If Only Biologists Were This Smart!

12 Replies to “If Only Biologists Were This Smart!”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   January 2, 2020 at 1:44 pm

   Reminds me of this quote: ” either mathematics is a useless tool, or we are being criminally blind.,”

   Bernard d’Abrera on Butterfly Mimicry and the Faith of the Evolutionist – October 5, 2011
   Excerpt:  renowned butterfly scholar and photographer Bernard d’Abrera considers the mystery of mimicry.,,,
   For it to happen in a single species once through chance, is mathematically highly improbable. But when it occurs so often, in so many species, and we are expected to apply mathematical probability yet again, then either mathematics is a useless tool, or we are being criminally blind.,,, Evolutionism (with its two eldest daughters, phylogenetics and cladistics) is the only systematic synthesis in the history of the universe that proposes an Effect without a Final Cause. It is a great fraud, and cannot be taken seriously because it outrageously attempts to defend the philosophically indefensible.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....51571.html
2. 2
   Silver Asiatic says:

   January 2, 2020 at 2:40 pm

   It was the numbers. The percentages. The law of averages. The wholly improbable, unprecedented, all but impossible string of perfect decisions and corresponding cash-outs that could not possibly be accomplished without, well, cheating.

   “Poker bloggers” were able to figure this out.
   On the other hand … some others we know of haven’t quite gotten that far.
3. 3
   pw says:

   January 2, 2020 at 9:59 pm

   Pattern Formation in the Drosophila Embryo

   Morphogen Tissue Patterning
4. 4
   kairosfocus says:

   January 3, 2020 at 7:19 am

   Blatant
5. 5
   Barry Arrington says:

   January 3, 2020 at 12:05 pm

   PaV, PaV, PaV, the patterns that led the poker bloggers to conclude “cheater,” are easily explained. Everyone knows we live in one of an infinite number of universes. In the multiverse in which we live, not only are the patterns not impossible, they are inevitable in at least one universe. We just happen to live in the universe in which these patterns were instantiated. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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   BobRyan says:

   January 4, 2020 at 12:56 am

   Barry Arrington

   You state everyone knows we live in one of infinite universes. Where is the evidence to support your belief? Has it ever been observed? Has there ever been a test done to prove it is more than a thought experiment? Just because you like the idea of infinite universes does not make it so. There are those who truly believe the world is flat. Despite no actual evidence to support their claim.
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   Barry Arrington says:

   January 4, 2020 at 4:32 am

   Satire Bob. But your response leads me to believe that Poe’s Law might make it impossible to satirize where the multiverse is concerned.
8. 8
   kairosfocus says:

   January 4, 2020 at 5:10 am

   BA, of course, Poe was targetting stereotypical, strawman caricature Creationists, building on Dawkins’ ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked. But now, with the absurdities implicit in the quasi-infinite multiverse assertion, the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. However, even in such a multiverse, a Boltzmann brain argument applies. Considering this local sub-cosmos it is far more likely that design has occurred when we see signs that are credibly supportive of such an inference, than that we are in some bizarro sub-cosmos that communicates that delusional connexion between apparently empirically and analytically reliable sign and what it seems to signify. Local rationality and the epistemic right of prudent induction prevail over bizarre, empirically unsupported speculation. KF

   PS: Walker and Davies have summ’at to say, too:

   In physics, particularly in statistical mechanics, we base many of our calculations on the assumption of metric transitivity, which asserts that a system’s trajectory will eventually [–> given “enough time and search resources”] explore the entirety of its state space – thus everything that is phys-ically possible will eventually happen. It should then be trivially true that one could choose an arbitrary “final state” (e.g., a living organism) and “explain” it by evolving the system backwards in time choosing an appropriate state at some ’start’ time t_0 (fine-tuning the initial state). In the case of a chaotic system the initial state must be specified to arbitrarily high precision. But this account amounts to no more than saying that the world is as it is because it was as it was, and our current narrative therefore scarcely constitutes an explanation in the true scientific sense.

   We are left in a bit of a conundrum with respect to the problem of specifying the initial conditions necessary to explain our world. A key point is that if we require specialness in our initial state (such that we observe the current state of the world and not any other state) metric transitivity cannot hold true, as it blurs any dependency on initial conditions – that is, it makes little sense for us to single out any particular state as special by calling it the ’initial’ state. If we instead relax the assumption of metric transitivity (which seems more realistic for many real world physical systems – including life), then our phase space will consist of isolated pocket regions and it is not necessarily possible to get to any other physically possible state (see e.g. Fig. 1 for a cellular automata example).

   [–> or, there may not be “enough” time and/or resources for the relevant exploration, i.e. we see the 500 – 1,000 bit complexity threshold at work vs 10^57 – 10^80 atoms with fast rxn rates at about 10^-13 to 10^-15 s leading to inability to explore more than a vanishingly small fraction on the gamut of Sol system or observed cosmos . . . the only actually, credibly observed cosmos]

   Thus the initial state must be tuned to be in the region of phase space in which we find ourselves [–> notice, fine tuning], and there are regions of the configuration space our physical universe would be excluded from accessing, even if those states may be equally consistent and permissible under the microscopic laws of physics (starting from a different initial state). Thus according to the standard picture, we require special initial conditions to explain the complexity of the world, but also have a sense that we should not be on a particularly special trajectory to get here (or anywhere else) as it would be a sign of fine–tuning of the initial conditions. [ –> notice, the “loading”] Stated most simply, a potential problem with the way we currently formulate physics is that you can’t necessarily get everywhere from anywhere (see Walker [31] for discussion). [“The “Hard Problem” of Life,” June 23, 2016, a discussion by Sara Imari Walker and Paul C.W. Davies at Arxiv.]
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   jstanley01 says:

   January 4, 2020 at 8:15 am

   I remember this coming up when do-it-yourself encryption was a thing. Someone pointed out, lighting up everyone’s lightbulbs, that the detection of encrypted information in one’s communications, in the form of apparent gibberish, would itself be a tell. So she came up with an application that embedded the encrypted data into what looked like pictures.

   If I recall correctly, the first examples she produced were watercolors of her cat playing the piano. So now you and Paul Harvey know, “the rest of the story… 🙂
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    kairosfocus says:

    January 4, 2020 at 8:33 am

    Steganography

    (Now, wouldn’t it be interesting to find hidden information in “junk DNA”?)
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    jstanley01 says:

    January 4, 2020 at 8:38 am

    KF, it doesn’t surprise me that she was cheating, even though that was back in 1498.
12. 12
    Axel says:

    January 5, 2020 at 3:50 pm

    This reminds me of Nicholas Taleb’s imaginary characters, Fat Tony and Dr John.

    https://harveynick.com/2018/11/11/ideas-which-changed-my-perspective-part-2-of-5-dr-john-and-fat-tony/