I'm not going to waste an entire hour listening to ID BS, especially if it's as brain-dead stiupid as you describe it.
I don't care how "learned" Gelernter's name claims him to be (German: lernen, lernte, gelernt), as a computer scientist he should know better than others the old dictum, GIGO ("Garbage In, Garbage Out") *. The output of your program can only be as good as the program and the data inputs: if your program is fouled up or you input crap data, then the results will be fouled up and crap. Or to a mathematician modeling something in the real world, your calculations depend on your model, so if you build a slap-dash fouled up model, then your results will reflect that.
Building crap models and using them to throw a lot of big numbers at the audience is one of the oldest "creation science" tricks to confuse and deceive its audience, one which IDologists use fully -- it's easy to refute most YEC claims, but ID claims are more difficult because of all the obtuse pseudo-mathematics you have to wade through and counter (not to mention that your countering would also go over most people's heads).
I should give Gelernter a listen before addressing his claims, but it's not worth sitting through an hour of that crap (I've had to sit through Hovind videos to find a specific claim and I have no desire to undergo such torture again). Do you have the timemark for when he makes his claims so that I can respond to what he's actually saying? Barring that, I have to go with your descriptions.
For example, what does he mean by "to assemble a protein molecule by molecule"? Are we talking about DNA base pairs, triplets of which form codons which translate for amino acids? Or are we talking about amino acids which chain to form proteins? Are we talking about the original proteins or modern proteins, or does he not realize that there's any distinction?
Also, is he talking about only one single attempt to form a (¿modern?) protein in such a single-step selection manner (see Chapter 3 of
The Blind Watchmaker)? Or is he allowing for a large number of parallel attempts such that the attempt would succeed if even just one individual attempt succeeds, meaning that the overall attempt would fail only if each and every individual attempt fails.
Refer to my page,
MONKEY PROBABILITIES (MPROBS), where I analyzed the probabilities in
MONKEY, my implementation of Dawkins' WEASEL program (again from
Blind Watchmaker):
- First, there is a huge difference between single-step selection and cumulative selection:
- Single-step selection is where you make your attempt and, when you fail (which is most probable), then you start all over from scratch, over and over and over again. In my MONKEY, the task is to randomly generate the alphabet in alphabetical order; in Dawkins' WEASEL, the target is a specific line of Shakespeare. Single-step selection could be described as "all or nothing at all."
The probability of single-step selection succeeding is abysmally small. For MONKEY's task to succeed with a super-computer capable of one million attempts per second (modern PCs can only do about 2000 per second) would take about 195 trillion years to earn a one-in-a-million chance of success, more than 10,000 times longer than the universe's estimated age.
All creationist probability arguments that I have encountered all single-step selection. I'm sure that Gelernter's contribution does the same. His second "hopeful monster" argument confirms my suspicion.
- Cumulative selection is a step-wise approach which accepts a small change in each step and uses the outcome of the previous step as the new starting point. Basically, you have a population of attempts and you select the one (as in MONKEY or WEASEL) or few (as in life) that come closest to the target and that/those serves as the starting point for the next generation. This does describe and model life far better than single-step selection.
Completely different from the abysmal failure of single-step selection, cumulative selection succeeds readily and quickly. When I read about WEASEL in The Blind Watchmaker, I couldn't believe it so I wrote my own, MONKEY, using Dawkin's description as the specification. WEASEL was written in BASIC, an interpreted language, so it ran so slowly that it took much of their lunch break to succeed. My MONKEY was written in Turbo Pascal, a compiled language, so it ran much faster (even on an XT clone with a Norton Factor of 2) and succeeded in much less than a minute (depending on population size, it normally took about 20 seconds -- on more recent PCs, it's almost instantaneous, which at first made me think that the program hadn't run).
Since I still couldn't believe what I was seeing even with my own program, I started analyzing the probabilities involved, doing the math, which resulted in my paper, MPROBS. Basically, each individual attempt would result in one of three outcomes: advancing (success), slipping back (failure), or no change (also counts as a failure). The probability of advancing is always low and it gets ever lower the closer the systems approaches the target. It turns out that the reason for MONKEY's success is that, while an individual's own success is unlikely, it becomes increasingly unlikely for every single individual in the entire population to all fail in each and every generation. Yes, we see the system backslide often, especially as we get to within a few steps of the target, but the probability of that continuing to happen becomes very small so MONKEY always succeeds in the end.
Creationists (including IDists) are ignurunt of cumulative selection and, even when they hear of it, cannot understand it nor its great power. I have no doubt that the "learned" Gelernter is no different.
