University of Chicago Medievalist, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, once quipped, "Only God could make a monkey capable of typing the works of Shakespeare."
I heard an interview with Stephen Meyer in which he explained that the number of possible combinations of the building blocks of life is vastly greater than the number of individual organisms (not species, but individuals) that has ever lived on Earth. That means that the search space for viable arrangements is immense -- so immense as to render it mathematically improbable, and, in practice, impossible, for a random mutation to create a viable organism.
Considering that that some 'building blocks of life' (proteins) *also* have to have the correct orientation in infinitely-fractional 3-dimensional space or become dangerous (think prions), random ordering of actual biological life would appear to be a disproven hypothesis.
At the same time, this doesn't prove that 'intelligence' is the driver. It could simply be that no universe that survives the 'universe creation process' can avail itself of 'random mutation' and that there's an 'ordering factor' to any (surviving) universe.
Darwin's still more right than wrong and we can prove it in any petri dish just about any day of the week. And Gregor Mendel seems to have been onto something (otherwise hybrid corn and Airedales would not exist).
The disproven 'random mutation' hypothesis is the fault of the 'neo-Darwinists' (NDs) who tried to take the correct observations of Darwin and Mendel and turn them into a single unifying theory of everything biological.
All this just suggests that the alternative to 'order' isn't 'random' but some different kind of order.
Well most of the “Petri dish” experiments where scientists have been able to synthesize say, a pyrimidine ribonucleotide from simple compounds, actually require some intelligent intervention on behalf of the scientists. For example, for this synthetic pyrimidine ribonucleotide to be biologically relevent, the scientists had to ensure they had only right-handed isomers of sugar that life requires, purify their reaction products at each step to prevent interfering cross-reactions, and follow a very precise procedure in which they carefully selected the reagents and choreographed the order in which they were introduced into the reaction series. So for all the “hey we made the building block of lifelong a Petri dish!” talk, sure are a lot of intelligent fine-tuning going on with the chemistry.
I wasn't talking about the emergence of 'living' from 'non-living'. Haldane, etc are complete frauds as far as I am concerned.
Instead I was thinking of Charles Darwin's fairly-well-documented assertion that natural processes operating on 'latent inherited characteristics' could produce lots of 'variation' in response to changes in environmental conditions that increase successful adaptation to those environmental conditions.
As long as the 'inheritance' of the organism under study has 'variation' to be expressed in response to environmental changes, we can make alterations to the environment in a petri dish and observe the changes in the *expression* of traits.
More than anything, that's what Darwin as trying to explain.
He just made the error of thinking that such variations constitute new 'species'. They do not.
'Species' is just a hand human box into which we put our ideas of how the universe is sliced up.
It has nothing to do with natural organization.
'Species' is a fuzzy concept in biology because *we* created the idea and we've done a poor job defining it. But we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves because we cannot, in fact, see into the basic operations of the ordering principles that make the movement from life to non-life and the movement from simple life to complex life possible.
At least not yet.
If we could, we'd probably come to the conclusion that new species are a *new* arrangement of holistically-related expressed and latent characteristics.
We'd also see how this rapid emergence of interrelated heritabilities is rare and completely unrelated to 'survival of the fittest'.
Ah ok. Sorry to misunderstand you. Yes I agree with you. I don’t take issue with natural selection, and I agree that “species” delineations are essentially arbitrary.
It's been my experience that, if you look closely, 'physics' doesn't *explain* anything. At bedrock, the answer to 'Why?' in physics will always be 'Because it is'.
This surely seems like a powerful mental experiment, using math, of the utter bankruptcy of "evolution."
For me, an even more powerful mental experiment, uses deductive reasoning to demonstrate.
Imagine walking through a wild wood, wild growths of vegetation, rocks, streams, all in a state of nature, no evidence of mankind. You break through the woods and enter a clearing. Manicured lawns, beds of decorative flowers, hardscaped patios with fountains spouting water surround the building In the center of the clearing.
Entering the building, you find a huge room, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves holding hundreds of thousands of books. Opening one at random, you see it, and all the other volumes, are printed in a text that's unknown to you. Each volume is filled with the text, with accompanying illustrations, graphs, and other extras.
Research question: Without math, using deductive reasoning, what can we say about source of the clearing, the building, the books?
Evolution Cultist answer: Clearly these artifacts randomly assembled themselves, in a series of random changes. And we have no further curiosity. QED. Smug in his ignorance, he is satisfied with an illogical recitation of his cult's mantra.
Reality-based Non-cultist answer: The evidence of an intelligence designing everything from the landscaping to the fine manufacture of the books, and the unknown content of the hundreds of thousands of volumes, is overwhelming and obvious. Although we cannot yet decipher the volumes, we can begin. The more we decipher, the more in awe we are of the intelligence of the designer of this compound and library. Using our own intelligence and deductive reasoning, we embark on a journey of discovery, searching for a better understanding of the intelligence and intentions of the Creator.
Not exactly on topic but asserting there is no Intelligent Design is extreme narcissism and arrogance in that it implies that humans are the most intelligent beings. Of course, you can always argue for aliens.
Typically this means that instead of God creator as the Designer, you could theoretically have an advanced alien species that seeded our universe with the basic building blocks of life, acting as the “Designer.”
Oh I agree with you. I was just pointing out that technically ID theory doesn’t rule out the possibility that our life on earth could have been seeded by an advanced alien species from far across the universe. But from a cosmological perspective, the fact that we have Something from Nothing, would to me, indicate a Creator. And you are right, the alien seeding proposition really only pushes the question of “why we have something from nothing?” further back. It doesn’t actually answer that question.
Good article. But if we're discussing intelligent design vs. evolution, it should be pointed out that the Darwinian model depends not only on "random" rolls of the dice, but also on natural selection. The proper comparison is with playing Yahtzee, using a natural process to do the selecting for you. Say the 26 blocks are rolled out in a certain order, and the ones that are out of order show red. Only the red ones are rolled again. Then how long would it take to get the full 26 in sequence?
Depends on how long it takes to fixate the ones that are "correct", and that "correct" is typically "this one survived and this one didn't". If something on the order of 1 in 4000 mutations are beneficial (don't have the source at hand), your wait time can be onerous.
Natural Selection doesn't solve this problem; it exacerbates it.
It could be way more or way less than 1 in 4000, depending on circumstances; no source is needed on that number, which is reasonable for hypothetical discussion. Our wait time can be onerous, but probably not 10-trillion-times-the-age-of-the universe onerous.
I'm not sure how natural selection exacerbates the problem. In at least two ways, real-life natural selection should improve it. First, it runs parallel threads in all the different individuals of a population. If only one in 4000 mutations is beneficial, then a population including 4000 or more individuals with mutations is fairly likely to have that one good one. Second, the outcome never has to be perfect, but only best of the bunch. All the letters in sequence, with only Y and Z swapped, is still pretty impressive in its order.
Let it be 1 in 10. At the total number of blocks you have (WAY more than 26 options), and the limited time for fixation (be really generous and call it the lifetime of the sun ~10^10 years), the generational lifetime of organisms (especially higher life forms) to fixate those positive changes --in the correct sequence --will eat up that cycle time like a 5-alarm fire.
And --Y--Z-- may be fatal to the organism over --Z--Y--. Most mutations in natural selection are fatal, not just some less-than-optimal selection.
Additionally, if these selections are (1) random and (2) mainly neutral or non-beneficial, you can't assume a continuous improvement or "evolution" of the organism. You have the option of regressing after a single improvement. Even if there are selected improvements, they have to survive not only the environment but the other non-improved members of their own cohort, which will dominate over them until fixation occurs.
You're using the term "fixation" a lot in your argument. What exactly do you mean by it? I was assuming you meant the state in which a given sequence became normalized in a population, but that would be a rather fuzzy status and would certainly not be expected to be the lifetime of the sun.
Okay, thanks. It seems that fixation means the point at which, given a starting state of two different alleles in a population, and absent selection, only one of them survives. The concept is apparently used in discussing genetic drift with probability math.
I don't think that fixation is necessarily important to the theory of evolution by natural selection as such. There's no rule to say that we can't have any number of competing alleles at any point in a population's genome, as is obviously the case if we aren't all identical twins with each other. The evolutionary process doesn't have to stop and wait for one of them to be "fixed" before moving on to anything else.
Another good example is to consider a deck of cards. With 52 cards, the number of combinations is 52-factorial. This number is larger than the # of atoms in the earth. What this means is that, even though millions of people have shuffled and played a hand of cards and will do so in the future, EVERY SINGLE shuffle and hand is completely different than any other one ever played. There is a virtually zero chance that any shuffle will ever result in the same arrangement of cards!
As another author has pointed out elsewhere, TENS does not consider fixation times for beneficial genes that would be introduced into the organism. This puts TENS into a vise, being squeezed by the massive numbers of potential combinations from which to glean the productive genes (as our host indicates here), and by the relatively short time available to fixate these productive genes (being very generous: appearance of life on Earth to Present Day.)
University of Chicago Medievalist, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, once quipped, "Only God could make a monkey capable of typing the works of Shakespeare."
Perfect.
I heard an interview with Stephen Meyer in which he explained that the number of possible combinations of the building blocks of life is vastly greater than the number of individual organisms (not species, but individuals) that has ever lived on Earth. That means that the search space for viable arrangements is immense -- so immense as to render it mathematically improbable, and, in practice, impossible, for a random mutation to create a viable organism.
