From Panda's Thumb: The Evolution of T-URF13: Does Irreducible Complexity Count or Not?

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

Then again, the probability (before the fact) that someone will be born in each generation is pretty high, and the probability that a person born in my generation will have a genome is 1. Someone being born in 10 generations is fairly likely, so my presence is not that remarkable.

But we’re not just talking about just any imaginable history of ancestors, just like we’re not just talking about any imaginable history of mutations. We’re talking about the specific results of each: You with your genome, and the flagellum.

Just like you are the result of a very unlikely series of mutations, as each of your own ancestors have their own unique set they passed on, the flagellum is a result of a very unlikely series of mutations, as the bacteria had their own unique set they passed on.

But these two are not comparable, yes, the probability of mutations in every generation is high, but the probability of those mutations producing a flagellum is low, whereas the probability that 10 generations of people will produce a person is high.

My argument is not about just any person, it’s about you specifically. Of all the possible people that could in principle have resulted from 10 generation of reproduction, it’s you. Your genome, your characteristics, your set of 10 generations of ~100 mutations accumulated every generation. We didn’t get just any possible person, we got you.

In both cases we got a particular result among innumerable that are possible in principle. Both results are unfathomably unlikely out of all the alternatives we know could have happened. Picking out the particular one we ended up with and computing it’s odds out of all the possible alternative histories, whether done for you or the flagellum, commits the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. Whatever argument you come up with against the flagellum being the result of a long series of compounding chance events can be applied to your own existence and the reasoning would be the same. If one must fall, so must the other. But that would be absurd, since obviously you exist and have at least 10 generations of ancestors. We can thus understand that the flagellum, like yourself, is just a contingent outcome of the history that happened to occur because those were the circumstances at the time.

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

@lee_merrill

I find it unlikely that all this function came about by simply combining two parts, the parts must have had pertinent function before the combining.

So this is what it comes down to, then. T-URF13 doesn’t count because ID-creationists simply refuse to believe what happens in reality.

No, I believe what happened, I only say that it’s unlikely that two parts came together, which did not have some of this function, and produced this function.

26s rRNA doesn’t code for protein. It’s the ribozyme within the ribosome of eukaryotes. The gene fragments from which T-URF13 derive come from DNA encoding a ribosomal RNA ribozyme (the ribosomal RNA called 26S rRNA). It is a gene that codes for an RNA molecule. It does not code for protein. So once again, you’re just wrong to disbelieve it. Your intuitions are failing you and you should take a closer look at why that is.