This is the claim that Bill Morgan presented in his AOLCREAT:
The faith that even one protein arose by chance is tremendous. Lets look at statistics. Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids, just like a train is made up of box cars. A chain of box cars makes up a train. A chain of amino acids makes up a protein. Humans have 20 different types of amino acids that make up our proteins, and the average human protein is 400 amino acids long. Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk.Imagine many box cars at a train station, and these box cars are made up of twenty different colors. The owner of the station tells you he wants a train to be 400 box cars long, and you are to pick the combination of colored box cars, but if it is not the order he has in mind (and he didn't tell you it) he will fire you.
What are the odds you will get the box cars in the right order? They are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you. The odds are 20 to the 400th power! This is the same as 10 to the 520th power, that is a 1 followed by 520 zeros! You have better odds of winning California Super Lotto every week for 11 years than the odds of one protein in your body having the amino acids being properly aligned by chance. The odds are really much worse because the amino acids must be left handed, they must form a chain "in series," no parallel branching, their shape (proteins are wound up like a ball of yarn) is crucial, you need an oxygen free environment, etc etc. And remember, this is for just one protein. Your body has countless trillions of proteins.
The model that a brilliant designer made proteins requires much less faith than to trust random chance and natural processes.
Since I didn't have enough time to devote to a point-by-point critique of Bill Morgan's AOLCREAT, as I had done for his earlier work, "Weird Science", I restricted my discussion to a relatively new claim for Bill, protein-sequence probabilities. Below is my email on the subject and the exchange that followed. But first I
############################################## Subj: Of Proteins and My MONKEY Date: 96-06-20 To: BillyJack6 From: DWise1 > I know you know too much about protein to honestly think that teh > materilaistic arguments of their origin are stronger than the argumet > they are the result of design, plan and purpose. At least I know enough about proteins to see the errors in your presentation of standard creation science doctrine concerning proteins. It's a pity that your "open and testing mind" never scrutinizes creation science claims. From AOLCREAT.TXT: "Life requires many things. Long amino acids chains make proteins...chains in the proper order and shape. Miller's experiment did NOT produce any chains. Life also requires DNA, RNA and never has any experiment produced DNA or RNA from base materials. Never have chains of DNA or RNA been produced. A cell membrane has never been produced. "The faith that even one protein arose by chance is tremendous. Lets look at statistics. Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids, just like a train is made up of box cars. A chain of box cars makes up a train. A chain of amino acids makes up a protein. Humans have 20 different types of amino acids that make up our proteins, and the average human protein is 400 amino acids long. Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk. "Imagine many box cars at a train station, and these box cars are made up of twenty different colors. The owner of the station tells you he wants a train to be 400 box cars long, and you are to pick the combination of colored box cars, but if it is not the order he has in mind (and he didn't tell you it) he will fire you. "What are the odds you will get the box cars in the right order? They are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you. The odds are 20 to the 400th power! This is the same as 10 to the 520th power, that is a 1 followed by 520 zeros! You have better odds of winning California Super Lotto every week for 11 years than the odds of one protein in your body having the amino acids being properly aligned by chance. The odds are really much worse because the amino acids must be left handed, they must form a chain "in series," no parallel branching, their shape (proteins are wound up like a ball of yarn) is crucial, you need an oxygen free environment, etc etc. And remember, this is for just one protein. Your body has countless trillions of proteins. "The model that a brilliant designer made proteins requires much less faith than to trust random chance and natural processes." First, we both know (now that you have read some actual protein sequences in my HUMAN.CMP file) that your assumption that every single amino acid in a protein is specified so that any change in the specific sequence would destroy the protein's functionality ("Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk."). For many amino acid positions it is the class of amino acid (eg, hydrophyllic, hydrophobic, charged, uncharged) and not the amino acid itself that is important. In reality, only some positions on a protein require a specific amino acid, others require any of a few different amino acids, and many will accept practically any amino acid. Indeed, it is precisely this fact that allows us to compare the differences in the same FUNCTIONAL protein in different species and find that the degree of difference between more closely related species