Evolution v Creationism: guided evolution? dhw? (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 21, 2015, 00:58 (3534 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Read this essay to see the odds against unguided evolution: nature's library of possible useful proteins;
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> http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/natures-library-of-platonic-forms/
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> Why hasn't dhw commented on this? This is the key to understanding the argument for design-> dhw: Wagner does not even reject random mutations, but he concludes that there is an inventive mechanism which can accelerate the process of innovation, and he calls it “genotype networks”. ... 1) How does evolution work? Even you accept the possibility of organisms having an inventive mechanism. Now you can call it “genotype networks” if you like. That is as far as the article goes. -You have missed the fact that Wagner talks around the problem of finding new proteins but offers no solution. Note the way he puts it:-"Imagine a giant library of books containing all possible sequences of letters in the alphabet. Such a library would be huge beyond imagination, and most of its texts would of course be pure gibberish. But some would contain islands of intelligibility - a word here, a Haiku there - in a sea of random letters. Still others would tell all stories real and imagined: not only Dickens's Oliver Twist or Goethe's Faust, but all possible novels and dramas, the biography of every single human, true and false histories of the world, of other worlds as yet unseen, and so on. Some texts would include descriptions of countless technological innovations, from the wheel to the steam engine to the transistor - including countless innovations yet to be imagined.But the chances of choosing such a valuable tome by chance are minuscule -"Evolution can't look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way along the stacks [by chance].-"A protein is a volume in a library just like this, written in a 20-letter alphabet of amino acids. And while protein texts might not be as long as Tolstoy's War and Peace, their total number is still astonishing. For example, a library of every possible amino acid string that is 500 letters long would contain more than 10^600 texts - a one with 600 trailing zeros. That vastly outnumbers the atoms in the visible universe.

"The library is a giant space of the possible, encoding all the proteins that could be useful to life. But here's the thing: evolution can't simply look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way painstakingly along the stacks. Imagine a crowd of browsers - each one representing an entire familial line - who must blindly explore the library, step by random step. This sounds like a party game, but there's a grisly twist. A mutation that compromises an essential protein such as haemoglobin is punishable by death. On that ill-fated volume, the bloodline ends.-"The challenge, then, is to land on texts that work. Nature has already discovered millions of them.-"The library is a giant space of the possible, encoding all the proteins that could be useful to life. But here's the thing: evolution can't simply look up the chemicals it needs in a giant catalogue. No, it has to inch its way painstakingly along the stacks. Imagine a crowd of browsers - each one representing an entire familial line - who must blindly explore the library, step by random step. This sounds like a party game, 
"-Wagner is describing exactly the problem I always see. How does the proper protein turn up when necessary for the next step in complexity. He is describing hunt and peck as a traditional Darwinist. There are millions of molecules in nature. only some fit into life. And he doesn't mention enzymes which are absolutely necessary for molecular reactions in life. Not 500 amino acids, thousands! And they must be present in the earliest cells. I'll remind you, a protein must have the correct order of amino acids, but also the proper folded form to be functional, so it is not just the number of amino acids alone. To make his case he simplifies the explanation in the article, but he damn-well knows the true facts.-The problem is immense for Darwinists to address with asdsurance, but he describes it as inching along:-"Step by step, the population of survivors spreads out through the library in a process that unfolds over many generations."-Very reassuring, 'many generations' solves the problem. I don't see it.