8/08/2005

The American Spectator has pretty well nailed the Roberts thing. Go there, it's short and sweet. And while you are over there read this thread on Darwin vs Intelligent Design. There's some people on both sides that are a lot smarter than I thought (I know, consider the source).

- Quoted: "If we wrote a program to run on a supercomputer that would generate random strings 22 characters long, and our supercomputer could run through a trillion tries every second, the odds would still be against producing this exact sequence by chance in 20 billion years. The fact that it's very improbable to produce this precise sequence by chance is another way of saying, in information theory, that it is highly complex."

You are making the same mistake Fermi made about cyclotrons generating enough enriched U235 in our lifetime. If a single computer was used (or cyclotron), yes. But what if I used 10 billion computers? Can I not deliver that permutation within but a couple of years? I think you have to answer yes. When you consider that in nature, cells don't live in singularity, but in the trillions each possible of developing a minute flaw during mitosis then change can come about rapidly.
Like I said, really good stuff.

No comments: