sparc
Posts: 2089 Joined: April 2007
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Quote (Acartia_Bogart @ April 23 2016,12:24) | Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ April 22 2016,21:56) | Quote (stevestory @ April 22 2016,14:15) | Quote | 141 Indiana EffigyApril 22, 2016 at 12:24 pm KF@139: “My particular existence is not a result of blind chance processes and blind mechanisms…”
Your unsubstantiated assertion is duly noted.
“…but the result of a functioning procreative system on the part of my parents.”
True. But my claim was about the unique individual that is you, not that your parents could procreate.
Your father produced 500 billion sperm cells throughout his life. Your mother had a couple hundred thousand eggs. The unique you is the result of one specific sperm cell from your father and one specific egg cell from your mother. Any other sperm or egg would not result in the you that we all know and love. The result is that the probability of you existing, given the existence of your parents, is in the order of one in 100,000,000,000,000,000 (please double check my math, I could be in error).
Now, to really scare you, try extending these probability calculations back a few generations. It will not take too many generations to arrive at a probability that is so astronomically small that it is effectively zero. Therefore, you can’t exist.
Obviously, this conclusion is rediculous because the initial assumption, that the unique person that is you was the targeted goal, is wrong. But this is the same assumption that ID uses when it talks about the combinatorial explosion. |
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OK, this is the argument that had me looking back in my records, Google Groups having totally failed me.
And I did eventually find it.
Quote | Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 21:47:52 -0700 (PDT) From: "Wesley R. Elsberry" <wre> Message-Id: <199908210447.VAA27645@cx33978-a.dt1.sdca.home.com> To: welsberr, talk-origins@moderators.uu.net Newsgroups: talk.origins Subject: Re: I know this is wrong... References: <37BD2BD3.89EEA3F@earthlink.net> Organization: Online Zoologists Status: R
In article <37BD2BD3.89EEA3F@earthlink.net>, jenn and jason <ouroboros@earthlink.net> wrote:
[...]
J&J>This was posted to me today- can anybody explain this nonsense?
?> But let's really look at the math. ASCI (the code I am ?>writing with) is base 256. So this sentence:
?> I am writing to you.
?>Has a total of 20 characters, and thus the probability of ?>getting this sentence by pounding on the keyboard is one in ?>256^20, or 1.5X10^-48.
This is inaccurate, as others have pointed out.
?>In cosmological terms that equals zero.
This would appear to be a reference to Borel. Borel's rule of thumb indicated that events less likely than 1E-50 could be considered to have zero likelihood. Dembski explored this in his book, "The Design Inference". Dembski's revision, though, results in a much different number: 1E-500.
?>The genetic code is base 4, and has millions of bits of ?>information. Changing a simple genetic code string of only ?>1000 characters (a very small and unimportant genetic code) ?>would be one in 4^1000, or 10^-602. Considering that there are ?>no more than 10^81 atoms in the total universe, you can see ?>how the probability drops far below unlikely. In fact, all the ?>time in the universe could not be enough for even one mutation ?>to take place, let alone all of the various different species ?>we see.
As others have pointed out,
1) mutations are observed to occur 2) classes of proteins can perform the same function 3) redundancy via duplication and divergence leads to novel proteins 4) biochemistry is not random, but has inherent constraints
I would like to demonstrate a problem with the indicated probability argument by example. Let us consider the probability involved in the specification of one particular human being, in this case the putative author of the probability argument quoted above. What is the probability that our putative author exists?
Each human being receives about 100,000 alleles from each parent. (This is a topic of current research, as to the actual number of loci in the human genome.) So, we can start off with a figure of 1/100,000^2, or 1E-10.
Each human genome consists of about 3 billion nucleotide bases, and the typical mutation rate is 1E-9 per base. This yields about 3 mutations per genome. Thus, there are about three mutations per human being on average. What are the odds that one human has the particular set of mutations that occurs in their genome? That's any of 19 alternatives at three positions out of 3E9 bases. First, we have an instantiation of 1 out of the possible permutations. The permutations are N!/(N-n)!, or 19!/(19-3)! = 19!/16! = 5814, and our relevant stat is 1/5,814. Now, the statistic for the positions that are affected is 1/3E9 * 1/(3E9-1) * 1/(3E9-2) = 3.70E-29. The average expected individual factor due to mutations is thus 6.37E-33.
But all the above assumes that the right sets of alleles come together. That's right, one must have the right parents. Here we have another term, where if M is the total human population, the odds of getting the right set of parents is 1/(M/2)^2. For our putative author, let's assume M was about 3 billion. This yields a value of 4.44E-19.
Let's total up the damage so far. The odds of our putative author coming about is 1E-10 * 6.37E-33 * 4.44E-19 = 2.83E-61. This ignores the fact that the author's existence is the result of not just the odds given above, but also the odds of each individual who existed in his ancestry. So the figure above is a drastic underestimate of the odds. By our author's reasoning, 2.83E-61 is much much smaller than 1E-48, and thus by the "cosmological" principles cited by our putative author, he does not exist. QED. ;-)
Notice, please, that I did not say that this kind of probability analysis is valid. The point is that this kind of analysis is invalid. Various of the figures or calculations are based upon flawed, simplistic, or incorrect assumptions. While any particular human being is unique as a result of a convergence of contingent factors, these factors cannot be enumerated and handled with the ease that the numbers above were generated and used. And after all, while the odds of a particular individual being instantiated really are quite remote, the odds that *some* human being may come about are much much better. (Consider the world's current human population figure.) That that human being may later come to use invalid probability arguments is no long shot at all.
-- Wesley R. Elsberry, Student in Wildlife & Fisheries Sciences, Tx A&M U. Visit the Online Zoologists page (http://www.rtis.com/nat/user/elsberry) Email to this account is dumped to /dev/null, whose Spam appetite is capacious. "In the fall when plants return\By harvest time she knows the score" - BOC
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And I am sure that Mullings will either completely ignore the comment or accuse IE of soaking strawmen in oil of red herring and setting it afire with a barrage of turnabouts, ad-hominems and a general lack of duty of care to the truth.
or maybe I am not reading Mullings accurately. |
Has this ever been possible?
-------------- "[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."
- William Dembski -
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