I have committed the unpardonable sin of promoting ID as theology and arguing ID is not science. ID is the lineal descendant of Paley’s natural theology (as in contrast to “revealed theology”). I’ve publicly disputed the use of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics as a general argument in favor of ID/Creation, and I’ve been mildly critical of the concept of specified complexity and its successors. I’ve suggested ID is most appropriately taught in college/seminary theology and philosophy departments. When I published a 2005 exchange between myself and Eugenie Scott of the NCSE regarding the appropriateness of ID being taught in college religion and philosophy departments, Eugenie was much kinder to me than some in the ID community who insist “ID is science.” See: Correspondence between Salvador Cordova and Dr. Eugenie Scott
To that end, in conjunction with university professors, deans of Christian and secular colleges (who are favorable to both Intelligent Design and belief in Special Creation), I’m helping build out the electronic component of courses that teach ID and concepts of Creationism for such venues.
The first order of business in such a course is studying Paley’s watch argument and modern incarnations of Paley’s watch. But I’ve found compartmentalizing the pure science and math from the theological issues is helpful. Thus, at least for my own understanding and peace of mind, I’ve considered writing a paper to help define terms that will avoid the use of theologically loaded phrases like “materialism”, “naturalism”, “theism”, and even “Intelligent Design”, etc. I want to use terms that are as theologically neutral as possible to form the mathematical and physical foundation of the ID argument. The purpose of this is to circumvent circular arguments as best as possible. If found what I believe are some unfortunate equivocations and circularity in Bill Dembki’s definition of Design using the explanatory filter, and I’m trying to avoid that.
VJ Torley was very kind to help me phrase the opening of my paper, and I have such high respect for him that I’ve invited him to be a co-author of the paper he so chooses. He of course is free to write his own take on the matters I specify in the opening of my paper. In any case, I’m deeply indebted to him for being a fellow traveler on the net as well as the example he has set as a meticulous scholar.
Here is a draft opening of the papers which I present here at TSZ to solicit comments in the process of revising and expanding my paper.
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Multiverse or Miracles of God?
Circumventing metaphysical baggage when describing massive statistical or physical violations of normative expectations
Intro/Abstract
When attempting to set up a framework for expressing the improbability of phenomena that may turn out to have metaphysical implications, it may be helpful to isolate the metaphysical aspects of these phenomena from the actual math used to describe them. Additionally, the probabilities (which are really statements of uncertainty) can be either observer- or perspective-dependent. For example, in a raffle or a professional sporting league, there is a guaranteed winner. Using more formal terminology, we can say that it is normative that there is a winner, from the perspective of the entire system or ensemble of possibilities; however, from the perspective of any given participant (e.g. an individual raffle ticket holder), it is by no means normative for that individual to be a winner.
With respect to the question of the origin of life and the fine-tuning of the universe, one can postulate a scenario where it is normative for life to emerge in at least one universe, when we are considering the ensemble of all universes (i.e. the multiverse). However, from the perspective of the universe in which an observer happens to be situated, the fine-tuning of that particular universe and the origin of life in that universe are not at all normative: one can reasonably ask, “Why did this universe turn out to be so friendly to life, when it could have been otherwise?” Thus, when someone asserts that it is extremely improbable that a cell should arise from inanimate matter, this statement can be regarded as normative from the perspective of human experience and experimental observations, even though it is not necessarily normative in the ultimate sense of the word. Putting it more informally, one might say that abiogenesis and fine-tuning are miraculous from the human point of view, but whether they are miraculous in the theological or ultimate sense is a question that may well be practically (if not formally) undecidable.
The objective of this article is to circumvent, or at least minimize, the metaphysical baggage of phrases like “natural”, “material”, “supernatural”, “intelligent,” when formulating probabilistic descriptions of phenomena such as the fine-tuning of the universe and the origin of life. One can maintain that these remarkable phenomena are not explicable in terms of any accepted normative mechanisms which are known to us from everyday experience and scientific observation, and remain well within the realm of empirical science. However, whether fine-tuning and the origin of life are normative in the ultimate sense, and whether they are best explained by God or the multiverse, are entirely separate issues, which fall outside the domain of empirical science.
Only if you equate physical with stochastic process. The explanatory filter just filters out stochastic processes. But, if we’re free to call anything physical, then might as well call intelligence physical.
Anyways, there are a number of materialistic atheists who are supporters of ID, so it’s not obvious that ID has anything to do with gods. Or, call god physical, and you have materialism that is consistent with theism.
These definition games are mostly silliness. Best to stick with the hard math where definitions are unambiguous.
How does this show specified complexity is incorrect or that there is a problem with the concept?
It’s hard to apply quantum physics to cooking a pizza, but that doesn’t mean quantum physics is incorrect nor useless. In fact, most of science, and academic knowledge for that matter, is pretty useless in everyday life. Yet, it still seems valuable for specialized applications.
Say we have an example where it is difficult or impossible to apply specified complexity in a rigorous mathematical manner, and yet we easily seem to make a design inference. Why does this show there is a problem with specified complexity?
In everyday life I easily recognize other intelligent agents all around me and infer their causation from their effects. I never am explicitly calculating specified complexity when I do this. Yet, I don’t feel the need to call into question the logic and math of the explanatory filter.
Or, take my own field, computer science. I have rarely, if ever, needed to use what I learned throughout all my degrees in my everyday job as a software engineer. Especially the concepts that seem most interesting to me, such as algorithmic information theory, are actually inherently useless since they are uncomputable. Yet, that does not make any of it false nor imply there cannot be specialized ways to apply the concepts. For example, this practical application derived from AIT is pretty cool:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1412045
Hi BruceS,
Even an eternal universe would still require an explanation, if it possessed features pointing to an intelligence behind it. Robin Collins has an excellent discussion of the fine-tuning required for inflation to work, as well as the beauty of the laws of nature, in his paper, Universe or Multiverse? A Theistic Perspective (see sections V and VI).
Eric,
I’m continually surprised by how unfamiliar you are with Dembski’s writings and views. What you wrote above would not fly with him.
He explicitly states, regarding P(T|H):
He is thereby excluding intelligence from the category of “other material mechanisms”.
He is also on record saying this:
Dembski is firmly in the supernaturalist camp with respect both to human and divine intelligence.
Hi everyone,
The following discussion may be of interest to some readers:
Fine tuning and the multiverse (Physics Forums, March 8, 2019). It features an interview with David Deutsch (13 minutes).
Deutsch rejects the design hypothesis because he thinks it kicks the design problem up one level, but I don’t see why it would. It’s not at all clear to me that the designer of a universe would itself need to be fine-tuned. Why should it be?
Interestingly, Deutsch also rejects the multiverse hypothesis, on the grounds that in the vast majority of universes, the universe is only just good enough for observers to frame the question, “Why are we here?” In most cases, the universe should collapse almost immediately after the observers frame the question, because short-lived universes are vastly more likely than long-lived ones.
Deutsch himself prefers the hypothesis that unknown laws of physics, relating to emergent phenomena, can explain the appearance of fine-tuning.
One reader on the Physics Forum thread comes up with an analogy that’s highly pertinent to the foregoing discussion about puddles, on this thread:
Questions to ponder:
(i) does the unexpected beauty of the laws of physics in our universe constitute a strong argument for inferring design?
(ii) does the unexpected longevity (and size) of our universe constitute a strong argument for inferring design?
Thoughts?
If it has a probability, it is a stochastic process.
If you have a material entity that is not a stochastic process, it is not excluded.
Not the designer(s), but their realm of existence. Intelligence has requirements Vince. Have you ever thought about that? Our own requires something to be intelligent about, and attributes that need a nature that can sustain such attributes. So, if an intelligence is needed to “fine-tune” our universe so that our intelligence can develop, function, exist, and have something to be intelligent about, the same goes for an “upper-level” intelligence. There’s no way around this. How could an intelligence exist without some natura that makes it possible? Without anything to be intelligent about? Otherwise what would “intelligence” even mean? How could anybody claim, honestly, that their “model” for ID is scientific, and based on our own intelligence as exemplar, without considering that intelligence has requirements?
ID as presented now isn’t science because it has no testable hypotheses and isn’t falsifiable.
So what’s stopping you?
Eric,
By that odd reasoning, design has no probability. Oops.
That seems more like PSR which I think is a separate issue from fine tuning.
Thanks for the link to the paper.
It is true that the the mechanisms which generate universes must be capable of generating universes like ours. I don’t know if we know enough about those mechanisms to claim that is an existence of a type of fine tuning. Instead, perhaps something analogous to Deutsch’s unknown laws explanation will apply at this level instead of fine tuning. Of course, that would lead us back to PSR.
The beauty issue is something different. Is the beauty in the laws? Or is it in us, as a result of how we do science in a universe that made our evolution possible? That is another important issue, but it is not fine tuning. Or at least it is not a separate problem of fine tuning from the one that makes universes supporting beings like us possible.
I think you would find an undergrad text on philosophy of science helpful for understanding the issue of what constitutes science (the so-called demarcation problem).
Entropy has already pointed out the nature of scientific outputs and how they differ from those of math or ID.
In addition, successful science is practice of human communities. To be a successful scientific community, scientific norms of behaviour are followed. These include among others the Merton norms.
https://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2008/01/29/basic-concepts-the-norms-of-sc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms
Do you really not see that this is just the old God-of-the-gaps- argument again? A couple of hundred of years ago you could have used this argument to ‘demonstrate’ that lightning is improbable (because the physics and chemistry of the day couldn’t explain it) and therefore it must be designed. You would have been wrong then, so why would you not be wrong now?
Why do you assume that we have now finally reached the limits of our understanding of nature? Don’t you think that people a few hundreds of years into the future may have a much better and different understanding than we have now? That, after all, is the clear historical trend in the development of human knowledge. What makes you think we are now at the end of that trend?
You are making a classical logical error here:
If A, then B (if a mind, it can create arrangements and sequences)
B, therefore A (arrangements and sequences, therefore a mind was involved)
Nope.
Put your proposed mind on the test bed and we will see if it can create the arrangements and sequences of life. Then we would be doing some science.
Is that designer alive? If so, wouldn’t he have to live in a meta-universe? Would that meta-universe not have to be fine-tuned to allow the designer to be alive?
It is universes all the way up.
Good question. Let’s just start here. What was the problem addressed by the fine tuning argument again?
Absolutely!
But what if the Gap is real?
I asked this question on an atheist call-inTV show last December to Tracie Harris. I was as humble and meek as possible because it was not my intent to be my usual combative self. Tracie Harris is an ex-evangelical Christian turned atheist, so I especially wanted to talk to her when I called in.
I related this account by Astronaut Charles Duke who was one of the few men to ever walk on the moon:
Now one could be skeptical for many reasons, but Duke isn’t professional preacher trying to get TV air time, he’s a national hero, a retired Air Force general, a successful business man, an MIT graduate, a Naval Academy graduate, etc. etc. He now ministers to the outcasts of society by visiting prisons. By investing time reaching out to the outcasts of society, he’s living his life as if he really was visited by the Lord.
So I asked Tracie Harris, “If I were that blind girl who was healed, I would serve the Lord the rest of my life.” I also related the story of the Bling Beggar in John 9, which is a more severe account. I said I would serve the Lord the rest of my life if that happened to me. In a sense, that is a God-of-the-Gaps issue.
So I asked Tracie, if hypothetically she were in the position of the blind girl who got healed (and by way of extension the Blind Beggar), what she would do.
She was gracious enough to answer the question. She said, “no.” She said she would try to figure out the mechanism of how the blind were healed so that all blind people could be healed. I thanked her for her candor and cordial response. But her answer is not for me and it’s not adequate for a lot of people who don’t believe science plus “the right” political system can be the ultimate remedy to the human condition by ushering a Utopia (or dystopia depending on how on looks at it). I didn’t openly ridicule her answer, and she didn’t openly ridicule mine, and that was the end of the conversation. Lot’s of athiests tuning in sneered and ridiculed me on the internet for that exchange. That’s fine, but their ridicule didn’t describe a better alternative for me than the Christian God…
That said, atheists have said they would believe if there were testable predictions of God. There is a certain logic to that. I believe in the principles of a light switch because I can get it to operate on demand. I flip the switch up and it turns on a light, I flip the switch down and it turns off a light. We tend to believe what we can describe, predict, and control. Victor Stenger and others said they would believe in God if they could subject Him to experiments — that is to say they (in so many words) would believe in God if God would do what they demand in the lab when they want and how they want. In fact, why restrict it to the lab, how about the field? They would believe in God if they could tell God to show up and do their bidding when they want, and how they want, and how many times they want. Yes, there is a logic to that, but on some level that is in effect say they would believe in God if they themselves were greater than God. But if God is greater than they are, as a matter of principle, somewhat as Godel showed, it cannot be resolved to human comprehension, nor would it seem appropriate God would bow down to every demand by mere mortals for experimental proof. So if such a God exists, as a matter of principle, to accept that truth, one must be as a little child relative to an infinite God, because finite mortals cannot comprehend the infinite. Cantor did a rather good job showing that mathematically.
But with respect to the origin of life. At first we believe in spontaneous generation of insects, then after Redi’s experiment, it was reduced to belief in microbes, but after Pasteur’s experiment, it was reduced to one-or-a-few abiogenesis events on the Earth, but after more knowledge, it’s now reduced to hoping desperately for even a few bio-polymers on Earth in a vast Universe, and then of late, even more remote odds in multiverses. It seems the gaps are getting bigger. Besides what does the multiverse profit me? It might only serve as passing entertaining fiction/fact, but the amusement seems rather fleeting and ultimately meaningless at a personal level. But if the Christian God is real…
They are not pro-ID. They are pro-IDM & Discovery Institute. Big difference.
Berlinski isn’t pro-ID; he’s anti-Darwinism. Denton is pro-id, not pro-ID. James Tour isn’t pro-ID, he’s anti-Darwinian evolution & anti-Darwinism.
Were you aware of this EricMH, or was this hidden & unknown from you until now? Or do you disagree with my assessment & insist that any or all of those 3 is actually pro-ID?
Do you know about IDism’s univocal predication & the DI’s implied theology of imago Dei?
This is where EricMH goes off the rails & just doesn’t understand what he’s dripping in with ideological IDism. He’s one of the few IDists who thinks atheists (& even anti-theists, Eric?) can actually (not just DI-fake) be pro-ID.
No, accepting ID ‘theory’ isn’t possible for an atheist. This is understandable, Eric, once you realize & openly admit that ‘theism’ & ‘supernaturalism’ are the only suggested alternatives to ‘naturalism,’ as the founding father of the IDM Phillip Johnson explained.
You likewise can’t “remove the religion from ID,” as if Charles Thaxton didn’t have the imago Dei fully 100% in mind & heart when he came up with/coined the term ‘Intelligent Design’. Did you meet Thaxton, as I did EricMH, at the DI’s Summer Program?
This is a point at which every IDist seems to arrive when they’re getting pummeled on all sides, by theists & atheists. They then tend to start individualizing IDT, making it into their own ‘thing’ as if they are a ‘theorist’ in their own right & on par with Dembski, Behe, Meyer & Axe, adapting it for the moment’s argument that they are losing, trying to bend it away from what multiple leading IDists have mistakenly said, in order to try to save it from what it has become by this highly political Seattle ‘think tank’. I feel sad when I witness this happen because the unaccounted for shame of the DI is exposed in such moments, by sincerely seeking ‘students’ who they have trained to be ‘Revolutionaries!’ and yet who have come to actually disagree with the philosophical & moral basis upon which the DI is making its ideological arguments.
There’s really quite little a thinking person can do when ignorant individuals on ideological missions-to-convert use devious natural theology arguments and make statements like “It just seems like ID is science.” That person must grow out of IDism on their own. If a reminder about this along the way is good for them, so be it.
You don’t need to give up theism to properly reject IDism, EricMH. Be welcome to check-in again when you realize that.
Thank you for displaying how praying works:
A particular prayer in a particular church
Thank you Sal for the chance to acknowledge this
Omnipotent ophthalmologist
I don’t see how anyone can expect to discuss aspects of realms outside of our universe and experience, and try to define those parameters and meaning, using only our experiences of this world, and expect to say anything logical or meaningful at all.
Its like saying, well, if there is a God, where does their food come from.
Paul Nelson had good advice for me (though when he said it, it wasn’t directed as me specifically): “tearing someone else’s house down, isn’t the way to build your own house up.”
I think Specified Complexity, if it is good will be eventually vindicated in ID circles. I really don’t know many ID proponents who can even state succinctly what it is, whereas, at least qualitatively, and in some cases quantitatively we can say when something violates expected chemical and/or physical behavior. A lot of ID proponents now are coming from the quarters of Biochemistry and Cellular Biology — “violation of chemical/physical expectation” is a more simple framing of the improbability argument. It resonates with the new breed of ID proponents, whereas SC does not.
Given that many of the ID arguments deal with biological systems and the origin of life, I’m deferring to the language practitioners in the field understand. There are whispers in the ID community that they can’t get SC to improve their ID arguments. Same for the general application (or lack thereof) in the use of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
I think succinct and simple arguments as to why the following is designed, work best. If a Design argument can’t be readily applied to a system of simple dominoes or fair coins, why should we expect it to be of practical value in evaluating far more complex systems?
Hence, for a college-level course, at least in my version, I’m avoiding 2nd Law and Specified Complexity altogether. FWIW, I managed to get tentative approval to deliver my course at a small Bible College already.
You’re welcome DNA_jock. 🙂
The college-level course will be someone like a buffet because when I’ve given ID/Creation talks sometimes in the audience I’ll have simultaneously a freshman drama major in one seat and a PhD molecular biologist in another. It’s might be more helpful to provide materials that are appropriate for their background. And the computer will present to them a list of learning modules from which they can learn appropriate to their back ground.
Thankfully, I don’t have to author much of the material, as some of it is being provided for me by my colleagues.
This is one of the “DOMINOS problem” in abiogenesis stated by a physical organic chemist:
If the supernatural interacts with this Universe, it is part of this Universe.
Or asking where is the body of Jesus?
From who? God?
FWIW, if one rejects the considerations in my previous comment from the physical organic chemist, one could of course, go to the chemistry considerations that led Koonin to start invoking multiverses.
I personally think it’s nice, for completeness sake, to see how the estimates were derived. And afterall, theory agrees with observation. Put nucleobases, sugars, and phosphorous, and water and see what happens. Normative chemical expectation doesn’t result in anything resembling a linearly-readable genome as we know it.
So if other universes interact with this universe, they are part of this universe?
Thus, it is not possible to discover evidence of other universes.
Just for completeness, the problem of creating a somewhat linear genome from a soup of nucleobases and sugars was solved by the intelligently designed Blue Herron technology. They solved “the Dominos” problem for short strands of DNA (DNA oligos) which have to be intelligently stitched together.
The above problem described by the physical organic chemist was solved by an intelligently designed chemical process that involved a recipe of steps.
Doesn’t matter if the gap exists, the argument is fallacious anyway, that’s the point.
dazz,
How would you support this claim?
Not trying to be polemic here, but how will one know God (like a personal Christian God vs. a Deist God) exists except He works a miracle?
That seems like a completely unrelated question. God might prove himself to exist by showing up, like he purportedly did in the form of Jesus, and perform miracles, but turning water into wine wouldn’t show that life was designed or automatically fill the gaps in our knowledge of biology.
At any rate, the fact that you require miracles to vindicate your position is your problem, not ours. I know you think there are reasons to believe some aspects of nature were miraculous events, but I don’t think you ever showed that to be the case. It’s arguments from ignorance and complexity all the way down. Sorry, but gets old pretty quick.
We know the gaps are real. It’s the god that we never seem to find in any of them.
An interesting concept. I wonder if it might be applicable to the rest of the analysis.
If designers are physical, then there is a regress of designers. That’s probably obvious to you, once it’s pointed out. (In fact, Dembski has made much of it, insisting that, when design is the result of a physical process, the process itself must have been designed.) I suspect that you didn’t see the regress for yourself because you believe in a supernatural Creator of the Universe. And I suspect that Deutch did not see a supernatural Creator as a way out of the regress because he believes in Physics.
Fair Witness,
It’s the totality of the evidence from which the inference is made.
Sorry. Don’t have it in me.
Self-reference always gives rise to paradox (logical inconsistency). I don’t believe that David Wolpert provides exactly what I need here, but you might want to have a look at his “Constraints on physical reality arising from a formalization of knowledge” (2018), an update of his “Physical limits of inference” (2008).
Never, ever have I made an argument about intelligent agency. What I have pointed out, quite a number of times over the past 20 years, is that psychologists and ethologists regard intelligence as a hypothetical construct — not something that is physically real.
I felt Koonin (not a Creationist, an anti-ID proponent as far as I can tell) argued that life is not well explained by expected behaviors of chemistry and physics, but rather a massive violation of expected behaviors of atoms.
Thus, abiogenesis qualifies as a miracle, imho, in at least the statistical sense. Whether it qualifies as a miracle in the theological sense, is a separate question.
I provided one example of such an analyses at the molecular level. There are others such analyses available, and some that are implicit in the mainstream literature.
But, if such analyses won’t suffice, what will suffice to show origin of life is a miracle? If the answer is, “nothing will suffice short of me hopping in a time machine and seeing it with my own eyes”, I respect that, and I’d say on some level it’s commendable to have such a high standard of proof.
Is it far to say won’t believe God created life unless He shows up to say, “I did it?” I commend your skepticism. But I’m just trying to clarify what standard of evidence would make the God-explanation an acceptable one to you.
Better yet, if you don’t like the analysis, and since you’re a DNA_Jock, I’d welcome an alternative analysis describing the odds of forming a circular or linear chromosome or genome from a primordial soup. If that’s too general a question, you can describe the minimal requirements in terms of concentrations, chemicals, and forbidden contaminants in the requisite mix.
The first question is what is the role of water!
There is something to be said for the “Water Paradox”
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-water-based-life.html
Ah, yes, a fortuitous events needed to make life that utilizes water.
Synthetically produced? As in, intelligently designed. But even then, that’s not quite enough by miles, maybe light years.
for completeness, here is the diagram :
From the abiogenesis hall of fame:
https://www.facebook.com/138681233223461/photos/a.138683993223185/619160918508821/?type=3
So if we have the other 4 kinds in solution:
alpha-D-deoxyribofuranose
alpha-D-deoxyribopyranose
beta-D-deoxyribopyroanose
linear-D2-deoxyribose
wouldn’t it be unlikely to form a “genome” the way we know it spontaneously where there is uniformity with beta-D-deoxyribofuranose? We could a apply a simple binomial distribution on the generous assumption we have some sort of linearly-readable genome right? How about 1000 bases?
Oh, that would be something like (12.5%)^1000 which is some outrageously remote number that would dwarf Doug Axe’s statistics.
The answer is, if you want to do it scientifically, you need a scientific theory for miracles. No need for a time machine, or stuff like that, that’s a classic creationist misrepresentation of science. You need a model that explains the data and makes testable predictions. All you have right now is lots of wishful thinking and a bunch of recurrent fallacies.
But you know all this already.
How can you have a scientific theory for miracles as a matter of principle? To have a scientific theory you need mechanisms that are repeatable when you want and how you want and how many times you want. If that is the only mechanism you’ll accept, then even if a miracle really happened which is outside of science, you’d never accept it.
I’m just pointing out the that the approach to what you believe is true will fail as a matter of principle if miracles are outside of scientific description. I believe (as in can’t prove) a miracle outside of scientific description is the cause of life.
You’d also need a rigorous definition of “miracle” and an objective way to test if particular observed phenomenon qualified.
Ain’t gonna happen.
That’s why I said that the fact that your position requires miracles is your problem, not ours. There are many other gaps in our scientific knowledge, but for some not unknown reason, you guys are only fixated on origins related issues. If you think the origin of life and the universe, for some reason, are better explained by some epistemic doctrine other than science, make your case, but what you do, in my opinion, is to muddy the waters, pretending that you have reasons to believe that miracles are proper scientific explanations. In short, you’re lying to your students. And once again, you know that, since you admit it’s impossible in principle to devise a scientific theory of miracles.
I will keep on believing that those are mysteries for science to unravel, for good reasons, I think. Call it scientism if you will, but your guys have had thousands of years to explain nature and they have failed miserably. If you want to replace science, come up with something better, but rehashing the same old crap (tornado-in-junkyard, for instance) over and over again, simply won’t cut it. Sorry
But Sal, you need to take into account the different ways the base could be attached to the sugar (9, 9, 15 and 6 for A, C G, & T respectively). That’s
12.5% / 9 x 12.5% / 6 = 0.029% for an A:T base pair and
12.5% / 9 x 12.5% / 15 = 0.012% for a C:G base pair.
You cannot even make a 42-mer of dsDNA without surpassing the UPB!
If you’re right, this is a true show-stopper for abiogenesis. You should publish this.
But what I’m teaching is for a religion/philosophy class, like I said in the OP!
Like from the very title:
and first paragraph
Now, you may dislike religion, but at least what you dislike can’t be based on me saying that my ultimate belief in God is necessarily a scientific one. What is scientific is that “a cell comes from a pre-existing cell [except by some unexplained exceptional mechanism]”.