Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Southack
That's an interesting theory, of course, but we simply have no scientific evidence on hand wherein an unguided, unaided, unintelligent "natural" process ever programmed/evolved/created/formed the Base 2 / Base 4 genetic instructions/data for any functional genome (not even a "simple" one)

Repeating myself: the theory of evolution describes how one organism evolves over time into another. It makes no claims about where the first organism came from. There is a !@#$load of good quantitative evidence of the relationship between the genomes of every living organism that has been studied.

Furthermore, that sort of theory which you advance above contradicts this: A Tiny Mathematical Proof Against Evolution [AKA - Million Monkeys Can't Type Shakespeare]

Probabilistic arguments are almost impossible to apply to complex natural processes. The science of statistical mechanics, which specifically deals with how to calculate probabilities for such processes, can currently handle (at best) problems like how water freezes into ice. We are a hundred years from being able to calculate probabilities of even the simplest possible abiogenetic process, and anyone who says otherwise is simply demonstrating that a little learning is a dangerous thing.

However, if you like probabilities, here's one for you; when salt crystallizes from solution, it goes from a nearly random distribution of sodium ions and chloride ions in water, to a crystal in which there is an exactly ordered array of sodium ions and chloride ions. If you call a sodium 1 and a chloride 0, and you go down one row of the lattice, it looks like this

10101010101010101010

For each atom, there are two choices, so there's a 1 in 2 chance each one will go in correctly.

Now, in a gram of sodium chloride, there are about 2 X 10^22 atoms. So the chances of this happpening corectly in every single case are 0.5 ^ (2 X 10^22). Don't bother with your calculator, it won't go that high, but that's (give or take a few trillion orders of magnitude) a 1 in 10^(5 X 10^21) chance, or 1 in (1 followed by a 5 billion trillion zeroes).

So by the same logic that says evolution can't have happened, salt can't crystallize from salt water. It's just too darn unlikely.

(If you think I'm tring to pull a fast one here, the calculation I just described is a simplified version of the method you would use to calculate the entropy of solution of NaCl from first principles. It's basic chemical physics.)

615 posted on 02/19/2003 7:49:07 AM PST by Right Wing Professor
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 606 | View Replies ]


To: Right Wing Professor
"There is a !@#$load of good quantitative evidence of the relationship between the genomes of every living organism that has been studied."

Yes, and every last piece of that evidence points to code re-use, not random, unaided "natural" formation of mathematical Base 2 / Base 4 instruction sets.

Human programmers re-use Base 2 software code every day. One would expect to see similar genetic code re-use among a broad spread of organisms if indeed DNA had been constructed via some form of consistent Intelligent Intervention.

On the other hand, IF genetic code was being formed by random, natural, unaided processes, then one would expect to see entirely unique instruction sets and absolutely no code re-use.

But we don't see that at all in our massive bodies of scientific evidence.

Instead of seeing that sort of non-pattern, we see something in our fossil records that more resembles the incremental progression of automobile designs that we would likewise witness in a long-buried auto junkyard (which is precisely where I predict that Evolutionary Theory will wind up).

620 posted on 02/19/2003 9:44:31 AM PST by Southack (Media bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 615 | View Replies ]

To: Right Wing Professor
"Probabilistic arguments are almost impossible to apply to complex natural processes."

That's not what we're doing.

The nuance here is important. We aren't trying to apply probablistic arguments to complex natural processes in the link that I gave to you above in this thread.

Oh no, not to the processes themselves, but to the OUTPUT of those processes (i.e. to the final, fully-sequenced DNA code).

This is entirely different than trying to predict where random processes will go.

What you are talking about, when mentioning that calculating processes is nearly impossible, is very much akin to trying to predict every bounce and direction of every lottery ball while it is in the hopper.

In contrast, what I am talking about (as well as what the URL link that I gave to you above in this thread is referring to) is simply predicting the probability of the final OUTPUT of those lottery balls (i.e. the winning number).

And it is dead easy to predict the probability/odds for that winning lottery number.

That's math. That's what I'm doing. And while I'm telling you that the odds of any one number or sequence of numbers is so and so, you're fumbling around trying to say that we still can't predict each and every bounce, direction, and position of the lottery balls while they are still in the process of bouncing around.

Such is the difference between trying to calculate every nuance of a process versus merely calculating the probability of a specific number or sequence of final output numbers.

621 posted on 02/19/2003 9:53:56 AM PST by Southack (Media bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 615 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson