Here's a study that says that children are natural scientists:

Apparently it takes a concerted effort on the part of many so-called science teachers in the public schools to slowly beat it out of them, over the course of several years.

But I wonder if anyone pondered the implications of this?

Schulz said she believes this is the first study that looks at how probabilistic evidence affects children's reasoning about unobserved causes. The researchers found that children are conservative about unobserved causes (they don't always think mysterious things are happening) but would rather accept unobserved causes than accept that things happen at random.

This probably explains the appeal of ID (partly because evolution isn't properly explained). If one believes that evolution is "random" (which is how it's too often explained), then there will be a natural tendency to look for the man behind the curtain.

But of course, it's not. What's random is the mutations themselves, not how they're selected. One sees many fallacies related to this in critiques of evolution, in which people figure out the probability of a monkey typing a sonnet, by assuming that each monkey starts anew with each try, and showing that it's astronomically improbable. With that assumption, of course, the creation of the sonnet is quite unlikely.

But if a monkey gets the first word right, and that's the starting point for the next monkey, then the result will out, and in a surprisingly short time, because the process isn't random. It's directed by an evolutionary force (in this particular case, the desire to have something that looks like a sonnet).

In the natural case, of course, it's driven by the fact that things that don't look like sonnets (that is, that have traits that cause their phenotypes to die before reproducing) don't go on to the next generation.

Pssst....Don't tell them that Science is a large part druge work. Once you get past the glamourous job of collecting the data, you then have to sift and sort and bend and twist it.

Numbers, formulae, rows, columns without end!

Actually, the real fallacy with the "typing monkeys" scenario is the idea that they will produce a particular work, say Hamlet. That's just intellegent Design in disguise, where Evolution is supposed to culminate in some sort of ideal goal species.

The goal of the monkeys is not a particular work, but ANY work, even James Joyce or Allen Ginsberg. Another factor is that if the monkeys are somehow told that certain letter combinations are favored (like "th" or "er" vs. "xp" or "vh"), or given keyboards that lock keys based on the probabilities of previous key entries, their ability to produce those random works increases greatly too.

Well said. A lot of the confusion seems to come from people who think "evolution" describes a mechanism. No, the mechanism is the ratchet of mutation + natural selection -> differential reproduction; "evolution" is just a label for the result over time.

The old wisdom still holds sway:

It has been said that a million monkeys, working at a million typewriters, can produce the collected works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know that this is not true."

I forget where I stole that. :)

"What's random is the mutations themselves,..."

Well, that would be true if you accept the consensus that mutations are caused by cosmic rays impacting DNA molecules. Has there ever been an experiment to confirm or deny this link in the chain of causality? For example, expose one group of single cell organisms to a greater dose of rays than another group, and see if any difference in the raw mutation rate (before natural selection gets its hands on it) can be found. I have no idea how that might be done. But if there is no experimental evidence to support this assumption, how do we know what causes mutations in the first place?

Well, that would be true if you accept the consensus that mutations are caused by cosmic rays impacting DNA molecules.

That is not a necessary condition to believe the mutations to be random. There could be many theoretical causes of random mutations (e.g., solar radiation, natural radiation). If one believes that they're non-random, then one has to postulate what the cause for that would be, which starts to get back to ID.

Okay, sure, there are other possible sources of randomization. I just wonder if any scientist has tried to measure, directly or indirectly, the mutations themselves, including the ones that do not enhance survival, to see if they are random in nature, or are somehow causally directed by the environment they are in. Of course this would be extremely difficult to do. If there were some mechanism which can somehow make advantageous mutations more likely, even slightly, that would accelerate the evolutionary process.

I stole this idea from Greg Bear, BTW ("Darwin's Radio")

I get what you're saying, David, and there's been a lot
of speculation on this point -- but so far as I know no
one has yet discovered such a thing. On the other hand,
responding to this:

[i]If there were some mechanism which can somehow make
advantageous mutations more likely, even slightly, that
would accelerate the evolutionary process.[/i]

Well, yes. Let's not miss the obvious. Actually there
are quite a few. Two of the more noteable being
[i]recombination[/i] and [i]sex.[/i]

Both only make it more likely that an advantageous mutation,
once it occurs, will survive and spread.

Recombination is the random mixing of genes within one
parent prior to reproduction, which I believe occurs in
all sexual organisms and many asexual. It has the effect
of putting mutations in new contexts so that their virtues
(if any) and liabilities are more readily discovered and
speed the spread of advantageous mutations through a
population, instead there randomly going extinct before
getting started which must be the frequent fate of many
desirable mutations.

Sex has a similar virtues except in this case the genes
of two individuals are being mixed.

Both these mechanisms also have the, probably more
important, effect of speeding up the rate at which bad
mutations (far more common than good) are stripped out
of a population.