Complexity of gene codes (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 18, 2010, 10:19 (5020 days ago) @ David Turell

George has drawn our attention to a discussion on the Dawkins forum concerning the enormous number of generations in the process of evolution from the simplest cell to humans ... "more than enough for chance and natural processes to evolve all manner of complexity."-David expects it to be found that "many of these adaptive processes are present in Archaia from the beginning, and to me that means design. If on the other hand, the processes developed over the 3.6 billion years of life, and are a recent phenomenon, then you are correct and there is no design, only chance."-I have no difficulty at all following George's logic. Once you take the plunge of accepting chance as the originator of life plus its mechanisms of reproduction with potential variation, the rest is plain sailing. But if you haven't taken that plunge, I can't see why recentness should lessen the complexity argument. If you follow the design scenario, it's perfectly conceivable that a designer might leave the original simple forms of life alone for a billion or so years, and then decide enough's enough and endow them with new innovative or adaptive mechanisms. Either you believe these mechanisms to be too complex for chance to assemble, or you don't ... regardless of the time factor. Scientists can juggle with time, generations and mathematical odds as much as they like, but firstly such calculations can only be speculative (different conditions, missing species, "Dawkins ventures a guess", "Dawkins estimates"...) , and secondly each of us has his own boundaries of credulity. I have myself repeatedly argued that the mechanisms for change must have been present in early forms of life for evolution to have taken place, but if you tell me those mechanisms didn't appear for say a billion years (i.e. a billion years elapsed before evolution began to produce more complex forms of life), I'm still confronted with the conundrum of how they managed to put themselves together. David says quite rightly that neither he nor George knows the 'true' answer and therefore each is left with his individual bias. I'm just puzzled as to why the bias has a temporal cut-off point.-Thank you, David, for your clear and comprehensive answers to my post of Monday 16 August at 12.51. No further questions!