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Author Topic:   The Simplest Protein of Life
dwise1
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Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(6)
Message 5 of 281 (674682)
10-01-2012 2:55 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by BoredomSetsIn
10-01-2012 9:00 AM


Yet another boring presentation of that silly old creationist probability PRATT*.
What you describe, a protein being created by falling together by chance, is descriptive of creation ex nihilo, which most certainly is extremely improbable. Rather, we would expect a protein to have evolved from a predecessor, which is far more probable, approaching inevitable. You are falsely attributing the probability of a creation ex nihilo event to evolution, which is wrong on so many levels.
Also, you falsely claim that every single one of those 124 amino acids positions on that protein are specified for one and only one amino acid. That is not the rule with proteins, as is evidenced by comparing the same protein in different organisms and which differs by several amino acids between species, even by tens of amino acids being different -- indeed, one form of creationist PRATT is to lie about what those comparison studies show. What do inter-species ribonuclease comparisons show?
To do a proper job of creating your probability analysis for creation ex nihilo (since it has nothing to do with evolution) would be to determine the exact requirements. For example, in the notes for their two-model class, Drs Thwaites and Awbrey give the example of a calcium-binding site on a protein. Consisting of 29 amino acid positions, only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids. You would erroneously calculate the probability of that calcium-binding site just falling together ex nihilo as being (1/20)29 (there are 20 amino acids, not 17, so your original calculations were flawed in that respect as well), which would be 1.86e-38. However, because of the variety of amino acids that most of the positions would allow, the ex nihilo probability would actually be 3.05e-12, 26 orders of magnitude greater (ie, more probable). But then, neither calculation has anything to do with evolution, do they?
But then another mistake you made was assuming just one player, just one attempt. You just came up with a probability (which was wrong) for a single event, when actually that single event would be played out many times over, so in reality you would need to come up with the probability that, given a very large number of trials (each attempt is called a "trial"), you would never once have a single success. As it turns out, with enough trials the probability of constant failure becomes vanishingly small.
Let's use poker as an example. With 52 cards, there are 311,875,200 possible 5-card hands, so the probability of getting any one specific hand is 1/311,875,200 = 3.20641e-9. That probability is the same for a specific royal flush and for a specific hand full of nothing. Now, there are many more ways to get a hand full of nothing than there are to get a royal flush, so it is more probable to get a hand full of nothing than to get a royal flush.
Specifically, there are four ways to get a royal flush, so the probability of a royal flush (p) is 1.2825643e-8 and the probability against (q) is 0.999999987. Very unlikely that you would deal a royal flush in one single hand. But get 10,000,000 poker players to deal 100 hands each for a total of one billion hands and the probabilities reverse themselves such that p becomes 0.9999973 (very near dead certainty) while q becomes 2.6908776e-6 (very unlikely) -- it's around 50 million hands where the odds become 50/50.
Similarly, in your creation ex nihilo scenario of ribonuclease spontaneously forming, there would not be just one single trial, but rather a very large number of trials going on all around the single event you were dealing with. Assuming that proteins would form as you describe (they would not, though proteinoids, AKA "thermal proteins" as per Sidney Fox's research, would), then with all those other trials going on in parallel the probability that every single one would fail becomes smaller and smaller.
Which brings us to yet another of your many mistakes. I've just been dealt a hand. What is the probability of my having been dealt that particular hand? 3.20641e-9? No, the probability is 1.0, dead certainty. It is a fixed point in time; it has already happened. Nothing can possibly change the fact that that is the hand that I had just been dealt. Now, what is the probability that I will be dealt the exact same hand again? Now that would be 3.20641e-9.
IOW, it is meaningless to build a probability argument based on what has already happened. Because the probability of something that has already happened is and will always be 1.0, dead certainty.
That was all just scratching the surface of what's wrong with your claim.
And just out of curiosity, did you yourself perform those "calculations"? Or did you just simply crib it from another creationist? Would you care to reveal your source?
For further reading, you may read two of my pages: The "Random" Proteins Argument and The Bullfrog Affair. And as an example of calculating probabilities: MONKEY PROBABILITIES (MPROBS), a companion page to my own version of Dawkins' WEASEL, MONKEY.

