Terry Gray wrote:
> The point IS NOT that we have a naturally
> occuring evolutionary environment here.
> No one would deny that we have a highly
> artificial system! I don't quite understand
> why you are pointing that out to us. It's
> totally obvious.
Well, Terry, if it's totally obvious, you seem
to have missed the point, because you continue:
> The point IS, however, that apparently coming
> up with a functional protein from random sequences
> is pretty easy (statistically, that is). In other
> words there's NOT a lot of specified information
> required to get a folded protein that does
> something.
Think about it this way. Suppose you find an
arrowhead in a field, and tell me that this
object displays intelligent design. No, I say,
arrowheads occur naturally, entirely without
design, in random piles of rock.
Then I take you to my vast Canadian mine to
show you how I discovered that arrowheads
occur naturally. Turns out I'm sifting
millions of cubic tons of crushed rock, used
an arrowhead-shaped template (form) to isolate
those few rocks with just the right shape. ;-)
The prebiotic relevance of the Szostak et al.
experiment is nil. Why didn't they start with
amino acids? We both know the answer. A whole
lot of specified information, provided by Szostak
and his co-workers, is needed even to reach
the point where one can go fishing for functions
in large pools of mRNAs (and their products).
Dembski explains all this beautifully in his
new book (plug, plug).
Jack Szostak will be here in Chicago in a
couple of weeks, at a mini-seminar on genome
evolution at the Univ. of Chicago. I plan to
attend, and to ask him about all this.
Paul Nelson
Senior Fellow
The Discovery Institute
www.discovery.org/crsc
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 06 2001 - 17:44:36 EDT