Re: Math In D.I. Land
- From: "chris.linthompson@xxxxxxxxx" <chris.linthompson@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 12 Jul 2006 07:27:12 -0700
CreateThis wrote:
On 11 Jul 2006 20:50:59 -0700, michael.palmer1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
How do you like this gem?
.... The general consensus of many meeting
participants was that Neo-Darwinism was simply not mathematically
tenable.
To put it another way: "a majority of a few of the participants
agreed".
LOL.
CT
If by "a few" you mean one, and one who was pretty badly misinterpreted
at that, you're correct. Read this:
*****
Schroeder cites a Wistar institute conference as showing evidence of
the improbability of evolution. The symposium was transcribed from
audio and published in 1967 as Mathematical Challenges to the
Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, a Symposium Held at the
Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology April 25 and 26, 1966, Paul
Moorhead and Martin Kaplan, eds. Needless to say, this is quite out of
date. Worse, it does not support Schroeder at all. Only one paper comes
anywhere near proposing that the origin of life and subsequent
evolution is improbable: Murray Eden, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian
Evolution as a Scientific Theory" (pp. 5-20). He does not really argue
that evolution is improbable, but rather that no present theory
accounts for certain peculiarities of life on earth, especially the
fact that all living organisms are composed of a very tiny fraction of
all the possible proteins.
In particular, Eden argues that given all "polypeptide chains of length
250 [amino acids] or less...There are about 20^250 such words or about
10^325" (p. 7). This number is ripe for quoting, but it does not stand
as the odds against life, and even Eden did not even imply such a
meaning--to the contrary, he admits that perhaps "functionally useful
proteins are very common in this space [of 10^325 arrangements]," and
facing tough criticism in a discussion period (where his paper was torn
apart, pp. 12-9) he was forced to admit again that perhaps "there are
other domains in this tremendous space which are equally likely to be
carriers of life" (p. 15). But his main argument is that life is
concentrated around a tiny fraction of this possible protein
development "space" and we have yet to explain why--although his
critics point out why in discussion: once one system involving a score
of proteins was selected, none others could compete even if they were
to arise, thus explaining why all life has been built on one tiny set
of proteins. One thing that even his critics in discussion missed is
the fact that his number is wrong: he only calculates the number of
those chains that are 250 acids long, but he refers to all those and
all smaller chains, and to include all of those he must sum the total
combinations for every chain from length 1 to 250. Of course, the
number "250" is entirely arbitrary to begin with. He could have picked
100, 400, or 20. He gives no arguments for his choice, and as we have
seen, this can have nothing to do with the first life, whose
chain-length cannot be known or even guessed at [5].
Among the huge flaws in Eden's paper, pointed out by his critics, is
that he somehow calculates, without explanation, that 120 point
mutations would require 2,700,000 generations (among other things, he
assumes a ridiculously low mutation rate of 1 in 1 million offspring).
But in reality, even if only 1 mutation dominates a population every 20
generations, it will only take 2400 generations to complete a 120-point
change--and that even assumes only 1 point mutation per generation, yet
chromosome mixing and gene-pool variation will naturally produce many
at a time, and mix and match as mating proceeds. Moreover, a beneficial
gene can dominate a population faster than 20 generations, and will
also be subject to further genetic improvements even before it has
reached dominance. I discuss all of these problems in my analysis of
Schroeder above. But in the same Wistar symposium publication, C. H.
Waddington (in his "Summary Discussion") hits the nail so square on the
head that I will quote his remarks at great length:
"The point was made that to account for some evolutionary changes in
hemoglobin, one requires about 120 amino acid substitutions...as
individual events, as though it is necessary to get one of them done
and spread throughout the whole population before you could start
processing the next one...[and] if you add up the time for all those
sequential steps, it amounts to quite a long time. But the point the
biologists want to make is that that isn't really what is going on at
all. We don't need 120 changes one after the other. We know perfectly
well of 12 changes which exist in the human population at the present
time. There are probably many more which we haven't detected, because
they have such slight physiological effects...[so] there [may be] 20
different amino acid sequences in human hemoglobins in the world
population at present, all being processed
simultaneously...Calculations about the length of time of evolutionary
steps have to take into account the fact that we are dealing with gene
pools, with a great deal of genetic variability, present
simultaneously. To deal with them as sequential steps is going to give
you estimates that are wildly out." (pp. 95-6)
*****
From
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html
Chris
.
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