People who are anti-evolution assume that the theory of evolution requires an atheistic viewpoint. Point out that if God wanted land creatures to appear, and if God controls evolution, the odds against sea creatures evolving into land creatures would make no difference. Genesis even says that sea creatures were created before land animals.
That’s an interesting point. i will definitely take your advice
There’s a lot of variation on the ‘mathematical probability’ argument. Most of them that I’ve seen have the same enormous error: they assume that if something didn’t happen the exact particular way it happened, it is enormously improbable to have happened at all.
So for example, you could calculate the improbability of your DNA code existing in its current pattern. But each new human has several brand new mutations, and most of them don’t do anything. Moreover, what was the probability of a particular sperm cell making it to the egg cell first? Pretty low, right? If it hadn’t, you might be a different person.
But you can’t conclude that your parents would never have had children if that sperm cell hadn’t won the race! They would almost certainly have had a kid, and that kid would probably be a lot like you.
This can be applied on a massive scale to evolution. The probability of life happening exactly as it has happened in our history is extremely low. But that is not at all the same as the claim that the probability of life itself is low, or that the probability of life evolving into enormous variety as we see around us is low.
We see examples in @gbrooks9’s bacteria video: there are lots of different ways the bacteria can evolve resistance to the toxin, even if the exact mutation that occurs is never exactly the same twice.
So figure out some way of asking your friend’s dad how he’s considered alternative possibilities that would also wind up with a sea creature evolving into a land creature, even if they don’t match the results we ended up with. That’s what you’d have to do, in order to make any confident statements about the probability of something happening.
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It is a commonly held belief among all non-mathematicians, not just creationists, that a remote possibility is the same as an impossibility. This is transparently untrue. Even if the odds of something happening are a trillion to one against, there is a likelihood of such an outcome, given several trillion events. With the aid of a large bucket of pennies, I have invariably been able to present to one of my audience a penny which has come up heads 10 times in a row, which had first seemed, when I first showed that the odds of such a thing happening were remote, too improbable to be possible.
Another mistake often made by creationists is to think that an evolutionary outcome of several chance events can be calculated by multiplying the chances together, arriving at something impossibly vast. Thus the chance of a cell doing this is 1/100 and the chance of it doing that afterwards is 1/100 and the chance of it doing the other afterwards is 1/100, so the total probability is 1/1000000, which is long odds. But this too is a mistake. Unless a mutation is fatal, it may survive to be reproduced many millions of times, so that the second mutation has a much bigger field to produce it than just the single cell in which the first originally occurred.
I wonder if a little thought experiment might help demonstrate this point?
Suppose you have a penny. You flip it. Tails, nothing happens, heads your friend gets to start flipping a penny, too. Tails twice in a row, stop flipping. Someone can later restart you by flipping heads.
Under this system, is it improbable to eventually get 10 heads in a row? 50 in a row? What if you can count from person to person, up the chain of friends that started flipping from each other?
It’s a pretty simple system of rules, and using just random chance, it can build pretty quickly!
I feel that an important point is missed in these type of discussions, and that is this:
If evolutionists claim that ToE is random based and associated thinking, and they turn to stochastic methods to support their case, they should accept conclusions, that such as such an event is impossibly likely - this is a result from stochastic computations and not ideological arguments.
If otoh evolutionists believe ToE is a special case, and they still maintain a random basis, they need to provide an ab initio mathematical treatment that explicitly clarifies the nature of random events and how they lead to the observations currently made.
My current reading of PoSc on these matters has indicated evolutionists are incapable of doing either.
Do not get aggressive at me - simply read some prominent PoSc works and make your comments based on these.
I think it may be useful to consider that the probability of an event happening depends on the conditions. The chances of getting ten heads in a row depends on having a coin, and how many coins you have, and how many heads each coin has. And so on. Mainstream science does not propose that just one water animal became a land animal. There were huge reproducing populations of many different kinds of water animals. The land was an unexploited niche. The changes took place slowly over millions over years. And so on.
As has been stated above, any attempt to calculate the probability at issue has almost certainly not taken many of those conditions into account.
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Hi DarkX -
Here’s another way to think correctly about probability.
