Evolution and Creation an Honest Question

[blutoski]

Attention, everyone. It has come to my attention that hammegk is "not so sure" whether statements known to the speaker to be untrue are less likely to be true than statements supported by experimental evidence.

I think that's the key problem. For reasons that are very understandable, only a fraction of the public are educated in the right specialties to recognize that the leadership involved in CS and ID are just a bunch of liars. I mean, It's taken me years and some direct experience to accept this: these people are not misguided. They know perfectly well that they're lying. (The recent Dover trial is a case in point - they lied to the public, and show no remorse.)

How do scientists combat this? Certainly, we can't expect laypersons to sit down and take an undergraduate-level biology course.

This is why we're winning the court of law, but losing the court of public opinion: my religious friends have been exposed enough over the years to accept my conclusions (they are, in fact, now very outraged at the CS/ID leadership), but it takes time, and most people just don't have it.



An analogy:
I used to work in housekeeping in a hospital. Graveyard weekends for years. Emergency room. And that bathroom almost defied the laws of physics. I developed a strategy of starting from the ceiling and working my way down. Every two hours, I'd go back, and it's like I was never there: the surfaces are covered in bodily fluids again. Over and over again. It was like it didn't matter whether I cleaned it or not.

Debating CS/ID people is like that.

The powerpoint stack is 250 slides of 5 lies apiece, and at the end of an hour, you have over a thousand utterly incredible falsehoods to research. It takes no time to invent lies, but they're very hard to counter in 10 words or less, even when the facts are on your side. And then you finally get them dead to rights and they say "You're right. I concede the point." And next week, they to to another lecture hall with a new audience, and the same slide deck, and you have to wonder why you bothered.



The problem isn't that religious people are bad: paradoxically, the problem is that they're good. The problem is that they believe that other religious people think like they do, and these CS/ID parasites exploit them.

 

[hammegk]

Fair enough. I will no longer ignore that problem.

Good. I'll point out a few errors you've introduced.

Attention, everyone. It has come to my attention that hammegk is "not so sure" whether statements known to the speaker to be untrue are less likely to be true than statements supported by experimental evidence.

I did not say that.

It has come to my attention that hammegk is "not so sure" whether statements made in total and deliberately willed ignorance are less likely to be true than statements based upon reason and evidence.

Nor did I say that.

It has come to my attention that hammegh is "not so sure" whether a deliberate misreading and misquotation of a text is less likely to reflect the authorial knowledge and intention than a correct one.

Nor did I say that.

Furthermore, he has stated that he "never could be convinced" otherwise, "for many possible reasons."

I will agree to that with regard to questions not within the purview of science.

I therefore urge all of you to take these direct admissions of fraud, chicanery, ill-faith, and willful ignorance into account when evaluating any of his writings, as he has declared himself forthrightly to be deliberately nothing more than an uneducated and uneducatable troll, intent only on disrupting the educational mission of the JREF.

I urge you to retract that bare-faced lie which I'd think beneath you.

Ask away. Feel free to fictionalize any answer you like, since the mere matter of factual accuracy is by your own admission irrelevant to the truth value of the answer.

I note you choose to ignore epsilon -- and it's meaning.

 

[sphenisc]

Excel did the heavy lifting.

I also recalculated for the credible criticism that perhaps it is imortant that all the riboses have the same configuration. Works out to one in:

64 (two events)
512 (three events)
4096 (four events)
32768 (five events)

respectively

So, if we assign a 99% confidence interval, two identical independent abiogenesis events are possible, with this relatively generous nucleotide model.

Could you explain a bit more.
In particular, why do you use 5 nucleotides?
By "all the riboses have the same configuration" , do you mean that all the riboses used in one particular pentanucleotide are identical. Thus giving us 8 (=2^(3 chiral centres)) variations.
If all variations are equally likely, then isn't the probability that a second abiogenetic event matches the first 1 in 8?

I think I need to se a bit more of your working in order to understand.


Thanks

 

[drkitten]

I urge you to retract that bare-faced lie which I'd think beneath you.

As the old-time muckraking newspapers put it -- "We stand by our story."

 

[hammegk]

I note you choose to ignore epsilon -- and it's meaning.

 

[blutoski]

Could you explain a bit more.
In particular, why do you use 5 nucleotides?

DNA + RNA

By "all the riboses have the same configuration" , do you mean that all the riboses used in one particular pentanucleotide are identical. Thus giving us 8 (=2^(3 chiral centres)) variations.

Exactly. Arguably, even without a common synthesis mechanism (as we would exect in a sterile environment) it's reasonable to believe that only identically configured riboses could polymerize. Not necessarily true, of course, but I'm willing to suspend argument on this for the sake of discussion.

If all variations are equally likely, then isn't the probability that a second abiogenetic event matches the first 1 in 8?

Not in this case, because we know one of them has to match today's configuration. (But, I know what you're talking about: the "first one's free" problem with a lot of chance discussions)

I think I need to se a bit more of your working in order to understand.

It's just a back-of-the-envelope discussion. It also assumes, for example, that we're using a nucleotide model of abiogenesis. There are other models which suggest that nucleotides were a later development, especially DNA.

The key point is that the more abiogenesis events that are supposed to have happened, the less likely it looks.

 

[steenkh]

It's just a back-of-the-envelope discussion. It also assumes, for example, that we're using a nucleotide model of abiogenesis. There are other models which suggest that nucleotides were a later development, especially DNA.

The key point is that the more abiogenesis events that are supposed to have happened, the less likely it looks.

DNa or RNa could not have started life on their own. There is a host of proteines that would need to be present simultaneously before life could form. This makes a model that goes straight to nucleotides very unlikely. A few more abiogenesis event would be much more likely, right?

 

[athon]

DNa or RNa could not have started life on their own. There is a host of proteines that would need to be present simultaneously before life could form. This makes a model that goes straight to nucleotides very unlikely. A few more abiogenesis event would be much more likely, right?

Nucleic acid polymers can exist naturally, albeit in rather inefficient forms. It is unlikely that they could self-synthesis in a complex manner without the assistance of physical structures, however it is feasible that early RNA structures could have performed roles similar to that of simple enzymes.

Athon

 

[steenkh]

So, at some point, the RNA should have ceased working as enzymes and being entirely devoted to being carriers of information?

 

[blutoski]

So, at some point, the RNA should have ceased working as enzymes and being entirely devoted to being carriers of information?

RNA is not even today entirely devoted to being informational. tRNA is an enzyme. It is this enzymatic role of RNA in the most primitive genetic biochemistry that gives legs to the proposal that it could be an ancestral self-replicator.

Even DNA has enzymatic properties. Retrotransposons, such as the ALU family.

 

[steenkh]

RNA is not even today entirely devoted to being informational. tRNA is an enzyme. It is this enzymatic role of RNA in the most primitive genetic biochemistry that gives legs to the proposal that it could be an ancestral self-replicator.

Even DNA has enzymatic properties. Retrotransposons, such as the ALU family.

Interesting, thanks!

 

[sphenisc]

L and D amino acids

Dissolving amino acids alters proportions

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025545.200-righthanded-amino-acids-were-left-behind.html