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To: johnnyb_61820
A summary of some of the points of evidence is here.

Some direct quotes from your source:

For a relatively short protein consisting of a chain of 200 amino acids, the number of random trials needed for a reasonable likelihood of hitting a useful sequence is then on the order of 20100 (100 amino acid sites with 20 possible candidates at each site), or about 10130 trials. This is a hundred billion billion times the upper bound we computed for the total number of molecules ever to exist in the history of the cosmos!! No random process could ever hope to find even one such protein structure, much less the full set of roughly 1000 needed in the simplest forms of life.

Statisticians, physicists, etc. have been pointing out and explaining constantly that you can't apply statistics retroactively like this, and biologists have been pointing out and explaining constantly that chemical processes are not equivalent to random assembly. Apparently, when a scientist tried to point out these tried and true annoying facts again (which creationists love to ignore), the response of the writer is

Why could this physicist not grasp such trivial logic? I strongly believe it was because of his tenacious commitment to atheism that he was willing to be dishonest in his science.

Better get some better sources than the Institute for Creation Research if you want to get an understanding of how science works - these people clearly have no idea what they're talking about.

396 posted on 11/29/2005 3:18:19 PM PST by Quark2005 (Science aims to elucidate. Pseudoscience aims to obfuscate.)
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To: Quark2005
"biologists have been pointing out and explaining constantly that chemical processes are not equivalent to random assembly"

Yes! Someone gets it!

Of course, not in the way you think :)

You seem to miss that creationists have been very _generous_ when presenting such estimates. In fact, all biological reactions are _equilibrium_ reactions, and therefore the ability to have this happen without specific outside direction is just 0.

You also might check out this paper in Cell Biology International, Chance and Necessity do not Explain the Origin of Life.

I've been working on a short article on creationist views of information which is somewhat along these lines, but is not yet finished. You can check out the current draft here.

"Better get some better sources than the Institute for Creation Research if you want to get an understanding of how science works - these people clearly have no idea what they're talking about."

The person in the article is a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratories, and his computer models of the Earth's mantle processes is one of the best in the world, and is used by NASA. Whether he is right or is wrong, I think he might have some idea what he is talking about.

403 posted on 11/29/2005 5:31:14 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
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