The Truth About Evolution and Religion

I got the calculation from a textbook used by 65 percent of biology majors in the U.S.:"Each of the four identical polypeptide chains that together make up transthyretin is composed of 127 amino acidsThe primary structure is like the order of letters in a very long word. If left to chance, there would be 20 ¹²⁷ different ways of making a polypeptide chain 127 amino acids long." (page 82 of Biology by Campbell and Reece)Also, I checked out #61 again and it turned out to be a video one hour in length.

Bullshit! That may be, but what does that have to do with evolution? What you are describing is creation ex nihilo, whose probability is indeed abysmally low. Unlike evolution which borders on the inevitable. 1 min = 60 sec
1 hr = 60 min = 3,600 sec
1 dy = 24 hr = 86,400 sec
1 yr = 365.2524 days = 31,557,807.36 sec31.56 million is one-31.687879'th of one billion -- of an American billion; the European billion is 1,000 times greater, so 31.56 million would be one-31,687.879'th of a billion. An American trillion is 1,000 times greater than an American billion and a European trillion 1,000,000 times greater than a European trillion, both of which shows to you be ever further off-track.Instead of spouting bullshit, why not try to speak the truth? There is no such number as a zillion. You can refer here for the real names of numbers: Names of large numbers - Wikipedia . If you had actually calculated that "probability", you would have come up with an actual number, not meaningless jibberish.Please stop trying to bullshit us. Go ahead and provide the quotes from your sources that Dr. Adequate keeps requesting.1 hr = 60 min

And from this, how did you arrive at your figure of 300²⁰?

I made a mistake. I meant 20 to the 300th power.

You are taking two different definitions of entropy and confusing the terms, one relating to thermodynamics and your version which relates to configurations. We'll distinguish them as "Thermodynamic entropy" and "Configurational entropy."Classical entropy, which is thermodynamic entropy, refers to an isolated system as it relates to 2LoT. This doesn't conflict or invalidate natural selection because the principle that entropy can only increase or remain constant when it is applied only to a CLOSED system. Is the Earth a closed system? Whenever a system can exchange heat with its environment, an entropy decrease of that system is entirely compatible with the second law. So since the earth is clearly not a closed system, what does it have to do with your argument? I'll spare the suspense. It doesn't.Your version of entropy relates to configurational entropy, that is, that all things tend towards disorder when left to itself. In a sense you confuse Boltzmann's constant with Claude Shannon's theories on information loss. Though they have similarities in how loss works, they aren't the same thing.So when referring to entropy from now on, you might want to distinguish between the two kinds of entropy. 2LoT and evolution have nothing to do with one another.Information loss and heat/energy loss are similar, but they aren't the same thing. Please stop saying things like evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics because it's just not true. If you want to use the term "entropy" to clarify your point, do so without falsely introducing 2LoT.

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"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from mistaken conviction." — Blaise Pascal

What that video does is show that genetic networks are easily assembled, and in many different ways.This shows that those huge numbers that creationists like to bandy about are meaningless, as that is not the way biological processes work! There's the key, eh? Good thing that with natural selection things aren't just "left to chance."Really, before you go citing those 20¹²⁷ numbers, you should understand what the video is saying.Lest you be like a creationist on another board who insisted that the odds against evolution were 1⁷²⁰.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Along with mutation and a few other mechanisms, yes. Not so much refuted as superseded. When that paper was published there was virtually nothing known about genetic sequences, reliable sequencing techniques only started appearing in the 70's. That said the degenerate nature of the genetic code was already well known, so Salisbury's failing to take that into account is somewhat baffling to me.Currently we know an awful lot about genetic sequences and one of the main things we know is that their function is by no means reliant on unique nucleotide sequences. The same functional modules are reused again and again in different genes. There is clear evidence of widespread duplication at both the individual gene and the whole genome level.As it stands the only thing you could do with Salisbury's argument is make a weak case against a theory of abiogenesis that no-one now subscribes to. I would agree but I would suggest that this greater understanding has shown us that the complexity is not the 'irreducible complexity' that ID proponents suggest but rather the product of a long history of random genetic change and changing environmental pressures which have constrained and favoured certain arrangements over others.One thing developmental biology clearly shows is that nature is a great fan of recycling. There are a few conserved developmental signaling pathways which have roles in the development of eyes, limbs, nerves, muscle and practically everything else. And when we look from the development of a fly to that of a human we see the same factors at play but ramified by gene duplications so where Drosophila have ~7 Wnt genes Humans have around 19.TTFN,WK

So, to recapitulate.On the basis that two people have not performed a calculation to prove some point that you yourself admit that they weren't trying to prove, you apparently conclude that the point that they weren't trying to prove must be false because when they didn't try to prove the point that they weren't trying to prove they didn't perform a calculation that would have proved the point that you say they weren't trying to prove ...Do I wake or sleep?

