dangin

I don't remember which IDer talks about how difficult it would be for all the amino acids, or proteins to get together to start life. And he goes through, on paper, how hard it seems and the sequence they would have to join in and so on.

Can anyone tell me how bad this analogy is?

A spherical object, made of balled twine, covered in leather stitched together, that weighs 7 ounces, and has a circmference of 9 inches. It is thrown at 90 miles an hour, and is rotating on a 30 degree axis, at five rotations per second.

It is struck by a conical wooden object, that weighs 32 ounces. The angle of the object is 178 degrees to the ground, the velocity of the object is 137 mph, the angle of the taper at the precise area of impact is 17 degrees.

OK, now write out the physics on paper and tell me where the baseball is going to land, exactly.

Or stand in the outfield, with a fielders mitt and catch it.

The point is the scietific expression of some things is much more difficult than the real doing of them.

Does this analogy stand up at all?

[ December 19, 2002: Message edited by: dangin ]</p>

liquid

The analogy works, in itself, but it is unlikely to address the argument directly, and I suspect it will not be a 'satisfying' answer for either side.

Undoubtedly, the creationist mistake lies in the assumptions of the calculation, but without seeing them it is impossible to be specific. Some points worth considering, however, are:

1) We don't know all the details of how protein formation occurred. Therefore, calculations based on simple permutations (i.e. 'a particular order') with no reference to physical models are as meaningless as calculating the probability of the position of the earth with no input from gravity.

2) The creationist probably makes the mistake of assuming that one particular combination was the 'goal', when in fact there may well be thousands, or even millions of combinations of proteins that could have arisen.

3) Over the immense time periods we are talking about, with the number of chemical events that could happen, even very unlikely things occur on the 'cruellest' of normal distributions. Almost certainly there were factors driving the creation of proteins (for instance, simpler proto-life forms, or thermodynamic dissipation constructs), so this is not intended to be an excuse, simply a reminder that no context has been established, and ignoring context makes a probability meaningless.

4) And finally we come to the physical effects that could/would 'cause' the formation of particular proteins. Take your pick from electrostatic replusion, attraction, hydrophobic clustering, enzyme action, catalyst - there is a whole specturm of stuff out there, but a biochemist would explain those better than me.

Hope that helps. Post the calculations to get a proper debunking.

[ December 19, 2002: Message edited by: liquid ]</p>

Shadownought

That's a good one. Shame on me for not thinking of it myself.

Jobar

A baseball analogy can be used to demonstrate the occurance of extraordinarily unlikely events. Consider the sequence of events needed to put a baseball in the one particular seat where you are sitting. I am certain that it's incredibly unlikely that you will catch any particular fly ball from any particular seat- but we all know that some particular ball will be caught by the person in some particular seat, in any given baseball game. Why, given enough fly balls, eventually one of them will knock a bird out of the air- I actually have a video in which that happens, despite the humongous odds against it!

mecca777

Now am I the only one who wishes they could come up with a way to work Fabio into this analogy?

Bobby B.

To go with the baseball analogy, what about Joe Dimaggio's hitting successfully in 61 consecutive games?

It is possible for any one person to do this!!!! There is a certain finite chance to hit successfully in a game (batting average * at bats/game). It is then possible to string together enough hits together in consecutive games to set this king of records. The chances become vanishingly small after just a few games though, but never drop to zero. Even if Jolting Joe normally had a 66% chance of hitting successfully in any one game (unrealistically high?), his chances to hit successfully in 61 consective games would be .66^61, only about .00000000025%. This is more than zero, but not very likely either!

Vorkosigan

Alas, The Streak was only 56 games, unless you mean his 61 game streak with the San Francisco Seals.

<a href="http://www.baseball-almanac.com/feats/feats-streak.shtml" target="_blank">The Baseball Almanac</a>