Imagine flipping a coin over and over. For each toss, the odds are fifty-fifty that it will come up heads (a one-in-two chance). The odds of getting two heads in a row is a one-in-two-to-the-power-of-two chance, or one-in-four. Five heads in a row is 1:2^5, or one-in-thirty-two. A hundred heads? 1:2^100, or roughly one in 1.3 trillion trillion trillion (thank Gates for the little calculator program on my computer). A creationist would claim that all the lucky chances that evolution requires is like getting not one, not five, but millions upon millions of heads in a row.What a great way of expressing such a complicated thing!
"But the creationists are forgetting something. Evolution ISN'T random, as they often claim. It's selected...What if, after every toss, we had the option of not counting it? What if we were allowed to simply discard every toss that came up tails? Now, given the ability to select, how long would it take to rack up a hundred heads in a row? About two hundred throws.
"Once you understand the concept of selection, and how it applies to evolution, you realize that what was thought to be vanishingly unlikely actually becomes virtually inevitable."
As long as I'm getting clarity from strange sources - I'd go on to say this analogy meshes nicely with a game I own called Evo. The scoring mechanic of Evo reward species that maintain a high population over time. The central game mechanic exterminates life that cannot survive its changing environment.
And there it is.
Mutation flips the coin - the environment tosses out the results it doesn't like.
Color vision is the equivalent to flipping heads a thousand times in a row? No problem.
The black & white vision predator lives well until prey until they've killed off all the high contrast prey. (Flip, tails: discard). Enter that one color vision predator who feasts on the prey that (in color) is easy to find. (Flip, heads: keep).
Over time - the black & white vision predator leaves less offspring behind (Flip, tails: discard)
-while the color vision predator produces more offspring - (Flip, heads: keep) (Flip, heads: keep) (Flip, heads: keep)
And so on. Pretty easy to get to a thousand that way.
1 comment:
evo sounds like an expansion of a 'natural selection' exercise we did in my evolutionary biology class (h/t harrison tordoff, of the minneapolis peregrine falcon reintroduction project). we had laminated 'environment boards' that were basically maps of red & green, with maybe some blue thrown in. then we had paper dots. there were big ones & small ones, in both red & green. we dumped the dots onto our boards, and then in our groups took turns acting as 'predators' for very brief, timed periods. at the end, we counted. the dots we had left, since our board was mainly red, were small & red. the small, same-color as the board dots always 'won', on account of the 'environment'. because contrasting color was easiest for us to see, and large size was easiest for us to see. it was pretty cool to see it in action.
sincerely,
thorn
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