Taken from Evolution 101 - Berkely

...Now as I've pointed out so many times before, a simple 153 base protein such as insulin has odds of 10^92 against a successful creation ...

...lets give nature a break by picking an easy task and assume that by some fluke, there exists a strand of base sequences EXACTLY 153 bases in length and that is ALMOST 90% identical in sequence

I hope that is a little more clear to you now.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by Maslo

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But thats the question of origin of life (abiogenesis), and not evolution. Two different things.

I am so tired of hearing that line from evolutionists.
It produces an intellectually dishonest perspective.
It like saying you can build a house with no supporting foundation.

That's a false dichotomy which I have created New Thread on.

edit on 26-1-2011 by Blue_Jay33 because: (no reason given)

Originally posted by tgidkp

Originally posted by tauristercus
...lets give nature a break by picking an easy task and assume that by some fluke, there exists a strand of base sequences EXACTLY 153 bases in length and that is ALMOST 90% identical in sequence

now you're talkin'. so, lets wrap this up, shall we?

add to what you have stated above the following:
- THIS astute post by Maslo.
- silent mutations due to degeneracy of the genetic code.
- and a more detailed understanding of protein folding as a result of polypeptide sequence. all amino acids are not created equal. this leads to a "higher level functionality" of the genetic code itself. in a similar way as i detailed before, the functionality is passed to a higher level of interpretation. these are your new dice. the drawing below shows an approximate value of each amino acid to protein fold.

taken from an article located HERE.

This means that approximately 138 bases are in the correct location within this sequence and 15 are not.

So natures task is to "replace" the 15 incorrect bases with 15 correct bases ... and if successful, out pops an insulin protein.

Now we have 23 pairs of chromosomes with 3.1 billion base pairs distributed amongst them ... so on average, each chromosome pair has 135 million base pairs. But this value of 135 million base pairs is based on today's genome estimate ... so again, lets help nature out even more by going back in time to when the average chromosome had say, half these bases - let's go with 75 million base pairs, shall we ?

Therefore we have our starting 90% correct sequence located on a chromosome, somewhere amongst those 75 million bases ... already a bit of a needle in a haystack situation, wouldn't you say ?
But lets press on regardless.

Now we'll assume a mutation rate of say, 100 mutations along that chromosome and we'll only consider mutations that make a base replacement only ... as opposed to the other kinds of mutations that could potentially alter the existing 90% of already valid bases along that sequence, consequently reducing the 90% down to lower values and taking us further away from our goal of 153 correct sequential bases.

So, we have 100 base replacing mutations that are entirely RANDOM and could happen ANYWHERE along the 75 million base length of our chromosome. This works out to an average of 1 mutation every 750,000 bases.
This means that there is a probability value of 1 in 4,900 that one of those 100 random mutations would happen somewhere within the chromosome location containing our 153 base sequence. So we are looking at odds of 4,900 to 1 against any of those 100 random mutations even being in the right 153 base neighbourhood !

Ok, 4,900 to 1 against ... not bad odds, you might say.

However those are just the odds of one of the 100 random mutations happening somewhere within our target sequence. We have to bear in mind that out of that 153 base target, 138 bases are already correct and we do not want them changed by a random mutation ... we only want one of the remaining 15 incorrect bases to be randomly mutated, hopefully into the correct base for that particular location within the sequence.
But based on the above information, we see immediately that there is a far greater chance (almost 91%) that the random mutation (if it even happens) will hit one of the 138 correct bases instead of one of the 15 incorrect bases that we DO want to change.

So it's quite plainly obvious that a random mutation acting against an existing but only partially correct sequence of bases, has a substantially far greater probability of causing degradation to the sequence then it would have of improving it.

But wait, it gets worse ...

We calculated above that there was only a 1 in 4,900 chance that the random mutation would target one of the 153 bases in the sequence ... and out of that a further 9 to 1 chance against one of the 15 incorrect bases being the actual target ... significantly decreasing further the TOTAL odds of an incorrect base being hit.

