Creation Myths with Dr. Michael Behe on "The Edge of Evolution"

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

This is all true until you put the person in a random spot in the Milky Way galaxy and then deriving a method of finding an American becomes a lot more challenging.

An analogy using physical spaces does not accurately represent combinatorial spaces.

The analogy explains exactly what is wrong with your argument, which is that you point only to the total size of the space, without giving any indication of the fact that is relevant to how difficult it is to find what you’re looking for: The ratio of functions to nonfunctional things.

The total size of the space tells you nothing. Literally not a single thing. Whether it’s proteins in sequence space, photons in outer space, or Americans in America.

If the concentration of salt in a body of water is 0.1g/cm³ it doesn’t matter whether you have just one cm³ or a volume the size of the universe. Finding salt ions is exactly equally difficult. Blurting that there’s a lot of water is meaningless. The real question is the ratio of salt to water, not the total volume of water.

You’ve had this thing with the ratio explained to you many, many times before. I have a genuiinely difficult time convincing myself you don’t actually understand it. So why do you continue to pretend not to?

@colewd

The bigger the search space the more functional solutions that are needed to be identified to make a random search feasible.

Guess what - there’s a wealth of evidence that there are enough such functional solutions to be found by evolution:

Functions are not so rare at all, and definitely not isolated, in sequence space of biopolymers

Found this paper on arXiv: Abstract: At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge de novo with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution, random polymers could have sufficed for the appearance of incipient chemical activity, while the cellular environment harbors a myriad of proto-functional molecules. The emergence of function is facilitated by several mechanisms intrinsic to molecular organization, such as redundant mapping of sequences into structures, phenotypic plasticity, modularity, or cooperative associations between genomic sequences. It is the availability of niches in the molecular ecology that filters new potentially functional proposals. New phenotypes and subsequent levels of molecular complexity could be attained through combinatorial explorations of currently available molecular variants. Natural selection does the rest. It’s hard to pi…