And of course C & R are right.Again, I would ask you to decide which falsehood you want to advocate. Either pretend that there's nothing but natural selection or pretend that there's nothing but random mutation.But you deny aspects of reality alternately. When you want to ignore natural selection, then you talk about mutation; but when you want to ignore mutation you talk about natural selection.You would look less stupid if you would just pick one lie and stick with it. Sure, you'd be contradicting reality, but at least you wouldn't be contradicting yourself.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Of course, nothing in the passage that you have quoted supports your fantasies or is even relevant to them.

You come across sounding like a Martian.It's as if you understand Martian perfectly, but do not understand a word of English. So as you read these papers in English, you look up your English-Martian dictionary, and attempt to translate each word into Martian. So you successfully translate the words, but you never do get the gist of what is being said.In its own way, it is pretty funny. Reading your posts is a lot funnier than reading the Humor V thread, because you exhibit so much misunderstanding in almost every sentence.There's a tree in my back yard. Its shape is quite complex. So I measure all of the branches, and the points and angles at which they branched off. Then I compute the probability of such a complex branching pattern. It's about one chance in a gazillion. Should I say that the tree could not have grown?The mistake is to think that there is a particular goal, that the tree must branch in a particular way that is immensely improbable. But the tree didn't have to branch that way at all. If, during its growth, it branched differently, it would still be a tree and would still be similarly complex. The probability computation has no actual relevance to the tree being complex. Likewise, your probability computations have no actual relevance to the complexity of the biosphere. The species branching could have occurred in zillions of different ways, and each of those would have resulted in a complex biosphere.

Entropy of the overall system in evolution decreases, too.But that;s the whiole point - for your assertions to have any relevance, you have to show that even localized decreases in entropy are impossible within a larger system.Evolution doesn't violate thermodynamics for the same reason snowflakes don't - their systems are not closed. Life on Earth, you see, is receiving a rather large input of energy from the Sun on a daily basis. This means that the Earth's entropy decreases, even though the total entropy of the entire system that includes the Sun increases.The same thing happens in your own body, you know. If your system were closed, consisting of only your body (with no external energy sources from food, air, or water), your net entropy would increase to the point that life would cease and your body would start to decay. Your stomach acids would begin to digest your gut, your blood would pool and coagulate, etc. Entropy would increase, and your ordered structure would begin to fall into disorder.But your system is not closed. You consume food, breathe air, and drink water to provide energy and mass to keep your body running. Even though the net entropy of the entire system is actually increasing, by respiring you cause your body to temporarily decrease in entropy.Your argument is the same fundamental misunderstanding of what the laws of thermodynamics actually say and how they apply to the real world that we see from Creationists on a near-monthly basis. Your argument follows from a false premise, and therefore your conclusions are false as well.

I'm unaware of any difference between configurational entropy and thermodynamic entropy. You are right that the law of increasing entropy or disorder applies only to a closed system. But a closed system is not a closed system when you consider another system interacting with it. The idea that entropy has nothing to do with evolution conflicts with the following and with common sense:"Considered thermodynamically, the problem of neo-Darwinism is the production of order by random events." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Chance or Law, in Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, The Macmillan Company, 1969, page 76)

But you are talking to him as though he was wrong about thermodynamics because he's studied it and misunderstood it. Obviously he is contemptibly, ridiculously wrong about thermodynamics. But the reason for his error is not that he tried to understand it and was stupid and muddled and confused.The reason that he's talking nonsense about thermodynamics is because he was taught to recite nonsense about thermodynamics by the people who indoctrinated him into reciting creationist lies.He has not achieved the dignity of actually being wrong about thermodynamics, because he has not yet even learned what thermodynamics is. From his point of view he might as well be saying: "Hey presto! Thermodynamico! Evolutiono disappearo!"To him the gibberish that he's learned to recite about thermodynamics is just a bunch of magic words. Even if it did relate to reality, he'd be the last person to know.

This is my understanding of Darwinism. It comes from Campbell and Reece:1)The birth of more individuals than the environment can support leads to a struggle for survival.
2) Individuals whose inherited characteristics fit them best to the environment are likely to leave more offspring than less fit individuals.
3) This unequal ability of individuals to survive and reproduce will lead to a gradual change in a population, with favorable characteristics accumulating over the generations.Random mutations is part of 3). I believe this whole process 1, 2, and 3 is called natural selection. The other two theories are orthogenesis and facilitated variation. Intelligent design is hogwash.