On an Unsavory Accounting
Numbers Don’t Lie
Thursday night found me resisting sleep with the remote. They’ve syndicated Magnum P.I. again. While mustachioed men in hot pants will keep me awake, I wasn’t in the mood.
I drop in on TBN periodically, feigning fair balance. That evening, I gently put down the remote to catch the last few minutes of Creation in the 21st Century. A very diligent Dr. Carl Baugh and his assuredly expert guest paced the stage around a varied and thoroughly low-caliber array of “scientific” visual aids. Hands waved, feet shuffled, and eyes bulged on cue. “How can it be any more obvious that the flagellum was designed?”
Guest Stooge offered this, my favorite argument of the evening:
- 20 base pairs of amino acids can be arranged in on the order of 10E260 possible configurations.
- The universe is 20 billion years, or on the order of 10E17 seconds, old.
- 10E260 / 10E17 = 10E243 = the number of amino acid permutations required per second since the beginning of time to assemble a single 20-base-pair protein.
- Therefore, evolutionary biologists make fools of themselves to assert that even simple proteins evolved randomly. Any reasonable person can see that there is a Designer hard at work.
By the same argument, ages should pass before your Uncle Sal fleeces you in a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em. There are 752,538,150 possible ways to deal two cards from a deck of 52. There are 2,118,760 possible combinations of five cards from the remaining 50 cards. At the rate of one hand a second, you’d spend about 50 million years inhaling cigar smoke and drinking flat beer before losing your last chip. Those numbers don’t matter, obviously, because a winning hand must only be better than any other hand at the table. That might be a pair of queens or a straight. It needn’t be a royal flush.
The analogy isn’t without its flaws, but the point is that I can come up with an apparently sound mathematical argument that’s built on faulty logic, too. Natural selection doesn’t suggest that a 20-base-pair protein materialized from purely random processes. Rather, primative successes created shortcuts through the enormous domain of possible iterations, giving rise, over time and after several iterations, to greater and greater complexity. The successes didn’t arise from realization of the most perfect arrangement of amino acids, rather the most successful at the time. That very likely involved more than one working combination, and thus a diverse soup of proteins would form.
I might consider such obviously ignorant proselytizing quaint, since I don’t expect many sinners watch TBN, i.e. Dr. Baugh is preaching to the choir. But the choir’s furiously busy singing the praises of Intelligent Design, lobbying to effectively cripple even further what passes for education in the U.S. At least Uncle Sal’s only taking your money.
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