[ExI] Anti-transhumanist crap on Kuro5hin and related.

[Harvey Newstrom]

giovanni santost wrote,
> I think it is kind of silly to try to "explain" evolution in
> terms of "chance". Chance is a code-word for our ignorance.
> Saying that evolution is driven by probabilistic events is not
> really an explanation of anything. It just shows we don't understand
> what really goes on and we recur to statistical arguments as the best
> possible way to model what we don't fully understand.

You are mistaken as to what evolution says.  The theory does not say things
happen by "chance" because we can't explain them.  The theory actually
explains how things work and calculates statistical probabilities for them.

For example, bears may be born with random variations in their fur.  In the
artic, bears with more white in their fur are statistically more likely to
escape notice than bears with more black in their fur.  Therefore,
statistically (not by chance) white bears survive x% more while black bears
survive x% less.  The next year, there are more white bears to have
offspring than black bears.  Over time, white bears become dominant in the
arctic while black bears die out.  None of this is guesswork, unpredictable,
or by "chance".  It is statistical math that the environmental pressures
cause random distribution of fur colors to bias towards white.  No fuzzy
ignorance here.

You are confusing things happening with "statistical predictability" with
things happening "by unexplained chance".

> As a model,
> Darwinian Evolution is the best  we have at the moment, but we have
> to realize any model is a limited picture of reality.
> Probability makes sense when applied to a large sample of data. Sadly,
> we know so far, just one example of  world with life so probability and
> evolution should be used in the same sentence with extreme caution.

There is no one example of evolution.  Every species that exists now or has
ever existed is an example.  There are millions if not billions of examples.

--
Harvey Newstrom 
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