Sorry Stephen, about 99% of these statements are grammatically correct.
Start with the statement "If you pick your nose, you get warts," For the
word "get" you can substutute "contract", "produce", "create", 'cause",
"generate", "induce", "make", "spawn", "originate" and many many more. In
the place of nose you can use "nares", 'nostrils", "nasal passages" You can
reverse the order and have "To produce warts, pick your nose" In the place
of warts, you can use "calloused bumps", "hypertrophy of the corium" etc.
You can create different families, such as "If you place your finger next to
your septum you get warts." In place of "if" you can use "when". In place
of "finger" you can use "digit". If you want you can use a gerundive (I
believe, I am not great at english) "placing your finger/digit in/on
the/your septum/nares/nasal passages/nostrils. You can say "Pulling
snot/bugers out of your nose/nostril/nares makes warts".
Use your imagination, I am sure that there are plenty of them I have not
thought of. And they are all grammatically correct.
I must confess, Brian Harper in a private e-mail warned me about picking my
nose in public. I should have heeded his advice. :-)
Now, consider that misspellings do not always ruin the meaning. I could say
"If you pick you're nose..." "If you pick your nostral..." the meaning is
still conveyed albeit less efficiently. Look at the posts on the reflector.
There are lots of misspelled words. I misspell "Occassionally" all the time.
Tonight I saw Brian Harper consistently misspell "falacy" (sorry Brian). It
should be "fallacy." But I fully understood what Brian was saying so the
misspelling didn't hurt communication. You understand me when I misspell
"occassionally" Thus the number of USEFUL strings are many times more than
the number of CORRECT strings. If you say that a phrase can have up to 5
misspellings before you can not understand it any longer than there are
1,650,000 sequences which convey the message about nose picking.
There are lots of gramatically correct ways to convey this sentence.
Stephen wrote:
>>Also, are Glenn's "330,000 eays to convey the information" in his
message *exactly* the same in meaning? A test would be to give a
different one of the 330,000 alternatives to each one of (say) 990,000
different English-speaking people. Only if a statistically
significant number of them correctly re-translated it back into
Glenn's ancestral message, would Glenn's hypothesis be sustained.<<
I didn't say that they were ancestral sequences. The question is, can a
given function be found by chance in a complex system. Language is a complex
system. Very few of the random strings have meaning, any meaning, yet I
showed that the percentage of volume of a random phase space containing a
particular function (telling your bride what you want for breakfast) is so
large that if written in proteins, one could find a suitable or many suitable
answers in the first vat of proteins you make.
Stephen presents the argument by Bradley and Thaxton which shows a much
greater set of problems than for language the D/L problem etc.
I will be the first to agree that proteins are different than language, but
creationists have long used the argument that one and only one sequence was
able to perform a given function. If this argument is valid, then it needs
to be cleaned up and the new information coming out about phase spaces needs
to be incorporated. How can we expect to hold on to the best and brightest of
our christian kids going into the sciences if our arguments can be overthrown
so easily?
You use Bradley and Thaxton, so I will also. In calculating the
configurational entropy for the 4 million nucleotides of E.coli, (page 138 of
Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of
Life's Origin, Philosophical Library, 1984) they use a KT ln(1). That 1 is
the number of combinations of the 4 million nucleotides which will produce an
E.coli. According to that equation, they are saying that one and only one
DNA sequence will do. Well there are lots of strains of E.coli, each with a
different sequence of DNA. Neither I nor anyone knows how many there are,
but it most assuredly is greater than 1. Some E. coli live happily in your
intestines, others, like those that were in Hamburgers in the
Washington/Oregon area will kill you.
But I don't want to pick on them alone, Robert Gange in Origins and Destiny,
Word, 1986) p. 73 making an analogy between the choosing of railway cars for
a train and the picking of a protein by random processes, says,
"Moreover, if just one railroad car is changed in the sixth position of one
of the trains, the result is sickle-cell anemia. Consider this: 270 million
of these hemoglobin protein molecules of just the right combination reside in
each of the 30 trillion red blood cells in your body."
He then goes on to calculate the probability of cytochrome C being produced
by chance based upon the erroneous idea that only one combination would work.
