From: keck@athena.cs.uga.edu (Paul Keck)
Subject: Re: Probability of Evolution
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 04:38:11 GMT

Amazing how a thread can get out of control if you decide to take a little
weekend trip!  Tampa was nice, BTW.  Check out the Salvador Dali museum
in St. Petersburg if you're down that way.  Better restaurants in Tampa.

In article <cR6wTB13w165w@kalki33> kalki33!system@lakes.trenton.sc.us writes:
>keck@athena.cs.uga.edu (Paul Keck) writes:
>
>> Most of the "proofs" of this sort that I have seen run under the perhaps
>> unwitting assumption that there is only one "test tube" where everything
>> is happening.  The probability may be 10e-150000 that life will form in
>> one test tube (not that I believe that, or course), but when you have
>> 10e150000 test tubes spread over the Earth's surface in those shallow
>> seas and deep sea vents, the probability becomes more like a sure thing. 
>
>A "primordial soup" one kilometer thick covering the entire surface of
>the earth with an average of one protein molecule per 10,000 cubic
>angstroms. (See "What is Matter and What is Life" by Dr. T.D. Singh and
>Dr. Richard L. Thompson, Bhaktivedanta Institute monograph #1, 1977)
>

He actually did consider this!  His Soup Volume (tm) seems pretty high,
though- is Thompson only talking earth surface now covered by ocean,
or 1 km over the ENTIRE surface?  Either way, if he starts with this
high a volume it _really_ makes me wonder how he got such an absurdly low
probability.

>> 
>> Not having read Thompson's paper/book, I don't know if he also makes the 
>> mistake that I have also seen before- that a human must spring full-formed
>> from the primordial soup.  Once any sort of self-replicating or even non-
>> degrading pre-life-form arises, the process begins to accelerate past the
>> totally random.  The process doesn't start from scratch at each step, i.e.
>> if the bacterium fails its "dice roll" to add this or that base pair to 
>> its DNA, it doesn't go back to its component chemicals.
>>
>
>But if the bacterium is being pressured by "natural selection" (i.e. a
>hostile environment) to mutate and reproduce or perish, then if it
>doesn't get just the right burst of cosmic rays at the right time, it
>will perish and decompose back into its component chemicals. Is it not
>so?
>
>Since the doctrine of evolution does not state that a human being
>springs "full-formed from the primordial soup", no valid critique of
>evolution can proceed as if this is what evolution claims.
>
The point I tried to make here was that each probability is often considered
to be (as many people have subsequently pointed out) one stop along a
linear trail to a fully-formed human.  Consider this hypothetical C'ist,
Kooki (any resemblance to any person living, dead, or reincarnated is
purely coincidental):

Well, let's make a human.  We'll start with protein gunk.  Maybe some
will stick together.
<flip>
Okay, it made it.  Maybe it'll form into base pairs, of the types we now
know are the best ones.
<flip>
On a roll.  Maybe now it will get a membrane.
<flip>
Ooooooh, too bad.  We'll start over with protein gunk again.  Maybe some will
stick together.
<flip>
...
<eons, and many incarnations, later>
It'll need eyelashes, since *we* know that all humans need eyelashes, and 
any other end product would be silly.
<flip>
Darn!  And after so many right occurrances, too.  Oh, well.  Maybe some
protein gunk will stick together...
<flip>

I'm sure any reasoning person can see that this is not the way evolution
is being put forth as happening.  Once a bacterium arises, for example,
NOT gaining some further adaptation doesn't necessarily reset it to the
beginning (unless it is outcompeted by something else and dies, and even then
its genotype is probably still around in a relative/clone).  We 
still have bacteria around, for example- the fact (IMHO) that some ancestral
bacterium gave rise to progeny which eventually gave rise to me, didn't
reset all its contemporaries to their components.

Hopefully this will clarify my earlier statements.  

Paul Keck.