to be less than between less closely related species. Creation science is well aware of the fact that the same FUNCTIONAL protein can have different sequences (at the same time that they claim that any change in that specific amino acid sequence would destroy a protein's functionality; honestly, would a little consistency be too much to expect of creation science?) and of what the patterns of relatedness that those differences show. Which is why there are so many false creation science claims of distantly related species having more similar proteins than more closely related ones. Like Walter Brown's blatantly deceptive rattlesnake protein claim. And Duane Gish's infamous bullfrog protein (which claim he made on national TV, then refused to produce his source, except to let slip at one point that it was based on a joke he had heard, and which thereafter caused similarly outrageous creation science claims to be met with the cry of "Bullfrog!" -- I have a file which tells the entire story, if you'd like to read it). Rather than brandying about a hypothetical protein, let's look at a specific case. In the class notes of Frank Awbrey & William Thwaites' creation/evolution class at UCSD (the Institute for Creation Research conducted half the lectures and Awbrey & Thwaites the other half), they give the example of a calcium binding site with 29 amino acid positions: only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids. The sequence of the 15 specified positions is: L* L*L* L*D D* D*G* I*D* EL* L*L* L* Where: L* = hydrophobic - Leu, Val, Ilu, Phe, or Met Prob = (5/20)^8 D* = (a) Asp, Glu, Ser, or Asn Prob = (4/20)^3 OR (b) theoretically also Gls or Thr Prob = (6/20)^3 D = Asp Prob = (1/20) E = Glu Prob = (1/20) G* = Gly or Asp Prob = (2/20) I* = Ilu or Val Prob = (2/20) Remaining positions = any of 20 Prob = (20/20)^14 = 1^14 = 1 Total Prob = Prob(L*) * Prob(D*) * Prob(D) * Prob(E) * Prob(G*) * Prob(I*) = (a) 3.05 x 10^(-12) OR (b) 10.2 x 10^(-12) Your own calculation of the probability of a functional order coming up (ie, the standard creation science method) would be: (1/20)^29 = 1.86 x 10^(-38). Comparing the lower probability to yours shows it to be 1.64 x 10^26 times greater. This invalidates your colored-box-car analogy as it stands (to correct it, you would need to allow for a variety of different combinations) and it invalidates your probability calculations. The second problem lies the assumptions of your protein model, exemplified in your statement: "[The odds for success in the box car analogy] are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you." Whatever is that supposed to have to do with evolution? What your model describes is CREATION EX NIHILO, not evolution. Do you believe that proteins are formed by "aligning themselves by chance"? That is not how life works. I will not patronize you by describing how cells produce proteins based on DNA base sequences transcribed onto RNA; you should know about that already and doubtless do. An evolutionary accounting for modern proteins would be that they had EVOLVED through their "descent with modification" (the basic definition for the "fact of evolution") from ancestral proteins; ie, that the genes for modern proteins were inherited from a long line of ancestors and had undergone changes along the way. The evolutionary account does not depend upon modern proteins being created ex nihilo, whereas the creationist account does. Hence your probability arguments apply to creationism and not to evolution, which uses an entirely different model to which different probabilities apply, as examined in my MONKEY program (attached). Rather, your complaint is against Abiogenesis. Please read my discussion in WEIRDSCI.WP, so as to keep the bandwidth down here. > "Life requires many things. Long amino acids chains make proteins... > chains in the proper order and shape. Miller's experiment did NOT > produce any chains. No, the Urey-Miller experiment only produced amino acids. But Sidney Fox's experiments showed that when heated, amino acids formed quite readily into chains, some of which were observed to possess catalytic properties. From that point, all we would need is the ability to replicate these thermal proteins for evolutionary processes to come into play. > The faith that even one protein arose by chance is tremendous. Fox's experiments showed that these thermal proteins formed quite readily, so the probability is extremely high. Ascribe not to chance that which is deterministic. > honestly......your intelligently planned and purposeful program > gives you"faith" that amino acids formed chains to produce parts > of a cell (don't forget you need DNA RNA, a cell membrane too) > and these cells redproduced into skin cells, nerve cells blood > cells etc to make a living organism? There you go again, trying to discredit that which you know absolutely nothing about. You don't know what my program does, nor how it does it, and yet you immediately try to discount it. Is this your living example of "[taking the path] of testing and examining with an open mind"? Well, Bill, *I* did take the path of testing and examining, not only with an open mind, but also with a critical and skeptical mind. Rather than accept a claim unquestioningly on blind faith, I dared to say that I didn't believe what I had just read, so I tested it and examined the results. MONKEY is the product of that testing and examining. And as a result of