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Author Topic:   Darwinism Cannot Explain The Peacock
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(3)
Message 22 of 165 (688815)
01-25-2013 4:48 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Arriba
01-25-2013 10:37 AM


I'd like to echo what Bluejay said. You tell us, rightly, that a single study based on statistical analysis may be misleading.
But you tell us that just after citing a single study based on statistical analysis and claiming that this on its own "falsifies" the sexual selection hypothesis. Not merely that it is at variance with that hypothesis, not that it casts a faint shadow of doubt on it, but that it falsifies it altogether!
This despite the fact that this one study is at odds with (a) other studies of peafowl (b) other studies of birds with exaggerated secondary sexual plumage (c) common sense.
By your own standards, you ought to be telling us that such a study on its own can't falsify anything and is probably wrong.
Instead, you pick and choose. You write:
The appropriate way to express the new findings is simple: Marion Petrie's results could not be replicated.
Even if we only had these two studies (which we don't) why would it not be equally "appropriate" to say that these new findings cannot be replicated? After all, they haven't been. If all we had were these two studies, then all we could say is that they seem to contradict one another: we have no more warrant to say Takahashi proves Petrie is wrong than to say Petrie proves Takahashi is wrong.
But as I say, we don't just have these two studies. Petrie's results have been replicated at least twice by different groups of researchers: see
* Yasmin, S. & Yahya, H. S. A. 1996. Correlates of mating success in Indian peafowl. Auk, 113, 490e492.
* Loyau, A., Saint Jalme, M. & Sorci, G. 2005a. Intra and inter-sexual selection for multiple traits in the peacock (Pavo cristatus). Ethology, 111, 810e820.
So it is simply untrue to say that Petrie's results cannot be replicated. It is true to say that her results and the results of two other independent research teams are at variance with the results of Takahashi et al, which have not been replicated.
So who is more likely to be wrong? Takahashi, of course. Petrie's results have been replicated, Takahashi is the odd one out.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 36 of 165 (688926)
01-26-2013 6:06 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by Bolder-dash
01-26-2013 11:28 AM


I note that in neither of those pictures is either of the subjects hopelessly tangled in the undergrowth.
But these are rarities, in any case. Normally hair doesn't do that.
(The invention of cutting hair, of braiding it up, etc presumably relaxed any evolutionary constraint on the production of really long hair.)

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 66 of 165 (689145)
01-28-2013 1:58 PM
Reply to: Message 65 by Arriba
01-28-2013 1:08 PM


Fantasy v. Data
What you have done is construct a rather elaborate fantasy to explain how the data we have might support the sexual selection hypothesis, and the hypothesis might still be wrong. This fantasy extends to imagining what will be reported in papers not yet published reporting studies which have not actually been done.
Well, I have less faith in your powers of clairvoyance than you do, and the fact is that the data we have at present do support the hypothesis. So for now I would place my money on it being correct.
Certainly to announce "Darwinism Cannot Explain The Peacock", as you do, seems premature. You should instead have titled the thread: "According To The Data Before Us, Darwinism Can Explain The Peacock, But I Have A Touchingly Nave Faith That Other Data Will One Day Be Produced Showing That It Can't".
I presume that your objection to Darwinism is purely ideological, since you are not saying the same thing about other propositions in biology such as that smoking is bad for you --- although you might if you chose, based on the same form of wishful thinking. For your method of reasoning (and I use the term loosely) would allow you to ignore any hypothesis supported by statistical data, no matter how true it is.

This message is a reply to:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(2)
Message 71 of 165 (689190)
01-28-2013 5:36 PM
Reply to: Message 70 by Bolder-dash
01-28-2013 4:51 PM


Ok Blue Jay, so you are claiming that chimpanzee females have mustaches and beards. So do you believe that the male chimpanzees tend to have sex with females who have less beards? Do you think the ones who have these mustaches that you see are at a real disadvantage in their population?
No, 'cos they're not human, and are not subject to sexual selection by humans.
In humans, men tend not to be attracted to women with beards. And lo and behold, by and large women do not have beards. Now if you could demonstrate that if by attaching an artificial beard to an otherwise passable woman you would make her more attractive to men, or at least that men would be neutral in their selection with respect to this variation, then you'd have a point.
But by and large women look approximately like men think they ought to look. For which I for one am thankful.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(3)
Message 91 of 165 (689322)
01-29-2013 3:14 PM
Reply to: Message 80 by Arriba
01-29-2013 11:19 AM


