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I sincerely doubt that anything is truly random, there has to be some type of cosmic drummer behind the scenes biasing certain events. Case in point is the conf

I sincerely doubt that anything is truly random, there has to be some type of cosmic drummer behind the scenes biasing certain events. Case in point is the conflict between molecular Darwinism and the numbers associated with the human genome. Approximately one billion nucleotide bases and with four different nucleotide bases in each location == 4^1,000,000,000 combinatorial explosion, a number waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay larger than 10^120 universal complexity limit, 10^80 stable elementary particles in the universe, and the generally accepted age of the universe ~10^40. The monkeys typing Hamlet thing is computationally intractable.

klodolph 7y ago
I mean, while you might have 4^1,000,000,000 possible genomes, only a vanishingly small fraction of those have ever existed.
- GregoryPerry 7y ago
  Your argument is essentially the anthropic principle, the entire "we are here because we are here" thing. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics counters stochastic evolutionary strategies, the math behind non deterministic molecular Darwinism is simply not possible given the youth of the universe.
  - Aaargh20318 7y ago
    > the math behind non deterministic molecular Darwinism is simply not possible given the youth of the universe. Doesn't it also depend on the size of the universe ? We don't have any idea how big it really is. It could be infinite in which case it's not only likely, but inevitable.
  - rimliu 7y ago
    What has the Second Law of Thermodynamics has to do with evolution? If you think Earth is an isolated system, just go out on a cloudless day and see for yourself why that is not the case.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    You’re definitely reading something I didn’t write. All I said is that this is a large state space, which has been largely unexplored. The reason it’s largely unexplored is because most of the state space is useless, inert garbage. The amount of time it takes to create a genome this large is proportional to the size of the genome, not the size of the state space. That’s how evolution by natural selection works. If you hypothesized a world without evolution, where things appeared completely by chance arrangement of molecules, that’s when the size of the state space becomes important. So I would say that your argument is not an argument against molecular evolution, it is an argument against something else.
gus_massa 7y ago
The main idea of "molecular Darwinism" is that the initial life for had a very short DNA [1]. While the species evolved, the short DNA evolves and got longer [2]. * For example some genes are repeated, a bad copy may repeat a gene and the DNA get longer. Virus may cause some duplications too. * Some genes are almost repeated,each copy has a slightly different function, so each one has a variant that is better for each function. The idea is that an error in the copy made two copies of the original gene and then each copy evolved slowly differently. * Some parts of the DNA are repetitions of a same short pattern many many many times. IIRC these apear near the center and the extremes of the chromosomes, and are useful for structural reasons, not to encode information. The DNA can extend the extreme easily because it's just a repetition of the pattern. * Some parte are just junk DNA that is not useful, but there is no mechanism to detect that it is junk and can be eliminated, so it is copy form individual to individual, and from specie to specie with random changes. (Some parts of these junk may be useful.) So the idea is that the initial length was not 1000000000, but that the length increased with time. Your calculation does not model the theory of "molecular Darwinism". Your calculation is about the probability that is a "human" miraculously apear out of thin air with a completely random genome, it will get the correct one [3]. [1] Or perhaps RNA, or perhaps a few independent strands of RNA that cooperate. The initial steps are far from settle. [2] It's not strictly increasing, it may increase and decrease the length many times. [3] Each person has a different genome, so there is not 1 perfect genome. The correct calculation is not 1/4^1000000000 but some-number/4^1000000000 . It's difficult to calculate the number of different genomes that are good enough to be human, but it's much much much smaller than 4^1000000000. So let's ignore this part.
- GregoryPerry 7y ago
  Again and irrespective of how much genome information was there initially and what it eventually became, you are still talking about a final optimization problem of 4^1,000,000,000. Even one tenth of that amount of the human genome is an unfathomably large number to randomly iterate to given the generally accepted statistics cited above. The math behind stochastic molecular Darwinism doesn't work out at all.
  - 7y ago
Elrac 7y ago
You're of course free to "doubt that anything is truly random" and to suspect that "there has to be some type of cosmic drummer," but I feel compelled to point out that your "case in point" completely fails to support your opinion. Your example insinuates that (a) all of the human genome is required to correctly model the human phenotype, i.e. each bit is significant, and, more importantly, (b) the human genome came into existence as-is without a history of stepwise expansion and refinement. I can't know whether you're a creationist, but I will point out that your attempted argument is on (e.g.) #8 on Scientific American's list of "Answers to Creationist Nonsense" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-cre...). Amusingly, SciAm's rebuttal even explains how the "monkeys typing Hamlet" fails as an analogy to the human genome.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
The only drummer needed, is environmental pressure. This is well understood and computationally ordinary.
ben_w 7y ago
Last time I argued with someone who didn’t believe in evolution, I went home and wrote something which implemented it. It took me half an hour and worked first time. We’ve been using simulated evolution as one of several ways to train AI for quite a long time now.

klodolph 7y ago

I mean, while you might have 4^1,000,000,000 possible genomes, only a vanishingly small fraction of those have ever existed.

