I agree it takes a certain amount of intelligence to write a program but this
evades the issue. God easily could have "written" a program into the fabric
of nature thus God wrote the rules for life. You commit the fallacy of
assuming that if God didn't do it like a magician with flash powder, then God
didn't do it. That is not a self-evident proposition. God could have
designed the universe as an engineer would rather than as a magician.
You wrote:
>>
Why? The MHC complexes are proteins.
> The alleles are made of DNA but one can
But the proteins they code for are made of a.a. which simplify
without invalidating the argument<<
I don't have much of a problem with that, except that it is the DNA which
must evolve, not the amino acids. The amino acids are not passed from parent
to child in the same way that the DNA is.
I wrote:
>>This is quite a different problem than what
> you are suggesting. I am not suggesting the discovery of one of these
alleles by random mutation but the generation of ALL these 59 alleles by
random selection by modification of the existing alleles. The pathway to the
new allele must involve random mutation of the existing allele. The only
way out of this is to assume that the flood was not anthropologically
universal or that the flood occurred a long time ago.<<
You replied,
>>Yeh, but that was not the point being made at the time.<<
I was the one who raised the genetic variability issue and the point I was
making was precisely that the flood had to be along time ago due to this
genetic variability.There is simply too much variability to have arisen in
the time frame most Christians allow from either the creation of man, which
was a major genetic bottleneck, or the flood, which was another genetic
bottleneck. Genetic variability was the issue which started this whole thing
and that is what I think is the important issue for Biblical apologetics.
You wrote:
>>Read above which you just tried to refute. In the case of MHC
complexes, the number of known sequences that will perform the job is
59, which you claimed was the maximum number of functional alleles
known at any locus. I am talking a.a., even if there were six codons
for each a.a., the number is still astronomical.<<
First, I didn't say 59 was the maximum number of functional alleles known at
any locus. I said that was the maximum number of alleles I know of. Others
may know of more. Let's go through the math again.
There could only be 10 alleles in the genome (forget a.a.) of the people who
got off the ark. If they were the entire human population at that time, then
there were only 10 alleles in existence for the MHC complex anywhere in the
universe. So the question is, "How long does it take for the other 49
alleles to arise by mutation from just these 10?" In a previous post I gave
the rates of mutation of 1 x 10^-7 for each nucleotide location each
generation. If you have a 1000 unit long gene, then each generation has a
10^-3 chance of having one mutation in that gene. Thus in about 1000
generations you would expect to have 1 mutation in that gene on average. At
20 years per generation, this is 20,000 years. As you know, many of these
alleles are different by many, many positions. For each position of
difference, you can on average add another 20,000 years between now and when
the last human bottleneck occurred. According to the Bible, the last Genetic
Bottleneck was the Flood (assuming it was anthropologically universal which I
do) This is the problem for the young earth, global flood position. It is
also a problem for views such as Hugh Ross advocates. He believes that
modern humanity was created about 30,000 years ago. There has not been
sufficient time to generate the observed diversity. While Ross is an old
earth creationist, his view also does not fit the data of genetic
variability. My view, which advocates a flood a few million years ago, comes
the closest of any view to fitting in with what we know from molecular
biology. But I have the sinking feeling that fitting the data is not what
Christians want in these areas. They want to change the data or ignore it.
If our Bible is true, and I believe it must be, then the only way to fit the
genetic diversity data is to move the flood way back in time.
The young-earth, global flood advocates fail to account for how caves can
form in limestone in such a short time after the flood to have man living in
them within a few hundred years. This is a logical contradiction. They also
have an even greater problem with genetic diversity because they must account
for all the genetic diversity of man within a few thousand years, as well as
the diversity of all the land animals who were on the ark. How much data
must go unexplained before we decide a new approach is required?
You wrote:
>>Now what is the chance of any of the human evolving by chance,
according to the figures (5*10^9) you gave?<<
What you calculated is the odds that you or I personally (my genome or your
genome) would would be drawn at random from a big tank of nucleotides. This
is not the odds that any of the possible humans might arise by chance.
Humans are not created according to chance by drawing nucleotides out of a
big lottery bucket.
Besides, there are not 4^(3.3 x 10^9) possible human genomes. Most of those
are useless. I would suggest that you get a book on nonlinear dynamics and
learn what a phase space is mathematically like. There are mathematical
rules which govern phase spaces which have been studied now for about 30
years and these limit what you can do in a phase space. Only certain
positions in a phase space are functional.
glenn