The Big Bang (Origins)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 23:49 (5308 days ago) @ David Turell

http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2010/04/27/homochirality_and_darwin.thtml
&a... > > 
> > 
> > Ah. I now know why I had an english teacher proclaim that "Pasteur proved that evolution didn't happen." 
> > 
> > I know that's not what the site said, but good god that guy could learn how to condense his writing. I'll analyze the math later.
> 
> Delighted you are back. I await the analysis-Well, the mathematics are pretty weak. Meaning, they don't discuss how they got their numbers, so it's more than a little vague. -So if life has spontaneously been created twice, there is a 50% chance of finding mirror life.-There's 4Bn+ years and far too many assumptions made here to give this claim any real validity. But theoretically, you'd have a p(1/2) chance of finding life in this instance. -If it has been spontaneously created three times, there is a 75% chance of finding mirror life.-There's two ways to interpret this. Life is created 3 times, and both L-R pairs are created every time. Or, life is created in one chirality once, and subsequently the other creation events are all the other hand. I use this second case because that's where his math goes down the s**tter. If life was created 3 times, and two of the times life was mirrored, than it's a 66% (total) chance of finding mirror life, not 75%. p(2/3). How he further extrapolates that to 88% boggles the mind. You'd need p(7/8) to get that. And at this point life would be exclusively "other-handed" in terms of chirality. -This guy's talking out of his blowhole. If the racemic nature of this chemistry is an equal 50/50, your chance of finding it is *always* p(1/2). It's a pure coin toss every time. If every time you get an L-R pair, the probability never changes. This is also of course, assuming that there isn't some property that favors one chirality over the other. -They're ultimately stating that abiogenesis is impossible due to chirality alone. Far too simplistic to be taken seriously--which considering how much writing is here, they could have condensed this. -Ultimately it's basing its argument on raw organic chemistry, and not the "pidgin" chemistry one would expect to find in the actual abiogenesis event. It's a strawman: "If we just toss a bunch of chemicals together, voila! We don't get life!"-Very unimpressed.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"