GregoryPerry 7y ago
Your argument is essentially the anthropic principle, the entire "we are here because we are here" thing. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics counters stochastic evolutionary strategies, the math behind non deterministic molecular Darwinism is simply not possible given the youth of the universe.
- Aaargh20318 7y ago
  > the math behind non deterministic molecular Darwinism is simply not possible given the youth of the universe. Doesn't it also depend on the size of the universe ? We don't have any idea how big it really is. It could be infinite in which case it's not only likely, but inevitable.
- rimliu 7y ago
  What has the Second Law of Thermodynamics has to do with evolution? If you think Earth is an isolated system, just go out on a cloudless day and see for yourself why that is not the case.
- klodolph 7y ago
  You’re definitely reading something I didn’t write. All I said is that this is a large state space, which has been largely unexplored. The reason it’s largely unexplored is because most of the state space is useless, inert garbage. The amount of time it takes to create a genome this large is proportional to the size of the genome, not the size of the state space. That’s how evolution by natural selection works. If you hypothesized a world without evolution, where things appeared completely by chance arrangement of molecules, that’s when the size of the state space becomes important. So I would say that your argument is not an argument against molecular evolution, it is an argument against something else.

gus_massa 7y ago

The main idea of "molecular Darwinism" is that the initial life for had a very short DNA [1]. While the species evolved, the short DNA evolves and got longer [2]. * For example some genes are repeated, a bad copy may repeat a gene and the DNA get longer. Virus may cause some duplications too. * Some genes are almost repeated,each copy has a slightly different function, so each one has a variant that is better for each function. The idea is that an error in the copy made two copies of the original gene and then each copy evolved slowly differently. * Some parts of the DNA are repetitions of a same short pattern many many many times. IIRC these apear near the center and the extremes of the chromosomes, and are useful for structural reasons, not to encode information. The DNA can extend the extreme easily because it's just a repetition of the pattern. * Some parte are just junk DNA that is not useful, but there is no mechanism to detect that it is junk and can be eliminated, so it is copy form individual to individual, and from specie to specie with random changes. (Some parts of these junk may be useful.) So the idea is that the initial length was not 1000000000, but that the length increased with time. Your calculation does not model the theory of "molecular Darwinism". Your calculation is about the probability that is a "human" miraculously apear out of thin air with a completely random genome, it will get the correct one [3]. [1] Or perhaps RNA, or perhaps a few independent strands of RNA that cooperate. The initial steps are far from settle. [2] It's not strictly increasing, it may increase and decrease the length many times. [3] Each person has a different genome, so there is not 1 perfect genome. The correct calculation is not 1/4^1000000000 but some-number/4^1000000000 . It's difficult to calculate the number of different genomes that are good enough to be human, but it's much much much smaller than 4^1000000000. So let's ignore this part.

GregoryPerry 7y ago
Again and irrespective of how much genome information was there initially and what it eventually became, you are still talking about a final optimization problem of 4^1,000,000,000. Even one tenth of that amount of the human genome is an unfathomably large number to randomly iterate to given the generally accepted statistics cited above. The math behind stochastic molecular Darwinism doesn't work out at all.
- 7y ago

Elrac 7y ago

You're of course free to "doubt that anything is truly random" and to suspect that "there has to be some type of cosmic drummer," but I feel compelled to point out that your "case in point" completely fails to support your opinion. Your example insinuates that (a) all of the human genome is required to correctly model the human phenotype, i.e. each bit is significant, and, more importantly, (b) the human genome came into existence as-is without a history of stepwise expansion and refinement. I can't know whether you're a creationist, but I will point out that your attempted argument is on (e.g.) #8 on Scientific American's list of "Answers to Creationist Nonsense" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-cre...). Amusingly, SciAm's rebuttal even explains how the "monkeys typing Hamlet" fails as an analogy to the human genome.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

The only drummer needed, is environmental pressure. This is well understood and computationally ordinary.

ben_w 7y ago

Last time I argued with someone who didn’t believe in evolution, I went home and wrote something which implemented it. It took me half an hour and worked first time. We’ve been using simulated evolution as one of several ways to train AI for quite a long time now.