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Old 08-11-2003, 11:36 AM   #1
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Default Out of context?

This is taken from a book called Life Itself, and someone is using it to back up claims against evolution. However, it is written by a man who believes in evolution as far as I can see. Are they withdrawing information and taking this out of context?

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This is the view of Sir Francis Crick in his volume, Life Itself:

If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?... Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is approximately equal to...a one followed by 260 zeros.... The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time (1981, p. 51).
Dr. Crick then made the following fascinating admission: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (p. 88, emp. added). But, while acknowledging the impossibility of the accidental formation of life here on the Earth, he refuses to accept the idea of an intelligent Creator, and instead opts for “directed panspermia”—the idea that life was “planted” on the Earth by intelligent beings from outer space.

Dr. Crick is not alone in this viewpoint. The same year that Life Itself was published (1981), Sir Fred Hoyle authored Life from Space, in which he took essentially the same position. In fact, in an article that year in Nature, he wrote:

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate mater is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it.... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence (1981, 294:148).
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Old 08-11-2003, 11:49 AM   #2
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The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate mater is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it.... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.
Disproving Abiogenesis does not disprove evolution, as these are two different things.


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There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other
And we can conclude this because we know the conditions of every other planet in the unviverse, and none of them have the right conditions


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if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence
dichtonomy. The beginnings of life could have been the products of chemical reactions.


(Edit: Perhaps this thread would be better off in the Evo/Cre forum.)
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Old 08-11-2003, 05:05 PM   #3
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Originally posted by RRoman
(Edit: Perhaps this thread would be better off in the Evo/Cre forum.)
I agree.
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Old 08-12-2003, 07:46 AM   #4
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I note that Crick's book was published more than twenty years ago. Much progress on the "RNA world" has been made since then.

And Hoyle, of course, was a maverick who regularly ignored scientific evidence that contradicted his fixed beliefs. Hence his rejection of the Big Bang theory.
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Old 08-12-2003, 08:21 AM   #5
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Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
And Hoyle, of course, was a maverick who regularly ignored scientific evidence that contradicted his fixed beliefs. Hence his rejection of the Big Bang theory.
Not to mention his and Wickramsingh's 'Archaeopteryx is a forgery' claims... Like, all eight of them? Like, how do you add feather imprints to a fossil so that the imprints pass under the bones?

Not to mention his coining of 'tornado in a junkyard' as a refutation of evolution.

Hmmm. Hoyle.
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Old 08-12-2003, 08:50 AM   #6
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Are they withdrawing information and taking this out of context?
Most likely, it's a common technique. Ironic, since the out of context argument is often used against biblical skeptics.

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If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare an event would this be?... The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time (1981, p. 51).
As has been touched on, the argument of taking current sequences to claim impossible odds is an invalid one, as early life would have been much simpler in form.

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Dr. Crick then made the following fascinating admission: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (p. 88, emp. added). But, while acknowledging the impossibility of the accidental formation of life here on the Earth, he refuses to accept the idea of an intelligent Creator, and instead opts for “directed panspermia”—the idea that life was “planted” on the Earth by intelligent beings from outer space.
This definitely sounds like text mining to me.

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Dr. Crick is not alone in this viewpoint. The same year that Life Itself was published (1981), Sir Fred Hoyle authored Life from Space, in which he took essentially the same position. In fact, in an article that year in Nature, he wrote:...There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence (1981, 294:148).
Hoyle should have known better than to ever make that airplane from a junkyard quote....what a terrible analogy. Even more terrible is that it's still used these days to claim abiogenesis impossible.

And the "primeval soup" image that has been around a while may indeed be wrong...I've read of various models of jumpstarting life production, from using clay and crystal structures to lay upon, to sludges and soups.
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Old 08-16-2003, 12:58 AM   #7
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Default Re: Out of context?

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Originally posted by Vylo
This is taken from a book called Life Itself, and someone is using it to back up claims against evolution. However, it is written by a man who believes in evolution as far as I can see. Are they withdrawing information and taking this out of context?
Yes. The quote on p. 51 comes from a passage where he's talking about selecting a particular amino acid sequence by chance. All the stuff you quoted is intended to show how difficult it would be for this to happen by chance. He then explains that it didn't happen by chance:

"What we have discovered is that even at this very basic level there are complex structures which occur in many identical copies - that is, which have organized complexity - and which cannot have arisen by pure chance. Life, from this point of view, is an infinitely rare event, yet we see it teeming all around us. How can such rare things be so common?

"Stripped of its many fascinating complexities, the basic mechanism is very simple. It was suggested by both Darwin and Wallace, each of whom conceived the idea after reading Malthus. Living organisms must necessarily compete, for food, for mates and for living space, especially with other members of their own species. They must avoid predators and other dangers. For all these various reasons, some will leave more offspring than others, and it is the genetic characteristics of such preferred replicators wich will be passed on preferentially to succeeding generations. In more technical terms, if a gene confers increased "fitness" on its possessor, then such a gene is more likely to be found in the gene pool of the next generation. This is the essence of natural selection."

In other words, he's setting up the "impossible to occur by chance" scenario as a background to argue specifically for, not against, evolution - as the person who extracted the original quote would have known very well.

Here's your second quote in context:

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imaginatioon too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, espcially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against. Perhaps in the future we may know enough to make a considered guess, but at the present time we can only say that we cannot decide whether the origin of life on earth was an extremely unlikely event or almost a certainty - or any possibility between these two extremes. If it was highly likely, there is no problem. But if it turns out that it was rather unlikely, then we are compelled to consider whether it might have arisen in other places in the universe where possibly, for one reason or another, conditions were more favorable."

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But, while acknowledging the impossibility of the accidental formation of life here on the Earth, he refuses to accept the idea of an intelligent Creator, and instead opts for “directed panspermia”—the idea that life was “planted” on the Earth by intelligent beings from outer space.
Well, he makes very clear the difference between accidental formation and chemical reactions followed by evolution. The person extracting those quotes has very carefully chosen them so that the difference is eliminated and hence Profesor Crick appears to be arguing a postion opposite to the one he's actually arguing. Typical creationist tactics.
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Old 08-16-2003, 04:36 AM   #8
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And Crick is a distinguished biologist, whereas Hoyle was a distinguished physicist/cosmologist who, while wrong on his steady state theory, did a great deal of useful work about the development of stars. So he wasn't an expert on biology or biochemistry.
 
 

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