If you want to talk about people commenting outside their feild of expertise, I would have to ask what business Darwin- who had no idea whatsoever about DNA or the awesome specified complexity of the genetic code- had in making sweeping proclamations about how life all came about? He didnt even know what life fundamentally WAS! To use the “outside his feild” argument that some are applying to Ulam, why was ol’ Chucky qualified to speak at all on the liklihood of self-organizing human biological complexity? Without knowledge of the genome, he literally had NO clue what he was even talking about!

As MANY skeptics have pointed out, the liklihood of unguided forces creating even the first self-replicating information processor- never mind all of human biological complexity- is barely even worth mentioning in a finite universe- and yet we are all just supposed to accept this hooey as unquestionable FACT with no actual duplicatable evidence that it ever really happened the way these blowhards GUESS it did .

Where ARE these imaginary self-organized self replicating proto-information processors? Show me one!Do they still POOF themselves into existence today? Or did they stop doing that before humans came along to be able to observe this alleged phenomenon? The very foundation of naturalistic theory literally doesnt even exist!

Evolutionary true-believers become irritated when “non-biologists” point out the mathematical and probabalistic problems with their theories, because that’s the 800 lb pink gorilla sitting on the living room couch that we are all supposed to just ignore. That works for people who accept things just because they sound good, but it’s a little hard to do for people who ask questions.

To those who think that Stan Ulam is unqualified to make such statements because he is “outside of his feild”, I would just have to say that anybody who could model and calculate the hydrocodes for the original H-bomb using ENIAC-era computers, is probably mathematically skilled enough to have a few insights on probability. If Ulam isnt qualified to speak on math, then who the heck is?

Regarding gpuccio’s resounding intellectual smack-down in comment # 33 of gib, I would just like to say thanks for driving a stake through the heart ( again ) of that tired old “deck of cards” argument. My God! That thing is like Count Dracula! No matter how many times you kill it, it just seems to keep coming back. I dont know if it’s the WORST argument that darwinists use ( they have so many candidates for that honor ), but it’s surely right up there in the top five worst.

Obviously it’s not enough that the cards come up in ANY order! I mean, whoopty-doo- I throw 52 cards on the floor and create random,complex information. How is that supposed to be analagous to life? Extrapolate this crap metaphore out to the human genome and you get billions of lines of random code? What is that supposed to accomplish functionality-wise? As you say, information has to be both complex AND specific for it to be relevant.

If I hear that deck of cards thing one more time by one more know-it-all darwinist, I swear, I am going to just beat myself in the head with my keyboard until I am unconscious, because I can’t take it anymore! Argh!

Perhaps PvM would do us the honor of reviewing Haldane’s Dilemma and commenting on the reasonableness of the parameters used by Haldane and then by Remine. That appears much more important than Ulam’s results. I would be very surprised to see evidence for thousands let alone millions of mutations sufficient to show Blind Watchmaker evolution.

In this report, we shall present an abbreviated account of calculations performed by us in the mid 1960′s. These calculations were preliminary and intended merely as the zeroth approximation to the problem concerning rates of evolution-a process which we have here severely stylized and enormously oversimplified. A mention of the results of such calculations in progress at that time was made at a meeting in 1966 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia by one of us. The discussion there, as reported in the proceedings of the meeting, was rather frequently misunderstood and the impression might have been left that the results somehow make it extremely improbable that the standard version of the survival-of-the-fittest mechanism leads to much too slow a progress. What was really intended was indications from our computations-simple minded as they were-that a process involving only mitosis, in absence of sexual reproduction, would be indeed much too slow. However, and most biologists realize it anyway, the Darwinian mechanism together with mixing of genes accelerate enormously the rate of acquiring new “favorable” characteristics and leave the possibility of sufficiency of the orthodox ideas quite open.

PvM’s objections again misses the point (or tries to hide it) that Ulam’s later paper actually affirmed his earlier results for non-sexual reproduction.

“I think you are misreading the Panda’s Thumb entry. When PvM says “I do not have access to the original proceedings”, I believe he is referring to the 1966 Wistar monographs.”

Hello there Mr. larrycranston,

If you read my posting in reference to this you would see that I make exactly the same claim.

You also wrote:
“I submit to you again that Dr. Dembski and/or his colleague misunderstood the 1966 work [...]“

And again I ask, how could you be so certain about any kind of alleged misunderstanding when neither you or that panda guy has the source readily available for verification? Do you really believe that the 1966 meetings were actually that amenable to Darwin?

You then write:

“[...] and were apparently unaware of the later clarification.”

Ah, so if there was a need for a clarification on the part of Ulam (four years later in 1970), then Dembski or any other subsequent Darwin dissenter should not be faulted for a so-called misreading that was perpetrated and caused by the same author four years earlier. Therefore, the onus fell on Ulam for failing to expound on the misleading details, for which he felt obliged to illuminate further in 1970, and not fellow darwin dissenters who had to wait four years for a clean-up PR explanation.

But enough with Ulam. Dembski also mentioned Niles Bohr. Did Bohr also recant in likewise manner, or should he be hauled away in the “anti-science crackpot” wagon?

JPCollado: I think you are misreading the Panda’s Thumb entry. When PvM says “I do not have access to the original proceedings”, I believe he is referring to the 1966 Wistar monographs. Did you think PvM was referring to the source document for the quote I provided?

Which part of “The discussion there, as reported in the proceedings of the meeting, was rather frequently misunderstood and the impression might have been left that the results somehow make it extremely improbable that the standard version of the survival-of-the-fittest mechanism leads to much too slow a progress.” (italics mine) is so difficult to understand?

I submit to you again that Dr. Dembski and/or his colleague misunderstood the 1966 work and were apparently unaware of the later clarification.

So why doesn’t some biologist, ANY biologist, step up and show the world that these two non-biologists were/ are wrong?

Complaining about their expertise is not a refutation of what was said.

ONE biologist, just ONE, needs to step up and demonstrate a series of accumulating mutations leading to the construction of novel protein machinery with a useful, and therefor selectively advatageous, function.

It only takes ONE biologist to refute those two non-biologists.

I take it that one hasn’t been born yet…

Mayr comments on the 1966 Wistar conference. He notes the spread and speciation of sparrows in the western hemisphere since 1850s compared to the freshwater fairy shrimp (Triops cancriformis) that has existed for 180 to 200 million years with little change.

In problem EVE with sexual reproduction, the acquisition rate appeared to be exponential if the initial population were large enough. But with a small population, more of the same mutations were held in common by the parents. This caused the rate to change from an exponential to a “quadratic” and eventually to a linear one when most mutations were common to the majority of the population. The problem EVE-PQ involved approximating this number (our formula for v).

The advantage of preferential mating over random mating gave an initially pronounced increase in the acquisition rate, but this was soon offset by the smallness of the population. In effect, as more mutations were held in common, the range of the distribution of mutations became narrow. After that the preferential mating was not much different from the uniform one.

The EVE-POS problem (where we kept a history of the mutations) gave us a measure of the distribution of mutations as a function of their age. It showed that most of the mutations initially acquired by one individual were lost in subsequent matings. This caused a redefinition of the probability a in computing the expected number of mutations held in common