Letters From Darwin - An Evolutionary Coin Flip
~ Thought Experiment - Coin Toss
Imagine for a moment that you have gone along to a magic demonstration. When you get there, you see a banked row of seats facing a stage. On the stage there is a man dressed in white robes, looking serenely at the audience.
In front of him is a table with a camera pointed at it, there is a big screen behind the man in robes, and you can see that it is showing the table top. The man asks for an audience member to give him a coin, so you get up out of your seat, and give him one from your pocket, and return to where you were seated.
You then see him pick up your coin and close his eyes, he waves his other hand over the coin, and says; I command you to land on heads!
He then tosses the coin and lo and behold it lands on heads. You start to feel slightly embarrassed for the man, it was a 50/50 chance and not that special.
However he picks up the coin again, waves his hands and says; I command you to land on heads! It is heads again, you start to wonder why you have come to this place, looking around, you can see others are wondering the same thing.
The man on the stage does his little routine again, he gets to 10 heads in a row, and there is adequate applause. Ten heads in a row is impressive, and you're sure the odds of doing so are tiny.
However the man does not stop, he keeps going! The auditorium goes quiet, you are all in awe, as the man keeps commanding the coin to land on heads, and it does. At twenty heads in a row people begin to lose their minds, shouts of; that's amazing or oh my god, how is he doing that?! ring out around the theatre.
Finally he is on 99 heads in a row, he pauses for dramatic effect, the lights dim, all you can see is the man and the table in the spotlight. He picks up the coin, places it on his forefinger and thumb, it seems like he is a little nervous, the atmosphere is tense, even though 99 is impressive, everyone wants to see the 100th head.
He raises his voice; for the last time, I command you; LAND ON HEADS!
As the robed guru flicks the coin into the air; you become aware of the thumping in your chest. You are absolutely mesmerised as you watch the silver coin flip over and over, seemingly in slow motion. It lands on the table, bouncing and spinning, all eyes are glued to the giant screen . . .
IT'S HEADS!
The place goes wild; everyone is applauding, cheering, laughing, even crying! Magic does exist; what other possible explanation could there be?! The odds of flipping 100 heads in a row, let alone actually dictating when you were going to do it, must be in the millions to one!
The Big Reveal
Impressive right? I mean, I'd be impressed at that show, wouldn't you be? Let's look at how our fictional guru managed to flip 100 heads in a row.
When we view the show in isolation we are impressed, however that masked A-hole who likes to give away magicians secrets; do you know the guy I mean? Anyway, he does a show and reveals to us how our guru did the trick, suddenly we are not so impressed.
It turns out the magician you went to has been doing that act 10 times a day, every day for the last 10 years. Many times over that year the audiences were not impressed, sometimes he only managed one head, and they all left. At other times, he got to fifty or higher, and they were impressed, but not overly so.
Then you are dealt a real whammy, this magician is not the only magician to be trying this trick. There have been a thousand robed gurus all over the country performing the same trick, ten times a day every day, for the last ten years.
Then one day, you walked into this magician's 36,500th show, and finally he did it. When you watch all the shows put together, it seems mundane, in fact, it just seems like it was inevitable that one day someone would throw 100 heads in a row.
This for me, is a great analogy for natural selection. Things seem perfect now, because we happen to be around to witness the cool part, with human ingenuity, computers, bridges, pyramids, aeroplanes and such. However we have just happened to arrive on the day that 100 heads get thrown.
Think of all the magicians flipping coins like all the different branches of species (genus), and think of throwing 100 heads in a row as the human race.
It could have been our magician who threw the 100 heads, or another one, it just so happened that we were lucky enough for it to be us.
If we stick around for long enough, we may just get to witness the biological equivalent of a coin landing on its edge 100 times in a row.
Further reading:
Surviving A Post Truth World - Fighting A War Between Reason And Superstition
WHAT DO YOU THINK, DID OUR MAGICIAN COMMAND THE COIN, OR WAS IT JUST PLAIN LUCK AND PERSISTENCE? DO YOU SEE THIS AS AN ACCEPTABLE ANALOGY FOR EVOLUTION? IF NOT, PLEASE LET ME KNOW BELOW!
