When is it Rational NOT to Believe an Expert?

BA, I did not know John Walker had reviewed "Signature in the Cell". I loved the review. Thanks! Upright BiPed

vjtorley, you may be interested in this reference I just found: Excerpt: As early as the 1960s, those who approached the problem of the origin of life from the standpoint of information theory and combinatorics observed that something was terribly amiss. Even if you grant the most generous assumptions: that every elementary particle in the observable universe is a chemical laboratory randomly splicing amino acids into proteins every Planck time for the entire history of the universe, there is a vanishingly small probability that even a single functionally folded protein of 150 amino acids would have been created. Now of course, elementary particles aren't chemical laboratories, nor does peptide synthesis take place where most of the baryonic mass of the universe resides: in stars or interstellar and intergalactic clouds. If you look at the chemistry, it gets even worse—almost indescribably so: the precursor molecules of many of these macromolecular structures cannot form under the same prebiotic conditions—they must be catalysed by enzymes created only by preexisting living cells, and the reactions required to assemble them into the molecules of biology will only go when mediated by other enzymes, assembled in the cell by precisely specified information in the genome. So, it comes down to this: Where did that information come from? The simplest known free living organism (although you may quibble about this, given that it's a parasite) has a genome of 582,970 base pairs, or about one megabit (assuming two bits of information for each nucleotide, of which there are four possibilities). Now, if you go back to the universe of elementary particle Planck time chemical labs and work the numbers, you find that in the finite time our universe has existed, you could have produced about 500 bits of structured, functional information by random search. Yet here we have a minimal information string which is (if you understand combinatorics) so indescribably improbable to have originated by chance that adjectives fail. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book_726.html bornagain77

Pelagius (#33) and Seversky (#35) Thank you for your posts. I'll confine myself to a few quick observations. 1. It is highly unlikely that a scientist of the stature of Fred Hoyle would be guilty of an elementary mathematical fallacy when calling into question a scientific "sacred cow" such as abiogenesis. Common sense would tell you that he'd take care to check his facts first - and his maths. 2. If you don't think that 2,000 enzymes are required for life, then how many do you think are necessary? 3. Even if some of these enzymes appeared after the first life, they still had to originate somehow, and the 10^40,000 odds calculated by Hoyle still make this an astronomically improbable event. Are you suggesting that the first living things somehow hastened (catalyzed?) the emergence of these new enzymes? If so, what is your proposed mechanism? 4. If you don't believe that there is a fixed number of proteins that is required for life, then I take it you believe that no proteins are required for life. (If you need even one, then that's a "fixed number.") Can you show me a proteinless organism? 5. How do you define the functionality of a protein? 6. The calculations in Dr. Stephen Meyer's book, Signature in the Cell, make no reference to fixed sequences in a protein, or to any particular protein. The calculations described in chapter 11 refer to the odds of getting any protein. 7. It would help if proponents of abiogenesis fleshed out their hypothesis in a little more detail. vjtorley

Seversky,, the answer is Zero,,,, and for $10,000 what is the question seversky? Jeopardy! Think Music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXGhvoekY44 ----------------- and the question is: How many proteins have been observed forming by natural processes in nature? bornagain77

vjtorley @ 32

The point of the 10^40,000 figure is that even over a very long period of time, and with oceans that are chock-a-block full of organic chemicals, you won’t be able to generate 2,000 enzymes. Yet there are 2,000 enzymes on Earth today. In essence, Hoyle was right

There are those, such as Ian Musgrave in this paper Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations from the Talk.Origins Archive, who disagree:

Problems with the creationists' "it's so improbable" calculations 1) They calculate the probability of the formation of a "modern" protein, or even a complete bacterium with all "modern" proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all. 2) They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life. 3) They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials. 4) They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation. 5) They seriously underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.

