Comment on EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN by Sean Pitman.
From Atoday blog:
http://www.atoday.com/content/educate-truth-perhaps-elaborate-spoof-turned-ugly#comment-7679
Prof. Kent wrote:
I’ve done some math, though I could have some errors. Sean claims that a functional change of 1,000 amino acids is impossible, i.e., it would require trillions upon trillions of years. However, he seems unfazed that a change of several hundred amino acids would be plausible in snakes. Here are my thoughts.
It isn’t a change of 1000aa, it is any change, even a single amino acid change in any pre-existing sequence, that ends up hitting upon a new 1000aa system that has an attached function which itself requires at least 1000 fsaars to work.
Again, the 1000 fsaar threshold isn’t a measure of change. It is a measure of the minimum structural threshold needed to produce a particular type of function. This threshold could be achieved with a single character change to something in the gene pool that just happened to be that close enough within sequence space.
The problem here is that the odds that the actual gap distance will only be a single point mutation wide is extremely remote at this level of functional complexity. The most likely minimum gap distance at this level is over 50 character changes wide.
It is this minimum likely distance (50 mutational changes at the level of 1000 fsaar systems) that creates the statistical problem for RM/NS.
So, here is the shocker (from my perspective; maybe Sean can pull the plug on my defibrillator):
– a 1000-fsaar change requires much more than 3,650 trillion generations
– a 200-fsaar change could happen in a mere 1,000 generations (or just 400 generations for some species)
– thus, a simple 5-fold level of change between 200 and 1000 fsaars requires more than a trillion-fold difference in the number of generations. I ain’t sayin’ this can’t happen, but, well…
It’s far worse than you think, but I’m glad you’re beginning to see the picture.
Given a huge population of bacteria (1e30 of them – a population as large as all the bacteria on Earth) crossing a gap distance of just 50 specific character changes wide would require 1e36 generations.
This is because a gap distance of 50aa changes is equal to a sequence space that size of 1e65 different sequences of 50aa. Dividing this space up between all the 1000aa sequences in our gene pool of bacteria (~1e34 sequences of 1000aa) equals a search space, per mutating 1000aa sequence, of 1e31. With a mutation rate of 1e-8 per codon per generation each 1000-codon sequence of DNA will get mutated once every 1e5 generations. With a generation time of 20 minutes, that is one mutational step every 2,000,000 minutes; which equals ~4 years. So, with one random walk/mutational step every 4 years, it would take 1e31 * 4 = 4e31 years for at least one individual in the entire population to achieve success, on average, at the level of 1000 fsaars (i.e., trillions upon trillions of years).
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Sean Pitman Also Commented
EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:
Um, I think the evolutionists are the ones who informed us about ice ages.
You’re mistaken. Evolutionists were not the first ones to propose ice age theories – theories which were around well before Darwin published Origins in 1859.
For example, Andrew Ure (1778-1857) was one of the top chemists of his day with an international reputation as a meticulous scientist, a prolific writer and an effective teacher. But he was also one of those brilliantly versatile men of science in the early 19th century. In 1829 he published A New System of Geology in which he proposed some new theoretical ideas for the reconstruction of earth history, one of which was one of the earliest conceptions of an ice age, which he speculated would have resulted from the Flood. One of the author’s he quoted was Jens Esmark (1763-1839)
Jens Esmark also argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages well before Darwin. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations. He attempted to show that they originated from changes in the Earth’s orbit. Adding to Esmark’s work, Bernhardi, in a 1932 paper, speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones around the globe.
http://creation.com/british-scriptural-geologists-in-the-first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century-part-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Esmark
They have given us more information about ice ages than creationists have and nothing, I repeat nothing, is going to change that. They have no problem with ice ages whatsoever.
