From: Brian D Harper <bharper@postbox.acs.ohio-state.edu>
>As has been noted many times, random in this context does not mean
>"without meaning purpose, plan, or design". Any "meaning purpose, plan, or
>design" is not detectable with scientific instruments. For example, in
>information
>theory one measures the quantity of information in a message irrespective
of
>what it means. One would not conclude from this that messages have no
meaning.
>Also, consider the engineer that designs complicated mechanisms by
mimicking
>Darwinism, i.e. by random variations coupled with a selection criteria.
>Would the
>random variations be "without meaning purpose, plan, or design" in this
case?
I think we need to distinguish between design of the system and design of
events occurring within the system. (I'll set aside the question of
"meaning" which is rather different, and, for convenience, I'll lump
together "purpose, plan and design" as simply "design".)
I would say that "random" in this context *does* mean without design. If
some designer is guiding the events of evolution, whether detectable or not,
then I say they are not random.
To take your example of an engineer building a Darwinian system, I would say
that the system as a whole is designed, but the random events occurring
within it are not. To take a specific example of human design, a roulette
wheel is designed, but the outcome of individual spins is not.
One further complication is that we need to distinguish between design and
determinism. We may consider an event to be random even if it's outcome is
predetermined, providing we have insufficient knowledge to conduct the
determination. For example, it may be that a sufficiently detailed analysis
of the roulette wheel would enable us to predetermine the outcome of the
next spin. (Actually, a roulette wheel may be such a chaotic system that
this is not the case, but bear with me.) We would still consider the spin to
be random, because we know that such a predetermination is not a practical
possibility. On the other hand, suppose the wheel were rigged so the
croupier can fix exactly what the next outcome will be, and does so. In this
case, we would *not* say that the spin is random, even though, from the
punters' point of view, each outcome is still equally likely.
So, if a designer has been manipulating the events of evolution to produce a
desired result, then evolution is not a random process. On the other hand,
if a designer set up the evolutionary mechanism and then let it run without
interference, then the process of evolution is random, and is without
purpose, plan or design.
Richard Wein (Tich)
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