Extent of Mutational Capability

Please remember that CRR is quoting ReMine on this issue; so if this is false then CRR is not lying, he is being lied to.

Not really. CRR was shown exactly where he/she was telling untruths, yet he/she kept on repeating the same falsehoods. To me that's a lie.Maybe CRR is too intellectually challenged to realise that he/she keeps on telling untruths. Those untruths are and were
pointed out.That's where it gets difficult. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

Yes and creationists pretend that their 'definition' is 'scientific'. Creationists always tell untruths. That's how they do it. They always tell untruths.

True enough. However, even though he is "merely" repeating a lie, it still does remain a lie. And the consequences of that lie being told is exactly the same whether or not CRR knows that it is a lie.

So, Gregory Rogers. Please show us the maths backing up your claims. From this thread it seems as if you are very reluctant to do it. Maybe it's because you don't have a clue?

Gregory Rogers and CRR are two different people. I don't see Gregory trying to put up a quantitative argument, so the absence of math is not a problem.As a matter of fact, I like them both. Gregory is asking questions which seem perfectly reasonable coming from someone who doesn't know much about the topic --- which is exactly the sort of person who should ask questions.And CRR, while he may be a creationist, is at least trying to be right. There's been some work and thought put it there, and while he is mistaken his mistakes have on occasion been subtle.

To be fair, the mistake that CRR seems to be making is a common one, the Sharpshooter Fallacy. This is where you calculate the probability of a specific event happening after it has happened.A good analogy is a deck of cards. If you shuffle the deck and then lay out all 52 cards one at a time, the probability of getting those specific cards in that specific order is 52!, which is a rather large number. However, the very act of shuffling and dealing cards guarantees that a highly improbable event will occur.The same applies for evolution. Once you have imperfect replicators competing for limited resources the guaranteed outcome is evolution. The product of that evolutionary process is going to be nearly infinitely improbable. However, once the process of evolution starts you are guaranteed an extremely improbable outcome because something will evolve. As Stephen Jay Gould said on many occasions, if we rewound the tape of evolution and started it again we wouldn't expect the same outcomes. If we went back to the Cambrian, there is no reason that we would expect to see humans, or even primates, hundreds of millions of years later. We would expect to see different types of species.The trick that creationists try to play is pretending that the outcome we see is the only possible outcome. That is where their math goes awry. It is like calculating the odds of our 52 card hand, pretending that the order of cards we see was somehow predestined or the only one that could occur. This is the Sharpshooter Fallacy, where you draw the bulls eye around the bullet hole, pretending that the shooter was aiming for the bulls eye from the start.

I think you mean to state that the odds are 1 in 52! or that the probability is 1/52!. Probability, by definition, is a number less than one.

If we're nitpicking, '1 in 52!' is the probability - the odds of it occuring would be 1 : 52!-1.

Re Message 203 (I've been away for a while, had a hard disk fail, etc.)That's an interesting example, and at first looks convincing.Now in previous posts you were clearly talking about mutations that had been fixed in the population (# 195, 176) and I was arguing that there wasn't sufficient time to fix the required number.In this example it is quite certain that the mutations I acquired independently will not be fixed in the population. It is equally certain that neither will the mutations independently acquired by my parents and passed on to me. Similarly with the from my grandparents (unless the population is extremely small). I can be pretty confident that until the number of my ancestors reaches at least the population size that none of them will have been fixed.So on the basis of the example you have given I can conclude, as in #206, that only a portion of the potential mutations would have bee fixed in the 350,000 generations available. My ballpark estimate was but the actual portion would depend on the population history.

I've seen the sharpshooter fallacy on Youtube where someone deals several cards then says "hey, I just achieved a 1/? event!"We need to look not only at the probability of en event but also at the probabilistic resources available. The chance of a royal flush is small but enough people are playing poker that we can be sure it happens nearly every day.On the other hand the chance of a bridge player getting dealt 13 cards of the same suit in order is so small (~1/10^60) it might never have happened, at least with a properly shuffled deck. (I hope I got my maths right)Douglas Axe has estimated the chance of a chain of amino acids forming a functional protein is ~1 in 10^77. Denton estimates that no more than 10^40 proteins have ever existed on Earth. So even with those vast probabilistic resources the odds are fantastically small that a protein could have formed by chance. (obviously there are lots of assumptions and boundary conditions in any estimates of this kind). Pro-evolution researchers have done estimates and come up with the chance forming a functional protein as ~1 in 10^50. However that still leaves the chance at ~1/10^10 so it remains fantastically improbable. Note this avoids the sharpshooter fallacy because any functional protein would be success.You can read more on this in Axe's "Undeniable".Other work has been done on the evolvability of proteins and shows that even the probabilistic resources of the Earth and Billions of years are not enough. And that's assuming you have a heritable replicator to start with; otherwise you can't have evolution.

A simple google search shows you are wrong.Four perfect hands: An event never seen before (right?) | The Aperiodical[Didn't notice the "in order" part.]Edited by Coyote, : Correction

Yes, if the cards can be in any order it changes the odds a lot. Bridge probably has a similar problem to whist in that you have to follow suit where possible and shuffling between hands might not be perfect.

I never said they would be. Indeed specifically said I was doing a different calculation; I wrote: "if fixation is too confusing, let's think about two individuals".But it still gives you an order-of-magnitude estimate of the difference between any given human and any given chimp. Can you find anything wrong with it?(Fixation would, as you point out, not happen to very recent mutations, but it would happen by the elimination of the diversity that existed before the split. It's a different issue.)Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No-one claims that proteins were produced by amino acids being randomly strung together.I notice that you have not shown any working.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.