They have no problem with ice ages, true. But, they do have a definite problem with the idea of very rapid, even catastrophically sudden, formation and regression. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that scientists began to realize that glacial melts can happen many times more rapidly than they tought possible just 10 years ago – to include the melting of Greenland’s ice-cap as well as the Antarctic ice. No one thought that such rapid melting could ever happen as rapidly as it is taking place today.
www.DetectingDesign.com/AncientIce.html
What is it with Adventists suddenly talking a lot about Las Vegas, card games, houses of cards, gambling and betting? I’m bewildered.
It is often a very good way to get important statistical concepts across to those people who don’t usually deal with numbers and the scientific usefulness of statistical odds analysis… like you ; )
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:
So…ice ages are scientifically impossible and therefore could only result from a global supernatural flood. The arctic seas became hot which caused very high precipitation. Then an extreme cold spell came along that made an iceberg out of high elevations and high altitudes, decreased the ocean sea level and dried out the Mediterranean basin. I assume these explanations fit within the 1000 gsaar threshold (geologically supportable argumentative age reasoning) of explanatory complexity
Ice ages are not scientifically impossible. They are certainly consistent with a global catastrophe that involved massive volcanic activity. And, massive meteor impacts may indeed have provided the sudden release of the huge quantities of energy needed to produce the initial catastrophe on a global scale. Also, it is well-known that ice ages would indeed reduce ocean levels quite dramatically – easily below the level needed to maintain water in the Mediterranean basin (which is known to have been dry during the last major ice age).
I fail to see what it is about this scenario that you find so “complex” and unbelievable given the starting premise of a sudden massive release of energy on this planet?… What would you expect to happen? Orderly weather as usual? The whole surface of the planet was broken up by the massive impact that set the whole catastrophe in motion… the aftershocks of which we are still feeling to this day.
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
@Geanna Dane:
So did the mammoths dies of cold or starvation? Maybe it wasn’t the intolerable cold, perhaps it was too much snowfall that spoiled access to the vegetation they depended on. Unless most or all of the fossils had identifiable food in their mouths or stomachs (I have heard that some did), how could one possibly know?
It really doesn’t matter if they died directly because of the cold or indirectly because of starvation (though I favor the former idea). Either way, the evidence suggests that they, along with millions of other types of animals, died out very suddenly in line with a sudden global cold snap. That’s the key point here. The cold snap would result in a rapid decrease in the ocean’s water level, resulting in an opportunity to dry out the Mediterranean basin…
Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com
Recent Comments by Sean Pitman
After the Flood
Thank you Ariel. Hope you are doing well these days. Miss seeing you down at Loma Linda. Hope you had a Great Thanksgiving!
The Flood
Thank you Colin. Just trying to save lives any way I can. Not everything that the government does or leaders do is “evil” BTW…
The Flood
Only someone who knows the future can make such decisions without being a monster…
Pacific Union College Encouraging Homosexual Marriage?
Where did I “gloss over it”?
Review of “The Naked Emperor” by Pastor Conrad Vine
I fail to see where you have convincingly supported your claim that the GC leadership contributed to the harm of anyone’s personal religious liberties? – given that the GC leadership does not and could not override personal religious liberties in this country, nor substantively change the outcome of those who lost their jobs over various vaccine mandates. That’s just not how it works here in this country. Religious liberties are personally derived. Again, they simply are not based on a corporate or church position, but rely solely upon individual convictions – regardless of what the church may or may not say or do.
Yet, you say, “Who cares if it is written into law”? You should care. Everyone should care. It’s a very important law in this country. The idea that the organized church could have changed vaccine mandates simply isn’t true – particularly given the nature of certain types of jobs dealing with the most vulnerable in society (such as health care workers for example).
Beyond this, the GC Leadership did, in fact, write in support of personal religious convictions on this topic – and there are GC lawyers who have and continue to write personal letters in support of personal religious convictions (even if these personal convictions are at odds with the position of the church on a given topic). Just because the GC leadership also supports the advances of modern medicine doesn’t mean that the GC leadership cannot support individual convictions at the same time. Both are possible. This is not an inconsistency.