Suppose you live in a state like mine (South Carolina) where license plates have 3 letter and 3 numbers. You walk through your school parking lot in the morning and head inside. In math class, you announce:
“I just saw the license plate BRU 298, ZTG 412, and AMQ 935. What are the odds?!”
The odds are incredibly low that you would see those 3 specific tags, actually–about 1 in 5.4 sextillion. Here’s 5.4 sextillion written out:
5,400,000,000,000,000,000,000
That’s a big number.
So you could walk into class every day and say “Something weird happened out in the parking lot. Something that has only a 1 in 5.4 sextillion chance of ever happening! And it happened yesterday, too!”
But you don’t. Why not? Because every license plate (except vanity plates) has 3 letter and 3 numbers. There’s nothing odd about a license plate with 3 letters and 3 numbers, even if a particular set of 3 letters and 3 numbers might happen just once in every 17.6 million permutations.
Just as there are a really large number of possible license plates, there are a really large number of ways to put nucleotides together to form DNA that can produce useful proteins. So if someone says that the odds of attaining a particular DNA sequence are infinitesimally small, I would agree. I could even go on to say that the odds that the DNA sequence in my cells would come into existence are 1 in 2^3,000,000,000 or so. 2 to the 3 billionth power, or 10 to the 900 millionth power, is a number so vast I can scarcely describe it. And yet here I am–I beat the astronomical odds! And you did, too, @DarkX_Studios! You are proof that an event with odds of 1 in 10^900,000,000 can happen. And each of your friends is proof that an event with odds of 1 in 10^900,000,000 can happen, too, because each one of them has a DNA sequence with the same infinitesimally small probability as yours.
Yet another way of thinking about low probability events is to think about the lottery. The chance that someone will guess the Powerball combination is really tiny: only about 1 in 292 million. But if enough people buy tickets, sooner or later someone will guess that combination.
In the same way, every time a creature is born, a new DNA sequence that never existed before comes into existence. It’s like all the people buying Powerball tickets; sooner or later something really interesting and rare and history-changing is going to happen.
Hope these analogies help you think about probability in a useful way. Basically no one is born with the ability to think accurately about low probability events; it takes a lot of training to get used to it.
Best regards,
Chris Falter
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I don’t recognize your PoSc abbreviation. It doesn’t seem to come from your previous paragraphs. I tried googling ‘PoSc evolution’ just in case it was obvious. The first result was this:
…Followed by a lot of Poli Sci. Would you mind clarifying which meaning you intended?
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Thanks this helped alot. I will definitely use this 
Show me the math that demonstrates that evolution is impossibly unlikely and we can talk. I have yet to see it.
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Stands for Philosophy of Science and I have used a couple, most from Rosenberg, a “dyed in the wool” atheist and eliminative materialist. I cannot think how I could be fairer and giving all opportunity to the side of avowed evolutionists.
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Joshua, I think your approach is faulty and perhaps somewhat unfair - I have little invested in any version of ToE and have responded on this site mainly due to statements such as “God has ordained evolution”, “Adam and Eve are myths”, “we can discuss how life commenced”, and similar theological statements. You should realise by now that if ToE is confined to biology, I would have little if any interest.
Now I cannot think how many times people have used coin tossing and stochastic methods to “explain” random and evolution, so my statement should not require justification from me - I seek an explanation from advocates only.
Hi Chris,
I understand your approach and agree with your numbers - but perhaps you may be missing the point. The number plates were all produced methodically and we can trace their history from the first number plate to the last. Information can be obtained on when they were produced, why and for which vehicle. Statistics become irrelevant in this context, and if someone felt seeing some number plates were astronomically unlikely, I would question his understanding of cars, number plates and all else.
[quote=“GJDS, post:11, topic:35420”]
If evolutionists claim that ToE is random based and associated thinking, and they turn to stochastic methods to support their case, they should accept conclusions, that such as such an event is impossibly likely - this is a result from stochastic computations and not ideological arguments.[/quote]This is a little confused, if I may say so. The term “impossibly likely” is a logical contradiction. No evolutionist thinks that evolution is impossible - in fact they all think that the chances of all living things having a common ancestor is exactly 1, as events have fallen out.
[quote]If otoh evolutionists believe ToE is a special case, and they still maintain a random basis, they need to provide an ab initio mathematical treatment that explicitly clarifies the nature of random events and how they lead to the observations currently made.
