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:
A random walk is no good as a simulation of what happens in genetics. This is the problem - you never lose. In the case of a single mutation for example with a 50% chance of getting it passed on and the individual having two children the possible outcomes are both, one or none. When you get none, the walk is finished. Your simulation does not account for the walk ever ending, therefore it gives false results.
This leads to very counterintuitive results
It gives counterintuitive results because it does not reflect reality. If you are betting on outcomes and you have one quarter to play with and keep playing indefinitely with that quarter, you may get ahead for a while but eventually you will lose your quarter and that is what happens with mutations. In fact, statistical analysis shows that the mutation will be lost in less than 10 generations.
Yes, of course they will. But it matters not how many vanish, it matters how many manage to persist.
It does matter that many will be lost. This is the basis of Haldane's dilemma. Evolutionists talk as if there is an almost infinite amount of time and an almost infinite amount of tries. However, both are finite and it is not a matter of some 4 billion years either. Taking evolutionary assumptions for example for the evolution of all mammals you have just about some 100 million years and the generations of mammals are fairly long (not like those of bacteria and insects) so you have quite a limited number of chances. You also need quite a few mutations to occur when you consider the number of species involved and the fact that to achieve the differences you need different mutations in each.
As I previously showed, small populations retain a larger percentage of mutations but produce fewer to work with, while large populations retain fewer mutations (as a percentage) but produce more overall. The net effect is that although many mutations are lost in either case, the population as a whole will acquire mutations at a rate equal to the mutation rate in a single individual.
Mutations will spread more easily in small populations because there is a greater chance of their being 'fixed'. This happens because individuals in small populations procreate with closer relatives than those in large populations. In short they are more inbred. The scientific facts show that inbreeding is bad and in fact 'inbred' is often use as an insult because of the deleterious effects it has.
That neutral mutations may persist in a population does not help evolution, because mutations are not additive amongst individuals as genetics shows. Because as I have shown a particular mutation will likely remain in only a single individual, additions to that mutation, which are required for neutral drift to accomplish any sort of evolutionary change, must rely on that single individual currently carrying the mutation to have another favorable mutation to add to it. Here is why that has an infinitely small chance of happening - the amount of unfavorable mutations far exceeds the possible neutral or favorable mutations possible and the original mutation will die due to the overwhelming chances of unfavorable mutations.
Actual measurements of non-fatal mutation rates are on the order of 1 per 1000 alleles per generation, or 4 per each human birth (1.6 deleterious).
The above is totally false. To determine that you would require the sequencing of the entire genome of both parents and the child for a large sample of the human population. No such sequencing has been done. This is an example of evolutionists just totally making up evidence for their theory.
It's just intellectually dishonest to try to dismiss reams of evidence and study as being merely attempts to "obscure the truth".
I am not dismissing reams of evidence, on the contrary. It is evolutionists who are trying to dismiss reams of evidence, in this case the certified fact that mutations are harmful to an organism, the certified fact that genetics tells us that a new allele will not spread in a population. As I showed above the random walk is a fraudulent model for what happens in genetics. It is not intuition alone that tells us that a single mutation will not spread through a population, it is verified facts. It is like saying that a person can go into a casino with one dollar and end up owning the casino. Yes it can happen - ONCE. However evolution requires that it happen all the time. Unlike gambling casinos though, where the odds are usually not too bad, with mutations there is a big joker in the deck working against the gambling mutation. That joker is called bad mutations which are even by the phony statistics of evolutionists, overwhelmingly against even a neutral mutation (you gave the phony chance of 1.6 against a neutral mutation just above). So you are not working with even odds but with massively unfavorable odds against both a mutation surviving and a mutation ever spreading. This is why evolutionists who talk about neutral drift never mention that mutations will dissappear due to unfavorable mutations intervening and destroying the 'line' which carries them.
That this occurs with mutations is not to be doubted. The facts of inbreeding show quite well that it is the non-inbreed individuals that are more successful. The facts of inbreeding show that severely inbred populations are subject to much more genetic disease than non-inbred populations. The facts of inbreeding show that inbred populations are less viable than non-inbred ones. These facts show the falsity of both neutral drift and Gould's punk-eek.
Very true. The amount of unfavorable random data mutations which occur while downloading programs over the internet will greatly outnumber the quantity of data mutations that yield new, favorable programming functionality from noisy downloads.
Likewise, most genetic programming mutations are unfavorable.
0.999999999999946575937950778196079485682838665648264132188104299326596142975867879656916416973433628
I'd bet money on that. It's about 99.999999999995% sure that they would fail to produce the sentence."
17 billion galaxies x 17 billion habitable planets x 17 billion monkeys at one line per second x 17 billion years (or 365.25 * 24 * 60 * 60) = 2.6357223096 x 10^48.
If the failure rate is 99.999999999995%, then the success rate is 0.000000000005%.
In those 17 billion years, the line will be created (2.6357223096 x 10^48)(0.000000000005) = 1.3178611548 x 10^37 times = 13,178,611,548,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times = umpteen gazillion times.
