Faith in mechanisms that would be outside our reach and understanding (as a matter of principle)

All this bloviation and you still haven’t provided a single probability calculation concerning biological life. :roll_eyes:

Sorry Sal but your “gee if you flip 500 coins” mantra isn’t going to fool anyone with an IQ over room temperature.

I am talking about lotteries like the Powerball lottery. The odds of any specific set of numbers in the Powerball lottery is about 1 in 300 million. According to your logic, it should take 150 million drawings before we have a 50% chance of having a winner. Therefore, getting a winner after just a handful of drawings is nearly impossible, and yet it happens.

I see you’ve never played blackjack in any of the Native American “Gaming” resorts (i.e casinos) in California. Almost every casino has its own form of “Blackjack” with custom variations of the standard rules just to change the probability distributions and trip up would be genius casino beaters like you. :slightly_smiling_face:

DNA may not have been necessary for abiogenesis. Until you show that DNA is necessary these criticisms don’t have any real relevance.

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Keep in mind Sal’s goal isn’t to get any reasonable results with his mangling of probability theory. It’s all just Creationist apologetics for the poor saps, I mean students, he’s going to “teach” evolution to. He brings the ideas here to practice his deliveries and make it harder for laymen to spot the flaws.

We can directly observe mutations happening through known physics and chemistry. We even observe the fingerprint of these natural mechanisms in the differences seen between species. I have a thread on this topic that you should check out:

And from a Biochemsitry Textbook:

Brownian motion is responsible for initiating many biochemical reactions. In the context of the cell, the most common environment for the thermal noise of Brownian motion is water. Water is the lubricant that facilitates the flow of energy and information transformations through Brownian motion. Enzymes find their substrates, fuels can be progressively modified to yield energy, and single molecules can diffuse from their sites of origin to their sites of effect, all through Brownian motion.

Biochemistry: A Short Course - John L. Tymoczko, Jeremy M. Berg, Lubert Stryer - Google Books

But water creates Browinian motion which in a cellular context can be used toward survival, but in a pre-biotic context is NOISE that can’t be rectified toward useful ends. Ion channels leverage Brownian motion, but Ion channels are improbable proteins that rectify the Brownian motion in one direction through the channel.

As seen in the idtDNA/Blue Heron process, a lot of machinery operating in carefully orchestrated steps have to be in place to prevent randomly oriented and positioned nucleotides from attaching in the wrong way to elongate a strand of DNA. This random orientation and positioning is due to Brownian motion, and machinery has to be in place to effectively filter out the effects of such randomizing processes.

On a related note, speaking of water, there is the water paradox in the origin of life.

When trying to understand the origins of life on Earth, researchers run into a paradox: while water is an indispensable solvent for all known life forms that exist today, water also inhibits the formation of string-like chains of nucleic acid polymers such as RNA that were likely precursors of life. This raises the question: how could the nucleic acids have formed in the first place?

The article goes on to suggest life must then have originate without water, but instead in formamide! Yikes.

Sal where are these “Dr. Tan’s improbability calculations” you keep talking about? They weren’t on the webpage you linked and you certainly haven’t provided any such calculations here.

Were you just making up things again?

What is this ridiculous obsession with brownian motion supposed to tell us? Yes, molecules in solution(or in gases) more or less randomly move around as they are bombarded with vibrating solvent molecules, so what? That tells you nothing about what kind of chemistry is going to result from that.

You’re not going to get all imaginable random associations of H2O and HCL in a solution. The atoms and molecules might move around in solution randomly, but the chemistry that takes place between them is determined by their physical attributes. The negative charges in H2O are found mostly around the oxygen atom, and the positive charges around the hydrogen nuclei. So the chlorine ion in HCL will associate with H in H2O, and the hydrogen ion in HCL will associate with O. And these reactions and associations (how fast they occur, how stable or strong the associations are) are also influenced by temperature and pressure.

Sal’s confusion of chemistry as being somehow determined by brownian motion to be just some completely random mess is utterly ridiculous. This is PRE-highschool chemistry.

First I have heard of her. Somewhat exceptional in being a bone fide research university attached associate biologist who’s listed recent publications are entirely in BIO-Complexity and Answers Research Journal. She is completely on board with the YEC orthodoxy, the appendix of one of her papers making embarrassing forays in isotope dating and cosmology where she is clearly out of her discipline.

https://biology.missouri.edu/people/?person=62#section-1

“Yikes” is not an argument. They give a scenario for how formamide could be generated. Do you know for a fact this could not or did not occur, if so how would you know?

The only way to make any progress in the origin of life field is to do models and experiments to try to determine the conditions that can give rise to chemistry and physical processes that could have any relevance.

And this is all based on the premise that life began with the abiotic chemical synthesis of DNA or RNA.

How do you know it did? There are many other models that don’t assume this.

And?

What does any of this have to do with the origin of life?

I sometimes wonder if ID creationists spent more time in a molecular biology lab they may have a different outlook on some of these subjects. Here are a couple of examples (which I am assuming you are very, very familiar with).

PCR. You can have a 6 billion base diploid human genome and just two places in that entire genome where two primers can specifically bind. They are all randomly bouncing around in solution, and yet some of those primers are able to bind to their specific binding sites within 30 second or less.

Pretty much any enzyme reaction. Put enough enzyme into a reaction and you can destroy 99% of the substrate in less than a minute. This requires the substrate to randomly bounce into the protein, and yet it happens very quickly and easily.

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You’re also not saying anything coherent.

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That’s funny I was thinking about writing a post on the same subject. If brownian motion was supposed to be some sort of great inhibitor to any putatively relevant chemistry at the origin of life, shouldn’t PCR be basically impossible?

It is true that those primers will go through a lot of random, transient associations as they bounce around in solution. But the “canonical” binding spot is eventually found, and persists, because that association is the strongest and most stable of all the possible ones. It will bind there much more strongly and stay there for much longer, than it will in any other place.

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This may all be as it is, but nothing you have said demonstrates that one can calculate probabilities of single events without first formulating the probability distribution of the possible outcomes of the process that generates the events.

You need to know the total number of possible outcomes of the process, and the number of ways to achieve the event under study as a result of the process. You then divide the latter by the former and there is your probability.

This is really basic stuff and I don’t understand why you are even arguing about it.

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Wow, those sections on radiometric dating and fossils are really cringeworthy. This person is utterly clueless about these topics.

The “it’s too improbable therefore GODDIDIT” argument has been a cornerstone of ID-Creationist arguments in the last 20 years or so. They never provide any actual calculations or values because they don’t have near enough info but that doesn’t matter to them. The point of the argument is to sway the opinion of scientifically unsavvy laymen. It’s religious apologetics all the way, not science.

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Just when I think I have a useful comment to contribute, I look at the sidebar and see there are still over 100 unread comments remaining. :rofl:

I sort of like Sal’s Stochastic Process analogy, but he didn’t mention the stationarity assumptions. An event of such small probability as to indicate a miracle points equally to a violation of assumptions, an exception to that general rule of stochastic processes. I think we are saying the same thing, more or less.

Maybe @stcordova is having problems with a PCR experiment in his studies?

Sal, there are several here who could help you work through things. There is no reason to blame Brownian Motion on your trials and tribulations. Most of us went through growing pains at the bench …

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