A fascinating watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=noj4phMT9OE&pp=ygUhc3RlcGhlbiBtZXllciB1bmNvbW1vbiBrbm93bGVkZ2Ug
Considering that that some 'building blocks of life' (proteins) *also* have to have the correct orientation in infinitely-fractional 3-dimensional space or become dangerous (think prions), random ordering of actual biological life would appear to be a disproven hypothesis.
At the same time, this doesn't prove that 'intelligence' is the driver. It could simply be that no universe that survives the 'universe creation process' can avail itself of 'random mutation' and that there's an 'ordering factor' to any (surviving) universe.
Darwin's still more right than wrong and we can prove it in any petri dish just about any day of the week. And Gregor Mendel seems to have been onto something (otherwise hybrid corn and Airedales would not exist).
The disproven 'random mutation' hypothesis is the fault of the 'neo-Darwinists' (NDs) who tried to take the correct observations of Darwin and Mendel and turn them into a single unifying theory of everything biological.
All this just suggests that the alternative to 'order' isn't 'random' but some different kind of order.
It's all (some kind of) order all the way down.
Well most of the “Petri dish” experiments where scientists have been able to synthesize say, a pyrimidine ribonucleotide from simple compounds, actually require some intelligent intervention on behalf of the scientists. For example, for this synthetic pyrimidine ribonucleotide to be biologically relevent, the scientists had to ensure they had only right-handed isomers of sugar that life requires, purify their reaction products at each step to prevent interfering cross-reactions, and follow a very precise procedure in which they carefully selected the reagents and choreographed the order in which they were introduced into the reaction series. So for all the “hey we made the building block of lifelong a Petri dish!” talk, sure are a lot of intelligent fine-tuning going on with the chemistry.
I wasn't talking about the emergence of 'living' from 'non-living'. Haldane, etc are complete frauds as far as I am concerned.
Instead I was thinking of Charles Darwin's fairly-well-documented assertion that natural processes operating on 'latent inherited characteristics' could produce lots of 'variation' in response to changes in environmental conditions that increase successful adaptation to those environmental conditions.
As long as the 'inheritance' of the organism under study has 'variation' to be expressed in response to environmental changes, we can make alterations to the environment in a petri dish and observe the changes in the *expression* of traits.
More than anything, that's what Darwin as trying to explain.
He just made the error of thinking that such variations constitute new 'species'. They do not.
'Species' is just a hand human box into which we put our ideas of how the universe is sliced up.
It has nothing to do with natural organization.
'Species' is a fuzzy concept in biology because *we* created the idea and we've done a poor job defining it. But we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves because we cannot, in fact, see into the basic operations of the ordering principles that make the movement from life to non-life and the movement from simple life to complex life possible.
At least not yet.
If we could, we'd probably come to the conclusion that new species are a *new* arrangement of holistically-related expressed and latent characteristics.
We'd also see how this rapid emergence of interrelated heritabilities is rare and completely unrelated to 'survival of the fittest'.
Ah ok. Sorry to misunderstand you. Yes I agree with you. I don’t take issue with natural selection, and I agree that “species” delineations are essentially arbitrary.
Also, “universe creation process” would still need to be explained—- random proceeds have still yet to explain how we get something from
nothing.
It's been my experience that, if you look closely, 'physics' doesn't *explain* anything. At bedrock, the answer to 'Why?' in physics will always be 'Because it is'.
Indeed! “Well why are the laws of physics such as they are?” “Well, because it is.” Or sometimes it’s “because it just works that way.”
This surely seems like a powerful mental experiment, using math, of the utter bankruptcy of "evolution."
For me, an even more powerful mental experiment, uses deductive reasoning to demonstrate.
Imagine walking through a wild wood, wild growths of vegetation, rocks, streams, all in a state of nature, no evidence of mankind. You break through the woods and enter a clearing. Manicured lawns, beds of decorative flowers, hardscaped patios with fountains spouting water surround the building In the center of the clearing.
Entering the building, you find a huge room, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves holding hundreds of thousands of books. Opening one at random, you see it, and all the other volumes, are printed in a text that's unknown to you. Each volume is filled with the text, with accompanying illustrations, graphs, and other extras.
Research question: Without math, using deductive reasoning, what can we say about source of the clearing, the building, the books?
Evolution Cultist answer: Clearly these artifacts randomly assembled themselves, in a series of random changes. And we have no further curiosity. QED. Smug in his ignorance, he is satisfied with an illogical recitation of his cult's mantra.
Reality-based Non-cultist answer: The evidence of an intelligence designing everything from the landscaping to the fine manufacture of the books, and the unknown content of the hundreds of thousands of volumes, is overwhelming and obvious. Although we cannot yet decipher the volumes, we can begin. The more we decipher, the more in awe we are of the intelligence of the designer of this compound and library. Using our own intelligence and deductive reasoning, we embark on a journey of discovery, searching for a better understanding of the intelligence and intentions of the Creator.
