Posted on 08/02/2004 7:42:46 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
According to modern evolutionary theory, the recipe for life is a chance accumulation of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen; add a pinch of phosphorus and sulfur, simmer for millions of years, and repeat if necessary. As a Ph.D. organic chemist, I am trained to understand the principles of chemistry, but this is not how chemicals react. Chemicals reacting with chemicals is a chemical reaction, and chemical reactions do not produce life. Life must create life. In the chemical literature, there is not a single example of life resulting from a chemical reaction. If life from chemicals were possible, it would be called spontaneous generation, an idea that scientists once thought happened in nature. Centuries ago, scientists used to believe that bread crumbs turned into mice because if you left bread crumbs on a table and returned later, the crumbs were gone and only mice were present. When true science got involved, they learned the truth that bread crumbs only attracted the mice that ate the crumbs. These scientists were quick to propose a theory that sounded reasonable until, that is, they studied the process and learned otherwise.
Proteins and DNA are complicated chemical molecules that are present within our body. Cells which make up the living body contain DNA, the blueprint for all life, and proteins regulating biochemical processes, leading scientists to conclude these components are the cause of life. While it is true that all living bodies have proteins and DNA, so do dead bodies. These chemicals are necessary for life to exist, but they do not "create" life by their presence; they only "maintain" the life that is already present. However, this is not the only problem with the "life from chemicals" theory.
Why do evolutionists vehemently proclaim the "life from chemicals" theory? Because if proteins and DNA only maintain life without creating it, then something else must have accomplished its origins. Evidence such as this points to an Omnipotent Creator, but they are not willing to make that concession.
Scientists can only look at life as it exists today, and try to determine how life originated in the past. They look at the end result and try to determine the process by which it was formed. Imagine looking at a photograph and trying to determine the brand of camera that was used to take the picture. Could you do it? Evolutionists have the same problem when they claim that life comes from chemicals. They look at the end result and propose a theory without ever observing the process. Scientists cannot study the past. Scientists can only look at the present and make theories about what happened in the past that would make the present the way it is today. When evolutionary scientists study the origins of life, they propose that all life resulted from chemical reactions by natural processes, overlooking the fact that chemical processes do not "naturally" behave in this manner. If you accepted chemical reactions as they occur, you would not believe that life came solely from chemicals. Is it legitimate to propose that evolution started in some primordial soup, when the long chain polymers that are present in proteins and DNA are so complicated that the level of chemical control needed during the chain building process is beyond the realm of natural chemistry?
Let's take a closer look at proteins and DNA, and the problems of their synthesis by evolutionary processes. Proteins are long polymers of amino acids linked in a chain. There are thousands of proteins within the human body, and they all differ by the sequence of the amino acids on the polymer chain. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid,) is a polymer of nucleotides. Nucleotides themselves are complicated chemical molecules consisting of a deoxyribose molecule and a phosphate chemically bonded to one of the following heterocycles: guanine, cytosine, thymine, and adenine. Although there are only four different heterocycles, the DNA chain contains billions of nucleotides connected together in a long precisely ordered chain. The sequence of the human DNA chain is so complicated, that even with the sophisticated scientific equipment available today, we still do not know the complete sequence. Proteins and DNA contain a unique order of the individual components. The order of the individual components is not a repeating pattern such as ABABAB or AABBAABB, but it is not a random order either. The order in these natural polymers is very precise, and it is this highly ordered sequence that allows these polymers to perform their intended purpose in the human body. If the sequence is changed even slightly, the altered polymer is no longer capable of performing the same function as the natural protein or DNA. If these polymers were formed by evolution in some primordial soup, then we should be able to explain how natural chemical processes were responsible for forming the sequence of amino acids. Evolutionists would say that amino acids eventually combined to form proteins and the nucleotide molecules combined to form DNA, and from them, life. To someone not trained in chemistry, this might sound like a reasonable process, but this is not how chemical reactions work.
Chemists are trained to understand the mechanisms of how molecules react and how to activate molecules so they will react predictably and in a controlled fashion. If a chemist wanted to synthesize the polymer chain of proteins or DNA in the laboratory, the starting compounds must be first activated so that they will begin to react. The chemist must then control the reactivity and the selectivity of the reactants so that the desired product is formed.
The problem with life arising from chemicals is a three-fold problem: chemical stability, chemical reactivity, and chemical selectivity during the chain building process. But evolutionists propose that these complex polymer chains built themselves in a precise, unlikely pattern, without an intelligent chemist controlling the reactions.
