TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

There are roughly 750,000 words in the bible, in the original hebrew there were no vowels. If we assume an average of two vowels per word, that's 1,500,000 vowels. The chance of any given vowel being assigned in the right way are 1 in 5, so that means there is only a 0.21500000 probability of all the vowels in the Bible being correct!

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Would you accept the above argument? Does it matter in your rejection whether the maths is right? No, of course not, because the assumption made (vowels have been randomly assigned) is nonsense. Similar it doesn't make any difference whether you've correctly calculated your probability because the assumptions you've used are nonsensical and bare no relationship to the subject you're actually talking about.

And they're not, which is precisely my point. Why are they not? Because the calculation I presented is nonsense because the assumptions behind it are nonsense.Exactly as the assumptions behind your calculation are nonsense.

There aren't any natural population of fruitflies without antennae and there never have been. Antannae evolved in much simpler organisms, through modification of the frontal appendages.

I don't have a web source you can easily access to hand, but pretty much any decent undergraduate level or above text book covering the invertebrates will tell you that antennae are modified appendages. Then you just have to look at the phylogenic distribution of antennae to confirm it evolved long before insects did.It's easily confirmed by insect embryology and the behaviour of hox genes, in any case.Now would you like to address the point? That your toy example of antennae emerging in antennae free fruitfly is nonsense?Edited by Mr Jack, : The point

How many undergraduate or graduate level textbooks on Biological topics have you read, Kaichos Man? If you wish to peddle the absurd idea that the commonalities found between species speak to common design please do begin a thread on the topic. But it's off topic here. *sigh* You continue to not get it, don't you? How many times do we have to say this, your example does not resemble anything like real evolution as such the calculations you've presented are nonsense. You need to stop prattling on about your strawman and actually address what evolutionary theory actually says.Any particular mutation is, of course, unlikely, but evolution does not require a particular mutation to occur (that's the real key point) and, in any case, evolution happens in populations across many, many generations so unlikely events occur with high probability.

Yes! And flying, fire-breathing... Oh wait...

Except that pterodactyls aren't dinosaurs and look nothing like dragons.Condensation? Yes, I fear having condensation breathed on me like nothing else.

The probability of all past events is 1. They have happened. The a priori possibility of their happening is completely meaningless.See my previous post on this.

I don't believe he's only talking about non-coding changes. There are two other classes of silent (or almost silent) change: firstly, most amino acids are coded for by multiple codons - these changes have a minimal effect* on the organism - and, secondly, many amino acid substitutions don't have much effect at all. In many parts of a protein substituting luecine for isoleucine will make no measurably difference to the function, similarly glutamate for aspartate, etc