@cryptogee,
Truly, you possess a gift for finding apt analogies.
I totally agree, what we see today are simply nature's random experiments that worked out. The 99.99...% that didn't, died out.
This phenomenon is readily observable respecting bacterial adaptation and, because they reproduce so quickly and numerously, the effect becomes apparent.
Start off with a billion bacteria in a petri dish. Throw in an antibiotic. It will kill off 999,999,999 of them. But one survives because of a random mutation that allowed it to be impervious to the antibiotic. Because the single bacteria has no competition from it's dead brethren, it's got tons of food and starts replicating like crazy. Soon, you've got 1 billion bacteria that are now all antibiotic resistant.
The reality is even more intriguing when you get into "Horizontal Mutation," an area of science that we're only recently starting to appreciate. Most bacteria live in multi-species colonies called biofilms. The biofilms are a secreted gelatinous material that protect it's inhabitants from host immune systems and antibiotics.
Nevertheless, plenty still get killed and when their bodies breakdown, it releases fragments of DNA. These fragments of DNA can be absorbed by the living bacteria, and the absorbed DNA starts producing proteins too. These DNA fragments are called Plasmids. So, if there is one antibiotic resistant species of bacteria in a biofilm colony, it can pass on its resistance to completely unrelated species of bacteria in that same biofilm colony.
The spirochete that causes Lyme Disease has 18-22 different Plasmids depending upon the strain.
The result is evolution on steroids, a rate of adaptation that could never occur if one relied on vertical mutation alone. Such recent realization has scientists quaking in their boots.
My daughter and I have spent 6 years experimenting on how to dissolve these biofilms in vivo. It's not easy.
Respecting randomness: Experiments have been done where humans create a "fake randomized list" of heads and tails. A second list is created by a computer. Judges can spot the fake within a minute or two.
How? Humans won't periodically put in a string of a 100 heads. It doesn't seem random. 2-3 heads in a row, sure ... but not a hundred. The judges simply scan both lists to find the one without "improbably long strings of heads" ... and that's the fake.
Wow!! Thank you for this!
Horizontal mutation sounds truly frightening; it really makes you wonder how anything other than bacteria can survive on this planet. That is why I loved the (spoiler alert) War of The Worlds ending, I felt that it was probably a fairly accurate representation of what would happen, though in reality they probably would have died before they did all the cool destruction stuff.
OK, well there's a line that I can't just let slide by :-) Are you both just home scientists? Work in a pro lab? Forgive me if I've missed that in a previous post, or maybe it's just my memory is being an arsehole again!
Yes and I remember vaguely somebody saying; I think it was google or facebook, for some reason had to make their random number generator less random, because humans have a fixed pattern of randomness in their heads.
Man, I'm interested in what you and your daughter are doing!
Cg
@cryptogee,
Thank you.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@quillfire/cryptogee-thank-you
My pleasure! :-)
Cg
Yes that was a great way of explaining it. In essence that is what is commonly thought of as the infinite monkey theorem. Basically that states given an infinite number of moneys typing away on keyboards for an infinite amount of time, inevitably one of them will type out a specific text like the complete works of William Shakespeare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
The coin required an intelligence, or this case a shyster, to have it continually land on its head. (He had two coins) And it required this intelligence/shyster to flip the coin and to also create the con/trick. It is an act of creativity ... so I see an intelligence at work and not just chance and natural selection. Question remains where does the intelligence originate. What drives the ideas? The con of course wants money and attention and this will serve his chances of procreating and having offspring that will survive. But where did the idea for the con come from? Where did the idea for a coin come from?
Lolz, there was only one coin, this was a thought experiment, so we have already ruled out cheating. However your point about what drives the idea or where it comes from doesn't really matter, the main message is, that the appearance of any 'guiding intelligence' is purely in our minds.
