Evolution vs. Intelligent Design discussion
A Question About Genesis
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Agree with "If the die has X sides, and the dice have been rolled X^100 times, then it's not really improbable anymore, is it?" Perhaps true - if dice is the best probability model for life and the universe.
Well, it isn't "perhaps true;" it is true. As the number of "attempts" for an event increases, the probability of that event happening at least once increases. With enough attempts, an event that in a single instance is highly improbable becomes quite likely. It's simple math. And speaking of simple math, 4 to the 100th power is not a 4 followed by 100 zeroes; it is much smaller. Consider: by this rationale, 4^2 would be a 4 followed by 2 zeroes: 400. But it isn't; 4^2 is 16. 4^3 is 64, not 4000. 4^4 is 256, not 40,000. And so on.
My point in using the dice metaphor is that to simply state that the origin of life is improbable isn't saying anything. For non-lving things to produce, by some event, living things is, at any one moment at any one place, highly improbable. But so what? If there have been two moments in time rather than one, the probability just doubled. If there have been two places in the universe rather than just one, the probability just doubled. And we are dealing with a potentially infinite number of places and a potentially infinite number of moments. So the improbability of a single instance is meaningless in the face of potentially infinite opportunities.
Please note that the fluit fly has MORE genes than humans - that conradicts the evolutionary concept of geater complexity.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here, but it doesn't seem to correspond to anything in reality. What is the "evolutionary concept of greater complexity" of which you speak? Evolution is driven by selection for greater fitness, not complexity. Complexity is a vague term that you are trying to equate to "number of genes" when this is not at all what it means. And even if evolution were driven by "complexity" or gene number, why would that dictate that humans should not have fewer genes than fruit flies?
In order for this statement about gene number to have any meaning you have to demonstrate ALL of the following, when, so far, you ahve demonstrated none:
1. Evolution is driven by selection for complexity, producing ever and ever more complex beings.
2. Complexity is a measure of the number of genes an individual has.
3. Necessarily, human beings are evolutionarily "greater" than fruit flies, and should therefore be more complex.
I doubt you can convincingly establish any one of these points, let alone all three.
Richard,We need to look beyond lotto numbers. What we are looking at, from an RNA world perspective, is equivalent to 4 to the power of 100 - for just the arrangement of the nucleoides in one RNA moelcule to arrive by chance alone. That is the number 4 followed by 100 zeros (4^100).
The question - how likely is this event given that 4^100 exceeds the the of atoms in the universe? On top of that, we need to add the probability of arranging sugar bases - not to mention the proteins required for replication.
First of all, I don't know why you keep harping on this 100 base pair RNA idea. I don't know where you got this number, and when I asked where it came from you simply repeated it. The implication is that it is not possible for any sort of self-replicating molecule to exist that is less complex than a 100-base-pair strand of RNA. You're also implying that there is exactly one pattern of RNA base pairs that could self replicate. Please back up these claims. And by "back up" I do not mean "repeat."
Furthermore, what does any of this have to do with "the number of atoms in the universe"? Nothing. You're just trying to do some mathematical ninjitsu to produce a large number (4^100, which, you falsely claim is a 4 followed by 100 zeroes) and then compare it to another large number (the number of atoms in the universe, which, considering that we don't know how big the universe is, and it might well be infinite, is a pretty meaningless number) and say, "Look, number A is bigger than number B! Therefore, I'm right!"
How many possible configurations are there for all the atoms in the universe? I bet it's a lot bigger than "the number of atoms in the universe." Therefore, by your rationale, the probability of all the atoms in the universe existing in the configuration that they currently occupy at this very moment is staggeringly improbable, and we should infer, therefore, that it cannot be a product of sheer "chance."
Possible - not probable - alone.
Again, you keep missing the point that the probability of an event happening in any one specific instance and the probability of an event happening at all, given a large number of opportunities, are not the same thing. The probability of any one person, playing one ticket on one day, of winning the lottery is breathtakingly low. This does not mean it is impossible for lotteries to be won. People win the lottery every day.
As Nate pointed out, the odds of any one particular configuration for the universe (the one that produced you and me, for example) are low, but the universe was bound to have some configuration, and whichever configuration it took would be just as probable as this one.
Staggering numbers that even Richard Dawkins has not overcome.
What does this mean, that Richard Dawkins hasn't "overcome" these numbers? I bet Richard Dawkins couldn't overcome my high score in Tetris of 544 lines. So what?
Mod
What does this mean, that Richard Dawkins hasn't "overcome" these numbers? I bet Richard Dawkins couldn't overcome my high score in Tetris of 544 lines. So what?
And they're not that staggering, as I actually provided some of the analysis for above.
Incidentally, 4^100 = 2^200. 2^10 = 1024, call it 10^3. 2^200 = (2^10)^20 = 1000^20 = 10^60 (all simple order estimates -- its a bit bigger but not on a log scale). The visible Universe contains around 10^80 atoms -- and currently it is believed that visible atoms make up only roughly 10% of the total mass as determined by gravitational observations. Again on a log scale where differences of ONLY a few powers of ten make little difference, 10^80 is 10^20 times bigger than 10^60, even before one worries about what is on the other side of the light cone of the current earth out at 13.5 billion light years relative to the big bang.
Richard Dawkins may not be able to "overcome" these numbers, but I'll bet he can multiply and handle log scales for big numbers. I'll bet that he knows that fruit flies have fewer genes than humans (and FAR fewer base pairs) as well.
rgb
Greetings!Great comments, but not convinced. Lots of ideas, but unsubstantiated concepts. Here are two questions to explore:
1. What scientific references substantiate that numbers along the lines of 4^100 are really not large numbers in the molecular world?
2. What scientific references substantiate that an odds ratio of 1 to 4^100 is a good biological bet for an origin of life model?
Richard William Nelson
Great comments, but not convinced. Lots of ideas, but unsubstantiated concepts. That's an outstandingly thorough rebuttal.
1. What scientific references substantiate that numbers along the lines of 4^100 are really not large numbers in the molecular world?
What does this have to do with anything? What does it matter if this is a "big" number?
2. What scientific references substantiate that an odds ratio of 1 to 4^100 is a good biological bet for an origin of life model?
You're still failing to understand a basic concept of probability. You're looking at the issue in a solipsistic way, from the perspective of the outcome. You're not looking at the whole picture.
Let's try an experiment. Go to Manhattan, to the intersection of 34th street and 5th ave., and cover the street with thimbles. Cover the whole intersection, the sidewalks, everything, with thimbles, and pack the thimbles as tightly as possible so that they are all touching, leaving no space between them. Thousands and thousands of thimbles. A huge number of thimbles. Then take the elevator up to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, to the observation deck, walk to the edge, close your eyes and throw a single BB off the roof to the street below.
Now, there are tons of thimbles on the street. The odds of the BB landing in any one particular thimble are astronomically low, to the point of being nearly impossible. And yet, what happens, without fail? The BB lands in a thimble. You are looking at this probability from the perspective of the thimble, saying, "Oh wow, how improbable! The odds were stacked so high against the BB landing in me, and yet it did! There must be something else behind it other than sheer chance!"
This is the wrong way to look at it. You have to look at the whole system. The BB was bound to land in a thimble. And whichever one it was, the odds would have been just as improbable. And yet, that it will hit some thimble is virtually certain.
You are assuming that there is something special, with the benefit of hindsight, about the thimble in which the BB ended up. When, of course, there isn't. There are an infinite number of ways the universe could have turned out, so the odds of the universe being the way it is are 1/infinity. So what? If the universe wasn't this way, it would be one of the other infinite number of ways it could be, and the people living there would be thinking, "Wow, what are the odds?"
Mod
Great comments, but not convinced. Lots of ideas, but unsubstantiated concepts. Here are two questions to explore:
1. What scientific references substantiate that numbers along the..."
Lots of unsubstantiated ideas? Grrrr. Are you being deliberately obtuse? Let's see, how about: "Sorry that I lied or was mistaken in my claim that fruit flies are more complex than humans. I don't see how I could have been so easily misled by my prior beliefs in a religious mythology that I wouldn't bother to check or verify their sources with any actual science articles or textbooks on the subject."
As for your odds ratio, let me see if I can make this very, very simple. The probability of some outcome is the set of all the states in the statistical ensemble that satisfy the criterion of the outcome divided by the number of states in the ensemble. Got that? The probability of drawing a heart from a well-shuffled deck is the number of hearts divided by the number of cards in the deck?
You have observed that the deck is large. Not very large as the ensembles considered in statistical mechanics go -- not even close to very large as I gave an explicit example to demonstrate. But the size of the deck alone does not matter! To construct an odd ratio one has to count the size of the set of desired outcomes too!
This you have not done. Nobody has -- it is too difficult! Furthermore, your ensemble isn't the correct ensemble even ignoring the non-Markovian dynamics associated with chemistry in "dirty" environments, catalysis, and so on. To do the counting correctly, you have to start with just one amino acid. Is it self-replicating? No. Then you have to consider two amino acids (and not just out of the current four-acid alphabet!) with a hydrogen bond in between, forming a "base pair". Are any of the base pairs self-replicating? So far, no.