* FOOTNOTE:
PRATT = "Point Refuted A Thousand Times", though that number is a gross underestimate. Creationist arguments consist primarily and often times entirely of false claims that have been addressed and refuted many times before, many of them decades ago. But creationists are still being fed those same old false claims and they keep presenting them as if they were actually worth something and we keep on repeating the same refutation over and over again. One person has described it as "slaying the dead." It doesn't matter how many times you tell your lies, they still will never be true. Goebbels was wrong.
Edited by dwise1, : Corrected two links

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by BoredomSetsIn, posted 10-01-2012 9:00 AM BoredomSetsIn has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 6 by BoredomSetsIn, posted 10-02-2012 6:33 AM dwise1 has replied
 Message 29 by Alfred Maddenstein, posted 10-07-2012 11:28 AM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(4)
Message 16 of 281 (674782)
10-02-2012 9:40 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by BoredomSetsIn
10-02-2012 6:33 AM


When did I ever say this has to do with evolution??
I have been studying "creation science" since 1981 and discussing it since about 1985, so I have about 30 years experience. During that time, I have seen creationists try all kinds of thoroughly dishonest and deceitful tricks, including outright and blatant lies. One of the sickest deceptions that I've seen a number of creationists attempt has been to vehemently deny the obvious, including vehemently denying that they're creationists or even Christians, though they usually drop that pretense within a few posts. Not that they ever fooled anyone, since what they had written had made it blatantly obvious what they were and what they meant. Needless to say, such outrageous conduct only serves to drive our opinion of creationists and of many Christians even lower.
I'm not lumping you in with those low-lifes, but my decades of experience inform me to not accept your claim at face value; I'll wait and see. The dead turkey you dropped in our laps is an old creationist canard. We know only too well how that script plays: Starting from my totally mistaken idea of how evolution works, I dream up a probability of that mistaken idea of evolution working that is so abysmally low that I can then "prove" that evolution is impossible and there must be a creator. Everybody here can see your post for what it really is. If you honestly believe that it has nothing to do with evolution, then you have succeeded in deceiving yourself.
And now in your reply, you come out and say:
Yes, but we are talking about the chances of it forming, with out a creator.
Just like with those sickest of creationist liars, which riases my suspicions about you.
And speaking of evolving...
DWise1 writes:
Rather, we would expect a protein to have evolved from a predecessor, which is far more probable, approaching inevitable.
I was unaware proteins could evolve
Yes, they do. But since you want to play the stupid rhetorical game of hyper-specificity, then to state it far more explicitly:
quote:
As species evolve, their genetic code changes through various mechanisms, including mutation. The only kind of mutation that has any relevance to evolution are genetic mutations, specifically genetic mutations in germ cells, AKA "gametes", eg sperm and ova. The types of these genetic mutations are small in number and involve mainly base substitution, base addition or deletion, duplication, and transposition.
Base substitution in particular can often result in different codons which in turn can often result in a different amino acid being substituted into the sequence of the protein specified by that mutated gene. Since a large number, if not most, positions in protein sequences can accept a number of different amino acids, or any amino acid, such substitutions do not affect the functioning of the protein and hence cause no selective pressure; they are deemed "neutral". Scientists have used the rate at which these neutral mutations can accumulate as a kind of "molecular clock", but that "clock" can be thrown off if a mutation is subject to selection as in the case of lysozyme rapidly evolving into alpha-lactalbumin. But regardless, comparing different species' protein sequences can reveal how closely or distantly related to each other those species are.
As you can see, "we would expect a protein to have evolved" is a much more concise way to say exactly the same thing.
...and of course something the human eye has never witnessed is inevitable.
Look at what I said in Message 5:
DWise1 writes:
What you describe, a protein being created by falling together by chance, is descriptive of creation ex nihilo, which most certainly is extremely improbable. Rather, we would expect a protein to have evolved from a predecessor, which is far more probable, approaching inevitable.
Your abortive creation ex nihilo method of the entire protein just falling together is extremely improbable, because it uses single-step selection which requires that the entire process must always start all over again from scratch each time it fails. That is why you need a creator to make it work. But evolution instead uses cumulative selection, in which you don't start from scratch every time, but rather from your last position. Evolution is the result of life doing what life naturally does. Cumulative selection is compatible and even descriptive of what life does, whereas your single-step selection has nothing to do with what life does. With single-step selection, it's almost impossible to succeed, whereas with cumulative selection it's almost impossible to fail.
Again, read my page, MONKEY PROBABILITIES (MPROBS), for an analysis of the probabilities of both single-step and cumulative selection, which are discussed on my MONKEY page.
DWise1 writes:
Also, you falsely claim that every single one of those 124 amino acids positions on that protein are specified for one and only one amino acid.
I never said that. Read carefully. The other versions don't matter right now.
I did read it carefully. You did indeed specify specific amino acids to each position. Read what you yourself had written and this time read it carefully:
It is made from 124 amino acids, the first one in the strand being Lysine. There are 17 different amino acids in this protein, so to simplify it, lets say that there is a 1/17 chance of Lysine coming first. The second one in line, is Glutamic acid. The odds of it coming second are 1/289. Then comes Threonine. Chances of it coming 3rd are 1/4913. If we continue down the list, the end result is 1 followed by 552 zeroes.
Now even you should be able to see clearly that you did indeed specify a specific amino acid to each and every one of the 124 positions in that protein. How could you even begin to think that you could deny such an obvious fact?
Actually, there are 24 amino acids.
No, rather there are about 500 known amino acids, but only 22 are proteinogenic. And of those 22, only twenty (20) are used by humans and other eukaryotes in creating proteins. From Wikipedia's Amino Acid:
quote:
About 500 amino acids are known which can be classified in many ways. . . .
Amino acids having both the amine and carboxylic acid groups attached to the first, or alpha, carbon atom have particular importance in biochemistry. They are known as 2-, alpha-, or a-amino acids (generic formula H2NCHRCOOH in most cases where R is an organic substituent known as a "side-chain"); often the term "amino acid" is used to refer specifically to these. They include the 22 proteinogenic ("protein building") amino acids which combine into peptide chains ("polypeptides") to form the building blocks of a vast array of proteins. These are all L-stereoisomers (left handed isomers) although a few D-amino acids (right handed) occur in bacterial envelopes and some antibiotics. 20 of the 22 proteinogenic amino acids are known as "standard" amino acids-those found in human beings and other eukaryotes, and which are encoded directly within the universal genetic code. The 2 exceptions are the "non-standard" or "non-canonical" pyrrolysine found only in some methanogenic organisms but not humans and selenocysteine; both of these are encoded via variant codons signaled by mRNA instead.
DWise1 writes:
IOW, it is meaningless to build a probability argument based on what has already happened. Because the probability of something that has already happened is and will always be 1.0, dead certainty.
Yes, but we are talking about the chances of it forming, with out a creator. So, since we are talking about an unconfirmed theory, I believe its fine to talk about the chances of something happening like this.
So, you present a creation ex nihilo scenario and come up with a calculation that shows it to be extremely improbable to have happened without a creator. And that is correct. But if you then introduce a creator, what are the probabilities then? And what does this prove except that in a creation ex nihilo scenario you would need something to interject and make things happen. So what?
You left out a third scenario, that it had evolved. Now that would involve a completely different mechanism for protein formation than you had presented (ie, the way that life actually does it) and with it a completely different set of probabilities.
And to answer you question, I did some of the calculations. The rest I got out of my biology book. But give me a break, I'm in grade 9.
First, nobody here gets any slack cut them, Captain Walker! If you want to try to run with the big dogs, then you need to be able to keep up on your own. Besides, there's the suspicion you've raised.
And BTW, your calculation is off. The entire probability should be (1/17)124, which comes out to be 2.6566463724254902266033244604965e-153, or 1 to 3.7641441871204352510844975399203e+152, hundreds of orders of magnitude higher than you had come up with. Could you please show some of your work on that? Or if that's not the part you had done, then provide your source.
{ABE}
PS
For that matter, did your probability argument come from your "textbook"? What is the title of your textbook and who are the authors? And what kind of school are you in?
Edited by dwise1, : PS