Cg
If there is no second coin and no trick, then this is a work of fantasy. You have violated known rules of the universe, which is okay in fantasy, but there must be some parallelism for the fantasy to work as an analogy, for it to be symbolic of actual experience. Where is the link to evolutionary mechanics? In your tale gurus can defy the statistical odds and do magic. How would that be possible without a guiding intelligence that is capable of defying physical limits and rules of chance and chaos. You cannot defy physical laws and rules of chance, unless by 'magic' whatever that means or they are not actually laws and binding rules, unless they are simply patterns that we take note of. That is possible, we know far less than we think we do.
Evolution is not bound to a coin toss. The known mechanism is natural selection. Those who fit best into the environment, survive and reproduce. Some posit there is an intelligence guiding the selection and creating evolutionary leaps of sorts. I am not sure but I would hazard that is true. The book Darwin's Black Box makes a compelling case for this.
Let's get meta. Where do our minds come from ... the intelligence found within? Do we assume that all our thoughts are our own and we alone generate them. I used to assume this. I do not anymore. Meditation has taught me the mind is more like a radio ... capable of broadcasting and receiving but often unaware that it is doing so. We have a great deal less free will than we think we do.
I would still say the coin toss was rigged ... for my I have more faith in the rules of chance than I do gurus that would waste such incredible powers on coin tossing. But you did set up the parameters and I will have to concede you the plot. LOL. But your analogy does not support the idea of a lack of guiding intelligence. It does the opposite. It does however also point to our tendency to believe in charlatans and magic, our tendency to jump to and insist on conclusions.
The position remains ... our very existence is statistically impossible and when we look at the nature of space ... so is our continued existence. All the monkeys in the world typing for eternity would never produce the works of Shakespeare and yet some suggest nothing but random chaos created and maintain a very complex universe ... let alone the world. That is a lot of lucky coin tosses. I am too much of cynic to buy that many lucky coin tosses.
Wowwww ,hmmmm i'm completely speechless right now in fact I don't know what to say but I think that the magician has some real deep secrets but according to darwin "though this analogy can have some doubts" but I think that there's still some secrets #deep secrets# behind getting HEADS consistently im a row, but I just believe that maybe he might not have strictly followed the rules may be he used a double head "##coated##" #coin# i.e the coin those not have a "tail" due to this reason there would be 100% probability of showing a 'head' .
That is what I "@ovimax" think, thank you so much for sharing this wonderful post @cryptogee and I look forward to seeing more from you. In order to get in touch with your latest post I'm going to upvote, follow and resteem this post so as to keep in touch with you.
This is a thought experiment, it isn't real, so the coin was a real coin, that you yourself gave to our pretend magician.
The point of the article is to show that many people doing many things, can create results that look fantastic if you don't know the bigger picture.
Cg
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I think it takes tremendous speed to be like that, and of course luck must continue to accompany, where I live there is no magic show, I just often see on television only, so I do not know what to think..
Hopefully one day I can watch the event like that...
Probably the best article I have read today!Its really interesting to go deep into the science of probablity and most importantly to be a part of something that which is really cool n a successful result of a thousand trials with 99 percent errors.Well,I think this cannot be an acceptable analogy for evolution because Evolution is something that is quite fixed which depends upon the parent causes but in this case, its all about mathematical probablity so, biology and mathematics is totally different thing to even consider comparing.
Yes it's not a concrete analogy, however it suffices to illustrate how something that seems really unlikely, is only that, if you don't look at the bigger picture.
Not so, evolution is by no means fixed, you are talking about specific racial traits, like skin and hair colour. Evolution relies on a change of circumstance, and a change of habit, so these things can in no way be considered fixed.
Cg
dear friend, you have again shared an extraordinary article. Thank you very much for this.
The secret behind the success is two major thing, focus and consistence.
Our magician has remain focus over the past few years in trying to achieve his feat. He believe in himself that the potential lies in him and that no matter the times of failure a minute of success will overcome it.
Consistence his a key, keep doing the same thing over and over again then you will see that in no time you become a master of your doing. Not all successful people becomes successful on a trial or over night but they keep on pursuing and pushing their goal in other to proof a point of success.
The man that says he can't will never be able to achieve.