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Author | Topic: Problems with the first life | |||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 193 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
This gives far too little time for random events to combine simple amino acids to single cell organisms with the exqusite genome which is the basis of all present day life. Aren't you the guy who has been asserting this in all sorts of topics? Or is is just a rash of similar claims? Anyhoe, from Message 1: "Nobody has enough information to calculate any meaningful probability or required time for life to come into existence by chance. Nobody even has enough information to estimate a probability or required time. Not you, not me, not Jonathan Wells, not Jonathan Sarfati, not the late Sir Fred Hoyle, not Henry Morris, not anybody. We just don't know. We do know that life exists, that many key steps in possible ways that life could have come about are themselves possible and pretty likely under the right conditions, and we do not know of any key steps that are impossible or particularly unlikely. So the jury is still out, but none of the evidence we have indicates that it couldn't have happened."
You can statistically rule out random events even over the very short span of some tens of millions of years as sufficient. Please show your calculations.
Unless you want to make liars of Crick and Hoyle among many others. Crick and Hoyle weren't liars; Hoyle was just wrong, and I think you are just minsinterpreting Crick. At least some of the "many others" are liars.
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JonF Member (Idle past 193 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
As for misunderstanding Crick, let me quote him: "Given the weakness of all theories of terrestrial genesis, directed panspermia should be considered a serious possibility" That doesn't even come close to supporting your claim that "You can statistically rule out random events even over the very short span of some tens of millions of years as sufficient." Sure, we should probably consider panspermia, although most people feel that it just pushes the same problem fartehr back. What relevance does that have to calculations of the probability of life arizing?
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JonF Member (Idle past 193 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
The most conservative estimates indicate that random mutations of the chimp genome to that of Homo Sapiens would take some 100 million generations or something on the order of a billion years.
Care to provide a reference? Side bet? I'm taking ReMine.
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JonF Member (Idle past 193 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
The relevance of the quote was to counter your blanket statement that I have misunderstood Crick. Have I? Yes, or perhaps you've misrepresented him. He did not claim that abiogenesis on Earth was impossible, nor did he claim to have any realistic estimate of how probable or improbable it was. An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against. (Francis Crick, Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88) {empahsis added - JonF}
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JonF Member (Idle past 193 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
The most conservative estimates indicate that random mutations of the chimp genome to that of Homo Sapiens would take some 100 million generations or something on the order of a billion years.
Would you explain how these estimates were made? Or provide an accessible source that describes them? Well, one of his references is The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom by Gerald L. Schroeder. Dr. Schroeder is a physicist living in Israel. I haven't read any of his books. He's a day-age creationist with a unique slant; the first day was 8 billion years, the second was 4 billion years, the third was 2 billion years, and so on. It takes some pretty imaginative and convoluted apologetics to make events of the last 15.75 (according to him) billion years into the Biblical description of creation, and of course you have to ignore a few internal contradictions (he says we're in the afternoon of the sixth day, but following his calculations tells us we're about halfway through the fifth day). As far as I've been able to tell there's no evidence for his view; the reason he proposes it is thet he likes it. He has a web site at The Hidden Face Of God: How Science Reveals The Ultimate Truth. He discusses the probability of evolution at Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness. If his calculations in his earlier book are as muddled and founded on misunderstandings as the calculations at that page ... for example:
quote: Note how he totally ignores the factor of selection, and appears to be presenting the probability that abiogenesis is proposed to have occured solely by random assambly of all the proteins involved in a complex modern organism; he probably deserves an award for the stupidest strawman argument of all time. And later:
quote: There is no "eye gene" with 130 sites, nor are there 20 possibilites at each "site" of a gene, nor do all visual systems in all animals have the same combination of amino acids in the genes that control their eyes. He's right that it couldn't have happened by chance, but ...
quote: Which is more misunderstandings compounded with assuming his conclusion. But wait, there's more ...
quote: Yes, the big finish is a totally unrelated non-sequitur!. Predictably, Answers in Genesis doesn't think much of his theories: Gerald Schroeder and his new variation on the ‘Day-Age’ theory. From an online review of his first book, Fitting the Bible to the Data:
quote: All in all, an amusing loon, not to be taken seriously.
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