But lets say that nature got lucky and did indeed hit one of those 15 incorrect bases with a random mutation.
Now we find ourselves in the situation that the already bad odds get even worse.

Lets say that the incorrect base about to be mutated is say an A ... and we actually need it to be replaced/mutated into say, a C.
The odds against this happening are 3 to 1.
The existing A could be replaced with another A, or replaced with a G, or replaced with a T ... all of which are incorrect and do nothing to improve the quality of the 153 base sequence but instead, degrades it further away from our goal of evolving an insulin gene.


Phew ... so after all that, what do we have ?

We have starting odds of 4,900 to 1 against one of the 100 mutations actually targeting one of the 153 bases in our sequence of interest.
These odds against are further increased dramatically by a 91% chance that the mutation will still target the wrong base within the sequence.
These odds against are further increased significantly with only a 1 in 3 chance that even if one of the incorrect bases is successfully targeted and mutated, that the replacement base will be a desirable one.

All random mutations occur at the lowest level possible ... and the lowest level is the base sequence stored within the chromosome.

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by tauristercus

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Hey tauristercus, you have great thread going here, I appreciate all the research you have put into your OP and succeeding posts, but just for clarity's sake are you atheist, agnostic or theist?

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by tauristercus

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Hey tauristercus, you have great thread going here, I appreciate all the research you have put into your OP and succeeding posts, but just for clarity's sake are you atheist, agnostic or theist?

Just wondering?
I am guessing an agnostic, but I could be wrong.

scientists have been unable to prove that life can spring from nonliving molecules. In 2008, Professor of Biology Alexandre Meinesz highlighted the dilemma. He stated that over the last 50 years, “no empirical evidence supports the hypotheses of the spontaneous appearance of life on Earth from nothing but a molecular soup, and no significant advance in scientific knowledge leads in this direction.”

Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University, “have presumed that all life’s building blocks could be formed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites. This is not the case.” Consider the RNA molecule. It is constructed of smaller molecules called nucleotides. A nucleotide is a different molecule from an amino acid and is only slightly more complex. Shapiro says that “no nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark-discharge experiments or in studies of meteorites.” He further states that the probability of a self-replicating RNA molecule randomly assembling from a pool of chemical building blocks “is so vanishingly small that its happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as a piece of exceptional good luck.” What about protein molecules? They can be made from as few as 50 or as many as several thousand amino acids bound together in a highly specific order. The average functional protein in a “simple” cell contains 200 amino acids. Even in those cells, there are thousands of different types of proteins. The probability that just one protein containing only 100 amino acids could ever randomly form on earth has been calculated to be about one chance in a million billion. Researcher Hubert P. Yockey, who supports the teaching of evolution, goes further. He says: “It is impossible that the origin of life was ‘proteins first.’” RNA is required to make proteins, yet proteins are involved in the production of RNA. What if, despite the extremely small odds, both proteins and RNA molecules did appear by chance in the same place at the same time? How likely would it be for them to cooperate to form a self-replicating, self-sustaining type of life? “The probability of this happening by chance (given a random mixture of proteins and RNA) seems astronomically low,” says Dr. Carol Cleland, a member of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Institute. “Yet,” she continues, “most researchers seem to assume that if they can make sense of the independent production of proteins and RNA under natural primordial conditions, the coordination will somehow take care of itself.” Regarding the current theories of how these building blocks of life could have arisen by chance, she says: “None of them have provided us with a very satisfying story about how this happened.”

Originally posted by Blue_Jay33
reply to post by tauristercus

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Looking at nothing but the mathematical odds logically defeats Darwinism quite handily as you continue to explain in this thread, that is if you are willing to explore, examine and inform yourself of them.
Denial is a fundamental trait that all humans display in all area's of life for various reasons.
The denial of factual math is quite sad to observe however. It's like saying 1+1 doesn't equal 2 because we don't want it to. It's an emotionally based perspective.