Then you have to count and examine 3, 4, 5, ... 100, 101, 102... 3.3x10^9... amino acids all connected up in base pairs and pi-bonded into larger proteins. As you examine every possible combination along the way, you have to test whether or not it is self-replicating not just in a test tube but in a dirty environment where things such as the clay matrices or chemical substrates of crystals or carbon buckeyballs or graphite sheets can form a "template" that catalyzes assisted replication with a feedback "selection" mechanism that favors reuse of e.g. long protein chains, looking at every stage for whether or not the chains are self-replicating in the particular environment in question, which could easily be one where the raw materials aren't "amino acids" per se, but the catalyzed protein strands produced by a substrate.
This hasn't been done, for the precise reason that makes you naively conclude that abiogenesis is unlikely. There are too many possible combinations to test even in a clean test tube, and way too many to test in a near infinity of possible dirty environment such as might have existed on a primeval earth. So you have no idea whether even your implicit assertion is correct -- that only one combination of 400 amino acids is self replicating. It might well be that 10^40 or 10^50 (out of the 10^60 possibilities) are. It also might be the case that there exist self-replicating proteins with only (say) 30 or 40 base pairs, that might be built with other amino acids than just the CATG (noting that in RNA, the alphabet is CAUG because the real alphabet is much larger than four and of course if anything ever succeeded, natural selection caused it to increase to eventually dominate the local chemistry as the most favored interaction).
Neither you nor anybody else can currently compute the "odds ratio" for abiogenesis because we lack the information needed to perform the computation, and because the chemical search for a particular solution in the laboratory has to replicate something that very probably took geological time to accomplish in the "laboratory" of primeval earth! In other words, even a few tens of thousands of organic chemistry labs performing a "search" experiment for a whole century only cover a tiny fraction of what nature would have searched in entire oceans of organic materials in a state that favored organic chemistry and protein synthesis over a hundred million years or so.
You like big numbers, so here are a few for you. In one year there are roughly pi x 10^7 seconds. In one mole there are 6 x 10^23 molecules. In one ocean of organic "goop" that would have formed as elemental nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen steeped at high temperature on the earth's cooling crust there would have been volumes on the order of 10^18 to 10^20 cubic meters of goop, containing at least that many moles of the raw constituent molecules. The timescale of chemical interactions as the mix cooled across various critical temperatures -- basically annealing the mixture and selecting precisely those compounds that form most rapidly and have the greatest dynamical stability once formed -- is difficult to estimate because it varies by many orders of magnitude depending on the particular reaction being considered, pressure, temperature, concentration, presence or absence of catalysts (all the reasons that organic chemistry labs haven't come CLOSE to exploring all of the possibilities, as they are many, many variables that lead to many, many different outcomes as they are tweaked -- a truly enormous phase space/ensemble) but it is certainly on the order of microseconds or less based on simple estimates of molecular separation and speed.
So how many molecular structures would have been sampled in those early seas? Just a very simple estimate is:
10^7 (seconds per year) x 10^8 (years at the desired range of pressure and temperature and surface chemistry) x 10^20 (moles of reactants) x 10^24 (molecules per mole) = 10^59 possible molecular configurations sampled using your naive assumption of equally likely sampling.
Well whaddya know! This is a number that is rather commensurate with 4^100 = 10^60! If this whole process weren't a bit of a joke because it ignore the fact that all configurations are not equally likely and that "biological" configurations are in fact relatively stable and hence favored as the soup cooked, it ignores catalysis and reaction dynamics, it basically ignores most of the actual science at about the same level as the ridiculous BICC sites from which you apparently get your numbers, then we'd be tempted to conclude that abiogenesis is a 1 in 10 shot as a newly formed planet with anything near the right surface chemistry spends a 100 million years or so in a highly reactive and complex chemical state. If we could only move Venus out to Earth orbit (putting it out on the other side of the sun or the like) and watch it for 100 million years as its conditions cooled to where they matched primitive earth's sort of, we could also watch and see if life emerged from the entire planet used as one enormous organic chemistry experiment!
That's the kind of scale one is talking about. I personally find it not only plausible that abiogenesis occurred -- it is the only possibility that is even vaguely plausible. Obviously you agree, as your proposed "intelligent designer" came to exist without an intelligent designer of its own, so clearly complex intelligent agents can emerge from chaos without a complex intelligent agent's help. You simply prefer to believe in the latter because of your attachment to a Bronze Age mythology, not because of reason -- reason suggests that the simplest explanation is the more likely one, and it is a lot simpler to believe in abiogenesis of life on Earth where we can actually study the mechanisms and see that they are indeed plausible than it is to postulate an unknown mechanism in a space of unknown complexity that resulted in a being with unknown intelligence and capabilities that at some unknown time in some unknown way performed some unknown actions that led to the formation of life as we now see it, and then for unknown reasons hid all its tracks to keep its existence unknown, providing all sorts of fake fossil evidence in a clear time sorted matrix of rock that suggested that an entirely different process -- one that is readily visible in the everyday world and can be shown mathematically to change naive probability estimates by geometric factors that home straight in on selected regions of outcome space -- is in fact responsible for the birth and current complexity of life. This unknown being persists in hiding its existence from us but (I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts) cares deeply about whether or not we worship it.
Shy guy, wouldn't you say? Do the deed and then erase all trace of it, deliberately creating misleading evidence and clues?
Now, since you pretty much ignored my last discussion of probability and big and small numbers (and I'm dead certain didn't actually visit any of the links I posted) I'm pretty sure that you don't really mean it when you ask for references on big and small numbers and probability and all that, but I'm going to give you one anyway. Visit this site:
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching...
and please, just read it. Work through the whole book, slowly, actually doing all of the algebra and learning it. Compare the level of this treatment to the treatment on your favorite Creationist website, the one where you got your "4^100" and "fruit flies are more complex than humans" nonsense from. This book is what real science looks like. Those websites are not. Note the difference. Any idiot can put up anything they like on the latter and nobody who reads them ever checks to see if they are true, or thinks more than ten seconds about them (about long enough to go "Gee, I guess the earth is around 6000 years old and was handmade by God -- just like my particular Abrahamic Bible says!")
The former, on the other hand, is built and constantly checked against the exacting standards of real mathematics, evidence, and reason. One is not permitted to say "I can't see how this works based on what I now know, so I guess a miracle occurred" because that explains nothing and ultimately cannot be falsified. A lack of an explanation, by the way, is not falsification -- it is just what it is, a lack of an explanation yet, in science.
Now go here:
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching...
and read in particular the probability of the initial state in the simple particles-in-a-box example, compared to the final state. See the number? e^(-10^24)? That's the kind of number that is a small probability in statistical mechanics. Try very hard to imagine all of the zeros following the decimal point -- it is small even on a logarithmic scale because its exponent is order of Avogadro's number.
The number of states in the ensemble, of course, is the inverse of this: e^(10^24) -- something that is thinking about being a big number in stat mech, although of course this is only one small box with one mole of particles. And remember that, however unlikely, an initial state with just such a probability is realized every time one performs this experiment in a lab, just as somebody wins the lottery.
As I said, if you pick up a haystack and a needle falls out at your feet, the correct conclusion is not "Saint's be praised! It's a miracle!" It is that the haystack is lousy with needles.
rgb
Greetings!No offense, but blog storytelling and analogies are not substitutes for published scientific analysis of probability. No references – no verification – no credibility.
Do we have the outer confidence limits of probability? Can it exceed 1 in 4^100? This requires a published reference.
This is the reason why Richard Dawkins has turned to extraterrestrial scources for the origins of life. Perhaps, Dawkins is hoping that the reality of probability does not exist elsewhere.
Let’s assume that science can prove that 4^100 chance events can happen, the next major issue centers on the origin of molecules. How can we explain the origin of electrons, neutrons and protons emerging out of an infinite vacuum by chance to form inorganic atoms - simultaneously?
In the beginning, what natural law came into play?
Richard William Nelson
RichardNo references – no verification – no credibility.
You mean like everything you've said so far?
Do we have the outer confidence limits of probability? Can it exceed 1 in 4^100? This requires a published reference.
What does this even mean? Can probability exceed 1 in 4^100? The probability of what? Since we're lambasting people for making unsubstantiated claims, let's look at the unsubstantiated claims you have made.
1. The simplest possible self-replicating unit is necessarily a strand of RNA with 100 base pairs. You haven't supported this claim with any references.
2. This 100-base-pair RNA must have arisen via random collision of molecules and not through any progressive process. You haven't supported this claim with any references.
3. Billions of years ago, the base pair "alphabet" had four "letters," making the number of possible 100-base-pair combinations in RNA 4^100. You haven't supported this claim with references.
4. 4^100 is a 4 followed by 100 zeroes. This is simply wrong.
5. Of the 4^100 possible RNA configurations with 100 base pairs, exactly one would be self-replicating. You haven't supported this claim with references.
6. Each of these 4^100 RNA configurations has exactly the same probability of occuring, rendering catalysts, environmental factors, relative stabilities, etc. meaningless. You haven't supported this claim with references.
7. The probability of an event occurring in a single instance is the same as the probability of that event occurring at all over a potentially infinite timespan comprised of potentially infinite result-producing events. This is simply wrong.
So what you have done is make a series of unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims about the way life must have arisen, and using these claims you have basically produced a number out of thin air. You have then plugged this number into your flawed understanding of probability to make the claim that what has happened could not have happened because it's so improbable. And now you're trying to place the burden of proof on us to disprove your illogical, unsupported and ill-informed claim.
We have tried to explain to you the gross mistake you're making in your concept of probability, but you simply ignore this because we're using analogies and "blog storytelling," whatever that is. You have demonstrated that you are ignorant of basic math. Your ignorance is not proof of anything; it is not an argument.
