Duke said:In reply to RX Reven' :
And that's one of the assumptions you are making that I disagree with.
It seems as if you are assuming that the particular amino acid combination found in the human body is the only effective combination.
Actually, if anything, it's the only effective combination that works for the human body NOW... precisely because this is the way we've evolved. But literally nothing says that this particular way is how we have to be. We could easily have evolved in a nearly infinite number of different ways in response to the same selection pressures.
If you start with a finished human genome, you are correct, the odds of randomly making a separate human genome that is identical are astronomically, cataclysmically against.
But that isn't how life works. We are the product of a nearly infinite set of chances, indeed... but there are a nearly infinite variety of ways we could have turned out instead.
Hi Duke,
My friend, you're making more assumptions about how people in my camp are preforming the calculations.
We're using Planck minimums for both time and distance to allow for the absolute maximum probabilistic resource (dice rolls) and we're assuming all materials are equally useful for coding life (of course, we're carbon based but silicone and ammonia may work fairly well but we're going flat out assuming all materials, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. are somehow just as good).
Further, we're not assuming that DNA or RNA are the only ways to store information...we're assuming an infinite number of ways to store information and all we care about is the number of dice rolls required to get the information required for life to be encoded (captured).
FWIW, I've read the top three pro-design books on the subject (Darwin's Doubt, Signature In The Cell, and something else I've forgotten) and I've read the top anti-design book on the subject (The God Delusion) all totaled, I've read 1,400+ pages of respected Ph.D.'s "Duking" it out.
Three primary technical skills are required to look at this (microbiology, organic chemistry, and statistics) and my primary skill set is statistical analysis; that's why I got into this.
Richard Dawkins, in his best selling book The God Delusion called people like me "theologians in a cheap suit" implying that we're just trying to wrap our religious belief system in modern science. Boy is he ever wrong...baring weddings and funerals, I've been in a church exactly once in the last four decades.
Enough, we're going way too deep on this subject to be appropriate for the TIL thread.
Bottom line, I'm not convinced that we were designed, I'm not arguing that point, I just believe that we're fooling ourselves when we conclude that we know where where we came from; genesis event unknown, amazing opportunity / mystery for brave, smart, unbiased, scientists to work on.
