I don't know if I did it with grace or not. Being the insensitive soul that
I am, I will check with my wife (who is my social conscience) to see if you
are correct on this on. :-)
>
>I will challenge one thing you have said, that is your and yockey's use of
>the probability numbers for the total number of cytochrome c's that are
>possible. There will always be the need to exceed the data in this area,
>but the number you use for the number of unique functional cytochrome c
>molecules (10^93) is off by a factor of 10^90 at present. There is no
>assurance that a substitution of aa1 in molecule "x" will allow that
>substitution in molecule "y". Since the functional and structural behavior
> if cytochrome c is determined by a *combination* of amino acids, each
>*potential* new combination would have to be tested (in a ilving system in
>which it occurs) before it could be included in the sample. It is glib and
>naive to assert that any amino acid found at a specific site in the
>cytochrome c molecule validates that amino acid for that site with all
>other valid amino acids at other sites. This is an assumption tha Yockey
>wrongly makes in developing his statistic.
That is not what Yockey is doing. He is not using ANY amino acid at a given
site. If he did, then the total number of functional molecules would be
the equivalent of the total possible combinations. WHat Yockey is doing is
substituting hydrophylic for hydrophylic and hydrophobic for hydrophobic
etc. He also utilizes the fact that numerous other species have differences
at a given site and their cytochromes work just fine. THis observational
data also vastly increases the number of possible functional sequences that
perform cytochrome c's function.
In any case, even using
>Yockey's assumptions (which are untested and illogical), that raises the
>liklihood of coming up with a cytochrome c by chance 1 in 10^90 tries. I
>don't feel too uncomfortable asserting that something other than chance was
>involved.
I agree that something other than chance is behind the universe. I just
think God set up the system where he chance would lead to the result he
wanted. If I shoot craps with you and use a loaded set of dice, I am
using chance to obtain the result I want, namely taking your money. Chance
does not require mindlessness behind it. All the casino's in the world use
this type of chance to get rich by taking the gambler's money. The casino
owners are not mindless---they know exactly how and where they have rigged
the odds.
Similarly, that is what I think God did when he set up the biological
system. He rigged the odds so that when mutations occured they would still
lead to us. This is a union of chance and determinism. One can see this in
the marvelous nonlinear equations like Duffy's equation, the Henon-Heiles
potential, quantum mechanical wave functions etc. Each of those use chance
but the outcome is deterministic! God can use the mathematical laws that he
set up to create us--using chance but with the outcome entirely
deterministic. And besides that God designed the biological world to be
able to pump info out of the environment and change when the environment
changed. That is truly ingenious. What anti-evolutionists seem to want is
a God who can't seem to foresee the future and create an ADAPTIVE
biological system. If life can't adapt then when the environment changes
there is no way to pump that info into the genome. In such cases where the
info isn't pumped quickly enough, species go extinct.
I think what God has done is more wonderful than what my YEC friends seem
to want. They want a static God who is incapable of many things. Incapable
of foreseeing that the environment would change. Incapable of mastering
chance! This of course means that God is not omnipotent. THe YECs want a
impotent God when he faces Chance! Chance is more powerful than God. I have
never understood that. It flies in the face of what we know about God. And
imo it flies in the face of what the Bible says about God. If chance is
more powerful than God, maybe we should worship chance. But of course, God
is supreme.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution