I pm-ed my response to you. I'll just post it here too I suppose:
sorry to bother you but i liked the way you answer questions religious people put you.a christian friend of mine showed me an article on a website . i am by no means religious but i was wondring, if you had the time, if u could let me have your take on it. here is the quote:
"The most compelling evidence is amino acids. The simplest known living organism has over 500 amino acids. When amino acids form, they are less than one-millionth the size of a human hair. When they form, they form with side groups of atoms. Scientist have found that all non-living amino acids form with 50% of side atoms on the right side of the acid and 50% on the left. This is true on all non-living amino acids. Living cells can ONLY contain amino acids on the left side. ALL amino acids found in every single living cell contains only left-sided amino acids. In the most favorable environment of scientific labs, this has never been duplicated. No scientist has ever created the left-handed amino acid that is critical to the formation of life. All amino acids always form with left and right sided atoms. If scientist in perfect conditions can't duplicate one single left-sided amino acid, how could the 500 necessary for life form by chance? The scientific odds of even one left-sided amino acid forming by chance is 10 to the 123rd power. In other words 1 chance in 10 followed by 123 zeros. i.e. 1 in
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Compare this to the rediculous odds of winning the lottery which is 1 chance in 80,000,000. And evolutionists say Christians have blind faith. But those are not the odds of life forming. It gets worse. That is only one of the 500 aminos necessary for the simplest life form. 20 specific aminos are needed for the simplest cell, but 500 in order for life to sustain in itself. The odds get worse. Those 500 different types of amino acids have to 'evolve' within a fraction of a millimeter of each other just to give them the chance of uniting. It gets worse. They also have to 'by chance' evolve at the exact same moment in time in a process that scientist say takes hundreds of millions of years. Elements break down the amino acids, so timing is critical. The chances of all these resources falling into place at the exact same time with the exact needed elements at the exact same place on earth within a few millionths of a millimeter of each other are 1 to the ERROR..Calculation overflow. Sorry, my Pentium doesn't have enough memory to even write the number."
would really appreciate it since i didn't have any personal response to give him at the time. look forward to hearing your response if u have the time.
thanks
There are multiple problems with that chance description. The first obvious one is saying that the simplest life form we know must have also been the first one that existed. We don't believe we have found the 'simplest life form' first of all. The 500 amino-acid one doesn't include viruses, prions, nanobes and nanobacteria. Apart from that. What are the chance of an amino acid forming? Glycine is the smallest one, NH2CH2COOH. This is not really an incredibly hard one that has such low chance... it's like asking what is the chance of oxygen forming? Even if we do use their number just for the fun of it. What does their number say? 10 to the 123rd power per what? Per second? Per minute? Total?
Even if we call it a once in a universe-time experience.. what are the odds of an amino acid forming if it can form almost every way it wants to? This means your calculation of chance needs to take into account every single possible protein, every single possible amino-acid and every single molecule that takes part in forming life. The chance that one of those forms is stupendously large, because the amount of possible forms are stupendously large.
Now there are a host of things one can add. If we assume the number is correct and that would be the chance of life spontaneously spawning (it's not but later about that)... what are the odds of there being a god? What would the chance be that the most complex thing we could ever possibly imagine would just spontaneously spawn into existence? That argument makes absolutely no sense if you want to put the chance that we live like that.
For the number, first of the obvious. If you want to use mathematics you actually need to
understand mathematics. The chance of x happening over t=10 seconds if x has a 0.1% chance per second is 1/100. The chance of x happening over t=10 seconds if x has a 10 to the 123rd power chance per second of happening are of course non-existent. The chance of x happening if x has a 10 to the 123rd power chance of happening per second and t=infinite is 100%. The chance of life forming is 100%, if you want to give life a x amount of chance.
If I throw a coin against my wall and it bounces of and stops rolling somewhere in my room and drops flat. I can now measure where it ended. Now if the coin would have been one nanometer different, it would obviously be in another spot, even if very slightly. Using this there must be billions of possible outcomes of how the coin landed and for all of them it could also be heads or tails. If I do this and you walk in my room and I tell you the coin landed there, you wouldn't doubt me for a second. Yet the chance of me telling the truth is so stupendously small that you should logically assume that I am lying. In fact even if you'd see it happen you should logically conclude that your eyes are tricking you, because the chance of a coin landing
anywhere is so incredibly small that it's just not going to happen. Yet logically.. the coin has to land.
Look at the mentioned lottery: 'Compare this to the ridiculous odds of winning the lottery which is 1 chance in 80,000,000'.
The world population is 6.8 billion. If you give everyone a lottery ticket, your chance of winning are 1 in 6,800,000,000. Does this mean you won't win? Well someone has to win.... does this mean no one will win it because the chances are that small? That's of course a ridiculous idea. Everything you do has an incredibly small chance of happening. You can't even begin to calculate how small the chance is of you sending this reply to me.
Now apart from all of this the image described in the calculation is quite simply wrong. We didn't (to our knowledge) suddenly go from nothing to a completely living single cellular organism. To put this into perspective for yourself is.. what is life? When does something shift into life? Quite simply put, there is no answer in biochemistry. An amino-acid is not 'alive'. DNA is not 'alive'. All the things in your body are not really fitting of the description of 'life'. We only call it life once the system is complex enough and working together. In other words, how life began is simply when separate processes began working together. This is not really all that rare...
"Consider the fact than many insects have such short life spans. Some flies only live for one hour. They have less than 60 minutes to find a partner, mate, find a place to lay eggs and die. According to evolutionary scientist, the evolution process takes about 250-300 million years to occur. What is the likely hood that not one, but two of these flies would evolve within one hour of each other in a 300 million year process?"
If I assume this was in comparison to early life forms (some insects die this fast, so the early life form might too!) it's of course important to note that bacteria in general do no 'reproduce' sexually but through cell division. Only one of them would be needed to rapidly grow a population. Now if it did mean flies it's a huge misunderstanding of evolution. Two flies mating might have a slightly mutated offspring, but this offspring can still easily reproduce with it's predecessors, even after a dozen of mutations that offspring might still be able too. Only after a string of mutations they become genetically incompatible, but by then there are already a ton more of that species (else it means the mutation didn't give any evolutionary advantage). So you don't need two of the same mutation suddenly being born. Evolution is not build on 'kind' to 'kind' jumping (note that kind is not a biology term).
What really happens is this, I'll list the mutation as a capital A to show an effect:
Mom fly x Dad fly
aa x aa
F1: Aa through mutation (F1 is first offspring generation)
Mr Aa is genetically mutated but can still easily reproduce with it's predecessor.
Aa x aa
F1: 50% is Aa, 50% is aa.
Now we are talking about not 1 kid, but hundreds of them that each will also have hundred of them. Before you know it the mutation is a big chunk (50% or so) of the population. If there is an evolutionary advantage as well... this number goes up. Unfortunately what they base their entire argument on is not correct in biology and only shows a lack of understanding of how evolution works.
To put it into perspective. If your son would be born with slightly better eyes than all of us, do you reckon this would mean he won't be able to reproduce?
"If you have 2 males, 2 females, or any difference in genetic make up, the critter dies and there is no second chance."
Yes, humans are all genetically exact copies. That's how DNA-testing works
