Some creationist friends of mine are making the argument that modern biologists are blinded by bias and that they should should listen to mathematicians, a group which my creationist friends assume to be overwhelmingly skeptical about the odds of evolution’s having occured. They cite stuff from Fred Hoyle and, curiously, the philosopher Thomas Nagel, both of whom are atheists with doubts about probability of evolution. One passage from Nagel that gets a lot of traction with my creationist friends comes from his review of Dawkin’s God Delusion, where he writes:
Though my friends concede that Nagel isn’t a mathematician, they claim he represents mathematicians’ thinking on the matter. And my friends aren’t the only creationists making this claim about mathetmaticians. Here a mathematician also makes the claim that evolution is mathematically impossible. Is it true that most mathematicians think this? Or is it true that a significant portion of them think this?
I have no evidence that they do. I strongly suspect that if a majority of any field of study considered evolution an impossibility, we’d know about it in no uncertain terms. I certainly believe that some mathematicians are creationists, and some of them will use “mathematical” ways to try to “prove” their views.
But the simple fact of the matter is that maths are about numbers, not cosmology or biology or any single aspect of evolutionary science. I have as much interest in what a mathematician says about the “probability” of evolution as I do what my cat has to say. It’s all just “meow meow meow.”
That aside, every single argument against evolution from a supposed mathematical position makes such alarmingly flawed suppositions about probabilities that they’re not even worth the pixels they’re printed on.
Absolutely not. This crap goes back to Henry Morris, if not earlier. I have watched Morris in action, doing absurd “math” manipulation, and then claiming that “The mathematicians in the room are now on my side.” No, they aren’t.
(He essentially proved that snowflakes can’t exist without each one being individually designed and engineered by an intelligent agent. You see, there are so very many possible snowflakes – or DNA molecules – so the odds of one just spontaneously popping up out of inert chemicals is one divided by that large number. This, obviously, displays a poisonous and deliberate distortion of how anyone believes snowflakes – or DNA molecules – come to exist.)
Typical creationist bullshit, and dismissible at a Junior High School level of education.
Well, one problem right off the bat is, your thread title is talking about evolution, but your quote is talking about the origins of life. Those aren’t the same thing.
Just realizing that Carbon is the whore of the elements should make anyone reduce the odds by taking into account the most probable reactions, Of course that goes for anyone that is not being dishonest in their calculations.
I like the idea is that we shouldn’t trust biologists, who spend their lives studying biology, a technical question about biology, but instead should ask a group of people with no expertise in biology.
You should tell your friend next time he needs a cavity drilled that dentists know way too much about dentistry to be trusted with such sensitive dental matters, and that he should really see if he can find a mathematician to perform the procedure.
Woah. I guess I’ll quote an old professor of mine: “Statistically impossible events occur all the time.”
A gigantic number of possibilities in no way disproves that a given outcome can’t exist. It’s really an absurd argument. Those familiar with simulation must come to grips with combinatorial explosions which occur with even pretty simple models.
Behe?? Are you kidding? Behe is not a mathematician.
So, I don’t see why we need to refute an unsupported hypothesis. If you think that most mathematicians think evolutions is impossible, then prevent your evidence. So far, you have not done so.
Interesting choice of the point to pick up Fred Hoyle’s story because if he couldn’t pick the winning horse in Steady State vs Big Bang, a belief he held for decades after the race was lost, and that was a field in which he was a foremost authority, why should we follow his lead in something in which he was no more an expert than you or me?
ETA: And he was a lousy SF author. But so was Carl Sagan.
John Mace, you sound as if Behe is a completely unreliable source. I don’t know who he is, so if you could take a moment and enlighten me I’d appreciate it.
Miller, would you mind editing my thread title to reflect the actual subject of this thread? Thanks.
simster, you said:
But from a creationist’s standpoint aren’t we begging the question to assume the truth of evolution as grounds for dismissing the creationist’s “odds” of its not having happened?
No because we aren’t “assuming the truth” of evolution, it’s a confirmed fact. We see it in action everywhere; in the lab, in the evolution of antibiotic resistance, pesticide resistance, cancer cell evolution, and on and on. And the fossil record is absolutely clear. It’s a fact. Denying evolution at this point is very much like denying gravity; there’s that much evidence for it.
This! Morris worked as hard as he could to come up with a truly gigantic denominator…and blithely assumed that the numerator was “1.” What marvelous logic! He calculated the odds that a random assembly of nucleic acids would produce…the DNA of a specific retinal cell in the left eye of a specific giraffe that lived 1700 years ago. No other possible cell; just that one.
Another flaw in that kind of creationist “argument from probability” is that it assumes a random assembly directly from totally unorganized nucleic acids to a large & complex DNA molecule. When in reality of course natural selection isn’t random (nor is the crystallization of snowflakes for that matter); nor did nature go from molecule-soup to a giraffe cell’s DNA in one leap.