Seversky

faded_glory, Please do expand. I don't totally understand the distinction. Do you mean that evolutionary step = beneficial mutation + natural selection? Or is the term broader than that, to include terms like genetic drift etc. Collin

The point of the 10^40,000 figure is that even over a very long period of time, and with oceans that are chock-a-block full of organic chemicals, you won’t be able to generate 2,000 enzymes. Yet there are 2,000 enzymes on Earth today. In essence, Hoyle was right.

vjtorley, Biologists do not believe that every enzyme found on Earth today must have been present at life's origin. Hoyle is attacking a strawman. His mistake here is identical to the one he makes in his "tornado in a junkyard" analogy. Just substitute the suite of two thousand enzymes for the 747. pelagius

Seversky (#5) Thank you for your post. You seem to be perpetuating the myth of Hoyle's fallacy - the idea that Hoyle merely calculated the odds of a complex biological structure coming together in one step:

In effect, he was arguing that the emergence in one step of a fully-formed complex biological structure was so improbable as to be impossible. The only problem was that this was not what evolutionary biologists were claiming had happened. They were proposing a long, slow process in which major changes were the aggregate effect of many small, incremental steps.

I'm afraid that's a mis-representation of Hoyle's argument. You might like to check out this link: http://creationevolutiondesign.blogspot.com/2008/10/re-fred-hoyle-about-747-tornado-and.html Here's what Hoyle actually said:

In particular, the enzymes are a large class of molecule that for the most part runs across the whole of biology, without there being any hint of their mode of origin. There are about two thousand of them. Enzymes are polypeptides (proteins) that specialize in speeding up biological reactions, which they do with far greater efficiency than man-made catalysts. They act both to build up and to break down a wide range of biosubstances. The surface shapes of enzymes are critical to their function. ... Surface shape is determined by the particular sequence of amino acids in the polypeptide structure. One can think of getting the surface shape right in two stages of approximation. There are some ten to twenty distinct amino acids which determine the basic backbone of the enzyme and these simply must be in the correct position in the polypeptide structure. The rest of the amino acids, usually numbering a hundred or more, then control the finer details of the surface shape. There are also the active sites that eventually promote the biochemical reactions in question, and these too must be correct in their atomic forms and locations. Consider now the chance that in a random ordering of the twenty different amino acids which make up the polypeptides it just happens that the different kinds fall into the order appropriate to a particular enzyme. The chance of obtaining a suitable backbone can hardly be greater than one part in 10^15, and the chance of obtaining the appropriate active site can hardly be greater than one part in 10^5. Because the fine details of the surface shape can be varied we shall take the conservative line of not 'piling on the agony' by including any further small probability for the rest of the enzyme. The two small probabilities we are including are quite enough. They have to be multiplied, when they yield a chance of one part in 10^20 of obtaining the required enzyme in a functioning form. By itself, this small probability could be faced, because one must contemplate not just a single shot at obtaining the enzyme, but a very large number of trials such as are supposed to have occurred in an organic soup early in the history of the Earth. The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10^20)^2000 = 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court." (Hoyle, F. and Wickramasinghe, N.C., "Evolution from Space," Paladin: London, 1981, Reprinted, 1983, pp.19-21. Italics mine - VJT.)

Notice that there's nothing in the above quote that says that the enzymes all have to originate simultaneously. Rather, he is talking about the "about two thousand" "enzymes ... across the whole of biology" and "the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial" in an "organic soup." The point of the 10^40,000 figure is that even over a very long period of time, and with oceans that are chock-a-block full of organic chemicals, you won't be able to generate 2,000 enzymes. Yet there are 2,000 enzymes on Earth today. In essence, Hoyle was right. vjtorley

I consciously said that each *evolutionary step* depends on the ones before, not that each *mutation* depends on the ones before. This is a fundamental distinction. If people have trouble grasping that difference I am happy to expand. I see that Toronto actually already made the same point. fG faded_Glory

Ah yes, I remember reading the JH research when it came aout a year of so ago:

It turns out, the Johns Hopkins researchers say, that the ribosome exerts far tighter quality control than anyone ever suspected over its precious protein products which, as workhorses of the cell, carry out the very business of life. "What we now know is that in the event of miscoding, the ribosome cuts the bond and aborts the protein-in-progress, end of story," says Rachel Green, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of molecular biology and genetics in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "There's no second chance." Previously, Green says, molecular biologists thought the ribosome tightly managed its actions only prior to the actual incorporation of the next building block by being super-selective about which chemical ingredients it allows to enter the process. Because a protein's chemical "shape" dictates its function, mistakes in translating assembly codes can be toxic to cells, resulting in the misfolding of proteins often associated with neurodegenerative conditions. Working with bacterial ribosomes, Green and her team watched them react to lab-induced chemical errors and were surprised to see that the protein-manufacturing process didn't proceed as usual, getting past the error and continuing its "walk" along the DNA's protein-encoding genetic messages. "We thought that once the mistake was made, it would have just gone on to make the next bond and the next," Green says. "But instead, we noticed that one mistake on the ribosomal assembly line begets another, and it's this compounding of errors that leads to the partially finished protein being tossed into the cellular trash," she adds. To their further surprise, the ribosome lets go of error-laden proteins 10,000 times faster than it would normally release error-free proteins, a rate of destruction that Green says is "shocking" and reveals just how much of a stickler the ribosome is about high-fidelity protein synthesis. "These are not subtle numbers," she says, noting that there's a clear biological cost for this ribosomal editing and jettisoning of errors, but a necessary expense. "The cell is a wasteful system in that it makes something and then says, forget it, throw it out," Green concedes. "But it's evidently worth the waste to increase fidelity. There are places in life where fidelity matters."

I remember wondering if anyone had told these things to expert Welsley Elsberry after he went on his tirade about Stephen Meyer?

"The analogy between language and biological sequence is poor for many reasons; starting with the most obvious point of disanalogy, proteins can lose 80% or more of their sequence similarity and retain the same structure and function...Eighty percent loss of sequence identity is fatal to English sentences. Clearly proteins are much less specified than language."

Upright BiPed

RuNAround, you state: "if you look at the sequence differences of the same protein from different organisms you see immediately that there is a fair amount of sequence variation. thus, there are a lot of mutations possible without loosing the functionality of the protein." you better check that evolutionary presupposition at the door: Severe Limits to Darwinian Evolution: - Michael Behe - Oct. 2009 Excerpt: The immediate, obvious implication is that the 2009 results render problematic even pretty small changes in structure/function for all proteins — not just the ones he worked on.,,,Thanks to Thornton’s impressive work, we can now see that the limits to Darwinian evolution are more severe than even I had supposed. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/10/severe_limits_to_darwinian_evo.html#more Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors - Doug Axe Excerpt: Contrary to the prevalent view, then, enzyme function places severe constraints on residue identities at positions showing evolutionary variability, and at exterior non-active-site positions, in particular. http://nsmserver2.fullerton.edu/departments/chemistry/evolution_creation/web/AxeProteinEvolution.pdf The Ribosome: Perfectionist Protein-maker Trashes Errors Excerpt: The enzyme machine that translates a cell's DNA code into the proteins of life is nothing if not an editorial perfectionist...the ribosome exerts far tighter quality control than anyone ever suspected over its precious protein products... To their further surprise, the ribosome lets go of error-laden proteins 10,000 times faster than it would normally release error-free proteins, a rate of destruction that Green says is "shocking" and reveals just how much of a stickler the ribosome is about high-fidelity protein synthesis. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090107134529.htm further note: The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity - David L. Abel - 2009 Excerpt: "A monstrous ravine runs through presumed objective reality. It is the great divide between physicality and formalism. On the one side of this Grand Canyon lies everything that can be explained by the chance and necessity of physicodynamics. On the other side lies those phenomena than can only be explained by formal choice contingency and decision theory—the ability to choose with intent what aspects of ontological being will be preferred, pursued, selected, rearranged, integrated, organized, preserved, and used. Physical dynamics includes spontaneous non linear phenomena, but not our formal applied-science called “non linear dynamics”(i.e. language,information). http://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/10/1/247/pdf "a very rough but conservative result is that if all the sequences that define a particular (protein) structure or fold-set where gathered into an area 1 square meter in area, the next island would be tens of millions of light years away." Kirk Durston bornagain77

