Quality Control the Gold Standard

Which is exactly what you do, say nothing about it.You say that Von Neumann wished to design a self replicating machine himself and ended up throwing in the towel. You haven't presented a scrap of evidence that he concluded that such a system could not be produced by any mechanism all you have done is said that Von Neumann gave up on producing such a system himself. You certainly haven't shown that he ruled out random mutation and natural selection as a method of generating such a system.Indeed Von Neumann himself explicity discusses the operation of a Von Neumann machine in terms of random mutation, (Von Neumann, 1966). So Von Neumann saw a requirement for heritable mutation in a self-reproductive system more complex than trivial systems such as crystalline growth.TTFN,WK

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that since you yourself were mentioning the many corrective systems you said were neccessary for a Von Neumann machine it seems a bit strange to complain when someone points out that such sytems can produce the sort of error levels you were calling for. Especially when living cells also have all these sorts of error correcting and detecting systems.The basic replication machinery is much much less effective, as can be seen when elements of it are knocked out or misfunction, as in many cancers which show hypermutation and genetic instability.TTFN,WK

The question is how similar to a modern living organism, or a hypothetical Von Neumann capable system, the original self-replicator needs to be. Why not provided some references to go with those claims. As far as I am aware this has barely any profile in the scientific literature but is rather a favourite of the ID crowd especially William Dembski who has popularised the concept.This is all just an argument from incredulity tarted up with some numbers you made up off the top of your head.That a problem is 'mathematically intractable' has absolutely nothing to do with its likelihood of occuring. N-body problems are mathematically intractable and yet few people resort to supernatural, or intelligent if you prefer, intercession to explain how the various bodies of the solar system interact.TTFN,WK

Thats a good point. Given that the germ cells are the products of several rounds of duplication themselves then 20-30 novel mutational differences between a human child and its parents would seem reasonable, especially if your figure only encompasses substitutions as Crash points out.TTFN,WK

No one is saying that Gish participated in the work that won the Nobel prize, all they are saying is that he worked with one of those that did. The 'their' in your quote from Evopeach is in reference to the principal's work not the team's.Gish worked with Stanley during his time at Berkley there is at least one paper that they published together (Gish, et al., 1958).TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 16-Feb-2006 11:45 AM

The general convention is that the first author will have done the majority, or at least an equal share, of the work. The last author is generally the supervisor of the group, which means a supervisor can get a lot of papers with little input other than general guidance. Any authors in between can range between substantial to small contributions, usually in descending order of contribution.From this the chances are that Gish did the majority of the work for that paper. I'm not sure how you could even start to assess the level of input of insight without having been in the lab at the time.TTFN,WKP.S. I don't think the Nobel they won was for Peace.