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
With all due respect, the author's math appears to be valid for every conceiveable real or theoretical situation in which data sequences itself without intelligent aid.
I probably wouldn't disagree with that statement. But, is there a specific real world situation where this has been postulated to occur?
"I probably wouldn't disagree with that statement. But, is there a specific real world situation where this has been postulated to occur?" - ThinkPlease
The Independent Birth of Organisms (from primordial soup) by Periannan Senapathy, Ph.D.
You must be a quick reader!
All of those articles, and thousands more just like them, share the same assumption that valid data can sequence itself without intelligent aid from a primordial soup (or kitchen, in the case of at least one article). After all, to get a living organism, we have to have a valid sequence of base pairs in its DNA structure.
That's precisely what you have agreed with me (above) that the author of the math for this thread has properly calculated.
"The primordial pond (or ponds) produced not just one or two, but millions, perhaps billions of "seed cells" which are analogous to a zygote (a fertilized egg). These seed cells were formed in the pond by the random assembly of: (1) new genes, (2) parts of previously-made viable genomes, and (3) other biochemicals, all of which existed in the pond." - Periannan Senapathy, Ph.D.
Please see Post #469.
Not quite what you want, since this isn't even neo-Darwinian evolution you are attacking here. Why else would his page say: NEW THEORY REFUTES EVOLUTION
Try again.
"Dr. Senapathy's theory of independent births has two components: (1) Darwin was only half right, and (2) the primordial pond produced many millions of original organisms, not just one or two."
Nice dodge, but Senapathy is proferring a revision to Darwinsim, just as Punctuated Equilibria is a revision to Darwinism.
This is completely valid, contrary to your insinuation, and meets your demands and conditions above precisely.
With a plausible mechanism for joining amino acids together, scientists began to explore the idea that these molecules could be the first living biological structures.
Andrew Pohorille is one of these scientists. As director of the Center for Computational Astrobiology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, Pohorille is using a computer to model how the hodgepodge of Earth’s early molecules might have assembled into peptides that can catalyze reactions. Pohorille and his colleague Michael New designed a computer model that reenacts the early steps in life. On the computer, they create imaginary peptide chains of various lengths. By running the computer program, they simulate how peptide chains randomly encounter each other and form longer, more complex strands.
In Pohorille’s model, the short peptides interact with each other for a prescribed amount of time, hooking up and breaking up. Once in a while, purely by random meetings, the peptides form a catalyst, able to incite nearby chemical reactions.
Pohorille has found that over time his peptides evolve into longer chains that become better and better at their task of catalyzing the formation of other nearby peptides. Since the process is random, however, there is always a chance that instead of forming a matchmaker, the system will produce the opposite: a catalyst that breaks up peptides. But this is not all bad, says Pohorille. He thinks these peptide-breakers could break up dysfunctional partnerships, thus freeing them to find better-suited partners.
Although some critics are skeptical of Pohorille’s work because they think the chances are slim that peptides can spontaneously form catalysts, others think he is on the right track.
Jean Chmielewski, a protein chemist at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, has created peptides that can replicate in test tubes. She and post-doctoral researcher Shao Yao built a 35-amino-acid-long chain capable of copying itself, a task peptides normally cannot do.
This is one of the closest things I could find to the assumptions of Watson. There are some fundamental differences, however, that I think make this differ greatly from Watson's assumptions. Mind you, this is pretty far afield from even his basic assumptions. This isn't even DNA life we are talking about, and we are not talking about base pair accumulation.
One. The peptide chains don't have to start over if they hit a dead end. A reaction that splits it into two small functioning peptide chains means that are not starting over completely from step one, which is a critical assumption in the Watson model.
Two. It isn't truly random, since the chemical reactions are guided by catalysts, which accelerate certain reactions at the expense of others. The presence of a pro-life catalyst could accelerate reactions beyond what Watson predicts, and it also decreases randomness from the equation, as it preferentially chooses certain reactions.
This is completely valid, contrary to your insinuation, and meets your demands and conditions above precisely.
Does it? I don't see specifically a random addition of singlular base pairs anywhere in there, where I have to throw out the entire sequence if something goes wrong (as it is according to the Watson model). I see here, that if something isn't right, it can be reused into something that is right, which Watson says is a complete no-no. Watson says that I have to start completely over from the first letter of the first sentence if something goes wrong (or three somethings, in his second article).
This is not precisely applicable, or even remotely so. Try again.
Do you mean through chemical reactions, or randomly? One of these things is not like the other...
Think about it this way. Could the authoritative text of Hamlet (assume that this phrase has a referent) have arisen by a evolutionary process from an ur-Hamlet text as discerning theater audiences chose between random variant texts? So, in one version, Hamlet soliloquizes "To be or not to BRIE," but that loses out in popularity to "To be or not to BE," and so on, as theater audiences painstakingly improve the text word by word.
That strikes me as a very good way to think of it, actually. The improvments that are approved of are kept for the next round, and those that are less popular are discarded, until you get to the final product.
Isn't this story ridiculous?
It is only an analogy intended to illustrate the principle. And the principle is sound, even if the particulars of this analogy seem rather silly ;)
To be or not to brie.
To be or not to bree.
To be or not to bhryea.
The audience will make sense of the word according to their training and socialization. As you are fond of pointing out the origin of the term "gook," I shall use that example to make my point.
The question is, then, how much does this relaxation of assumption buy us? Hmmm.
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