The Argument Clinic

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@colewd

@Roy

No. Because you haven’t provided any actual numbers.

Hi Roy

I have several university courses in both calculus and statistics and my major included applied mathematics. I have also studied tensor calculus.

Did you pass any of those courses?

In order to do so, you would have to learn that it’s necessary to show your working, and that just giving the final answer isn’t enough. If it’s right it doesn’t show understanding, and if it’s wrong (as your answers invariably are) there’s no way of working out where you went wrong and correcting your error.

So you should know better than to just include previously unmentioned numbers with no derivation whatsoever, as you do here:

It is somewhere between 1 and 10^371 vs a denominator of 10^482. Since the latter simply gets you a successful protein fold (a sequence without a null mutation) and not a complex function that is highly resistant to mutation I would estimate that the real number is much closer to 1 then to 10^371.

Neither 10^371 nor 10^482 have appeared in this thread before. 10^482 might be a bad approximation of 20^371, and 10^371 derived from it, but since you’ve not explained where they come from, and 10^371 looks like a botched attempt to divide 20^371 by 2, the only response needed is to .

You should also, if you’ve that much maths background, know the difference between fractions and rations, know how to manipulate exponents, and know to check that you haven’t accidentally introduced extra zeros when transcribing numbers:

The search for the bacterial flagellum would take about 2^30000 trials or more depending on unseen complications. This would need to start from an organism that has never had one.

I am sticking with the assumption of 50% amino acid substitutions generating a null allele and a combined residue count of 300000.

That much background should also help you avoid errors that a ten-year old wouldn’t make, such as not being able to correctly subtract 3-digit numbers, or this gem:

I did answer it. But my answer was about 3x in the exponent too large. The flagellum to fold and bind 30 proteins will take about 2^10000 trials. Translated to the fraction 2^-10000 or 18^10000/20^10000.

2^-10000 is not the same as 18^10000/20^10000. It’s not even close.

2^-10000 is approximately 5e-3011. 18^10000/20^10000 is approximately 3e-458^[1].

You’re off by more than 2500 orders of magnitude - which may be a new world record.^[2]

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1. Evaluated as (18/20)^10000 to avoid calculator overflow. ↩︎

2. I know that technically that 2^30000 and 2^10000 are more than 6000 orders of magnitude different, but really the error there is only in the exponent. ↩︎