The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

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.

What? No, I'm saying that accusations of improbability mean little, given the vast number of attempts that are made every day. You do understand that a 1:1000 chance is worse than a 500:1000 chance, don't you? The more attempts occur, the higher the likelihood of any specific outcome occurring, not lower.

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?

You are aware that the evolution of the eye predates even the brain, yes? The optic nerve evolved from nerve fibers attached to a light sensitive patch of cells that had been present from an extremely early organism. The retina was the back of those same cells, at the point at which they had cupped to form a pinhole camera for better directional "vision." All this is firmly present in the link that you've sworn up and down you've read.

Is there any particular reason you keep tossing problems with (your understanding of) evolution at me, rather than actually presenting positive evidence for your god?

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.

They aren't random chance, they all go through the filter of natural selection, which only admits viable solutions. Moreover, your dire little pronouncements aside, the chances are not zero, they're just small, so quit exaggerating. Oh and also? They're not goddamn random because they're also constrained by the state of the genes being replicated too, so at every step you're just fucking wrooooong. I'm getting so damn tired of telling you this, over and over, only for it to be forgotten as though you're a goldfish in the very next post.

Also, you're dodging my point, which is that you said you'd read something, and then asked a question answered in that very thing. Did you read it or not?

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.

How did you determine that? Other than that you really want that to be true, what research have you done on this issue, and do you truly think that scientists don't have an answer for this?

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.

If you have billions of rolls of the die, it doesn't matter how many faces the die has.

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.

Except the odds aren't zero, and your only argument for that they are is "because I said so." This is getting sad...

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

And now you're reduced to childish special pleading. Amazing how, when we get past the pretenses of intellectual rigor and all that, it's always "but my magic man doesn't have to obey all these rules, because I don't want him to!" You really think your simpering assertions will make up for your abject failure to provide positive evidence?

Oh, and you've got such a thing for probabilities so: what's the probability of there being an eternal thing outside of the universe? You want to talk long odds? There's your long fucking odds: at least with evolution we've got actual examples of living creatures with which to derive a probability. For your god, we've got no indication that life forms can be eternal or live outside the universe: the odds there really are zero, but you don't care because it's what you really, really want to be true.

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).

"Evolution is impossible," is not evidence for your god. Evidence for your god is... evidence for your god, not just evidence against some other proposition. Apparently I need to keep saying this, because you never seem to internalize anything that might threaten your precious default fallacy, "god did it."

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!

... Except that, again, and the fact that I keep having to remind you of this is either a testament to your ignorance, or a testament to your dishonesty, but the human body is not some miraculous end product popping into existence from nowhere- you know, like your religious fables say!- it is, in actuality, a non-random product of millions of years of evolution from much simpler organisms. The odds are not that high if you take into account the actual model rather than assuming, for no reason, that the system has to start from scratch every time. It doesn't: the generation of a human body has a blueprint from the parents, which itself has a blueprint from a parent organism just fractionally different from them, and so on, ad infinitum. As you go back down the line, organisms lose complexity and thus the odds of them forming from nowhere reduce, but after the point at which they did form from nowhere- at which point they would have been exceedingly simple and not subject to your long odds at all- then each succeeding organism has a self replicating basis which means that no chance is required at all for them to form.

My understanding of probability is just fine: your understanding of basic biology is either limited, or being held back for ideological means.