| | I'm not sure about the "specified" portion of the argument.
Ah! The congenital artist! So far, you're the only one here exercising her intellect! Thank you! I'll interpret your lack of certainty regarding "specificity" as a question.
The term "specified" is one of the keys to understanding what the darwinism/anti-darwinism debate is all about. Although it merely qualifies the noun "complexity" -- as in the phrase "specified complexity" -- in a sense it's actually the more important concept.
Here are some examples:
1. Suppose we have an amateur archer whom we blindflold. We spin him around so that he's dizzy, and require him to shoot off some arrows toward the proverbial "broad side of a barn." We're not at all surprised when his arrows strike the barn in a random pattern. Now, suppose we walk over to each of the arrows stuck in the wood, and we draw a target around it, with the bulls-eye in the center of each arrowhead. Absurd? Sure! But the question is this: Can we draw any conclusions about the skill of the archer? No. Of course not. He may be good; he may not be good; we don't know. But that fact that we drew targets -- goals -- around the randomly distributed arrows AFTER the arrows were shot in no way permits us to say that "he hit the bulls-eye!" Right? Of course right.
Conversely:
Suppose we have a gifted professional archer (if such there be) who is required to hit one pre-selected target -- i.e., a specified target -- at a distance of 100 meters. Lo and behold! She hits the target in the bulls-eye! Not only that; she is able to repeat the impressive feat at will. Twenty times in a row, she hits ONE SPECIFIED target, dead center. Can we draw some conclusions? Yes. She's great. Wouldn't it be absurd (not to mention just plain insulting) if we claimed that she hit a SPECIFIC target by chance? Of course!
Simple, isn't it? That's the essence of specificity.
It turns out that that this notion is extremely important to other concepts such as information; to be brief: the more SPECIFIC a goal or target is, the more INFORMATION it takes to hit the target. There is, indeed, a mathematical proof of this provided by the originator of the first quantitative theory of information, Claude Shannon, in a famous paper he published while working at Bell Labs in 1948 (you can even find the paper online, titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"). But there are good intuitive proofs of this as well. Imagine sending a letter to your friend, John. You write the letter, put it in the envelope, and address the envelope thus: "To My Friend." Not very specific, says the post office. Can you give us more specific information, m'am? OK. "To My Friend, John." Yep. We're getting warmer. Humor us, lady. Give us more specific information. OK. "To My Friend, John Smith." etc. etc. Finally, the clerk promises you a free book of Ayn Rand stamps if you give as much specific information as you can. So you write "To My Friend, John Smith, 1234 Main Street, Cleveland, Ohio, 17654-3211." Now THAT's specified information; and the less of it you have, the less of a target or goal the post office has to work with. The more of it you have, the more specified your target or goal becomes.
Obvious to the point of triteness? Sure (ain't information theory great?). It turns out that the same intuitions (and much of the same math) can be applied to "targets" -- such as amino acids -- in a field like biochemistry. Here's how:
When I say "protein" think "the biochemical analog to a word." When I say "amino acid" (the building blocks of proteins) think "the biochemical analog to a letter." It's an analogy, but it's a good one, and it's a very common one: amino acids form an alphabet -- this one has 20 letters in it, instead of our 26 -- which can be combined in various ways, just as letters can be combined in various ways. Now, when I say "Earth's environment billions of years ago" think "A Scrabble board with the letters tossed onto it randomly from the box." Never mind how the letters -- the amino acids -- came into existence in the first place. It doesn't matter for this example. (FYI, two guys in 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, synthesized amino acids by zapping puddles of organic chemicals with electricity. Unfortunately, it was later shown that the sort of chemical environment they had used to create their amino acids never existed on the early earth. The experiment was interesting but proved nothing about how in fact the basic building blocks of proteins came into existence.) So consider our Scrabble board, and ask yourself the following: is there any physical restriction on how one square piece of wood can fit next to another square piece of wood? Of course not. You are permitted physically to put one Scrabble piece next to any other Scrabble piece. Similarly, there is no chemical restriction on the order (or number) of amino acids in forming chains that we call "proteins." The only question is this: (for Scrabble) does the sequence of letters form a meaningful word in English? (For amino acids) does the sequence of amino acids form a meaningful, i.e., functional protein? So far, so good?
Now consider this: most functional proteins (proteins that actually DO something) -- even very simple ones -- are at least 100 amino acids long. Going back to Scrabble, that means that we require a word -- let's say a complete, meaningful sentence -- that is composed of at least 100 letters. Easy to create? Sure -- if there's an actual mind doing the composing. You just writing, then do a "Word Count" with MS Word, and trim off what's too long, always being careful of things like grammar and punctuation, and always being sure that the entire chain -- the sentence -- makes sense. But what if a Darwinist asserts "Oh, you're not allowed to compose the sentence; you have to create it randomly, by jiggling the Scrabble pieces in a bag and pulling out one letter at a time until a meaningful sentence is achieved. "That's absurd!" you cry. "That would take forever, assuming it could be done at all!" The Darwinist -- probably a knee-jerk True Believer like Richard Dawkins -- would answer "Not so. There are 26 letters (and a space, let us suppose to distinguish individual words), so the chances of pulling out any particular piece is 1/27. The odds of pulling out any specific combination of 100 letters is 1/27^100. We've got all the time in the world, so start shakin'!"
