I have been noticing recently how incredibly tangled headphone wires become when you put them in a pocket. It strikes me as a clear warning against believing what evolution teaches. It's probably related to what someone recently described to me as the perversity of inanimate objects, also known as Flagle's law.
Flagle's Law of the Perversity of Inanimate Objects
Any inanimate object may be expected at any time to behave in a manner that is entirely unexpected and totally unpredictable for reasons which are completely unknown or thoroughly obscure.
More laws here.
10 comments:
I like the Presentation Principle. Spurgeon said something similar about sermons didn't he?
There are almost infinite ways your cables can be arranged. Only a relatively few ways are "untangled" and therefore very unlikely to be observed.
With DNA [much more complex] and even more ways that mutations can occur the chances of useful mutations are zero even on the huge time scales being proposed.
I now think that Darwinism combines a truth with a ridiculous assumption. Sexual reproduction means offspring are varied and unique. This usually ensures that some are suited to survive new or changing habitats. This strengthens a species and ensures its survival. The flawed argument is that mutations can contribute to these variations and cause a species to adapt with time into a new species. Going back to your cables...VERY VERY unlikely.
Paul Burgess. Probabilities don't dwindle to zero. That's not how probability works. The huge timescales that you propose are *exactly* what allowed such a mechanism to work. Very unlikely things can happen given a very large number of chances. That's simple logic, not a ridiculous assumption.
To the main point of the post; Absolutely! Finagle obviously spent a lot of afternoons trying to get his DVD player to connect to his TV through his Digibox...
Tom: If I leave my headphones in my pocket for a huge amount of time then they are likely to be untangled when I take them out?
Anyone confused out there - there are 2 Toms (Tom creationist, Tom evolutionist). It's interesting that Tom E wants to put so much on great lengths of time. It will be interesting to see if he has any answer to Tom C's question.
What Tom C says about DVDs and TVs reminds me of the inconsistency of a John Cage (life is random but don't eat random mushrooms) or a Peter Singer (not all human lives are worth saving but keep my mother alive though she has Alzheimer's).
I was confused. I thought there was one Tom ;-)
What's the probability of shuffling a pack of cards back to it's original order. Excluding the jokers 52! = 8.1EXP67. If you shuffled once every second that is 2.3EXP60 years! That's billions of billions of times more than the oldest age being proposed for the universe.
The headphone cable is slightly more difficult for me to model but the statistics are grim.
I was reading a book on the brain. Much of the content was very helpful as an educator BUT the author spoke of thousands of millions of adaptations producing the "modern" human brain. He also viewed our species as a few million years old. That's thousands of adaptations per year. It's just not happening.
BTW I love much of the music of John Cage especially when performed by Joanna MacGregor. Does that take me our of the Schaeffer school of apologetics.
@other Tom: No, they aren't. There are gazillions (like Paul, modelling this makes my neurons hurt) of possible tangled states and few untangled ones. Crucially for the comparison with evolution, there's no pressure on the headphones to *be* untangled and no reliable mechanism of encoding and transmitting what we could humorously call 'untangleability'. With living organisms the environment provides the pressure and DNA provides the mechanism for encoding and transmitting.
@Gary. I put in time for - I presume - the same reason you put time into writing your enjoyable blog; I'm nice and I like communicating with other nice people. I bet that you - like me - wish you had more time to do that sort of thing :) Anyhow hope my comments aren't intrusive.
@Paul. See @Tom. Evolution isn't like shuffling cards because each shuffle is an independent event (hence the combinatorial growth to a number I can't even conceive of), where the development of an organism is a series of connected events. If, while you shuffled, every time a card ended up at its 'correct' place it got fixed there and the others moved around it, you'd have a better (though incomplete) analogy with evolution.
Thanks the three of you for your comments. I've been thinking of the tangled wires for a while now. What I find odd is that it is Tom E who comes over as the blind optimist and us three as the sober sceptics. I don't detect any movement either side here but it was good to raise the subject and do keep coming here all three of you. I should disabuse Tom E of the idea that I'm a nice person but I do try to be without losing my edge. As delightful as it is to chat these are crucial issues.
@Tom Your evolutionary argument re environmental pressure and DNA as it were preserving the successful card turns is well thought through.. How would you understand the development of complex structures that require multiple adaptations over long periods of time before they are locked down by natural selection?
http://lifehacker.com/5409389/use-an-over+under-wrap-to-keep-your-headphones-kink+free
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