GilDodgen: That’s why it took 10^20 trials for malaria to come up with just two mutations required to defeat chloroquine. That’s 10 billion times as many humans as have ever lived. Let me ask the following question with an appeal to simple logic: With the empirical evidence described above -- concerning the "creative" powers of random mutation and natural selection with the available probabilistic resources -- would anyone with even basic reasoning power suggest that this http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/WindowsLiveWriter/LittleLucy_9D3C/4242_68954%5B4%5D.jpg turned into Mozart by the same mechanism? Such claims on the part of Darwinists immediately relegate them to the outer darkness of the most nutty pseudoscience. GilDodgen

rna, or is your handle really RuNAround since that is only thing I ever get from you? RuNAround, has a totally novel and unique +150 amino acid protein ever been found by anyone in sequence space that would perform the exact same function as a already existent +150 aa protein that is already in a existent life form? The answer, which you already know, is of course no. Does Szostak's work address this very specific question that I asked you as Axe's work does? ,,, The answer is again no, and that is why that Plos paper is relevant since it clearly points out the lack of evidence for any biologically relevant proteins generated by Szostak's work. i.e. it shows the proteins never did anything more than just stick to stuff. i.e. Why did they not evolve some brand new function using the universal protein fuel ATP that it had bound to? Was this to much to ask of the great evolutionary wizard behind the curtain? i.e. Why did e-coli not use this new resource to turn into something other than a defunctional e-coli? Where oh where is the proof for evolution RuNAround? Evolution Vs ATP Synthase - Molecular Machine - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4012706 Molecular Machine - The ATP Synthase Enzyme - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4380205 Why do you not see this problem? Why do you insist that Szostak's work is relevant when it clearly has not cut the mustard in the least as far as demonstrating the evolution of a single biological relevant functional protein? Does shoddy science impress you? You must get paid for believing life can spontaneously generate with such shoddy evidence for the information genrating capacity of evolution! Is that true? Do you get paid money for work related to the belief that life can come from non-life even though the chasm between functional information and material processes makes the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk!? As far as the real science is concerned you need to satisfy the requirement for generating a unique +150 aa protein in sequence space that will perform the exact same function as an existent protein (cruise control and all) and you will have falsified Axe's claim, until then you are basically entertaining a pipe dream that is not relevant to Axe's work in the least! RuNAround, Why didn't you even care to address the 'cruise control" evidence? Tell me Exactly why should amino acids be found to have highly advanced algorithmic information embedded within them that can encode very specific calculus equations for each protein? Care to explain how a PID control equation can be tailor made for each individual sequence of amino acids in each protein so as to achieve cruise control by random mutations? Now that would be interesting if you would try to puzzle that out, but no, instead you want play head games by insisting the scientifically falsified is relevant. Why is this RuNAround? why do you play useless games have you no integrity within your science? Myself, I would be very ashamed to practice science in such a shoddy manner as to not receive correction when it is so clearly overwhelmingly warranted? bornagain77

#25 bornagain (1) would you maybe mind answering my question - how does the PLos paper you cite above calls into question szostaks work? I am really interested to get that connection. (2) szostaks 10exp12 number is an experimental observation. which facts do I distort by citing that observation? (3) szostaks protein adopts a functional defined three-dimensional fold and binds to two other molecules just like other proteins. In which respect does it differ from 'genuine functional biological' proteins? (4) Every year multiple novel protein folds are discovered by analyzing the structures of proteins from all kind of organisms by x-ray crystallography. How do you know that there are not 'proper biological proteins' around that adopt the same fold as the szostak protein? fold space is far from completely described. (4) regarding the bbip10-protein you mention above. if you look at the sequence differences of the same protein from different organisms you see immediately that there is a fair amount of sequence variation. thus, there are a lot of mutations possible without loosing the functionality of the protein. the title of your source is just misleading and sensational. but that was a distration from my question anyway, wasn't it? rna