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by BoredomSetsIn, posted 10-02-2012 6:33 AM BoredomSetsIn has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 22 by zaius137, posted 10-04-2012 2:47 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 18 of 281 (674859)
10-03-2012 3:08 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by BoredomSetsIn
10-02-2012 6:33 AM


A Correction
BoredomSetsIn:
I need to point out an error in my first reply, Message 5, in which I miscalculated the probability of drawing a specific poker hand:
DWise1 writes:
Specifically, there are four ways to get a royal flush, so the probability of a royal flush (p) is 1.2825643e-8 and the probability against (q) is 0.999999987. Very unlikely that you would deal a royal flush in one single hand. But get 10,000,000 poker players to deal 100 hands each for a total of one billion hands and the probabilities reverse themselves such that p becomes 0.9999973 (very near dead certainty) while q becomes 2.6908776e-6 (very unlikely) -- it's around 50 million hands where the odds become 50/50.
I had arrived at a probability that was 120 times lower than it should be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinations:
quote:
In mathematics a combination is a way of selecting several things out of a larger group, where (unlike permutations) order does not matter.
The formulae for combinations and permutations of n items taken k at a time are:
quote:
C(n,k) = n! / ( k! (n-k)! )
P(n,k) = n! /(n-k)!
My approach to calculating the probability of drawing a specific poker hand was to multiply the joint probabilities of drawing those specific cards: 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50 x 1/49 x 1/48 = 1/311,875,200.
The error I made in that calculation was that I was implicitly specifying the order in which those 5 cards were dealt, whereas order should not matter. IOW, I had calculated the permutation whereas I actually needed the combination. Since there are 5!=120 ways to order 5 cards, it turns out that the probability of getting one specific hand is 120 times greater than I had calculated:
120/311,875,200 = 1/2,598,960 = 3.8477e-7.
Now to rewrite that paragraph and add a table of probabilities:
quote:
Specifically, there are four ways to get a royal flush, so the probability of a royal flush (p) is 1.539e-6 and the probability against (q) is 0.99999846. Very unlikely that you would deal a royal flush in one single hand. But get 30,000 poker players to deal 100 hands each for a total of three million hands and the probabilities reverse themselves such that p becomes 0.9901199239 (very near dead certainty) while q becomes 0.00988007614 (rather highly unlikely) -- it's just around 450,000 hands where the odds become 50/50.

Num Hands p q
1,000 0.0015378946 0.99846210542
10,000 0.0152729507 0.98472704928
100,000 0.1426489652 0.85735103481
450,000 0.4997189604 0.50028103965
1,000,000 0.7854212239 0.21457877605
2,000,000 0.9539559489 0.04604405113
3,000,000 0.9901199239 0.00988007614

Just thought that as a student you should see what kinds of mistakes can be made in setting up a problem and that when we make a mistake we need to correct it. Hiding a mistake is called "covering it up". Cover-ups are not good; it was President Nixon's involvement in the cover-up of a crime that had led to his resignation.
And OBTW, we have this part of your claim in Message 1:
BoredomSetsIn writes:
If we continue down the list, the end result is 1 followed by 552 zeroes. To put that in perspective, It's the same as a poker player drawing 19 royal flushes in a row, with out trading in any cards.
The probability of drawing a royal flush is 1.539e-6, so the probability of drawing it 19 times in a row is (1.539e-6)19, which is 3.610e-111. Which is 3.610e+441 times more probable than your purported probability of 10-552, which in turn is wrong by a factor of 2.656646e+399 -- it should have been 2.656646e-153.
Just exactly where did you get that claim from?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by BoredomSetsIn, posted 10-02-2012 6:33 AM BoredomSetsIn has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(2)
Message 24 of 281 (674955)
10-04-2012 3:12 PM
Reply to: Message 22 by zaius137
10-04-2012 2:47 AM


