ChemEngineer in Message 9 writes:
The first, original synthesis, whether stepwise or in one single, continuous process, consisted of "selecting" 1 out of 20 amino acids making up humans, one at a time, 38,138 times, or 1/20 to the 38,138th power or 10-49,618. The pretense of claiming that "sections" of any protein were "assembled" overlooks the unassailable fact that any "section," however small, had to be assembled under the same statistical constraints. Whether one does the computations in one step or 1,000 steps, the figures are beyond dispute. They get a great deal worse, in fact.
It doesn't seem like you're representing things accurately here. If we were trying to produce an entirely unique sequence, it's sort of correct that we can't save any net effort by breaking it down in to sequences and making those first. The best you can do there is to make them in parallel.
But Titin isn't an entirely unique sequence. Mostly it's composed of a bunch of repeating protein domains chained together. So if we're producing it from scratch, there is no need to make each of those repeating segments individually. We can simplify the task by making those particular domains once each and then duplicating them for the remaining 100+ times each one appears.
It also seems questionable to treat it as a series of independent events that all need to happen before we have anything. If a shorter form of Titin is useful (and given that one exists that is 1/6 the size that seems pretty likely) then it's not a random selection of a bunch of elements in a row anymore, it's more like a series of steps that can happen one after another.
This is the reason I never found any of the probability-based arguments from creationists convincing. It seems like it's mostly about picking a set of assumptions that produces an impressive looking number without giving much attention to justifying why those assumptions are accurate.
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