rna, as Gil mentioned the problem is far worse than evolutionists will ever admit, for the entire problem for finding proper proteins is a "top down" concern in which functionality is derived from the multiple interactions of several precisely shape interacting proteins. Warning: Do NOT Mutate This Protein Complex: - June 2009 Excerpt: In each cell of your body there is a complex of 8 or more proteins bound together called the BBSome. This protein complex, discovered in 2007, should not be disturbed. Here’s what happens when it mutates: “A homozygous mutation in any BBSome subunit (except BBIP10) will make you blind, obese and deaf, will obliterate your sense of smell, will make you grow extra digits and toes and cause your kidneys to fail.”... the BBSome is “highly conserved” (i.e., unevolved) in all ciliated organisms from single-celled green algae to humans,..." http://www.creationsafaris.com/crev200906.htm#20090630a GATA-1: A Protein That Regulates Proteins - Feb. 2010 http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2010/02/gata-1-protein-that-regulates-proteins.html Heat shock proteins: Excerpt: They play an important role in protein-protein interactions such as folding and assisting in the establishment of proper protein conformation (shape) and prevention of unwanted protein aggregation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_shock_protein Which begs the question, "If this complex of 8 proteins which is found throughout life, is severely intolerant to any mutations happening to it now, how in the world did it come to be in the first green algae in the first place?" rna We have been through this before and I am fairly certain you realize that a bottom up approach is simply not going to work. (hint: methinks it looks like a weasel) A Meaningful World: How the Arts And Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature http://www.amazon.com/Meaningful-World-Sciences-Reveal-Genius/dp/0830827994 Also you well know Szostak's number reflects "non-biological" protein bindings whereas Axe's number reflects, "protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds", which are in fact genuine functional biological ones he is estimating from his work! Basically your defense of Szostak's 10^12 number for functional proteins is a blatant and willing distortion of the facts, since I know for a fact you know better. further note: Proteins have also been shown to have a "Cruise Control" mechanism, which works to "self-correct" the integrity of the protein structure from any random mutations imposed on them. Proteins with cruise control provide new perspective: "A mathematical analysis of the experiments showed that the proteins themselves acted to correct any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations and restored the chain to working order." http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S22/60/95O56/ Cruise Control?,, The equations of calculus involved in achieving even a simple process control loop, such as a dynamic cruise control loop, are very complex. In fact it seems readily apparent to me that highly advanced algorithmic information must reside in each individual amino acid used in a protein in order to achieve such control. This fact gives us clear evidence that far more functional information resides in proteins than meets the eye. For a sample of the equations that must be dealt with, to "engineer" even a simple process control loop like cruise control, for a single protein, please see this following site: PID controller A proportional–integral–derivative controller (PID controller) is a generic control loop feedback mechanism (controller) widely used in industrial control systems. A PID controller attempts to correct the error between a measured process variable and a desired setpoint by calculating and then outputting a corrective action that can adjust the process accordingly and rapidly, to keep the error minimal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller It is in realizing the staggering level of engineering that must be dealt with to achieve "cruise control", for each individual protein, that it becomes apparent even Axe's 1 in 10^77 estimate for finding specific functional proteins within sequence space, may be far to generous. Though the authors of the paper tried to put a evolution friendly spin on the "cruise control" evidence, finding an advanced "Process Control Loop" at such a base molecular level, before natural selection even has a chance to select for any morphological novelty, is very much to be expected as a Intelligent Design/Genetic Entropy feature, and is in fact a very constraining thing to the amount of variation we can expect from a "kind" of animal in the first place. for further note see: Behe - Dollo's Law bornagain77

If scientists understood more about mathematics they will soon know that their evolutionary speculations are absurd. So the key is more math knowledge and understanding among scientists. This can save a lot of money as scientists can then not perform experiments that have no chance to succeed. How much money is wasted on stupid experiments that can only fail! What if mathematicians reviewed all grant proposals for soundness before money will be granted? Morgentau

The protein-sequence problem is actually much worse than described so far. Proteins almost always interact with other proteins, so the proteins with which they interact would require simultaneous compensatory mutations to maintain functionality. The mutation hypothesis, with the exception of explaining the utterly trivial, is simply hogwash. GilDodgen

#21 bornagain "Whereas Szostak’s work has now been brought into severe question ..." Why would the PLOS paper you cite above call into question Szostaks work on the selection of functional proteins from random sequences? The reason for the abnormal growth of the bacteria is that the protein binds ATP which is needed for normal growth of the cell as you are well aware. By overexpression of an ATP-binding protein you sequester ATP from the metabolic pathways. This would most likely happen upon overexpression of any ATP-binding protein (with high enough affinity) regardless of its origin, man-made or natural. In fact, in many cases even the overexpression of natural e. coli proteins in e. coli is toxic for the cell as well as overexpression of proteins from other natural sources. Those guys were just after a catchy title for their paper to get some attention. Thus, Szostaks work is totally unaffected by this paper: In a random pool of 4x 10exp14 random sequences you find at least four different protein families capable of atp-binding. And they even have two binding sites, one for atp and one for zinc-ions. rna

