The meaning of evidence

[Sherlock Holmes]

This thread is to discuss the meaning of the term "evidence" particularly with respect to claims made by evolution advocates.

The reason I started this thread is that I often see - what I regard as - a conflation of consistent with and evidence for. If we are to make reasonable inferences and maintain objectivity and avoid making assumption unwittingly then the more precisely we define "evidence" the better I think.

The biggest risk here is to imply that some observation P is evidence for X and only X, rather than evidence for X and Y or Z. Unless we are on our guard we can informally exclude reasonable possibilities Y and Z and so on. Now the observation P might well be evidence for X and only X, but unless that is soundly established we simply can't assume that.

If we mistakenly regard P as evidence for X and only X then we fall into the trap of believing that P can only be observed if X was the cause.

This is exemplified by an analogy I recently put together that I think warrants its own thread, so here it is:

Consider this jigsaw

None of the circles overlap, we can see this when we can see the totality of the jigsaw. But if we already believed for some reason or other, that they must overlap and we only had twenty random pieces and never see the rest, we could make up a jigsaw (theory) where we "fill in the blanks" so to speak and "show" that we sometimes have overlapping circles.

We'd be absolutely right too in saying the twenty pieces were consistent with an image that has overlapping circles, but we'd be dead wrong to say the twenty pieces are evidence of overlapping circles, because as we know, none of the circles actually do overlap.

So do you agree or not, there's a difference between observations that are evidence for some hypothesis vs consistent with some hypothesis and we should always be careful and make this distinction clear in our arguments?

[The Barbarian]

If he's a philosopher (with a pre-existing bias against Darwinism) proposing something about paleontology that a majority of paleontologists, including a number of his fellow anti-Darwnians, disagree with, that's strong evidence that he's wrong. Like many other creationists, he's trusted and invested in creationism, so it's hard for him to abandon it.

Well this belief that the popularity of an idea is somehow a reliable indication of its veracity is a very common misunderstanding.

If you believe that, one of us does. Is that the problem here? I'm just pointing out that people who actually learn about things, put in the time and study to know them, and work in the field, tend to be more knowledgeable than people who don't. Pretty much always the case.

That its fallacious is easily shown by the obvious fact that popular ideas were at one time unpopular, before they became popular.

Don't know of too many scientific theories that came about from non-scientists. There is plate tectonics, which was first proposed as continental drift by a meteorologist. What else?

Science is littered too with examples of once popular accepted beliefs that are now no longer regarded as valid, one example being the almost universal acceptance of the luminiferous aether hypothesis in physics until the early 20th century.

Right. Hypothesis. Not a theory. And when someone figured out how to test it, it failed. Pretty much the way science works. On the other hand, paleontology, as even honest creationists admit, is strong evidence for macroevolutionary theory. The hypothesis was repeatedly tested and verified by later discovery of transitional forms. Which again, even honest creationists admit is strong evidence. But even more compelling is that we never see a transitional that the theory says should not exist. No feathered mammals. No crabs with bones. That's much stronger evidence.

Science is not a popularity contest,

Something that should have come to you when you were posting all those quotes. The bandwagon argument is a huge loser for creationism.

the relative veracity of competing ideas is not established by assessing their relative popularity,

Well, it apparently is for creationists. But who else?

Years ago, Immanuel Velikovsky had this fixation that most of history was caused by galloping comets which later became planets. He had both scriptural analysis and astronomical hypotheses to support it. Carl Sagan recounts talking to a Hebrew scholar about him. The scholar said that the scriptural analysis was garbage, but he was impressed by the astronomy. Sagan replied that he had the opposite impression.

For reasons that are obvious. That's where Meyer is.

[brunumb]

There could be any number of unforeseeable effects capable of thwarting evolution, we do not know, you do not know so on that basis I am skeptical to say the least.

Evolution has no specific direction or goal so there is nothing to thwart. As long as there is life there is evolution.

[Sherlock Holmes]

There could be any number of unforeseeable effects capable of thwarting evolution, we do not know, you do not know so on that basis I am skeptical to say the least.

Evolution has no specific direction or goal so there is nothing to thwart. As long as there is life there is evolution.

