Subj: Re: Creation Science Date: 96-05-05 16:31:18 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 File: AOLCREAT.TXT (53760 bytes) DL Time (14400 bps): < 1 minute Sorry for hte delay in my snail like reply. I think John would not mind if you called him. Call Everett Purcell at 714 838-1498 for his number. Bill ################################ Subj: Re: AOLCREAT.??? - Whazzit? Date: 96-05-18 19:38:28 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 The Gene Johnson of Atheist Unlimited???????? That guy had more names than I have sox! What a thrill! The art work is a lot better....want to see it? If I send it as DOC and tehy have a MAC are tehy out of luck? Bill ############################################## Subj: Re: AOLCREAT.TXT, Weird Science, etc. Date: 96-05-31 00:44:08 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 honestly......your intelligently planned and purposeful program gives you"faith" that amino acids formed chains to produce parts of a cell (don't forget you need DNA RNA, a cell membrane too) and these cells redproduced into skin cells, nerve cells blood cells etc to make a living organism? I sincerely appreciate your advice on mailing my text file. I have given you all the arguments Ic an. Indeed there are more issues to share on but I know athat a pearl of wisdom would make you ever say..hery, thats right there is a God. I say this with love but for some reason knwn only to you (and God) you chose to have nothing to do with Him and your way of lashing out is to ridicule those who love Him and believe in Him. My dear friend your arms are too short to fight God. Please feel free to call me if you wish at 714 898-8331. I know you know too much about protein to honestly think that teh materilaistic arguments of their origin are stronger than the argumet they are the result of design, plan and purpose. You biases cloud your logic. Bill Morgan %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% To keep this message from becoming too long and to keep the response time from dragging, I will only reply to part of your message for now. Besides, there is a lot I need to tell you about proteins, but that can be incorporated into discussion of AOLCREAT.TXT. Also, I have three files to send to you, but that should only be done one at a time. Two of them are MONKEY (which you automatically dismissed sight-unseen and with absolutely no knowledge of its content; so much your own ability to take a path of "testing and examining with an open mind" [from Summary of AOLCREAT.TXT]) and my response to "Weird Science." But first I will send you my testimonial of learning about creation science. Attached to this EMail is WARUM.DCW, which I originally wrote for Charles Lang, mentioned within the file, and then upgraded for Paul Ekdahl on CompuServe. The file is a straight, plain-vanilla ASCII file, 80 columns wide, which uses the standard MS-DOS convention of terminating each line with CR-LF. Upon reading WARUM.DCW, you will find that I did indeed approach creation science in order to test and examine it with an open mind. You will also see several of the reasons why I found creation science to have failed that testing and examination. > ... and your way of lashing out is to ridicule those who love Him and > believe in Him. Please explain yourself here, Bill. PRECISELY where and when and how did I ridicule you or anybody else in the manner that you describe? Please provide a direct quotation. Be specific. The only thing approaching ridicule that I have seen in this exchange (and especially the previous) has come from you, not from me. The tone of your AOLCREAT.TXT was much calmer than "Weird Science" and the accompanying notes and lacked the crass flippancy of the former. I had actually thought that you had matured, but your messages (the second one especially) indicate otherwise. Perhaps your outbursts seemed humorous on your end, but they certainly appear unstable on this end. I would prefer to refrain from phoning you, since you would undoubtedly weird out on me even more in that medium. At least by keeping our exchange in writing, there is the chance that you will put at least some thought into what you write. At the very least we'll have the opporunity to review what we say. Dan Barker, a former fundamentalist preacher who grew up in the faith and was personally called by God to the ministry, refered to the situation among fundamentalists in which "their theology becomes their psychology." Your immediate attempts at proselytizing and your implied inability to ascribe a lack of acceptance of your theology to anything but willful disobediance of God indicate to me that you are in that aforementioned state. You and many other fundamentalist proselytizers I have had to deal with in the past fail