Let’s assume that science can prove that 4^100 chance events can happen
Disregarding the fact that the 4^100 number is one you pulled out of thin air, we don't have to "assume" that 4^100 chance events can happen. We know they can happen. By definition, they have a 1 in 4^100 chance of happening in any given single instance. So, given 100x4^100 attempts, we would expect this event to happen approximately 100 times, for example.
In the beginning, what natural law came into play?
What beginning?
Mod
The way I learned this 35 years ago from George Roberts (a student/friend of Bertrand Russell) is in the form of the "dartboard problem". You are given an ordinary dartboard and a dart with an infinitely sharp tip. You are blindfolded and throw the dart at the dartboard without looking in such a way that it strikes the dartboard "somewhere".
What is the probability that any given point is struck?
The naive answer is zero because there are an uncountable infinity of points on the dartboard and you can only strike one. The probability is thus 1/\infinity = 0. Yet the dart struck the dartboard with probability unity! It hit somewhere even though the probability of hitting any given point is zero.
This is where if this weren't just blog bullshit and we were doing actual mathematics of the sort in the stat mech book or a good course in advanced calculus (both of which I teach, Richard, so if it is "authority" you are looking for, look no further) this would be a great way of introducing the concept of measure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebesgue...
to avoid "paradoxes" of this sort. In a discrete/finite case it isn't strictly necessary as then the usual counting arguments work, but to deal with very large or countably infinite spaces, discrete or continuous, the concept is very useful.
Ultimately its application to the dartboard problem means that we cannot speak of the probability of hitting a point, only an area around a point. In statistical mechanics, this means that the probability of getting any single configuration out of the configuration phase space in any really large space is pretty meaningless -- numbers like 1 over 10^{10^30) requiring the lifetime of the Universe and more to write down in digital form -- what matters is volumes of the phase space.
What it means to Richard is nothing, though, because Richard does not want to learn. Richard appears to be content to just repeat his assertion that a reasonable estimate of abiogenesis anywhere on any of the planets around any of the trillion trillion visible stars in the Cosmos over the billions of years that stars and planets have existed is 1 over 4^100, or roughly 1 in 10^60. I've presented a reasonable estimate that suggests that even on his terms, this is not true because there are order of 10^60 interactions occurring over that timeframe -- actually I was off by a factor of 10^7 or so because I forgot that reaction rates are in MICROSECONDS, not seconds, at the molecular level so really there are order of 10^67 opportunities to hit the 10^-60 shot, but what does it matter as the model is stupid either way.
If Richard wanted to learn, instead of just make assertions without any backing, when he made incorrect assertions (such as the complexity and gene count of the fruit fly or that 4^100 is 4 followed by 100 zeros) he would acknowledge the error, and if he had anything like the humility of a student, he would go work harder on understanding what he was talking about before continuing the discussion.
If he were given references like a stat mech text that teaches probability or a paper on the actual comparative genetics of the fruit fly and the human, he would say things like "Thanks for the reference. Gee, I didn't realize that computing probabilities accurately was so complicated. Nor did I realize that there is so much DNA in common between fruit flies and humans, almost as if the basic template of life was laid down sometime in the distant past and has subsequently diverged. I'll have to study this and think about it some and then will get back to you."
If he were interested in learning, he wouldn't ask questions like:
...the next major issue centers on the origin of molecules. How can we explain the origin of electrons, neutrons and protons emerging out of an infinite vacuum by chance to form inorganic atoms - simultaneously?
In the beginning, what natural law came into play?
He wouldn't ask this question, he would just watch the Discoverey channel or the Science channel instead of PTL and learn the answers along with his 9 year old kid (who he probably forbids to watch these channels lest they learn "dangerous" ideas that contradict the Bible.
Because I am a compulsive teacher, though, I will answer his questions anyway, just in case he actually wants to know the best possible answers to them at this time.
First, Richard, think about how one should answer the question the best possible way, if you really don't have any idea. Choices are:
a) Read about the answer postulated by some unknown author and passed down verbally for hundreds of years back in the late Bronze or early Iron age, and then accept that as the Gospel Truth because they claimed to know and everybody knows that ancient wisdom and knowledge is better than the modern sort.
b) Look at the world and try to figure out the answer, using that modern sort of wisdom, which involves using things like mathematics, logic, reason, observation, evidence, a lack of bias concerning the answer, a need for the answer to fit consistently into an entire scheme of answers, and a requiring just the right amount of simplicity -- simpler answers being better than really complex ones when they both explain the evidence equally well!
I vote for b). How about you?
If one uses the methology laid out in b), the resulting system of explanations that is the best we can do given the evidence is "modern physics and cosmology". I therefore humbly suggest that you sit down with your 9 year old (if you have one) and watch animal planet, discovery, nat geo, science channel shows quite regularly. Visit a museum. Sign up for courses in mathematics and physics at your local community college. Visit the many, many wikipedia pages that lay out all of modern science remarkably beautifully. Think. Learn.
If your answer (as I suspect) is really a), then how in the world do you expect to convince anybody else to share your delusion?
rgb
Greetings - Nathan, and and rgb!Looks like we will just have to agree to disagree. What science has definitely demonstrated to date is -
1 - No known natural law exists to explain the origin of matter - including inorganic matter.
2 - No known natural law exists to explain the origin of life. Even what is known about early Earth's environment is physically incompatible with Miller-Urey's reducing atmosphere.
3 - No known natural law exists to explain the origin of new species. Darwin's theory - followed by neo-Darwinism with the advent of Mendelian genetics -followed by evo-devo following the collapse of Crick's Central Dogma - followed by the failure of the Altenberg-16 Summit - leads to the following conclusion based on the scientific evidence
There are no natural laws that can account for our obvious existence.
Today, based on the "slight, successive" changes in the fossil record, molecular biology, embryology, and genetics - even the simplest tree of life cannot even be constructed as stand alone trees - not to mention trees with parrallel evolution.
Perhaps the new evolutionary vogue approach is - the discovery of natural laws for the origin of matter and life are now irrelevant - and the construct of a tree of life based on the convergence of evidence discovered is irrelevant - which is OK
Life is Good
Richard William Nelson
Looks like we will just have to agree to disagree.We don't have to "agree to disagree." You could just convince us. You could provide some sort of support for any of the claims you make that, as I pointed out in my last post, are unsubstantiated. You could justify your simplistic and misguided view of probability which states that the probability of a particular RNA configuration arising by some process is simply 1 over the number of possible configurations, completely ignoring the process by which the RNA forms.
But you don't do these things. You simply make assertions, ignore questions and counterarguments, and when your shell game doesn't dazzle, you "agree to disagree" and change the subject. Well played, sir. Well played.
Richard wrote: "Greetings - Nathan, and and rgb!Looks like we will just have to agree to disagree. What science has definitely demonstrated to date is -
1 - No known natural law exists to explain the origin..."
Perhaps, Richard, it is best for you to agree to disagree - you wouldn't like to admit that your book(s) and website were all complete bollocks now would you!
Mod
Looks like we will just have to agree to disagree. What science has definitely demonstrated to date is -
1 - No known natural law exists to explain the origin of matter - including inorganic matter.
This is a completely meaningless statement. Where to begin, where to begin...
Natural law isn't written on stone tablets by burning bushes. It is inferred by observation and reason. It is viewed as being a successful explanation to the extent that it has predictive power and is consistent with the entire network of linked explanations/natural laws of observation-supported inferential science.
There is this natural law you may have heard of called "conservation of mass-energy". As far as we have been able to observe, trying very hard, it is never violated and has never been violated. This law basically says that "matter" is never observed to be created or destroyed, only moved around and changed from form to form (where there is only one kind of "matter" in modern physics: mass-energy" and where your distinction of "organic" and "inorganic" matter is idiotic. The atoms in your body aren't "inorganic" before you eat them, then suddenly they become "organic", and then you excrete them out and poof they're inorganic again. Atoms are atoms. Electrons are electrons. Perhaps you've been misled by your obvious ignorance of things like organic chemistry into thinking that an organic molecule is somehow different from regular molecules -- they aren't, they are just molecules containing carbon, as you would know if you weren't sleeping in high school chemistry.
According to the laws of nature as we best understand them, then, mass-energy has no origin. That doesn't mean that it couldn't have had one -- it means that we have never observed any such thing and therefore have no reason to believe that it exists or ever existed. Note well that the big bang (an event that can be well-inferred from data and that can in some sense be directly "seen" if you look with the correct tools) is an "erasing" event that makes it difficult to observe the previous state of the Cosmos, but there is little reason to infer that before the big bang there was "nothing" and then suddenly there was "something", any more than there is a good reason to think that the inside of our skull doesn't exist just because no one has ever seen it or that the past never really happened because we cannot no directly observe it. Given only observations of continuity and conservation there is little reason to infer a real discontinuity or creation.
Your statement is thus worse than false -- it is a deliberate misrepresntation of what science has definitely shown. Do you have a physics Ph.D. that I'm missing or something like that? Credentials of some sort that give anyone a reason to think that you are marginally competent, let alone expert, to pronounce on what "science has definitely shown"?
Of course not. My undergrad freshman physics major students are smart enough not to make a statement such as "science has definitely shown" in the first place, especially a negative statement that begs the question by implying that matter necessarily had to have an origin. Of course all kinds of real physicists, including quite a few friends of mine, are studying the actual science of matter, including things like the quark-gluon plasma that we believe was an early stage in the breaking of the symmetry of the unified field in the early stages of the big bang or searching for the Higgs particle at the LHC.
