The fine tuning argument looks at the
probabilities of the universe happening by chance. We are going to be looking
more narrowly at this at first, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the
Theory of Macro Evolution as it applies to biology on this planet.
Even
though it’s called a theory, the theory of Evolution is widely accepted in
science circles and is no longer really viewed as up for debate.
I think
this is unfortunate, as while some parts of the theory seem to be clearly true,
there are leaps taken that seem unsupported by the numbers behind it.
therefore, we are going to be looking at a simplified, strengthened towards pro evolution argument, and showing that while it may be able to work at some level, you hit a point where it just becomes ridicoulous to say that it's by evolution.
In our lifetime, we have seen small scale evolution happen in nature, and in the laboratory
(references needed https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-examples-of-evolution-observed-in-the-lab),
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolution-at-different-scales-micro-to-macro/examples-of-microevolution/,
https://www.businessinsider.com/examples-of-evolution-happening-right-now-2015-2.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-animals-keep-evolving-into-
crabs/#:~:text=Carcinization%20is%20an%20example%20of,among%20very%20closely%20related%20animals.
https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
Taken together with the patterns we can see in the fossil record, this makes it seem ridiculous to many people that there is still even debate and discussion on this topic.
While we intend to briefly look at the fossil record later, we need to
talk about the problems, We think that there is a lot more trouble with this problem than is generally given credit too, especially for larger size proteins, and so we want to look at when you multiply small and large numbers together,
separately, and have different types of sieves to filter them.
Mutations act as a seed for a random number generator, and natural
selection is supposed to help sift the answers into ones that survive and
reproduce.
There is
good evidence that this happens and works on a small scale regularly. It’s
like, if you had a random card generator, that picked cards at random, and then
selected for the largest cards. It would be easy from those two variables to
get hands that were predominantly face-card heavy, and were more likely to be
sets and runs in poker. That works great if you only need a few cards to
make your set.
NEED EXAMPLES OF DIFFERENT UNLIKELY THINGS COMBINING TOGETHER.
Now some people say that just because something has a really low probability of happening, that it doesn't mean anything. Like say we got a hand of cards that went from a to king in order, all in the same suit, it seems really unlikely to come about by co-incindence. but someone can (and I have seen argue), that it's the same if you happen to just put a 5 of a different suit at random in there, or change several of the cards etc. that every combination is equally unlikely to happen. and in some ways that is true, if it doesn't matter what your trying to go for. but say, that you are trying to go for a protein that can strengthen the muscles ina birds wing and that there's only 200 or so variations that would work for it. in that case, if there's 5 hundred billion options that you are looking at, those 200 variations stand out.
But say you were playing a game of poker where the minimum viable hand
size was 16 cards, and anything less than that, or that didn’t have the right
cards in the 16 were tossed. (check numbers later) If there is only a 50%
chance that it will continue adding cards every two cards, and it needs
to be a recognizable pattern of cards when all sixteen are played out, it would
be much more difficult to get a sixteen card Royal Flush in those
circumstances, or even a Straight flush.
Or to make it look more like DNA, Say that you needed a specific
alternating sequence of heads and tails to get the message that you were trying
to send, and that your sequence was 16 flips long. (DNA is base 4, and so 16
coin flips would basically correspond to the probability (before any
complications) of an 8 piece DNA strand. On any individual try you
are unlikely to get the response you needed, but, if you do it say 65 000
times, it wouldn't be surprising to get the response we just mentioned.
Now let's increase the DNA strand to 80, or a 120. As you go up in
length, it Naturally gets harder, and we could probably see it being 20 or even
150 times harder as you go from 8 to 80 or a 120 respectively. It's actually
over a Million trillion trillion times harder to reach the 80 bit
sequence, and a further million trillion times harder to reach the 120 from
there. Exponential numbers go up a lot farther and faster than the brain is
expecting. These would not be unusually large numbers for a protein
string. (the Average size of a protein in humans that I got from the
internet is 430 bits long).
I am going to try and make a steel man argument, ( like straw man but the opposite), and show how, at least in some cases, evolution is an incredibly poor quality scientific guess about everything came together).
At Say 350 bits long, Assuming 8 x10 to the 32 cells on
earth* (I took the estimated total that I saw online for total number of cells
on earth and multiplied it by 20 to be
safe. see reference https://www.quora.com/How-many-cells-are-on-earth#:~:text=Assuming%20500%20trillion%20cells%20per,actual%20number%20is%20likely%20more.)
, instantly filling the planet from (I heard that it took the earth 4 billion years to cool enough for life, we'll assume 10 billion years ago.) Then assume that every
minute each one of these cells underwent a random mutation and tried to output
random DNA protein sequences 350 bits in length (I've heard that cells can put out 250 at a time, so lets assume 2000)and that they never stop, tire or die out. Then Assume 5 liveable planets
per every single solar system and multiply it by the total believed number of stars in the
universe, which is thought to be 200 billion trillion stars. (then times that by 50 just in case we are off). Finally, there are some protein sequences that can be built in multiple different ways, and that occasionally happens, so lets take a 30% off the total odds against getting this 350 bit string, because of the permutations. You get Roughly 8x10 to the 32 (for cells on the earth) 5.256e+15 (for the 10 billion years)1000 times a minute for attempted protein synthesis, 5 for every star having multiple producing planets (which I think is a truly ridicoulous assumption), times 10 trillion trillion (for every star in the known universe times 50). (putting some of these to the ten numbers
back into "normal" numbers to give a sense of scale) you are
getting pretty close to something. times ten to the 70 which is a really
Really big number, but which is still less than (please check me here as well) one in a trillion
trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion
trillion of happening by chance. (3.682 times ten to the 210 in scientific
format) And that's 70 bits smaller than the average size, which means the
average sized protein is actually aprox. a trillion trillion trillion trillion
trillion trillion trillion times less likely than the 350 bit. At that point,
we can say that we are off by over 10, 000, or even a million on a couple of
our estimates on this, and we are still extremely extremely unlikely to see the
majority of protein synthesis to come about by chance.
I should also mention that there are several issues that make DNA protein synthesis less likely ( look up email from ashley, reference some), and there is almost no issues that I am aware of that make DNA protein synthesis more likely, except if a larger DNA molecule was almost identical to a smaller DNA molecule, and just needed a couple of transcription errors. (where it repeats the whole thing over). but in that case, to prove my point, we would just need to look at a larger DNA molecule where that is not the case.
Therefore while small scale DNA proteins and changes might sometimes
occasionally come about by chance, saying that all of the DNA in proteins for
humans came about by chance seems ridiculously unlikely (talk more
about this later. giving sharpshooter example). It's actually supposed to
be a lot less likely than this, honestly, because I haven't covered all of the
complexities involved in making a human protein. Then by default we are often
looking for an intelligent designer cooking the books so to speak, to make our
Extremely unlikely chances happen. (but wait, some of you will probably
mention, what happens if we are just in a multiverse where every possible
option is taken, then, no matter how unlikely, there would actually be billions
and trillions of earths where life formed. An interesting and unusual argument,
and one we'll likely try to look at later on). In the meantime, a fairly
common objection I've seen raised when I try to bring up the arguments against
all DNA coming about by chance is that we clearly see common ancestry in the
fossil record, and so it must have all come together by chance from a common
ancestor, and so it must have still happened somehow and maybe were just really
wrong about the probabilities of the math.
First off, we could be quite wrong about the probabilities of the
math, and the numbers just get so big, that it still seems incredibly unlikely
to be explained by chance. Second, the fossil record is actually a lot
squirrely and less clearly for evolution than usually claimed. (Need
reference of book I read talking about this, I cons of Evolution maybe some other articles
too).
But disregarding that, the big point we want to make about the few fossil
records that do exist that clearly show multiple similarities between different
species is that there is another, legitimate explanation. Builders can build a
bunch of houses in an area and reuse the blueprints or features in one house
when building the next one beside it, but it's very false to say; that just
because they clearly have similarities in their building code, that they
are descended by chance from one common master building. In the same way,
if there is an intelligent designer (say energy being aliens), that was
drafting through different versions of life on earth, they might well take
versions of working models of previous life that they had, and reuse existing
designs in the new models of mammals etc. that they are making. I am not
saying that all life changes everywhere are instances of design, just that some
of them seem much more likely to be, and that it doesn't automatically mean
chance, just because you see a repetitive design used in multiple areas like
the bat wing, the blue? whale (crash course video reference) fin and the human
hand.
350 DNA sequence
5,260,135,901,548,373,507,240,989,882,880,128,665,550,339,802,823,173,859,498,280,903,068,732,154,297,080,822,113,666,536,277,588,451,226,982,968,856,178,217,713,019,432,250,183,803,863,127,814,770,651,880,849,955,223,671,128,444,598,191,663,757,884,322,717,271,293,251,735,781,376
70%
3,682,095,131,083,861,455,068,692,918,016,090,065,885,237,861,976,221,701,648,796,632,148,112,508,007,956,575,479,566,575,394,311,915,858,888,078,199,324,752,399,113,602,575,128,662,704,189,470,339,456,316,594,968,656,569,789,911,218,734,164,630,519,025,902,089,905,276,215,046,963.2