to realize that other peoples' own religious beliefs are as valid and truthful and fulfilling to them as yours are to you. Your condemnation of my beliefs (without any knowledge of them, mind you) has as little impact on them and would normally make as little sense to me as if I were to take you to task for rejecting the True God of Nature in order to worship a man (the actual reason given by a very famous American Founding Father for considering Christianity to be tantamount to atheism). For that matter, even if you were to convince me of the need for a divine designer, you would fail to understand how I could then pick an entirely different creation myth than yours. Henry Morris also displays this inability as he assigns all other creation myths to the "evolution model", which has nothing to do with evolution. Sorry, Bill, but Genesis is not the only alternative to evolution. Bill, we both proceed from two entirely different sets of premises and so will need to overcome those differences in order to communicate. Your own concern in the matter of creation science is use it to fend off any perceived attacks against and challenges to your religious beliefs posed by evolution and science, as well as to use it as a tool for proselytizing -- you appear to be more actively using it for the latter purpose. On the other hand, MY concern in the matter is for Truth and for truthfulness, which I have found to be very sorely lacking in creation science and especially in much of the leadership of the creation science movement. You cannot see how anybody could honestly reject your form of Christianity once they have learned about creation science while I cannot see how anybody could honestly accept it. I cannot see how anybody could honestly convert to a religion under the explicit understanding that they would have to accept as true something which they know for a solid fact is false, namely creation science. If you really want to convert me, then the last thing you should be trying to use is creation science; I already know too much about it, obviously more than you know yourself or would ever want to know (I will discuss this later). However, unlike your inability to understand my position, I can at least appreciate yours. My own Christian training is fundamentalist, courtesy of Chuck Smith's church in Costa Mesa. I do understand something of your theology and of its consequences. I have been proselytized to by the best of them, so I know most of the arguments and tactics. One even tried to sell me "after-life insurance" by redressing Pascal's Wager in a car insurance analogy, whereupon I, knowing Pascal's Wager, pointed out that the premium for that insurance is exorbinant and would only pay off in the most restricted of circumstances (by analogy, if your insurance would only pay if you were hit by a green Edsel -- on the northbound side of the Santa Ana Freeway -- while it was exceeding the speed limit --- backing up -- at night -- with its lights off). And before you again accuse me of ridiculing fundamentalists, let me say that many of my friends are fundamentalists. At three of my last four jobs (over the past 9 years; as an engineer you know that we are high-tech migrant workers ) I worked with several fundamentalists. Not only were we friends, and we were also able to discuss religious matters freely, but I have also been asked often for advice in religious matters. I have always been supportive of their faith and respectful of their beliefs, even though I do not share those beliefs and even strongly question the wisdom of some of those beliefs. Therefore, please understand that I am approaching these conversations with respect for your beliefs, as is taught by my own religion (respect is not the same thing as acceptance, any more than being required to understand something would be the same as having to believe in it), and with very strong concern about the detrimental effects of creation science. Elsewhere I state that I believe that creation science is the greatest contributor to the spread of atheism and here I will begin to explain why. First, guess what a leading reason is for becoming an atheist. I have heard the testimony of some atheists. One recurring theme was that they had discovered that their religious leaders had been lying to them. Since almost all of creation science consists of distortions and misrepresentations of evolution and science, what would you expect to happen later when they finally want evolution really is? That's right. Orson Scott Card presented this moving scene of the consequences of teaching your children creation science: "Oh, the stupid children are safe enough; they'll just laugh at evolution and be happy fools for the rest of their days. But my heart goes out to the