In fact, some of those very undergrad physics majors will be working on the earliest LHC data this summer, which is ubercool if you think about it. Strangely enough, most physicists that I know do not invoke God, a miracle, a mystery, or anything supernatural in their search for explanations of nature. Why is that, do you think?
2 - No known natural law exists to explain the
origin of life. Even what is known about early Earth's environment is physically incompatible with Miller-Urey's reducing atmosphere.
The only natural laws we know of are called "the laws of physics". Period. That's all. Bearing in mind (once again) that they aren't handed down on stone tablets by burning bushes to bronze age tribal shamans and have to be inferred the hard way, those laws can be summarized as follows:
There are four known fields (and a possible fifth under active investigation):
1) Strong nuclear: quarks and gluons. This field is primarily observed inside nuclei and nucleons, where it binds nuclei and nucleons together. It is the field that releases the energy stored in the sun.
2) Electromagnetic: electronic charge and photons. This field is responsible for pretty much all chemistry and structure in the Universe outside of nuclei, and contributes significantly to the structure of nuclei as well. It isn't too much to say that we are electromagnetism, since 100% of our biological processes, including our thoughts and energy release mechanisms, are mediated by electromagnetism.
3) Weak nuclear: quarks, charges, and heavy vector bosons. This field is responsible for beta decay of nuclei and moderates the strong nuclear force and electromagnetic force in various ways. It was successfully unified with the electromagnetic field into a single electroweak field theory (the standard model) back in the 70's and 80's, and work continues to successfully unify electroweak with the strong nuclear and gravitational field (next).
4) Gravity: mass and gravitons(?). Gravity describes the observed tendency of masses to attract one another. It is by far the weakest of the four known field/forces and requires objects the size of planets to generate forces that a thin layer of electromagnetic forces in the form of the atoms of the floor and our feet easily oppose. It is, however, largely responsible for the long range structure of the Universe, as it pulled primoridal matter from a nearly uniform distribution into first large clouds of hydrogen and helium (in the 75%-25% ratio predicted by the theory of nucleosynthesis in the early Universe and observed today -- see how those things kind of go together in science?) that eventually collapsed into stars and galaxies and planets and so on.
More speculatively, careful observations of e.g. orbital speeds of stars in various galaxies have discovered anomalies in their values -- they differ from what one would expect given just the gravitational attraction produced by the visible matter, and have the wrong long-range distribution. This has led physicists to infer the possible existence of a fifth force/field -- fancifully referred to as "dark matter/dark energy" because it apparently does not couple strongly/at all to the electromagnetic field and hence is quite literally invisible, light being an electromagnetic phenomenon. Work continues on this field, again by some of my colleagues whose offices are just down the hall from my own. To the best of my knowledge, none of them are asserting that there is anything magical or supernatural about this field, only that it is needed to restore consistency of our set of explanations with the observational evidence concerning the Cosmos.
Now, here are the rules of real science. These force/fields and (so far) only these force fields are available as candidates for explanations in the Cosmos. If an anomaly (like the one associated with dark matter) is observed, one doesn't throw up one's hands in dismay and go "Lawdamercy, it's a miracle, physics is wrong, we have evidence of the Hand of God" -- we instead study the phenomenon, infer its systematic behavior, think very hard, and attempt to deduce a larger theory that incorporates both it and the earlier theories in one coherent whole.
In physics, it is strongly believed that all these fields are aspects of a single "unified" theory of everything -- for good reason given the unification of electricity and magnetism by Maxwell and Faraday and the unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force by Weinberg and Salaam. Incidentally, you really ought to read some of Weinberg's comments concerning "creationism" here:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/q...
Note well the bit about "scientific theory is never regarded as certain", and this from a Nobel Laureate and one of the smartest people on this planet. Contrast that with your ignorant "science has definitely demonstrated..." -- sounds sort of like empty bombast, doesn't it, compared to the humility of actual scientists?
As has repeatedly been pointed out in this discussion, there isn't the slightest reason to believe, based on observational science, that the origin of life was anything but naturally occurring, physics-mediated chemical processes in the environment of the primoridal Earth. Given that this primordial environment existed four to five billion years ago and that the earth is dynamic, it is difficult to know precisely what that environment looked like except through radiometrically dated fossil evidence. So (just as a consistency check) are you suggesting that that evidence is sound so that our beliefs about the early state of the earth, the dating of the fossil record, and the age of the Cosmos post big bang are definitely accurate or would it be more accurate to say that we do not know for certain what the conditions were at the time the radiometrically dated fossil record suggests that life arose? Given that, would it not be better to say that so far science has not been able to come up with a convincing argument for how abiogenesis did occur, although there are actually a number of consistent and plausible hypotheses? You too can read over the list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
With references, note, and with a modest amount of actual empirical evidence to support all of them but none of them yet compelling enough to rise above the rest.
Strangely enough "A superbeing came down to the primordial earth and created the earliest one-celled life forms" isn't even on the list. Note well that this is a difficult problem to solve, but the lack of a consistent, evidence-based solution so far does not mean that "science has definitely demonstrated that no such solution exists". That's just horseshit, I'm sorry.
3 - No known natural law exists to explain the origin of new species. Darwin's theory - followed by neo-Darwinism with the advent of Mendelian genetics -followed by evo-devo following the collapse of Crick's Central Dogma - followed by the failure of the Altenberg-16 Summit - leads to the following conclusion based on the scientific evidence
There are no natural laws that can account for our obvious existence.
Again, the failure of theories and the advent of new, better theories is a normal part of science and does not mean that "no natural laws can account for our obvious existence". Are you daft? Seriously? That's like saying "Newtonian physics failed and relativistic quantum field theory hasn't yet unified gravity, so no natural law can account for the trajectory of a thrown baseball." Crazy talk, man!
The observational evidence alone is more than sufficient to prove the theory of evolution in its broad strokes, just as Newton's "failed" law of gravitation suffices to describe thrown baseballs amazingly accurately. What is being studied now are details and consistency. Nothing suggests that "consistency is impossible" as it is already mostly consistent.
rgb
Mod
Great points – will respond to at least some.
Esk – “Ah, so you are certain that only one pattern out of all 4^100 forms the unique self-replicating RNA? Or is it possible th..."
By the way, you might want to read Shapiro's actual speculations about abiogenesis when he writes extensively on the subject instead of just publishing and out of context sound bite. Shapiro is a "metabolic abiogenesis" advocate, in contrast to an "RNA first" advocate. There are, of course, large numbers of scientists working on the issue and following different ideas -- the way science naturally and probably works.
Shapiro has a lovely article here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/art...
in which (strangely enough) he doesn't endorse the supernatural explanation or the "intelligent designer" explanation that is God dressed up for school. He seems to endorse a chemical process, and spells it out -- along with conditions and possible experiments that might validate it -- that might plausibly have existed in the primordial environment and that are (he asserts) potentially capable of kickstarting "life" as a chemical process.
I'm not impressed with his statistics -- his gorilla analogy only works if you don't have many, many gorillas on many many stars in an enormous Universe -- and I'm not convinced that alternative plausible pathways exist, as a number of equally reputable people think that they might and have explicit models that are not utterly implausible either. The big problem in both cases is not knowing in detail the conditions in the early earth, and the true explanation could involve parts of several proposals, not just one.
Anyway, Shapiro seems very strongly to favor abiogenesis through chemistry. Imagine that!
rgb
Greetings!The best selling science book on Amazon.com is Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyers. Meyers earned his Ph,D from Darwin's old stompting grounds - Cambridge University.
Although the volume of book sales does not measure truth or validity, the book is a valuable edition to the current debate.
Meyers is an outspoken critic of origin of life and species by existing knonw natural laws. The line of skeptics is undergoing a process of evolution.
Richard William Nelson
Greetings – Hp!Since you have read my book, on page 251 Paul R. Ehrlich of Stanford University and author of the famous The Population Bomb is quoted as saying what?
Richard William Nelson
Wow, Richard. You just ignore ignore ignore every point made and keep leapfrogging from tired argument to tired argument. Now it's the "this book sold well" argument. Still no substantiation for any of your previous claims?
Why would I have read your book? I never stated I had read it – whatever gave you that ridiculous idea? I have read reviews of the book and visited your rather humorous website but that is the limit of my knowledge of your scatty ideas.I think it funny you expected me to remember a quote from someone who was shown to be incorrect with many of his predictions related to population growth. Is this a precursor for how we will consider your works in a few years time? Then again, perhaps you were putting Ehrlich in his place.
Rather than provide your own ideas (backed up with “published references” – “No references – no verification – no credibility.”) regarding the origin of life and the mechanisms this life have obviously used for survival to modern times you continue to produce the same ridiculous, invalid statistical ramblings.
May I ask exactly how you think life came about here on this planet? Is it your belief that a “creator” popped life into existence here some 6000 years ago? It would appear so given the nature of your writings and the composition of the “treatises” constituting the bulk of your website’s attack on Darwin.
As rgb, dan and nathan have asked many times: If complex combinations of matter can not statistically converge to create life in any way, shape or form, how did we get here? Or even more to the point how did a god get to where it is? As a god must be the most complex being imaginable and can not have statistically arisen from matter (from your calculations) from whence did god come? Love to hear your thoughts on the “matter”.
