[ModernDayCato] Here's some science for you, friend. I happened to be listening to talk radio on the way to work yesterday. There was a molecular biologist talking about so-called 'random evolution,' with regard to a single-celled organism.It sounds like ModernDayCato's "scientist" authority is repeating (with mutations) the old creationist chestnut from Hoyle & Wickramasinghe:He said that the odds of that organism evolving randomly were calculated to be 10 to the fifty thousandth power, which is basically an unfathomable number, which validates what I suspected since the first time I heard it...Darwin was the first person to push junk science.
[ModernDayCato]But seriously, no. Google actually buttressed the argument. Take a look for yourself.
[Dimensio]How can we "take a look for ourselves" when you refuse to provide any references, or even a justification for the starting premises of the alleged probability calculation?
MDC, please click on the link to the whole article. You need to understand just how dishonest these "impossible odds" arguments are. The authority figures you respect (WRT creationism) are lying to you.The most commonly cited source for statistical impossibility of the origin of life comes from another odd book, Evolution From Space, written by Fred Hoyle and N.C. Wickramasinghe (Dent, 1981; immediately reprinted by Simon & Schuster that same year, under the title Evolution From Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism). The statistic 10^40,000 is calculated on p. 24 (Hoyle repeats the exact same argument on pp. 16-17 of The Intelligent Universe (1983)). A twenty-amino-acid polypeptide must chain in precisely the right order for it to fit the corresponding enzyme. Although Hoyle does not state it, this would entail that there must have been a minimum specificity, of one specific possibility, for the first enzymic life, of 10^20, a value to which Hoyle himself says "by itself, this small probability could be faced" (and this statistic even fails to account for that fact that any number of "first enzymic organisms" are possible, and not just one as his calculation assumes). Hoyle then goes on: "the trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes," (in "the whole of biology," p. 23), "and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10^20)^2000 = 10^40,000..."
There are three flaws in this conclusion: he assumes (1) that natural selection is equivalent to random shuffling, (2) that all two thousand enzymes, all the enzymes used in the whole of biology, had to be hit upon at once in one giant pull of the cosmic slot machine, and (3) that life began requiring complex enzymes working in concert. ...