Evolving the Musculoskeletal System

No, he's not. The first life didn't do protein-based chemistry.

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That is, the chance of life occurring by natural processes is 1 in 10 followed by 1018 zeros.

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Koonin didn't write this; this is editorializing from whatever source you're copying from.This is why you should rely on primary sources, IC; because you frequently mistake editorializing in the secondary source for material in the primary source.

Ok, this paper is in Biology Direct, thanks. The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life - PubMed

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The "many worlds in one" (hereinafter MWO) model makes the startling prediction that all macroscopic, "coarse-grain" histories of events that are not forbidden by conservation laws of physics have realized (or will realize) somewhere in the infinite universe, and not just once but an infinite number of times [1,2].

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I don't see a lot of support in this paper for your position, frankly. What Koonin is saying here is not that life is improbable, it's that life is inevitable under the widely-held cosmological assumption of eternal inflation and deflation.

Right, and according to Koonin, because the probability is not zero, it will inevitably happen an infinite number of times in an eternally inflating and deflating universe.Koonin's paper, in other words, reaches the exact opposite conclusion as you portray.

Look, it's not me, it's Koonin. It's a direct quote from the paper you cited approvingly.You did read the paper, didn't you?

This paper does not present a "chance of life", it presents a chance of protein-based life occurring spontaneously, which basically nobody is saying happened except Koonin.And Koonin believes that despite being so unlikely, it happened an infinite number of times. Are you so sure you want to hang your hat on this Koonin paper? Think carefully.

Organisms increase the entropy in a chemical system to produce the energy they need to live.

Photosynthesis is hard. It takes a fairly complex series of enzymes and specialized organelles. The first living things engaged in incredibly simple metabolic chemistry because those reactions are a lot easier to catalyze and mediate with simple enzymes or ribozymes. The first "foods" were probably easily-reduced hydrogen compounds, like hydrogen sulfide.Photosynthesis emerged as a way not only to exploit the energy of the sun, but to exploit the capacity of water to act as the electron donor in the redox chemistry living things exploit for energy. (A redox reaction requires an electron donor (reducer) and an electron receptor (oxidizer)).

Thermodynamic entropy isn't the only entropy that exists. This is an example of information entropy.

Because that's how it happened. Do you have a refutation of that position or not? Could you explain why you find natural selection an unsatisfying answer?Talking to you is akin to talking to a very small child. Imagine that I showed you a videotape of 10 random people from off the street. I explained that I had a miracle ten-minute basketball training regimen that would train anyone at all to have perfect shot accuracy, and then I showed you the tape - 10 people randomly selected off the street, a shot of them flipping through my book (available on Amazon!), and then the amazing part - the rest of the videotape is each one of those 10 people making a dozen three-point shots each, with no missing."How does it work!" you would exclaim! "How can Crash's method result in such incredible gains of accuracy?!" And then, during the fraud prosecution, I would be forced to admit that I merely had each person shoot from the three point line a hundred times each, and I just edited out all the misses. You don't see them missing on the record because I selected that part of the record out and destroyed it.And you would reply "But that doesn't explain their incredible accuracy! I mean they hit every shot they made! I saw it!" When you say that a perfectly explanitory response is not "satisfying", the rest of us can only conclude that it is because you literally did not understand it.And, of course, you're on the record that the best way to understand science is to not understand anything at all about it, so naturally you won't ask questions designed to increase your understanding. Why you continue to allow yourself to be the person who knows the least in these discussions is a mystery to me. It's one thing to bring a knife to a gunfight. It's quite another to do so because you think knives always beat guns.

The grip of a screwdriver can be used to crack open nuts by banging them really hard. It has the function, in other words, of opening nuts.Is the intentional purpose of screwdrivers to open nuts? No? If things can have unintentional function, how do we tell the difference between intentional and unintentional functions?Be specific.

Haven't we talked about this before? If it's such an "intelligent system" why is the retina in backwards? Why is there a blind spot? Why are some people colorblind or nearsighted?The lens in my eye focuses the image about 1-2 mm short of resolution on my retinas, necessitating prescription eyewear for me to see much further than about two meters. Is that the "intelligent design" you're referring to?As I recall, your reply was that the eye must be "intelligently designed" because you don't have to stand on your head to see things the right way. That's a pretty low bar, don't you think, for intelligent design by the smartest being in the universe? Really? Pope John Paul II was an atheist? Natural selection doesn't have to "determine" anything - mutations that are detrimental to survival select against themselves by definition. To not survive means to die before reproducing. Nobody has to "select" against organisms that don't survive; they're already dead, they're already selected against. When a fox is able to catch the slower rabbit, nothing else has to happen for the mutations that contributed to the rabbit's capture to be selected against - it's already happened, the rabbit is dead.

Is it possible then for computers to simulate anything?Are computer programs that simulate weather actually simulating "intelligent raining"? Can you explain why you believe that all attempts to simulate anything on computers are doomed to fail? Maybe you could go through the code of some of these simulations and show me where they utterly fail to actually be simulations.Your notion that computer simulations are utterly impossible is not widely shared, particularly not in the field (some thousand researchers strong) of computer simulations.

How would you take your intelligence out of the equation, you mean? Well, here's how I would do it - I would base the initial conditions and parameters of the simulation on as few of my decisions as possible, preferably duplicating whatever constraints existed in reality. For instance, if I was simulating the interactions of atoms and needed to specify the atomic weight of hydrogen, I would simply put in the actual weight of hydrogen instead of making any kind of decision on my own about how much virtual hydrogen should weigh.And then I would further remove my own intelligence from the equation by having the simulation run unattended, autonomously, without asking me for any further decisions or input.The purpose of these simulations, indeed of any simulation, is to simulate natural processes without any intelligent intervention whatsoever. Can you identify the precise step where the computer programmers failed at this goal? Maybe you could identify the bugs in their code that resulted in their simulation being, against their intentions, a simulation of intelligent intervention in antenna design?

Why would they be "unexplainable"? Evolution of skeletons would be the explanation, and we see those elements in the evolution of the lower chordates, for whom fossils are quite abundant.We don't see those hard spots in living creatures now because that evolution already happened. Organisms already have skeletons. Why would they evolve again? Well, no, it doesn't. For instance insects have an open circulatory system with no vessels ("pipelines") at all, just a blood/lymph substance that sloshes over body tissues and is circulated by an open heart. The next step up from that is a small number of vessels to direct blood out of the heart to the lungs and then out of the lungs into the body cavity, which we see in a number of organisms; then a semi-closed circulatory system where fresh and stale blood is allowed to mix within the heart, like birds have; then finally a fully closed system that segregates stale blood going to the lungs from fresh blood headed out to the body. Most of the life on Earth has no circulatory system at all, and you're asking us how life could be possible with a simpler form of heart? Jesus, your ignorance is truly unsurpassed. Why don't you ask a tree how it can survive without a heart? Why don't you ask a bacteria how it can survive with no blood or blood vessels? You certainly evince all of the intellectual maturity and biological knowledge of a child. But biology is complicated and it needs to be done by adults.

I guess I wasn't very clear. I was assuming that my remarks would be read in the context of IC's argument, which is that if skeletons evolved, then every species with a skeleton should contain individuals who have less-evolved skeletons. Remember? He keeps asking why, if the human skeleton evolved piece by piece over millions of years, why we don't see humans with piecemeal skeletons.And the answer is because they've already evolved skeletons; every human being inherits the genes for a fully-evolved skeleton from their parents. No human being has to evolve their own skeleton, they already have a fully-evolved one that they inherited.ICDesign has this notion that evolution is a kind of slow change that happens in individuals, where a fish grows legs and lungs and takes a step onto land. Of course, he looks around and doesn't see any of this happening at all, so naturally he doesn't believe in "evolution." He sees individuals growing into static adult forms and then not changing at all.We keep trying to tell him that evolution is something that happens to populations, not to individuals, but ICDesign believes that learning things is not a good way to understand things, he believes that knowing the least about a scientific field puts you in the best position to assess its merit. So, naturally, we will be unable to convince him that evolution is not a slow change that happens to individuals, it's a slow change that happens to populations of individuals as a result of how individuals are born different from each other.ICDesign is determined to be the person who knows the least about biology in these conversations because he believes that's the best way to judge conclusions in the field of biology. Of course, somehow I doubt he goes to doctors who have yet to attend medical school, or has his car maintenance done by people who have never in their lives seen automobiles. For some reason it's only science where ICDesign believes that the best way to know what's true is to know nothing at all.