that testing and examining, I am very much impressed with the power, the speed, and the certainty (ie, ability to converge rapidly) of Natural Selection (even you said "Natural Selection is a true concept."). In Chapter 3 of "The Blind Watchmaker" (did you ever read it as you had promised, Bill?), Richard Dawkins addressed the old analogy (by Eddington, I believe) of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters pounding away continuously for an infinite amount of time and thus being able to produce Hamlet. Dawkins toyed with the probability of randomly producing just one line out of Hamlet, "Methinks it is like a weasel" (two characters are looking at the shapes of clouds) and came up with an astronomical number for the odds against succeeding, such that a computer making a million attempts per second would require millions of billions of years to succeed (my calculation). But then that is not how life would do it. In life, a parent produces a number of offspring that are almost exactly like him, yet slightly different. Then the most fit survive to become the parents of the next generation, and so on. So he wrote a program, which he called WEASEL, that started with a random string, produced copies of that string which differed only by one randomly selected letter in a randomly selected position. Then the fittest string (measured by its relative proximity to the target string) became the "parent" of the next generation. He wrote the program in interpreted BASIC, started it, left for lunch, and it had the answer by the time he returned. Indeed, it succeeded over and over again, without fail. Well, I just could not believe that! So I wrote MONKEY (named after the aforementioned simian steno pool) in Turbo Pascal (my language of choice at that time; at present it would have been written in C++, though I'm returning to Pascal for Delphi). It produced the string (the alphabet in alphabetical order) within a minute! I ran it over and over again and it succeeded over and over again -- repeatedly, consistently, without fail. Well, I still couldn't believe it! So I developed a mathematical model of what MONKEY was doing and calculated the probabilities involved. Then finally I could believe it because I could see how it worked. Indeed, I found that the system would converge rapidly to a probability of success of over 99.99%, near dead certainty. I gained a great appreciation for the observation of a famous biologist (Ernst Mayr? or John Maynard Smith?) that natural selection makes the improbable inevitable. Ironically, I got the idea of expressing the model as a finite-state machine (which allowed me to use Markov chains) from the math-genius son of my former boss (the kid is third-generation Fundamentalist); after hearing my description of the abysmally poor performance of single-step selection (YOUR model of selection; read MONKEY.DOC), his jaw literally dropped as he watched MONKEY succeed in 30 seconds. As a result of my work with MONKEY, I have also become interested in artificial life experiments. Of particular interest are genetic algorithms (GA), which use mechanisms rather similar to MONKEY's to find optimal solutions of complex engineering problems. The classic GA example was Goldberg's problem of controlling pressure in a complex pipeline network. More recently, Stanford professor John Koza demonstrated using GAs to design high-order analog circuits automatically (eg, 5th-order filters, 20-rung ladder filters). I consider it important for you and other creationists to learn about MONKEY because it points out a common mistake that you are constantly making and need to correct. Your probability arguments typically misrepresent evolution as using single-step selection, which is an abysmally poor technique, whereas evolution, and life itself, uses cumulative selection, which is an extremely powerful technique with incredibly high probability of success, as demonstrated by MONKEY. Besides, as I have already pointed out, single-step selection is more descriptive of special creation (one-time good deal get it all together in one single try from scratch). The sooner you abandon your bogus arguments and address the real issues, the sooner you MIGHT start to be taken half seriously (ie, as anything other than a threat to science education). Attached you will find MONKEY.ZIP. Extract the files with PKUNZIP v2.04g or later. The files are: MONKEY.DOC -- Text file explaining how to use MONKEY MONKEY.EXE -- Executable copy of MONKEY. Should run on any IBM PC or compatible. Does not need any graphics card. MONKEY.PAS -- Turbo Pascal source file for MONKEY. Read it to see how MONKEY works. MPROBS.DOC -- Text file containing a discussion of the probabilities involved in MONKEY and a description of how MPROBS works. MPROBS.PAS -- Turbo Pascal source file. Calculates the probabilities for cumulative selection using Markovian chains and stochastic matrices. Very primitive interface (ie, none) which requires the program to be recompiled for every change of parameters. README.MNK -- Distribution MONKEY README file. MONKEY.DIR -- List of files in MONKEY.ZIP (output from PKUNZIP -v) READ.ME -- README file for Dan. Offers a little more explanation and addresses some of his specific questions. If you do not have PKUNZIP, please let me know and I will send you a copy. As you read it, do try to follow the path of testing and examining with an open mind. If you can. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ############################################## Subj: Re: Of Proteins and My MONKEY Date: 96-06-21 23:34:27 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 First, let me say I really respect the time and effort you have put into this issue. I love zeal and passion in people and you ovbiously possess both. Even if someone disagrees with me on something, I always have a deep respect for them if they are articulate, logical, well researched and respectful (you never slammed me personally which is rare on AOL, allow me to apologize for any Christians that attack you rather that the argument. I would like to point out one flaw with you your "monkey" and your descent with modification argument. Suppose you had a billion monkeys typing for infinity, they would type Hamlet eventually right? But one key factor is left out.....suppose if a monkey hits a wrong key the computer monitor "blows his head clean off'" (Clint Eastwood quote) the second he types a wrong key? Suppose a disasterous mutation pops in between the amoeba to man...you won't make it to Burt Parks! Do you see my variable? Life allows no mulligans. One bad mutation and poof.....we'd never make it! I consdier you a friend and I hope you feel the same way! In scholarly love, Bill yes I read Dawkins book. He is brilliant. He really makes wild anaologies, such as crystals and cell behaving similarily. He also puts all his faith in time. I respectfully state his fatih i thus greater than mine. Tell me.....what do you know about proteins that I should know....please tell me how they formed independently of plan. ##############################################Work and other duties kept me from responding, resulting in a five-month hiatus. We picked up this thread later, when Bill offered me a "new" essay.
No response from Bill. And he continues to use this false probability claim in debates and in his "literature", even though he knows it's false, which means that he is deliberately lying.############################################## Subj: Fwd: Creation vs Evolution Date: 98-05-18 01:01:30 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 File: 10CRE97.DOC (55808 bytes) DL Time (14400 bps): < 1 minute ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj: Creation vs Evolution Date: 98-05-18 00:58:23 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: BillyJack6 Attached is a paper I made on the subject of Creation vs. Evolution. It is geared to be very friendly to people who may be evolutionists or athiests. My goal is to present the reasons why I beleive the Creation Model is a much better explanation for what we observe than the Evolution Model. If anyone who receives this desires more free information can either call me or e mail me at 714 898-8331. ######################################################### Subj: SOS Date: 98-06-03 23:32:24 EDT From: DWise1 To: BillyJack6 CC: DWise1, liber8r@mcs.com For Liber8r's sake: ### YOUR MESSAGE ### Subj: Fwd: Creation vs Evolution Date: 98-05-18 01:01:30 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 File: 10CRE97.DOC (55808 bytes) DL Time (14400 bps): < 1 minute ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj: Creation vs Evolution Date: 98-05-18 00:58:23 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: BillyJack6 Attached is a paper I made on the subject of Creation vs. Evolution. It is geared to be very friendly to people who may be evolutionists or athiests. My goal is to present the reasons why I beleive the Creation Model is a much better explanation for what we observe than the Evolution Model. If anyone who receives this desires more free information can either call me or e mail me at 714 898-8331. ### END YOUR MESSAGE ### >Attached is a paper I made on the subject of Creation vs. Evolution. It is geared to be very friendly to people who may be evolutionists or athiests.< Uh, Bill, that's just your AOLCREAT.DOC file again. Yeah, sure, you made cosmetic changes to a few lines and you inserted a sentence or ten in a few places (forgetting to correct the paragraph numbering scheme that you screwed up in the process -- Word can handle that stuff for you, you know; let your tools do the work, something I learned very quickly with a pneumatic jack hammer), but it is still the SOS that you sent me two years ago and that you and your buddies, god@boy.com and lady@love.com, spammed all over the newsgroups, much to everybody's annoyance. Also you still have not learned to distribute the file in a universally readable format, like TXT, instead of as a Word6 document, which is something of a binary file. Remember that your penchant for spamming a binary file raised some flames. How badly did those guys in the professional football newsgroups rough you up, BTW? And you have made absolutely NO corrections to the errors you know to be in it. Your misunderstanding of proteins and of the models for the evolution of proteins is still there, even though you know better now. You even continue to claim that the protein sequence has to be exactly right or else the protein won't work. You know that is false! Remember when you made the same mistake as Michael Denton had with interspecies protein comparisons? THAT claim depends on the SAME protein being DIFFERENT in different species. Hello? In one claim you say that the same protein has different amino acid sequences in different species (OK, so most of the chimpanzee proteins