God, Man and Physics

Discovery Institute ^ | 18 February 2002 | David Berlinski

[tortoise]

Rubbish. The final probability, which you don't even know because you probably didn't even read that far, mathematically shows that 17 Billion monkeys in each of 17 Billion planets typing for 17 Billion years would have less of a chance of typing THE FIRST SENTENCE of Hamlet than a single lottery ticket has the chance of winning a single lottery.

I read it. Who cares how improbable it is? 17 billion years and 17 billion monkeys isn't very much. I actually think you kind of missed the point of that paper (it was a geek joke), but whatever.

So no, you can't get Hamlet out of randomness, much less the entire collected works of Shakespeare, and certainly not a sophisticated computer program.

How do you logically fly from utterly improbable to impossible? It may seem to be true for you to equate the two in day to day life, but it isn't even remotely true in a mathematical sense. Mathematics doesn't use rounding errors and fudge factors (though engineers do).

[Southack]

Nonsense! You have been CONCLUSIVELY debunked by the math in the link in Post #310.

In no way, shape, or form can complex programs or works of Shakespeare EVER be demonstrated to appear out of randomness no matter how much finite time you have, no matter how much computing power you throw at it, no matter what you do.

The MATH says that even after BILLIONS of years of non-repeating randomness (a generous condition), that it is still less likely for the first sentence of Hamlet to appear naturally than for 17 16 2 61 45 6 to win the lottery tomorrow.

Read the link in Post #310. It debunks your wild-eyed folklore with facts, charts, and verifiable calculations (i.e., with math).

It's over. You lost. The PROOF is in the link in Post #310.

Your claims of "trivial" have already been diminished to the weak-kneed "possible", but even there you don't have 17 BILLION YEARS for a demonstration.

This has got to hurt. You were running around claiming that "math" would save you, not realizing that you were quoting FOLKLORE! Now you've been debunked with, of all things, math!

I love it! This is rich! You have been shot down in flames.

You are so busted!

[tortoise]

I might also point out that at the beginning of the page you link to, the author wrote this:

"This argument is actually quite sound -- given enough time and enough monkeys, one could eventually produce "Hamlet" by accident."

Thanks for playing though. Like your Prigogine evidence, you are either ignorant of the math or intentionally misappropriating it as "evidence" of your position. That's okay, you can still use the mathematics text that I referenced. Not that it will help you.

[Southack]

"How do you logically fly from utterly improbable to impossible?"

That's easy: "utterly improbable" precludes you from ever being able to demonstrate that which you had the nerve to call "trivial" to provide.

You don't have 17 Billion years. The Earth hasn't even been around that long.

You've been disproven by math. Game over, man. Game over.

[Southack]

""This argument is actually quite sound -- given enough time and enough monkeys, one could eventually produce "Hamlet" by accident."

The author highlighted "could" to mock just how improbable that was, even given 17 Billion years of trying.

You've gone down in flames. The math has ruled against you!

[tortoise]

Your claims of "trivial" have already been diminished to the weak-kneed "possible", but even there you don't have 17 BILLION YEARS for a demonstration.

I would point out that only a dumb ass would actually use monkies and typewriters to prove this point. Even a current computing cluster is vastly faster and would do the same job in a tiny fraction of the time. Throw in quantum computing, which will be commercial in ten years at the outside, and you can sift it in linear time (read: in a fraction of a second) due to the nature of the problem (not all exponential time problems translate to linear time problems on quantum computers, though this one does).

[tortoise]

The author highlighted "could" to mock just how improbable that was, even given 17 Billion years of trying.

I do believe you are grasping at straws. This is a ridiculously weak comeback to a rather decisive point I made. When you start referencing math texts, I'll listen.

[Southack]

"I would point out that only a dumb ass would actually use monkies and typewriters to prove this point. Even a current computing cluster is vastly faster and would do the same job in a tiny fraction of the time. Throw in quantum computing, which will be commercial in ten years at the outside, and you can sift it in linear time (read: in a fraction of a second) due to the nature of the problem (not all exponential time problems translate to linear time problems on quantum computers, though this one does)."

You were the one who claimed that the million monkey example wasn't folklore, not me.

Go ahead, show the math for a massive computer attack at the Shakespeare problem. I've already done so in the link in Post #310, and it shows that your massive computer attack on the problem will still fail, even given BILLIONS of years (which is far too generous as you promised that a demonstration was trivial, and something that takes more than my lifespan is obviously not trivial).

But you won't show the math. You're just going to run around calling names and finally fleeing this debate.

You can't produce an example. You can't post the math.

You've been debunked in post #310, and pretty soon you'll just flee this thread because you can't handle any more mathematical humiliation.

You're toast!

[Southack]

"I do believe you are grasping at straws. This is a ridiculously weak comeback to a rather decisive point I made. When you start referencing math texts, I'll listen."

Post #310 is an on-line mathematical text. It conclusively debunks your wild-eyed claims with math. The numbers, charts, and equations are included in that link.