toronto, you presuppose functionality where none exists, yet when functionality is considered: Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds: Doug Axe: Excerpt: Starting with a weakly functional sequence carrying this signature, clusters of ten side-chains within the fold are replaced randomly, within the boundaries of the signature, and tested for function. The prevalence of low-level function in four such experiments indicates that roughly one in 10^64 signature-consistent sequences forms a working domain. Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10^77, adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15321723 Evolution vs. Functional Proteins - Doug Axe - Video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4018222 Axe's work also tends to agree with other reputable research that has been conducted in this area (Sauer; MIT; 1 in 10^64). Whereas Szostak's work has now been brought into severe question: A Man-Made ATP-Binding Protein Evolved Independent of Nature Causes Abnormal Growth in Bacterial Cells Excerpt: "Recent advances in de novo protein evolution have made it possible to create synthetic proteins from unbiased libraries that fold into stable tertiary structures with predefined functions. However, it is not known whether such proteins will be functional when expressed inside living cells or how a host organism would respond to an encounter with a non-biological protein. Here, we examine the physiology and morphology of Escherichia coli cells engineered to express a synthetic ATP-binding protein evolved entirely from non-biological origins. We show that this man-made protein disrupts the normal energetic balance of the cell by altering the levels of intracellular ATP. This disruption cascades into a series of events that ultimately limit reproductive competency by inhibiting cell division." http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007385 Minimal Complexity Relegates Life Origin Models To Fanciful Speculation - Nov. 2009 Excerpt: Based on the structural requirements of enzyme activity Axe emphatically argued against a global-ascent model of the function landscape in which incremental improvements of an arbitrary starting sequence "lead to a globally optimal final sequence with reasonably high probability". For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids. http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2009/11/10/minimal_complexity_relegates_life_origin bornagain77

Clive Hayden @18,

faded_glory, Each step depends on the steps that came before.

No, each step does not depend on the ones before,

Consider a 4 bit string: 1010 To get to 1011, we need only the last bit to change. If each generation has a mutation of 1 bit, the probability of getting the last bit to change are 1 in 4 since there are 4 bits in total. To get from 1010 to 0101 however, would take 4 generations. Therefore the odds of getting 1011 if you start from 1010 are 1 in 4 not 1 in 16. This shows that the likelihood of step (X) is dependent on step (X-1). If the one-bit change is in a string that is 32 bits in length, the odds are 32 to 1, not 4 billion to 1. Do you agree Gil? Toronto

pelagius you state:

"You’re playing in thousands of lotteries simultaneously. Evolution doesn’t seem so absurd anymore, does it?"

Shoot pelgius, let's let every particle in the whole universe play the lottery as fast as planck time will allow and see if any one of them can be expected to "win" for just one protein molecule. The Universal Plausibility Metric (UPM) & Principle (UPP) - Abel - Dec. 2009 Excerpt: Mere possibility is not an adequate basis for asserting scientific plausibility. A precisely defined universal bound is needed beyond which the assertion of plausibility, particularly in life-origin models, can be considered operationally falsified. But can something so seemingly relative and subjective as plausibility ever be quantified? Amazingly, the answer is, "Yes.",,, c?u = Universe = 10^13 reactions/sec X 10^17 secs X 10^78 atoms = 10^108 c?g = Galaxy = 10^13 X 10^17 X 10^66 atoms = 10^96 c?s = Solar System = 10^13 X 10^17 X 10^55 atoms = 10^85 c?e = Earth = 10^13 X 10^17 X 10^40 atoms = 10^70 http://www.tbiomed.com/content/6/1/27 ----------------- amino acids have to congregate in a definite specified sequence in order to make something that “works.” First of all they have to form a “peptide” bond and this seems to only happen about half the time in experiments. Thus, the probability of building a chain of 150 amino acids containing only peptide links is about one chance in 10 to the 45th power. In addition, another requirement for living things is that the amino acids must be the “left-handed” version. But in “abiotic amino-acid production” the right- and left-handed versions are equally created. Thus, to have only left-handed, only peptide bonds between amino acids in a chain of 150 would be about one chance in 10 to the 90th. Moreover, in order to create a functioning protein the “amino acids, like letters in a meaningful sentence, must link up in functionally specified sequential arrangements.” It turns out that the probability for this is about one in 10 to the 74th. Thus, the probability of one functional protein of 150 amino acids forming by random chance is (1 in) 10 to the 164th. http://www.spectrummagazine.org/reviews/book_reviews/2009/10/06/signature_cell 10^164 - 10^108 = 10^56 against (10 million, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion) that any one of the particles of the universe will win the lottery fro a single protein. Question pelagius, do you want to play poker with me? bornagain77

