Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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You are not being overly clever, Jonathan M.
| Quote | | This struck me at the time as a very strange argument to be making given the fact that many Darwinists (Dawkins & Futuyma spring to mind) say that the brilliance of Darwin was to reduce the improbability of getting complex, design-like systems. What was the whole point of “Climbing Mount Improbable”? The point was that probability didn’t have to jump up the sheer face of the cliff. It could meander up the gently sloping rear side, in small probability increments. But if we can’t assign probabilities to the events, exactly what has Darwin’s theory done? |
What is the probability of one cent being added to 99 other to create a dollar? Guess what - you cannot absolutely calculate the probability (folks, see why they have a problem? Of course you do) of that event, which "occurs" every single day gazillions of times - yet without a physical penny being added to a physical 99 cents.
What are the initial conditions?
What are the circumstances?
What are the premises? Isn't a dollar, despite being "real," also just a social construction? And isn't a billion dollars, despite being a collection of electrons beamed from one computer screen to another, nevertheless physical enough to affect people's lives?
You don't get it, my dear. No one "evolutionary event" has one probability assigned to it because no one "evolutionary event" can even exist apart from environmental conditions, themselves subject to their own probabilities. You are attempting to calculate the probability of a sunrise by observing the earth from space. The sun does not really "rise," and "species" (a convenient term that we use because of our human tendency toward dualism and assigning categories) are mutable. A genetic mutation is not adaptive or maladaptive absolutely - it becomes either by being selected or not. You cannot disentangle mutation from selection, selection from environment, and environment from the behavior of the organisms in it (phenotype), or phenotype from genotype (not a simple cause-effect relationship.) You do not get it.
If you need to disentangle the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers before you can catch a fish, Zeno, you are going to starve to death - which your brain is doing.
The irony is that it is they who are materialistic in their attempts to envision evolution - mired in the concrete, they flounder at attempting abstract thought. Always the same old block! Small wonder Pigliucci threw up his hands (or just threw up).
So, did the sun "rise" today, or did it first have to rise halfway, and thus a quarter way, forever and ever so that the sun (sorry, Hemingway) never rises? Teach the controversy! 
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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