Thu 9/14/2023 11:35 AM
Hi John—
Your critique of the Dawkins weasel demonstration found its way to
me, and
I agree with it entirely. I offered my own critique
in Undeniable (p198-200). You hit the nail on the head! (I highlighted the red)
Regrettably, even solid refutations of evolutionary arguments like
this don’t seem to get their proponents to rethink their position. I’ve become
convinced that this is because the root problem is spiritual, not scientific or
intellectual.
Best regards,
Doug Axe
Douglas Axe, PhD
Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology
Professor of Computational Biology
Co-Director of Stewart Science Honors Program
School of Science, Technology & Health
Biola University
October 3, 2023
John, I think you were spot
on.
Well put.
I think it's incredibly
dumb to take Dawkins' position as fact or even possible.
Jason Cardova, PhD,
Biochemistry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program
In chapter 3 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, biologist
Richard Dawkins gave the following introduction to the program, referencing the
well-known infinite monkey theorem.*
“I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough
time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the
works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time.
Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to
produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence
'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving
him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital)
letters, and a space bar.1 How long will he take to write this one
little sentence?”
“Mak(ing) it relatively easy” is only a small part of Dawkins’
unscientific extrapolation from a short sentence to “the complete works of
Shakespeare,” much less what Sir Arthur Eddington originally said, as I explain
below.
How lazy of Richard Dawkins to fail to look up the author of his
monkey business. It was Sir Arthur
Eddington.
In 1928, British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington presented a
classical illustration of chance in his book, The Nature of the
Physical World: “If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a
typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an
army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write
all the books in the British Museum.”
This is nonsense compounding nonsense. And yet my high
school math teacher presented this proposition to his classes in the
1960’s.
First, an “army of monkeys” wouldn’t be very interested in hitting
typewriter keys repeatedly. There is nothing for them to gain in so
doing.
Second, those who did hit the keys would quickly get to the end of
the line, and have no concept of returning the carriage to type the second
line.
Third, those very few who somehow overcame the first and second
hurdles, repeatedly, would find that the paper was ejected from the carriage,
and they are hopelessly unable to replace the first page with a fresh sheet of
paper.
Fourth, we will never get to the fourth problem of exhausting the
ink in the typewriter ribbons because the “army of monkeys” would have
defecated on or otherwise ruined every typewriter.
Fifth, Sir Arthur Eddington never began to consider the statistics
of monkeys “selecting” 1 out of approximately 100 different keys, counting
upper and lower case of all letters, numbers, and punctuation
marks. A page of an average book has 250 – 300 words.
(https://hotghostwriter.com/blogs/blog/novel-length-how-long-is-long-enough)
*Finally, the largest army in the world is the People’s Liberation
Army of Communist China, with over 2,000,000 troops. This is
hardly “infinite” in number. (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/)
The average word has 6.47 letters. (https://capitalizemytitle.com/character-count/100-characters/)
Using the lower value of 250 words, times 6.47 letters is equal to
1,617 characters in a page.
1/100 to the 1,617th power is 10-3,234,
for just one page, much less “all the books in the British Museum.”
“we just think of one chance in 10 to the 40th power”
as “impossible”. – Richard Dawkins, (The Blind Watchmaker, page 142)
Emil Borel, a famous statistician, defined “impossible” as an event with a probability of 10-50 or less.
https://owlcation.com/stem/Borels-Law-of-Probability
Calculations: (105 marbles/km)3 =
1015 marbles per cubic km
1015 marbles/cubic
km x 1.083 x 1012 cubic kilometers/earth =1.083 x 1027
marbles to fill one earth sphere the size of earth.
1050 marbles /
1.083 x 1027 marbles/earth size sphere = 9.234 x 1023
earth-size spheres full of marbles, which is to say
923,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 (923,400 billion billion) earth-size spheres
full to search and find the unique marble on your first and only try.
Personally, I would call it impossible to find that unique marble in just one
earth-sized sphere full of them.
We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in
its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just
as before ... it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random
error – 'mutation' – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense
phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however
slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A
WEASEL.
Note: Darwinian evolution
has no “target.” It follows random
mutations without any “target”whatsoever.”
First Dawkins makes statistical claims that are nonsense. Next he “simplifies” the keyboard he is using
to provide hypothetical evidence of Darwinism.
Now he assigns a “target” which is non-existent for any random mutation,
or any computer program intended to mimic random mutations followed by
*selection*. This isn’t science, it’s wordplay for the naïve and gullible.
Generation 02: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P
Generation 10: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P
Generation 20: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL
Generation 30: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL
Generation 40: METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL
Generation 43: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Dawkins continues:
“The exact time taken by the computer to reach the target doesn't
matter. If you want to know, it completed the whole exercise for me, the first
time, while I was out to lunch. It took about half an hour. (Computer
enthusiasts may think this unduly slow. The reason is that the program was
written in BASIC, a sort of computer baby-talk. When I rewrote it in Pascal, it
took 11 seconds.) Computers are a bit faster at this kind of thing than
monkeys, but the difference really isn't significant. What matters is the
difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and
the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take
to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step
selection: about a million million million million million years. This
is more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far
existed.”
So much for Dawkins’ specious argument in defense of Darwinism,
which he proudly claimed, “… made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist.” (http://UncommonDescent.com) Twenty-six capital letters plus the space
bar equals twenty-seven. Twenty-seven to the twenty-eighth power equals ten to
the fortieth different possible combinations, of which we seek only one
specifically. Dawkins admits his definition of “impossible” is 1
chance in 10 to the 40th power*. (*The Blind Watchmaker,
by Richard Dawkins, page 142) This is not for all of Shakespeare’s works,
but for one short sentence, and even then, on a dramatically altered keyboard,
not of fifty possible keys, lower case, and fifty more keys, upper case, but
for only twenty-six keys, all upper case.
Of critical but neglected importance is the fact that for
“selection” to occur, the intermediary produced by the random mutation MUST
confer a “selective advantage” for the host organism, otherwise it will be
lost. It is therefore incumbent on the advocate for Darwinism to
demonstrate, in each case, what that improvement is and how it operates, every
single time, without exception. “Selection” requires no
less. This is easily done when copying short sentences, but not so
easily done when originally constructing over 20,000 proteins in humansa,
the largest of which is titin, at 38,138b amino acid residues
in length. 1 out of 20 amino acids “selected” consecutively 38,138 times has a
probability of 1 chance in 1049,618. This is for only one
protein. Calculating for chirality, i.e. the “selection” of L amino acids
instead of D amino acidsc and all peptide bonds rather than the
equally probable non-peptide bondsd reduces the probability of
original naturalistic synthesis to 1 chance in 1072,578. Twenty
thousand more proteins to go! Extrapolation from simple adaptation, to the
evolution of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to all living organisms
is clearly a statistical impossibility.
“All improvement (in a living cell) is
therefore, in the first place lucky, which is why people mistakenly think of
Darwinism as a theory of chance. But
mistaken they are.” – Climbing Mount Improbable, page 82
(Our
‘maximum amount of luck’) is one chance in 10 to the 20th power. –
Blind Watchmaker, page 146
b - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4889822/
c - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480
d - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480 ]
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