The purported long term process relies on the complex mechanistic behavior of cells, antagonistic behavior might emerge over time that is simply unforeseeable since its subject to random mutations sometimes. Take your car and randomly change something every week, you might better understand what I mean.

Here's a short computer animation of just part of the internal machinations of a cell:

I work with and design software for a living, software is an abstract machine (or typically a multitude of distinct interacting finite state machines) and gets quite complex. Behavior can emerge over time that is almost impossible to foresee during design - that's why we have to test software often very heavily. There's a particular kind of test too called a "soak test" where we leave the software running under heavy simulated loading often for weeks just to see if anything undesirable emerges and most of the time it does, this is the only way to weed out such behavior too. Testing for short periods often never reveals or even hints at these kind of problems.

Sometimes too even an apparently tiny change or bug fix can have astonishing unintended consequences, much of the time the programmer had no idea that things would go awry, the phrase "but I only changed one line!" typifies this.

Observing such systems over short time periods often provides no hint that such behavior is present.

The kinds of behavior often found by soak testing includes:

• Gradual slowdown, increasing response times.

• Gradual unconstrained growth of memory use.

• Gradual unconstrained consumption of disk space.

if these are not discovered during testing and remedial design changes made, then they will lead to catastrophic failure ("site down") and so on. These kinds of issues are unacceptable in systems like flight control, satellite navigation, medical electronics and so on.

It is a fact of life that complex systems based on a multiplicity of state machines are almost always prone to long term degradation, unforeseen by even the most rigorous design teams, if this were not the case then we could dispense with software testing, saving time and money, but we can't, nobody knows how really.

To suggest that biological molecular systems of enormous complexity can achieve this kind of robustness and be free from long term degradation, without any design teams is just one reason that some of us are extremely skeptical of the grandiose claims made by some evolutionists, James Tour is but one example.

[JoeyKnothead]

The purported long term process relies on the complex mechanistic behavior of cells, antagonistic behavior might emerge over time that is simply unforeseeable since its subject to random mutations sometimes. Take your car and randomly change something every week, you might better understand what I mean.

"I might be Teddy Roosevelt, but I ain't."
- Punkinhead Martin

It might be that certain processes don't lend themselves to evolution. That don't mean that all them that do, don't.

[Sherlock Holmes]

The purported long term process relies on the complex mechanistic behavior of cells, antagonistic behavior might emerge over time that is simply unforeseeable since its subject to random mutations sometimes. Take your car and randomly change something every week, you might better understand what I mean.

"I might be Teddy Roosevelt, but I ain't."
- Punkinhead Martin

It might be that certain processes don't lend themselves to evolution. That don't mean that all them that do, don't.

Pigs might fly too.

[JoeyKnothead]

The purported long term process relies on the complex mechanistic behavior of cells, antagonistic behavior might emerge over time that is simply unforeseeable since its subject to random mutations sometimes. Take your car and randomly change something every week, you might better understand what I mean.

"I might be Teddy Roosevelt, but I ain't."
- Punkinhead Martin

It might be that certain processes don't lend themselves to evolution. That don't mean that all them that do, don't.

Pigs might fly too.

So, as we've both shown now, arguments predicated on "might" are a poor means of establishing truth.

[The Barbarian]

I work with and design software for a living, software is an abstract machine (or typically a multitude of distinct interacting finite state machines) and gets quite complex. Behavior can emerge over time that is almost impossible to foresee during design

Happens in evolution, too. Sometimes, an unforseen effects are useful. But generally, they aren't. Here's an interesting thing about evolution; the less fit a population is for their environment, the more often one of those unforseen effects becomes widespread in the population. Can you guess why?

- that's why we have to test software often very heavily.

There's a particular kind of test too called a "soak test" where we leave the software running under heavy simulated loading often for weeks just to see if anything undesirable emerges and most of the time it does, this is the only way to weed out such behavior too. Testing for short periods often never reveals or even hints at these kind of problems.

In living populations, it's called natural selection. Works really well.

Sometimes too even an apparently tiny change or bug fix can have astonishing unintended consequences, much of the time the programmer had no idea that things would go awry, the phrase "but I only changed one line!" typifies this.

Any sufficiently complex system can exhibit behavior that looks designed, but isn't. This isn't recent knowledge. From 1997:

Creatures from primordial silicon - Let Darwinism loose in an electronics lab and just watch what it creates. A lean, mean machine that nobody understands. Clive Davidson reports
“GO!” barks the researcher into the microphone. The oscilloscope in front of
him displays a steady green line across the top of its screen. “Stop!” he says
and the line immediately drops to the bottom.

Between the microphone and the oscilloscope is an electronic circuit that
discriminates between the two words. It puts out 5 volts when it hears “go” and
cuts off the signal when it hears “stop”.

It is unremarkable that a microprocessor can perform such a task—except
in this case. Even though the circuit consists of only a small number of basic
components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson, does not know how it works. He
can’t ask the designer because there wasn’t one. Instead, the circuit evolved
from a “primordial soup” of silicon components guided by the principles of
genetic variation and survival of the fittest.

Thompson’s work is not aimless tinkering. His brand of evolution managed to
construct a working circuit with fewer than one-tenth of the components that a
human designer would have used. His experiments—which began four years ago
and earned him his PhD—are already making waves.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... n-reports/

More recently, applications for this have exploded. It's not just cybernetics; engineers use these processes. They are called "genetic algorithms" by engineers. It's no surprise to biologists and molecular biologists that evolution can be vastly more efficient than design for very complex problems:

Diesel Engine Design using Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm
...However, MOGA requires a large number of iterations. There- fore, for MOGA, a diesel combustion simulator that can express combustion precisely with small calcu- lation cost is essential. Phenomenological models can simulate diesel engine combustions precisely with small calculation cost. Therefore, phenomenologi- cal models are suitable for MOGA. In the optimiza- tion simulations, fuel injection shape, boost pressure, EGR rate, start angle of injection, duration angle of injection, and swirl ration were chosen as design variables. The values of these design variables were optimized to reduce SFC, NOx, and SOOT. Through the optimization simulations, the following five points were made clarified. First, the proposed system can find the Pareto optimum solutions successfully. Second, MOGAs are very effective
Tomoyuki Hiroyasu Doshisha University
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _Algorithm

To suggest that biological molecular systems of enormous complexity can achieve this kind of robustness and be free from long term degradation, without any design teams is

Is supported by the fact that complex systems are evolved when engineers, using Darwin's theory of mutation and natural selection, let nature take it's course. It's not just biology that works better without design. Highly complex machinery can also be optimized thereby and more efficiently than "design."

just one reason that some of us are extremely skeptical of the grandiose claims made by some evolutionists, James Tour is but one example.

Since he admits that he doesn't understand evolution, it's not any surprise that genetic algorithms would be a mystery to him as well.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to Sherlock Holmes in post #123]

To suggest that biological molecular systems of enormous complexity can achieve this kind of robustness and be free from long term degradation, without any design teams is just one reason that some of us are extremely skeptical of the grandiose claims made by some evolutionists, James Tour is but one example.

I've also written many hundreds of programs since my first Fortran punched card version in 1976, some very involved with thousands of lines of mainly number crunching code, and the goal of those efforts was indeed robustness and reliability. But evolution (as Barbarian alluded to) is so powerful for the very reason that is isn't "perfect" and working towards some goal. The flexibility in its mechanisms is what allows adaptation and speciation to occur so that living things can continue to adapt and change under natural selection.

So it seems strange that you would doubt biological molecular systems of enormous complexity can arise via evolution, when its mechanisms allow exactly that kind of thing to happen.

[JoeyKnothead]

Now I just gotta...

[Tcg]

[Replying to JoeyKnothead in post #129]

A few years ago my pretty thing and I had a pair of Love Birds. They produced three lovely little Love Birds, well eggs that hatched into little Love Birds. After watching shows on the TV where birds pushed their little ones off cliffs and such to teach them how to fly, I wondered how we'd teach our little brood to fly. One day while holding them in my lap, they simply took off and flew up to land on one of our curtain rods. I suspect pigs learn to fly just as easily. Of course, most curtain rods wouldn't hold them.


Tcg