I’ve often wondered how many times God could have tweaked things by introducing mutations before it would show up as not random. My gut feeling is that given that mutations aren’t predictable the number is probably fairly high.
Interestingly, I have seen several people pick up a well-messed-up Rubik’s cube, look it over, and proceed to solve it without looking again, which indicate that they saw the arrangement of the pieces, visualized a path to order, and implemented the moves for that path – yet I’ve never seen anyone do the same with knots.
I suppose the difference is that the variations on a Rubik’s cube conform to a “space” of possible operations, while the corresponding “space” for knots would be immensely larger.
To survive and reproduce.
I tired and failed to get this concept across to a guy who kept insisting that humans couldn’t have a mutation that enables them to remain healthy under conditions of Mars gravity until people have been exposed to that gravity!
Though I did manage to get him to agree that a wheel-shaped space station rotating at the proper rate to give Mars-equivalent ‘spin gravity’ would do just as well as actually going to Mars.
Made me think of two things: A guy in coastal geology class who thought that waves coming up on the beach are random, but the professor said no, we just lack the math to predict wave action properly – I sided with my fellow student because wave action is ultimately extremely chaotic and the number of initial conditions may as well be infinite. Then there was the computer science major who was a D&D player who needed random numbers, so he built a cage to hold like three dozen dice of different kinds and used the dice as his seed – with an algorithm where the results of the first two dice read determined which of the rest to throw out.
Your failure to understand is because you insist on imposing your modern Western worldview on ancient literature and because you are assuming that what they wrote has to fit what you expect.
No, I haven’t. I’ve pointed out that you cannot understand them just by reading an English translation.
Only if you demand that the Holy Spirit conform to your preferences.
Translation has nothing to do with it; not forcing meaning into a text just because you want it there does. You aren’t reading Luke and Peter objectively, you’re reading them so they say what you expect.
You have a filter that you impose on all of scripture that makes it impossible for you to see anything except what you want to see. Until you stop expecting ancient literature to read like a 1960s newspaper report you’re not going to actually read the scriptures.
I hope you can also understand how there has to be a better way of responding to the ID proponent who argues the events are not random. It’s incongruous to say the events are random in response to someone saying they are not, when the word random is being used in a different sense.
Lamarckian evolution is intuitive, but still wrong. Humans are heavily biased to find associations in nature, even if they are false associations. As has been quipped many a time, it is quite beneficial for humans to associate a rustling in the tall grass with a lurking predator, even if it is a false association. Pareidolia is another example. As I have said many times, the reason that we have the scientific method is because of our fallible intuition.
If roulette was random, wouldn’t you expect a player to win sometimes and lose sometimes? If a player won every time, wouldn’t you suspect that roulette was non-random?
If mutations are random with respect to fitness, then beneficial, neutral, and deleterious mutations would all be possible outcomes.
I am using the word “random” in the same way it is used in the rest of science.
In a fair game of roulette the outcome would be unpredictable
Not when someone asks if the event is truly random. I saw an article which asked if electronic roulette is really truly random, and it made me wonder what it will be like with quantum computers.
Quantum computers, on the other hand, can generate truly random numbers. This is because the measurement of a qubit in superposition is a probabilistic process. The result of the measurement is random, and there’s no way to predict the outcome. This is the basic principle of quantum random number generators.
What’s the difference between random and truly random? How would you relate that to mutations?
Electronic roulette uses a deterministic process (i.e. a computer algorithm) to produce the results. If you had enough results you could probably pick out the non-randomness of the process. In the biomedical research world we will publish the pseudorandom seeds used in our code so someone can repeat our pseudorandom simulations.
Mutations would probably be closer to random quantum processes since they are occurring at the molecular level.
I played an online game where random seeds came from the millisecond into an hour that a person logged in plus the air pressure at a random location. I thought the first plank would be enough so I found the secondary one amusing. I also wondered just how random the selection of the weather station was.
I would use a random model and see if there were any deviations from that model, wouldn’t you?
Interestingly, Salvador Luria (one of the authors on the random mutation paper) got the idea for those experiments while attending a faculty event that had slot machines. He realized that hitting a jackpot on a slot machine could be equivalent to a bacteria hitting the jackpot with a beneficial mutation. For his random model he used a Poisson distribution which gives the possibility of an event with a given rate and length of time. This model allowed him to determine if random mutations were the cause of the beneficial phenotype.
However you approach randomness in QM apply the same approach to random mutations.
A casino worker who made sure that games such as roulette wheels kept working properly said they have video of the result of every single spin, from which statistics are compiled to track the performance. Newer machines are tooled so much more finely than a half century ago that deviation from randomness just doesn’t happen, but in older machines it was possible – and the casino needed to discover that before any players did!
His biggest job with the wheels was keeping things dust free, a job that began with the air filtering system which filtered out dust and returned air to the floor under positive pressure as a way to reduce the entry of dust, and ended with actually dusting the machinery – no physical touching, though, just compressed air and static electricity.
Which is why I like the analogy Salvador Luria made to winning the lottery. It’s preceisely the experience of winning the lottery over and over the ID proponent looks to in making a probabilistic judgement that it is not random.
But it’s somehow not science to say it isn’t random, so I say it’s equally not science to say that it is random.
ChatGPT says that is a infinite number. It also stated the notation used includes the ordinal number ( \omega ), which is the first transfinite ordinal number, representing the set of all natural numbers.
Surely it must not be difficult to understand how there is not an infinite natural number.
My understanding of math is very limited, but
when I piddled with this awhile back in relation to the cosmological argument, a number of people I spoke to claimed the alephs were infinite numbers. I would try to say the alephs are infinite or non-numerical values. And there are probably just two that we know of.
Most of the time when I ask a math group (in a way where it is plainly a math issue) whether infinity is a number, the answer I get is that it isn’t. One time I responded by saying that means there cannot be an infinite number of events. The person shot back with it being an issue for metaphysics and not math.