The only problem is, you don't have "all the time in the world." The number 27^100 to produce a specified sentence -- let alone one that is meaningful in English -- is so astrononomically large, that by putting a "1" over it, it may as well be ZERO. One mathematician, William Dembski, from considerations of physics, has set 1/10^150 as a "universal probability bound"; i.e., any event that had less chance of occurring than one-in-10^150 cannot have happened by chance. That's an extremely conservative "upper limit" he's established. Another mathematician, Emil Borel, set 1/10^50 as a bound.
Now, if this is true for a specified target of 100 letters (the specified target here is merely "any meaningful English sentence of 100 letters), imagine what the odds would be if we were required, using chance alone, to form a meaningful sentence of 300 characters! (It would be 1/27^300) That's the situation Darwinists face when they require random processes like "mutation" and "natural selection" to create a specific protein (such as, e.g., just ONE of the proteins used in the bacterial flagellum). They claim that "time is on their side" but it isn't. There have only been about 10^25 seconds of elapsed time since the (purported) Big Bang; even if there were pre-existing amino acids everywhere in the universe (not just on earth), and even if they formed rich puddles, or even rich oceans, there still would not be enough time (a/k/a "probabilistic resources") to have created that one protein, let alone all of the other proteins that compose living beings.
To say otherwise -- as does someone like Richard Dawkins -- would be similar to saying that if we had enough monkeys banging away randomly on PCs with MS Word for enough time, they would manage, after many trials, to come up with just the right combination of letters, spaces, punctuation, chapter numbers, and sequence divisions, to have composed "Atlas Shrugged." Furthermore, since we can now "explain" the appearance of this meaningful string of letters (totaling almost 1,100 pages) by appeals to strictly natural, random, non-telelogical causes, we may dispense with such mystical, pseudo-religious explanations as an imputed "author" named Ayn Rand, who "composed" the novel with a certain "goal" or "intention" in mind.
So now do you have at least some idea of what "specified" means?
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Rather, I've always thought that it was a "resistant" type of variant that emerged, not a specified one to the environment, as can be seen by existing forms of infectious germs which evolve to be resistant to treatment within a decade or so. Medical science is now worried about "super strains" of HIV infections, as a current example.
Now that you have some basic nomenclature, I can try to answer this one more briefly!
It's an excellent point. It turns out, however, that the common fact of bacterial resistance to antibiotics (and of insects to insecticides) is not a model for how evolution could have occurred. Why? The reasons for bacterial resistance are well understood: the bacterium loses genetic information in one of its structures (the ribosome) preventing the antibiotic from chemically binding to it. To be exact: the bacterium doesn't so much "learn to resist" the drug; it loses sensitivity to it. It's not the same thing. What happens is that one of several possible DNA mutations occur which destroy the binding site that the antibiotic needs to attach to the bacterium. In essence, the bacterium destroys a little piece of itself in order to survive. Since the destruction -- in this case, loss of genetic information -- is in the gene, the loss of sensitivity is heritable, and a whole strain of resistant bacteria can arise.
An analogy: when I say "criminals" think "bacteria"; when I say "the law" think "antibiotics."
Criminals are on the run from the law, but the latter is in hot pursuit: the bad guys have left a trail of highly specified information that the cops can use to grab them and bring 'em to justice. The cops know their names, the apartment building address, the apartment number, the street address, the city, the state, and even the darn zip code. What can the bad guys do to protect themselves from the cops? They can stay where they are and let the cops swoop in, and then try to "evolve" some clever plan of counter-attack and escape; or they can try to erase some of the specificity of the information that makes them sensitive to an attack in the first place. It turns out that on the top 3 floors of the apartment building they're in, the landlord has just put in 500 new rooms (so the rooms are a little small; so what), but hasn't had time to put the apartment numbers on the doors yet. Hiding out in one of these "anonymous" rooms is the equivalent of erasing some of the specificity of the information defining the whereabouts of the criminals. Their "address" (so to speak) would be "Sid and Billy Hatfield / 1234 / Oak Street / Cleveland / Ohio / 12345-6789 / floor unknown / apartment unknown.
It may not take a very smart cop long to search the "anonymous" rooms, but what if the cop is a robot, programmed ONLY to search (i.e., "bind with") a pre-selected room; a specified room? In that case, the bad guys survive; not because they "evolved" a highly sophisticated strategy for dealing with the cops; but rather by withholding from the cops some necessary specified information.
That's essentially how a bacterium outwits an antibiotic. A DNA mutation destroys some specified information about the "address" of a receptor site on its ribosome, and the antibiotic can no longer "find" it (i.e., "bind with it").
The reason this is NOT a good model of macroevolution is because the latter requires an increase in genetic information -- an increase in specificity -- not a decrease. So while bacterial/insect resistance to poisons certainly shows that mutations leading to loss of genetic information can sometimes confer survival benefits on this or that species, it in no way shows that random mutation + blindly operating (non-goal directed) natural selection can increase genetic information and "evolve" more complex biological entities from less complex ones.
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