Alan Prendergast has this story in Westword about Robert Hannum, a professor of “applied probability” at the University of Denver. Recently the management of a casino hired Professor Hannum to investigate a roulette player whom they suspected might be cheating. The house has a huge mathematical advantage in roulette, which is why the casino suspected something other than random chance was involved when the player parlayed a few thousand dollars into over $1.4 million.
Professor Hannum crunched the numbers, however, and told the casino that while the player’s run was very unlikely (about an 80:1 shot), it was not so unlikely as to suggest cheating. And sure enough, over the next few gaming sessions the player blew his entire $1.4 million stack.
What was the key assumption underlying the casino management’s request of Professor Hannum? They assumed that some events are just too improbable reasonably to attribute them to the interaction of random chance and the physical laws of nature working on the roulette wheel (i.e., “physical necessity”), and and if an event is not caused by the interaction of chance and necessity, the most likely cause of the event is design by an intelligent agent. In the particular case of gaming “design by an intelligent agent” goes by the name of “cheating.” Finally, the very fact they hired Professor Hannum suggests they understood that design leaves behind indicia that can be sussed out objectively.
Consider an example from poker. Suppose a poker dealer deals himself 13 royal flushes in hearts in a row in a five card game. The odds of this happening are easy to calculate. They are about 2.74^-71. To put that number into perspective, the dealer could deal the same 13 hands to every atom in the universe, and it is less than even money that any atom would receive that same series of hands. Conclusion: It is not, as a matter of strict logic, impossible for random chance to result in 13 royal flushes in a row, but the odds of that happing are so low that the inference to design is overwhelming.
Now the odds of the information content of even the simplest strand of DNA forming though pure random chance are even less than the odds of dealing 13 royal flushes in a row. Yet Neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) theorists routinely discount the design inference. How can this be? Read More ›