Posted on 03/05/2002 9:45:44 PM PST by Southack
This is part two of the famous "Million Monkeys Typing On Keyboards for a Million Years Could Produce The Works of Shakespeare" - Debunked Mathematically.
For the Thread that inadvertently kicked started these mathematical discussions, Click Here
For the Original math thread, Click Here
Please explain the difference.
The guy is either passionate or out-to-lunch, wink wink
Success!! Pi does say hello, twice.
The string 85121215 was found at position 61936834 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.
Andy is in Pi 101 times! 100,000,000 digits
1. Lightning causes forest fires.
2. But I can also cause a forest fire.
3. Ergo, the "lightning theory" is falsified.
</southhack mode>
No, all that Watson has demonstrated was that you can use randomness where it is not applicable to get unreasonable answers. Neither you nor he have been able to adequately describe how his results have any physical significance. His logic isn't all that good either, since he leaves himself quite wide open to several logical holes, as Physicist mentions in this very thread. Seems to me you should find something more airtight to hang your hat on.
In the example I listed, yes.
The "proof" for this thread shows that very large amounts of data cannot self-form in one step. It's a huge leap to go from there to saying that it can never self-form. The whole point of evolution is that it is done tiny step by tiny step. Nobody has ever claimed that the first cell simply fell together one day in all its modern complexity.
You are now arguing that because said speciation event was not "natural", that it doesn't count.
No, I'm arguing that because that ability arose in the 20th century, it is unable to explain the speciation that occurred prior to the 20th century. People weren't around when the dinosaurs first appeared, so we could not have created them. If you want to claim that somebody else created them, you have to demonstrate who did it and how. Showing what we do now is neither here nor there.
I'm perfectly happy to state that when human beings effect changes in the genomes of organisms, those specific changes are not themselves evolved. But for every such change you can point to, I can point to a host of others that occurred naturally.
Human beings have put satellites in orbit around the Earth. Does that necessarily mean that therefore some intelligence put the moon in place?
That is not the accepted view, I think. It is entirely possibly for self-replicating compounds to exist that bear no resemblance whatsoever to single-celled organisms as we know them today. Simply acknowledging that possibility renders this article moot. Fine - we're not expected to believe that lightning flashed and a human crawled forth from the slime, instead we are supposed to believe that lightning flashed and a single-celled organism such as an amoeba crawled forth.
You are looking at the complexity of single-celled organisms as they exist now and assuming that the first self-replicating "creatures" were at least as complex - bearing analogous structures and such. That is not a requirement for evolutionary processes to occur. Other posters have discussed self-organizing systems - some of those posts might interest you.
In any case, this is all about abiogenesis, in the end, not evolution per se. Am I to assume that you have no objection then to evolution or natural selection, and that in fact your issues involve only abiogenesis?
Of course there is. Indeed, there is some 10 billion years of physical existence before organisms appeared. This is his whole point. Before organisms existed, what created the specific genetic sequence necessary to sustain that first organism?
Oh, I see. No, you misunderstand me. Natural selection is an effect of organisms living in an environment, any environment. To discuss natural selection in any other context is to abstract the effect away from the cause - it would be akin to discussing gravity with respect to a universe that had no physical bodies. Therefore, implicit in my discussion of natural selection is the assumption that there is an a environment, and an organism or organisms. "Before natural selection" would mean, I suppose, that you are really interested in a discussion of abiogenesis. As I said, others can discuss that probably better than I can. Just be aware that there is no requirement that the first self-replicating systems bear any resemblance whatsoever to contemporary organisms, and that there is a such thing as a self-organizing system.
This is the point that I'm stuck at with the "time and contingency" argument for the existence of God. It goes like this.
1) Assume that the universe is infinitely old.
2) Assume that non-existence is a real possibility for everything.
3) Then we would not be here now because all possibilities would have to have been realized including the possibility that everything would pass out of existence. Since nothing comes from nothing, nothing would exist now.
The conservation of energy seems to be a good argument against #2. But it seems to contradict the idea of potency and act; essence and existence.
Also, from philosophy we know that an infinite series of motions cannot exist in reality. There must be a Prime Mover. Time cannot logically recede infinitely into the past since an infinite number of steps would have to have been realized for us to be here now. And an infinite number of steps cannot be realized in actuality.
To start, I'll bet you that whatever apparently (hi Sabertooth) random initial DNA sequence would result in a viable life form in any conditions on earth. My chances of winning are extremely small, as the math shows.
However, over a billion years, I wonder how many DNA sequences tried and died because they didn't result in a viable life form? Something with a very high exponent I'm sure. Enough tries to even out the odds? What we see are the results of the tries that worked.
As you've said, the argument goes like this. If the universe is infinitely old, then all possibilities for everything to occur should have occurred, as they've had an infinitely long period of time in which to do so. And if one of those possibilities is the simultaneous non-existence of everything, then that should have happened also. But, here we are, ergo the universe is finite in time.
Problems. One, this only works if you assume that all possibilities must occur within a certain time frame. Probability doesn't work that way - it tells you what is likely to occur, but it does not prescribe what must occur, unless some event can be found that has a probability of 1. Really, it's entirely possible that such an event has a non-zero chance of happening, but simply hasn't happened yet. And if the non-existence of everything really has a probability of 1, that's almost the same as saying that we never existed at all. Yet, here we are. ;)
And, just as a reminder, current scientific theories on cosmology and the orgins of the universe are not reliant on the assumption that the universe has always existed for an infinite length of time - in fact, as I understand it, an infinite universe would contradict current theories on the origin of the universe. However, this is far outside my area of expertise - if this is something you'd like to explore in depth, I suggest you ping Physicist back to the thread. He's far more qualified than I to discuss the current state of thinking in this area.
In any case, back to Aquinas. From the notion of a finite universe, it is deduced that there is at least one being that does not owe its existence to something that came before it - the "Prime Mover", or First Cause, variously posited to be God. What can I say? David Hume dealt with Aquinas in his own fashion better than I could - "Whatever we can conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent."
Who made God? is the logical question in the face of the Prime Mover argument. If we posit one God, why not two, or three? Further, Aquinas predicated all this on the assumption that a First Cause was really necessary to explain existence. I would suggest that it is entirely possible to believe that the universe is the ultimate cause of itself, that it just popped into existence of its own accord, for no particular intelligent reason at all.
After all, given a non-zero probability, and an infinite amount of time.... ;)
Obviously, though, I have trouble rescuing Aquinas in this argument. Oooops ;)
Please try to understand the difference between an artificial analog signal carrying information to be decoded, and a real system, such as the solar system, which has infinite information and no noise floor. This is the difference between the original musical performance and a vinyl recording. Vinyl has a noise floor, the original performance does not. Real systems cannot be fully encoded, and their behavior cannot be fully predicted.
My argument is that life is such a real system and that DNA, while it certainly looks digital and superficially looks like information, it does not in fact, behave like a blueprint or a computer program. You cannot extrapolate the future from DNA. Certainly not viability and certainly not viability in a competitive system.
Viability is a function of the whole system, including selection.
Seems like biology, not evolution...
I asked you before, don't believe you replied. Do you still think feedback indicates intelligence? If not, do you agree that feedback is one of the differences between the two problems?
Regards.
The is a math proof that the probability of getting a particular number with a fair die is 1/6. Why is it important to mention that it's fair? Because the proof assumes all numbers have equal probabilities. If this is not the case the proof can be thrown away. That's exactly why the proof in the article is junk.
Is genetic engineering "natural speciation"?
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