Today we think of “hand-me-down” clothes as being passed from older to younger siblings or other relatives, but this isn’t the origin of the phrase. Originally it denoted cheap ready-to-wear clothing that was “handed down” to the buyer in a shop. The “tell” was if your trousers had a crease from having sat on a shelf before you bought them. Having a knifelike crease in your slacks was definitely NOT the height of fashion back then.
I read this in a work of fiction, albeit one that presumably embodied realistic circumstances for the time it was written, in the 1910s. The passage in question was only incidental to the main plot.
I don’t see the relevance of this as a response to the misconception about the odds of a protein sequence forming - the “junkyard tornado” fallacy. The point of the fallacious claim is that a protein sequence is one of an infinitesmally small number of possible sequences that actually does something useful. That’s not analogous to a randomly-generated card sequence. And the correct rebuttal is that a protein sequence is not formed by chance. Mutation is a chance process, but the accumulation of incremental change by natural selection is not.
When I was very young we had a record the size of an EP that had four grooves on each side. Both had a children’s song – not very long as you can imagine with the stylus zooming in like that – that was identical until the last stanza.
Here’s a typical argument from the godfather of creationists, Henry Morris, Ph.D. I wouldn’t doubt that elsewhere he has used the tornado analogy, but here he’s simply trying to convince you that the chance of a successful mutation sequence (in this example, 1 in 10^60, ten million times better than the chance of producing the order of the cards I just shuffled) is infinitesimally small, even if you had a billion mutating systems running for ten billion years on every square foot of the earth.
The error Morris is making is that when a beneficial mutation is subject to positive selection, it goes to fixation in the population. So the relevant calculation is the sum of the times it takes for each successive beneficial mutation to arise and go to fixation, not the product of the probabilities for each successive beneficial mutation.
This doesn’t alter what I said: I don’t see why you think that a random shuffle of a deck of cards is a rebuttal to this fallacy. The challenge is to explain how one of the very few useful sequences could arise out of the vast number of all possible sequences. Morris is correct that it’s not something that could happen solely by chance. He just doesn’t understand natural selection.
Excuse my ignorance but I do not understand this line at all. I understand what “52!” means and I understand the number of seconds represented by 10 to the power of 67. What does the bit about the timer showing three significant digits actually mean? Please explain carefully so an idiot like me can understand.
I don’t think it’s a rebuttal to that fallacy. I think it’s a rebuttal to the claim Morris actually made, namely that if something has a probability of one in trillions of trillions, it will never happen.
I don’t want to debate you, and this isn’t the forum for it anyway, so I’ll happily concede that your approach, to refute something hidden in his assumptions, is superior to my approach, refuting his main point.
Suppose the number we’re talking about is a smaller one,
48,769,130 seconds
And now imagine it ticking down on a countdown timer.
The rightmost digit currently reading “0” will change every 1 second;
the next digit to the left currently reading "3’ will change every 10 seconds;
the next digit … every 100 seconds;
etc
Showing the number to 3 significant digits means that only the leading “487” is visible, and all columns further to the right are hidden. Since the “7” column only changes every 100,000 seconds, it will take a long time before we see the part of the number that is visible change.
But in that sense his claim is perfectly correct, since the required sequence is not just any sequence, but is specified. Which it is - as one of the very few functionally useful sequences.
It’s the difference between any lottery number coming up - of course one of them has to - and a number specified on one of my 20 lottery tickets coming up.
Significant digits just means the precision you want to show. For example, you can approximate Pi to three significant digits by saying it equals 3.14. By convention, for numbers greater than one you have just one digit in front of the decimal point, so the number of significant digits is one more than the number of decimal places. If you want more precision, you can say it’s 3.14159, giving six significant digits. Obviously, you can give as many digits as you want (or can calculate).
With exponential notation, you do the same thing. 52! has 68 digits, which is too many to write out, and too many to show on a timer. So you pick a manageable number of digits to show. You could say it’s 8.06581751709439e+67, showing the first 15 significant digits. That’s still quite a lot to write or show on a timer. You could make it 8.0658e+67, that’s 5 significant digits. In my post, I made it three significant digits, so it’s 8.06e+67. I cheated a bit, normally you would round up, but I didn’t want the last digit to change (I considered that a minor liberty since I was also walling off the Pacific Ocean and stacking paper to the sun). If your timer showed four significant digits, you would see that it went from 8.065e+67 to 8.063e+67 while you stacked the paper to the sun, but you wouldn’t see any change with three significant digits.
I didn’t read it that way. All he specified was that the mutations be good. There could be trillions of different good mutations (and in evolution, good doesn’t mean superpowers, it just means it’s viable and conveys some slight advantage). So there would be a brazillion possible sequences that fulfilled his conditions, not just one.
My last post on this. Please start another thread if you can’t let it go.
Interestingly I often mention the card shuffling fact as one of my favourite random facts - but with a different demonstration of the odds. I’m sure I’ve posted it on this board before. But if not here it is again:
If each star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a population of a trillion people, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second since the Big Bang, they would be shuffling until modern humans strolled the Earth before they ran out of combinations.
No, if you’re considering a protein sequence for example, only an infinitesmally small proportion of the universe of possible sequences has any useful function. The point of his argument is that many good mutations must all occur together. Under his assumption that all that’s going on is chance mutations being found together by chance, he’s correct to conclude that this could never happen.
Myrtle Beach is home to a spiritual center that almost no visitors know about although it is on the main highway. It’s 500 acres of prime ocean front land. It was built in the 50s before Myrtle Beach became a big tourist town. I’ve been there 2x for a week.
Packaged adult breakfast flakes (eg, corn flakes, Special-K), per ounce of packaged weight, contain more sugar than Coca Cola and more salt than potato chips.
46 US states have a city/town/settlement called “Riverside”.
11 US states have no cities with a street named after Martin Luther King jr.
The most common US county name is “Washington”, found in 31 states. “Jefferson” is second with 26. The most common US county name not named after a President is number 3 ranked - “Franklin” in 25 states.
There are 15 US counties called “Grant” and 12 called “Lee”. 4 are called “Davis” or “Jeff Davis”.