well-meaning parents of smart children as they dread the day when their children come home and say: 'Today, I learned what evolution really is ... and YOU LIED TO ME! And if you lied to me about that, then what else did you lie to me about? Did you lie about Jesus and the Resurrection? About sin and redemption? How could I ever believe you again?'" Around 1980, public elementary-school teacher Ray Baird taught creation science to his 5-th graders. This practice came to parents' attention when he bought some ICR "public school edition" materials. As you do, these materials repeated urged the children to make a decision, right then and there, between evolution and God, between atheism and creation. As you do, these materials insisted that there is no possible alternative to making this choice. As a result, a number of students decided to become atheists. One school child interviewed told of a kid he knows who took the message to heart and announced his decision to become an atheist because "he decided that creationism was so stupid that if religion required him to believe it then he wanted nothing to do with it. Interestingly, it was mainly the smarter children in Baird's class who became atheist because of creation science. Even after Baird had given them extra research assignments, so that they would have to think about it more. Nor are college students immune. At the 1986 International Conference on Creationism (ICC -- interestingly, the ICR never mentioned that event in Acts & Facts, even though the entire ICR geology department attended), Glenn R. Morton, a practicing petroleum geologist (area geophysicist for Arco Exploration Co.) and a staunch creationist who "want[s] an earth as young as [he] can get it," but who realizes that it is much older than mere thousands of years, presented his paper, "Geological Challenges to a Young Earth," a devastating rebuttal to Flood Geology. On the day before Morton's presentation, he gave a capsule version of his presentation (this "capsule" took an hour) to a creationist physicist (who, like most conference attendees, had no understanding of the scientific ideas that he has rejecting) (as reported by Robert Schadewald): "As conventional geologists know, the evidence against Flood Geology comes from everywhere. Morton cited the Green River shale, which has bird tracks in many of its millions of layers. There are too many fossils; microscopic fossils of diatoms are found in beds up to three kilometers thick. Many limestones look just like shallow-water deposits being laid down today, burrows and all. Seismic data shows ranges of mesas like we see in the west today -- buried in sedimentary rock. Using oil well drilling logs, geologists can map ancient rivers -- channeled deltas, sand crescents, and so forth -- now deeply buried in sedimentary rock. Pollen grains found in salt deposits prove they are evaporites, in clear contradiction to Henry Morris' claims. And so on, for an hour. Morton's job gives him access to a tremendous library of seismic profiles and well logs, and he used these and other graphics to illustrate his points." The entire ICR geology staff (John Morris, Steve Austin, and David McQueen) was present the next day for Morton's presentation. During the question period, Austin criticized Morton for attacking a 25-year-old publication and then implicitly repudiated _The Genesis Flood_ himself. But the fun started when John Morris identified himself as a petroleum geologist and accused Morton of sounding like an anticreationist and told him to quit raising problems and start solving them. Schadewald writes: "Morton chopped him off at the ankles. Two questions, said Morton: 'What oil company did you work for?' Well, uh, actually Morris never worked for an oil company, but he once taught petroleum engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Second, 'How old is the earth?' 'If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning.' Morton then said that he had hired several graduates of Christian Heritage College, and that all of them suffered severe crises of faith. They were utterly unprepared to face the geological facts every petroleum geologist deals with on a daily basis. Morton neglected to add that ICR is much better known for ignoring or denying problems than for working on them." Notice that they suffered severe crises of FAITH, not of GEOLOGY! This should not come unexpected, considering Dr. Henry Morris' teachings about geological evidence, teachings which the ICR lives by: "No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." (_Biblical Cosmology_, page 33) "The data of geology, in our view, should be interpreted in light of Scripture, rather than distorting Scripture to accommodate current geological philosophy." (_Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth_, page 6) In short, if it don't fit our theology, then either make it fit or ignore it. To that, his son and heir apparent, John Morris, has added (and many at the ICR seem to concur and actively teach): if it refutes the smallest part of our theology, then it disproves our entire theology. No wonder those students suffered so at seeing their faith crumble before them. Nor was this an isolated incident; a number of creationists in the Religion Forum on CompuServe have also stated that if it turned out that evolution is true, then their only choice would be to become atheists. Just as they were taught by creation science. Bill, are you familiar with the idea of "self-fullfilling prophecies"? If you teach your children that by accepting that they evolved from animals then they will act like wild animals, then they will do as you had taught them. If you teach them that by accepting evolution they will become hedonistic atheists, then they will do as you had taught them. Children learn well; be careful what you teach them. Please review what Jesus taught about what would happen to anyone who would mislead children. When I visited the ICR in Santee, I'm pretty sure I saw a mill-stone quarry just down the street. That quarry must be getting a lot of business from the ICR. And, of course, this did not even begin to touch on the subject of creation science preventing people from converting Christianity. If you tell them that by converting they must believe in creation science, which they know is utterly false, then that alone should be enough to turn the honest ones away. Or else they will join one of the churches that knows better than to require creation science. > You biases cloud your logic. Matthew 7:3-5, Bill. I'll get back with you later with another of the files I owe you. PS I'm sure that you will take exception at my references to creation science as false and lying. While it is difficult to prove deliberate deception, I do know a case which could not be anything else but deliberate deception. In abbreviated form (to save a little time): Walter Brown's Rattlesnake Protein Claim Creation/Evolution Newsletter Vol4 No5 Sep/Oct 1984 pp15-17 data came from cytochrome c comparisons by Dr. Margaret Dayhoff Walter Brown's son used the data in a high school science fair project in which he concluded that rattlesnakes were more closely related to humans by cytochrome c than to any other organism. When the author asked Brown to explain his claim, Brown explained that of the 47 organisms in the study, the one closest to the RATTLESNAKE was the human. However, Brown was careful NOT to say that the one closest to the human was the rattlesnake, which would have been totally false. human -- rattlesnake 14 amino acids difference human -- rhesus monkey 1 amino acid different human -- chimp identical, no differences no other snakes were included in the study, so the rattlesnake was about equally different from all the other organisms in the study Brown was shortly afterwards observed after a debate telling about rattlesnakes being more closely related to humans. When the author started explaining to the group about the claim, Brown very quickly changed the subject. There is no way that Brown could have not known that he was misrepresenting the facts and that he was lying (ie, telling a deliberate falsehood) with the intent of deceiving his audience. FWIW, here is the appropriate protein data: char aa[] = {"CSTPAGNDEQHRKMILVFYWX"}; int naa = 21; char *amino[] = {"Cys","Ser","Thr","Pro","Ala","Gly","Asn","Asp","Glu", "Gln","His","Arg","Lys","Met","Ile","Leu","Val","Phe","Tyr","Trp", "xxx"}; Comparisons with human cytochrome c: >CCCZ - Cytochrome c - Chimpanzee (tentative sequence) 532, 532 100.0% identity in 104 aa overlap 10 20 30 40 50 60 HUMAN.CC GDVEKGKKIFIMKCSQCHTVEKGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAPGYSYTAANKNKGIIWG X::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: CCCZ GDVEKGKKIFIMKCSQCHTVEKGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAPGYSYTAANKNKGIIWG 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 HUMAN.CC EDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMIFVGIKKKEERADLIAYLKKATNE :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::X CCCZ EDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMIFVGIKKKEERADLIAYLKKATNE 70 80 90 100 >CCMQR - Cytochrome c - Rhesus macaque (tentative sequence) 527, 527 99.0% identity in 104 aa overlap 10 20 30 40 50 60 HUMAN.CC GDVEKGKKIFIMKCSQCHTVEKGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAPGYSYTAANKNKGIIWG X::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::.:: CCMQR GDVEKGKKIFIMKCSQCHTVEKGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAPGYSYTAANKNKGITWG 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 HUMAN.CC EDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMIFVGIKKKEERADLIAYLKKATNE :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::X CCMQR EDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMIFVGIKKKEERADLIAYLKKATNE 70 80 90 100 >CCRS - Cytochrome c - Eastern diamondback rattlesnake 478, 478 87.3% identity in 102 aa overlap 10 20 30 40 50 60 HUMAN.CC GDVEKGKKIFIMKCSQCHTVEKGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAPGYSYTAANKNKGIIWG X::::::::: :::. :::::.::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::::: CCRS GDVEKGKKIFSMKCGTCHTVEEGGKHKTGPNLHGLFGRKTGQAVGYSYTAANKNKGIIWG 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 HUMAN.CC EDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMIFVGIKKKEERADLIAYLKKATNE .:::::::::::::::::::.:.:.:.:.::.:::::::.:X CCRS DDTLMEYLENPKKYIPGTKMVFTGLKSKKERTDLIAYLKEATAK 70 80 90 100 Human - Chimpanzee (tentative sequence) 532, 532 100.0% identity in 104 aa overlap * IDENTICAL * Human - Rhesus macaque (tentative sequence) 527, 527 99.0% identity in 104 aa overlap Site 58 I - T Human - Eastern diamondback rattlesnake 478, 478 87.3% identity in 102 aa overlap Site 11 I - S 15 S - G 16 Q - T 22 K - E 44 P - V 61 E - D 81 I - V 83 V - T 85 I - L 87 K - S 89 E - K 92 A - T 100 K - E X 103 N - A 104 E - K %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > I sincerely appreciate your advice on mailing my text file. I have given > you all the arguments Ic an. Indeed there are more issues to share on > but I know athat a pearl of wisdom would make you ever say..hery, > thats right there is a God. Being a real Boy Scout, I'm glad to help where I can. Even though my minister keeps warning me to take care before whom I cast my own pearls, here I go again . Attached you will find a ZIP file containing my belated reply to your "Weird Science." Use PKUNZIP to extract the file (PKUNZIP weirdsci). The file is in WordPerfect 5.1 format, which WinWord6 can convert very easily, though the font usually comes out too large. Simply select Edit/Select All and then change the font and font size to your liking. If I may ask. At the time you kept making such a big deal about nobody ever being able to find a single error in "Weird Science" and yet I found errors in every single frame of every single page and was able to keep my commentary down to a little over 80 pages. Surely I'm not the only one to have seen through it. Would you be willing to share with me the other critiques that you surely must have received? Next time, proteins! %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% > I know you know too much about protein to honestly think that teh > materilaistic arguments of their origin are stronger than the argumet > they are the result of design, plan and purpose. At least I know enough about proteins to see the errors in your presentation of standard creation science doctrine concerning proteins. It's a pity that your "open and testing mind" never scrutinizes creation science claims. From AOLCREAT.TXT: "Life requires many things. Long amino acids chains make proteins...chains in the proper order and shape. Miller's experiment did NOT produce any chains. Life also requires DNA, RNA and never has any experiment produced DNA or RNA from base materials. Never have chains of DNA or RNA been produced. A cell membrane has never been produced. "The faith that even one protein arose by chance is tremendous. Lets look at statistics. Proteins are made up of chains of amino acids, just like a train is made up of box cars. A chain of box cars makes up a train. A chain of amino acids makes up a protein. Humans have 20 different types of amino acids that make up our proteins, and the average human protein is 400 amino acids long. Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk. "Imagine many box cars at a train station, and these box cars are made up of twenty different colors. The owner of the station tells you he wants a train to be 400 box cars long, and you are to pick the combination of colored box cars, but if it is not the order he has in mind (and he didn't tell you it) he will fire you. "What are the odds you will get the box cars in the right order? They are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you. The odds are 20 to the 400th power! This is the same as 10 to the 520th power, that is a 1 followed by 520 zeros! You have better odds of winning California Super Lotto every week for 11 years than the odds of one protein in your body having the amino acids being properly aligned by chance. The odds are really much worse because the amino acids must be left handed, they must form a chain "in series," no parallel branching, their shape (proteins are wound up like a ball of yarn) is crucial, you need an oxygen free environment, etc etc. And remember, this is for just one protein. Your body has countless trillions of proteins. "The model that a brilliant designer made proteins requires much less faith than to trust random chance and natural processes." First, we both know (now that you have read some actual protein sequences in my HUMAN.CMP file) that your assumption that every single amino acid in a protein is specified so that any change in the specific sequence would destroy the protein's functionality ("Remember, the arrangement of these amino acids is crucial to the function of the protein. If it is the proper arrangement it does its job, if the order is mixed up, it is worthless chemical junk."). For many amino acid positions it is the class of amino acid (eg, hydrophyllic, hydrophobic, charged, uncharged) and not the amino acid itself that is important. In reality, only some positions on a protein require a specific amino acid, others require any of a few different amino acids, and many will accept practically any amino acid. Indeed, it is precisely this fact that allows us to compare the differences in the same FUNCTIONAL protein in different species and find that the degree of difference between more closely related species to be less than between less closely related species. Creation science is well aware of the fact that the same FUNCTIONAL protein can have different sequences (at the same time that they claim that any change in that specific amino acid sequence would destroy a protein's functionality; honestly, would a little consistency be too much to expect of creation science?) and of what the patterns of relatedness that those differences show. Which is why there are so many false creation science claims of distantly related species having more similar proteins than more closely related ones. Like Walter Brown's blatantly deceptive rattlesnake protein claim. And Duane Gish's infamous bullfrog protein (which claim he made on national TV, then refused to produce his source, except to let slip at one point that it was based on a joke he had heard, and which thereafter caused similarly outrageous creation science claims to be met with the cry of "Bullfrog!" -- I have a file which tells the entire story, if you'd like to read it). Rather than brandying about a hypothetical protein, let's look at a specific case. In the class notes of Frank Awbrey & William Thwaites' creation/evolution class at UCSD (the Institute for Creation Research conducted half the lectures and Awbrey & Thwaites the other half), they give the example of a calcium binding site with 29 amino acid positions: only 2 positions (7%) require specific amino acids, 8 positions (28%) can be filled by any of 5 hydrophobic amino acids, 3 positions (10%) can be filled by any one of 4 other amino acids, 2 positions (7%) can be filled with two different amino acids, and 14 of the positions (48%) can be filled by virtually any of the 20 amino acids. The sequence of the 15 specified positions is: L* L*L* L*D D* D*G* I*D* EL* L*L* L* Where: L* = hydrophobic - Leu, Val, Ilu, Phe, or Met Prob = (5/20)^8 D* = (a) Asp, Glu, Ser, or Asn Prob = (4/20)^3 OR (b) theoretically also Gls or Thr Prob = (6/20)^3 D = Asp Prob = (1/20) E = Glu Prob = (1/20) G* = Gly or Asp Prob = (2/20) I* = Ilu or Val Prob = (2/20) Remaining positions = any of 20 Prob = (20/20)^14 = 1^14 = 1 Total Prob = Prob(L*) * Prob(D*) * Prob(D) * Prob(E) * Prob(G*) * Prob(I*) = (a) 3.05 x 10^(-12) OR (b) 10.2 x 10^(-12) Your own calculation of the probability of a functional order coming up (ie, the standard creation science method) would be: (1/20)^29 = 1.86 x 10^(-38). Comparing the lower probability to yours shows it to be 1.64 x 10^26 times greater. This invalidates your colored-box-car analogy as it stands (to correct it, you would need to allow for a variety of different combinations) and it invalidates your probability calculations. The second problem lies the assumptions of your protein model, exemplified in your statement: "[The odds for success in the box car analogy] are the same odds the amino acids will align themselves by chance to make one protein in you." Whatever is that supposed to have to do with evolution? What your model describes is CREATION EX NIHILO, not evolution. Do you believe that proteins are formed by "aligning themselves by chance"? That is not how life works. I will not patronize you by describing how cells produce proteins based on DNA base sequences transcribed onto RNA; you should know about that already and doubtless do. An evolutionary accounting for modern proteins would be that they had EVOLVED through their "descent with modification" (the basic definition for the "fact of evolution") from ancestral proteins; ie, that the genes for modern