i'll try to provide you with more material below, since
quote:
Originally posted by John:
quote:
Originally posted by forgiven:
no john they put their own mathmatics forward in an attempt to refute his...
Yes, darling, like this little gem:
The theory of the origin of life favoured by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe depends heavily on their calculation of the probability that an enzyme could be produced by shuffling amino acids is no better than one in 106900. There are many objections to this sort of calculation, but one that we have not seen mentioned previously is that it takes no account of actual observations of the catalytic properties of random co-polymers of amino acids.
thanks sugar, but unless i'm mistaken i believe i already included that quote in my original post
quote:
Notice the red? This is an example of exactly what I have been saying. The data doesn't exist.
oic... why? because they *say* it doesn't? and why exactly do you place so much faith in someone who admits their argument is "...one that we have not seen mentioned previously.."?... do you trust this authority more than those who do make statistical analysis? why?
quote:
not to show that the computations can't be done, but to show that humphrey's are in error...
quote:
Yes, indeed, like here...
Let us now ignore the experimental evidence and accept that 1 in 106900 is a reasonable estimate of the chance of assembling a catalyst by tinkering with amino acid sequences.
... were we see the authors ASSUME some figures for the sake of argument. And go on to show that the arguments used are silly anyway, but for different reasons.
ok, so you seem to think this heretofore unknown 'refutation' of h&w is the coffin's nail that proves calculations are impossible... ian musgrave admits it is possible to assign probabilities to the monomers to polymers and the formation of catalytic polymers... he doesn't like to go much further however, going on to say "For the replicating polymers to hypercycle transition, the probability may well be 1.0 if Kauffman is right about catalytic closure and his phase transition models, but this requires real chemistry and more detailed modelling to confirm."
as you can see, musgrave doesn't deny anything here he simply tells what, in his view, would be needed to confirm another aspect of the calculations
john stockwell argues against borel's law (which, if true, would serve to show the "impossibility" of abiogenesis) by saying, "The point being, that Borel's Law is a "rule of thumb" that exists on a sliding scale, depending on the phenomenon in question. It is not a mathematical theorem, nor is there any hard number that draws a line in the statistical sand saying that all events of a given probability and smaller are impossible for all types of events."
granted, borel's law doesn't speak specifically to abiogenesis but still, not everyone agrees that computing the odds is impossible...
quote:
quote:
you seem intent on moving back to your brand of argument, that of attacking a person instead of providing sound arguments...
And you are back to your favorite tactic-- no, actually, you have never abandonned it but quite consistently poke and prod and stubbornly repeat yourself until someone pokes back. Then you start pitching stones and crying foul.
oic... the "i know you are but what am i?" peewee herman argument... i might poke and prod, i might be stubborn, i might repeat a point... but i don't personally attack the person... you try to bully people and you resort to personal attacks that are childish and immature...
quote:
As for the quality of my replies, why don't you compare your posts to mine. I have gone to great lengths to explain WHAT is wrong with Humphreys methods. You have repeated "well, other people accept Humphreys .... nah nah nah...." How sound is that argument, darling?
as sound as saying "some don't accept h&w" i guess, sweetie?... ok then, here're some more:
dr. stanley miller (yeah that one) seemed to shoot down a few competing ideas... on meteorites etc, "Certainly some material did come from these sources. In my opinion the amount from these sources would have been too small to effectively contribute to the origin of life."
on panspermia: "That's a different controversy. There are different versions of the theory. One idea is that there was no origin of life, that life, like the universe, has always existed and got to the Earth through space. That idea doesn't seem very reasonable since we know that the universe has not always existed, so life has to happen some time after the big bang 10 or 20 billion years ago."
on submarine vents: "Submarine vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds you are going to have in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean goes through those vents in 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get. Furthermore, it gives you a time scale for the origin of life. If all the polymers and other goodies that you make get destroyed, it means life has to start early and rapidly. If you look at the process in detail, it seems that long periods of time are detrimental, rather than helpful."
this is telling, imo: "So there are all sorts of theories and speculations. The major uncertainty concerns what the atmosphere was like. This is major area of dispute. In early 1950's, Harold Urey suggested that the Earth had a reducing atmosphere (f: unlike now) .... Although there is a dispute over the composition of the primitive atmosphere, we've shown that either you have a reducing atmosphere or you are not going to have the organic compounds required for life."
so among the "all sorts" of theories and (yes even) speculations, we have the grandaddy of exobiologists saying that if one of these speculations isn't true "..you are not going to have the organic compounds required for life."
from the university of pittsburg's pro-abiogenesis site:
Arguements against abiogenesis usually include a calculation which indicates that the statistical probability of ending up with complex molecules like RNA by "chance" (random events) is so small as to be "impossible". ("Like a tornado in a junkyard assembling a Porche")
However, the calculation is based on bad assumptions. (Statistics can be used to "prove" anything, if you manipulate the starting assumptions right!) Abiogenesis is staggeringly improbable IF you work on trying to get a particular modern (~300 amino acid long) protein all in one step, but this is not what is proposed.