Here I can get two for the price of one.John Wiester quoting W. Lee Stokes, a
Mormon old earth Creationist, says,
"A chain of 1000 nucleotides made of the four basic units might exist in any
of 41,000 ways, but only one will form the protein being sought." W. L.
Stokes, Essentials of Earth History, 4th edition, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice
Hall p. 186, cited by Wiester, The Genesis Connection, Thomas Nelson, 1983,
p. 95
In this last case, the DNA language is degenerate. Several DNA triplets code
for the same protein. 6 code for Leu., 6 for Ser., 6 for Argenine etc. This
means that Stokes statement, endorsed by Wiester, that one and only one
sequence codes for the protein being sought, is wrong.
Modern research, Joyce's work, is showing that that is not true. Yet we have
known that for more than 50 years anyway from other research.
When you consider that pig, cow and sheep cytochome c, hemoglobin, insulin
etc are not identical, and some of these proteins will work with humans as
substitutes, it is patently obvious that our dependence on one and only one
sequence being the "correct and designed" sequence is an erroneous argument.
My concern is that Christians should be much more rigorous and thorough than
that. We all make mistakes, but this mistake has remained in the Christian
apologetical literature long after it was know to be false. We just haven't
updated our arguments.
Stephen wrote and quoted Bradley and Thaxton, and then Denton::
>>There must be a difference of scientific opinion here:
Bradley & Thaxton:
"Neglecting the problem of reactions with non-amino acid chemical
species, the probability of getting everything right in placing one
amino acid would be 0.5 x 0.5 x .05 = .0125. The probability of
properly assembling N such amino acids would be .0125 x .0125 x . . .
continued for N terms of .0125. If a functional protein had one
hundred active sites, the probability of getting a proper assembly
would be .0125 multiplied times itself one hundred times, or 4.9 x
10^-l9l. Such improbabilities have led essentially all scientists who
work in the field to reject random, accidental assembly or fortuitous
good luck as an explanation for how life began." (Bradley & Thaxton,
p190)
and Denton:
"Although the exact degree of isolation and rarity of functional
proteins is controversial it is now generally conceded by protein
chemists that most functional proteins would be difficult to reach or
to interconvert through a series of successive individual amino acid
mutations....The impossibility of gradual functional transformation is
virtually self-evident in the case of proteins: mere casual
observation reveals that a protein is an interacting whole, the
function of every amino acid being more or less (like letters in a
sentence or cogwheels in a watch) essential to the function of the
entire system. To change, for example, the shape and function of the
active site (like changing the verb in a sentence or an important
cogwheel in a watch) in isolation would be bound to disrupt all the
complex intramolecular bonds throughout the molecule, destabilizing
the whole system and rendering it useless. Recent experimental
studies of enzyme evolution largely support this view, revealing that
proteins are indeed like sentences, and are only capable of undergoing
limited degrees of functional change through a succession of
individual amino acid replacements. The general consensus of opinion
in this field is that significant functional modification of a protein
would require several simultaneous amino acid replacements of a
relatively improbable nature. The likely impossibility of major
functional transformation through individual amino acid steps was
raised by Brian Hartley, a specialist in this area, in an article in
the journal Nature in 1974 From consideration of the atomic structure
of a family of closely related proteins which, however, have different
amino acid arrange- ments in the central region of the molecule, he
concluded that their functional interconversion would be
impossible..."
(Denton M., "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis", 1985, Burnett Books,
p320)
***** endquote
Yes, there is a difference of opinion. Given the facts I cited above, I
firmly believe that, mathematically, this argument is wrong.
My point is not necessarily that the origin of life is so likely that it
would happen every day, but that Christians who are presenting arguments in
support of our theology should be very thorough and rigorous in the use of
our arguments. My concern about the correctness of apologetical arguments
began with the mis-portrayal of geology, the science I am most familiar
with. But I am not sure I see a major difference in other fields I have
looked at. In the probability argument, we are not presenting the correct
facts.
I don't know if the origin of life can happen with out God. The
evolutionists have not proven their case. But given what science has done in
the past that Christians thought would be impossible, I am not going to be
surprised if someday they do create life. Christians should at least be
prepared for the occurrence of such an event rather than having to attempt to
explain why the creation of some life form by scientists isn't the creation
of some life form.
glenn
16075 Longvista Dr.
Dallas, Texas 75248