Evolutionists improbable becoming probable argument

I know more than you. I totally agree that the longer a sequence is the less probable any single sequence is. But we aren't talking about any specific sequence. We are talking about functional sequences. If we saw that existing books fit into a nested hierarchy we would suspect that they share a common ancestor. We could also watch books reproduce, and see what pattern of substitutions occur in each generation.We could then compare the observed pattern of substitution to the differences between the different books to see if the differences between the letters is consistent with the observed pattern (such as transitions outnumbering transversions).We could look to see if there are parasitic books that randomly insert their short texts into much larger books and see if we find the same insertions at the same position in many different books which would indicate a single insertion in a common ancestor.We could compare how much of the writing was conserved over generations, and what wasn't. We could then see if sequence divergence matches the pattern expected from common ancestry.We could then use consensus sequence to find the most functional writing that has been conserved over many generations, and use our knowledge of common ancestry to reconstruct the writings of many past generations using consensus sequence.Those are a few off the top of my head.

Nobody is talking about a single sequence here. That is a straw man and you know it.Funny how you always work towards nested hierarchy. Biased much?

I didn't say that there was a single sequence in the post you are quoting. You asked how we could figure out their origins. If those books fit into a nested hierarchy then we would expect an evolutionary process and common ancestry.

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If we saw that existing books fit into a nested hierarchy we would suspect that they share a common ancestor. We could also watch books reproduce, and see what pattern of substitutions occur in each generation.

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To an extent that is the case - manuscripts copied by hand are an example of imperfect reproduction. I don’t think we see anything like as good a nested hierarchy as in the case of life, but an element of it is there.Related to that is the use of deliberate errors to detect plagiarism, in maps, for instance. That might be compared to the evidence from ERVs.

So how would you determine if books fit a nested hierarchy? Given two random books, how do you even compare the two? They may not even be the same language.

We could ask your ID god ... if anyone could find it.

You would need many books to determine if they fit into a nested hierarchy. As for measuring the phylogenetic signal, the quantitative measure of how well the data fits a nested hierarchy, you could use the same methods used for DNA sequences. If they don't fit into a nested hierarchy then we could certainly consider that they were separately created.If we stretch your metaphor, all life speaks the same language at a genetic level. You can take a human gene and express that gene in bacteria, which I have actually done a more than one occassion. There are mice that are fluorescent green because they express a jellyfish gene for a fluorescent protein, as another example of humans moving pieces of genomes around. As a molecular biologist, there is only one language you need to learn.

If each manuscript was copied from the previous copy it could be possible to trace ancestry and reconstruct the original, given there are enough branching lineages. In the same way, it is possible to reconstruct much of the ape common ancestral genome by comparing the genomes of humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans (and gibbons if you want to include them). There are a lot of parallels we could point to if manuscripts were copied and past on in a similar fashion to genomes.Another example would be the game of telephone where each person in a line whispers a message to the next. If we set up a branching pattern where two lines were started very three people we could construct a phylogeny of the final messages at the end of each branch, and possibly reconstruct the original message.

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If each manuscript was copied from the previous copy it could be possible to trace ancestry and reconstruct the original, given there are enough branching lineages. In the same way, it is possible to reconstruct much of the ape common ancestral genome by comparing the genomes of humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans (and gibbons if you want to include them)

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If. I believe that what we can do is quite limited. There was continuous copying - because books wear out. And hand-copied books are nowhere as numerous as living creatures.

You would definitely need lots of data for a thorough reconstruction.Also, books wearing out wouldn't be a problem anymore than it is a problem that organisms wear out and die. As long as each copy was made from the last the old copied books could fade away. We would use the most recently copied books (the most recent generation) to reconstruct the whole (if there were quite a few of them with a decent representation of different branches).

Now, let's not go overboard on this thing, Mike. You don't need a billion billion consecutive coin tosses for what you're trying to demonstrate, just upending a bucketful of coins all at once is more than enough, and it's much easier to visualise.The more important thing to note about your example is the mistake that you make by specifying in advance that all the coin tosses need to be heads. So, basically, you are saying that throwing a bucketload of coins on the floor and seeing them all end up heads is vastly improbable. But you forget that any other outcome is equally improbable. Yet, when looking at the seemingly random mess of coins on the floor, nobody is going to be surprised. Because, after all, some configuration had to happen. It's only amazing if it happens after you specify that exact configuration in advance, be it all heads, or any other permutation.So, in conclusion: an event with a vanishingly small probability is not by definition impossible. A couple of hundreds of coins on the floor prove it.

As Mike has never responded should not this thread be shut down?

Ah, but the effort of copying largely stopped when printing came in. Everyday copying became completely unnecessary when a printed replacement could be obtained.

A macroevolutionary event.

Another thing, Mike: you go into great detail with your examples of improbable scenarios, heaping complicating elaborations on top of each other in order to increase the improbability of what you are sketching. But you never mention even one detail about abiogenesis. You simply state that it is equally improbable as your fantastically improbable stories.Have you thought about how many molecules bump into each other somewhere in the universe at any moment in time? Or have you given pause about how big the universe is and how much time there has been for molecules to react with each other? Those numbers really do dwarf your improbabilities to the point of them becoming rather mundane happenings. If you think a billion billion is a large number, think again. Now, I realise I'm also just stating this without precision, and you don't have to believe me, but you could at least think about abiogenesis in some more detail before you dismiss it as way too improbable, and therefore impossible.