Re: [asa] Amazing Proteins

Hi, Mike,

Reading through this conversation, I'm trying to get to the bottom of
what you are saying. I guess the following paragraph gets to the
heart of it; you write

> For example, without proteins, and their manufacturing process, what
> becomes of the blind watchmaker? Without proteins, and the latent functions
> contained within, might not the blind watchmaker exist as the impotent,
> crippled, blind watchmaker with no one to notice its existence? If so, how
> much credit does the blind watchmaker really deserve?
>
>

In other words the watchmaker wouldn't have the basic materials to
make the watch, and by implication your amazement that such materials
exist? One might infer that there is a "fine-tuning" argument to be
made here - how amazing that the laws of the universe allow such
things as possibilities. However, you don't appear to make that
point.

But when you make the statement "how much credit does the blind
watchmaker really deserve?", it has set me thinking. Surely the
reason for the amazing variety of proteins is due to the fact that
they are long chains of around 20 different building blocks (I see
this as a kind of molecular alphabet), so the possibilities for
variety are astronomically large. One might say that only a tiny
fraction of such sequences are going to be useful, and fold over in
the right way, but this still leaves an immense number of
possibilities for evolution to discover.

 I wonder if a similar analogy can be made by considering the 26
letters in the English alphabet. A random arbitrary sequence of the
symbols is likely to be meaningless, but consider the immense variety
of different forms of textual communication; the Shakespeare sonnet,
the bawdy limerick, the lyrics of a pop song, the news items you read
in the newspaper, the endearments lovers whisper to each other, and
the staccato utterances of text messages (sorry txt msgs).

Now, when you say "how much credit does the blind watchmaker really
deserve", is this not equivalent to saying "how much credit does
Shakespeare deserve for 'shall I compare thee to a Summer's day"
because if you take away the letters of the alphabet, he would be a
nobody without the means to create his literature". Similarly perhaps
Mozart doesn't deserve credit for the complexities of the last
movement of the Jupiter Symphony, because if the notes of the musical
scale (and all the latent functions and harmonies within them) didn't
exist he wouldn't have the means to compose melody.

In summary, if even intelligent designers, such as Shakespeare and
Mozart are utterly dependent on a small finite set of elemental
building blocks that they can string together, then shouldn't one also
give the Blind Watchmaker some credit for being able to construct
living organisms from a similar set of molecules?

What I am wondering is how my two examples differ from yours?

Regards,
Iain

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Received on Sun May 4 06:35:29 2008