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
The creature trying to attain macroevolution on the other hand will have that very problem. To become any new kind of creature will require more than one new kind of body part/organ. If against all odds the creature should somehow evolve the first such part then, during the time in which the second is evolving, the first, having been at best useless and at worst antifunctional all the while, will DE-EVOLVE and either disappear outright or become vestigial.
How far down in the series is this string? Somewhere near the imaginary end?
Hmmm. It's been a while since I thought about lipid chemistry, but I think we could imagine such a thing. It would need a method of automatically partitioning itself without spilling its guts everywhere. I bet we could dream one up where some environmental change triggers such a partitioning. However...
If the cell simply kept growing, it would eventually break up automatically.
...do you mean our hypothetical cell, or do you mean that extant cells will behave this way?
Nonsense.
That is the point. If he wanted to convince the world of his divinity, and he was god-like in his wisdom and foresight, why not do a miracle that would provide intcontravertable eternal evidence of such by writing "Jesus was here" or "Jesus is Lord" on the face of the moon.
Point being, some say the evidence of God is all around us -- you just have to subtract the evidence of the devil first, (or evidence of 'the fall')...
As "Church Lady" says, "How convenient."
The world is imperfect for a reason. On another thread about "Intelligent Design vs. Evolution" I wrote something like the following:
"For an all-powerful creator, who put his all into the intricacies and mechanisms of creation, 40 days and 40 nights and a kabillion gallons of water make a pretty crude eraser."
Why not just fix everything by sheer miracle. Why not just *poof* everything God was displeased with.
I don't mean to be antagonistic, my opinion of religion is neutral but leans negative because of how it is consumed -- people don't clean the root before eating it, they take the clinging soil as essential to the fruit.
Like Aesops fables, the important thing is that they represent truths not that they *are* true. Religion and God are the result of concious matter ascribing purpose, affinity and divinity to itself -- as a phenomena, not as individual mini-gods. God is within, not without.
That is the type of god I can respect, understand and believe in.
As others have noted, there are naturally additional mechanisms for enhancing the survivability of certain combinations. Some combinations naturally fall apart real quick, while others tend to replicate. The "monkeys and typewriters" analogy chanages dramatically if, while pounding out a stream of random text, words in the dictionary are kept while non-words are discarded.
Some guy built a machine to generate the self-referential sentence "this sentence contains ______ As, _______ Bs, ______ Cs, ... and ______ Zs." (blanks are numbers written as words). Took 5 years to generate a legitimate solution by inserting numbers sequentially and testing for correctness. By instead counting letters, inserting values, and re-evaluating, the 5 year time can be cut down to a few seconds. The point is that by changing from pure randomness or sequential testing to even simple affinity testing & generation, seemingly impossible probabilities suddenly become easy certainties.
The realm of "chaos theory" revolves around the concept of "attractors": in nature, few events (if any) happen purely randomly; instead, there are simple rules that guide behaviors into viable patterns. Regarding "monkeys+typewriters vs. evolution", the flaw in the article is that DNA etc. needs little to start minimal reproduction, and once that affinity & reproduction process begins, it tends to perpetuate itself, useless mutations terminate swiftly, and useful mutations tend to reproduce. When applied to the "primordial soup", the "strange attractors" of chaos theory apply, and chemical affinities tend to promote progress.
There are plenty of problems with evolution. The "million monkeys" argument is not one of them, and simply shows ignorance.
Huh? I hate to quibble (I think), but aren't you being overly constrictive in your term 'DNA'? By using DNA as meaning nuclear DNA only you are overlooking the 'DNA mechanism' -- meaning RNA, etc.
I am no molecular biologist, but I do know the cellular (proteins?) and gunk are 'built' using the 'DNA mechanism'.
It's a question of the cell's needs, what the cell is able to absorb from its environment, and what it has to manufacture for itself. While blood is an unusually hospitable environment to support something as complicated as a red blood cell, the earliest cells probably didn't have very sophisticated needs.
I see here you are being more specific, and tracing your thread back I see we are talking about minimal DNA requirements for a 'living cell'...
To me, sematic convenience causes us to define a living cell as something that includes cells that are dependent on environment for their functioning ability -- even 100% dependent -- but that definition could apply to something simular to a micro-encapsulated drug...
Lets back up, are you saying there are cells that do not have a 99% faithful reproduction of nuclear DNA of thier host? Are there cells that have no nucleus at all?
That's where I got lost in the discussion.
Why is debate considered a waste of class time? It is a great motivator.
A perfect example is this thread: whoever posted this thread didn't pay much attention to the responses to the previous, practically identical, thread. If s/he had understood the "affinity, filtering & reproduction" comments, s/he would/should not have bothered posting the remarkably long & misguided "second proof". I expect to see a third post, which will say the same thing and miss the hundred counter-proof posts previously posted.
I disagree. Those who are immune to learning lose nothing. Those who already know everything lose nothing. But many people between these extremes learn both from the content of the debate and from the process of forming and expressing opinions.
Exactly. The definition of life would get awfully fuzzy in the very early going. There's an intellectual gimmick that creationists often use to avoid this: they say 1) evolving things must be alive, 2) there is a simplest possible life form, 3) this life form cannot have evolved, because anything simpler wouldn't be alive by my definition and therefore cannot evolve by my definition, therefore 4) life cannot evolve from nonlife.
Viruses are good examples of things that only behaves like an organism in the right environment. And then there are the prion diseases...
Lets back up, are you saying there are cells that do not have a 99% faithful reproduction of nuclear DNA of thier host?
I don't know about 99%, but yes, not all reproductions are perfectly faithful.
Are there cells that have no nucleus at all?
Eukaryotes (like you and me) have cells with nuclei; prokaryotes (like bacteria) do not. (Bacteria still have DNA, of course.)
Are you saying that some forms of life have no DNA whatsoever?
How did you arrive at that conclusion?
You'd have to start a new proof to work on that question, as it isn't intended to be addressed in the math here. Not enough data at hand to really ask the right questions to find out, I'd guess...
It's a little like seeing strange footprints in the sand at the beach and asking what created it? Was it manmade? Was it an animal?
This math proof is merely dealing with the footprints...
That depends what you call life, and what you mean by DNA. Some viruses are RNA-based rather than DNA-based, but some people don't think of viruses as life-forms. Prions don't have nucleic acids at all, but even fewer people would call them life-forms. The problem here is that we tend to define life in terms of DNA, rather than vice-versa.
There aren't any cellular organisms that don't have DNA, but that's because DNA works so well. Any DNA-less single-celled critters have long since been devoured into extinction.
Once you read and understand all three linked articles and comments, you might discern that the author is discussing the probability of DATA being stored, not chemicals reacting with each other.
Whether we are looking at the data in a story such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, or at the data that distinguishes ameoba DNA from that of the DNA of an ox, the mathematical probabilities of said data being formed naturally, without intelligent intervention of any kind, is identical.
Hence, the math is valid for a probability proof of either.
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