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
I hope you don't mind my jumping in, but I see two problems with your argument. First, you're talking about the odds of a particular set of mutations occurring. Second, the likelihood of a particular neutral mutation occurring is different (and I'd guess generally much less) than of it's being snuffed out after it occurs.
Selection is a crooked gambler who ignores bad throws of the dices and demands pament for throws in his favor. Hence the continual deviation from probability. Anyone can win if you don't have to cover your losses.
Of course the uncovered losses are paid by the sub-optimal creatures who suffer from disease or who are killed and eaten.
I guess if you believe in a designer you believe in a sadist.
That seems to me an unnecessary remark.
Correct. My point was that it makes no difference whether the event is phenotypically neutral or not. I was under the impression you were making a point that because the are neutral, they are independent events.
I have done so already. Your assumptions are flawed.
Hey ... "intelligent intervention" ... that must be you!
I see. You are using it interchangeably for chance mutation events and chance fixation by selection events. The mutation events for all practical purposes in this discussion are random, whether they are phenotypically neutral or not. Selection, on the other hand can eliminate or enhance particular mutations, but only once they have already occurred.
It depends on neighboring selection. Let's take a protein as an example. The survival of the whole protein and all the neutral mutations in it, depend on the selection of non-neutral mutation. Thus, the rate of neutral mutations are calculated from less sequence dependent portions of the genome.
Thanks for the info. I googled the phrase and came up with this:
"British politician and author Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) enlightened us with the following observation: "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Did Twain pull a Doris Kearns???? Or visa versa?
"I have done so already. Your assumptions are flawed." - Nebullis
You are intellectually dishonest. I'm sorry that I wasted my time debating you. You clearly have a preconceived agenda and are willing to ignore every possible point to you that contradicts your personal agenda.
As a matter of fact, you did NOT honestly address Post #557. Nor were my assumptions flawed as you erroneously claim above.
You have nothing honest to say and nothing scientific to support your claims. I've made numerous point by point rebuttals of your claims, but that doesn't even slow down your dishonest posts. For instance, I pointed out that human software was a rock solid analogy to genetic DNA programming, and you denied even that analogy.
At one point you claimed that my analogy meant that only Intelligent Design was possible, and when I pointed out that my analogy only demonstrated that Intelligent Design was possible, you went on as if you hadn't even been corrected.
I haven't seen you admit a single mistake or error that you' ve made, and yet it is crystal clear to any student of cryptography that you erred grieviously in your original wanton attacks on Post #557 (which you still haven't addressed honestly).
And the list of your errors and my point by point refutations and corrections stretches on for more than a 100 of the last posts on this thread.
Yet still, you persist as though you were right all along, when nothing could be further from the truth.
You are no scientist. Logic, facts, math, and analogies simply aren't in your intellectually dishonest mentality.
That you continue to post as if you were to be taken seriously simply demonstrates that you are in denial of reality. Merely outlasting and outposting someone on a thread will never make your bad argument good.
I can't stop you from making smart-alec quips, and I can't stop you from posting as if night was day and day was night. Since this is an anonymous forum, you can't even be properly embarassed in public, and make no mistake that your behavior richly deserves to be publicly humiliated.
You've been wrong in almost every post that you've made, and you've shown no shame or even demonstrated that you've grasped the concept and nature of your numerous errors.
You take the cake, and on FR, that says a lot.
"Which is precisely my point. The author has selected a particular sequence and shown that that particular sequence is very unlikely to occur, just as I did. It therefore doesn't support his conclusion." - edsheppa
It might be your point, but that isn't an accurate representation of what Watson did.
Watson demonstrated the math for calculating the probability / improbability of data sequencing itself into a desired output (e.g., Life, the first sentence in Shakespeare's Hamlet, et al). What you did was demonstrate that some output will always be possible.
Sure, you flipped a coin a thousand times and got an output result. That isn't exactly unsurprising. Anyone who flips coins a thousand times is going to get an output result. The odds are 1 in 1 that you will get an output, not 1 in 10^300 as you wish to imply.
On the other hand, flipping a coin a thousand times and hitting a pre-determined output is another beast altogether.
The difference is about the same as seen in a powerball lottery. The odds are 1 in 1 that every powerball lottery machine is going to select an output. Hitting that output twice, or predicting that output in advance, however, brings up entirely different and much lower odds, obviously.
Science says it. The evidence which we have on hand does not support the existence of 10^280 viable species. If you have evidence to the contrary, please post it.
This has already been covered in previous posts on both this as well as the previous thread.
In brief, if a selection function is placed into a system by any intelligent source, or if the selection function itself has built-in intelligence (say, a dictionary or a computer program), then yes, I would consider it to be a form of intelligent direction. On the other hand, if you are referring to a selection function that occurs naturally (e.g. the Law of Gravity), then no, I would not consider it to be a form of intelligent direction.
To avoid the deliberate obfuscation of many who would attempt to disrupt these threads, however, it is best that we consider only those selection functions that existed prior to the first viable life form being created.
In that lifeless world scenario, it is far easier to determine whether a selection function is "intelligent" or not.
Are you claiming that such a selection function is available for us to consider in regards to the first acids and bases becomming assembled into the first viable DNA based life form?
It is most assuredly an accurate representation of what he intended to convey as evidenced by his conclusion. I think you agreed to that a few posts back.
Hmmm. Species is it? I thought we were really talking about biologically useful amino acid sequences. Are you saying now that the line from Hamlet was to represent viable species? I don't think so. It's more likely his analogy is to a first self-replicator or something like that given what he says in conclusion about the random creation of life.
But to take a stab at your question, it's certain that thre are vastly more than 10^280 variations of the human genome that are viable due to the redundancy in the code.
Now, I know that's really answering your point; such a calculation would be very hard indeed given how much we don't know. It's simply not practical. But I do feel there are very good reasons for thinking biologically useful variations are far more common than you apparently think they are. Here is my favorite example.
Microorganisms have acquired new enzymes that allow them to metabolize toxic industrial wastes never occurring in nature (e.g. chlorinated and flourinated hydrocarbons), and are an increasingly important method of pollution control (Ghosal et al., Science 228: 135-142, 1985). Susumi Ohno (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 81:2421-2425, 1984) found that one such new enzyme, nylon linear oligomer hydrolase, resulted from a frame-shift mutation. Frame-shift mutations scramble the entire structure of a protein, and so the enzyme is a random construct! As would be expected, this new enzyme is imperfect and has only 1% the efficiency of typical enzymes, but the important thing is that it works (Bakken, n.d.).From another site I can't seem to locate again, I understand that the enzyme is some 100 amino acids. That we have observed in the short time we've had the capability to an essentially random length 100 protein that has a new, biologically useful function I consider strong evidence that they are much more common than you seem to.
In that lifeless world scenario, it is far easier to determine whether a selection function is "intelligent" or not.
Really? How? You seem to be saying that chemistry is unintelligent but a simulation of chemistry (being created by an intelligence) would be intelligent and yet I see no essential difference.
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