Randomness does exit, no reason for me to convince you of it, there is plenty of information on the web.

Something is random if each variable is just as likely to occur.
1-10, each number has a 1/10th chance of landing.

How this confuses you, confuses me.

What causes you to believe that randomness exists and what to you think is the cause for randomness?

Or are you saying that some things have no cause?

I would like to talk about the scientific understanding of luck and randomness. It is, after all, an extremely important ingredient to that video that explains evolution.

No really its not. That some events have an even chance of occurring is hardly that important.

Getting all metaphysical with randomness is not going to help you understand evolution.

Luck is either prescriptive or descriptive. You are thinking of supernatural luck, which is prescriptive. The video is talking about the descriptive type of luck. They had bad luck in that a new predator species entered the area or there was a long drought or a huge flood or disease. Any natural phenomena that is unlucky for the species.

That is a logical guess, but how do you know it is true?

And if it is true, then what you are saying is that there is no effective influence at work. None at all.

No, I'm talking about the 25% who died of random causes "they were unlucky."

Apparently scientists believe in luck and that luck has something to do with randomness.

I'm sure they believe in descriptive luck and it definitely has something to do with randomness. You can't allow your belief in the supernatural to overwhelm your common sense. Sometimes when your car dies on the highway, it was just a random incident that has nothing to do with high powers or reptilians or ghosts or any other non material thing. Sometimes, bad things just happen randomly.

Here is my experience with so called "randomness."

In a deck of tarot cards there are 80 cards. Repeatedly, when I draw cards for a specific person, or if they draw them for them self, the same suit and similar cards cards always come up.

There 1 in 80 chances of certain cards coming up if I draw only one card. And drawing five cards the odds change a little but most of the time the same cards will turn up or the same suit will turn up. (Cups)

For another person, completely different cards or suits turn up consistently.(swords)

Luck? Or did something influence the draw?

Very funny. I don't believe in the "super natural."

If my car dies on the highway, it was because I did not keep it in good repair and something wore out.

No, I believe in the law of cause. For everything that happens there is cause.

I believe that there is a true reason and set of causes and a true scientific reason for everything that happens.

I don't believe in "luck" or non influenced randomness.

Everything that appears to be "random" has a set of causes.

I think for scientists to explain evolution using the ingredient "luck" is very unscientific.

It's still English and they commonly speak English.


Does "Random chance" sound better?

Is that what you think I am doing? Getting all "metaphysical?" Very funny.

There is a reason and cause for everything. I know that science only "observes things" and they don't much care about cause, but I don't think they will disagree that there is a cause for everything.

You can't ignore the forces you call "metaphysical" as if they don't exist.

Consciousness exists. The mind exists. Thoughts are things. Science ignores these truths and strips everything down to what he observes and tries to make sense of it.

Its so sad.

Everything that is random has a set of causes, the two are not mutually exclusive.

From Wikipedia: In the descriptive sense, luck is merely a name we give to events after they occur which we find to be fortuitous and perhaps improbable.

In other words, you are running late for work and you hit all green lights, you can call that good luck. It doesn't mean that anything supernatural happened, it doesn't mean that there weren't underlying naturalistic reasons for what happened, it's just a way of describing the event.

Similarly, a scientist could write "Giant Fruit bats evolved in a single isolated valley and through luck, they were able to survive long enough as a species to spread throughout Africa." and simply mean that circumstances allowed the giant fruit bat to evolve as a species and grow to large enough numbers, so that they could spread out and become successful in other habitats.

It certainly has more fluff, but in this context its the same thing.

There is no such thing as "luck." Nothing is "random." It just appears that way.

And appearances are what scientists live and swear by.

Plenty of things are random. You are confusing "random" and "causation". There is random causation. A whole series of events could happen that cause a bowling ball to fall out of a plane, but it's just random chance that it falls on your head.

Okay so now how about the statement that mating is "random."

If mating is simply "random" then we should all have mates. (We don't need mingle, all we need to do is go into a shopping mall and find a member of the opposite sex and randomly pair up.)

Mating is not simply random. In fact, like attracts like.

no, it will probably fall on YOUR head since you thought of it.

I looked through about 8 of those videos and its the same old stuff I've been coming across for 6 months now. I agree with natural selection, I agree with mutation combined with natural selection. But it is generally accepted that insertions and duplications of DNA are junk DNA and are not functional. I am still waiting to see these favorable/functional/beneficial insertions and duplications, whereby the organism increases in complexity through mutation, selection, and time. They mentioned insertions and duplications in the third video, but without saying that so far those have only created "junk DNA", which I felt wasn't giving the true picture from an empirical point of view ie they gave the impression that the DNA can increase favorably in size, and then projected how natural selection would then select the improved complexity. If it occurred natural selection would do that, but that's all possiblities, not facts.

All those videos need now is a proven experiment that shows beneficial increasing to genome size, so they have some facts to back up the interesting possiblities they present. Then I will accept evolution as a viable theory and we can then start debating if that particular theory does apply to the fossil record, a whole new and interesting topic.

First, I have to clarify: I'm not arguing that those "scientists" were 100% right, I'm arguing that you are wrong. The use of the word "luck" can be used in a scientific paper. Randomness does exist.

Second of all, even if mating were completely random, it wouldn't mean that every individual would have a mate. That is a non sequitur.

Third, I agree that mating is not random.