A design inference from tennis: Is the fix in?

_{Denyse O'Leary

June 24, 2011

Design inference, Intelligent Design}

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The conspiracy theorists were busy last month when the Cleveland Cavaliers — spurned by Lebron, desperate for some good fortune, represented by a endearing teenager afflicted with a rare disease — landed the top pick in the NBA Draft. It seemed too perfect for some (not least, Minnesota Timberwolves executive David Kahn) but the odds of that happening were 2.8 percent, almost a lock compared to the odds of Isner-Mahut II.

Question: How come it’s legitimate to reason this way in tennis but not in biology? Oh wait, if we start asking those kinds of questions, we’ll be right back in the Middle Ages when they were so ignorant that …

Comments

There are about 5 billion people in the world. Picking two at random gives a probability of about one chance in 10^19 of picking that pairing. It is obviously a fake. </parody> When I look at the cited SI link, I see that they are using conditional probability, as is appropriate (and which rules out my crude calculation). If ID arguments were a little more careful about how they estimate probabilities, they might be taken more seriously.Neil Rickert_{June 24, 2011
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OK, can you explain?Elizabeth Liddle_{June 24, 2011
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Elizabeth Liddle:
And this is where ID goes (interestingly) wrong, IMO. Unlike most hypotheses regarding evidence for the supernatural, in which the miraculous is cast as the null(“science can’t explain it, therefore a miracle”), in ID the miraculous – or at least Design – is cast as the alternative hypothesis (H1).
This is false.Mung_{June 24, 2011
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Of course you can reason that way in biology. We do it all the time.
An example might be a gene that is shared across multiple species. The Darwinist reasons, this is just too improbable to have happened by chance. Therefore, they reason, it must be due to a shared common ancestor. What is missed in this line of reasoning is that not only is the "chance" hypothesis rejected, but so is the "chance + natural selection" hypothesis. You know, that mechanism that is otherwise supposed to be so all powerful and capable of explaining anything. And the Darwinian shell game continues. So Darwinians use the chance + selection "explanation" when it is convenient, but even they have to admit of cases where it's just too improbable as an explanation, even for them, so they switch to yet another "explanation." An incredibly flexible theory.Mung_{June 24, 2011
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The methodology is exactly the same as is used countless times daily in all the sciences, namely, the probability of the observed under the null hypothesis. It isn't the math that is at issue here, it's the operationalisation of the hypotheses. In the above scenario, null hypothesis (H0)was the draw was done by the official method. The alternative hypothesis (H1) was that the draw was fixed to favour a particular team. The probability of the observed data was, apparently very low under the null, so the null could be rejected. Now apply this to biology: Normally, again, we have a null hypothesis and an alternate hypothesis, and we test the alternative hypothesis by seeing how likely our observed data is under the null. To do this we have to operationalise an appropriate null. And again, we do this all the time. To demonstrate that some alleles are are advantageous, for instance, we need to demonstrate that the proportion of new alleles that go to fixation is more than we'd expect under the null of no allele being other than neutral. Or to demonstrate that a bacterium has acquired a new antibiotic resistance, we need to demonstrate that a greater proportion of bacteria reproduce successfully is greater than the proportion expected under the null of no new resistance. And this is where ID goes (interestingly) wrong, IMO. Unlike most hypotheses regarding evidence for the supernatural, in which the miraculous is cast as the null("science can't explain it, therefore a miracle"), in ID the miraculous - or at least Design - is cast as the alternative hypothesis (H1). This means that formulating the null correctly is extremely important - what is required is to characterise what we would expect to see under any other non-Design hypothesis. So unlike the scenario in the OP, instead of starting with a clearly stated null (whatever the official draw formula is) we have a null that begs the very question at issue: what non-design process might produce the observed data?Elizabeth Liddle_{June 24, 2011
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Good question? If we could reason our way to the conclusion that a sports event has been fixed, why couldn't we reason our way to the conclusion that god designed living things? Oh yeah, because we aren't morons.JesseJoe_{June 24, 2011
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Of course you can reason that way in biology. We do it all the time.Elizabeth Liddle_{June 24, 2011
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Ah! Read the link!AussieID_{June 24, 2011
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Dunno if this is right ... aren't the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball? I think you may have a dose of the Wimbledons? Correct me if I'm wrongAussieID_{June 24, 2011
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