Go ahead, post the final probability number at the end of that text just to show that you actually read it. Go ahead and admit just how low the chances are of getting even the first sentence of Hamlet in 17 Billion years of randomness.

Come on, this is fun! I've got you totally down and out, and I LOVE seeing you drag this out. Perhaps we can go ANOTHER 350 posts with me just banging on your now disproven claims by citing over and over again the very math that debunks your folklore!

[A Navy Vet]

Let's say it's highly improbable, but not *impossible*, for the monkeys to type out the first sentence of Hamlet, given enough time and monkeys. And let's say it's not *impossible* that certain ammino acids came together to form the bases of life, given the random environmental soup needed.

With that in mind, how *possible* is it for those monkeys to finish the entire play? Or how possible is it for those primordial organisms to evolve into the thousands of Earth species WITHOUT design?

I'm probably over my head here, but it would seem to me that simple results may occur with the right circumstances. More complex results may indeed be an impossibility, especially since life on Earth is believed to have originated in a finite amount of time.

[Southack]

Hey! Where did you go?! This is way too much fun for you to flee yet! Come on, dance around and try to deny the math some more!

Let's all read the link in Post #310 again just to see once again the math that proves you wrong.

Then when we're done, let's do it again!

[Southack]

(from the link in Post #310)

Okay, now for the moment of truth. We know how many possible different lines can be produced, hence how likely it is for us to get the right one at random (because only one is right). We can calculate the chances of getting the quote in a year most easily by calculating the chances of missing on every attempt: the chances of getting the quote will be 100% minus the chances of missing on every attempt. I need a really amazingly precise calculator to do this because the chances of missing are so close to 100% that most calculators will round it off to 100%. The calculation is as follows.

probability of missing on one attempt = 1 - 1/(32^41)
...of missing for a minute straight = (1 - 1/(32^41)) ^ 60
...of missing for an hour straight = ((1 - 1/(32^41)) ^ 60) ^ 60
...of missing for a day straight = (((1 - 1/(32^41)) ^ 60) ^ 60) ^ 24
...for a year straight = ((((1 - 1/(32^41)) ^ 60) ^ 60) ^ 24) ^ 365
If you have access to Unix, you can calculate this with the dc command, but be warned that it may take quite a while to calculate and annoy other users because the computer is so slow. Use of the nice command is suggested. The syntax, should you care to try, is as follows. Type the dc command, then type the following lines.

99k
1 1 32 41 ^ / - 60 ^ 60 ^ 24 ^ 365 ^
p

The figure that is eventually printed will be the probability (expressed as a value between zero and one) of our monkey not typing our little phrase from Hamlet in the space of one year's worth of continuous attempts. The answer that it prints looks like this:
0.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999386721844366784484760952487499968756116464000
Notice all the nines? Even to fifty or more significant figures, this reads 100%. Okay, so realistically, there is no way that our monkey can do its job in a year. Maybe we should start talking centuries? Millenia? As I understand it, common scientific wisdom suggests that the universe is about 15 billion years old (although they may have revised their dating since I last heard about it). We can easily extend our current figure of one year to count many years. Our calculator will be much faster if we break the calculation down to powers of two and just use the "square" operation, so let's choose a nice even power of two like 2^34, which is about 17 billion (17,179,869,184 to be precise). The new figure is:

0.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999989463961512816564762914005246488858434168051444149065728

The chances of failure are still essentially 100%, even after 2^34 years. Hmmm. It doesn't look like were are going to get very far with this, but just for the heck of it, let's see if we are any better off with a lot of monkeys. Let's not hold back here -- I hypothesize 17 billion galaxies, each containing 17 billion habitable planets, each planet with 17 billion monkeys each typing away and producing one line per second for 17 billion years. What are the chances of the phrase "TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION." not being included in the output?

0.999999999999946575937950778196079485682838665648264132188104299326596142975867879656916416973433628

I'd bet money on that. It's about 99.999999999995% sure that they would fail to produce the sentence. Are you astounded? It's such a trivial requirement, right? Just one puny sentence. And yet the figures keep coming up "impossible". Where have we made a mistake? We have fallen into the same trap as the politician who was the subject of my joke, way back up there. We have failed to appreciate the sheer magnitude of the problem. Let's look at it one more time.

The number of 41-character strings that are possible with a 32-character alphabet is 32^41. According to dc, this value is as follows.

51422017416287688817342786954917203280710495801049370729644032

In case you don't feel like counting, this value is 62 digits long. In our hypothesising above, we imagined 17 billion galaxies, each with 17 billion planets, each with 17 billion monkeys, each of which was producing a line of text per second for 17 billion years. How many lines of text did we wind up producing in this experiment? The math is as follows:

2^34 * 2^34 * 2^34 * 2^34 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60

And the answer is as follows:
2747173049143991138247931294711870033017962496000

Once again, in case you don't feel like counting, the answer is 49 digits long. Now, there is no guarantee that our monkeys are going to type something different every time, but even if we managed to rig up the experiment so that they never tried the same thing twice, they have still only produced 1/18,718,157,355,362 of the possible alternatives. The denominator in that fraction is 14 digits long, by the way. It's a figure that's vastly bigger than anything you would come across in the real world. Is it any wonder, in light of that, that it is so damn hard to get the right answer by accident?

