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To: betty boop
Seems like kinda long odds to me.....

If the model were correct, those odds would look absurdly long to anyone, and thus would bother anyone. How odd, then, that no one has ever noticed a creationist wondering if that might not mean the model itself is goofily wrong.

You can compute the probability of you happening that way and it would only add another "billion billion" or two to the total. Yet here you are. You didn't jump together all at once from a soup of aminos. The closest you came to jumping together all at once by chance was a long-ago and not-so-chance encounter of an egg and a sperm. The thing that resulted was not exactly you.

Most complex proteins have googolplexes of workable versions. There are lots of known, observed, cytochrome Cs, for instance. The cytochrome C of humans and yeast differ from each other by fifty-something substitutions yet human cytochrome C works fine in yeast cells. Even that's grossly misleading regarding the possibilities of variation, as the observed distribution of c-C is skewed by the common descent of life. It would be possible to make c-C which differs in far more positions and would still work. It turns out that the critical factors are 1) geometry and 2) the exact right aminos at certain key bends and ends. The rest is structural padding. Certain potential substitutions mess up the geometry. Others mess up the "key-aminos-at-reactive-points" restriction. Everything else is OK.

Nobody thinks any particular modern protein just jumped together. Creationists only pretend to think some people think that. Early proteins in early self-replicators were probably simple and inefficient compared to their modern successors everywhere. That is, even in very simple "primitive" organisms the proteins have been evolving for billions of years toward working better. Complexity and efficiency came with competition, that whole "variation and selection" thing creationists make such a hash of.

I'm not a real abiogenesis enthusiast and only once in a blue moon read any of the research on the subject. It's interesting to me, however, to note that the people "refuting" the work being done in this area refuse to address said work AT ALL but only absurd strawmen. Many have been doing so for years on end and are utterly incorrigible in their bizarre perseveration.

1,956 posted on 10/03/2006 12:10:06 PM PDT by VadeRetro (A systematic investigation of nature does not negotiate with crackpots.)
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To: VadeRetro

In addition to what you've stated, examination of many genes provides evidence that a lot of genes evolved through a process of exon swapping. I read recently that the first organism may have started with somewhere around 1000 or possibly 2000 exons, and genes have evolved from mixing together exons and mutating them. If you examine many proteins you can see that they are made up of several different domains, and if you examine the gene each domain typically is contained in one exon.


1,957 posted on 10/03/2006 1:20:22 PM PDT by ahayes (My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.)
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To: VadeRetro; Alamo-Girl; hosepipe
The closest you came to jumping together all at once by chance was a long-ago and not-so-chance encounter of an egg and a sperm. The thing that resulted was not exactly you.

Actually, it was "me," VR. And I wouldn't say that "chance" was responsible -- at least once there was a fertilized egg (I mean, my parents might never have met in the first place.) Anything I ever became subsequent to that "long-ago encounter" was captured and specified in that instant. It just needed time to play out, plus free will (choices made or not made) so to make me recognizably the person I am today; and all preceeding and succeeding developments of "me," from the moment of conception until the day I die.

You will doubtless recognize this insight as mainly Platonic and Christian in inspiration; but I imagine Aristotle would have agreed with it, too -- he who explained to us what a "formal cause" is, in logic.

For someone who isn't all that interested in abiogenesis, you seem to "defend" it in principle as being at least possibly true and valid. Well sure, anything's "possible" given infinite time. But evidently infinite time is not what we have to work with. The biggest critics of the theory that life arose from non-life happen to be the mathematicians these days. Such men as Chaitin, Yockey, von Neumann, Hoyle, et al., have advanced trenchant arguments against it. Yet I am not aware that life scientists have made much of an attempt to refute them on the merits of their arguments. At least not so far.

Also I note that there's nothing in Darwinist evolutionary theory that says anything about the origin of life, as you have already pointed out. Why, then, do so many of the same people who accept Darinist theory insist that life got statrted by abiogenesis?

1,958 posted on 10/03/2006 1:21:27 PM PDT by betty boop (Beautiful are the things we see...Much the most beautiful those we do not comprehend. -- N. Steensen)
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