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To: ColdWater
This makes it easy for evolutionists to claim that random processes can generate "information". Source?

A monkey typing on a typewriter creates Shannon information. Thus not a few Darwinist writers have simply dismissed the information problem by asserting that information is generated constantly by mutational changes.

I don't have a link offhand, but Richard Dawkins would be an example. He tried to recover from an interview with Gillian Brown that subsequently became part of the video From A Frog to a Prince, in which he was unable to provide an example of evolution producing information. In his follow-up, he claimed that natural selection 'informs' the genome by selecting out unsuitable mutants.

In other words, if you have a population of black and white moths and natural selection kills off all of one color, then informational gain has occured. In a sense this is true, but it is silly to portray it as a solution to the origin of information in the genome itself - natural selection (by itself) weeds out genomic information, leading to less information in the genome, not more.

I presume that there is more serious thinking going on somewhere among evolutionary theorists who grasp the information problem, but at the popular/propaganda level, they are either not getting it, or pretending not to get it.

17 posted on 10/16/2009 7:10:55 AM PDT by Liberty1970 (Democrats are not in control. God is. And Thank God for that!)
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The argument for monkeys typing out Shakespear is a disingenious argument that 'evolution could have happened' because 'there is a chance', and has been used for a long time to deceive peopel hwo don't understand just how impossible macroevolution is statistically
"Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") used this technique in Oxford, in 1860, while debating Samuel Wilberforce. He stated that if monkeys randomly strummed typewriter keys for a long enough time, then sooner or later Psalm 23 would be printed out. Huxley used this argument to demonstrate that life could have originated on Earth by chance. (2)

Julian Huxley (1887-1975) repeated this analogy to 'prove' that long periods of time could allow impossible evolution to occur. In his analogy, given enough time, monkeys randomly typing on typewriters could eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare. (3)

Stephen Hawking used the monkey story in 1988. He proposed that if there was a horde of typing monkeys, then "very occasionally by pure chance they will type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets." (4)

When all these outlandish statements were made "... no evolutionary scientist or mathematician who knew better raised a single objection." (5) So as a result, these statements have convinced many people that 5 billion years is enough time for life to evolve on Earth.

This ruse has been very convincing because most people have difficulty comprehending very small and extremely large numbers.

Just how logical is this monkey story? In simple terms, if every square foot of the earth's surface was covered with monkeys randomly typing on typewriters, at the rate of ten characters per second (about 5 times the realistic speed) they could not do the job. Even if they typed non-stop for 30 billion years there would not be the slightest chance that one of them would type even a single five word sentence of 31 characters, with spaces and punctuation in the correct place. The probability for them to achieve this is less than one chance in a trillion. (6)

Richard Dawkins also appeals to the monkeys to convince his readers that evolution by natural selection is plausible. He believes that a thousand such monkeys could type Shakespeare's sentence, "Methinks it is like a weasel." However, the probability of them typing this six-word sentence (including spaces), is one chance in 10>39. (7)

It has been calculated that it would be statistically impossible to randomly type even the first 100 characters in Shakespeare's "Hamlet". If the monkeys typed only in lower case, including the 27 spaces in the first 100 characters, the chances are 27100 (ie. one chance in 10>143). (8)

"If each proton in the observable universe were a typing monkey (roughly 1080 in all), and they typed 500 characters per minute (faster than the fastest secretary), around the clock for 20 billion years, then all the monkeys together could make 5x1096 attempts at the characters. It would require an additional 3x1046 such universes to have an even chance at success." (9)

Recently, the reality of this last statement has been so damaging to the support for Darwinian evolution, that many evolutionists have taken up the "additional universes" scenario as a way out. They change the analogy and invent an unimaginably large number of universes that are all full of monkeys. They believe that under these new conditions, sooner or later one of the monkeys will succeed. This is the basis of the Anthropic Principle (see my lecture notes #8, "The Anthropic Principle", for a refutation of this theory).

Returning to the mathematics, Michael Behe estimates the probability of just getting the 30,000 gene pieces required for blood clotting in the right sequence as 10-18. To get the genes plus the clotting activator working together by chance has the probability of 10-36. (13)

Fred Hoyle estimates the following probabilities for chance, random arrangement of amino acids:- (14)

10>19 for a ten amino acid polypeptide

10>20 for a functional enzyme

10>130 for the histone H4 molecule

10>40,000 for all of life's 2,000 enzymes

This last value (10>40,000) shows the probability that a very, very tiny part of evolution could have happened. This probability is more unlikely than the monkey's chance typing (viz 10>143) which have been used to 'prove' evolution.

Bear in mind that Mathematical Zero is 10>50. Any value smaller than this is relegated by mathematicians to the realm of 'never happening'.

18 posted on 10/16/2009 9:03:42 AM PDT by CottShop (Scientific belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge)
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To: Liberty1970
Source?

I don't have a link offhand

You could just select one of the false propaganda creation sites at random.

42 posted on 10/18/2009 10:05:49 AM PDT by ColdWater
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