[Southack]

Hey! Where did you go?!

Stick around! This is just starting to get fun!

[PatrickHenry]

You weren't doing very well in this debate, either...

You didn't give me much to work with.

[Joe Brower]

-- there is nothing precluding a God from setting up an evolutionary mechanism to accomplish his creations... In fact it would to be testiment to a greater (and comprehensible) God to fashion this mechanism.

This has long been my postulate as well. The way I put it is "If you were an engineer so skilled that you could create a machine that, once switched on, would regulate, improve and repair itself automatically from then on, would you not do so? I would!".

[Vercingetorix]

"Nonsense! That's the same as saying that the ability of two computer programs to interface with each other can only be the result of a shared ancestry between them. It's a nonsensical claim that is bogus even at its face value." -- Southack

You really don't know anything about biology, do you? This is a waste of time until you at least finish the fourth grade. Or maybe you could ask your Dad to explain the Birds and the Bees to you. Really, your inability or refusal to understand the simple stuff every single time it's explained to you is absolutely amazing.

[VadeRetro]

No, I'm simply asking you to substantiate a claim that you made (i.e. that there was no evidence of big leaps in design introductions).

Your problem is that the monotremes actually fit on the evolutionary tree just fine. We have a picture of a line of reptiles called Synapsidia which is gradually turning mammalian before our eyes in the fossil record.

We can see the reptilian jaw double-jointing, coming apart, and becoming mammalian ear bones in this sequence. We can see almost-uniform reptilian teeth increasingly differentiating. We can see the defining Synapsid skull hole forming and moving around, fusing in late synapsids with the eye socket.

What we can't see are soft tissue changes like mammary glands, fur, warm-bloodeness (but we have clues in the bone canals on this one). However, we can predict that these are also creeping in, in some order or other.

That's where the monotremes come in. They're warm-blooded. They have fur. They have mammary glands (but not nipples). But they still retain the reptilian cloaca (monotreme = "one holer"). They lay eggs.

They branched off early. They've been evolving on a unique path for a very long time. They have unique features.

That poison spur you lawyer on is simply a platypus innovation, like its electrosensing muzzle. It's no more impossible than a bee's stinger or rattlesnake's fang, and it's much newer and less efficient than those aforementioned structures. (But a lot of snakes seem to have invented the poison fang independently. You can see some species no farther along in this than the platypus is with its venomous spur.) It's an adaptation of pre-existing structures. (And why is that always true?)

Creationists always try to make the platypus something it isn't.

A designer can do anything. We could find a salamander with hammer-anvil-stirrup ear bones if a designer was fooling around. We could find fish with hair. We could find grasshoppers with feathers.

Evolution predicts exactly the kind of transitionals ("mosaics") that we find. We knew before it happened that we would find dinosaurs looking like birds, birds looking like dinosaurs in the fossil record. (OK, Huxley was influenced by the Archaeopteryx find when he proposed dinos-to-birds in the 1860s.) We knew to expect land-mammals-to-whales. We knew to expect fish-to-amphibians, reptiles-to-mammals, apes-to-humans.

Your Designer is limited to the kind of thing evolution can do and the platypus is no exception.

[Virginia-American]

There is one mammal, and only one mamal, in all of history that is poisonous

In all of history?! That's a long time. How do you know?

[VadeRetro]

Your 194 is a strawman of the Occam's Razor dilemma. Occam's Razor is variously stated as "When two or more hypotheses cannot be disproven, choose the simplest." Or, "Do not unnecessarily multiply conjecture." So here's a more realistic statement of the match-up.

Evolution:

1) We can see populations changing in undirected, natural ways that tend to be adaptive.
2) We understand important details of these changes.
3) Past changes are the result of these processes.

ID:

1) We can see populations changing in undirected, natural ways that tend to be adaptive BUT NEVER MIND THAT, THAT'S JUST MICROEVOLUTION AND IT DOESN'T PROVE ANYTHING.
2) We understand some BUT WE'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND THE REST OF IT NEVER NEVER NEVER IT'S JUST IMPOSSIBLE WHAT ARE WE NUTS TO PRESUME WE CAN UNDERSTAND CREATION? WE'RE JUST THE CREATED STUFF WE'RE NOBODY.
3) Therefore somebody, God or an alien civization, has been running around making stuff happen although there's no direct evidence of same.

[VadeRetro]

The figure in 337 is from The Fossil Record by Clifford A. Cuffey. (Don't want to be like Doris Kearns Goodwin. No sir!)