpose, only that there is no scientific evidence for these concepts. Scientific theories in general do not make statements about universal negatives, especially in areas of philosophy or theology. In my experience, this is how Christian scientists are able to harmonize scientific theories and religious beliefs, understanding the very real philosophical limitations of science.
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Noble claims Darwin was Lamarckian, Dawkins said it’s 6th edition Darwin 
@T_aquaticus What do you think about this statement from Noble regarding mitosis?
Such purposiveness necessarily emerges at a level that has the degree of dynamic complexity necessary for it to be instantiated. Cells clearly have that complexity. Molecules do not. It goes without saying that this is not conscious purposiveness. It is purposiveness in the sense that the organism responds to challenges in a logical way. We don’t need to know how the logical purposiveness developed in order to recognise it in the behaviour of an organism.
It’s a lot of meaningless rhetoric. Until it is tied to data in some meaningful manner it will continue to be so.
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Meaningless? I’m not sure you have any basis to determine that.
I also assumed the data would support the conclusion an organism has the ability to instantiate a purposeful process. Something which molecules cannot do.
You asked for my thoughts.
I would agree that you are making an assumption.
How would one determine if a cell has “instantiated a purposeful process”? What makes it purposeful? What would a non-purposeful process look like at the level of a cell? How would you test this idea in experiments?
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I did. Your answer surprised me, and questioning your basis to determine meaning may still be a legitimate criticism.
Good questions… and this topic is way further reaching than I could have ever guessed
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Is there any issue with determining whether an organism instantiated a process?
In science, when you state that something has a certain quality you need to define that in terms of empirical observations. The foundation of science is empiricism. This gets back to the Zimmer article that quotes Douglas Futuyma:
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Like being unable to determine the probable outcome of an individual’s choice.
At what point is the scientist able to admit the problem with… I wonder if the term is… reductionism?
I just came across an article which seems to nuance the issue further
“I was surprised that so many (over 2,000) different large non-coding RNAs were altered by the increase in stress hormone levels,” Hannan told PsyPost.
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Speaking of nuance:
For these reasons, amongst others, Darwin’s view of evolution was a fairly nuanced one with multiple mechanisms, prominent amongst which was natural selection.
Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life
Here it is, the rub in all this:
Despite Darwin’s acceptance of the idea, the inheritance of acquired characteristics was deemed impossible. Natural selection working on chance variations in genetic ma-terial was thought to be entirely sufficient to explain all evolutionary change.
Is that a limit of technology or an inherent part of nature? How would you distinguish between the two?
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I might draw a comparison between how the appearance of something from nothing will be the same as the appearance of an immediate effect of an uncaused cause
Lamarck’s ideas of evolution included many different components. The idea that acquired traits could be inherited was a guess about the mechanism of how traits originate and are passed on, one which has proved to be largely incorrect for biological evolution (though fairly accurate for learned behaviors). He also thought there was continual abiogenesis of simple forms and steady progression towards more “advanced”, though with environmental influences contributing to diversity rather than everything being on the same straight line path. He also made particular suggestions about what organisms might be closer to the transitions between major groups. Today, “Lamarckian” often just refers to the inheritance of acquired features instead of the more core aspects of his model.
DNA methylation and resulting inactivation of particular genes can be inherited across a few generations within humans, though things with shorter generation times are much easier to study.
Consider the sequence of digits:
841971693997105
It is “random” in the sense that the source shows an overall equal probability of any one digit at each place in the sequence. But it can be considered “nonrandom” in that it is a sequence from pi.
Similarly, mutations are “random” with respect to whether a particular mutation will be useful. Our best models for “will mutation X happen?” involve a probability. Organisms cannot notice that having a lactase enzyme would be handy and increase their chance of having that mutation. However, certain mutations are more likely than others. Many organisms, including mammals, have high mutation rates in certain genes where having new features is useful (particular components of the immune system, for example). This enhances the chance of both useful and useless mutations, but natural selection can favor the useful ones once they happen. Similar, a report of “Lamarckian” evolution in bacteria took bacteria that had an artificially disabled gene and put it in a situation where repairing the gene (a reverse mutation from the change made by the researchers) would be useful. Some eventually had a mutation that repaired the gene. The gene was re-disabled and the bacteria put back through the same process. The second time around, the repair mutation happened faster in some of the bacteria. But it turned out that those bacteria had mutations in other genes, involved in error checking. The first step of the experiment had inadvertently selected for bacteria with a higher rate of mutation. The same process may happen naturally. If there’s a lot of competition, then sticking with the existing successful formula is likely to be a good plan; evolution will favor not changing, and higher mutation rate is a disadvantage. But if competition is not intense, then alternatives have more of a chance to get established. The lower competition could be because resources are abundant, or it could be because everyone’s struggling just to get by and not able to compete. The latter might happen with a change in the environment.
Is the mutation to repair the lab-disabled gene “random”? It is random in the sense that the probability of it happening is, as far as we can tell, best described by a certain percent chance of happening. It is no more likely than assorted useless mutations. Not all of the bacteria had that mutation. But there are certain mutations that are or aren’t possible. Mutations in an organism are starting from something that works, so the chance that the result also works is pretty good. Yet there is a chance that the new something works quite differently is also significant; small changes in sequence can make big differences in effect and conversely big sequence differences can have nearly identical effects. The utility of the mutation is tested against the environment - does the organism survive and reproduce? Thus, selection is a major non-random component. Theologically, we can assume that God is in control - also quite non-random; however, He does make use of what are, to our eyes, mathematically random processes.
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