12.03.08
James comments on random evolution: Berlinski and statistics
Comment from James on Darwinism and random evolution.
It certainly seems like James is right that one is wasting one’s breath with Darwinists.
James
You’re wasting your breath…Berlinski tried to explain it as simply as possible to Dawkins and he still didn’t get it:“In fact, Mr. Dawkins has simply misunderstood the fundamental character of the theory to which he has committed his passionate defense. Darwin’s theory is both random and deterministic. True enough. Mutations occur randomly, but once they have occurred, natural selection acts deterministically to cull the successes and discard the failures. By and large, true again. Nonetheless, Darwin’s theory is essentially stochastic, a term which in statistics refers to a process in-volving a random sequence of observations.
Let me call a random mutation together with its deterministic consequences an evolutionary episode. The proto-tiger develops claws; he lives to mate successfully. Such is a single evolutionary episode. According to Darwin’s theory, evolutionary episodes are independent. A snapshot of any given episode does not suffice to determine the character of future episodes. And for obvious reasons: future events are contingent on further random events. It follows that the episodes must themselves be represented by what probability theorists (and everyone else) call a random variable. And processes represented by a random variable are by definition stochastic. These facts are understood by anyone in possession of the requisite technical concepts. For all his flaws as a philosopher, Monod was quite clear about the character of Darwin’s theory.â€
http://www.2think.org/letters.shtml
From Darwinism and random evolution, 2008/12/03 at 3:20 PM