I think that either I or the author of this thread has made a mistake, because I do not understand how the laws of probability would allow that many successful lines of text, if "... they have still only produced 1/18,718,157,355,362 of the possible..." lines of text.
You are confusing correlations. The concern here is about an individual cell’s entropy. The individual code information per cell, or per codon, does not increase—it can only decrease as the plant or baby ages.
Hi everybody,
This thread is fascinating. There is so much in it. But there is at least one thing missing or at the very least not discussed enough. Why there is no more evidence of the evolution? Before I start, I want to say that I would want to be an evolutionist because it seems so logical! But the theory of evolution have to stand on his own legs. Even if there is no other good scientific solutions doesn’t make it valid by default!
So my point is that there is not enough intermediate species in the fossil records that we’ve found so far. My main argument is that I suppose that for every species that did appear in our fossil records we should have at the very least one intermediate specie or more. In some case it should be a lot more than one! Just take the example of the whale, the elephant, the giraffe or the man. In each case it could be argued that a lot of iteration had been needed to arrive at what we have today. Some of these iterations will have produced new species. Even in the case where those iteration will not have produced new species, a lot of variability will have been seen. Take the neck’s giraffe, how many intermediate “mutant” would have been needed to arrive at this point. The elephant trunk is an other example of a large number of intermediate “mutant” to arrive at this very complex organ. The blue whale is an other example of an extreme number of intermediate “mutant” to arrive at such an extraordinary animal. I write mutant because I don’t want to define all of those intermediate creature as new species as I don’t really know if it is the case or not. An other example is there is no link between Eohippus (a small dog-like animal that existed 50 million years ago) and its descendent Mesohippus (a sheep-sized animal that lived 30 million years ago).
The fossil records is mostly constituted of species that are not intermediate, or precursor for other species. Of course, it could be argued that we don’t know that yet. I agree with that. Where I diverge is if we do believe in evolution, we should found a greater diversity of fossil that we have found up to now. In fact, we should find mostly intermediate species, or at the very least a lot more diversity in what we’ve found. It seems based on articles that I’ve read that they are at least 5 millions species and maybe up to 100 millions species on our planet today. If for every specie that we have we have at least one intermediate or more, where are they?
Most of the time, specialist argue of the relative rarity of fossils. The special conditions needed to have fossils are few and far between, so that explain the relative dearth of fossils and especially the absence of missing links between them. I propose the exact opposite, if we need an intermediate specie or more for each one that we have today. It should be easier to find intermediate species. A corollary finding could be why today we do not observe more of these intermediate species. In fact, it could be argued that every living creature are intermediate species. But if it is so, the fossils records are not there to prove it and our day to day observation are short of concrete examples. So how can you prove evolution, when you can’t prove it based on fossil records or actual observation. I don’t like math that much, but lets say that 10 millions species exist today, and let’s say that the earth had 3.5 billions years to produce them. It means that we should produce a new specie every 350 years. Of course if we have 50 millions species it means a new species every 70 years. But since we need at least one intermediate specie to produce a new specie, because an intermediate specie will maybe have no practical use of the new mutation (an half trunk for an elephant or an half neck for a giraffe) we need an intermediate form or a new specie every 35 to 175 years. Of course, since very few of the mutation are beneficial. Maybe less than 1 in 1000 are beneficial if you believe what the the article below says
It means that we should observe a lot more mutation that we observe today. Since those mutation would produce some exterior change, as the trunk of the elephant, we should observe mutation every 12 to 60 days or so. Of course, it will be very difficult to observe those because there is just too much data. But for the casual observer the fact seem to contradict the observation. I have read a lot on this subject and so far I have see no proof of an actual new specie under the sun. More to the point we have a lot of extinct species in the fossil records that would prove that we need more new species from evolution than less. An other way of saying that is we should observe more variation in mutation and more creation of new species as we have seen up to date.
An other strange fact is some species does not seem to evolute at all. The Coelacanth did not change a lot for 410 millions years (Wikipedia). Shark are an other example of a species that did not evolute for a great period of time. So it is putting a greater pressure on the rest of the biosphere to produce more new species and thus mutate more rapidly. This problem of actual observation of evolution is not new. Even Darwin admitted it in 1859, when On the Origin of Species was first published, he described the lack of transitional fossils as “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory”. Some have tried to explain this with some new theories about evolution to explain this absence of observable fact. They call it punctuated equilibrium and even some preeminent evolutionist are critical of it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
That theory have been created in part to explain the absence of transitional form of life in the fossil records. But it my opinion, it does not matter if new species are formed rapidly or not as they’re should be always more transitional form of life as definite one. And for those of you who don’t like my English, forgive me as I am french .
Cheers!
17 Billion galaxies, each with 17 Billion planets, each with 17 Billion monkeys typing a line a second for 17 Billion years and still the odds are basically impossible that such a result would occur. And that is a very simple result when compared to even the most basic organism. Not to mention the fact that he threw in the monkeys, typewriter, planets and paper... It is pretty conclusive that the complexity required for our system to exist rules out the possibility of it occurring randomly.
ping
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