are identical to human proteins, which started to give rise to the rumor that all of the differences between humans and chimpanzees were cultural -- relax, that's a joke; they did finally find a protein that was different. Just don't you go and follow in Gish's footsteps by using this joke as a "scientific source") and then in another claim you say that there is only one single amino acid sequence for a given protein and if you change even one single amino acid you have destroyed that protein's functionality. Bill, your two claims contradict each other! If your "model" is supposed to be the "better explanation", then it should not contradict itself. Or do you just make whatever wild claim you can to oppose science, with absolutely no regard for consistency? Besides, your protein formation argument still uses the wrong probability model. Rather than using an evolutionary model (which is what you were trying to disprove/discredit), you used a creation ex nihilo model. I already told you about that. You know better. Why haven't you corrected it yet? And you are still trying to claim to have been an atheist, even though you admitted to me that you had never stopped believing in the existence of your god, that you constantly prayed to that god, and that you were only pretending to yourself to be an atheist in order to give your hormones and your depravity full and free rein. Since you know that your claim to have been an atheist is false, why do you continue to make that claim? Just because it sounds good? I also know that when you speak before the public, you advertise that false claim prominently. Why not just tell the truth? Is telling the truth against your religion? Does this mean that you haven't done anything to correct "Weird Science" either? You said that you have a new version of it, but from what I've seen of your work, I'm sure that you have corrected nothing and have added more misinformation. OBTW, do you have an electronic version of it? I already echoed back to you the newsgroups' reactions to your spamming of AOLCREAT.DOC, keeping the complaints against the spamming itself to a minimum. I had tried to draw them primarily from Christian sources. Most of those berated your efforts as making Christians look like a bunch of idiots or a pack of liars, like: "Bill, I do not want to sound harsh but this stuff would get ripped to shreads on 'talk.origins'. While I believe in creation as the only source of my existance these arguments have been refuted many times. While I know that you are trying, I hate seeing people branded as 'liars for Jesus'. " Even a minister had nothing good to say about you and AOLCREAT.DOC; Rev David Michael Rice [Shy.David@EdenBBS.COM], Mariner's Ministries, Dana Point, CA: "In summary, ignorant fools like this are a bane to Christianity and the Body of Christ, as idiots like this tend to give Christians a bad name. Documents like "aolcreat.txt" show non-believers just how very ignorant, stupid, uninformed, deceptive, uneducated, blatently IMBICILIC Christians can be." The only positive messages I saw were from one Christian who had not been exposed to creation science before and from the hawking of god@boy.com and lady@love.com as they were busy spamming it all over the place, even farther afield than you had, saying "hey, lookit this!" One thing I noticed was that they also posted it in talk.orgins, whereas you had made sure to avoid that newsgroup. It certainly could not have been through ignorance, because one response noted that you had posted there before, that you had been told many times exactly what was wrong with your claims, and that you would keep coming back with the exact same false claims that they had refuted before. From chrislee@netcom.com (Christopher A. Lee): "This crap has been refuted on alt.atheism and talk.origins each time Bill Morgan posted the identical article. Yet he ignores the responses and repeats the same drek hoping that people have forgotten it from last time." That describes the strategy of a snake-oil salesman: come into town, make your claims, then move on to the next town before they have a chance to hear of what happened in the last towns. That is the dishonest strategy of somebody who knows that they are trying to pull a fast one. It used to work really well for the ICR, until their opponents started talking with each other and sharing information, eventually forming the NCSE [http://www.natcenscied.org/]. Bill, either you are incredibly stupid, or you know full well that your claims are false. I'm sure that the former is not true, which leaves us with the latter. I noticed right away that as long as you thought that I didn't know anything about creation science, you were very verbose and ready to talk, but as soon as my knowledge of and experience with the subject became evident, you clammed up. You have repeatedly dodged almost every question I have asked you, even the obvious ones like "How old do you think the earth is?". You have almost without fail refused to defend any of your claims, as if you realized yourself that there is no way that you could defend them. I think that you know that you are "lying for the Lord" That you are trying to uphold the truth of the Bible with false claims. That you are trying to convert others to your religion by any means possible, no matter how deceitful. Bill, since when did the Truth need to be upheld by lies? Since when did your god say that he would