Albion

Perhaps someboy could point us to the original of the Eldredge quote from Disciple's C&P from GodandScience, becaue the only place where some of the keywords are showing up is as a secondary quote from a creationist source.

goat37

Ok Disciple... given the scientific age of the earth if 4.5 billion... how do you explain why there were no birds or mammals more than 250 million years ago? mammals would have to be created by non-mammals, and birds from non-birds...
(which came first, the chicken or the egg? the egg, but the egg did not come from a chicken)

Jinto

That would be 10^26. 10E26 is 10*10^26 or 10^27. And yeah, I knew what he was trying to say, but I'm trying to get him to read the stuff he copies and pastes before submitting it, and hopefully learn binary as well.

theyeti

I assume you mean 1 in 10^141. (That's what happens when you cut and paste -- superscripts get lost.) At any rate, as has been pointed out already, this is wrong. The number of possible proteins with 40 amino acids is slightly less than 1.1^52. (There are twenty amino acids, so you simply raise 20 to the power of the number of amino acids.) I can't figure out how the source you cut and pasted from came up with your number, but this should tell you something about the competence of your source given that he screwed up such an extremely simple calculation.

Nonetheless, the number is only meaningful if you make a fatal assumption: that every amino acid in a given protein is invariant (i.e., can't be substituted with another). This is flat out false; in general, only a handful of amino acids in most proteins are invariant. There are others that are conserved, and can be substituted only with similar amino acids, and then there are others whose ability to be substituted depends entirely on other amino acids that it might interact with. But in general, a large fraction of amino acids can be substituted with any other amino acid without altering function. (Of course which amino acids can be mutated depends on the "context" that the mutation takes place in -- mutating one amino acid can alter which changes are allowed at other positions.) It is very common to find closely related proteins with 50, 60, or even 70% or more of their amino acids different, and yet they still have identical (or highly similar) structure, and identical (or highly similar) function. There are differences that go even beyond that, but it's hard to know if such proteins are related by divergence or convergence. The fact is, proteins are highly evolvable.

theyeti

Passant

NumberTenOx,

Master Li says hello!

hezekiah jones

Originally posted by Disciple
L. E. Orgel

I have a very nice e-mail from Dr. Orgel stating his broad position on just about everything you have posted in this thread. Since I never asked his permission to reproduce it anywhere, I'll just have to open it now and enjoy a little chuckle all by myself.

NumberTenOx

Um, yeah, that's it.

I would be most humbled if you would say hello to the sweet old man for me, sir.

hyzer

"broad position"

should that read "broad opposition"?

pangloss

I thouhgt you said in your opening post that YOU wanted to debate?

It would appear that you are content to, instead of actually debating anything, simply post things that you have copied form creationist websites.


That is not debate.

That is basically spamming.


Care to actually debate something?

Goober

ROFL!!!! Let's see if he even reads your post. What's the bet he never even notices.

I notice that all of his arguments have [copied from ....] in numerous places in them. Someone should tell him the traditional way of arguing is to think of the arguments yourself and then quote evidence to back it up, not quote the arguments and think of the evidence to back it up yourself.

Oh, well it's good to see he's mastered copy and paste, even if he hasn't quite got the hang of reading arguments he's copying and thinking critically about them himself.

Somehow I think this will be a disappointing argument. Oh, well at least Jinto is making it amusing. I salute you.