... forming a protein ex nihilo (I do not like this term but it seems you do) ...
The reason why I apply that term to the scenario of a modern protein forming by amino acids spontaneously linking up is because what such a scenario describes is indeed a creation ex nihilo scenario.
Furthermore, it is a purely speculative scenario that does not exist in reality. In the real world, proteins are formed within the tissues of organisms with great regularity through mechanisms that are fairly well understood by scientists and educated normals, but apparently not by creationists who keep coming up with these imaginary probability arguments. Only somebody who is ignorant, or is an idiot, or is a dogma-blinded orangutan (who is jealous of the chimpanzees who dare to do real science), or is a liar intent on deceiving others would for one moment believe that modern proteins are formed by amino acids spontaneously linking up out of pure chance.
Please note that most creationists are rank-and-file followers and so would be grouped among the ignorant and the dogma-blinded, the latter group including the delusional, the self-delusional, and the willfully ignorant. It is the creationists who know how proteins actually form and yet who concoct and disseminate these ludicrous probability claims who are the liars, though that would not exclude them from being dogma-blinded. Even though most of those lies are spread by the rank-and-file who believe them to be true, that does not make them any less a lie; all that does is allow for moral judgements that the creationist spreading the lie while believing it to be true is not guilty of lying, even though the lie has the same effect and consequences regardless of whether the one spreading it believes it to be true or knows it to be a lie.
Now, there are many instances in nature of amino acids spontaneously linking up to form peptide chains, but that is still not how modern proteins form. So this kind of creationist probability argument is still based on ludicrously false premises and is still meaningless.
For example, the probability of drawing 19 royal flushes in a row.
DWise1 writes:
The probability of drawing a royal flush is 1.539e-6, so the probability of drawing it 19 times in a row is (1.539e-6)19, which is 3.610e-111.
From the wiki it clearly states:
quote:
The following enumerates the (absolute) frequency of each hand, given all combinations of 5 cards randomly drawn from a full deck of 52 without replacement. 649,739:1
Raise this to the 19th power you get 2.767195 e^110:1.
First, what wiki? Just exactly where did you pull that quote from, a netherly bodily orifice? If you are going to provide a quote, then also provide a reference to the source!
Second, why are you trying to call my probability calculation into question? For what purpose?
Now, hopefully you should know that probabilities are given within the range of 0 to 1, inclusive, with 0 being impossibility and 1 being dead certainty. Therefore, they are given as decimal fractions, though they could also be expressed as an equivalent percentage. The notation of n:1 translates to 1/n .
2.767195e+110:1 -> 1/2.767195e+110 = 3.613768e-111.
Which is the same as my result, 3.610e-111 (SRA). So what point were you trying to make? Or didn't you even both to do the math?
Also, 2.767195 e^110 says "2.767195 times the natural exponent raised to the 110th power." Just how did the natural exponent get involved in this? Or do you not understand standard computerized scientific notation?
Applying a little perspective, you get the following scenario.
The universe is estimated to contain ~1080 atoms. To pick an exact single atom say that was labeled ahead of time (marked in some way) a single first choice would be 1080:1. However, the probability of your choice is ~ 10100:1, trillions and trillions of times less. So where is that atom? Is it in the computer screen in front of you or in one of the trillions of co-universes out there somewhere floating around an unnamed nebula?
Well, that certainly was meaningless. Here's another scenario you might consider, a much more realistic one, though it would be very difficult to calculate the exact probabilities.
As is true for everybody (with their own respective parents, of course), your personal genome is the amalgamation of randomly formed halves of your two biological parents' own genomes. What is the probability of that particular spermazon fusing with that particular ovum? For that matter, what is the probability of your parents even having happened to meet and mate? And what is the probability of your having come to term and been born without a mishap during delivery? And of your surviving infancy and childhood and the rest of life up to this point in time? All of those are joint independent probabilities, so they all get multiplied together. That probability is pretty low, isn't it?
Well then, now apply the same to both your parents and to their parents and to their parents going further and further back through generation after countless generation back over 10's and 100's of thousands of years and much, much more. Each and every one of those events (that particular fusion of two half genomes followed by survival in order to spawn the next generation) had to have happened. If any single event in that long, long chain that led to you did not happen, then neither would you have and you would not exist.
