Re: Chance and Selection

From: Chris Cogan (ccogan@telepath.com)
Date: Mon Dec 04 2000 - 16:11:22 EST

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    > Bertvan:
    > In my judgement believing in tooth fairies is more reasonable than
    believing
    > rationally organized mutations can arise by chance with no intelligence
    > involved.

    Chris
    Consider a single nucleotide. There are four possibilities for that
    nucleotide. One of them is beneficial to the organism, and the others are
    not. Randomly, out of every four replacements of this nucleotide, one
    should be beneficial. Simple probability theory says that if the
    possibilities are all equally random (equally probable) it *should* occur
    about one time in four, on average.

    But *you* claim that this one beneficial occurrence will *never* occur.

    WHY IS THAT?

    What will *prevent* this beneficial change from *ever* occurring if the
    replacements are randomly occurring?



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