What evidence?
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Please show your work.
What was the very first organism like and how do you know that? How did it originate and how do you know that? How do you calculate the probability of that state of affairs obtaining?
TRANSLATION: “I have no evidence to back my claim so I’m just going to ignore criticisms and flounce out”.
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We now have estimates of the minimum number of genes required to sustain life. Solving homochirality alone will you 10000 bits.
Reference please.
Also that isn’t an answer to my question. How do you know what the first form of life was like?
Please show your work.
You already know this Rum. Knock off the nonsense.
No Bill, don’t try to squirm out of this.
Reference!
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Actually with an iterative process and the appropriate feedback it’s trivially easy to get 500 coins to all be heads.
- Toss the coins, leave the ones that landed heads alone.
- Re-toss the ones which landed tails.
- Repeat until you have all heads.
Creationists always forget about the feedback provided by natural selection. Always.
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Bill always gets so defensive when he’s asked to back up his claims but can’t do it. 
That’s what Craig Venter and his collaborators have attempted to do in a new study published this week in the journal Science . Venter’s team painstakingly whittled down the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides , a bacterium that lives in cattle, to reveal a bare-bones set of genetic instructions capable of making life. The result is a tiny organism named syn3.0 that contains just 473 genes. (By comparison, E. coli has about 4,000 to 5,000 genes, and humans have roughly 20,000.)
Yet within those 473 genes lies a gaping hole. Scientists have little idea what roughly a third of them do. Rather than illuminating the essential components of life, syn3.0 has revealed how much we have left to learn about the very basics of biology.
FAIL again Bill. Ventner’s experiment only shows how many extant proteins extant life requires. It doesn’t say anything about ancestral life forms or ancestral proteins, let alone the earliest self reproducing life.
You don’t understand any of this, do you?
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That’s not a reference, that’s a quote from a popular press article. And nowhere do they actually demonstrate what the minimum number of genes require for life is. If you read the actual publication to see what they did, they just take a cell and try to strip away genes until they whittle it down to some set where it appears they can’t remove any more. There’s zero reason to think this is in any way related to what the first forms of life were like.
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I know you base your thinking on wishful speculation and ignoring data. These are the current set of facts and 1000 balls is very conservative as I said. This is it for this discussion.
So no evidence for the requirement of 1000 balls. Thanks for the evidence ID-Creationists have 0 balls.
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But that’s you doing that. You are taking this experiment and extrapolating into an unknown area of science: What is life, what forms can it take, and what is the simplest one possible?
You are the one saying that if we can’t remove anymore genes from this organism X without killing it, then no simpler organism could possibly exist. That’s basically what you’re doing. But that’s pure speculation and wishful thinking.
If you disagree and you really think this work shows no simpler organism could exist, then explain how you reach that conclusion from this experiment.
Craig Venter and his team whittles genes away from some organism and test along the way whether the organism grows under their tested conditions. They find that they get down to about 470 genes and then it appears as if they can’t remove any more from that organism before it fails to grow under their tested conditions.
Now, how does it follow from this that no simpler life could possibly exist?
These are the current set of facts
What exactly are the facts? You mean that Craig’s team removes genes until they hit some set where they can’t remove any more before they fail to detect growth. Yeah, that’s a fact of their experiment.
and 1000 balls is very conservative as I said.
You said that, yes. It’s completely made up of course.
This is it for this discussion.
No, we’re not really done. We are only now getting started. You made your claim, you brought the reference you appear to think supports your claim. But only now are we getting to the meat: Does it in fact support your claim and if so, how does it do so?
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Your speculation rests on the fact that someone cannot prove it false? This is why this discussion does not going anywhere.
If you want to make the case for life simpler than 473 genes then this discussion is worth having.
Then I guess this universe wasn’t really fine-tuned for life then
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I’m not the one making speculations, you are.
You are the one making a conclusion about what is possible, based on some experiment being done that you’ve read about, and I want you to explain to me how that conclusion follows from that experiment.
You think that, in an experiment where they removed genes from some organism until they failed to detect growth, it has been shown that life can not possibly be simpler than the organism they ended up with in that experiment.
So, how does that follow Bill?
You are the one making the claim that life can not be simpler than having 473 genes. You need to back up this speculation with evidence.
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I am not making the claim it could not possibly be simpler. I am simply making the calculation on the available data which comes out order of magnitude more than my claim.
I think when you analyze the functions that are required to sustain a living self replicating population it is remarkable that you can do it with 473 genes.