For example, my great-great-grandfather came from Baden, Germany, and my great-great-grandmother from Ireland. Somehow they met and married in Missouri. What were the odds of that happening? They settled in Lawrence, Kansas. On 21 Aug 1863, while he was holding his two-year-old son, my great-great-grandfather was shot through the heart by one of Quantrill's raiders and the same bullet struck the boy in the head. Both were laid in the pile of dead from that raid, but in the night guards heard the child crying and found that instead of having been killed he had only been grazed. That boy lived to become my great-grandfather. If that bullet had been aimed a fraction of an inch to the side, that boy would have died and I would not exist.
And yet, despite the extremely low probability of it, we both do exist, as do billions of other people and as had all the generations that had come before. And the same applies to all wild populations of plant and animal. With such extremely low probability of having come about, this is exactly how the world has turned out to be.
Now, this is an example of calculating the probability for an event that has already happened, which is in turn an example of The Sharpshooter Fallacy that Taq pointed out in Message 4. So it's not just a matter of coming up with probabilities, but rather also about understanding the context and therefore what those probabilities mean. Coming up with impressively large numbers devoid of meaning to impress an ignorant audience is a form of deception; eg, Kent Hovind's deliberately deceptive solar-mass-loss claim.
Secondly, you minimize the replacing of a single amino acid in a protein. Did you know that a protein exhibits four critical organizations by changing a single amino acid you may not significantly change one organization but will certainly alter one of the other critical organizations.
And yet we have compiled extensive libraries of proteins' amino-acid sequences gathered from many different species. And with those sequences we can compare the same protein from different species and we can see the differences in those sequences. And there are a lot of differences. Depending on the protein in question, the count can easily range between 10 and 20. For example, in Walter Brown's deliberate deception about a rattlesnake protein comparison, using the data from a comparison study by Margaret Dayhoff which compared cytochrome c, consisting of 100 to 104 amino acids, between 47 organisms, humans and rattlesnakes differed by 14 amino acids and humans and macque monkeys by one amino acid; in a later study, human and chimpanzee cytochrome c were found to be identical -- because the study had included no other snakes, all the other species were as distant from the rattlesnake as were humans, but because the others had slightly more differences Brown claimed that humans and rattlesnakes were more closely related, though he had to ignore the macque. If you insist that changing a single amino acid would radically change the protein into something else, then how do you explain the same protein having so many different amino acids and yet still remaining the same protein?
Now, of course, if an amino acid substitution caused a protein to become a different protein, then that would not have been a neutral mutation, right? I do not see where I had said anything different than that. So what's your point?
You further assert.
DWise1 writes:
No, rather there are about 500 known amino acids, but only 22 are proteinogenic. And of those 22, only twenty (20) are used by humans and other eukaryotes in creating proteins. From Wikipedia's Amino Acid:
But the fact that life does not favor the rest of the amino acids does not say that they will not form peptides and poly peptides even with the 20 present in life.
At no point did I ever say that the other amino acids will not form peptides. But then not all peptides are proteins, now are they? Rather, only 22 amino acids are used to form proteins and only twenty, termed "standard proteinogenic", are used by eukaryotes to form proteins. We are, after all, talking about forming proteins rather than just any old peptide, and for that matter we are talking specifically about eukaryote proteins, so only the twenty standard proteinogenic amino acids need be considered when we are talking about eukaryote proteins. Right? And if you disagree with that simple concept, then explain exactly why you disagree!
Still they must be considered in a random chance for assembly. That would force the probability to take the form (1/500^n). Any calculation of a random forming poly peptide would start with (1/500)n. Unless you remove all the other naturally forming amino acids from the flask in the lab before you start you experiment. Wait that is an intervention by an intelligent being.
Only if you concoct an imaginary contrary-to-fact creation ex-nihilo scenario for the formation of modern proteins. Which is a ludicrous evolution. Yet again, that is not how proteins form!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 22 by zaius137, posted 10-04-2012 2:47 AM zaius137 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 25 by Dr Adequate, posted 10-04-2012 4:14 PM dwise1 has not replied
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(1)
Message 81 of 281 (675786)
10-15-2012 9:29 PM
Reply to: Message 78 by PaulK
10-15-2012 5:52 PM


Did anyone else notice that the calculation in the OP was horribly wrong ? 17 ^ 124 isn't anywhere near 10 ^ 552 - and anyone who does even a rough check can easily see that. (100 ^ 124 is "only" 10 ^ 248 !)
The correct figure is of the order of 10 ^ 152, a difference of 400 orders of magnitude.
Yes, in Message 16 in reply to the OP:
DWise1 writes:
And BTW, your calculation is off. The entire probability should be (1/17)124, which comes out to be 2.6566463724254902266033244604965e-153, or 1 to 3.7641441871204352510844975399203e+152, hundreds of orders of magnitude higher than you had come up with. Could you please show some of your work on that? Or if that's not the part you had done, then provide your source.
{ABE}
PS
For that matter, did your probability argument come from your "textbook"? What is the title of your textbook and who are the authors? And what kind of school are you in?
Not only did the OP and his supporters here fail by using false premises and a false model, but at the very least he should have tried to get the calculations right. With Windows' calc in Scientific View or whatever Apple and Linux offer, there's just no excuse for failure to do basic number crunching.
And no answer to those questions either. I suspect that the OP was yet another "post to an evil-ution forum" homework assignment. Hopefully he learned something, doubtful though that may be.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 78 by PaulK, posted 10-15-2012 5:52 PM PaulK has not replied

