hezekiah jones

Here, this one does:

Wha?!

luvluv

ps418, I do mean that too, but there are a few claims he makes that I agree with that I want to see if they hold water with you folks, and that fine tuning argument is one of them. Specifically, the conclusion that the odds of any planet having the conditions for life in the universe to be 1 in 10 to the 139th power.

Furthermore, what do you folks think of the arguments against evolution from probability?

luvluv

He should have said, and I hope he meant, odds of these things happening by accident. I don't see how you calculate odds against "Divine Design". I mean I fully admit I believe in Divine Design, but I don't see how you form probabilities for it.

ps418

I think they're mostly pretty ridiculous, since they are based on assumptions that "evolutionists" do not hold in the first place (e.g. the assumption that genes originate via the random combination of individual nucleotides, the assumption that every loci in a gene or protein can only be occupied by one specific nucleotide or amino acid, etc.). You might want to check out:


<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html" target="_blank">Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?</a>

<a href="http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/prob.htm" target="_blank">Origin of Life Probability </a>

<a href="http://talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob.html" target="_blank">Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations </a>

luvluv

All right I'll check those out ps418.

Here is a link explaining some of those items in the table, but it still doesn't account for where he got his probability numbers;

<a href="http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/designevidenceupdate1998.html" target="_blank">http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/designevidenceupdate1998.html</a>

ps418, I also heard Ross say on a radio link over there that he went to a Origins of Life conference attended by evolution scientists. He says that scientists there said they don't know how life originated, or that they "don't have a working model for it yet". Is that true? What is the current opinon on how DNA and the like originated?

Coragyps

Numbers 78 to 93 - elemental makeup of crust.
What in the world is he going on about?? The whole exercise seems to be pulling fractions out of some bodily orifice! Sell it to The Weekly World News- not to me.

ps418

We should keep in mind that, although they are both of interest to biologists, evolution and the origin of life are seperate subjects. As to theories about the origin of life, this is not something I'm particularly familiar with (I'm a geology buff), so I'd be of little help in this area, I'm afraid.

Patrick

luvluv

Okay the first thing you linked is way over my head.

The second article seems to deal with the probability of beneficial mutations, interesting but not what I am asking for here.

The third article was quite informative, but I have some questions.

1) The author says:

"Okay, you are looking at that number again, 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040, that's a big number, and although a billion starting molecules is a lot of molecules, could we ever get enough molecules to randomly assemble our first replicator in under half a billion years?

Yes, one kilogram of the amino acid arginine has 2.85 x 1024 molecules in it (that's well over a billion billion); a tonne of arginine has 2.85 x 1027 molecules. If you took a semi-trailer load of each amino acid and dumped it into a medium size lake, you would have enough molecules to generate our particular replicator in a few tens of years, given that you can make 55 amino acid long proteins in 1 to 2 weeks [14,16]."

Is this actually a do-able experiment and if so has anyone ever tried this?

2) Has anyone ever created or seen created a self-replicating molecule? Are there any experiments going on now to try to see one?

3) Is there a model for what all biologists specifically believe to be the 1st self replicating organism/molecule?

4) The author claims:

The synthesis of primitive self-replicators could happen relatively rapidly, even given a probability of 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040 (and remember, our replicator could be sythesized on the very first trial).

Okay, but couldn't it also not happen at all?

5) Doesn't the fact that we don't know (I'm assuming we don't know, maybe you guys know) the exact conditions of earth during the time when life was originating kind of give the edge to a naturalist explanation? I mean, certainly given completely stable favorable condtions, all of these probability equations work out neatly. But what if it's just really hot for a few thousand years? Or if a metor crashes into the earth (which didn't have an atmosphere back then, correct?). Or if there was an earthquake? Wouldn't even a strong wind be enough to undo a few hundred years worth of microbiotic advancement?

6) Also, assuming that a lake medium sized lake could produce one self-replicating molecule in tens of years, wouldn't we need a lot more than one to really get life up and going? As I mentioned before, a relatively minor event (a rock falling into said lake) could start the whole process over again.

Thanks guys sorry if I am coming off as ignorant.

[ March 05, 2002: Message edited by: luvluv ]</p>

luvluv

ps418, what do you think of this:

Fungus Paints Darker Picture of Permian Catastrophe

The greatest extinction of life ever recorded in the fossils appears to have been even worse than previous estimates suggested.1 The Permian extinction, a catastrophic series of events about a quarter billion years ago, may have destroyed as many land species as ocean species—some 90 percent.

An international team of eight paleobotanists and geologists has found evidence of wood-rotting fungi in huge abundance across five continents at an epoch which corresponds with the Permian extinction.2 The quantity of fungi indicates a vast supply of dead wood covering those land masses, a supply so large as to suggest a near total extinction of land plants.

Some corroboration of this hypothesis comes from a recent, specialized study in Australia. That study reveals that 97 percent of leafy plant species went extinct in the Permian era.3 And since animal species rely heavily on plants for food, we can reasonably postulate that a massive animal extinction resulted. Thus, the former 70 percent figure for Permian extinction of plants and land animals is being revised upward.

A second basis for the revision comes from a geophysical study published in 1995. As you may recall, the several probable causes of the devastation included huge lava flows across Siberia.4 New research establishes that the impact of these Siberian eruptions was previously underestimated.5 Enough molten basalt spewed forth to pave the entire surface of Earth twenty feet thick, had the stuff been distributed evenly. At the same time, these eruptions released enough chlorine and sulphur to poison both the atmosphere and the water on which land life depends.

Such a vast extinction event as the Permian catastrophe poses a formidable challenge to any strictly naturalistic interpretation of life. Given the extent and characteristics of the Permian devastation, natural selection and mutations fall far short of adequately explaining the rapid, widespread, and diverse speciation that occurred as soon as conditions on Earth improved.

References:

Hugh Ross, "Life's Fragility," Facts & Faith, 8:3 (1994), pp. 4-5.
Henk Visscher, et al, "The Terminal Paleozoic Fungal Event: Evidence of Terrestrial Ecosystem Destabilization and Collapse," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 93 (1996), pp. 2155-2158.
G. J. Retallack, Science, 267 (1995), pp. 77-80.
Ross, p. 5.
P. R. Renne, Science, 269 (1995), pp. 1413-1416

ps418

luvluv:
The second article seems to deal with the probability of beneficial mutations, interesting but not what I am asking for here.

No, the article discusses the number of useful sequences in sequence space, which directly applies to both origin of life calculations and to 'probability of beneficial mutations' calculations as well.


2) Has anyone ever created or seen created a self-replicating molecule? Are there any experiments going on now to try to see one?

I remember hearing something about self-replicating proteins a while back.

<a href="http://w3.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1990/may09/23124.html" target="_blank">Self-Reproducing Molecules Reported by MIT Researchers</a>

<a href="http://www.scripps.edu/chem/ghadiri/html/selfrepli.html" target="_blank">Peptide Self-Replication</a>

<a href="http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/sak-peptides.html" target="_blank">SELF-REPLICATION: Even peptides do it. By Stuart A. Kauffman</a>


Okay, but couldn't it also not happen at all?

Sure. The point of the article was to address a specific set of arguments that it could not happen.

Patrick