Problems with the first 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." Please show your calculations. 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.

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?

Side bet? I'm taking ReMine.

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.

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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.

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(Francis Crick, Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88){empahsis added - JonF}

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:

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Proteins are coils of several hundred amino acids. Take a typical protein to be a chain of 300 amino acids. There are 20 commonly occurring amino acids in life. This means that the number of possible combinations of the amino acids in our model protein is 20 to the power of 300 (that is 20 multiplied by itself 300 times) or in the more usual ten-based system of numbers, 10 to the power of 390 ( Ten multipled by itself 390 times or more simply said a one with 390 zeroes after it!!!!!) . Nature has the option of choosing among the possible 10 to the power of 390 proteins, the the 1.5 x (10 to power of 12) proteins of which all viable life is composed. Can this have happened by random mutations of the genome? Not if our understanding of statistics is correct. It would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.

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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:

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The eye gene has 130 sites. That means there are 20 to the power of 130 possible combinations of amino acids along those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened by chance. ...

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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 ...

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... It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent structures. ...

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Which is more misunderstandings compounded with assuming his conclusion. But wait, there's more ...

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... So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod [mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye has to be reexamined."

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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:

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At times you get the impression that this book is a parody, with quite a few good chuckles when read in that context. However, the sections on evolution soon convince you that no parody is intended. They are just too unfunny, too dull. Schroeder trots out all the old, tiresome arguments about why "life could not have stared by chance" and how the simplest forms, even viruses, are "far too complex to have originated without there being an inherent chemical property of molecular self-organization and/or reaction enhancing catalysts at every step of their development" (85). He applies the usual creationist deception of calculating chance probabilities as if chance is the only operative mechanism, and then saying this "proves" that God intervenes along the way when they come out very low. And, of course, the "staccato aspect of the fossil record" refutes classical evolution. "These rapid changes cannot be explained by purely random mutations at the molecular-genetic level" (87).

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All in all, an amusing loon, not to be taken seriously.