  
dwise1
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Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(2)
Message 231 of 281 (676525)
10-23-2012 2:54 PM
Reply to: Message 229 by ICANT
10-23-2012 11:25 AM


Re: Anything to say about the topic?
RIDICULOUSLY UNLIKELY
Percy writes:
It certainly didn't happen anything like the opening post suggests, with all the amino acids coming together in the correct order by chance because that would be incredibly unlikely.
INCREDIBLY UNLIKELY
It seems you agree 100% with BoredomSetsIn.
I also agree.
{sigh} You still do not understand.
I have a pencil on my desk next to me. How did it come into being and what is the probability of that? Somebody opens the discussion by claiming to have calculated the probability that some free energy spontaneously coalesced into matter consisting of just the right elements and compounds and in just the right shape to form that pencil and he found that event to be extremely improbable. Everybody agrees that that kind of event is extremely improbable. However, the OP of that discussion strongly implies that we on the side of science believe that that is how pencils come into existence and we inform him that his assumption that we do is highly incorrect. Then others who feel themselves to be on his side start chipping in insisting that we on the side of science do indeed believe that the OP's assumption of what we think is correct and we have to informed as well that that assumption is highly incorrect. But they keep deafening themselves to the truth and maintain their false assumption regardless of how many times we have to repeat that they are wrong.
ICANT, open your eyes and engage your brain. The OP of this topic started with the assumption that we think that modern proteins first came into existence through the spontaneous and random self-assembly of amino acids. No, we do not think anything like that! What part of that are you incapable of understanding? Yes, such an event as he described would indeed be very improbable, but such an event has nothing to do with anything.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 229 by ICANT, posted 10-23-2012 11:25 AM ICANT has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 278 of 281 (725249)
04-25-2014 1:49 AM
Reply to: Message 268 by Ed67
04-24-2014 11:43 AM