faded_glory,

Each step depends on the steps that came before.

No, each step does not depend on the ones before, each step is an accident, a random event, thus called random mutation, and especially to get many random events that are not harmful is exactly like winning the lottery over and over and over, with each winning having nothing to do with winning the previous lottery. Gil is right. Clive Hayden

Successive lottery draws are independent events, whereas evolutionary changes are successive steps in a continuous chain of events. Mutations are entirely random with no view to the future, so of course they are independent events. That's why it took 10^20 trials for malaria to come up with just two mutations required to defeat chloroquine. That's 10 billion times as many humans as have ever lived. GilDodgen

But life is based on chemical reactions... Proteins are not produced by a chemical reaction, they are manufactured by machinery that is programmed through a base-four digital code. GilDodgen

GilDodgen wrote:

So, instead of winning the million-dollar lottery once, all you have to do is win the thousand-dollar lottery a thousand times. Problem solved!

Except that you don't have to win a thousand times. All that matters is that somebody occasionally wins. And by the way, there isn't just one lottery. You're playing in thousands of lotteries simultaneously. Evolution doesn't seem so absurd anymore, does it? pelagius

Collin @9, Seversky @11,

John Wilkins:When information plays a causal role, nothing is added to the account by calling it “information”. In short, if genetic information is concrete, it is causality. If it is abstract, it is in the head.

That expresses very well what I mean. It's not that I believe information does not exist Collin, I believe instead that information is simply the term we use when we describe something. An apple is red because that is the label we give anything that reflects light of a certain wavelength. It is not part of an information-processing system meant to convey the "information" that it is red. John Wilkins seems to disagree with GilDodgen's claim that:

Once it was discovered in the 20th century that living systems are not essentially based on chemical reactions and stochastic processes, but upon information and information-processing systems,..

Toronto

Seversky, I do see what you mean. DNA doesn't get read by a conscious, intelligent person before causing proteins to be arranged. But I would like to read Signature in the Cell before I comment too much more. Collin

Clive, It may be a brilliant analogy, but it is also a flawed one. Successive lottery draws are independent events, whereas evolutionary changes are successive steps in a continuous chain of events. Each step depends on the steps that came before. Gil's analogy still falls into the same trap as Hoyle's. fG faded_Glory

Collin @ 9

Toronto, Are you saying that there is no information content in the cell?

There is an admittedly minority opinion, to which I am sympathetic, that holds just that. This is the Abstract from the draft of a paper by philosopher of science John Wilkins:

It is often claimed there is information in some biological entity or process, most especially in genes. Genetic “information” refers to distinct notions, either of concrete properties of molecular bonds and catalysis, in which case it is little more than a periphrasis for correlation and causal relations between physical biological objects (molecules), or of abstract properties, in which case it is mind-dependent. When information plays a causal role, nothing is added to the account by calling it “information”. In short, if genetic information is concrete, it is causality. If it is abstract, it is in the head.

Seversky

Gil,

So, instead of winning the million-dollar lottery once, all you have to do is win the thousand-dollar lottery a thousand times. Problem solved!

Brilliant analogy! Clive Hayden

Toronto, Are you saying that there is no information content in the cell? If that is what you are saying then I'd respond like this: "A central idea in contemporary biology is that of information. Developmental biology can be seen as the study of how information in the genome is translated into adult structure, and evolutionary biology of how the information came to be there in the first place." — Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith, from http://evoinfo.org/ " When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the 'intelligence' which fashioned it comes from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides. ... If to determine the origin of information in a computer is not a false problem, why should the search for the information contained in cellular nuclei be one? — Pierre Grassé" http://evoinfo.org/research-tools/ Collin

They were proposing a long, slow process in which major changes were the aggregate effect of many small, incremental steps. So, instead of winning the million-dollar lottery once, all you have to do is win the thousand-dollar lottery a thousand times. Problem solved! GilDodgen

GilDodgen @4, I am sorry if I was not clear enough. Let me give it one more shot. From Behe's Amazon Blog:

I am Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.