In modern abiogenesis theories, the end product (the first "living things") are much, much simpler than modern proteins. They are simple molecules probably no more than 30-40 subunits long. These simple molecules then slowly evolved into more co-operative self replicating systems and then finally into simple organisms. Abiogenesis has a number of small steps rather than one BIG one.
not one mention of the odds being impossible to calculate, merely an admonishment that, since "life" should be defined simpler, it isn't as bad as it appears
while this one doesn't speak to calculations per se, it is interesting:
"No living cells are present, but entire bacterial genomes are available, together with ribosomes, membranous vesicles, ATP and other energy containing substrates, and thousands of functional enzymes. Once again, would a simple living system arise under these conditions? ...most experimentalists would guess that little would happen other than slow, degradative reactions of hydrolysis, even though virtually the entire complement of molecules associated with the living state is present. The dispersion has lost the extreme level of order characteristic of cytoplasm in contemporary living cells. Equally important is that the ATP would be hydrolyzed in seconds, so that the system still lacks a continuous source of free energy to drive the metabolism and polymerization reactions associated with life." [Micro. Mol. Biol. Rev. Vol.61, No.2 - June 1997]
yet another pro-abio site:
So what are the exact Creationist arguments against the probability of abiogenesis (which they invariably misrepresent as being the same as the theory of evolution)? Well, just remember that 90% of them are based on the strawman assumption that the very first living thing on this planet was a full-blown cell, similar to a modern organism, instead of the simple self-replicating molecule theorized by those who actually perform legitimate research in the field.
as you can see (yet again), this one also doesn't argue against calculations, it simply states that creationists attack a complex strawman instead of a simpler cell(man)
alexander mebane wrote:
Robert Shapiro is a chemist who actively participated in the post-1952 experimental investigations of "origin of life by natural chemical evolution", and in 1986 published a very significant book (Origins) summarizing that work and the conclusions to be drawn from it. Dismissing as unrealistic the idea that either DNA or RNA could ever have spontaneously "evolved", because of the complexity of those purine base + sugar + phosphoric acid structures. He asks what could have been the simplest possible "pre-living" chemical assemblage that might have been able to generate the essential quality of life, self-replication. Generously oversimplifying to the maximum degree credible (or beyond), he proposes (p. 296) that the first "proto-life" might conceivably have emerged from a set of as few as ten very small "primitive enzymes", each one a mini-protein of only 25 links, and all constructed from a set of only four amino acids, rather than the twenty that Nature now employs. Assuming for the purpose the real natural occurrence of a "primordial soup" that consisted exclusively of those four amino acids (which is of course, a simply ridiculous postulate), he proceeds to show that, under these absurdly favorable conditions, the probability of "spontaneously", or accidentally, forming the requisite set of molecules would be about 1 in 10^150. So, if something like 10^150 random trials were available, the thing might really have happened. But he had previously calculated (p. 126) that, if one assumes that the Earth was covered by a 10-km-deep layer of "soup", and that random trials went on at the rate of one billion per second in every cubic micrometer (billionth of a cubic millimeter) of that ocean for one billion years (the maximum time that really elapsed before life appeared), only 1.5 x 10^62 separate tries could be made. This number is so invisibly tiny compared to 10^150 (far tinier than a bacterium compared to the whole Solar System!) that the spontaneous natural formation of the ten mini-enzymes is thus demonstrated to be strictly impossible.
there *are* countless other examples that either show the calculations or at worst don't deny the possibility of such calculations... would they be difficult? well of course.. are there things we might not know yet? sure... so what?
yeah it's true, i quote others (as john did)... and it's true that there's no way i can do any of the math... but john would have us believe that people disagreeing with the possibility of computing the odds of abiogenesis occuring is tantamount to such computations being impossible... there are a lot of very bright people out there who disagree... of course they disagreed before checking with john, but someone will probably point out their error
™ Version 4.2
