Wow. I didn't mean to appear in such a way that frustrates you, and possibly others. Frankly, I 'd like to be more thorough and careful in what I say in response but it takes so much time to do so. More than I can afford to spend here.
I didn't see anything in my hasty review of posts in response to mine that indicated intermediate benchmarks in the path from abiotic to what might be posited as the simplest thing we might call protolife. Did I miss something?
I thought my response that, since no steps have been given that can be quantified, I would quantify one step for an example. Then I showed the simple arithmetic that it takes to jump that gap that I specified.
I didn't realize I had ignored some counter argument that explained there are steps much smaller than the step I chose to analyze.
I don't understand at this moment why you call my design based bias "determinism". To me, determinism is what Heisenberg dispelled. I go with Werner. I don't believe in determinism. I'm not dodging you ... I don't understand what you meant.
And on "the counter arguments made about how your statistics are disagreed with", could you snip a piece directly from the post you see as such a counter argument?
Thanks.
I wrote a rather lengthy post to respond to your statistical argument about the infinite time for dna.rna to arise.
Many answered to your post, I don't think that I need to post them. They in fact were specifically addressing the 'design' bias or the 'determinism' bias.
While the evolutionary use of the word determinism is separate from the physics and philosophical usage it is also very similar. It runs like this:
People often talk about humans and the evolution of intelligence, they say things like "It is a marvel that evolution worked to create intelligence, it is such a powerful thing that obviously it was selected for as a survival trait."
This is a determination of the end goal of evolution which is a mistake: evolution is blind. Changes in the genome and the environment are blind to the outcome of the path.
In the example of intelligence one of the possible paths could be:
Flicker of intelligence>more intelligence>greater intelligence> advanced intelligence
However this ignores the fact that intelligence is dependant upon the substrate of brain architecture and it is like talking about the evolution of the wheel without looking at wood working tools. Tools are developed for the task at hand one can not say that an arrow straightener is part of a chain that leads to the wheel. Because the tool is developed for the task at hand.
One of the likely paths to intelligence runs like this:
Hominid develops upright gate>narrowing of female pelvis>reduction in size of babies brain case at birth> increased growth rate of brain after birth> modification of brain growth to more brain growth.
During each phase of this process the adaptation of the proto-human is blind to the end of out come of increased brain growth. The original upright gate is not related to increased brain growth although it does encourage reproductive success and the same is true of each step, the reproductive success is not geared towards developing intelligence or in this case the capability for intelligence. It is geared to reproductive success and the exploitation of the environment that leads to reproductive success. The success of a modification is blind to the end result. It is a matter of contingent history, like a drop of water rolling on a surface, the end position is where the drop ends, not planned in advance.
So when you talk about the likelihood of a particular sequence in DnA/RnA and then compute some likely hood of it arising you are making an error of determinism, in looking at the potential paths that natural selection might have used, you can not start at the end point.
That is like looking at a computer chip and saying that it is the end path of technology and that it is statistically impossible because you are ignoring the path of contingent history that led to it. Yes the likelihood that a computer chip would randomly assemble itself from atoms is very low. However they do exist.
Please avoid the whole creationist part of the above example of human manufacture, it was chosen solely as an analogy.
I gave specific examples of possible intermediate steps in abiogenesis in that lengthy post.
