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Were Adam and Eve real people?

Bird123

Well-Known Member
Bird123,
You said that you would not stake your life on the idea that the story of Adam and Eve is a true story. The problem is , it seems to me, that you are staking your life on the story of Adam and Eve is a false story.
Without the story of Adam and Eve being true, we would not know were we came from, or where we are going. We would not know how we got into the condition we find ourselves in, or how we could ever get out of our problems.
The Bible clearly tells us what we must do to get into God’s favor again. If we obey Jesus, God’s son, we can receive the same blessings that Adam and Eve would have received, Everlasting live in a Paradise earth. Agape!!!


You have never ever had a condition to be in. Religion uses fear and intimidation to gain followers? Are these really God's actions? Of course not.

Am I staking my life on Beliefs? Not me. The Truth I speak of can be Discovered by those who search. Discovery, unlike beliefs, takes work. It will never be served up on a platter to merely accept or reject.

As I see it. God is Unconditional Love. God will never be who some of these religions are teaching. Why? The actions of those belief gods are not the intelligent thing to do. I'm sure even you can think of a better way.
 

nPeace

Veteran Member
Human genetic diversity is too great for there to have ever been a human population size that consisted of less than ca. 10,000 individuals. Pairwise Sequentially Markovian Coalescent (PSMC) analysis confirms a population bottleneck in humans that consisted of no fewer than ca. 10,000 individuals. Source: ( Li, Heng, and Durbin, Richard. ) "Inference of Human Population History from Individual Whole-Genome Sequences". Nature International Weekly Journal of Science. 28 July 2001. PSMC estimate on simulated data. : Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

If there were the most severe population bottle-necking such as one breeding pair that is portrayed in the case of the Biblical Adam and Eve, then there would be a maximum of 4 alleles passed on by Adam and Eve to their children. Furthermore, the subsequent inbreeding would cause some loss of alleles due to genetic drifting. There would not have been genetic diversity in the small group of Adam, Eve and their children who would've had to commit incest among each other for the procreation of their inbred children. A lack of genetic diversity would have persisted for thousands of generations until genetic mutations could cause the genetic diversity of today's population. Based on the number of different alleles there are for the number of genes within the current population and the known rate of mutations per nucleotide sites in humans, geneticists can calculate the minimum number of people needed to create the current amount of genetic diversity. Numerous genetic studies suggest that there were several thousands of people more than two people during the most severe population bottleneck which ever occurred in human history.

DNA segments ( Alu repeats ) insert themselves at various chromosomal locations. There are various forms of Alu sequences and several thousand families of Alu. One well-studied family of Alu is called Ya5, which has been inserted into human chromosomes at 57 mapped locations. If we were to have descended from a single pair of ancestors such as Adam and Eve, then we all would have each of the 57 elements inserted at the same location points of our chromosomes. " However, the human population consists of groups of people who share some insertion points but not others. The multiple shared categories make it clear that although a human population bottleneck occurred, it was definitely never as small as two. In fact, this line of evidence also indicates that there were at least several thousand people when the population was at its smallest". Source: ( Venema, Dennis and Falk, Darrel ) " Does Genetics Point to a Single Primal Couple?". 5 April 2010. Does Genetics Point to a Single Primal Couple? | The BioLogos Forum

Coalescence theory analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms and linkage disequilibrium indicates the mean effective population size for hominid lineage is 100,000 individuals over the course of the last 30 million years. The effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium is a minimum of 10,000 followed by an expansion in the last 20,000 years." Source: ( Tenesa, Albert, Navarro, Paul, Hayes, Ben J., Duffy, David L., Clarke,Geraldine, Goodard, Mike E. and Visscher, Peter M.) " Recent Human Effective Population Size Estimated from Linkage Disequilibrium". Genome Research. 17 April 2007 Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium

Indeed, there is ample genetic evidence that biblical Adam and Eve never actually existed.
Do 'we' know this for certain, or is it assumed to be the case?
How can 'we' assume that Biblical Adam and Eve never actually existed, based on little or, no evidence of what transpired between generations of reproducing kinds.
We do not know the rate of population growth. Also, it was by means of four pairs, that earth was populated - Noah and family.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Do 'we' know this for certain, or is it assumed to be the case?
How can 'we' assume that Biblical Adam and Eve never actually existed, based on little or, no evidence of what transpired between generations of reproducing kinds.
We do not know the rate of population growth. Also, it was by means of four pairs, that earth was populated - Noah and family.

If you were truly interested in learning people here would help you. And referring to another refuted myth only makes your case weaker. Fear of education appears to be your problem.
 

nPeace

Veteran Member
Evolution is simply significant enough gene pool changes within a species changing over the course of many generations resulting in organisms having genetic traits different enough from their distant ancestors; so that there'd be no possible sexual reproduction occurring between somebody who were to have distant ancestral genetic traits with anybody living in the current population.

As I've noted elsewhere in some other discussions about Christianity, Jesus's family tree has a time span of 77 generations listed between his generation and Adam whom the Bible claims was the "first man". Reference: (Luke 3:23-38) and Eve whom the Bible claims as the mother of all the living. (Genesis 3:20)

However, the Australian aborigines have evidently been in Australia for over a thousand consecutive generations. Reference: Aboriginal Australians - Wikipedia

There have been hundreds of generations of Native Americans between the time their common ancestry migrated from Asia until the time of Christ.
Reference: Native Americans in the United States - Wikipedia

Of course, the Bible is wrong; in fact, there were people prior to the 76th generation before Christ that allegedly was spawned by Adam and Eve.

Adam as being the first man and perpetrator of original sin is an important premise of Christianity. If Adam wasn't the first man, then there isn't actually any "origin sin". Jesus supposedly died on the Cross to save humankind from "original sin". If there isn't any "original sin" from which to be saved, then Jesus Christ's death on the Cross is pretty pointless and meaningless. Evidently, there were many generations of people prior to the 76th generation before Christ whom the Bible claims was spawned by Adam. So then, Adam, Eve and original sin are mythological. There is neither any "first man" nor "original sin" throughout human evolution. Thus, Jesus Christ having died on the cross to save mankind from "original sin" is not reality but is rather mythological.

The fossil record isn't the only evidence in support of evolution. There is other collaborating evidence, such as overwhelming genetic evidence of common ancestry between humans and other great ape species.

Specific examples from comparative physiology and biochemistry:

Chromosome 2 in humans

Main article: Chromosome 2 (human)

Further information: Chimpanzee Genome Project § Genes of the Chromosome 2 fusion site

Figure 1:

chromosome_fusion2.png


Figure 1: Fusion of ancestral chromosomes left distinctive remnants of telomeres, and a vestigial centromere

Evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens from a common ancestor with chimpanzees is found in the number of chromosomes in humans as compared to all other members of Hominidae. All hominidae have 24 pairs of chromosomes, except humans, who have only 23 pairs. Human chromosome 2 is a result of an end-to-end fusion of two ancestral chromosomes.

The evidence for this includes:
The correspondence of chromosome 2 to two ape chromosomes. The closest human relative, the common chimpanzee, has near-identical DNA sequences to human chromosome 2, but they are found in two separate chromosomes. The same is true of the more distant gorilla and orangutan.
The presence of a vestigial centromere. Normally a chromosome has just one centromere, but in chromosome 2 there are remnants of a second centromere.
The presence of vestigial telomeres. These are normally found only at the ends of a chromosome, but in chromosome 2 there are additional telomere sequences in the middle.

Chromosome 2 thus presents strong evidence in favour of the common descent of humans and other apes. According to J. W. Ijdo, "We conclude that the locus cloned in cosmids c8.1 and c29B is the relic of an ancient telomere-telomere fusion and marks the point at which two ancestral ape chromosomes fused to give rise to human chromosome 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_o...on_descent

The first individual of the genus Homo-species could have naturally formed from a couple of Australopithecus hetero zygotes, each of whom had the same type of chromosome rearrangements formed by fusion of the whole long arms of two acrocentric chromosomes, mated together and reproduced viable and fertile offspring with 46 chromosomes.

This first generation of Homo habilis then incestuously bred with each other and reproduced the next subsequent generation of Homo habilis.

References:
  1. J. Tjio and A. Levan. 1956. The chromosome number of Man. Hereditas, 42( 1-2): 1-6.
  2. W. Ijdo et al.1991. Origin of human chromosome 2: an ancestral telomere-telomere fusión. PNAS, 88: 9051-9056.
  3. Meyer et al. 2012 A high-coverage genome sequence from an archaic Denisovan individual. Science, 338:222-226.; K. H. Miga. 2016. Chromosome-specific Centromere sequences provide an estímate of the Ancestral Chromosome 2 Fusion event in Hominin Genome.Journ. of Heredity. 1-8. Doi:10.1093/jhered/esw039.

Endogenous retroviruses (or ERVs) are remnant sequences in the genome left from ancient viral infections in an organism. The retroviruses (or virogenes) are always passed on to the next generation of that organism that received the infection. This leaves the virogene left in the genome. Because this event is rare and random, finding identical chromosomal positions of a virogene in two different species suggests common ancestry. Cats (Felidae) present a notable instance of virogene sequences demonstrating common descent. The standard phylogenetic tree for Felidae have smaller cats (Felis chaus, Felis silvestris, Felis nigripes, and Felis catus) diverging from larger cats such as the subfamily Pantherinae and other carnivores. The fact that small cats have an ERV where the larger cats do not suggests that the gene was inserted into the ancestor of the small cats after the larger cats had diverged. Another example of this is with humans and chimps. Humans contain numerous ERVs that comprise a considerable percentage of the genome. Sources vary, but 1% to 8% has been proposed. Humans and chimps share seven different occurrences of virogenes, while all primates share similar retroviruses congruent with phylogeny.

Figure 2:

Fig.1.jpg




There's plenty of evidence humans share common ancestry with other great apes.

Evidence of common descent - Wikipedia

ERVs provide the closest thing to a mathematical proof for evolution.. ERVs are the relics of ancient viral infections preserved in our DNA. The odd thing is many ERVs are located in exactly the same position on our genome and the chimpanzee genome! There are two explanations for the perfectly matched ERV locations. Either it is an unbelievable coincidence that viruses just by chance were inserted in exactly the same location in our genomes, or humans and chimps share a common ancestor. The chances that a virus was inserted at the exact same location is 1 in 3,000,000,000. Humans and chimps share 7 instances of viruses inserted at perfectly matched location. It was our common ancestor that was infected, and we both inherited the ERVs.

Johnson, Welkin E.; Coffin, John M. (1999-08-31). "Constructing primate phylogenies from ancient retrovirus sequences". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 96(18): 10254–10260. Bibcode:1999PNAS...9610254J. doi:10.1073/pnas.96.18.10254. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 17875. PMID 10468595
Apparently, you are missing a number of important facts.
1. The genealogy in Luke does not include all the generations. There were many, not mentioned.
2. Is there really overwhelming genetic evidence of common ancestry between humans and other great ape species?
Genetic differences proves we all carry DNA by varying degrees of measure, but nothing more... unless one wants it to prove something more.
For example...
What is the genetic percentage difference between rats and mice?
What is genetic percentage difference between humans and rats?
What is genetic percentage difference between humans and mice?
What is genetic percentage difference between humans and chimps?
What is genetic percentage difference between humans and apes?
Can you provide this data, please? I'm having a difficult time finding these.
Seems I can only find what evolution believers want us to find.
So if you have a link where I can find a more complete listing, I would appreciate having it. Thanks.
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
Hi everyone!

I was just curious about everyone’s opinion on Adam and Eve. Do you interpret the story as literal? As in, they were the first two people, the Apple was an actual Apple, etc.

Or do you think it’s more allegorical? If so, how do you interpret what Adam and the Apple mean? Why do you think humans sin?
Someone had to be first walk with God

Adam
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Apparently, you are missing a number of important facts.
1. The genealogy in Luke does not include all the generations. There were many, not mentioned.

Let's ignore the errors of Luke for now.

2. Is there really overwhelming genetic evidence of common ancestry between humans and other great ape species?

Yes, there is. And congratulations on using proper terminology for once. That did not hurt so much now, did it?

Genetic differences proves we all carry DNA by varying degrees of measure, but nothing more... unless one wants it to prove something more.

Oops, I knew it could not last. There you go talking about "proof" again.

For example...
What is the genetic percentage difference between rats and mice?

Very small, on the same order as that of chimps and man.

What is genetic percentage difference between humans and rats?

Much larger.

What is genetic percentage difference between humans and mice?

Again, much larger, almost exactly the same as the former.

What is genetic percentage difference between humans and chimps?

Very small.

What is genetic percentage difference between humans and apes?

Poorly asked question since humans are apes. And the amount will vary depending upon which ape species you choose for comparison.

Can you provide this data, please? I'm having a difficult time finding these.
Seems I can only find what evolution believers want us to find.
So if you have a link where I can find a more complete listing, I would appreciate having it. Thanks.

No, this is a Gish Gallop. How about asking one at a tinme? And it appears that a source was given to you. Why didn't you accept it?
 

Thief

Rogue Theologian
Why would a god have to have walked with his creation?
and not walking with His creation.....
leaves God.....still walking alone

God was the First in mind and heart
Someone had to be First

and in so doing.....the First to be solitary

and splitting the soul into many locations....even one other
would be like talking to a mirror
no matter how many reflections are made

so.....contain the spirit in a parcel of substance and turn it loose
see what it becomes

when it gels sufficiently......try talking to it
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
and not walking with His creation.....
leaves God.....still walking alone

God was the First in mind and heart
Someone had to be First

and in so doing.....the First to be solitary

and splitting the soul into many locations....even one other
would be like talking to a mirror
no matter how many reflections are made

so.....contain the spirit in a parcel of substance and turn it loose
see what it becomes

when it gels sufficiently......try talking to it
Nonsense is not an answer to a question.
 

Moz

Religion. A pox on all their Houses.
Oh what the heck. As I said the difference between rate and mice is similar to the difference between man and chimps:

Difference between mice and rats

The similarities between man and other great apes:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12167610_Genetic_Differences_between_Humans_and_Great_Apes

From almost 99% down to 96.4% for orangutans.

Lastly humans and mice come in at 85% similar:

Why Mouse Matters
Unanswered Mathematical and Computational Challenges facing Neo-Darwinism as a Theory of Origins
Kurt Gödel

The computational capacity of the universe suggests an upper bound to the number of transformational steps available for any theory of origins
Surely there has been enough time, Dr. Watson?
The theory of evolution depends entirely on the veracity of a self-replicating molecule arising on purely stochastic grounds. One would expect this to involve a modest stretch of time.

How much time? In the "Blind Watch Maker" Richard Dawkins suggests that attaining such a probability is simply a matter of having the correct perspective - for example, if we lived for 100 million years and happened to play bridge we would not be surprised to see something as improbable as a perfect bridge hand - where each player was dealt the same suite - turning up from time to time. So it would not be so improbable after all.

How accurate is this assumption? Calculating the chance of one perfect bridge hand where we play bridge 100 times a day for 100 million years comes out at a paltry 1.63x10-15 - the same degree of delight one would associate with winning a lottery event twice. Which is not quite "from time to time". To improve this to a chance of say one in a million we would have to keep playing a hundred games a day for 61,238,285,120,420,996 years. By contrast, the best current estimate for the age of the earth weighs in at a mere 4,567,000,000 years.

Even mathematicians occasionally underestimate probability - in "A Brief History of Time" Stephen Hawking mentions that monkeys pounding away on keyboards will "very occasionally" by pure chance type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets. The calculation for the sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" shows that the chance is about 1 in 10690 i.e. 10 followed by 690 zeros. [r78] As there have only been 1018 seconds since the Big Bang and there are about 1080 atoms in the visible universe it is difficult to see where 10690 fits in comfortably. Physical limits on monkeys and keyboards means we would have to cycle through the heat death or final collapse of the universe in excess of 10600 times to obtain a single sonnet.

Could the universe have cycled through this many Big Bangs? Thermodynamics dictates that the number of photons will increase relative to other particles with each cycle, thus given a finite number of particles, the entire universe would eventually be reduced to photons. Our ability to read tells us the universe is not based on infinite cycles.

Of course, this is not saying that an event of 1 in 10690 could not take place - rather it is an objective measure of how unexpected life is given the assumption of a reductionist universe.

The informational complexity inherent in a sonnet parallels the informational complexity that defines a protein. Just as a sonnet is assembled from 26 letters (ignoring punctuation, spaces and capitals), proteins are assembled (by previously assembled proteins) from strings of 20 distinct amino acids ranging in length from 20 (TRP-Cage) to 26,926 (Titin). Proteins are the "work-horse" of biological life - each cell in the human body produces about 2,000 per second, and as each protein is produced it is folded by other proteins or self-folds into a complex three-dimensional shape required to activate it's chemical function.

The most abundant proteins associated with the DNA of eukaryotes are the Histones. As they are essential for maintaining the structural integrity of DNA and have a role in the transcription process they are structurally intolerant to change. Histone H4 contains about 104 amino acids and differs in two or three places across a wide range of species. The high level of invariance of Histone H4 with respect to cellular replication suggests it is a candidate for examining probabilities associated with the formation of an equivalent protein in a primeval cell on the basis of chance.

With 104 amino acids, there are 20104 ways a primeval equivalent of Histone H4 could have been arranged through chance. For convenience, we approximate 20104 by 2 x 10135 .If we assume that the entire observable universe - approximately 1080 atoms - was available to manufacture the very first Histone H4 equivalent protein - at an average of 10 atoms per amino acid - we would have 1077 amino acids available. If we spent all 1018 seconds since the Big Bang cycling through all possible proteins using all the available resources of the universe once every second we would have generated a maximum of 1095 proteins. Thus the chance of obtaining one Histone H4 equivalent protein using all the resources in the universe for a workable primeval cell would be 1 in 1040.
To put things in perspective, a perfect bridge hand would be 4,473,877,774,353 times more likely.
r37]

Replication of the DNA template proteins are derived from is carried out by proteins. In prokaryotic cells DNA polymerase III is a complex of seven subunits ranging from 300 to 1,100 amino acids in length, one does the copying and the remainder are involved in accessory functions including error correcting. In E. coli DNA repair processes are managed by approximately 100 different genes. Just how does one "evolve" an error correcting process distributed across 100 genes on the basis of chance?

As a general rule about one third of the amino acids in a protein are directly involved in providing structural and chemical function and are therefore invariant while the remaining amino acids are drawn from a pool of about three or four types. Given that the simplest bacteria requires some 2,000 enzymes (protein catalysts), and assuming an average enzyme chain of 300 links we have

2000! x [ 1/( 20100 x 4200)] 2000 => a probability of about 1 part in 10500,000... source.... Evolution of Life: A Cosmic Perspective N.C. Wickramasinghe & F. Hoyle

The evolutionary view is this calculation would be more realistic if performed using the intracellular parasite Mycoplasma genitalium as a model. The disadvantage of using Mycoplasma genitalium is that it depends on the existence of the cellular machinery whose probability we are trying to estimate. Another problem is an analysis of the genetic characteristics of the mycoplasma class suggests it arose through a loss of genetic material. [r11]

Either way the probability for the random generation of the enzymes for this parasitic organism work out at about 1 part in 106,393. In a purely reductionist universe, one Shakespearean sonnet would be more likely by a factor of 105,703.
 

LAGoff

Member
Hi everyone!

I was just curious about everyone’s opinion on Adam and Eve. Do you interpret the story as literal? As in, they were the first two people, the Apple was an actual Apple, etc.

Or do you think it’s more allegorical? If so, how do you interpret what Adam and the Apple mean? Why do you think humans sin?

I like the Jewish mystical interpretation that the Garden of Eden was a middle place between heaven and Earth. And Eve convinced Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree the eating of which would subject one to death (i.e. coming down to the Earth, which would subject one to toil, child-birth pain, and death). She's the hero of the Story! So it's not really a sin or a curse, it's just what happens when you choose to come here. And God wants us to come down here (see Ex 25:8), but from our free will, and the Story is about how God enginered it. Our job is now not to get back to Eden, but to make down here a place where God can dwell through the commandments (mitsvahs) in the Tora (the Pentateuch) and through this we can become one with God here-- even this lowest of worlds (i.e. BECAUSE it is the lowest of worlds). This is why the Tora (and rest of Tanakh-- the 'OT') has very little to say about the disposition of our souls in an afterlife. I mean, you can say that coming out of Egypt is a way of saying we should stop concentrating on heaven and hell (Jews don't believe in hell, just a kind of purgatory for at most one year for some who accumulated enough stink from this harsh world that it takes a year to cleanse them (purgation)-- but that's post-biblical) like the Egyptians (and now the Christians and Muslims) who were fascinated with it.
 

Ouroboros

Coincidentia oppositorum
Unanswered Mathematical and Computational Challenges facing Neo-Darwinism as a Theory of Origins
Kurt Gödel

The computational capacity of the universe suggests an upper bound to the number of transformational steps available for any theory of origins
Surely there has been enough time, Dr. Watson?
The theory of evolution depends entirely on the veracity of a self-replicating molecule arising on purely stochastic grounds. One would expect this to involve a modest stretch of time.

How much time? In the "Blind Watch Maker" Richard Dawkins suggests that attaining such a probability is simply a matter of having the correct perspective - for example, if we lived for 100 million years and happened to play bridge we would not be surprised to see something as improbable as a perfect bridge hand - where each player was dealt the same suite - turning up from time to time. So it would not be so improbable after all.

How accurate is this assumption? Calculating the chance of one perfect bridge hand where we play bridge 100 times a day for 100 million years comes out at a paltry 1.63x10-15 - the same degree of delight one would associate with winning a lottery event twice. Which is not quite "from time to time". To improve this to a chance of say one in a million we would have to keep playing a hundred games a day for 61,238,285,120,420,996 years. By contrast, the best current estimate for the age of the earth weighs in at a mere 4,567,000,000 years.

Even mathematicians occasionally underestimate probability - in "A Brief History of Time" Stephen Hawking mentions that monkeys pounding away on keyboards will "very occasionally" by pure chance type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets. The calculation for the sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" shows that the chance is about 1 in 10690 i.e. 10 followed by 690 zeros. [r78] As there have only been 1018 seconds since the Big Bang and there are about 1080 atoms in the visible universe it is difficult to see where 10690 fits in comfortably. Physical limits on monkeys and keyboards means we would have to cycle through the heat death or final collapse of the universe in excess of 10600 times to obtain a single sonnet.

Could the universe have cycled through this many Big Bangs? Thermodynamics dictates that the number of photons will increase relative to other particles with each cycle, thus given a finite number of particles, the entire universe would eventually be reduced to photons. Our ability to read tells us the universe is not based on infinite cycles.

Of course, this is not saying that an event of 1 in 10690 could not take place - rather it is an objective measure of how unexpected life is given the assumption of a reductionist universe.

The informational complexity inherent in a sonnet parallels the informational complexity that defines a protein. Just as a sonnet is assembled from 26 letters (ignoring punctuation, spaces and capitals), proteins are assembled (by previously assembled proteins) from strings of 20 distinct amino acids ranging in length from 20 (TRP-Cage) to 26,926 (Titin). Proteins are the "work-horse" of biological life - each cell in the human body produces about 2,000 per second, and as each protein is produced it is folded by other proteins or self-folds into a complex three-dimensional shape required to activate it's chemical function.

The most abundant proteins associated with the DNA of eukaryotes are the Histones. As they are essential for maintaining the structural integrity of DNA and have a role in the transcription process they are structurally intolerant to change. Histone H4 contains about 104 amino acids and differs in two or three places across a wide range of species. The high level of invariance of Histone H4 with respect to cellular replication suggests it is a candidate for examining probabilities associated with the formation of an equivalent protein in a primeval cell on the basis of chance.

With 104 amino acids, there are 20104 ways a primeval equivalent of Histone H4 could have been arranged through chance. For convenience, we approximate 20104 by 2 x 10135 .If we assume that the entire observable universe - approximately 1080 atoms - was available to manufacture the very first Histone H4 equivalent protein - at an average of 10 atoms per amino acid - we would have 1077 amino acids available. If we spent all 1018 seconds since the Big Bang cycling through all possible proteins using all the available resources of the universe once every second we would have generated a maximum of 1095 proteins. Thus the chance of obtaining one Histone H4 equivalent protein using all the resources in the universe for a workable primeval cell would be 1 in 1040.
To put things in perspective, a perfect bridge hand would be 4,473,877,774,353 times more likely.
r37]

Replication of the DNA template proteins are derived from is carried out by proteins. In prokaryotic cells DNA polymerase III is a complex of seven subunits ranging from 300 to 1,100 amino acids in length, one does the copying and the remainder are involved in accessory functions including error correcting. In E. coli DNA repair processes are managed by approximately 100 different genes. Just how does one "evolve" an error correcting process distributed across 100 genes on the basis of chance?

As a general rule about one third of the amino acids in a protein are directly involved in providing structural and chemical function and are therefore invariant while the remaining amino acids are drawn from a pool of about three or four types. Given that the simplest bacteria requires some 2,000 enzymes (protein catalysts), and assuming an average enzyme chain of 300 links we have

2000! x [ 1/( 20100 x 4200)] 2000 => a probability of about 1 part in 10500,000... source.... Evolution of Life: A Cosmic Perspective N.C. Wickramasinghe & F. Hoyle

The evolutionary view is this calculation would be more realistic if performed using the intracellular parasite Mycoplasma genitalium as a model. The disadvantage of using Mycoplasma genitalium is that it depends on the existence of the cellular machinery whose probability we are trying to estimate. Another problem is an analysis of the genetic characteristics of the mycoplasma class suggests it arose through a loss of genetic material. [r11]

Either way the probability for the random generation of the enzymes for this parasitic organism work out at about 1 part in 106,393. In a purely reductionist universe, one Shakespearean sonnet would be more likely by a factor of 105,703.
Well, then it's impossible that we're not related to the apes, since we're sharing an identical genetic defect which have a probability lot worse than those calculations. We can't produce C-vitamin but have to get it through food. Practically all animals except for a handful can produce it and don't have the problem. The few that can't produce C-Vitamin, can't because of mutations. The genetic defect that we have is exactly the same as the closest relatives in the ape family, while the other animals that can't have different mutations. The probability for sharing the exact same defect mutation is astronomical. The only explanation is that we share ancestor. That's the only way to have it, or it mutated exactly the same, which is beyond improbable using the same statistics above. And that's not the only identical mutation we share with them. So sorry. Don't use probability to disprove evolution, since it would backfire beyond infinity.
 

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Unanswered Mathematical and Computational Challenges facing Neo-Darwinism as a Theory of Origins
Kurt Gödel

The computational capacity of the universe suggests an upper bound to the number of transformational steps available for any theory of origins
Surely there has been enough time, Dr. Watson?
The theory of evolution depends entirely on the veracity of a self-replicating molecule arising on purely stochastic grounds. One would expect this to involve a modest stretch of time.

How much time? In the "Blind Watch Maker" Richard Dawkins suggests that attaining such a probability is simply a matter of having the correct perspective - for example, if we lived for 100 million years and happened to play bridge we would not be surprised to see something as improbable as a perfect bridge hand - where each player was dealt the same suite - turning up from time to time. So it would not be so improbable after all.

How accurate is this assumption? Calculating the chance of one perfect bridge hand where we play bridge 100 times a day for 100 million years comes out at a paltry 1.63x10-15 - the same degree of delight one would associate with winning a lottery event twice. Which is not quite "from time to time". To improve this to a chance of say one in a million we would have to keep playing a hundred games a day for 61,238,285,120,420,996 years. By contrast, the best current estimate for the age of the earth weighs in at a mere 4,567,000,000 years.

Even mathematicians occasionally underestimate probability - in "A Brief History of Time" Stephen Hawking mentions that monkeys pounding away on keyboards will "very occasionally" by pure chance type out one of Shakespeare's sonnets. The calculation for the sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" shows that the chance is about 1 in 10690 i.e. 10 followed by 690 zeros. [r78] As there have only been 1018 seconds since the Big Bang and there are about 1080 atoms in the visible universe it is difficult to see where 10690 fits in comfortably. Physical limits on monkeys and keyboards means we would have to cycle through the heat death or final collapse of the universe in excess of 10600 times to obtain a single sonnet.

Could the universe have cycled through this many Big Bangs? Thermodynamics dictates that the number of photons will increase relative to other particles with each cycle, thus given a finite number of particles, the entire universe would eventually be reduced to photons. Our ability to read tells us the universe is not based on infinite cycles.

Of course, this is not saying that an event of 1 in 10690 could not take place - rather it is an objective measure of how unexpected life is given the assumption of a reductionist universe.

The informational complexity inherent in a sonnet parallels the informational complexity that defines a protein. Just as a sonnet is assembled from 26 letters (ignoring punctuation, spaces and capitals), proteins are assembled (by previously assembled proteins) from strings of 20 distinct amino acids ranging in length from 20 (TRP-Cage) to 26,926 (Titin). Proteins are the "work-horse" of biological life - each cell in the human body produces about 2,000 per second, and as each protein is produced it is folded by other proteins or self-folds into a complex three-dimensional shape required to activate it's chemical function.

The most abundant proteins associated with the DNA of eukaryotes are the Histones. As they are essential for maintaining the structural integrity of DNA and have a role in the transcription process they are structurally intolerant to change. Histone H4 contains about 104 amino acids and differs in two or three places across a wide range of species. The high level of invariance of Histone H4 with respect to cellular replication suggests it is a candidate for examining probabilities associated with the formation of an equivalent protein in a primeval cell on the basis of chance.

With 104 amino acids, there are 20104 ways a primeval equivalent of Histone H4 could have been arranged through chance. For convenience, we approximate 20104 by 2 x 10135 .If we assume that the entire observable universe - approximately 1080 atoms - was available to manufacture the very first Histone H4 equivalent protein - at an average of 10 atoms per amino acid - we would have 1077 amino acids available. If we spent all 1018 seconds since the Big Bang cycling through all possible proteins using all the available resources of the universe once every second we would have generated a maximum of 1095 proteins. Thus the chance of obtaining one Histone H4 equivalent protein using all the resources in the universe for a workable primeval cell would be 1 in 1040.
To put things in perspective, a perfect bridge hand would be 4,473,877,774,353 times more likely.
r37]

Replication of the DNA template proteins are derived from is carried out by proteins. In prokaryotic cells DNA polymerase III is a complex of seven subunits ranging from 300 to 1,100 amino acids in length, one does the copying and the remainder are involved in accessory functions including error correcting. In E. coli DNA repair processes are managed by approximately 100 different genes. Just how does one "evolve" an error correcting process distributed across 100 genes on the basis of chance?

As a general rule about one third of the amino acids in a protein are directly involved in providing structural and chemical function and are therefore invariant while the remaining amino acids are drawn from a pool of about three or four types. Given that the simplest bacteria requires some 2,000 enzymes (protein catalysts), and assuming an average enzyme chain of 300 links we have

2000! x [ 1/( 20100 x 4200)] 2000 => a probability of about 1 part in 10500,000... source.... Evolution of Life: A Cosmic Perspective N.C. Wickramasinghe & F. Hoyle

The evolutionary view is this calculation would be more realistic if performed using the intracellular parasite Mycoplasma genitalium as a model. The disadvantage of using Mycoplasma genitalium is that it depends on the existence of the cellular machinery whose probability we are trying to estimate. Another problem is an analysis of the genetic characteristics of the mycoplasma class suggests it arose through a loss of genetic material. [r11]

Either way the probability for the random generation of the enzymes for this parasitic organism work out at about 1 part in 106,393. In a purely reductionist universe, one Shakespearean sonnet would be more likely by a factor of 105,703.
TLDR. Scanned it. This looks like another failed odds argument. There are several problems with it. First it tries to calculate the odds of humans evolving. That is an argument that is so poor that it belongs in the idiotic category. That is similar to calculating the odds that you would be born. Let's focus only on the male contributions to your being here. The average ejaculation has 250 million sperm. And a man has tens of thousands of these over his lifetime. One of those was you. Let's be conservative and call your birth, and this is only figuring in the odds from your father's side, at one in 2.5 trillion. But for you to be born your father and mother would have had to have the same odds. So we need to cube that original figure. But their parents face the same odds, now we have to say that the odds of your birth were one out of (2.5*10^12)^7. Each generation we go back almost doubles the last exponent. In fact, by your greatgrandparent's generation the odds for your birth are up to more than one out of the number of particles in the universe. Effectively making your birth impossible.

You do not exist.

Or, just maybe, there was something wrong with my approach. It was the same mistake the ignorant creationists that you copied and pasted made.
 
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