Originally Posted by The_Real_Hawkeye
Originally Posted by oldtrapper
Originally Posted by The_Real_Hawkeye
Originally Posted by oldtrapper

Sorry ol' bean, but this is just more arguing backward.

Actually, it's the reverse of what you say. You folks are trying to suggest that purely speculative evidence that something cannot happen is proof that something that quite evidently did happen (supported massively by the available evidence), didn't.



Your argument is like this. I see a rock. It was caused by the big bang. The evidence for the big bang is that the rock is here. See?

The Big Bang Theory is a fairly well supported scientific theory, while speciation by natural selection is massively supported by every observation made in biology, and in related fields, such as geology. The two are not even close.



Misleading, if not outright false. Micro-mutations occurring by natural selection are massively supported by evidence and no one but the most doctrinaire young earth creationist thinks otherwise, but that's not where the fight is. The debate is whether the same process that can cause a small change in finch beak size (for example or variation among dog size, shape or color) has the power to create life from inorganic matter or to change a dog into a horse. On that question the evidence shows overwhelmingly that natural selection is not up to the task. In the first place, natural selection is non-starter until you have at least a simple life form. But origin of life researchers don't have a clue how that life form could possibly have emerged from inorganic matter. All they've got is hand-waving speculation. Literally, they've made virtually no progress on this issue since Darwin's time. Furthermore, the odds that natural selection (assuming away the origin of life problem) can generate the massive amounts of information needed to generate even one simple protein are overwhelmingly tiny. So tiny in fact that it is essentially impossible. Here's a summary of how physicist Gerard Schroder illustrates the odds:

"In an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts a computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!) the monkey’s produced 50 typed pages---but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (A or I). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has 30 characters (the 26 letters and other symbols), then the likelihood of getting a one letter word is 30 x 30 x 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one letter word is one chance out of 27,000. Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?” he asked? He continued: All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening for, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” I counted the number of letters; there are 488 letters in that sonnet. What’s the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence as in “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”? What you end up with is 26 multiplied by itself 488 times----or 26 to the 488th power. Or, in other words, in base 10, 10 to the 690th. [Now] the number of particles in the universe---not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons and neutrons---is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to the 600th. If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips---forget monkeys---each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet the world just things monkeys can do it every time.”

And the information required in DNA to sequence a single simple protein is vastly more than the information contained in a simple Shakespearean sonnet.


Tarquin