This is an interesting way to view randomness - what do you think of “the mechanisms for these matters are so complex and variety influenced by many subtle factors, that it is beyond our current capabilities to deal with such in a scientifically meaningful manner”.
The only approach currently available is via probabilities and statistics.
That is called hidden variable theory and it was disproven. Einstein and others proposed this because they had a hard time with what quantum physics was telling us. What you and these suggested is what scientists would have liked to believe – that they just had to keep uncovering these complexities we haven’t figured out yet. But Bell figured out how to test the idea and the tests showed this was wrong. There are no hidden variables, and there really are random factors incorporated into the laws of nature.
But even though these random factors are everywhere, it doesn’t mean everything is random. Events have many many different causes. So along with these random factors are also a lot good reasons why things happened the way they did. I have suggested these random factors are a window through which God can participate in events. But it is very narrow window. An all knowing God can use it to do miracles in our lives, but it is far too narrow for some non-physical puppet master (mental soul) to direct our bodies from outside the physical laws of nature.
I am responding to outlooks regarding mechanisms for biochemistry (and ultimately biology). Complex mechanisms in biology and biochemistry involve numerous interactions and processes, which might appear random at a glance. However, most of these mechanisms are far from random. They are governed by intricate and well-regulated biochemical pathways, molecular interactions, and genetic codes.
Other lineages had different starting points and different environmental pressures. Feathers are made of beta-keratin proteins, which mammals don’t produce, so mammals couldn’t evolve feathers without first evolving the component proteins, which is unlikely since they already have other proteins which perform a similar role. Also, if (as seems likely) feathers first evolved for thermoregulation, mammals already have fur so there’s no selection pressure for them to evolve a different method of thermoregulation.
Statistics (or rather probability) is definitely part of the answer - there are a staggeringly huge number of possible genomes, and the probability of two genomes that have been diverging for millions of years converging to the point where they both even contain one identical gene, let alone enough identical genes to produce the same feature such as feathers, is even more unlikely than a monkey with a keyboard producing an exact copy of Hamlet.
But that is why mammals won’t evolve feathers. It’s not that it’s impossible for it to happen - it is theoretically possible - it’s just so extremely unlikely to happen that it’s impossible in practice.
It’s actually the same chance of one in 6m. It doesn’t matter whether the numbers to match are on a specific ticket or are the result of drawing from another lottery machine; the odds are the same.
The point about statistics is this.
If your odds are 1 million to one, that one can be at any point. It could be the first, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. So statistic are fine in terms of weghing up whether to do something but deceptive if used as an analysis of things that have happened
Your usage implies that we would have to wait the whole of the massive number, whereas, in reality it could , and probably would happen quicker.
Richard.
I do tend to think we have roughly two categories of randomness with some inevitable overlap. One is “true” randomness in quantum mechanics where there doesn’t seem to be any physical way of predicting outcomes (while staying away from ontological claims). The other is a kind of the Butterfly Effect or Three Body Problem where the system is deterministic but so sensitive to small perturbations that we have no practical way of predicting outcomes. Mutations kind of sit in between because they sit in the gap between macromolecular systems and quantum events.
Some people prefer to describe it as stochastic, but that always feels like a way of avoiding the word random. However, we do often take a pragmatic approach and use stochastic models if they do a good job of modeling the system. Utlimately, science leans heavily towards the pragmatic.
All of science is using statistics to analyze things that have already happened. The classic example is the Student’s t-test which gives you the probability that your two experimental groups are from the same population. When a scientist says their results are statistically significant they are describing a statistical analysis of things that have already happened. We couldn’t do science without statistical analyses of things that already happened.
I would be interested in your view as a chemist on this topic. How do you view enzyme activity and protein binding? I’ve done a bit of enzyme and binding kinetics, but only enough to pretend to be a chemist. My understanding is that there is a quantum mechanical core in these interactions, and also a randomness akin to gas molecules banging into one another, or Brownian motion. Am I getting something wrong here, or is there something I am missing?
Just to provide some clarity, we use Koff/Kon to describe protein binding where some protein molecules are binding substrate, some are continuing to stick to their substrate, and some are releasing from the substrate. What decides which molecules do which?
That was the answer I was looking for, thank yu.
Shame you (et al) have to keep insisting about statistics as well.
I suggest that you stop now, unless you want me to claim that science is using statistics incorrectly.
As with any tool, it helps to know its limitations. Clearly you do not know the limitations of statistical analysis.(Don’t jump , unless you want a further argument.)
The fact that it happened at all does!
(see above about statistical analysis)
Richard
It appears that all you can do is make claims. You have yet to demonstrate anything.
Please, do tell. Show me (not claim) how I am getting it wrong. Are you saying scientists shouldn’t use the Student’s t-test?
And you appear to be gunning for a fight.
No. If you do not know, I am not going to “teach you”
Richard
You can’t teach me because you don’t know. That much has been made clear.
This started well with the idea of two categories… BUT… if it really does engage the nonlinearity of chaotic dynamics then the separation from the true randomness of quantum physics disappears because that is a sensitivity in which a specification of initial conditions requires an infinite degree of precision.
I think the other category which @GJDS is pointing to (quite correctly) is one where lack of knowledge is relevant and this does indeed apply to complex situations in biology… where the only handle we have on them at the moment is statistical studies. Hell it can even apply in orbital dynamics where we don’t have all the information required for a perfect calculation such as bodies we haven’t discovered and measured or even mass distributions (of gas and dust as well as the bodies themselves). Sure the 3 body problem adds non-linearity on top of that but lack of knowledge is a real factor in many of these things.
That is definitely true at the cellular and organismal level. Gene interactions are mind-boggingly complex, perhaps beyond the capability of a single human mind to understand the entirety of it. The best we can do as individual humans is understand a little chunk of it. It is hoped that AI and computational analysis will help us out of this conundrum, and it has already done so in many areas such as protein folding. This is why sequencing genomes is the first easy step, but understanding what those sequences do is a massive task.
It might. It might not. If the odds of something are 1/n, it’ll happen on average after about n events, and becomes more likely than not to have happened after about n/2 events.
This isn’t the escape hatch you might think it is.
Probability, not statistics. They aren’t the same thing.
Look at the other thread (Theiestic)
IOW I am not going to explain any further, and there is more to it than I have already referred to.
Richard
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