reward you for tricking people into converting? If you believe that you are solely responsible to him, what do you think your reward will be for casting your web of lies to snare souls? Yeah, yeah, I know. You are not responsible for your actions, so long as you do it for your god. You will just plead inherent human depravity (one of the original "Five Fundamentals" defined in 1895 from the Niagara Conferences), ask for forgiveness, and enter into your paradise, along with the Muslim suicided martyrs (eg, the terrorist human bombs). Annotated copies of AOLCREAT.DOC have also been posted on the Web, at: Creationist Crap [http://aix2.uottawa.ca/~s866370/creation.html] Creation vs. Evolution1 [http://www.mcs.net/~liber8r/onfile/crevevo1.html] I think you will recognize the second one as belonging to our friend, Liber8r. Yet another question. Matt Singerman [yotaxes@pipeline.com] commented: "By the way, there is no such thing as a "registered" engineer. You get your diploma, and that's it. No registration process except if for private industry, which is not registration, but certification." I would have to agree with Matt, though I have heard of a form of licensing for "Practical Engineers," which a technician with several years of experience and no engineering degree can apply for. Why do you refer to yourself as a "registered mechanical engineer"? Or is this yet another simple, direct question that you will refuse to answer? Also: "When I get a chance to teach at a college, ..." What college(s) have you taught at. What classes? What are your credentials? ######################################################### Subj: Re: SOS Date: 98-06-14 23:19:49 EDT From: DWise1 To: BillyJack6 CC: DWise1, liber8r@mcs.com ### BEGIN ### Subj: Re: SOS Date: 98-06-04 01:34:36 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 I have taught at USC, UCLA, Cal State LA, San Diego State, UC Santa Barbara and many community colleges. A registered mechanical engineer is a PE a Professional Engineer which means I passed a licensing test (most engineers are not PE's). Thanks! Bill ### END ### >A registered mechanical engineer is a PE a Professional Engineer which means I passed a licensing test (most engineers are not PE's).< Then for your credibility's sake, you should add some of this additional explanation to your AOLCREAT.DOC, along with some explanation of the significance of your licensing. Oh, and distribute it in a more universally readable format, like text. Or convert it to HTML for the web. >I have taught at USC, UCLA, Cal State LA, San Diego State, UC Santa Barbara and many community colleges.< OK. But what courses? In what departments? With what credentials? I know that to teach at junior and community colleges, you need at least a master's degree in the subject that you will be teaching. What are your degrees and what are they in? How is your having taught at these colleges relevant to the creation/evolution issue? #########################################################
Bill has posted some videos on YouTube, including some of his debates. When I saw him use this false protein probablity claim in his debate against Phil Summerfeld on 07 March 2009, I included the following in an email to him along with critiques of several other false claims he used in that debate and dishonest tricks that he had pulled. I'm reposting it here for your benefit as a kind of summary refutation of the claim.
In Part 9 of 11 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7QIcWhLgzk&list=PL2DC89853E1DA94C0&index=9 ) at 6:31 you trot out that old false claim about the odds of a complete modern protein forming out by pure chance. Bill, we've been through this before. You even responded, albeit with drivelling nonsensese, so you know full well how completely and utterly false your claim is.Please review that discussion at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/morgan/protein_probs.html . Since I am certain that you will not do so for fear of learning the truth, I will repeat it in brief below:
First, you over-specify the protein sequence by requiring that each and every single position in that protein could be occupied and one and only one very specific amino acid. As Drs. Thwaites and Awbrey demonstrated in the notes for their two-model class (the only true "balanced treatment" class that I have heard of even to the point of having professional creationists from the ICR give half the lectures; the campus Christian clubs absolutely hated it), only a very few positions require a single specific amino acid and that's primarily restricted to active sites on the protein. Some other positions, again mainly in active sites, may have any of a particular type of amino acid (eg, hydrophyllic, hydrophobic, charged, uncharged). And many positions can be filled by any amino acid.I'm sure you are familiar with another class of creationist argument, that protein comparisons show humans to be more closely related to unrelated species (eg, donkeys, rattlesnakes, bullfrogs, chickens -- see my "Bullfrog Affair" page at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/bullfrog.html ) than to chimpanzees. Of course, those claims are ludicrously wrong; I'm not even sure how much they're still being used. But if a protein had to have a very highly specific amino-acid sequence in order to be functional, then there could be no variance between species and such protein comparisons would simply not exist.
