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Originally posted by iman
Yakk,
That was all really interesting, but I think you've missed my point - which was pretty small.
Nobody [well, nobody with eyes and a brain] would deny your bacteria example. Nobody says that just because a scientist sets up an experiment to study gravity, gravity only exists in lab conditions.
Maybe you didn't actually read the article Lebell linked to (by the way, the link posted by brianna doesn't work. You have to go back to Lebell's post).
The 13-letter word argument tries to show how a selection mechanism that "harnesses" chance could produce something as complex as proteins/DNA/cells/human beings. ID'ers have, apparently, used the argument before that a million monkeys each typing one word per second would take up to 79,000 years to come up with a single 13-letter word. So how could something as complex as a protein, with all those amino acids that have to be in a particluar sequence and particluar shape, have arisen by chance? And that's just *one* protein out of thousands (millions? billions? I don't reallly know), and we haven't even gotten to DNA yet, not to mention RNA, mRNA . . .
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Consider this.. This analogy takes into account that there are resources for all possible combinations of all the ingeredients. If for example a million monkeys were typing at typewriters with only the 15 keys on them, it would take considerably less time for that combination of letters to be produced.
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To counter this, the smarties at Scientific American have asked us dummies to consider the analogy of coming up with a 13-letter word using the selection-mechanism I described in the last post.
What I'm saying is that the selection mechanism mentioned in the article - generating sequences of 13 letters, and preserving the ones in the right place - works to explain INTELLIGENT evolution, not natural evolution. Yes, you're right - believing in natural evolution does not mean that all evolution is non-intelligent. But evolution must be, at bottom, non-intelligent. How the hell do the guys at SA think they can argue against ID by coming up with a selection mechanism that depends on intelligence?
The argument does not support natural selection over intelligent design.
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I take the argument they make a different way. In the context I understood it, it wholly supports their agurments.
You are looking at it as if the 13 letter word is analogous to a predifined result that evolution produced from a blueprint designed by some mysterious intelligence. Think about it like this: each of the 13 letters represents a trait in an organism that will benifit its survival. A million of these organisms might produce thousands upon thousands of random genetic mutations. On their own, these mutations dont enhance the organisms chance of survival; but a combination of 13 out of the thousands of mutations do. The mutations are random, but a combination of them help the organism survive, so those mutations get passed on. The other useless combinations of mutations fade away because of natural selection.