Quality Control the Gold Standard

The term "rna" doesn't even appear in your opening post, only DNA. Your main point seemed to be this: The experiments I cited do precisely what you claim here is impossible, improve replication accuracy through a process of inaccurate replication and selection. There are no known limits to the improvements such a process can achieve. One of the significant problems faced by origins of life research is that for the most part we don't know what the conditions on the early earth actually were. The experiment didn't include as one its goals a replication of the early earth environment. The goal was to see if an evolutionary process could improve the accuracy and speed of replicators, which answers your last question about "what constituted the measure of improvement."--Percy

Really? This is from http://www.humble.k12.tx.us/KHS_profile.htm: Caught exaggerating again, I see. And while Kingwood H.S. is rated Exemplary by the Texas Education Agency, I could found nothing about any national academic ranking.Regardless of your personal experience at a single high school in Texas, it is common knowledge that the Texas State Board of Education provides lists of conforming and non-conforming textbooks to the school districts under its jurisdiction. In the biology discipline there are probably around 5 to 10 books on the conforming list, and I expect your group chose from among these books. To go outside the conforming list would be to risk a poor assessment by the Texas Education Agency.AbE: This is all off-topic, of course. I just felt it important to correct your misstatements about textbooks.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 02-14-2006 11:19 AM

Wow! Can't read either huh? 4013 including the freshman class.I am more concerned about the level of scientific literacy the evos possess. I mean I thought you'd at least have a grasp of significant figures.5,000 has one significant figure and three place setting zeros.I just assumed you knew as a literate science expert that this represents an estimate.. looks like I have to revise my assumptions downward for the posts.California buys more textbooks than Texas by the way.

Obviously neither can you. This, too, is from the website: The freshman class doesn't attend Kingwood High School at present. If the freshman class is considered part of the high school for administrative purposes, this wasn't made clear by either you or the website. But it doesn't matter, because even with the freshman class included you're still off by about a thousand students.But you're drifting off the point, which is that the set of textbooks you were selecting from were likely on the Texas State Board of Education's conforming list. And PaulK's original point was that state boards of education of large states like California and Texas have a significant influence on what publishers put in textbooks. If these large states request reduced treatments for evolution, then that is what will happen. And has happened. This isn't any secret. It makes big splashes in the news several times a year.--Percy

Just FYI, 4,013 with one significant figure is 4,000, not 5,000.

I see you conveniently circumvented your obvious error in not understanding basic significant figures knowledge. And such puts my figure which I have said was an estimate in thr range of 4100 plus.Actually in Texas schools can use any books they wish but they may not get state support for the purchase.And if you think there has been any lessening of evolutionary teaching in high schools in Texas and California or anywhere else you are just intellectually dishonest.I once had a one hour telephone debate with Dr. Steven Schafersmann a paleontologist from Rice. Since he heads a foundation to preserve evolution in Texas schools you can bet its well represented.He did of course turn down my offer to fly Duane Gish in from So Cal and sponsor all expenses for a debate at Rice on his turf.When you have an on point documented experiment showing pre-rna to rna to the seven sigma genome replication lets see it.After all your words were .. "there is no known limit to the improvement that can be achieved" by evolutionary processes acting on a crude rna replicator".What do you think a week or two to get it finished?

And here I thought you were up on things. The only current theory of merit is the rna world or rna first theory. Natuarally I thought you were aware of these basic issues. Looks like a downgrade in the level of posting is in order.

You've just demonstrated that you don't have the above.

My point is that 5000 without a decimal point at the end or a bar over any mumber is generally considered to have one significant figure.That means the estimate is an unbiased sample mean of a normal distribution where the uncertainty is indicated as plus or minus 999 which of course just happens to include the purported number 4013.

You can be exceptionally insulting for one so blatently in the wrong. Bizarre. Without specific eror bounds, 5000 can represent at most a range of 4500 to 5500.Apologies for the OT.

Really? Absolute crap. Where do you get your maths degree?

Shhhhh Cavediver. It has been obvious for sometime that a large fraction of what EP says isn't true. Don't get into that; it is fun as it is.

Here in the states we covered Significant figures in 9th grade (freshman in high school) science class......... (at least in Montgomery County, MD schools)

Sorry Ned my capacity for bogus biology, genetics, and chemistry is boundless but when maths takes a hit, I can't help but get cranky...

As I've stated several times already, it is likely the original process, whatever its nature, took hundreds of millions of years in a laboratory the size of the entire globe. It is highly unlikely to be duplicated from beginning to end in a single experiment in a lab. I would like to see this too, though it is highly unlikely that such a lengthy process of progression could be demonstrated in a single experiment. It would much more likely be a series of many experiments produced over decades and decades of work by scientists in the origins of life community.I understand that your skeptical that science will ever achieve this, but personal incredulity is a poor reason for rejecting anything. There are, for example, excellent theoretical reasons for believing that matter cannot exceed the speed of light, but you have produced nothing equivalent for believing that natural processes are insufficient for producing highly reliable replicators. Scientists have shown that it is possible in relatively short periods of time to improve replicator reliability by quite a bit. I would point out here that your claim that it was from .0001 to .0002 are figures just pulled from the air, and given your errors in other areas of math, such as your claim that 5000 is the proper approximation for 4013, they are not to be trusted.Since the laboratory evidence shows that what you claimed was impossible is actually possible, now it is only a matter of degree and extent.--Percy