After all, he argues, random processes are used all the time to model things in science: When we test a sequence of numbers for randomness, we are essentially testing how easy it is to predict the sequence of numbers. One of the simplest tests is to measure how frequently heads and tails occur during a Read More…
Tag: randomness
Rob Sheldon offers some comments on Karsten Pultz’s “Bicycle” ID thesis
Sheldon: “… in computer science, it is very difficult to make a random number generator. Successive runs of the code should not produce the same numbers. But most generators do.”
Karsten Pultz on why randomness depends on order
Pultz: Comparing to evolution, the randomness produced by the orderly dice, would be the same randomness having produced the dice itself, because that’s how evolution works, slowly building order by random events from the bottom up. Applying the same hypothetical process to bicycles the random event that I get a puncture when riding my bike would be the same type of event which initially created the bike.
Proof of the power of sheer randomness
Look how the sea just deposited these pebbles here…
At Mind Matters News: Randomness is not a scientific explanation
Eric Holloway: … randomness is unprovable, which was proven by three different computer scientists: Ray Solomonoff, Andrey Kolmogorov and Gregory Chaitin. The only thing we can know is that something is not random. Hence, we can never know that something originated from randomness.
Gregory Chaitin on true randomness
Chaitin: You see, with the normal coin tosses, actually every possible finite sequence of heads and tails in a sense is equally random, because they were all generated by tossing a fair coin. But some of them, all heads has a lot of structure, all tails have a lot of structure, alternating heads and tails have a lot of structure. I was looking at something that ignored how the sequence is generated and just looked at it and said, is there structure here or isn’t there?
Chance vs. Randomness: Another theological dance in Darwin’s defense?
Pardon the suspicion but some of us remember sneery “science-splains” at theistic evolution sites as to how there is a huge difference between chance and randomness—which sounded exactly like some scuzz claiming that there is a huge difference between taking money to keep quiet about wrongdoing and a bribe.
Warning: Watching this video may cause you to lose the ability to see randomness
From David Nguyen: Why Tumor Biologists Should Never See Randomness But Only Degrees of Disorder See also: What is Randomness? Part 1, with David Nguyen
Responding to Moran – Is “Unguided” Part of Modern Evolutionary Theory?
I am always aghast that in the 21st century people still make the claim that mutations are unguided. This is a hold-over idea from before the discovery of DNA, simply because some mutations were found to occur independently of selection. However, modern evidence has showed that mutations are actually in large part due to mechanisms Read More…