Stone Mason
New member
In looking at today's BEL topic it pointed me to the http://kgov.com/did_life_evolve_0 Did life Evolve link. On the page it allows you to download a program that attempts to get the letters of the alphabet in sequence and it shows that it should take about 1.95 x10^24 years to accomplish the task with 100,000 attempts every second. (That is 26^26/365/24/60/60/100,000, but that isn't correct, it should be 26!/365/24/60/60/100,000 which is 1.28x10^14 years. That is still a really long time though. But for now lets assume that the bigger number is correct.) But there is a flaw in the reasoning which is applying a singular process to something that is fundamentally a parallel process.
For instance if you ran 1000 computers on the same task you would reduce the time to 1.95 x 10^24/1000 = 1.95 x10^21 years. Its still a big big number but as you can see the more computers you throw at the problem the faster it comes up with the right answer.
Doing some fast looking around the net, you can see that there is about 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of water on the planet and that under optimal conditions that there can be about 1,000,000,000 single cell animals in a gallon of sea water. For simplicity lets chop that down to 1,000,000 on average, and that they reproduce once an hour. So how many years would it take for those cells to do a mutation that would create the 26 letter sequence.
1 Million x 326 million trillion x24 reproductions a day x 365 days = 2.83 x10^30. This means that it would take approximately 0.0217 seconds to hit the 26 letters in sequence.
Additionally the above example was just using cells. That is not really good because to get life started you would need to have self reproducing molecules first. So really you would need to change that from 1 million single celled animals in a gallon of seawater to 1.266 x 1026 molecules in a gallon of sea water. Now the bulk of that would be water, so lets just say that only 1 part per trillion is an organic-ish molecule that reduces the number down to 1.266x 10^14 per gallon. However the chemical reactions will be much more frequent on average then once an hour. But for the sake of being really conservative lets just say they have 10 reactions per hour. Cranking through the math it comes out to 1.266x10^9 times faster then in the above example.
Now the smallest self replicating molecule known is 32 peptides long. But there are only 4 letters in the sequence so that would also be faster since 32^4 is 1.84x 10^19 which makes this 3.3^17 times faster to reach than having to do the whole alphabet which could as we saw above be done in under 1/200th of a second.
So what does all of this mean? The experiment that Bob is proposing is based on a bad premise, i.e. that all of this stuff has to happen serially, not in parallel.
While researching some of the basics for this post I stumbled upon the following web site that goes into this kind of math in much more detail.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
For instance if you ran 1000 computers on the same task you would reduce the time to 1.95 x 10^24/1000 = 1.95 x10^21 years. Its still a big big number but as you can see the more computers you throw at the problem the faster it comes up with the right answer.
Doing some fast looking around the net, you can see that there is about 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 gallons (326 million trillion gallons) of water on the planet and that under optimal conditions that there can be about 1,000,000,000 single cell animals in a gallon of sea water. For simplicity lets chop that down to 1,000,000 on average, and that they reproduce once an hour. So how many years would it take for those cells to do a mutation that would create the 26 letter sequence.
1 Million x 326 million trillion x24 reproductions a day x 365 days = 2.83 x10^30. This means that it would take approximately 0.0217 seconds to hit the 26 letters in sequence.
Additionally the above example was just using cells. That is not really good because to get life started you would need to have self reproducing molecules first. So really you would need to change that from 1 million single celled animals in a gallon of seawater to 1.266 x 1026 molecules in a gallon of sea water. Now the bulk of that would be water, so lets just say that only 1 part per trillion is an organic-ish molecule that reduces the number down to 1.266x 10^14 per gallon. However the chemical reactions will be much more frequent on average then once an hour. But for the sake of being really conservative lets just say they have 10 reactions per hour. Cranking through the math it comes out to 1.266x10^9 times faster then in the above example.
Now the smallest self replicating molecule known is 32 peptides long. But there are only 4 letters in the sequence so that would also be faster since 32^4 is 1.84x 10^19 which makes this 3.3^17 times faster to reach than having to do the whole alphabet which could as we saw above be done in under 1/200th of a second.
So what does all of this mean? The experiment that Bob is proposing is based on a bad premise, i.e. that all of this stuff has to happen serially, not in parallel.
While researching some of the basics for this post I stumbled upon the following web site that goes into this kind of math in much more detail.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