And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
So my message to any other users in this forum who might have suggested that I had "[constructed] a rather elaborate fantasy to explain how the data we have might support the sexual selection hypothesis, and the hypothesis might still be wrong..." is simple: Take a remedial math class and get back to me.
It was I who suggested that. I have a Ph.D. in math, and am profoundly unimpressed by your silly games with Bayesian statistics, and by the silly mistakes you've made while playing them.
Let's look at what you did wrong.
(1) Petrie's study does not investigate whether sexual selection can explain the tail of the peacock. It investigates whether and to what degree peahens select peacocks according to the qualities of their tails. These questions are not co-extensive, and so when you're assigning figures to P(H) and P(E|~H) the two Hs don't actually stand for the same thing.
(2) The figure you've used for P(H) is merely a quantification of your prejudices, i.e. you pulled it out of your ass. You can't really improve a statistical analysis by adding in a datum you've made up based on your personal bias. This is why the nature and magnitude of your biases are not taught in "remedial math class".
As with your previous post, what you've hit on is a method where you can deny a fact, no matter how true and no matter how well-supported by statistical evidence --- just by choosing P(H) to be low enough. If, for example, you want to deny that smoking causes cancer (as you might if you worked for a tobacco company) all you have to do is declare that it is "a priori" unlikely, assign it a small enough value, and all the evidence we have won't push P(H|E) over 50%. And then you can point out that P(H|E) is less than 50%, and that you've proved this with MATH!!! Oh, and by taking your prejudices as data.
One has to be very careful using Bayesian math in the context that P(H) is a guess rather than a known frequency. You have exercised no such caution, and this makes your whole number-juggling worthless. What you have proved is simply that if you are sufficiently biased against a proposition, it is hard for statistical evidence to make you believe it. Well, we knew that.
(3) And now it's time for you to pull another figure out of your ass --- the figure for P(E|~H). You don't actually know the p-value reported in Petrie's paper, as you admit. So you make it up --- and you choose the largest value consistent with the paper being published at all.
This breaks one of the cardinal rules of argument: that if you are trying to prove something, and you don't know a figure, it is illegitimate to assume the figure most favorable to your argument. To construct a strong argument, you use the figure least favorable to your argument; under certain circumstances it might be acceptable to use a figure based on an average.
For example, if I wish to prove that you will never become heavyweight champion of the world, and I don't know your height, it would be illegitimate for me to assume that you are as short as is consistent with you being a human being. On the contrary, since I'm trying to prove it impossible, I'd have to assume that you were the ideal height to become heavyweight champion of the world.
(If I merely wished to prove it unlikely, I might be excused for assuming that you were of average height.)
(4) And then you pull a third figure out of your ass when you claim that P(E|H) is 0.95.
I've saved the best 'til last.
Would you like to tell the class where you got that figure, Arriba?
Actually, I think the class can guess. You subtracted your (made-up) figure for P(E|~H) from 1, didn't you?
Really, Arriba?
And then you think yourself fit to lecture people on probability theory and to tell people other than yourself that they should "take a remedial math class". When that little maneuver tells us all we need to know about your mathematical literacy and grasp of probability theory.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 80 by Arriba, posted 01-29-2013 11:19 AM Arriba has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 103 by Arriba, posted 02-01-2013 9:45 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 93 of 165 (689358)
01-30-2013 1:42 AM
Reply to: Message 83 by Arriba
01-29-2013 12:43 PM


Re: Unprovable Postulates
I can't count the number of times I've heard that science has put a man on the moon and how the Internet wouldn't be possible without science. People roll their eyes and say how hard they laugh that someone uses their computer to say that science doesn't work.
On the other hand, I can't count the number of times I've heard that the Earth wouldn't exist without Jesus Christ, much less the Sun, and my body, and there would be no plants or animals to eat. They say that they laugh every time someone stands on the Earth and says they don't believe in God.
The difference would be that the first set of propositions is known to be true.
Here's a news flash for you - the most important reasons I have the computer I'm typing on are three:
1. Double-entry accounting.
2. Charles Babbage, mathematician, and his differential engine.
3. Six Sigma Statistical methods.
Where does electricity come on your list?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 83 by Arriba, posted 01-29-2013 12:43 PM Arriba has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 106 by Arriba, posted 02-01-2013 9:58 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(4)
Message 94 of 165 (689374)
01-30-2013 4:05 AM
Reply to: Message 80 by Arriba
01-29-2013 11:19 AM