(Excerpt) Read more at icr.org ...
That's incorrect. Mathematically, it doesn't matter if you have random formations of 5 or 10 or 50 or 100 or 1000 subgroups that themselves randomly group together, or if you have one large random group...the mathematical odds are the same for both.
Moreover, any *random* sequencing of more than 64 complex data points will always statistically fail to form any useful pattern.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds like the argument from improbability, i.e. that this couldn't have happened because it's just so astronomically improbable. This is a fallacious argument. For example, in PA we have a lottery (similar to many other states) in which 6 balls are chosen without replacement from a set of balls numbered from 1-42. There are 5245786 possible combinations of 6 balls that can be so chosen. This lottery has been drawn once each week for several years. Just taking the last 25 drawings, the odds that the exact sequence of 25 combinations that were drawn would be drawn are 1 in 9.9 x 10^167. If we drew 25 combinations of balls once per second, we would expect it to take 3.1 x 10^160 years to obtain this particular sequence of 25 combinations. Therefore, it isn't possible that, by chance alone, this sequence of results could have been obtained. Only problem with this arguement is that it happened.
No. Math is math. Odds are odds, and random is random.
What the math shows is that you don't get long series of data sequenced randomly.
That's not to say that long series of data can't be sequenced, just that it can't happen *randomly*.
You can try this at home. Write a quick program to generate random 1's and 0's. Let it run until it outputs a working program longer than 64 machine commands. What you'll find is that you'll *never* get a useful program sequenced...but that doesn't mean that useful programs can't be written to your hard drive. It's not impossible. It's not improbable; it simply isn't done randomly.
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There is an easy test, shuffle a deck of cards, and let me know when you shuffle them back into new deck order.
Information Theory, (all the rage in scientific circles in the 70's,) showed that information can not result from randomness. Chaos theory, (all the rage of the 80's and early 90's,) showed that true randomness does not exist. There is a pattern in scientific study, once a theory is shown to give a wrong answer it is quickly discarded. ; )
I was under the impression that Chaos Theory said simply that you naturally gain more order in your system as you lose useful energy.
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Dr McCombs isnt much of a scientist. Any moron knows that
bread crumbs don't turn into a mouse. They turn into
cockroaches. Just ask Mama T. She knows science.
Creationists hope you don't know physics. Entropy, anyone?
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is only one useful program, and further that this useful program is N bits long. Then, if you flip a coin N times and record a 1 each time the coin comes up heads and a 0 each time it comes up tails, you generate a random sequence of N bits. There are 2^N possible such sequences. Since we assumed that only one of these is a useful program, this implies that this program can be generated randomly with a probability of 1/2^N. Admittedly, if you generate the sequence once, twice or even any reasonable number of times, you almost assuredly will not generate a useful program (assuming N is reasonably large). In principle, though, it is possible to randomly generate this sequence.
Both of the above are false. Information theory shows that randomness generats the maximum amount of information. Chaos theory shows that deterministic systems are not necessarily predictable.
Are you saying that undirected entropy naturally creates order?
Simply put, the creation/transfer of information requires not only a sender/creator, in your case randomness. But also a reciever/translator/user that understands the language/code. Otherwise there is no useful anything.
And yes, that is what chaos theory started out as.
If you have no energy in a system, say, a system of 4 tennis balls inside a box, then you have an ordered group of tennis balls inside your box. Ergo, order.If you add energy to the box (e.g. shake it), then the tennis balls are no longer arranged in a precise order (i.e. disorder) until all of your useful energy in the system has entropied again.
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Only if you have infinite amounts of time. Since our universe is not infinitely old, we can't go there.
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Looks like bad math to me. Shouldn't it be somewhere around 1 in 10^12th? Are you multiplying exponents or something?
From the time of Galileo religion has been reduced to explaining less and less.
BUMP
I get it! So when the balls stop moving, wherever they are, that is considered order. Interesting what acounts for order these days.
And once again, the only "scientific" group willing to put their name on this nonsense is a single-interest group.
Bad science, to have a pre-determined position and try to work backwards from that outcome.
Better to argue intelligent design, as the debate over evolution is long since over.
Check this out
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/chance.asp
I'm merely paraphrasing Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's (creator of Chaos Theory) example of order and disorder in a system. I'm certainly open to hearing a better explanation from a more credible source.
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This is Wolfram's thesis. Take a random input to a cellular automata, and the result is, in some subset of cases, an interesting pattern. Does this imply anything fundamental? I donno.
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