I wrote:
>We use synthesized reagants and artificial conditions
>>to do all of biochemistry and genetics. Does that mean
>>that biochemistry and genetics are biologically irrelevant?
>>If intelligent control invalidates an experiment in this
>>area, then _all_ experiments are invalidated.
Paul Nelson wrote:
>Nonsense.
It is you who are writing nonsense, although perhaps you are just not
taking the trouble to write what you really mean.
Paul Nelson wrote:
Origin-of-life investigators routinely
>debate the merits of each other's experiments in
>terms of their prebiotic plausibility. I do not
>think you would credit an experiment claiming to
>show the natural or prebiotic (i.e., undirected)
>synthesis of ribozymes, for instance, if the
>investigators began with RNA from Sigma. Experiments can be more, or
>less, illuminating
>of any particular problem, depending on how
>closely we take their conditions to mirror nature. Of course experiments
>are "intelligently-designed," in the sense that we arrange what Francis
>Bacon called "a trial," to understand how nature herself operates. But if
>a *result* depends critically on the intervention of an agent -- i.e., if
>we see that nature on her own would not achieve the same -- then it
>is willfully naive to pretend that we didn't intervene.
You appear to be claiming that any experiment short of a full re-enactmant
of a natural origin under authentic conditions is useless. I agree that
overblown claims have been made from many "pre-biotic" simulations, but
that doesn't mean that all experiments that only address a segment of
the problem are useless. The fact is that the specific objections you made
would apply to any experiment.
I wrote:
>>The experiments are designed to begin answering the
>>specific question, "How rare are foldable/functional
>>protein sequences in sequence space?" This is an
>>interesting question from the standpoint of protein
>>biophysics alone, but it is obviously relevant to the
>>question of whether and how completely new proteins
>>can arise in non-functional or frame shifted sequences
>>of existing organisms.
>>
>>The only reason I alluded to Bill Dembski in particular
>>in my message is that I gather that, in contrast to Behe,
>>he believes that even individual proteins cannot arise
>>by chance.
>The number I remember is 10^60 for the odds that he
>>gives, which is too rare to find by chance. The results
>>of these experiments begin to suggest that he is wrong
>>about that one point, but obviously much remains to
>>be done to see how rare different kinds of functions are.
Paul Nelson wrote:
>The number Bill estimates refers to a prebiotic context.
In the stuff I have seen, Dembski uses the size of protein
sequence space as a basis for defining a level of complexity
that cannot be produced by anything but intelligent design.
I don't see anything in his argument that is specific to
the prebiotic context. As I said, I am under the impression
that he doesn't think that even single proteins can arise by
chance in any context.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 10 2001 - 01:25:51 EDT