You cannot have it both ways. Clearly, there can be a lot of variance in the sequence of a protein and it will continue to be functional. Therefore, the actual probability that you would get would be far higher than you falsely claim. In Thwaite and Awbrey's example of a 29-position active site, the actual probability would have been 1.64 x 1026 times greater than your bogus approach would have yielded. Since that example left out the much higher percentage of positions in an entire protein that would accept any amino acid (and hence the probability for each such position would be 1.0), a proper probability calculation for your sample protein would be greater by a much greater factor.
Second, fully functional modern proteins do not come into existence by randomly falling together. Nor is that the way that they originated. In your presentation, you repeatedly misrepresented evolution as things falling together by chance. No, that is not how evolution works, but rather it is how creation ex nihilo works. Nobody would seriously maintain that modern proteins just fell together at random by blind chance, but rather we would say that they evolved. You are lying about what evolution is in order to create a strawman caricature that you can defeat easily. Your purpose in do that is to deceive your audience ... and likely yourself as well.
On that page, review my discussion of my experiments with MONKEY ( http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/monkey.html ) and my analysis of the probabilities involved ( http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/mprobs.html ). Again, since you will continue to be an idiot and ignore the facts, here's a very brief re-cap:
The probability model of creation ex nihilo is what you describe: have everything fall together at random and, if you don't get what you wanted, scrap the whole thing and start all over completely from scratch. This is called "single-step selection". My test involved producing a string which is the alphabet in alphabetical order. The probability of succeeding using single-step selection is so small that I cannot calculate it directly -- both my calculator and computer would under-flow. I had to use some math magic (described in mprobs.html), after which I wrote in mprobs.html:Now we can determine how many trials are necessary to ensure us of a given probability of success. For various values of P3, they are:
P3 (%) m 1 E -9 6.156 E 27 1 6.187 E 34 10 6.486 E 35 25 1.771 E 36 50 4.267 E 36 75 8.534 E 36 85 1.168 E 37 90 1.417 E 37 95 1.844 E 37 99 2.835 E 37 99.99 5.670 E 37So even for just one chance in a million of succeeding, we have to make something to the order of 1027 attempts! To put this into some perspective, assume we have a computer that can make one million attempts per second (a very generous assumption, since mine can only make about 200 per second). That translates to 31,556,926 million attempts per year. At this rate, it would take about 195 trillion years to earn that one-in-a-million chance -- nearly 10,000 times longer than the universe's estimated age of 20 billion years!
To be blunt, the performance of single-step selection is abysmal. But then it also does not come close to describing evolution. For that, we will now examine a model based on the cumulative-selection method.
When I wrote that in 1989, I was using an XT clone running at Norton Index 2. I've since estimated that my current computer runs about 500 to 1000 times faster. Too fast to see MONKEY work, but still nowhere near that hypothetical super-computer making a million attempts per second.
As I said, evolution does not use single-step selection as you misrepresent it doing, but rather uses cumulative selection in which it makes copies of what it has, some of which are imperfect copies, and the best of the copies is/are used to make the next generation of copies. Cumulative selection converges on the solution very quickly. Instead of having to grind away for trillions of years, MONKEY would produce the string in less than 30 seconds back in the day on my XT -- nowadays, it appears to succeed instantaneously. Repeatedly, consistently, never fails. Even though the probability of an individual copy being closer to the solution was rather low and got even lower as it approached the solution (and, indeed, while it's running I would often observe it to back-slide towards failure). After having analyzed the probabilities (again, read mprobs.html), I found that in order for MONKEY to fail, all the copies produced in each and every generation would have to fail. I calculated that probability and found it to be vanishingly small, making failure virtually impossible.
That gives us a small taste of how powerful cumulative selection is. And of how powerful evolutionary processes, which use cumulative selection, can be.
And the only way you can argue against it is to lie about evolution and deceive your audience into thinking that evolution instead uses the creation model, puny single-step selection.
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First uploaded on 2000 July 02.
Updated on 2015 October 20.