My current reading of PoSc on these matters has indicated evolutionists are incapable of doing either.[/quote]Then please extend your current reading a little. A simple Google of “probability of evolution” or something similar will give a variety of discussions on the matter, many of which explicitly clarify the nature of random events.
[quote]Do not get aggressive at me - simply read some prominent PoSc works and make your comments based on these.
[/quote]I should be delighted. Perhaps you’d like to suggest one?
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I have taken your advice and googled “probability of evolution mathematically”. Now keep in mind that my comment was to seek either: (a) a clear stochastic methodology that would give mathematical credence to randomness in ToE, or (b) if it is on a par with physics and chemistry, an ab initio treatment to show/explain how similar ToE is to say, QM. I have yet to find anyone with a scientifically sound response. And yes, start with Rosenburg and find a proof or sound basis for ToE from his approach to PoS - note he is imo the most ardent evolutionist I have come across.
Without seeking anything for or against, I found the following (I note that almost every hit was either pro-creationism or anit-creationism, an unhealthy position for a major branch of the natural sciences! – perhaps you may add your personal theological insights to this discussion?):
- According to the most-widely accepted theory of evolution today, the sole mechanism for producing evolution is that of random mutation combined with natural selection. Mutations are random changes in genetic systems. Natural selection is considered by evolutionists to be a sort of sieve, which retains the “good” mutations and allows the others to pass away.
Since random changes in ordered systems almost always will decrease the amount of order in those systems, nearly all mutations are harmful to the organisms which experience them. Nevertheless, the evolutionist insists that each complex organism in the world today has arisen by a long string of gradually accumulated good mutations preserved by natural selection.”
And
- Those familiar with probability theory will recognize that one central difficulty with these creationist arguments stems from the fact that in any probability calculation, one must first very carefully define the ensemble space. As noted above, it makes no sense to consider, as an ensemble, all possible random assemblages of atoms into a protein chain, since that is not the scientific hypothesis of how alpha-globin and other biomolecular structures came to be. Instead, the only valid ensemble for this analysis is the set of all possible outcomes of an eons-long string of biomolecular processes, encompassing proteins, organisms, species and environments. But at present we have no possible way of even enumerating such an ensemble, much less determining the probability of any particular scenario or class of scenarios in this ensemble. Perhaps at some time in the far distant future, a super-powerful computer could simulate with convincing fidelity the multi-billion-year biological history of the earth, in the same way that scientists today attempt to simulate (in a much more modest scope) the earth’s climate. Then, after thousands of such simulations have been performed, we might obtain some meaningful statistics on the chances involved in the formation of some class of biological structures such as alpha-globin. Until that time, all such probability calculations are essentially meaningless.
Along this line, it is also important to keep in mind that the process of natural biological evolution is not really a “random” process. Yes, mutations are “random” events, but the all-important process of natural selection, acting under the pressure of an extremely competitive landscape involving thousands of other species as well as numerous complicated environmental pressures, is anything but random. This strongly directional nature of natural selection, which is the essence of evolution, by itself invalidates simple-minded probability calculations.”
And
3) Now let us attempt to apply this reasoning to evolution. What is the probability that an eye could arise gradually via known evolutionary mechanisms? In biological terms we are asking for the probability of evolving the genes necessary for constructing the eye, which immediately presents a problem. Complex structures like eyes do not arise from the action of a well-defined set of genes. Instead, there are many genes that play a role in eye formation, many of which serve other purposes as well.
But this objection is not yet fatal to the argument. While we may not be able to say specifically which genes are responsible for eye formation, we can reasonably assume there are quite a lot of them. Recall that genes are made from the four nucleotides adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine (which we will abbreviate by A, T, C and G). Consequently, a gene can be modeled as a sequence whose elements are these four letters. As a conservative estimate, let us suppose that a gene one hundred letters in length is necessary to construct an eye. The actual number is surely far larger than this.
Therefore, the total number of possible outcomes in this case is simply the number of sequences of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s that are one hundred letters long. This number is obtained by multiplying four by itself one hundred times, which is a very large number indeed. Only one of those sequences codes for the eye, as we know it. There are surely a fair number of trivial changes we could make in the precise gene sequence that will also produce the eye. Therefore, the number of favorable outcomes in this case will surely be greater than one. However, we can assert with some confidence that the number of favorable outcomes will be far smaller than the number of possible outcomes.
