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:
Yes, well, of course, "infinite" DOES make it not only possible, but inevitable. ....But what about this: If a number of monkeys equal to the total number of particles in the universe typed furiously at the rate of a million key-strokes per second for 5 billion years, would their be enough information to equal that in the most simple self-sustaining cell known? Just for starters, something on the simple side: how are you going to get sufficient lipids for your cellular bi-layer, all appearing in the same restricted physical space, all at the same time, from non-biological sources?
Again, the ability to use numbers in this fashion is soley based upon the intellegent design of the supercomputers that man created. The number is, in and of itself, not the issue, the event is the issue. "If there is an infinity or near-infinity of universes..."
Calls for speculation. Not relevent. Even so, other universes have no relative bearing upon our own so far as we can determine. Also, this is bordering on the supernatural, to teh point that if the supernatural is to be included, then I can also include the supernatural to suit my postion.
"The issue here is that the author of the article is positing a "proof" of his thesis. So by definition the burden of proof is on him."
Correction. The burden of proof is upon the orginators of the typing money myth, as it is they who proposed it. This author is simply refuting the myth with math. There are an infinite number of variables that are not factored in whcih should have been.
For one, the myth begins with very high order, not rtandomness...If it were truely random at the start...
the monkeys would not have a typewriter, but would have had to write with a pencil or pen that the monkey designed, on paper which the monkey created. Both of these, in and of themselves consititute intellegence, as the monkey would have created them, so inessence they must be discounted.
In true representative fashion, the probability exceeds the numbers cited by the author by so much of an exponentil factor that it cannot happen ever, without intellegent interference into the experiment.
If anyone's "proof" goes POOF, it is the evolutionary claim that the second law of thermodynamics occurs everywhere in the obsevable universe except in htier pet evolutionary theory, which by the way was neither observable, testable or refutrable, and there fore is junk science. The reason the two laws of thermodynamics are called laws is because they are never violated in any sphere upon which we gaze. The typing monkeys are the evos attempt to claim otherwise when it scomes to their pet theory. Regardless of other alleged universes (which, BTW, many quantum physisists call different dimensions, not universes, so again we arrive at speculation, without clear observation), in THIS universe, the laws of TD apply everywhere we look and in order fo the evos to claimn their evolutionary model they are forced to negate the weight of these universal laws.
Quantum computations are not relevent.
then these guys you've been talking to haven't been talking about natural selection. or maybe they're wrong. fitness has a lot to do with evolution/natural selection. thats how it works.
Yes, well, of course, "infinite" DOES make it not only possible, but inevitable. ....But what about this: If a number of monkeys equal to the total number of particles in the universe typed furiously at the rate of a million key-strokes per second for 5 billion years, would their be enough information to equal that in the most simple self-sustaining cell known?
Just for starters, something on the simple side: how are you going to get sufficient lipids for your cellular bi-layer, all appearing in the same restricted physical space, all at the same time, from non-biological sources?
See, I can't even get paragraphs right without harmful mutattions.
Calls for speculation. Not relevent.
as if putting a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters is not "speculation". anyway, can you give some source of where you get this idea that the million monkey argument was made by evolutionists. ie, people who understand evolution?
if it were infinite one would get it on his first try.
Well, that could be true only if you are speaking of self-replicating life. But in order to get to first life, iterated randomness is irrelevant.
Iterated randomness only happens if you have, up front, a functioning "iteration" machine.
so now science has to find first life? but the rest is ok? that satifies me. creationists can sit around and be happy that god did it, and the scientists will let them know when they find the answer. happy medium.
Funny how in just a few hundred years, we have seen the evolution of Teacup Poodles and Great Danes. If these animals were developed apart from the intervention of man we would class them as seperate species. Certainly fossil remains of animals that diferent would be different species.
The endangered species known as the Eastern Red Wolf was recently determined to be a hybrid of the plentiful coyote and the plentiful grey wolf.
Apparently all these animals are interfertile!!. They are ALL DOGS!! Why are some labled seperate species and some are not? The answer is that there is no answer. Species divisions are frequently arbitrary. Logically, these are all breeds of dogs, some wild , some domestic.
There is considerable genetic variability in most living things. On Galapogos, Darwin was able to trace the decent of the Finches there from a common parent population. Some were very different than others. Various behavioral issues made for quasi reproductive isolation in some cases. (There are a lot of birds that still jump over the fences though)
Those finches aren't less similar than the extremes you see in domesticated dogs. Yet they are defined as species because someone wanted prestige or wanted to bolster their world view. They could easily be defined as breeds or races.
Darwin acknowledged the arbitraryness of species definitions when he said "A species is whatever a compentant naturalist says it is."
The list you are trumpeting is the result of arbitrary lines in the sand being drawn by individuals who had a vested interest in evolution explaining all of life.
For me, the biblical concept of kind is more scientific than the very nebulous and inconsistant use of species classification.
I don't have the book with me here, but Willam Dawkins, one of the leading evolutionists used this argument in one of his books ---not The Blind Watchmaker, one of his more recent books. I'm sure there's somebody on this thread that can give you chapter and verse.
They didn't do it with typewriters; they did it in the most absurdly improbable way of all: by evolving into humans, developing language and culture, and then, on St George's Day, 1564, giving birth to one William Shakespeare, who wrote the plays we all know and love.
As to how they managed this, I refer you to one of the best written books on the subject of probability and evolution, Climbing Mount Improbable.
