Is belief in God a natural instinct ?

[festive1]

Of course it's applicable to evolution. A shared culture (including religion) helps people to form a cohesive society, which allows larger, biologically sustainable groups to form. Want a modern-day reference? Look at the Amish. They are a relatively small group that only marries and therefore mates within itself. Because of this, they have become susceptible to genetic mutations. In this group, it's having more than 10 fingers. Compared to the general public, the Amish have this trait in greater percentages.

Huh? This has nothing to do with my point. To clarify, I'm pointing out that fitting data into patterns is a big part of the study of evolution.

I'm pointing out that the Amish are evolving extra fingers because their reproductive population is too small. Genetic diversity is a good way of ensuring that recessive traits (like having extra fingers) remain recessive. This seems to me to be putting data (Amish people having a higher incidence of extra fingers) to evolution (in this example from having too small a population to maintain the genetic health of said population).

[John V]

"Fitting" data into a pattern can be the first -and most minor- step in forming a theory, that would be the hypothesis ( and the less "fitting" that has to be done by the person proposing it the better..btw). Whether or not we fit data into a pattern is meaningless unless we can demonstrate the accuracy of the data and the existence of the pattern exterior to our own proposition. This is where the heavy lifting (and overwhelming majority of scientific endeavor) occurs. To be completely blunt, the scientific method is what it is precisely to insulate us from this pattern seeking bullshit that leads some of us to conclude wizards in the absence of wizardry. What you seem intent on ignoring, in your ill-thought out comparison, is that the only similarity between the two is that "human beings do stuff"..........

None of this applies to evolution itself, of course...because it requires no hypothesis. It is an observation. "Studying evolution" in it's broadest sense, since you have been so broad, is a simple act of gathering specimens. Whether or not a pattern exists or the observed change -that we call evolution- is random, or whether the data fits either scenario is another thing entirely. That would be the "by" header in "Evolution by Natural Selection", for example.

So no, John, it isn't a big part of either studying evolution....or proposing it's various mechanisms. But I love how your statement went from "a big part" to "involves" in one post. Which one of these two would you like to explore more thoroughly? I think I've explained why it's not a big part...and how little involvement it has (if any, it depends on the specifics) as a consequence of doing so. If I haven't, feel free to dig deeper.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad1.html

After you've read through the pages on the implications and methodologies, you will be armed in the ways of cladistics. Therefore, if you dare, you can take a journey into the real world of cladistics. Should you choose to venture on this journey, pray you are well-armed with good luck and wits!
...
There are three basic assumptions in cladistics:

Any group of organisms are related by descent from a common ancestor.
There is a bifurcating pattern of cladogenesis.
Change in characteristics occurs in lineages over time.
The first assumption is a general assumption made for all evolutionary biology. It essentially means that life arose on earth only once, and therefore all organisms are related in some way or other. Because of this, we can take any collection of organisms and determine a meaningful pattern of relationships, provided we have the right kind of information. Again, the assumption states that all the diversity of life on earth has been produced through the reproduction of existing organisms...

[Ryantology]

Religion is 'fitting completely fabricated bullshit to patterns', as 'data' implies something observed to actually exist.

So, even if the methodology of evolution is fundamentally flawed, this does not change the fact that in the very best of scenarios, religion is only entirely useless in uncovering the truth of reality. As we all know perfectly well, religion often works (hard) to drag humanity's understanding of the world back to the bronze age in which it was fabricated.

You have a ton of nerve questioning the methods of science when your preferred explanation is "MAGICAL SKY DADDY SNAPPED HIS FINGERS AND EXISTENCE HAPPENED".

[The Grand Nudger]

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/clad/clad1.html

After you've read through the pages on the implications and methodologies, you will be armed in the ways of cladistics. Therefore, if you dare, you can take a journey into the real world of cladistics. Should you choose to venture on this journey, pray you are well-armed with good luck and wits!
...
There are three basic assumptions in cladistics:

Any group of organisms are related by descent from a common ancestor.
There is a bifurcating pattern of cladogenesis.
Change in characteristics occurs in lineages over time.
The first assumption is a general assumption made for all evolutionary biology. It essentially means that life arose on earth only once, and therefore all organisms are related in some way or other. Because of this, we can take any collection of organisms and determine a meaningful pattern of relationships, provided we have the right kind of information. Again, the assumption states that all the diversity of life on earth has been produced through the reproduction of existing organisms...

Did you want to have a conversation about cladistics instead of evolution John? Or - is some part of that supposed to support your previous statements? If so, would you care to highlight which part and why you think it does so?

[Angrboda]

I found this interesting:

Assessing Randomness

But how do we interpret the randomness of events occurring around us? By what criteria do we decide whether our experiences are just coincidences, or represent a true pattern at work? Cohen (1960) summed up our deficiencies by saying that, based on his experimental results, “nothing is so alien to the human mind as the idea of randomness.” The problem appears to be two-fold: one is that “the very nature of randomness assures us that combing random data will yield some patterns,” and that “if the data set is large enough, coincidences are sure to appear,” (Martin, 1998). More generally, this can be summed up by the Ramsey theory (Graham and Spencer, 1990) in which Frank P. Ramsey proved mathematically that “Complete disorder is an impossibility… [e]very large set of numbers, points or objects necessarily contains a highly regular pattern.” If humans are pattern seekers, and randomness necessarily contains patterns, then we’ve arrived at our first stumbling block.

The second prong in our failure to detect randomness is the method by which the human mind assesses randomness. In 1937, the Zenith Corporation unwittingly provided a simplistic glimpse into this human perception (Goodfellow, 1938). During a series of radio broadcasts, psychics appeared on one of their programs and “transmitted” telepathically a five-digit randomly-generated sequence of binary digits4. Listeners were asked to record the sequence and send it in to the company to determine if “people are sensitive to psychic transmissions,” (Griffiths and Tennenbaum, 2001). Although there was no true correlation between the listeners’ sequences and those “transmitted,” the listeners were found to have a predilection to create certain “random” sequences in preference to others. For example, the top three sequences sent in were 00101, 00110, 01101, which were submitted about ten times as often as sequences such as 00000 or 00001. Importantly, the responses indicated that listeners believed alternations of numbers (e.g. 0101) were much more representative of randomness than long strings of the same digit. More simply, the listeners perceived randomness to be a change (alternation) from the previous digit.

Falk and Konold (1997), in a similar vein, conducted an experiment in which subjects were asked to assess the randomness of long strings of randomly generated binary digits. An ideally random sequence has a probability of alternation of 0.5, that is, the digits within the sequence alternate about half the time5. They found, however, that “sequences with overalternations are perceived [by the subjects] as more random than their [mathematically-assessed] randomness warrant6.” They go on to suggest that this human predilection for perceiving randomness in alternations is attributable to the core method humans use to assess randomness: difficulty of encoding (memorizing). This is related to the idea of compressibility of data – that an “ideally” random sequence is incompressible to a simpler form because the information encoded has no “patterns”. Therefore, a sequence with easy to memorize patterns (long strings of non-alternating digits) is perceived as being non-random, although, as given earlier, clumping of data or “runs” are a natural feature of randomness. Tellingly, Falk and Konold also noted that the time required for subjects to memorize a given sequence correlated directly to the randomness assigned to it by other subjects. That is, the sequences rated most random were also the most difficult to memorize.

— from Digital Bits Skeptic

[mr.atheist]

That is interesting,thanks for sharing.