proteins were inherited from a long line of ancestors and had undergone changes along the way. The evolutionary account does not depend upon modern proteins being created ex nihilo, whereas the creationist account does. Hence your probability arguments apply to creationism and not to evolution, which uses an entirely different model to which different probabilities apply, as examined in my MONKEY program (attached). Rather, your complaint is against Abiogenesis. Please read my discussion in WEIRDSCI.WP, so as to keep the bandwidth down here. > "Life requires many things. Long amino acids chains make proteins... > chains in the proper order and shape. Miller's experiment did NOT > produce any chains. No, the Urey-Miller experiment only produced amino acids. But Sidney Fox's experiments showed that when heated, amino acids formed quite readily into chains, some of which were observed to possess catalytic properties. From that point, all we would need is the ability to replicate these thermal proteins for evolutionary processes to come into play. > The faith that even one protein arose by chance is tremendous. Fox's experiments showed that these thermal proteins formed quite readily, so the probability is extremely high. Ascribe not to chance that which is deterministic. > honestly......your intelligently planned and purposeful program > gives you"faith" that amino acids formed chains to produce parts > of a cell (don't forget you need DNA RNA, a cell membrane too) > and these cells redproduced into skin cells, nerve cells blood > cells etc to make a living organism? There you go again, trying to discredit that which you know absolutely nothing about. You don't know what my program does, nor how it does it, and yet you immediately try to discount it. Is this your living example of "[taking the path] of testing and examining with an open mind"? Well, Bill, *I* did take the path of testing and examining, not only with an open mind, but also with a critical and skeptical mind. Rather than accept a claim unquestioningly on blind faith, I dared to say that I didn't believe what I had just read, so I tested it and examined the results. MONKEY is the product of that testing and examining. And as a result of that testing and examining, I am very much impressed with the power, the speed, and the certainty (ie, ability to converge rapidly) of Natural Selection (even you said "Natural Selection is a true concept."). In Chapter 3 of "The Blind Watchmaker" (did you ever read it as you had promised, Bill?), Richard Dawkins addressed the old analogy (by Eddington, I believe) of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters pounding away continuously for an infinite amount of time and thus being able to produce Hamlet. Dawkins toyed with the probability of randomly producing just one line out of Hamlet, "Methinks it is like a weasel" (two characters are looking at the shapes of clouds) and came up with an astronomical number for the odds against succeeding, such that a computer making a million attempts per second would require millions of billions of years to succeed (my calculation). But then that is not how life would do it. In life, a parent produces a number of offspring that are almost exactly like him, yet slightly different. Then the most fit survive to become the parents of the next generation, and so on. So he wrote a program, which he called WEASEL, that started with a random string, produced copies of that string which differed only by one randomly selected letter in a randomly selected position. Then the fittest string (measured by its relative proximity to the target string) became the "parent" of the next generation. He wrote the program in interpreted BASIC, started it, left for lunch, and it had the answer by the time he returned. Indeed, it succeeded over and over again, without fail. Well, I just could not believe that! So I wrote MONKEY (named after the aforementioned simian steno pool) in Turbo Pascal (my language of choice at that time; at present it would have been written in C++, though I'm returning to Pascal for Delphi). It produced the string (the alphabet in alphabetical order) within a minute! I ran it over and over again and it succeeded over and over again -- repeatedly, consistently, without fail. Well, I still couldn't believe it! So I developed a mathematical model of what MONKEY was doing and calculated the probabilities involved. Then finally I could believe it because I could see how it worked. Indeed, I found that the system would converge rapidly to a probability of success of over 99.99%, near dead certainty. I gained a great appreciation for the observation of a famous biologist (Ernst Mayr? or John Maynard Smith?) that natural selection makes the improbable inevitable. Ironically, I