While Behe may be right that life is designed, he reached those conclusions based on his training and research in biochemistry. He studies life's cellular and molecular interactions from the point of view of a biochemist. Based on the above quote from Behe, how is this statement wrong?

But life is based on chemical reactions according to Behe and anyone else who studies it as biology.

You are again claiming that your analogy of life, as that of an information-processing system, is the basis of life while Behe's research is the study of the ..chemical.. interactions we know as life. If life was not based on chemistry, Behe's training would be useless in the study of it. Please show me where I am wrong reaching that conclusion about a biochemist. Toronto

Mr. GilDodgen, that link is great. Have you shown it to any Darwinist mathematician. Mathematicians are the ultimate experts because they use only logic. Morgentau

Barb @ 2

Back in the 1960s, mathematicians attempted to explain that there simply wasn’t enough time for evolution to have occurred by chance. Tell me, which group of experts do I believe: the mathematicians or the biologists?

If you had a problem with your heart, who would you consult, a cardiologist or a urologist? After all, both are highly-trained and experienced specialists, shouldn't their expert opinions carry equal weight? On the alleged mathematical improbability of evolution, the most notorious example is that of Fred Hoyle. In his 1983 book The Intelligent Universe he wrote:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

In effect, he was arguing that the emergence in one step of a fully-formed complex biological structure was so improbable as to be impossible. The only problem was that this was not what evolutionary biologists were claiming had happened. They were proposing a long, slow process in which major changes were the aggregate effect of many small, incremental steps. Hoyle was a highly-respected scientist but he was an astronomer not a biologist. In astronomy, his opinions carried the greatest weight, in biology, much less so. As an aside, those who like to quote Hoyle in support of their opposition to evolution tend not to mention some of his other pronouncements, such as this one from his 1993 book Our Place in the Cosmos with Chandra Wickramasinghe:

The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.

How authoritative would vjtorley or Gil or BA77 say Hoyle was here? Seversky

Dear Toronto, With all due respect, your post is completely incoherent and incomprehensible. Therefore, I cannot reply. Behe's thesis is that life is designed, and that chemistry is the medium, not the message. How you could have possibly missed this is beyond me, unless, of course, you never read his works. Barb: Tell me, which group of experts do I believe: the mathematicians or the biologists? Believe the mathematicians. An understanding of the absurdity of Darwinian chance-and-necessity claims is quickly and easily understood through simple, junior high school mathematics. I outline this here: https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/writing-computer-programs-by-random-mutation-and-natural-selection/ This understanding is thoroughly trivial and easily accessible through simple logic. As secular Jewish mathematician David Berlinski puts it (I paraphrase): Chance-and-necessity Darwinism is "nutty." GilDodgen

I would say it's always rational not to believe expert as unbelief is the rational position to take except when unbelief in something corrupts the foundations of rationality itself. For example cosmologist who says because of her unbelief that "Universe come from nothing caused by nothing" has rejected foundations of rationality and as such everything she says is probably false as well. Innerbling

Back in the 1960s, mathematicians attempted to explain that there simply wasn't enough time for evolution to have occurred by chance. Tell me, which group of experts do I believe: the mathematicians or the biologists? Barb

GilDodgen,

Once it was discovered in the 20th century that living systems are not essentially based on chemical reactions and stochastic processes, but upon information and information-processing systems,

But life is based on chemical reactions according to Behe and anyone else who studies it as biology. You are using your analogy of the life process, i.e, that of a software/hardware system, and claiming that the analogy is the process itself. We can say true or false, 0 or 1, but at the level of a transistor, we are talking either current flow or charge. The binary information is how we describe the state of the gate. Early computers were analog, not digital. Had they remained analog, how would you then have described the mechanism of life? Lastly, if you had a heart problem, would you want a cardiac specialist, or a GP? Toronto