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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
you know full well that the 500 heads has no valid application to any real world scenario related to life, and you also know that you are misrepresenting evolution when you tell them about “shaking them in the little bucket and pouring them out”
That’s precisely why showing them how random variation plus selection can do it would be the honest thing to do instead of poisoning thei minds with talks about binomial distros that have zero to do with what you’re trying to teach them that fails, namely evolution
Who’s straight to them do you ask? Obviously not you
This was teaching them the basics of creation science in a way that they could also have a little fun. The binomial distribution is way of conceptualizing the direction of natural evolution of molecular and mechanical systems with an inherent tendency to remain disassembled and disorganized when they are in the disassembled and disorganized state. This is obviously relevant to origin of life and to limited extent the theory of universal common descent with modification. When they grow up, if they want to study more, the have a good foundation of understanding.
Creationists erroneously tried to teach the idea of natural expectation using the 2nd law of thermodynamics. I’ve fought tooth and nail against the abuse of the 2nd law by creationists here at TSZ. It’s a bad approach. The binomial distribution is a superior pedagogical tool to teach large concepts about fragile systems (like life) that exist in a state far from natural expectation. Natural expectation is the true natural “selection”, not the falsely advertised idea of Darwiniain selection (which is contrary to natural expectation, and therefore not really “natural” as Darwin claimed).
It is easier to teach the concept of natural expectation of inherently fragile systems through the binomial distribution.
It is a considerably harder to demonstrate it mathematically, but one in principle might show that fragile systems like houses of cards or dominos standing on edge and rube Goldberg machines are fragile systems far from ordinary expectation in an environment with random, uncertainty maximizing boundary conditions.
I don’t need to get into all the fancy words, the kids intuitively understand this because God instills that intuition in them.
dazz:
No one has shown that natural selection (which includes random mutation) is capable of anything beyond merely changing allele frequencies within a population. No one has ever shown that natural selection is the force Darwin claimed. So it is a lie to try to pawn NS as some powerful designer mimic. It is a lie to say NS produced vision systems as Darwin claimed.
But then again, having drank the kool-aid, evolutionists cannot admit to any of that
Baloney, Pasteur saw it rather easily when he established the homochirality of life. Chiral molecules like amino acids tend to be synthesized in Urey-Miller experiments according to the binomial distribution, and if miraculously they started out homochiral (all heads) that doesn’t stay the case for very long as when it is maintained at room temperature it move toward the binomial distribution. This is one of the major barriers to the origin of life. See my response to Allan Miller regarding alpha helices above.
The binomial distribution is one of the many reasons we have the expectation that life will not come from non-life. So, you’re so quick to accuse me of not telling the truth, when you your self need to god to Sal’s school of creationism to learn the basics.
Depicted below is an alpha helix of a protein, made possible by a violation of the binomial distribution, made possible by a living creature, made possible by the creatures ancestors, made by God.
Sal:
I think I see the problem.
Yes we do.
All.The.Time.
All environments are thermodynamically racemizing, and the presence of a chiral catalyst doesn’t change that fact, but chiral catalysts can be stereospecific, so we get to see chiral amplifications all the time.
Also, Sal is ignoring the fact that the binomial distribution assumes independence. That’s naughty.
Even better for him, now he can teach those kids that evolution can only find the right combination in a 4th of July. Evolution just became 365 times more impossible
There is no redefinition required. You are lying to children and you know it. I have summarized my argument here, here, and here. You have not countered any of those.
Unfortunately for you, Sal, you’ve demonstrated just enough intelligence to understand modern evolutionary theory but you lack the intellectual honesty to accept what that means for your unsupported religious beliefs. You know that what you are teaching these kids are strawman arguments, fallacious reasoning, and falsified claims, yet you do it deliberately.
You, Sal Cordova, are abusing children.
stcordova,
Yes, I knew exactly where you were going with coin tosses. You weren’t teaching him the binomial distribution at all!
I still don’t get why you think chirality is a coin-tossing issue. If a system can distinguish one amino acid from another based on side chain, chiral versions of the acids it can distinguish (including the isomer of the current residue) all have an -H side chain at that point, and so can easily be excluded by exactly the same mechanism. I don’t know the definitive answer to how such discrimination arises – I’m betting against peptide soups – but coin-tossing is irrelevant to it.
[eta – sorry for derailing the vital discussion about moderation, lol!]
I can’t answer for keiths, but I think the rule about always assuming good faith needs to be adjusted to allow participants to note when someone is being deliberately dishonest by, for example, quote mining.
Ideally I’d like a system that doesn’t require moderation at all. Joe Gallien is why we can’t have nice things.
Like evolution. There’s only one way it can go from here.
How can you prove that Patrick, are you mind reader? If you even suspect I really believe what I teach, then that is reasonable doubt that I am not lying, just mistaken at worst, and even telling the truth at best.
Aw shucks, that’s the nicest compliment I’ve gotten from you in a long time.
Exactly. I made this point some time ago:
If you really wanted to teach them something, you’d give little Janey and Johnny each a cup of coins to shake and dump out. Janey puts all the coins that came up tails back in her cup and shakes again. Johnny puts all his coins back in his cup unless they all come up heads simultaneously. Then you let them see who gets all heads in the fewest number of shakes.
Janey learns something about cumulative selection, Johnny gets to continue to be a creationist.
Sal continues to abuse children with his lies nonetheless.
god, we have a problem.
Addendum to state it more accurately:
Non-existent mechanisms don’t exclude because they don’t exist, and that is the case in a pool of non-Living Urey-Miller type amino acids.
Worse, we don’t even have a credible synthesis pathway for RNAs, much less homochrial RNAs. I don’t know that one can even have a genetic (DNA or RNA based system) if the coded strands are not homochiral as well.
The distribution is applicable if you are willing to see it’s applicability to the question of OOL.
But the binomial distribution is only a starting point to illustrate the more general concept of natural expectation of physical and chemical systems. The first life exists far outside natural expectation. If that were not the case, we wouldn’t have fine minds like Koonin arguing for multiverse solutions to the OOL problem.
In any case, I find it hard how Patrick can call the little 15 minute game with kids and coins “child abuse.” I mean, that is far more honest than telling kids about Santa Claus, don’t you think?
Cumulative selection in nature is not the net norm, extinction and reductive evolution is. The only place cumulative selection is the net norm is in the imagination of evolutionists, not in direct lab and field observations.
So now who is telling the truth about direct scientific lab and field observations, you or me?
Artificial selection, Patrick. Janey learns something about artificial selection.
I have seen you in these discussions for years. You demonstrate understanding of the concepts, even though your religion prohibits you from accepting them and causes you to ignore the signal for the noise. You know, for example, that your coin example has nothing to do with random mutation and natural selection, yet you still use it. You avoid teaching any real science because that might cause your students to question their faith.
You’re indoctrinating children with lies, both of commission and omission, Sal. That’s abusive. It’s also against your god’s commandments. You should stop.
All evidence to the contrary, of course. Don’t blame me because you are an blow hole who cannot support anything and loves to hump straw men. I just point it out
That is what teachers do when the present evolutionism as science.
You’re so full of it. You use the coins analogy to teach those kids that evolution can’t do this or that, and to “show” that only purpousfulness can account for the arrangement of the coins. You want the kids to believe that someone must have put them there, heads up, intentionaly
You KNOW that’s not true and that you are teaching them a caricature of reality. Shame on you Sal
The exercise I suggested was a simplification of evolution very much like the weasel, appropriate for young kids, yours are blatant misrepresentations
Baloney, I’d want them to learn math, physics, and biochemistry. That’s real science, not evolutionary theory. I want them to question their faith. Sketicism is good, gullibility is not a virtue.
I know what I say works because when I meet college pre-med, pre-dentistry, pre-whatever biology students who are at least open to my viewpoints, I speak to them in the language of what they learn in their science classes. Many of them easily reject evolutionary theory or strengthen their creationist beliefs. Evolutionary theory hardly qualifies as science.
“In sciences pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics.”
You’re welcome to promote your naturalistic ideology, that’s fine, but let’s not pretend it qualifies as science. I’m not saying the ID and creationism qualify as science either, and I’ve said as much here at TSZ, but it’s fair game to point out when evolutionary theory goes against natural expectation of the evolution of mechanical and chemical systems. Theory and empirical evidence show the natural expectation is away from complexity, not toward it. That’s why bottles of milk have the word “Pasteurized” on them not “Haekelized” or “Darwinized”.
You want to cross swords with me on science, you’ve had your chance and you’ve not even shown up, so now all you can do is make flimsy accusation of me abusing children.
When they grow up they can see you’re exchanges with me here at TSZ. They can get their fill of the Abby “potty mouthed” Smith’s of the world and the PZ Myers of the world and people like you who call their loving parents “child abusers”. You called my Dad a child abuser. You don’t even know him and what a good man, husband and father he was. Your primary basis for saying this is your self-assured belief that you can appoint yourself judge and jury of what is ultimately true and disregard the possibility that you could be wrong about ultimate questions.
Not only was your insult of my Dad totally classless, it shows how you just appoint yourself the judge and jury even after I am willing to say I not regard it child abuse when Dad took me too Catholic church and Catholic Sunday school, and I can say that as an ex-Catholic. You’re insult of my Dad was totally classless and evidence more of your inability to engage my arguments than evidence that my Dad was child abuser of me.
I know a lot of atheists raised in Christian homes, but who also love and revere their parents. You want to call their mom’s and dad’s child abusers too?
FWIW, when these kids grow up, they can see the character of “scholars” who question the existence Jesus like Richard Carrier who of late is now the laughing stock by his former atheist peers:
Patrick,
Do you understand Sal’s arguments? Thinking they are lies may just an issue of understanding.
Yes, I fully understand Sal’s arguments. He has a long history on the ‘net. He also understands that what he is presenting is a distortion of what the science actually says. He is deliberately misleading children.
Patrick,
Sal made an argument correlating his coin toss with exclusively left handed amino acids forming outside of biology, which you claim is a straw man argument. Can you demonstrate this is true and that his argument against exclusively left handed chiral amino acids forming in nature is false?
If not would you concede that his coin toss analogy was not a straw man argument after all?
The Patrick has a twisted view of science and reality. There isn’t anything short of meeting, talking with and getting demonstrations from the Intelligent Designer(s) that the Patrick will accept as scientific evidence for ID. And all he needs for evidence for evolutionism is a nice story.
Trying to reason with the Patrick is a fruitless endeavor
Regarding the connection of the binomial distribution (as illustrated by coins) to chemistry of living things from the journal of Physical Chemistry:
So again, my detractors claim it has no relevance, but here again I demonstrate it from papers in the mainstream.
So who wants to teach kids again that the binomial distribution isn’t relevant? It is plenty relevant. So now the kids have had a chance to learn a little about the notion of expectation and the law of large numbers.
FWIW, I don’t even recall that I connected it explicitly to evolutionary theory, but to show them they can make a design inference. I chose this example because the law of large numbers is a superior way to teach ID over “specified complexity”.
Pure, unadulterated bullshit. The coin toss thing is what he uses to teach 6 y. o. kids life must be specially created, because those things don’t happen randomly. When I told him that was a gross mischaracterization of evolution he said it was a simple example for 6 year olds. Of course that doesn’t even begin to justify the blatant misrepresentations so I showed how one can properly characterize evolution and show that RM+NS can explain 500 heads coins, he started quibbling about NS not being all that prevalent and ridiculous things no one would expect a 6 yo kid to understand
That’s the kind of BS we’ve come to expect from Sal
Frankie,
Will see if Patrick can support his argument of Sal’s dishonesty.
dazz,
This is not Sal’s argument. Left handed amino acids forming in production is an OOL discussion and pre natural selection.
Here’s what Sal teaches, Bill
He’s teaching them that “it had to be someone”
Chirality? Amino Acids? LMFAO
dazz,
I understand he is arguing for the existence of God but your claim that his argument is not grounded in biology is bullshit. The above chirality argument supports the coin toss analogy very well. Patrick is making claims of child abuse yet he has not successfully supported the argument that Sal is making dishonest claims.
Do you think making an argument for the existence of God is a priori dishonest? 75% of the worlds population believes in Gods existence.
stcordova,
All that you have demonstrated is a failure to understand the point made.
You Googled ‘enantiomer binomial’, or some such, found one of the hits, and pasted that***. Growing a peptide chain, if there is any acid specificity at all, is not going to be confused by chirality.
This is not a coin toss system. In your naive view, the only thing that happens is generation of alpha peptide linkages (but not, for no good reason, beta or gamma), perfectly capable of distinguishing among different side chains but then totally flummoxed when a D acid turns up instead of an L – despite the fact that it has a different side chain at the L position. You have a ‘chemistry set’ view, big baths of reagents and measure the total concentrations. That doesn’t work at the growing peptide level.
If an acid has the same molecular weight and atomic composition, how can it be distinguished, you think to yourself. But I have no idea what chemical system you have in mind that can do that – distinguish on side chain, but not distinguish enantioners.
If any system can discriminate side chain, it can discriminate opposite isomers for free. Because the side chain is always -H.
[eta – the authors quoted simply argue that there is no sufficient energetic distinction between enantiomers to drive asymmetry of chirality. That treating it as a binomial distribution offers no insight into the chirality distribution of acids in solution.]
Allan Miller,
Would you expect amino acids synthesized outside a biological system to repeatably come up with left handed versions?
But it won’t grow peptide chains like the ones we find in life on this planet, nor do NASA astrobiologists (for reasons like formation of Alpha helices) think a protein-based life can be hetero chiral (racemic is a better term) rather than homo chiral.
The point is, the homochiral features of life are not consistent with emergence from a racemic pool of amino acids such as from a Urey-Miller reaction nor a racemic pool that emerges just due to heat acting over time and making them racemic if they weren’t already racemic in the first place.
It establishes a record. A history.
It’s even worse than that.
The authors only consider the chiral bias due to nuclear parity violation, noting
So the authors are restricting themselves to Epv, and not even considering the effect, in solution, of intermolecular interactions.
Only because they are explicitly ignoring such interactions does their “can be described by an asymmetric binomial distribution” assumption hold water.
It’s yet another GSW to the foot for Sal.
Under the circumstances under discussion, yes, I would.
DNA_Jock,
http://www.pnas.org
(/) > Current Issue (/content/112/19.toc) > vol. 112 no. 19
Why do living systems need an enzyme that purges D AA’s?
Thanks for the explanation.
Creation science does qualify as science? Nothing so far has demonstrated that, you have yet to make a positive argument for creation science, all science has unknowns ,just pointing that out is not convincing you have a better explanation.
Is creation science unified, does it have mechanism or merely poof? What exactly do you believe occurred ?
They don’t all need one. They probably all HAVE one, because it’s useful to stop peptidyl-D-amino-tRNAs from gumming up the works. Highly adaptive, doncha know. 😉
Yeast do fine without DTD, unless you poison them with millimolar D-tryptophan. I note that the authors there didn’t let the cells have any L-tryptophan; so they maximized the enantiomeric ratio to get maximal toxicity.
But that isn’t terribly relevant to your original question, which was :
Given a chiral catalyst, I would.
In particular, anyone drawing an analogy with tossing 500 coins is demonstrating their ignorance.
The 500 coin crap is obviously a placeholder Sal uses so that he can later reference that in all sort of ridiculous misrepresentations of reality and evolution.
His ramblings about chirality are simply another of his cherry picking + straw man BS arguments.
Does anybody believe that if one of those kids ever approaches Sal with the usual Bill Cole BS about the sequence space of a protein, and the kid tells him the problem reminds him of the 500 coin story, Sal would just point out to him that it was just meant to (mis)characterize homochirality? Of course not, the goal is to teach kids to NOT understand the problems, so that god can look like an easy and obvious solution to all them
It’s particularly obscene to call that creation “science” considering he’s teaching them to not think in scientific terms, namely, to go wherever the evidence takes you
DNA_Jock,
So would you expect a chiral catalyst to be available at the estimated time of OOL?
Definitely.
But I don’t think that was the question that you wanted to ask. The answer to that question can be found (amongst other places) in the paper that Sal cited.
You are welcome.
Yes if we are only talking science part, not the part that appeals to theology. A good example is discussions about junk DNA, experiments related to nucleosynthesis and radioactive decay and radio metric dating, etc.
Arguments about God and passages in the Bible get outside what I consider outside of science, so that part of creationism is not science. Whether that part is outside of creation science, I have not much of an opinion.
Inference: a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning.
Shame on you Sal
But the problem is, there is a scientific and a theological way to approach any of these issues. The theological approach is to DECREE that there is little or no junk DNA, that radioactive decay rates can vary wildly over time, etc. Not that such positions are supported by evidence, but rather are seen as theological requirements that require actual evidence to be ignored, misrepresented, cherry-picked, or fabricated. This is NOT science.
It is characteristic of creationism to take scientifical-sounding terms, apply theological distortions and foregone conclusions, and therefore conclude that creationism is science. Ain’t so.
So says the guy who said of thermodynamics:
Ribosomes don’t float around to discriminate between L and D amino acids in a pre-OOL environment because ribosomes wouldn’t exist at that point.
Btw, when something dies, did you know it starts to racemize its amino acids? Jeffrey Bada uses it to make some estimates of age because the fossils racemize. Now, why is that racemizes even though these previously living but now dead things now have ribosomes with peptidyl transferases?
So the fact you neglected that shows your rush total disregard of available scientific observation, not my ignorance.
The binomial distribution is applicable as a model where randomizing mechanisms are in play, not a model where living systems with machines to over come such randomizing mechanisms are available.
The context of my use of the binomial distribution was in an OOL scenario, not for a scenario of something already alive where ribosomes are already formed (with lots of homochiral parts). Talk about unwillingness to represent accurately what was trying to be communicated.
But I should point out that the successuful operation of the ribosome in question assumes this reaction that involves ATP can take place:
amino acid + ATP + tRNA ↔ aminoacyl-tRNA + AMP + PPi
ATP is an RNA that has 3 phosphate groups (Adenosine is an RNA, hence the name Adenosine Triphospate). ATP synthesis is not so trivial, and beyond that, one of the many reasons dead things racemize even with the presence of ribosome in the cell is that without this reaction to fuel the acylation of the amino acid and addition of a tRNA, the ribosome’s machinery is as good as dead. This reaction will stop when there is no more ATP available, and ATP net synthesis stops as the digestive process stops which is usually the case after something is long dead.
So DNA_jock’s insinuation that his citation somehow solves the homochriality problem is pretty bad. The mechanisms he cites won’t help proteins that are already formed but now racemizing, and it can’t synthesize new proteins that are non-racemized.
So DNA_Jock is leaving out a few important details to say the least. My irony meter jump exploded when he accused me of ignorance. Sheesh! Your biochem DNA_Jock is getting a bit rusty. You need some remedial training, bud. This getting embarrassing for you.
But congrats to DNA_jock, he is still top of the google hits for “dQ/T is rarely informative”.
Flint,
Please stop talking about science as if you know what it entails. Your position on biological evolution isn’t science and yet you think it is. The fact it makes untestable claims betrays you