Yes. And you understand this is for everyone else, not for you. I know you want to stay ignorant, and I want to let you.
Anyone who plays craps knows the odds of snake eyes are 1/36. So I show you a pair of aces, and ask you the odds of that happening. 1/36, you say. Wrong oh, I tell you, because I didn't tell you how many rolls I took to roll snake eyes. Oh well, tell me how many rolls you took, you say. Six, I say. Then you say, the odds of getting at least one pair of snake eyes in 6 rolls is 1/36 for getting them on the first roll, plus (35/36)*(1/36) for getting them on the second, plus (35/36)^2*(1/36) for getting them on the third, and so on. You whip out your programmable calculator and tell me that probability is 0.155. That's still wrong, I tell you.
Why?
Because what I did was throw the dice; then, if I got two aces, I kept them; if I got one, I kept it, and threw the other dice. I hung on to the ace I already had, to see if I could get another. And I kept doing that.
The probability of getting two aces this way (according to my spreadsheet calcs, which could be wrong, although they look OK) is actually 0.442, three times better than just rolling both dice.
There are two take-home lessons here. The first is you can't calculate a priori probabilities of a result unless you know the details of the process that led to the result. Just knowing how many throws is not enough.
The second and more important lesson is, you can greatly boost your success if you can get half-way and hang on to the partial success. And that's what happens in evolution. That's what having a genome lets us do. It lets us keep our partial successes, and try again (by mutation - another throw of the dice). The probability of creating a perfect myoglobin molecule in one shot from component amino acids is vanishingly small, But if you can synthesize some large number of other molecules each of which is maybe 1/100 as good as real myoglobin; not great, but good enough to let you survive and reproduce, you can pass on the result to the next generation, and throw the dice again, and eventually get it right.
And that's why Professor Dumbass at Baylor is full of it. Because he knows what I know, and he knows that calculating an a priori probability without knowing the details of the process impresses only the mathematically naive.
Thunderous applause. This one's a keeper.
That's not very nice, using a post to me to lecture everyone else while enjoining me to refrain from reading and comprehending out of a concern that I remain ignorant. Piss poor attitude, in short, for a perfesser.
But, just to spite your arrogant buns I won't shield my eyes. Instead I will do my best to read and comprehend your screed in an effort to determine whether it truly addresses the value, or lack thereof, in using mathematics and probabilities as a tool for obtaining evidence of intelligence or design.
My first clue of its value is that an intelligent agent is giving us a lecture about numbers as a non-factor, while using numbers to make the point. You wouldn't be related ot that other oxymoron, would you? Sind sie ein "Ich?"
The second and more important lesson is, you can greatly boost your success if you can get half-way and hang on to the partial success. And that's what happens in evolution. That's what having a genome lets us do. It lets us keep our partial successes, and try again (by mutation - another throw of the dice). The probability of creating a perfect myoglobin molecule in one shot from component amino acids is vanishingly small, But if you can synthesize some large number of other molecules each of which is maybe 1/100 as good as real myoglobin; not great, but good enough to let you survive and reproduce, you can pass on the result to the next generation, and throw the dice again, and eventually get it right.
And that's why Professor Dumbass at Baylor is full of it. Because he knows what I know, and he knows that calculating an a priori probability without knowing the details of the process impresses only the mathematically naive.
Most to-the-point post I've read in quite a while. This is *exactly* the heart of the "probability" issue. Very well said, and exactly correct.