From Kirk Durston at Contemplations:
There are countless people who use the following rationale to justify why there was no need for an intelligent creator behind life – evolution has had a near-infinite number of trials in which to create the full diversity of life, including its molecular machines, molecular computers, and digitally encoded genomes. Here, we will take an opportunity to examine these points more closely.
In other scientific disciplines, the first step one must take before figuring out a solution, is to establish the boundary conditions within which a problem must be solved. Since we should require the same standard of scientific rigour from evolutionary biology, let us calculate an extreme upper limit for the total number of evolutionary trials one could expect over the history of life.
…
Obviously, in order for evolution to find any RS7 sequences, 10^43 trials is woefully inadequate – by 57 orders of magnitude. As I have shown elsewhere, RS7 requires 332 bits to encode, well within the range of what an intelligent mind can produce. Therefore, what options should we examine? More.
Durston suggests, as option 3 of 3: “novel protein family sequences were encoded by an intelligent mind.”
Here I (O’Leary for News) must pause to express doubt that any line of evidence whatever would make such a conclusion acceptable to a large proportion of academics. It has nothing to do with evidence.
It’s fine to go ahead and add more evidence, indeed, that’s essential. But it is essential mainly for the intellectual well-being of people who are prepared to let evidence matter. In the age of the war on falsifiability and attempts to criminalize dissent from climate orthodoxy, it’s a safe bet that evidence no longer plays the role it used to.
Increasingly, one must be prepared for this outcome: Yes, we can demonstrate it. No, that doesn’t matter. The fix is in and people need their fix.
See also: Kirk Durston: Information decrease falsifies essential Darwinian prediction
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