We have had more and more great conversation on my Facebook wall about this topic. Please, if you haven't already read them, go back and read posts one and two in this series to catch up on where we are. In the first post, I proposed a probability calculation that I felt, at the time, showed an impossibility for the main tenants of the Darwinian Hypothesis. After a short conversation on my Facebook wall, my second post attempted to defend the conclusions of my first with a smaller scale calculation, again using probability theory to show the unlikelihood of the very beginnings of Darwinian evolution occurring.
Since then, the Facebook conversation has continued and as part of that conversation I found a very interesting scientific paper by a physicist at MIT named Jeremy England that does a good job of refuting the assumptions my calculations. There is a summary written in mostly layman's terms here. The basic idea is that some molecules, or configurations of molecules, become more likely to assemble under certain circumstances because of their inherent ability to dissipate energy. At a macroscopic level, we can see and example of this in the phenomenon of Rayleigh–Bénard convection. The organized patter of convection cells that are generated when heating some liquids from the bottom are a more efficient way to dissipate heat energy than a more random movement of molecules would be, so the configuration self assembles with a much higher probability than other configurations. Dr. England proposes then that low entropy structures like life coding RNA or DNA strands or certain life supporting proteins might become much more favored than other microstates under certain conditions because of the inherent ability to dissipate heat energy found in living things. Since the math I used in my previous two posts assumed equal probabilities for each microstate, my calculations can no longer be considered valid.
The usefulness of Dr. England's work is not limited to attempting to explain life or evolution. In fact, I will be trying to apply some of the ideas from his paper to my own research in computational chemistry. But it is important to note that Dr. England's work is, by his own admission, not yet complete in its application to the generation of living things from non-living matter and that other highly regarded members of the science community like Eugene Shakhnovich of Harvard University find his application of his ideas to life phenomena "extremely speculative". Even if his work concludes in the way he hopes and expects, Dr. England will only have shown the mathematical possibility of abiogenesis and the early steps of evolution, not their actual occurrence.
The Darwinian Hypothesis has several other mathematical and scientific problems that we will look at in some future blog posts, but for right now, I will be taking a break from Evolutionary topics just because there is a growing list of other things I would like to discuss here related to my other interests like politics, distance running and racing, general theology, etc. I don't want this to become an evolution/creation only blog. There are indeed more important ideas to discuss.
Whether you agree with me or not on this or other topics, if you are finding these posts and discussions interesting, please follow this blog and feel free to join the conversation. I can also be found on the Facebook page I linked above and on a newly created Twitter account, so please follow me on whichever of those you regularly use.
No comments:
Post a Comment