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The All-Powerful and Infinitely Creative Darwinian Magic Wand: “Deep Time”

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In another UD thread a commenter made the following observation and claim:

Darwinists are not going to be surprised by very high function after 3.5 billion years of evolution.

Ah yes, the ubiquitous and all-powerful Darwinian magic wand of “deep time,” which makes the impossible possible, the possible probable, and the probable inevitable — or so goes the completely unsubstantiated Darwinian fantasy that flies in the face of trivial logical scrutiny, basic reason, simple combinatorial mathematical evaluation, and empirical evidence (as elucidated in Behe’s Edge).

Time is not the issue; it’s the probabilistic resources, which are clearly inadequate even if one makes unrealistically optimistic assumptions at every stage of the evolution of living systems.

Forget natural selection; it’s completely irrelevant concerning improving the probabilistic outcome. Throwing out failed random experiments does nothing to improve the probability that the next random, error-induced experiment will be successful.

How can this not be obvious? Just do the math with a simple computer program as I did, and then start to think about the hyper-exponential probabilistic explosion introduced by the massively sophisticated, functionally integrated, digitally controlled, automated, self-replicating, error-detecting-and-repairing, information-storing, information-retrieving, information-processing machinery of the cell.

And this is just the beginning at the cellular level. In those magical 10^17 seconds (three billion years) that Darwinists invoke, not only did this happen, but the human mind came about, with all its powers to investigate and discover this incredible technology.

Please give me a break.

The numbers don’t add up. They don’t add up even by orders of magnitude, and they don’t add up even by many orders of magnitude raised to exponents with many orders of magnitude, when one considers all of the finely orchestrated functional integration required to make even a “simple” cell survive and reproduce.

Comments
Interesting. The way I understand evolutionary principles, including natural selection, even without speciation and morphological changes life wold soon deteriorate. The powerful mechanism of natural selection is always at work, continuously, thereby preserving a species. But it also allows for evolution by responding to input from the environment. But that's another story. As far as I understand current thinking in the vast and intriguing field of the why and how of evolution, natural selection is much more and quite different from the simple mechanistic version under constant attack from creationists. I believe it is commonly referred to as a strawman. I don't think it is done with intent; it is just that I suspect creationists are not particularly interested in scientific research. As far as I can tell, for the time being the strongest arguments for ID are the arguments about why evolution is impossible. It can all be boiled down to "the evidence shows something happened in the past. We say Designer did it, natural forces alone couldn't do it; science says natural forces did it all by themselves, without outside help."Cabal
January 26, 2010
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Gil - It is not a matter of probabilistic resources. In fact, time works against the evolutionists. Here is why - nearly every chemical reaction in biochemistry is an equilibrium reaction. Yet, if we actually achieved equilibrium, we would be dead. Therefore, the more time that is available, the less likely that the dynamic equilibrium necessary for life would be set up. Most probability measures for the origin of life used by IDers is based on the probability of independent events. However, this gives way too much benefit of the doubt to the abiogenisists. The fact is that the probabilities are dependent probabilities, and because the reactions are equilibrium reactions, each reaction takes them one step _further_ away from being able to function properly until life begins.johnnyb
January 25, 2010
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Doggonitt, Mr. Dodgen. Stop crashin' their party, would ya? Dotcha know how easily you can get a does from a could? Here's the equation: (P*T)/W+1=E Translation: probability multiplied by time divided by a wish and add one for good measure = evolvability. You can take that equation to Lehman Bro...er. Anyways, you'll be laughin' all the way to hedge heaven.Oramus
January 25, 2010
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