Kicking The Ball Through The Goalposts
Researchers seeking to alleviate their ignorance - nonsense! They're only interested in getting funding, ideally federally funding, and that funding is intended to aid them in procreating as best as they can in order to further spread their genes. Truth has nothing to do with it so stop pretending. Science is how people who can't kick the ball through the goalposts try to get laid.
Even given that dubious proposition, it is obvious that scientists would still try to find the truth, because that is in fact how they gain their prestige. If their rockets fell over on the launching pads, if their vaccines made people more likely to contract diseases, if the nuclear reactors they designed took in more electricity than they put out, if their predictions of eclipses were no better than chance ... etc, etc ... then they would be objects of derision and scorn, and would not get the hot women. Or the funding. Let their motives be as venal as you choose to imagine, their venal motives would be a motive to be right.
In the same way, someone who tried to get money and women by "kicking the ball through the goalposts" would have a powerful incentive to kick the ball through the goal posts rather than kicking it somewhere else.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 102 of 165 (689432)
01-30-2013 4:55 PM
Reply to: Message 96 by Bolder-dash
01-30-2013 11:15 AM


Now you have a tail, which makes it harder to fly, which makes you slower, and more susceptible to being eaten, and yet somehow you have to be able to also describe this in a way that makes sense as an advantge. So your side is left bumbling with the notion that, well, they survived,so see that proves it must be.
Oh, look, it's the Argument From Undesign.
Yeah, peacock tails are stupid, aren't they? Which proves that they must have been created by an all-wise god who also happens to be a total moron. The tail of the peacock is such a bad lousy idea that instead of being produced by a process which you guys habitually summarize as "random chance", it must have been designed by infallible omniscience ... on one of its off-days.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 109 of 165 (689601)
02-01-2013 11:28 AM
Reply to: Message 103 by Arriba
02-01-2013 9:45 AM


Re: And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
Accordingly his a priori odds are 10/100,000 or 0.0001 but when I start by granting you 0.01 - a number 100 times more generous than the one he uses you whine about it like a little bitch.
But Ioannidis had a reason for producing his figure --- that the results in his hypothetical example were based on data-mining. Your reason is simply that you're biased against a conclusion you don't like. The idea that peacock attractiveness is related to the display qualities of their tails was not produced by making 100,000 measurements of different bird species and different morphological features and seeing what correlations appeared in the data; it was the hypothesis to be tested.
What you didn't notice is that I assumed P(E|H) was 1 during the last step, even though I had previously assumed it was only 0.95.
OK, let's add that.
(5) You used two different and inconsistent values for P(E|H), both of which you made up.
The rest of your pretentious blather seems to be designed not so much to justify your halfwitted blunders as to convey your delusion of competence. After the little exhibition you've made of yourself, this is hardly a delusion you will persuade anyone to share.
Why would you when you already know the truth as though it were revealed to you from on high? Your real goal is to stamp out the heresy you see before you. Like the rest of your fellow cult members, you have a mind like concrete: All mixed up and permanently set.
And yet curiously enough it falls to me to point out your fatuous footling blunders; whereas it is you who have explicitly taken your own bias as a datum. These facts would be suggestive to a keener thinker than yourself.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 103 by Arriba, posted 02-01-2013 9:45 AM Arriba has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 117 by Arriba, posted 02-05-2013 9:02 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 112 of 165 (689605)
02-01-2013 11:46 AM
Reply to: Message 106 by Arriba
02-01-2013 9:58 AM


Re: Unprovable Postulates
It never ceases to amaze me the bad examples that people come up with in fora like these.
We got to the moon, you claim, because of science. I suppose you're going to say that it's because of Newton's Law of Gravity that we got there.
You ignore, of course, the fact that the Law of Gravity has been falsified. It is not merely the fact that it couldn't predict the precession of Mercury, or that the gravitational lensing observed during the eclipse of 1919 validated Einstein's theories far more than Newton's, or that quantum mechanics has also similarly abandoned the law in favor of gravitons, but also the point that the Law of Gravity cannot explain the movements of galaxies without resorting to a liberal sprinkling of "dark matter" at conveniently located places in order to make the numbers work.
No, more to the point I want to point out this: Sir Isaac Newton was a mathematician, alchemist, philosopher, and theologian. Yet when he formulates a (wrong) law science gets the credit. Why is that? Why not math? Why not alchemy? Why not philosophy? Why not theology? Why should science get the credit when Newton wasn't a scientist?
P.S. Georg Ohm, the inventor of Ohm's law, was a high school teacher and mathematician. He was fooling around with an electrostatic generator, which was first invented by Johan Wilcke, whose father was a pastor in the German Church in Stockholm. He became a Thamian lecturer and similarly was not a scientist. Again I ask: Why does science get the credit? Why not math? Why not the German Church in Stockholm? In fact, history tells us that scientists called Ohm's Law "a tissue of naked fantasy." Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say I have the computer in spite of science and not because of it.
Am I to suppose that this heap of crap was really intended to be a reply to my post? Or were you trying to reply to someone else?

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 129 of 165 (689935)
02-06-2013 2:58 PM
Reply to: Message 117 by Arriba
02-05-2013 9:02 AM


Re: And May God Have Mercy On Your Soul
You state: "But Ioannidis had a reason for producing his figure --- that the results in his hypothetical example were based on data-mining." This only proves that you have no reading comprehension ability.
And yet it falls to me to point out that Ioannidis was describing data-mining, and to you to be wrong about it.
But this is by-the-by. My point, which you have not attempted to dispute, is that Ioannidis' figure was calculated, whereas your figure for P(H) was simply made up to reflect your biases.
This is not brain surgery. It's simple math - something you're supposed to be good at.
As I have pointed out, the study of mathematics does not include a study of your personal prejudices. Mathematicians are not interested in how biased you are, even if you quantify it.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(12)
Message 130 of 165 (689938)
02-06-2013 3:33 PM
Reply to: Message 119 by Arriba
02-05-2013 9:04 AM


I can tell you for a fact that Newton wasn't a scientist. All you need to do is pick up a dictionary (try dictionary.com) and you'll see that the word "scientist" got added to the dictionary in 1834.
Also, we know for a fact that he wasn't a vertebrate, since that word was only added to the dictionary in 1826.
You silly little man.

This message is a reply to:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 139 of 165 (690613)
02-14-2013 3:25 PM
Reply to: Message 138 by Tangle
02-14-2013 3:21 PM


Re: Unprovable Postulates
I doubt anyone give a flying tea trolley.
Well, I for one am always interested in mocking the egregiously wrong. Character flaw or hobby? --- you decide.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 138 by Tangle, posted 02-14-2013 3:21 PM Tangle has replied

Replies to this message:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 161 of 165 (726503)
05-09-2014 11:38 AM
Reply to: Message 160 by Arriba
05-09-2014 11:25 AM


Re: Unprovable Postulates
Galileo was not a scientist for several reasons. First of all, the word scientist hadn't even been invented by the time of his death.
Nor had the word "vertebrate". Is that a proof he wasn't a vertebrate?
Second, the supposed pre-runners of scientists were known as "natural philosophers" but Galileo wasn't a natural philosopher. He was a medical school dropout turned mathematician. In fact, he gained his first teaching position by using Dante's Inferno to calculate the wingspan of Satan. After three years his contract was not renewed.
How does any of this, if true (you might supply references), stop him from being a scientist? He practiced science. This is what scientists do.
You declare him to be a "mathematician" instead, but was he a "mathematician" when he discovered the moons of Jupiter? Was that a mathematical or a scientific discovery?

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(2)
Message 163 of 165 (726511)
05-09-2014 12:48 PM
Reply to: Message 160 by Arriba
05-09-2014 11:25 AM


Re: Unprovable Postulates
Galileo wasn't a natural philosopher. He was a medical school dropout turned mathematician. In fact, he gained his first teaching position by using Dante's Inferno to calculate the wingspan of Satan. After three years his contract was not renewed.
Galileo, after twenty years of university teaching, applied for a court position with the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In making his application he included a significant and unusual request. "... As to the title of my position," he wrote, "I desire that in addition to the title of 'mathematician,' his Highness will annex that of 'philosopher,' for I may claim to have studied for a greater number of years in philosophy than months in pure mathematics." --- Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science, Volume 1

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