Re: Lenny's Counter Argument

On Jan 28, 10:47 am, Seanpit <sean...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Another way to look at this issue is to consider a situation where you
have a specific paragraph of 1000 specifically arranged characters.
This paragraph is functionally meaningful and this function is
dependent up the specific arrangement of all the characters in the
paragraph.  What are the odds that any single sequence in a given book
or series of books, like all the books in the Encyclopedia Britannica
(EB), would have more than a few dozen character matches to a specific
1000 paragraph?

It is very likely, unless this paragraph was a direct quote from one
of these books, that no more than 20 or so characters would match any
20 characters in the target paragraph.  In fact, in finding enough
subsequence matches in the EB, the average sequence match size would
probably be around 10 characters or so.  In other words, it would take
about 100 fragments each averaging 10 characters in size to make up
the specific 1000 character paragraph.  While this is better than
starting with pure random sequences, the odds that random mutations to
the EB will line up all 100 snippets of 10 characters each to produce
our specific 1000 character paragraph are extremely remote this side
of trillions of years of time.

And, that's the problem in a nutshell.  With each step up the ladder
of functional complexity, the odds that a sizable percentage of the
needed sequence will exist, preformed, within any collection of
sequences that wasn't already derived from the sequence in question,
drop, exponentially, with each increase in the minimum sequence size
and/or specificity requirements.

Take the above paragraph as an example for a little experiment: If
you do a Google search for, "And that's the problem in a
nutshell" (i.e., A 36-character match to the paragraph), you'll get
471 matches. If you do a search for, "And that's the problem in a
nutshell. With", you'll only get one match. If you do a search for
And that's the problem in a nutshell. With each", you'll not get any
matches.

And, as the target sequence gets longer and longer, what happens to
the average match size for portions of the target sequence? Do they
get longer and longer as well? - relative to a given pool of sequence
options? No. The average size of a sequence match stays the same.
What does this mean? It means that more and more sequences of the
average length are required to be linked together in the proper
collective arrangement by purely random processes before the final
product can be realized.

Of course, the followup argument usually is that larger subsections
would also be beneficial well before the final sequence is realized.
Therefore, a non-random selection force could be employed along the
way. The problem with this argument is that the gaps between the
proposed steppingstones along the way are simply too large once a
certain level of minimum size and/or specificity is reached - like
1000 fairly specified characters.

The same problem holds true for protein-based systems. This is the
reason why computer software programmers will never be out of a job
and it is also the reason why the software of biological systems did
not arise by the mechanism of RM/NS beyond very very low levels of
functional complexity (i.e., well shy of the 1000 fsaar threshold
level).

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


.

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