got the idea of expressing the model as a finite-state machine (which allowed me to use Markov chains) from the math-genius son of my former boss (the kid is third-generation Fundamentalist); after hearing my description of the abysmally poor performance of single-step selection (YOUR model of selection; read MONKEY.DOC), his jaw literally dropped as he watched MONKEY succeed in 30 seconds. As a result of my work with MONKEY, I have also become interested in artificial life experiments. Of particular interest are genetic algorithms (GA), which use mechanisms rather similar to MONKEY's to find optimal solutions of complex engineering problems. The classic GA example was Goldberg's problem of controlling pressure in a complex pipeline network. More recently, Stanford professor John Koza demonstrated using GAs to design high-order analog circuits automatically (eg, 5th-order filters, 20-rung ladder filters). I consider it important for you and other creationists to learn about MONKEY because it points out a common mistake that you are constantly making and need to correct. Your probability arguments typically misrepresent evolution as using single-step selection, which is an abysmally poor technique, whereas evolution, and life itself, uses cumulative selection, which is an extremely powerful technique with incredibly high probability of success, as demonstrated by MONKEY. Besides, as I have already pointed out, single-step selection is more descriptive of special creation (one-time good deal get it all together in one single try from scratch). The sooner you abandon your bogus arguments and address the real issues, the sooner you MIGHT start to be taken half seriously (ie, as anything other than a threat to science education). Attached you will find MONKEY.ZIP. Extract the files with PKUNZIP v2.04g or later. The files are: MONKEY.DOC -- Text file explaining how to use MONKEY MONKEY.EXE -- Executable copy of MONKEY. Should run on any IBM PC or compatible. Does not need any graphics card. MONKEY.PAS -- Turbo Pascal source file for MONKEY. Read it to see how MONKEY works. MPROBS.DOC -- Text file containing a discussion of the probabilities involved in MONKEY and a description of how MPROBS works. MPROBS.PAS -- Turbo Pascal source file. Calculates the probabilities for cumulative selection using Markovian chains and stochastic matrices. Very primitive interface (ie, none) which requires the program to be recompiled for every change of parameters. README.MNK -- Distribution MONKEY README file. MONKEY.DIR -- List of files in MONKEY.ZIP (output from PKUNZIP -v) READ.ME -- README file for Dan. Offers a little more explanation and addresses some of his specific questions. If you do not have PKUNZIP, please let me know and I will send you a copy. As you read it, do try to follow the path of testing and examining with an open mind. If you can. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% ############################################## Subj: Re: Of Proteins and My MONKEY Date: 96-06-21 23:34:27 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 First, let me say I really respect the time and effort you have put into this issue. I love zeal and passion in people and you ovbiously possess both. Even if someone disagrees with me on something, I always have a deep respect for them if they are articulate, logical, well researched and respectful (you never slammed me personally which is rare on AOL, allow me to apologize for any Christians that attack you rather that the argument. I would like to point out one flaw with you your "monkey" and your descent with modification argument. Suppose you had a billion monkeys typing for infinity, they would type Hamlet eventually right? But one key factor is left out.....suppose if a monkey hits a wrong key the computer monitor "blows his head clean off'" (Clint Eastwood quote) the second he types a wrong key? Suppose a disasterous mutation pops in between the amoeba to man...you won't make it to Burt Parks! Do you see my variable? Life allows no mulligans. One bad mutation and poof.....we'd never make it! I consdier you a friend and I hope you feel the same way! In scholarly love, Bill yes I read Dawkins book. He is brilliant. He really makes wild anaologies, such as crystals and cell behaving similarily. He also puts all his faith in time. I respectfully state his fatih i thus greater than mine. Tell me.....what do you know about proteins that I should know....please tell me how they formed independently of plan. ############################################## Subj: Re: "Weird Science" Date: 96-06-22 00:21:38 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 the only critique is the spelling of Lemcont Demoy's name =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=