The Problem with Christians

[AJW333]

So we are agreed that the development of the eye is dependent upon mutations of the DNA.

Except that the unusable ones aren't generally viable life forms, are they? You are looking at only the successes, over countless attempts made over millions of years, ignoring the mountains of failures both seen and unseen, and then pretending that there are only successes. There aren't: when you don't artificially limit the odds for no reason, what you'll find is that there are more than enough failed attempts to justify what successes there are,

You are now arguing for me, not against me. If the number of possible AA combinations to make one protein is 10^500 and the majority of them are failures (resulting in death)  then the  odds of ever evolving at all become so much worse.

No, that's not my model, not in its entirety. My model also allows for each individual component to perform its own, isolated function for the organism prior to becoming the eye, or for sequential, less complex eyes to build up to the current form.

So in the human eye, the optic nerve joins the retinal cells to the neurons in the back of the brain (in multiple separate nuclei). What function did each of these structures perform before they were all connected to each other?

What's particularly strange is that you'll ask this question at all, given that the link I gave, which you claimed to have read, contains the answer within the first screen: light sensitive cells evolve a depression, which confers limited directional light-sensing to the organism. If that depression cups around and is filled with simple water, then you've got a pinhole camera, but more importantly, you've got the anterior chamber of the eye and a rudimentary fluid to fill it, and from there it's a simple mutation to allow for the generation of a specialized fluid, rather than just water.

You keep ignoring the numbers! There's no such thing as a simple mutation to produce 676 different proteins in the aqueous humor. Each of these proteins is formed by DNA requiring an average of 450 AAs in precise sequence. The chances of these forming through random chance mutations is zero.

Which still suggests nothing like what you're claiming here. Yes, the mutations are random, but they're strained through the process of natural selection: every mutation is going to give some result, there's no means by which nothing will happen. Either the result is fatal, in which case you won't be seeing that organism around, or it isn't, in which case you will. The odds are irrelevant because you're not looking at a fully random process, you're looking at a randomized input through a filter, which spits out only successful (for a given value of success) results. You are then looking at those successful results and pondering why there's only successful results, while ignoring the filter that all of them went through before you even get to look at them.

Again you are ignoring the fact that random mutations cannot account for the complexity of AA sequences in the 100,000+ proteins that the body makes. I would also point out that the numbers are actually much much worse than the 10^500 that I have used. For each AA to be assembled in any given protein, it requires the correct sequence of three base pairs to do so. There are 64 possible combinations of codons required to select each amino acid so the odds for creating the correct AA sequence in the avg protein is 1:64^450 which is exponentially worse than the 1:20^450 (10^500). For example, 20x20x20x20=160,000 and 64x64x64x64= 16,777,216. So God only knows what 64^450 comes to.

I've said this before, but I guess it bears repeating: when you're looking at events that have already happened, the odds are irrelevant.

Fallacious logic. If the odds of something happening the way you think it did are zero, then it didn't happen the way you think it did.

s it just your god, eternal and always extant?

Yep. Since God created the universe, he is external to it and not subject to any of its laws, they are subject to him.

... Which is...? It hasn't escaped anyone's notice that you haven't presented any yet, dude. When you were asked, all you did was attempt to show that evolution is improbable again, which... is not evidence for design.

Not sure how many times I need to say this but the numbers say that evolution is not improbable, it is impossible. You just keep ignoring the impossible odds of code forming through random mutation, even if you throw in natural selection which is still largely dependent on random mutation (Dawkins and the blind watchmaker).

... Oh my. I seem to have hit upon the central fallacy that the rest of your threadbare position hangs on. And also? When you presented your math, evolution still had a positive probability there.

You don't understand probability. There are certain limits of chance that beyond which, it is considered absurd. Borel's law puts this at 10^50. Concerning the number of AAs required to create the average protein, the probability of generating the correct sequence could be higher than 10^1000 which would be 10^20 beyond absurd - just for one protein out of 100,000 that the body makes. The age of the universe is 10^18 seconds so in order to create just one useful human protein by random assembly, you would have to have 10^55 attempts per second to have any chance!