Posted on 03/05/2002 12:52:58 PM PST by Southack
There is a recurring claim among a certain group which goes along the lines of "software programs can self-form on their own if you leave enough computers on long enough" or "DNA will self-form given enough time" or even that a million monkeys typing randomly on a million keyboards for a million years will eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare.
This mathematical proof goes a short distance toward showing in math what Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigogine first said in 1987 (see Order Out of Chaos), that the maximum possible "order" self-forming randomly in any system is the most improbable.
This particular math proof deals with the organized data in only the very first sentence of Hamlet self-forming. After one examines this proof, it should be readily apparent that even more complex forms of order, such as a short story, computer program, or DNA for a fox, are vastly more improbable.
So without further adue, here's the math:
You missed the original point. How much feedback did the very first strand of useful DNA and/or near-DNA have?
for that, the prob has to be zero. its close to it, but not zero.
you won't. you'll die. then you can ask the creator.
This is the same old thermodynamics argument, and that's been shot down time and time again.
Exactly. This argument conveniently ignores the fact that planet earth is sitting beneath a water-fall cascade of solar energy which is powering the self-ordering structures we see all around us. While it's true that for the solar system as a whole the amount of disorder in the system is constantly decreasing (ie, the sun is burning out) order on planet earth is "fed" by the influx of energy from the outside.
It is an old argument. An old wrong argument.
I don't know. whats the makeup of said first strand?
Chemistry. Physics. Feedback. Natural Selection.
The process the generated DNA did not exist in a vacuum. It took place in a world governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. It gradually developed, influenced by natural selection.
A better question would be, how *could* you get a random distribution? In truth, almost nothing at the macro-level is random.
Here's a comparison of permutation and combination possibilities for consideration:
Binary code has 2 letters, 0 and 1;
the atom has 3 letters, electron, proton, and neutron (and little pieces of interest only to specialists};
DNA has 4 letters, G, A, T, and C;
Western music has 12 letters, A - G and some in between;
English has 26 letters.
Thus it might be appropriate to compare the alphabet of DNA to the alphabet of language, but the strings of DNA to a library of books, or to a Sam Goody's of CDs, or to Windows sourcecode in binary, or to an ocean of chemicals.
How many peptides (each with 32 or more amino acids) would it take to store the first gene in a primitive life form?
With that number, we can calculate the probability / improbability of amino acids randomly (i.e., without intelligent aid) forming a tiny part of a DNA strand.
Of course, we'll wind up with a number that causes Evolutionists to go into massive denial, but such is the nature of math...
Anyway, thanks for the feedback - you've highlighted exactly what's wrong with this article ;)
Wrong! Macroevolution requires that at some point, descendents of one population of the species evolved enough times that they "look a lot different" than the descendents of the other population.
French & Portuguese both "evolved" from Latin, but I doubt a native French speaker could understand someone speaking in Portuguese, or vice versa, & neither of them would understand a Latin speaker. Micro or macro difference there?
In the case of monkeys, they would have to follow rules. Otherwise there is jungle rule, which seems to non-monkeys to be chaos. There is a mathematics of chaos, but it probably precludes Macbeth.
Oh...you mean intellegent design!
...and the only reason that this computing can happen is because intellegent humans have created a machine that can calculate faster than the human brain is able to calculate. All of which points to intellegent design, with purpose. But the experiment is intentionally set up to factor out intellegence, so your observation is not applicable to this scenario.
BTW, please show us one instance of natural quantum computations happening in the natural world, without intellegent intervention. Computers don't count, as they are programmed by intellegent men.
The "random walk" is one example. Every step in the walk (i.e., your location) depends on preceeding steps, yet is random. There are many such statistical processes in nature.
Once we know that, then we can calculate the probability / improbability of the data for a gene self-forming.
It's in the math.
I'm glad you're able to link to Earth. Should visit sometime. :-)
Yes. The point is that you don't grow a new organ in one shot and then say "wow, how improbable is that!". A mutation produces a change that makes you a little bit better fit for the environment. You produce more offsprings who inherit this change. A whole lot more generations later another mutation makes your descendant a little better fit, etc. Then, when you compare yourself to one of your descendants you may notice that the accumulated changes resulted in a new organ. Regards.
Oh, man, t-shirt quality drawings of amino acids! I saw a site with some great drawings once. I'll try to remember where it was.
(Each amino acid is a molecule. They're a few dozen atoms big.)
Here we go. Try this page.
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