[Travler]

Originally Posted by Yahwe

your birth was by random chance.

In fact your birth disproves inteligent design.

I am sorry that you feel that way. My parents deeply loved each other and their desire to have me as a child occured long before my conception. My father was distinctly aware of the moment of my conception and his love for me began well before I was born. I was not random by any means. I was chosen. There are people in this world that feel that maybe they were a mistake because they did not receive the love they needed from their parents. It's easy to see why alot of people feel random but it's a misconception based on emotional need.

The following information comes from Evolution and Chance
Version 2.1 Draft 1
Copyright © 1996-1997 by John Wilkins
[Last Update: April 17, 1997]

Genetic changes do not anticipate a species' needs, and those changes may be unrelated to selection pressures on the species. Nevertheless, evolution is not fundamentally a random process.

Darwinism has long being interpreted as a view of nature as based upon "chance". Ideologues have pounced on this to bolster their own extra-scientific philosophies. The antiscientific Stalinist perversion of genetics in the USSR in the 1940s known after its main proponent as Lysenkoism is an example. In an attack on Darwinism, Lysenko said:


"Such sciences as physics and chemistry have freed themselves from chance. That is why they became exact sciences.
Animate nature was developed and is developed on a foundation of the most strict and inherent rules. Organisms and species are developed on a foundation of their natural and intrinsic needs.

By getting rid of Mendelism-Morganism-Weismannism from our science we banish chance out of biological science.

We must keep in mind clearly that science is the enemy of chance."

[T D Lysenko, Aug 7 1948. Appleman 1970:559]

Mendel, Morgan and Weismann were the biologists who discovered genes and mutation. Their work underpins modern biology and modern evolutionary theory.

Lysenko's intuitions about chance in biology were so successful that 20 million people starved to death as a result of his false science applied to agriculture. With appropriate substitutions about "kinds" and God's purpose for species, the statement could have been made by a creationist.

This conception of genetic changes as accidental and unique, about which no laws may be formulated, is fundamentally flawed, for all that it reappears in a number of influential works on evolution. Causes of genetic change are being uncovered routinely, and they involve better or worse understood mechanisms that are very far from random, in the sense that there are very clear causes for the changes, and that they can be specified in detail over general cases. Monod's use of the phrase "realm of pure chance" is rhetoric and is misleading at best, simply false at worst.

There is no basic randomness here, except as far as it arises from the general indeterminacy of the physical world (known as stochastic processes). The same is true for Development Rules. Fetal development in mammals is becoming well understood in terms of the causes of cell differentiation and gene activation. Once these processes have been fully uncovered, there will be no randomness here, either.

Therefore, randomness must enter into evolution per se, if it does, at the level of Ecological Rules; that is, in the ecological struggle [Sober 1984]. However, nobody can fairly argue against the statement that certain phenotypic properties -- a longer beak or stronger hindlegs -- can influence their relative reproduction in a population. So, even if the correlation is only a matter of frequency, there is still a nonrandom relationship between what is claimed as the cause and the effect.

Yet, it is often claimed that randomness drives evolution, as in the quotation from Monod above. We have to ask, where does chance really enter into evolution?

Random Relative to What?

To understand the randomness claimed for evolution by scientists, as opposed to that feared by theologians and moral philosophers, it's important to ask "random relative to what?" In any model of a process as described by a scientific theory, there are many things taken for granted. Philosophers of science refer to these as ancillary assumptions or hypotheses. Some of these are assumed from ignorance: science might not yet have any workable and tested theory or model to deal with that class of phenomena. Others are assumed because they are well worked out in another scientific theory or discipline.

Another way to say this is just that the changes that get encoded in genes occur with no forethought to the eventual needs of the organism (or the species) that carries those genes. A gene change (for instance, a point mutation -- a mistake at a single locus of the genetic structure) may change in any way permitted by the laws of molecular biology, according to the specific causes at the time. This may result in a phenotypic change that may be better suited to current conditions than the others about at the time. However, it probably won't. So far as the local environment is concerned, the change is the result of a random process, a black box that isn't driven with reference to things going on at the level of the environment. It's not really random, of course, because it is the result of causal processes, but so far as natural selection is concerned, it may as well be.

Replication Rules are not random in the sense that, say, Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty or quantum mechanics is sometimes supposed to show the fundamental randomness of reality. They are merely random with respect to natural selection. Natural selection is not random: it is the determinate result of sorting processes according to relative fitness. It is stochastic, in the sense that better engineered features can fail for reasons of probability (they may meet accidents unrelated to their fitness), but that poses no greater threat to the scientific nature of evolution than it does for, say, subatomic physics or information theory.

There are scientists and philosophers who think that probabilities represent a real indeterminacy in the world; that even if you had, in principle, full information about all causes for a system, it would still be possible only to predict the distribution curve rather than the outcome for any single object. This is called the propensity interpretation (Beatty and Finsen in Ruse 1989), and holds that real things have a real propensity to behave in a range of ways rather than a real set of properties that will specify a strict determined outcome. Whether this is true or not is not relevant to evolution as such, for if it is true, then it is true of everything, and not just living things.

Different Senses of Chance

We need to distinguish between two senses of "random": the one kind that involves a total break in the causal chain, and in which the event is essentially chaotic; the other that requires only unpredictability, such as the decay of unstable atoms, or Brownian motion, but which remains a caused event. These get confused all the time. There is nothing about changes in a genome or a gene pool that is random in the first sense, but much of the second sense. For example, shuffling a deck of cards results in a properly physical process of the rearrangement of each card, yet there is no real way to predict the order of a random shuffle. Cards don't just materialise in place, but you don't know what you will end up with (unless you bias the shuffling so it isn't random).

Gould [1993: 396f] has written about the different senses of "random" and "chance" in science:


"In ordinary English, a random event is one without order, predicatability or pattern. The word connotes disaggregation, falling apart, formless anarchy, and fear. Yet, ironically, the scientific sense of random conveys a precisely opposite set of associations. A phenomenon governed by chance yields maximal simplicity, order and predictability--at least in the long run. ... Thus, if you wish to understand patterns of long historical sequences, pray for randomness."

On the other hand, the term "randomness" as applied to mutation often refers to the lack of correspondence of phenotypic effect with the stimulus and with the actual or the adaptive direction of evolution. ... It is a well known fact, emphasized over and over again in discussions of genetics and evolution, that the vast majority of known mutations are inadaptive. ...

----I mostly just pasted the parts regarding chance. You can read the full essay in the link above. I hope this discussion has been settled now.