My whole point was that if you were to think about your world-view you would begin to see the many problems associated with it. Darwin may well be incorrect in some of his assumptions relating to The Origin of Species and Natural Selection but they are still the basis for the most consistent and evidenced view of the survival of life here on Earth. Just pointing out problems that you perceive with Darwin’s theory but not providing a rational alternative is not in the least bit helpful.
You state that “There are no natural laws that can account for our obvious existence.” I would like to modify that to “no known natural laws” (even though we are pretty close). We humans do not know it all yet but give us a chance…
Mod
Also, I'll say it one last time, so everybody listen up:
The laws of physics are the natural laws of the Universe as best we know them. They fully explain chemistry. Chemistry is obviously fully capable of explaining biology -- there is no magic in cell biology that is not mediated by chemistry, including every single aspect of cell reproduction and the reproduction of the organism. Chemistry is equally clearly capable of explaining abiogenesis, which is why there are many, many scientists searching for a model.
Therefore it is categorically false to state that science has shown that natural law cannot explain abiogenesis. This isn't just an opinion -- an opinion would be: "To me, abiogenesis driven by chemistry seems unlikely, based on what I known of chemistry and physics." It is a deliberate lie, and one that conceals the fact that most scientists do not share this view and indeed would casually reject it as absurd.
So please, it is a fact that the laws of nature are capable of explaining abiogenesis. At worst it is unlikely, but it's a big, possibly infinite Universe and given an infinite number of opportunities all over the Universe, any finite, non-zero chance will eventually come to pass. And if it did, of course the beings that eventually evolved intelligence would be asking these questions and going wow, look at how unlikely it was, but it happened anyway.
However, most scientists, including as I noted the ones Richard is quoting out of context to create the illusion of "scientific support" for his absurd lie, don't think that it is unlikely at all. They think that it is actually likely, and are searching for the likely chemical process that caused it to come about.
Since you don't like my haystack analogy, I suggest that you (Richard, who are no doubt carefully avoiding reading anything I suggest as learning something would force you to confront the flaws in your own arguments) study Polya's Urn and Urn problems in general in statistics. To put it bluntly, if you put your hand into an urn known to contain white and black balls, where you do not know a priori what the relative fraction of black to white balls is in the Urn, and draw out a black one, chances are that drawing out a black ball is favored. There is even an expression one can use (maximum entropy) to compute the "best possible assighment of probability". Currently the best assignment of probability for Earth-like planets is: Life is probably quite likely, given one planet with life out of one earth-like planet examined.
rgb
Greetings – rgb!You posted - “Antibiotic resistant Staph Aureus, HIV, H1N1 -- that microevolution thing sure does a good job in producing ever more divergent variants of existing species”
Microbes are not new to microbes – constants mutations allow for rapidly adapt to changing conditions – but mutations do not produce new species, in microbes or man.
In 1943, published in a paper entitled “Mutations of Bacteria from Virus Sensitivity to Virus Resistance,” microbiologist Salvador Luria, biophysicist Max Delbrück, and bacteriologist and geneticist Alfred Hershey discovered that mutations occur at a constant rate. In 1969, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine “for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and genetic structure of virus.”
Experimenting with the antibiotic streptomycin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1950s, Joshua Lederberg, along with his graduate student Norton Zinder, demonstrated that bacteria never previously exposed to streptomycin
was already resistant to the antibiotic.
More recently, preexistent resistance in bacteria has also been observed in viruses and insects. After studying the AIDS virus in 2000, theoretical biologists Ruy M. Ribeiro and Sebastian Bonhoeffer, from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America about their observation of the same phenomena in viruses. Resistance was preexistent and was not acquired by mutations. Ribeiro and Bonhoeff er concluded, “the key to drug resistance lies in the diversity of the viral population at the start of therapy.”
In 1978, in a Scientifi c American article entitled “The Mechanisms of Evolution,” evolutionary geneticist Francisco Ayala wrote: “Insect resistance to a pesticide was fi rst reported in 1947 for the housefl y [Musca domestica:] with respect to DDT [synthetic pesticide:]. Since then, resistance to one or more pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods. The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds”
While bacterial resistance through the mutation model is a logical mechanism for evolution, the reality is the bacteria have remained bacteria, the virus has remained a virus, and the fly has remained a fly. Preexistent genetic variants determine the range of mutations. In 1977, Pierre-Paul Grassé, president of the French Academy of Sciences, observed, “bacteria, the study of which has formed a great part of the
foundation of genetics and molecular biology … stabilized a billion years ago.”
The question is whether the mutations are the “raw material for evolution” or nature’s means for the microbes to adapt to the environment. Refl ecting on the interpretation of mutations, Grassé wondered, “What is the use of their unceasing mutations if they do not change?” Grassé concludes, “the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect.”
Acknowledging that while novel mutations do occur, molecular biologist Soren Lovtrup, of the University of Goterborg in Sweden, writes, “micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical theory.”
Lovtrup continues by lamenting the core of evolution’s central dogma: “I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology.… I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will pose the question: How did this ever happen?”
The answer to Lovtrup question is – persistent ignorance.
Richard William Nelson
Richard,but mutations do not produce new species, in microbes or man.
This is a hollow statement. First of all, it isn't just mutation, but the combination of mutation and selection that gives rise to new species. Secondly, it betrays a lack of understanding of what a "species" is. There is no magic line in the sand that separates one species from another, no magical point along an evolutionary timeline where the new species emerges. So explain, please, what special boundary must be crossed for a new "species" to form? Why can the process of mutation and selection create a certain amount of genetic change, but not, over a longer timeline, an amount of genetic change large enough to constitute a new species?
Resistance was preexistent and was not acquired by mutations. Ribeiro and Bonhoeff er concluded, “the key to drug resistance lies in the diversity of the viral population at the start of therapy.”
Again, you reveal a lack of understanding. Evolution is not a sentient process whereby a bacterium says, "Oh, gee, new drugs to fight me. I shall now evolve a resistance to them." Drugs to not cause mutations in bacteria that lead to resistance. Drugs provide the selective pressure that drives evolution. A trait, such as resistance to drugs, will become more prevalent in a population as it is selected for. This trait could be the result of a mutation, or it could be a trait that exists in a certain proportion of individuals in the population. But without selective pressure, the trait will not become more prevalent, will not spread throughout the population, and will not, therefore, alter the overall makeup of the gene pool.
the reality is the bacteria have remained bacteria, the virus has remained a virus, and the fly has remained a fly.
This is a tautology, and is meaningless. Of course the fly is a fly. How could the fly not be a fly? How could something simultaneously be and not be a fly? But has the fly always existed? No. Has the man always existed? No.
I may as well say that the therapsid has remained the therapsid. Only, therapsids don't exist anymore, because they've been replaced through evolutionary time. Or, maybe God created therapsids - with their jaw articulation that is a clear bridge between reptilian and mammalian jaw structure - shortly after he created reptiles, but then took them away and then created mammals. Or maybe he just invented those fossils to trick us into thinking therapsids existed, so that stupid people like us will not believe in him and we can keep the conversations interesting in hell.
The question is whether the mutations are the “raw material for evolution” or nature’s means for the microbes to adapt to the environment.
Um, evolution is adaptation.
Mod
Ah, so you now deny (as far as I can tell) that mutations take place at all, even in bacteria. You reject even micro evolution. All genetic diversity that ever will exist, already exists.
Of course this belief is unfailingly contingent upon belief in a Universe that is extremely young. This is because we have rather sound evidence of the existence of enormous numbers of species in the past that are no longer to be found save through their bones. If we attempt to make sense of the timeline inherent in the fossils left in the rocks, and use radiometric and other methods to date them, we conclude that there have been multiple mass extinction events in the extremely remote past, extinction events that have completely eliminated kinds of species that lived in what appeared to be completely different ecologies. This evidence isn't hidden away in a handful of obscure articles -- it is on open display in every museum of natural history in the world. It isn't a view rejected by every sane evolutionary biologist in the world -- the timeline laid out in the fossil record is accepted as fact by every person on earth whose thought processes are not corrupted to the point of insanity by a strange wish to accept just one of the many creation mythologies written out in ancient literature as being an actual factual description of our origins. You cite a tiny handful of articles that made it past referees (but none of the articles that criticize the obvious inconsistency of their conclusions).
For example, if you are at all interested in the actual science being done on a broad scale, you could read the hundreds of articles from the last month or two only published in:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/jo...
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcevolb...
http://springerlink.com/content/120595/
http://www.sage-hindawi.com/journals/...
http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/current.shtml
http://www.sgm.ac.uk/pubs/micro_today...
http://www.plosone.org/article/browse...
http://www.pagepress.org/journals/ind...
http://www.springer.com/life+sciences...
et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. But no, this is all part of a plot. It is all Lovtrup's:
I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.
Strong words! Especially where he calls Darwinian theory a myth, given that it is a scientific hypothesis that has been and continues to be subjected to a process of verification. The Book of Genesis, now that's a myth. It's pretty easy for unbiased people to differentiate the two, and Lovtrup at least claims to be an unbiased scientists uninfluenced by any prior religious beliefs, so we have to interpret his use of the term "myth" here as mere rhetoric. He wishes to convince us of something. Fine. Just what is it that he wishes to convince us of?
"Indeed, the nature and the wealth of the corroborating evidence are such that the theory on the reality of evolution turns out to be one of the best substantiated theories in biology, perhaps in the natural sciences."
Well, I guess that it isn't that evolution of new species doesn't occur, is it? No, if one reads on, one discovers a curious fact. Lovtrup is a neo-Lamarckian! He isn't concerned with whether or not evolution occurs through natural selection -- he accepts this (and the creation of new species and the observed fossil record and timeline and so on) without question.
No, he is concerned with one detail of the theory of evolution -- whether or not mutation or e.g. "epigenetic" phenomena are primarily responsible for the natural variations that nature selects for. Which is fine with me -- I have no dog in this race. Since I have a science fair experiment sitting on my kitchen table being run by my fourteen year old son that is studying the effect of gamma-ray induced mutation on marigold seeds (1 krad of exposure to a 620 keV Cesium source for the most strongly irradiated seeds) and since even a cursory examination of the literature and mechanisms used to breed new crops and species provides ample evidence that mutations can and do occur both naturally and when humans undertake to accelerate the process, and that some fraction of those mutations are "beneficial" and can be selected for naturally or unnaturally, I have to say that any attempt to build a theory of evolution without mutation is silly beyond compare, but epigenetic processes are very likely factors as well -- DNA itself is a kind of "memory" of the entire evolutionary process and without getting all wacko about either Lamarck or worse, Lysenko, mutations that give rise to epigenetic expression of "fossil DNA" may well play an important role, especially when the mutation in question is e.g. a trisomy of an existing chromosome or one of the other processes that can alter chromosome count.
The fact that this book was written and published in such a way that it is not a peer-reviewed work seems not to bother you at all. The fact that humans -- including my son -- systematically use both chemicals and radiation to deliberately accelerate the process of mutation, followed by unnatural selection, to create variants of species that are outside of genetic boundaries (and regularly engaged in this enterprise even in his time) seems elusive to Lovtrup, which may be why he published his polemic outside of referreed channels that quite correctly would have called this into question even back in pre-PCR 1977.
But no matter. Lovtrup is that rare gem: An actual scientist (albeit one writing an unreferreed work in 1977 that can provide you with quotes to be taken out of context, making it look like he is somebody that rejects the evolution of species, somebody that endorses a theory that forces us (or so you claim) that all genetic variability that will ever exist already exists, nothing new is ever created by evolution, so it all must have been hand-built by a mechanism that cannot be observed or falsified at all: God.
But gee, perhaps (now that we see that Lovtrup explicitly and quite unambiguously accepts that evolution occurs all of the time and is responsible for the diversity of species, however much he may want to pick nits about the primary driving mechanisms associated with the source of variation in the "variation plus natural selection" model) we should think about the mathematics of the extinction problem and optimization theory.
I write genetic optimization programs. I am a modest expert on them. I don't publish them -- they are too valuable -- they form the basis of intellectual property worthy of patent or being kept as a trade secret in computational modeling theory. I therefore can tell you quite authoritatively that genetic optimization algorithms without a mutation step cannot adequately explore the "space" in which optimal solutions lie.
Genetic optimization algorithms are (because of their enormous value) studied and published by lots of people -- many of them are out there as more or less standard algorithms available to the knowledgeable computer scientist. If you take any initial population of "trial solutions" to a problem (which is all that species are, from the point of view of evolution) and subject them to selection processes that weed out the less fit members and allow only the more fit members to reproduce, you systematically and irreversibly cull genetic variation information out of the population.
This process is quite visible in the computer algorithms, where it is one of the biggest problems associated with genetic algorithms. As soon as you "stress" a population with a selection mechanism that favors survival/reproduction of only those members that possess or do not possess a certain trait, that trait exponentially grows to saturation or exponentially disappears from the population, where "exponentially" means that this process occurs quite rapidly in terms of the number of generations involved -- a few hundreds or thousands (which is a mere blink of geological time, however long it seems in human years).
When I say "disappear" I mean it -- they aren't just rare, they are gone. Extinction through natural selection always reduces the size of the surviving gene pool -- it is subtractive, not additive. This is especially apparent with asexual reproduction mechanisms such as those visible in certain classes of living things, and we fully understand how it works.
Sexual reproduction makes things more interesting, because it searches for shuffled permutations of the gene pool, and hence searches a much broader space of possibilities than one searches with asexual reproduction followed by selection, but it does not repair this problem. Genetic algorithms with crossover and exchange followed by selection also tend to rapidly converge, irreversibly losing genes/codons at various sites, often before discovering that those genes are useful when they combine with certain other genes in the general population.
Genetic algorithms with or without crossover therefore universally exhibit these two features: The irreversible shrinking of the "gene pool" over time, and the premature convergence of the algorithm on non-optimal solutions as a direct consequence of this shrinking, which effectively closes off parts of the search space before beneficial combinations can be found even in sexual reproduction. Things are even worse in complex ecologies, where a single trait can be simultaneously bad (but not lethal) and good -- the sickle cell adaptation being a prime case in point. In malaria-endemic regions it is conserved, because it is less lethal than malaria, but in temperate climates it is not and rapidly enough disappears from a population.
The hypothesis of a fixed gene pool thus unambiguously predicts a monotone decrease in the number of species. A fixed gene pool unambiguously predicts a monotone narrowing of the genetic variation of each species. These are simple, well-understood consequences of the process of selection, which (as creationists are fond of pointing out) cannot create new species acting alone, only winnow and reduce the variation of existing ones.
When we examine the fossil record, we do not observe a monotone reduction in the number of species. We observe the exact opposite -- the continuous emergence of new species to fill specific ecological niches. This process is not monotonic or continuous -- there are many mass extinctions, followed by periods of proliferation as emptied niches are refilled by completely different animals. Nor do we observe the monotone reduction in the genetic diversity of species. On the contrary, we observe even on very mundane time scales the emergence of new variants of existing species, and can directly engage in and manipulate the very processes that occur in nature to accelerate the process, right up to the creation of new species:
http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/...
The hypothesis of a fixed, mutation free complement of genetic information is thus trivially confounded by observational evidence. It is a valid hypothesis that is falsifiable, and in fact has been falsified. It is not correct. Mutations and genetic accidents are necessary to explain the fossil record within the confines of reason and consistency with the general body of science, and are directly observed. So why do you still doubt them?
rgb
Gretings - Dan!Just wondering - if the mechanisms of evolution via mutation and natural selection seems to be a done deal, then, what is taken the Altenberg-16 so long to publish a consensus statement?
Richard William Nelson
Greetings - rgb!You posted - "Mutations and genetic accidents are necessary to explain the fossil record within the confines of reason and consistency with the general body of science, and are directly observed."
Agree mutations and genetic accidents can fit in the "confines of reason." The use of the word "reason", however, spells trouble in the science - reason means deduction.
Please explain what you mean by "the general body of science."
Richard William Nelson
Just wondering - if the mechanisms of evolution via mutation and natural selection seems to be a done deal, then, what is taken the Altenberg-16 so long to publish a consensus statement? I have no idea what the Altenberg-16 is. There's no Wikipedia page for it, which is pretty telling, considering that there's a Wikipedia page for pretty much everything. As best as I can tell, it's a conference of 16 people who already doubt evolution by natural selection. So, surprise surprise, there are at least 16 people who don't believe in evolution by natural selection, and these 16 people have not put out a statement in support of evolution by natural selection yet. Or so you say, since I have no idea who these people are and what they've done. To be sure, this Altenberg conference is hardly the be-all end-all moment in evolutionary theory. I could name millions of people who have not yet published a statement about evolution. So fucking what?
But honestly, Richard, why should I bother answering your questions when you consistently ignore everything I or anyone else says? I've asked you countless questions, presented countless counterarguments to and dissections of your claims, and you simply hop to the next stone in the stream and throw out another one-liner. Your repertoire of zingers isn't proof of anything.
Mod
Please explain what you mean by "the general body of science."
Reason does not spell deduction. If it did, it wouldn't exist, would it? And because you fail to understand this, to you it doesn't.
However, I'm happy to teach you. How would you like to proceed? I can assign some light reading, such as:
a) Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/worl...
where you will learn that deduction is empty, because it must begin with unprovable axioms that beg any question they answer and laws of inference cannot be proven deductively. Hume is both right and wrong here -- deductive reason begins with unprovable assumptions and consequently we cannot prove any absolute truth that isn't a tautology of one sort or another on a presumption (all deductive conclusions are contingent, in other words). However, one can deductively prove a theory of inference (see below) from a small set of axioms that more or less quantify "common sense"!
b) Richard Cox's Algebra of Probable Inference is your next assignment. This is arguably the most important work of metaphysical philosophy ever, for all that it is nearly unknown, as it derives the theory of Bayesian inference from three simple axioms. The algebra itself was already known, of course -- Laplace had written it down imperfectly and George Boole had written it down in detail in his An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (which we might as well add too as it is well worth reading). In these two works it is made quite clear that what you call "deductive (Aristotelian) reasoning" is a limiting case of an algebra of the uncertain -- the case where one is absolutely certain that something is true or false permits so-called "boolean" true/false algebraic reasoning to proceed, but of course we have damn few propositions we can be absolutely certain of, so the Cox-Jaynes algebra is the actual "logic" we reason with in the real world. Jaynes?
c) Read E. T. Jaynes: Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Again, a truly monumental work by a great physicist (Cox was also a physicist). He lays out the "desiderata" (axioms) used by Cox more clearly than Cox did, and gives numerous examples demonstrating how the algebra Cox derives, used in an approximate "seat of the pants" way, is how humans make nearly every judgement or decision that they ever make in their lives. In other words, this algebra describes an essential aspect of the way we think, at least when we are using reason to think. Of course Jaynes goes far beyond this -- he points out that it is the rational basis for all of science!
In fact, it answers the following question: Given the sum total of our experience -- both the evidence itself and the set of "plausible hypotheses" that attempt to describe it -- what is it best to believe? Best in a quantitative sense, note well. It is simply a way to arrive at the set of unbiased beliefs that are most likely to be correct, or approximately correct, given the evidence.
This is the true role of "reason" in human affairs. Not to make pronouncements of "absolute truth" -- when it is simple indeed to demonstrate that we can never be absolutely certain of nearly anything at all, but to make reasonable pronouncements of whether or not a proposition concerning the real world is probably true, or likely to be part of the truth or an approximation to the truth. It is common sense, quantified.
d) Yes, this really is how we think. Take a stab at: Information Theory, Inference & Learning Algorithms. Information theory was derived by Claude Shannon back in the mid-40's to describe information transmission on noisy networks, but it turns out to be itself derivable from Cox's algebra -- the two theories are more or less identical although they address different contexts. Both are empirically verified out the wazoo -- all of statistical mechanics in physics can be derived from either one. Cox technically has precedence, though, as his work slightly preceded Shannon's. If you get through MacKay's book (a free version is available on the internet for study) then you will be a better person, I guarantee it. If it doesn't make your head explode first;-)
e) Finally, just in case you are inclined to argue about the nature of reason and validity of deduction: Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. This is actually written for the lay person, and is quite accessible. In it Kline lays out in easily understandable terms how mathematicians came to realize that the original idea of the Greeks -- to use reason alone to deduce perfect truths about anything at all was a false one. This isn't just an opinion -- it has been proven that one cannot in general prove nontrivial theories that are a priori correct and complete, and numerous discoveries in mathematics and physics have put to rest the idea that e.g. "Euclidean Geometry" is in any meaningful sense non-contingent truth.
Get through all of that and you'll have a much, much better idea of what reason is all about, and why your pronouncements concerning evolution are unreasonable. Along the way you'll "probably" need to learn a bit of probability theory, which (given the obvious fact that you don't understand it at all) is also a good thing:-)
Now, to answer your latter question.
Science is the process whereby we come to believe that which we can doubt the least, given the evidence and the network of connected, evidence-supported beliefs. Note well that scientific "facts" (where the word to all scientists really truly does just mean "things we find it very difficult to doubt" and not "a priori truth" do not live in a vacuum. They are interconnected. We use things we have come to believe very strongly as Bayesian priors in any assessment of a new hypothesis. We can't really help doing it, in fact, it is the way our brains function at the neural level, but it also is very much a major part of our semantic reasoning process, of "common sense".
Here's how it works. In a state of complete ignorance, I contemplate a penny. If I let go, what will happen to it? Well, in a state of complete ignorance, anything could happen to it. It could disappear. It could turn into a frog. It could fall up, fall down. If I narrow the field of choices (which is infinitely broad, of course) to whether it falls up or down (or perhaps remains in place) it seems as though the best guess I could make is that it will probably move up or down with equal probability, another way of saying "I don't know" (maximizing entropy in the probability estimate).
I let go of the penny and it doesn't disappear, turn to a frog, etc -- it remains a penny that looks the same as the penny I released and falls down. I pick it up and go "Gee, I wonder if it will do that again?"
According to Hume -- I have no reason to think that it will! I cannot deduce the necessity of it falling from any purely logical and mathematical argument that doesn't contain assumptions I cannot prove. According to Cox, Jaynes, Shannon, maximum entropy, my best assessment of probability for the next trial is biased very slightly in favor of falling down. Out of the universe of possibilities, this one actually occurred in my only trial so far. One can even compute (subject to certain assumptions) a best set of probabilities for up vs down at this point. I let go and of course the penny falls again.
Over time I repeat the experiment many, many times and find that the penny always falls down, never up. If I am using common sense, I infer that there is likely some reason that this is true, and my assessment of the probability that the penny will fall if released continues to rise towards, but never reaching, unity.
I then try another experiment, and pull out a quarter. What should my initial assessment of its probable behavior be? Hume would again place no bounds on it. It is different from the penny, and every trial is unique in many, many ways. Surely I should start at the beginning and say 50-50, up vs down? Because I am completely ignorant, I say fine, and repeat the series of experiments. I find that whenever I drop a penny or a quarter, they fall down, and infer that at the very least this is a very probable outcome of a penny or quarter dropping experiment
Now I pull out a dime. Hume once again knows nothing and can infer nothing, but Cox-Jaynes have learned from their prior experience. Two objects that are at least superficially similar both fall when released. Sheer common sense says that it should be a bit more likely that the dime will fall too. I am using my inferred provisional rule "coins fall" to predict probable outcomes for a new coin.
As time passes, I learn that this rule is a very good rule indeed. Not only coins, but nearly anything weighty that I drop falls down. I have no idea (not really) why -- but it is so consistent that I've given a name to this observed propensity and rule: Gravity!
I have discovered a few exceptions. Smoke rises. Helium balloons rise. Birds fly. The moon and the sun appear to rise. But I've also observed various regularities. Pendulums not only fall as they swing, they do so according to a strict rule relating their period to their length. Rocks and pennies not only fall, they fall according to a mathematical rule that can actually predict the period of those pendulums. One day a rule is invented that appears to explain both rocks and pendulums and the motion of the planets and the moon, the same rule actually explains why balloons and smoke rise (although birds are a bit different). Eventually, I start to take "gravity" for granted as a truth.
This truth functions as a Bayesian prior for all judgements that I make. When I find a body with a crushed skull on the sidewalk with a broken flowerpot scattered all around, my first act is to look up to see if there are flowerpots on an overhead ledge that might have fallen or been dropped. I reject instantly the notion that the flowerpot "just appeared" above the person's head and happened to be going down or that the flowerpot shards and the broken skull are unlikely to be connected. I know too much to treat everything that is possible on an equal footing any longer.
And this, my friend, is the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a bunch of rules -- like gravity, electromagnetism, chemistry, biology, evolutionary genetics -- that are mutually consistent (so one isn't like a flowerpot carried by invisible fairies instead of using the more obvious cause of gravity), supported by evidence and each other, that appear to be so true whenever we test them that we use them to assess the probable truth of general assertions throughout our lives.
rgb
Greetings - Dan!Try a Google search for Altenberg Summit to check it out.
The reason for the summit was to bring together the different branches of science to build the structure for a new theory for evolution.
Would like to attempt to answer your questions - one at a time. What one do you want to start with?
Richard William Nelson
Greetings - rgb!You posted - "And this, my friend, is the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a bunch of rules"
Just as an FYI - "scientific knowledge" and a "bunch of rules" may or may not be the same the discovery of the natural laws of nature.
For example, we know that science has demonstrated that high blood pressure over long periods of time increases cardiac mortality and morbidity. Therefore, lowering blood pressure would be assumed to be a good rule to follow. We now know, unfortunately, that lowering blood pressure with certain medications (e.g., hydralazine) actually further increases the risk of cardiac mortality and morbidity.
Knowledge gained through scientific investigation can lead to erroneous assumptions. We now know that how the blood pressure is lowered is more important than lowering blood pressure.
When looking at evolution from a distance - it looks like evolution really happened. We now know, however, when the specifics of the fossil record, molecular biology, embryology, and genetics are closely examined, not a single Tree of Life can be developed from any one of these disciplines - and certianly not from a convergence of evidence from these four disciplines into Darwin's elusive single Tree of Life.
Perhaps you have the evidence? Somewhere?
Richard William Nelson
Mod
That's just how science works. Science collects evidence, makes assumptions -- a.k.a. develops hypotheses that might or might not explain the evidence in terms of everything we know (which are just hypotheses themselves that have proven "universally successful" in our attempts to disprove them) and then subjects them to tests to attempt to disprove, prove, or learn something new (collect more varied evidence) about them.
And if you actually read the missive I wrote you, you'll see that it completely describes this process of self-correction leading to self-consistency.
What you will also see is that it doesn't allow for magic or the supernatural or for inconsistent causes.
As for evolution: Clearly my publishing links to a small handful of the many journals that seem to devoted to its study didn't convince you that when you look at evolution up close and personal, it looks like it really happened! The specifics of the fossil record, molecular biology, embryology, and genetics all support the general model of evolution, overwhelmingly. No credible scientist these days denies that evolution happened -- at most they quibble about details in how it happened. Understandably, given the nature of the fossil record, which is sparse in time and which fails to preserve e.g. DNA.
There is absolutely nothing in the visible Universe that suggest that it was handmade, by any conscious hand. In fact, when we study its evolution in time it appears to be a perfect mechanism. Everything we see, when we examine it arbitrarily closely, operates according to invariable rules -- the laws of physics. Our knowledge of those laws may well be incomplete, but that doesn't mean that evidence on the fringes suggests something other than natural mechanical law.
Just because you say things, and just because you use the term "we", does not mean you speak for scientists in general or that those things are true. You're what, a Dr. of Pharmacology? So you fill prescriptions (and teach others how to fill prescriptions)? Precisely where and when did you obtain your degree in evolutionary biology? How many publications in refereed, reputable journals do you have in the field of evolutionary biology (as opposed to pharm, where sure, you've published)? And when did you become sufficiently expert in physics to be able to pronounce on e.g. quantum chemistry or molecular biology at the physical level?