Re: One Fell Swoop? Why not?
It's the FAITH STATEMENT that 'everything came about by some form of evolutionary process' that blinds Darwinists to the possibility of life being created in 'one fell swoop'.
There is a very huge difference between a protein having evolved and having it "created in 'one fell swoop'." For one thing, no modern protein ever gets "created in 'one fell swoop'", but rather it is produced by natural biological processes. Evolution examines what life clearly does as we have directly observed over multiple generations. We have observed organisms producing modern proteins, whereas we have never seen modern proteins being "created in 'one fell swoop'". Evolution deals with what actually happens, whereas your model of a modern protein being "created in 'one fell swoop'" simply does not happen.
Furthermore, the probability calculations for the two models are completely different and produce completely different results. The methods of selection are called "single-step selection" and "cumulative selection" and are presented and discussed in Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. In the third chapter he presents his WEASEL program that tests cumulative selection. While he does not present the code (it was in BASIC), I wrote my own example based on his description -- others have described mine as the most faithful implementation of what Dawkins described -- which I called MONKEY; see my web page, MONKEY.
Your "created in 'one fell swoop'" model uses single-step selection in which you try to get the result you want in one single step and when that fails you start over completely from scratch. The probability of this succeeding is so small that if you made a million trials per second, it would take about 195 trillion years to have one chance in a million of succeeding. The age of the universe is only about 13 billion years, so it would take about 10,000 times the age of the universe for single-step selection to have one chance in a million of working. Truly abysmal. The only way for single-step selection to work would be supernatural intervention.
But that is not how life works and evolution describes and depends on how life actually works. Evolution uses cumulative selection, in which several copies (AKA "offspring") are generated which are very much like, though slightly different from, their parents. Then the best of those copies are used to generate the next generation of copies. Instead of always starting from scratch, each generation uses its parents as the new starting point. Depending on various factors, this method succeeds within minutes and even seconds.
I performed a mathematical analysis of the two processes, which my MONKEY page links to (MONKEY PROBABILITIES (MPROBS):). With cumulative selection, the only way for it to fail is for each and every copy of each and every generation to fail to advance towards the goal. It turns out that the probability of failure with cumulative selection becomes extremely low, such that success becomes virtually inevitable.
Of course, if you had bothered to review the responses to BoredomSetsIn's OP, then you would have already learned all that. Instead, you ignored the content of the thread and ended up making the same stupid mistakes that BoredomSetsIn had made. While it is important to be able to learn from our own mistakes, it is far more important to learn from other people's mistakes. You missed your chance.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 268 by Ed67, posted 04-24-2014 11:43 AM Ed67 has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 280 by Pressie, posted 04-25-2014 3:56 AM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 279 of 281 (725250)
04-25-2014 2:02 AM
Reply to: Message 263 by Ed67
04-24-2014 11:16 AM


Re: God of the Gaps Fallacy
And the whining "God of the Gaps" is not an argument. It shows that you have been presented with a situation that can best be explained by positing a creator. When Darwinists have no response, they whine "You used God-Of-The-Gaps".
No, that is not what "God of the Gaps" is. You really do need to know what "God of the Gaps" is, because that is what ID and most of "creation science" based themselves on.
When you don't know something, Wikipedia is a good place to start researching it. At God of the gaps:
quote:
God of the gaps is a type of theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The term was invented by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to point out the fallacy of relying on teleological arguments for God's existence. Some use the phrase to refer to a form of the argument from ignorance fallacy.
Invariably, ID arguments boil down to: "Here is an unanswerable question. Science cannot answer it. Therefore that proves God."
Read up on "God of the Gaps" on Wikipedia. Also read a couple essays by a Christian and a physicist: Science and Christian Apologetics and What Does "God of the Gaps" Mean? -- an index of his writings are at Writings of Allan H. Harvey. Knowledge always works so much better than ignorance does.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 263 by Ed67, posted 04-24-2014 11:16 AM Ed67 has not replied

  
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