Fantastic! A well written, brief article I shall keep in mind when arguing ID with friends.
Not exactly on topic but asserting there is no Intelligent Design is extreme narcissism and arrogance in that it implies that humans are the most intelligent beings. Of course, you can always argue for aliens.
Intelligently designed aliens?
It's aliens all the way down.
wow man
Aliens
without passports . . .
Typically this means that instead of God creator as the Designer, you could theoretically have an advanced alien species that seeded our universe with the basic building blocks of life, acting as the “Designer.”
Out of body experiences give me hope that the matter doesn’t matter as much as a lot of folks think.
And who created that alien species?
Oh I agree with you. I was just pointing out that technically ID theory doesn’t rule out the possibility that our life on earth could have been seeded by an advanced alien species from far across the universe. But from a cosmological perspective, the fact that we have Something from Nothing, would to me, indicate a Creator. And you are right, the alien seeding proposition really only pushes the question of “why we have something from nothing?” further back. It doesn’t actually answer that question.
I accidentally went down a similar rabbit hole recently when pondering the number of unique bingo cards. Mind bending!
Good article. But if we're discussing intelligent design vs. evolution, it should be pointed out that the Darwinian model depends not only on "random" rolls of the dice, but also on natural selection. The proper comparison is with playing Yahtzee, using a natural process to do the selecting for you. Say the 26 blocks are rolled out in a certain order, and the ones that are out of order show red. Only the red ones are rolled again. Then how long would it take to get the full 26 in sequence?
Depends on how long it takes to fixate the ones that are "correct", and that "correct" is typically "this one survived and this one didn't". If something on the order of 1 in 4000 mutations are beneficial (don't have the source at hand), your wait time can be onerous.
Natural Selection doesn't solve this problem; it exacerbates it.
It could be way more or way less than 1 in 4000, depending on circumstances; no source is needed on that number, which is reasonable for hypothetical discussion. Our wait time can be onerous, but probably not 10-trillion-times-the-age-of-the universe onerous.
I'm not sure how natural selection exacerbates the problem. In at least two ways, real-life natural selection should improve it. First, it runs parallel threads in all the different individuals of a population. If only one in 4000 mutations is beneficial, then a population including 4000 or more individuals with mutations is fairly likely to have that one good one. Second, the outcome never has to be perfect, but only best of the bunch. All the letters in sequence, with only Y and Z swapped, is still pretty impressive in its order.
Let it be 1 in 10. At the total number of blocks you have (WAY more than 26 options), and the limited time for fixation (be really generous and call it the lifetime of the sun ~10^10 years), the generational lifetime of organisms (especially higher life forms) to fixate those positive changes --in the correct sequence --will eat up that cycle time like a 5-alarm fire.
And --Y--Z-- may be fatal to the organism over --Z--Y--. Most mutations in natural selection are fatal, not just some less-than-optimal selection.
Additionally, if these selections are (1) random and (2) mainly neutral or non-beneficial, you can't assume a continuous improvement or "evolution" of the organism. You have the option of regressing after a single improvement. Even if there are selected improvements, they have to survive not only the environment but the other non-improved members of their own cohort, which will dominate over them until fixation occurs.
You're using the term "fixation" a lot in your argument. What exactly do you mean by it? I was assuming you meant the state in which a given sequence became normalized in a population, but that would be a rather fuzzy status and would certainly not be expected to be the lifetime of the sun.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Fixation_(population_genetics)
Okay, thanks. It seems that fixation means the point at which, given a starting state of two different alleles in a population, and absent selection, only one of them survives. The concept is apparently used in discussing genetic drift with probability math.
I don't think that fixation is necessarily important to the theory of evolution by natural selection as such. There's no rule to say that we can't have any number of competing alleles at any point in a population's genome, as is obviously the case if we aren't all identical twins with each other. The evolutionary process doesn't have to stop and wait for one of them to be "fixed" before moving on to anything else.
Another good example is to consider a deck of cards. With 52 cards, the number of combinations is 52-factorial. This number is larger than the # of atoms in the earth. What this means is that, even though millions of people have shuffled and played a hand of cards and will do so in the future, EVERY SINGLE shuffle and hand is completely different than any other one ever played. There is a virtually zero chance that any shuffle will ever result in the same arrangement of cards!
However, SCIENCE can explain why it can be KNOWN,
that airliners were NOT used as weapons on 9/11/2001
and by that, the fact that TSA has no excuse at all for even existing.
As another author has pointed out elsewhere, TENS does not consider fixation times for beneficial genes that would be introduced into the organism. This puts TENS into a vise, being squeezed by the massive numbers of potential combinations from which to glean the productive genes (as our host indicates here), and by the relatively short time available to fixate these productive genes (being very generous: appearance of life on Earth to Present Day.)
"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."