I can see why you would draw your example of the "failure" (or would you call this a success?) of science in the field of pharm, but all you're really pointing out even there is that the human body is a pretty complicated system and that simple inferences may be confounded because of that. How is this even surprising? Is the world supposed to be linear, so that if one aspirin is good, ten aspirin are even better and a thousand aspirin will cure anything?
Clearly you have something against Darwin -- your book and your posting on various blogs make that clear as you descend to the edge of ad hominem in addressing his work and hypothesis. Bear in mind, however, that even if Darwin were the most scurrilious scientist in the history of science (and frankly I think there is little evidence of that, but suit yourself) and even if he was reasoning from the very beginnings of the mountain of evidence that was eventually to emerge, that mountain validates the essence of his theory!
Let me ask you once and for all so we can get this out in the open. You obviously don't want Darwin to be right. You -- in your immense scientific knowledge and wisdom -- have concluded that evolution did not happen, that we have a fossil record in which species appear and disappear in a time-ordered fashion that clearly demonstrates a successive increase in complexity from a chaotic initial state with many competing forms (some of which would be enormously exotic today) that have disappeared to be replaced with other forms. The timescale of this process is known beyond all doubt to extend over nearly four billion years.
So what is your theory to explain this? Please be honest. You've been pretending to be a scientist -- you've written a whole book that pretends to be science. Science, however, doesn't just attack existing hypotheses -- it is necessary to advance competing hypotheses so that they can be compared to the evidence. So what is your hypothesis for the origin of species and for their temporal appearance, disappearance, and change?
Once you've posted this, we can discuss the evidence you have for it. Somewhere.
rgb
Richard,I did Google the Altenberg Summit. I have done this several times now, every time you've posted about it. And yet, all the top hits are creationist websites (including your website) and links to the self-published book that it produced, which is clearly an ant-evolution screed. Also among the top hits on the search is an article that does not mention the Altenberg Summit except for in the comments page, where someone named Richard William Nelson (which is also your name!) has mentioned it unprompted. In fact, Google results for a search on "Altenberg Summit" are so thin that your comments about it on Goodreads show up on the first page of search results.
You keep presenting this "summit" as the most important event in the history of evolutionary biology, as if the entire field of evolutionary biology and all related fields got together and said, "Hey, let's have a big meeting where we finalize all of biology once and for all. It should take about a week." This is obviously preposterous, as it bears no resemblance to how science actually works, but, just in case, I Googled it (repeatedly) and sure enough, it clearly is not the watershed moment in science that you make it out to be. I have yet to run across a single article about it in any major publication - Time, Newsweek, the NYT, CNN, etc. Nor have I seen much discussion anywhere on the summit's supposed importance other than by people who have written books about it or who are named Richard William Nelson. To be sure, I can't find a simple, straightforward description of the event and its supposed importance anywhere other than websites selling a book about it. The world has had over a year to find out about this supposedly monumental event and yet, as far as I can tell, almost nobody seems to care about it.
One of the few bits of information I found was that it was a gathering of 16 "scientists and philosophers." This should set off some alarm bells; it has the familiar ring of all those lists of "scientists who reject evolution" that include such evolutionary experts as electrical engineers and plastic surgeons.
So I'm done trying to do your homework for you to prove to myself that this Altenberg Summit was somehow an important event whose supposed lack of consensus somehow proves anything about anything. You have clearly latched onto this and thrown it into your repertoire of one-liners: "A random gathering of people hasn't produced a single, complete unified theory encompassing every last detail of evolution! Therefore, evolution is false!" I may as well say that I organized a meeting of meteorologists and poets to determine the exact amount of water in the oceans to the milliliter and they failed to reach a consensus, so therefore, there is no such thing as an ocean!
Would like to attempt to answer your questions - one at a time. What one do you want to start with?
Jesus, where do I begin?
You entered the discussion talking about RNA, and produced out of thin air this idea that life must have begun with a spontaneously arising bit of self-replicating RNA with 100 base pairs. This argument is based on a number of faulty assumptions that I have asked you to justify and that you have not. I outlined these problems in post 72; you responded by simply ignoring the post and several of my subsequent posts.
You told a lie about the fruit fly having more genes than humans, a lie that even if true would mean nothing without some faulty assumptions, which I outlined in post 63 and which you ignored.
I'm not going to be picky. I'll start with a small goal of getting you to answer any question I have asked, regardless of what it is. You could go to any of the numbered lists I've made of unsubstantiated (and sometimes blatantly false) assumptions on which your arguments rely and justify one of them. You could explain why evolutionary theory should dictate that a human should have more genes than a fruit fly. You could explain what the number of atoms in universe has to do with the number of possible configurations of RNA, and why one should supposedly be smaller than the other. You could explain your theory for the diversity of life. You could search any of my posts for question marks and respond to any one of these questions.
Greetings - rgb & Dan!Thanks for the feedback - we will just have to agree to disagree.
Life is Good!
Richard William Nelson
Would like to attempt to answer your questions - one at a time. What one do you want to start with? ...
Thanks for the feedback - we will just have to agree to disagree.
Was that your answer to my questions?
Mod
I ask you for what you think happened to produce the fossil record and your response is that we'll have to agree to disagree? Disagree about what? That I asked you a question?
Look, in principle you shouldn't be a complete idiot. You've gone to college and gotten a creditable undergraduate degree in a real science (if your website is true and you didn't really flunk out or graduate with a 1.95 average or the like). You've gotten (again according to your own self-reported information) a Ph.D. in pharmacology, which means that you must understand ordinary arithmetic and enough calculus to be able to handle exponential decay and half-life, or you'd be killing people right and left by failing to account for half-life in medication dosing.
Therefore you must have been exposed to enough nuclear physics along the way that you understand the principles and calculus behind radiometric dating. It is bone simple.
If people were always dosed with a single fixed amount of some common medicine (if they were dosed at all) and you measured the levels of that medicine in their blood, the equation for exponential decay and drug half-life would tell you with a great deal of confidence when they received that dose. Sure one person here or there might have an odd metabolism, or take a drug that confounded your results somehow, but if you measured the level of all of the people in a room and they almost all had the same level, you'd have a lot of confidence in the result.
Which is precisely how radiometric dating works. You have to understand this, or at least if you aren't able to understand this you need to turn in your degree and become a goat herder before you hurt somebody. You therefore either believe in the dating of the earth and therefore the fossil record, or you have somehow managed to split your brain into a rational part you use in your job and an utterly irrational part you use to analyze questions of science anywhere they come into conflict with some really pernicious personal bias.
So what is it? Are you a creationist? Young earth? Old earth? Danikenite? Christian? Jew? Muslim? What is this mythology or bias that keeps you from just taking the evidence at face value instead of trying to find some deep flaw in it without exercising the same discipline that actual researchers in the field use? If I were to go in and try to prescribe or fulfill meds for some train-wreck of a patient, I'd kill them in a heartbeat because (although I am not stupid) I haven't studied all of the things I'd need to study to do a good job. I therefore eschew making solemn pronouncements about whether or not Coumadin is or is not a good drug to take if you're taking a daily multivitamin and a vitamin E supplement (on top of a couple of antibiotics, a blood pressure med, etc). I leave that up to my wife, who is a physician. She, in turn, leaves making profound statements about quantum theory or statistical mechanics or mathematics to me.
Yet you, without a shred of actual education in the field of evolutionary biology, without every having participated in the academic disclipline, don't hesitate to write entire books on the subject after setting up some sort of bogus "conference" that is strangely enough unattended by a single human being that actually works in the field and is regularly published in refereed journals.
Why?
What, I repeat, is your well-founded hypothesis to explain the radiometrically dated fossil record?
rgb
P.S. -- on Slashdot they reported today that NASA scientists are claiming to have resolved all of the issues raised by critics and stand by a claim that a 4 billion year old meteorite from Mars (radiometrically dated, of course), contains microscopic fossils -- and so do a handful of other martian origin meteorites.
So if your answer for Abiogenesis is "God did it, just so that he could create humans" or any other Abrahamic/Genesis nonsense, gee, looks like he did it on Mars too.
OTOH, if life arose on Mars independent of Earth, that's two out of two planets that could have supported life in the only solar system where we can check. That's like shaking the damn haystack and having two needles fall out at your feet.
Ready to concede that the haystack is probably lousy with needles yet?
Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
Books mentioned in this topic
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (other topics)Algebra of Probable Inference (other topics)
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (other topics)
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (other topics)
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (other topics)
Which is to say that it doesn't matter if something is only a million-to-one shot to happen, if it is given a million chances to happen, it is likely to happen, and if it is given several million chances to happen, it will be extremely likely to happen at least once.
The odds against life occurring are large. The universe larger yet. (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.")
When I was young there was a good article on Drake's Equation. They took the most optimistic and pessimistic numbers that experts were willing to back and ran them through the equation with the star population of the Milky Way Galaxy. The pessimistic numbers worked out to a figure of 0.5. Which would imply that there is, at this moment, one intelligent, technologically capable, communicative species per every other spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. 60% of locally known galaxies fall into this type. Assuming that holds true for the rest of the universe, that's about 51 billion galaxies that should have intelligent life that satisfies the Drake Equation (which means they have technology, they have radio transmissions which get into space; never mind all the ones that don't do that, or where they no longer exist/use high-power area EM transmissions, or where there's life without intelligence, or all the galaxies not similar to the Milky Way) right now—and this was the worst case.
And finally:
http://www.glasswings.com.au/comics/o...