science, chance and luck
- From: "g" <gillawton@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 02:04:00 -0400 (EDT)
Recently a member of the group intimated (with respect to
a specific thread not meant to be picked up here) that "luck"
often is attributed the credit for some evolutionary
developments and that whatever is scientific would be that
which seeks to establish cause, and not luck... (or words to
that effect).
Only the most naive conceptualization of cause and effect
would seek 1:1 correlations of cause and effect. There is
nothing miraculous or magical about the fact that a coin
with a head side and a tail side would TEND, when flipped
repeatedly, end up head up about half the time and tails
about half the time. If one is in position to be shot by a
firing squad if it is heads, and set free if it is tails, and the
coin is flipped and ends up tails up, one definition of "luck"
might indicate the freed man is "lucky."
By the same token, one definition of "cause" might say that
there is no such thing as luck, and therefore the man's freedom
was caused by the nature of coin flipping.
Some scenarios are equivalent to a flipping of a two-headed
coin, some to a coin with dissimilar sides, some to veritable
spins of roulette wheel with, say, a thousand numerals on it.
Also, some events have a 1:1 cause and effect relationship
upon what follows the event, despite having, say, a one chance
in a million of its own happening. The full range of mathematical
probabilities of a single occurrence coming about, and the full
range of mathematical probabilities of what will follow IF that event
occurs, is infinite.
Whether one wishes to CALL it luck if a member of a specie, at
one favorable time, receives one favorable DNA error that also
is capable of being replicated, the element of chance does play a
role in the time and place of that event, and other surrounding
events. If an early progenitor of giraffes were to give birth to a
colt with an erroneous gene copy that would give it a lightly longer
neck than competitors for the leaves of trees, and a lion happened
to catch that particular colt, a sufficient SET of timely and sufficient
events would not have occurred to influence the future of the
specie (or, a fragile chain of sequences necessary to the passing
along of that favorable trait would not, at that time, contribute to
future favorable speciation).
If a timely and sufficient chain of events was not broken, then by
some definitions that would be called "luck."
In short, no statement concerning the place of "luck" in science is
valid toward any useful conclusion, pro or con anything, without
a very a prior rigorously established list of subsumptive relations
which narrow down precisely what is, and is not, to be communicated
by use the term.
There is much to confirm, in the hear and now of human experience,
that crap happens quite frequently and less frequently not-so-crap.
If the latter is what one means when he says "luck," then to deny it has
occurred at all would be no less rational than to demand that it was
a direct result of a 1:1 correlation of cause and effect.
g
.
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