- Second, any mathematical models for evolution and evolutionary processes must use the correct selection model, which is cumulative selection. The moment that IDists start to use single-step selection, they have destroyed the validity of their model and their argument.
The reasons for this have already been presented above.
Another treatment of this is on my page,
THE "RANDOM" PROTEINS ARGUMENT, in which I responded to a typical creationist probability claim about the chances of a modern protein just falling together randomly -- my impression is that this is what Gelernter is also trying to argue. Several problems with that:
- That is simply not how it works. That is not how proteins form, so just what are they talking about?
- There is no actual abiogenesis scenario, in which we expect any modern proteins to have formed at that time, but rather ancient barely functional proteinoids which later evolved into their modern forms. It's only creationists who think that's how it must work.
- The argument demands one-and-only-one highly specific amino acid sequence for that protein. It doesn't work that way! First, the very existence of differences in amino acid sequences for the same protein in different species (included in some creationist arguments, so they do know about that and acknowledge it) kills that assumption immediately.
Second, it is a well-known fact that only some loci in a protein are specified for one specific protein. I review this on my page, which is a reprint of an email with a creationist (to which he did not reply, as I recall) plus some of my posts on CompuServe.
In the class notes for their classic two-model class at SDSU (closed down by strident protests from campus Christian clubs), Thwaites and Awbrey take the example of an active site on a protein and show the variety of amino acids that could occupy each locus:
quote:
Rather than brandying about a hypothetical protein, let's look at a specific case. In the class notes of Frank Awbrey & William Thwaites' creation/evolution class at UCSD (the Institute for Creation Research conducted half the lectures and Awbrey & Thwaites the other half), they give the example of a calcium binding site with 29 amino acid positions: only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids.
The sequence of the 15 specified positions is:
L* L*L* L*D D* D*G* I*D* EL* L*L* L*
Where:
L* = hydrophobic - Leu, Val, Ilu, Phe, or Met
Prob = (5/20)^8
D* = (a) Asp, Glu, Ser, or Asn
Prob = (4/20)^3
OR (b) theoretically also Gls or Thr
Prob = (6/20)^3
D = Asp
Prob = (1/20)
E = Glu
Prob = (1/20)
G* = Gly or Asp
Prob = (2/20)
I* = Ilu or Val
Prob = (2/20)
Remaining positions = any of 20
Prob = (20/20)^14 = 1^14 = 1
Total Prob = Prob(L*) * Prob(D*) * Prob(D) * Prob(E) * Prob(G*) * Prob(I*)
= (a) 3.05 x 10^(-12)
OR (b) 10.2 x 10^(-12)
Your own calculation of the probability of a functional order coming up (ie, the standard creation science method) would be: (1/20)^29 = 1.86 x 10^(-38).
Comparing the lower probability to yours shows it to be 1.64 x 10^26 times greater.
This invalidates your colored-box-car analogy as it stands (to correct it, you would need to allow for a variety of different combinations) and it invalidates your probability calculations.
In addition to such active sites, the rest of the protein is primarily structural, which to me means that any of the 20 protein-building amino acids would do. Of course, that would by far further kill creationist ideas of amino-acid specificity in proteins.
Did I misunderstand Gelernter's arguments? If so, then please give us the timemarks so I can get the straight skinny.
{FOOTNOTE *:
We DSes (US Navy Data Systems Technicians, disestablished in the 1998) saw GIGO, "Garbage In, Garbage Out", as being depicted in our rating symbol:
The helium atom is used in the rating symbols for all electronics ratings (not technically correct, but far easier to embroider than a copper, silicon, or germanium atom). The three arrows pointing in represent inputs and the arrow pointing out represents output. This image is of a metal pin. When embroidered on a rate badge, the input arrows are solid and the output is just an outline (empty). We would interpret that to mean that the input arrows were the unprocessed "garbage in" and the output arrow was the processed "garbage out."
TRIVIA:
The rating symbol for
Electrician's mate is a globe of the earth. Here is why that is.
The creation of rating symbols happened around 1921. The Navy team went to each rating community and asked about equipment or tools or anything else that would symbolize what that rating did. At that time, many light bulbs were spherical and were called "globes" (as opposed to our current talk of an oniony shape, "bulb", or the German "Glhbirne", "glowing pear"). So when the team spoke with the Electrician's Mate the response was "a globe", which the team misinterpreted. By the time the mistake was discovered, it was too late to correct it.
}
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