Before self-replicationing life appears we need some help from environment - that's why we don't have life on every planet. Still, given 'good enough' components the problem is not as difficult as the one monkeys have - nobody 'cleans up' between iterations - the process gets to use intermediate results, monkeys don't. Regards.
Micro evolution in my view does NOT even need a new species to arise in order to have occured. A shift in gene frequences in a given population is microevolution. New species arising by "splitting"; the loss of common genetic information that would allow two subpopulations to interbreed is also microevolution.
Marcoevolution, which my dictionary defines as "evolutionary change involving relatively large and complex steps", is differnet. I would adjudge marcoevolution to have occured if complex new structures arise in an organism. NOT a LOSS of function, as in a blind, white cave fish speciating from normal ones, but rather a gaining of structures the organism never had the orignal genes for. For example, the continuous-throughput resparitory system of birds arising from the in-out system of all other vertebrates.
To stretch it out to its maximum extent, I think mutations could in theory produce new species with new information ;but only so many combinations of mutations are possible while still enabling one to have a workable creature.
For example, the experiments done with fruit flies showed that, far from evolving into novel new organisms, or even novel new mutations, THE SAME SET OF MUTATIONS KEPT ARISING OVER AND OVER AGAIN. It would seem that there are only so many ways to scramble the genes of a fruit fly and stll get a functioning creature of any type.
From these established facts, I would suppose that similiar limits would apply to more complex organisms.
Which is?
42?
Perhaps there are an infinite number of universes with infinite variations of the physical laws...
I am sympathetic to those who attack this line of reasoning though. IF life consisted of an arrangement of matter that could happen accidentally, then the probability arguments make sense. What is omitted from your calculation is that there is more than one arrangement of matter that can be alive. How many potential target arrangements are there? The answer is that it is almost infinite. At a molecular level, no two bacteria are the same.
Replace your single acceptable outcome with an infinitely large group of target outcomes and the calculation changes a lot.
The question should be asked though, can life be assembled by random arrangement ever? I contend that in every living cell there are compounds that cannot exist outside of a living cell. There are unstable compunds that are held in check by complex enzymes such that random biogenesis becomes an absurdity. Without the ATP metabolic pathway nothing on earth plant or animal or bacteria would be alive. Within that pathway are compounds that are positively explosive outside of a cell. The cell can't exist without those compounds. Random chance can't explain evolution of the ATP pathway. The bits and pieces would self destruct instantly and wouldn't stay put while waiting for the next needed molecule to stray past. It's not vastly improbable, it's completely impossible. There's too high of an energy threshold to cross.
That's what my Mom use to say to me too.
Yes, but let's make the problem simpler to give the argument of Evolution a fighting mathematical chance.
How many DNA codons would we expect to see in the simplist known gene? Since we know that there are only four DNA codons (also called "letters" on this thread), we can calculate the precise probability / improbability of the natural, unaided self-formation of the data for a single gene once we agree upon how many codons are in a gene.
And then we can watch Evolutionists go either ballistic or into denial at said number. Such is the impact math has...
I don't know anyone (especially any scientific proponent of evolution) who would seriously suggest that enough monkeys typing away at keyboards could produce a work of Shakespeare. The "typing monkey myth" is a straw man argument. However, taking the "typing monkey myth" as a metaphor for "random chance", you might find some proponents of evolution who would suggest that evolution could be the result of pure random chance. But most proponents of evolution would hold (as they have done elsewhere on this thread) that evolution is not a purely random process.
However, the author is not simply refuting a (straw man) myth with math, as you put it. The title of the article is "A Tiny Mathematical Proof Against Evolution". The author states in his conclusion, "I find it impossible to believe that "chance" had anything to do with the process that created life. How can I suppose that Shakespeare himself was the result of a random process when it is quite clearly impossible for even a trivial fragment of his work to have arisen by chance?".
Whether or not the theory of evolution is correct, the author of this article is trying to prove that evolution by chance is impossible. Yet his "proof" completely fails to take into account quantum mechanics. His method of "proof" (calculating probabilities so small that they cannot be obtained within the size and age of our universe) is exactly analogous to the method which is often used to "prove" that certain encryption systems with sufficiently long keys are impossible to crack. But those encryption systems may well turn out to be crackable using quantum mechanic processes which are not limited by the conventional multiplication of probabilities. Therefore, the multiplying together of probabilities to get numbers so small that they cannot occur within the size and age of our universe fails as a method of proof.
I am not talking about the design of computers, intelligent or otherwise. I am talking about quantum mechanics as a known aspect of our universe, and the author's failure to account for that in his method of "proof".
If indeed there are an infinity of universes or dimensions (which is a serious hypothesis for interpreting quantum mechanics), then the probability of random chance producing intelligent life through evolution would have to be measured against all of those universes, not just a single one. And only that specific universe (out of the infinity of universes) which contained intelligent life would have intelligent beings who were aware of their existence and were capable of discussing the question of how they came to exist.
Sorry, but scientific observation has proved that evolution occurs. It just disagrees upon the mechanism of that evolution. But extensive sedimentary layers with a fossil record that starts with the simplest organisms and with time (layers=time) more and more advanced forms appear points towards some form evolutionary change.
Of course, you could argue that the MIND that created the Universe. GOD. Neglected to give IT's ultimate creation, life the ability to physically adapt to changing environmental conditions.
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