This seems to show that, while we may not be able to calculate precisely the probability of evolving the genes necessary for eye formation, we can still assert that the probability is very, very small.
Have we done it? Can we conclude that it is effectively impossible for evolution to have produced an eye? Many creationists would say that we could. You will find the argument described in the previous paragraph, presented in varying levels of detail, in a great many creationist outlets. Sadly, their analysis overlooks several crucial points.
Perhaps you have already spotted the flaw in this argument. In carrying out our calculation, we simply assumed that every hundred-letter gene sequence was as likely as any other. This assumption is completely unwarranted, for two reasons.
First, keep in mind that evolution works its magic by modifying preexisting structures. Consequently, the particular gene sequences likely to occur in a given generation are those attainable from preexisting sequences via known genetic mechanisms. As an example, suppose that in some organism we find the gene sequence ACGATCT. One source of genetic variation is the point mutation, in which an individual nucleotide is replaced in the next generation with a different nucleotide. Thus, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the offspring of our hypothetical organism will possess the gene sequence ATGATCT. By contrast, it is highly unlikely that we will encounter the sequence TGATAAG.”
So if we suppose, if we see the magic, if we say it is random but the mighty natural selection fixes it all – we end up with Rosenberg (at least he has the intellectual courage to admit this) that it is all semantics and debate – not a stochastic or ab initio treatment is sight.
Perhaps you can perform something like that and provide the rest of us poor scientists with your mathematical (not semantic) rendition of ToE.
Are you talking about the randomness of mutations? Because a lot is known about that. No one knows how to predict when and where a particular mutation will happen, just as no one knows how to predict when and where a meteorite will land. But we know a lot about the processes that cause mutations, and we can study particular genomes to learn about how the genomic context affects the probability of particular mutations. We have learned that the mutation rate itself can be adjusted (under stress for example). We can identify, at least in particular test cases, regions of a genome that can easily tolerate mutation and regions that can’t tolerate any at all.
All of these processes are regularly modeled quantitatively, often by biologists collaborating with computational experts from, say, physics and mathematics.
When you ask for a “clear stochastic methodology” you seem to asking (but correct me if I’m wrong) about true randomness. But that’s really not the kind of randomness that is associated with evolution. In other words, while it does seem that we really can’t (in practice) predict the behavior (genetically speaking) of an individual bacterium in an experiment, most notably its likelihood to experience (or generate) any particular mutation, we don’t assume that this is the kind of fully random process that is exemplified by nuclear decay (for example).
As I hope you have seen explained by others, repeatedly, at BL, “random mutation” means “mutations that arise independent of the organism’s ‘need’ for them.” There are very slight hints that this separation (between ‘need’ and occurrence) is somewhat blurry – IMO the main blur is the fact that the mutations rate seems at times to be ‘deliberately’ increased as though that is an adapted response aimed at increasing genetic diversity in hopes of ‘getting’ a mutation that will solve a problem. I think that’s a far cry from ‘directed mutation’ but it is definitely an erosion of the experimentally-supported separation I mentioned above.
I hope those comments are at least somewhat related to your question.
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So you must be fairly delighted being in the company of BioLogos supporters, a great many of whom (though not all) do not believe God-ordained Evolution is “random”, and that the reason God is “in the mix” is to make sure it happens just the way He wants it to.
My outlook has always been that we should not mix orthodox theology with ToE - and there are many examples where this has occurred, such as mythologising Adam and Eve etc.
So no, I do not think that ToE is God ordained, far from it. I think the (pseudo)theological meanderings I have seen on this site are boorish and amateurish, not because people are not Christians (far from it), but because they place too much credence on ToE - I trust you and others at least understand the distinction I am making…
I have gone to some lengths to accept that biologist perform good work and I do not seek to critique their data or observations. Perhaps the above pro-ToE quote says it all - my responses have sort to discuss the basis of ToE as presented by evolutionary biologists (which is not as clearly stated as I would have hoped). So whatever type of random process(es) is/are envisaged, the understanding is opaque.
That is still ok as far as a scientific theory goes - it is not a basis for inserting some type of theological argument(s).