“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.
Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today. As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics: we’re screwed. Pic related.
Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.
Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely. Why? Because, why not?
Let’s talk about Life.
I’m going to start with a number. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character. I could have written it out as 1×10300, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact. What, exactly does 1×10300 represent?
Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10300 I get zero.
Let’s take a step back. RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf. When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO. It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:
When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder. There was no other whey.
By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768
This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO2 so grass can eat CO2 and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch. A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.
Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.
If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein. RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO2 into steak without being mashed together, just right. The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up. If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.
The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.
That’s where all the zeros come in. The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways. 1×10300 of them, approximately. There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe. There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way. Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.
Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful. Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work. There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge. And not the good kind of brain sponge.
Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns. No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly. But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.
How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry? Say, “please get off the couch.”
So, we have 1×10300 ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets. I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years. And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage. But 1×10300 is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.
And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight. No RuBisCO? No Nabisco™. To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right. We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.
This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar. When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long. The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday. Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.
RuBisCO is improbable. DNA? Wow. The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.
David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too. Time may change him, but he can’t change time.
One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years. Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.
This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain. The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent. Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.
It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:
- That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
- this is all a simulation (the little g god),
- that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
- that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
- that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.
Random choice is out, mathematically. Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.
How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?
That the universe was created by a First Cause/Creator is one thing but many assume that it automatically follows that affirming a Creator then means adopting one of the existing organized religions. It does not.
I can claim with certainty that there was a Creator, due to math alone. I can claim with personal experience that Christianity is more right than wrong.
Thanks for the nod to the Great Whedon! They wrote a book about Firefly, you know. They called it Jane’s Fighting Ships.
Ha! Love it! Is the best one Vera?
I know I spelled his name wrong; it was just for the reference. His name was actually spelled the way it was because he was a space buccaneer, and everyone knows that’s a man’s field.
hahahahaha!
Yep, the Universe is obviously self-organizing to a degree that is somewhere between totally mind-boggling and utterly incomprehensible. In this context, it is amusing we attribute all of what we observe to a conscious intelligent life form we call God. Life and consciousness and intelligence are probably inconsequential byproducts on the way to something even more incredible that is totally incomprehensible to us that doesn’t involve everybody having a 1*10^300 square foot mansion across a street of gold from the one where Jesus lives.
Before you even start talking about the improbability of RuBisCO and DNA, you gotta consider the improbability of the constituent atoms that make them up. The big bang created only 3 of the 92 stable elements in our current universe – hydrogen, helium and lithium. Even then, what was initially created was only the proton-neutron NUCLEI of these 3 elements. It took another 300,000 years for the Universe to expand / cool down enough to where the floating electrons could manage to attach themselves correctly and form ATOMS of these three elements. Then and only then could stars start their billions-of-year-cycles of condensing and blowing up and then re-condensing into the next, different kind of star that produced the next, different block of atom types in the periodic table.
And we are still figuring out the details of just how all of these elements are created.
Early “green pea” galaxies had to create oxygen before that oxygen could combine with Big Bang hydrogen to create the WATER that became concentrated in the later grand-spiral type galaxies like our current Milky Way where we live.
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-green-pea-galaxies
Later stars had to create carbon in the so-called Hoyle or CNO process before those carbon atoms could mix in to create RuBisCO and DNA…
https://spaceref.com/press-release/carbon-creation-finding-set-to-rock-astrophysics/
There have been several waves of creation like this, each leading to different intermediate end points like iron, or gold, or uranium, each taking billions of years and depending on all the previous one to result in all the other elements that make up our world today.
https://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/Boyce_LS_NS_PT.jpeg
And the uranium we have today may just be an intermediate point. Future new star (or black hole / quasar?) generation types that have not yet existed may produce elements that don’t even exist today, forming some key component in the Ultimate Goal Of The Universe…
https://www.thoughtco.com/island-stability-discovering-new-superheavy-elements-4018746
This current mess humans are in on tiny Earth cannot possibly be the end-state pinnacle of thirteen billion years of such a grand process. We are currently learning about the existence of dark energy and dark matter that make up the vast majority of the Universe’s composition, not the tiny sliver of normal matter and light that is our familiar little corner in all of this grandeur around us. Our task in life is to come to grips with the fact we will never know where this is all headed – we have neither the life span or the intellectual capacity required.
So all we can do is…enjoy the ride.
Exactly! And I didn’t even begin to touch base on the phosphorous problem – one element that is required for Life As We Know It that may be wicked scarce.
I think it was Einstein that said, “The more I learn, the more I know so little about”.
Looked it up Snip The phrase has its origin in Ancient Greece. In Plato’s account of the philosopher Socrates, the latter was said to attribute his great wisdom to his knowledge and acceptance that he knows nothing. This principle, also known as the Socratic paradox, is the same principle behind the saying “the more I learn, the less I know”.
I’m pretty sure Einstein also said it in German more than once LOL.
Amazing article John Wilder, a nice mix of puns and prose.
Michael, thank you! Those are very kind words.
And, for me? The more I know, the less I’m certain of. But those things I’m certain of? I’m much more certain of because they’ve passed the test.
The evolutionist argument is that in the entire universe, RuBisCo has to form exactly once and after that happens, the advantage in natural selection is so massive that it will be reproduced so often that soon it will be everywhere. Seems like an argument that can’t be proved or disproved mathematically; you’ll come up with something like “the chance is one in 10^9999” and the answer is, “it only has to happen once.”
Back in the 1990s, there was a fad in the computer science world called genetic algorithms. The idea was that big problems in software could be solved by letting the software do “evolution” – natural selection – to solve the problem.
A good friend, whom I’ve lost contact with in the last 20 years, was working on his Ph.D. and decided he’d use a genetic algorithm to solve a chess board problem, the Knight’s tour. The knight, of course, has an odd movement, kind of L shaped, and the problem is to start a knight at a random square on the chessboard and have it move around the chess board and land on every square exactly once. Is it possible?
Bottom line: he could never get it to work. He eventually resorted to what he called “dinosaur killers” that wiped out everything up to the latest move and start over. His eventual conclusion for his Ph.D. was that there were problems that this “unnatural selection” couldn’t solve.
But it only has to happen once, even if it’s once in 10^9999 trials.
Exactly. But it doesn’t have to only happen once, it has to happen at enough places and times to lead to, well, us. We are either improbable or common.
I think it’s common. Which implies design.
Also? Kick ass comment.
The thing is RuBisCo wasn’t there to start with. There were many pre–RuBisCo molecules of various compositions and conformations, and they all evolved over time under evolutionary pressure, and eventually the one (or ones) that worked best came to dominate, and voila, there was RuBisCo. Like others have pointed out, the best only has to be created once, and it will then dominate and edge out anything less competitive.
And if it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here. Or we’d be something else. And out there on some other planets, we probably are. And maybe they have a RuBisCo ver. 2.0, and it works even better than ours.
And yet . . . no. RuBisCO is a pretty successful protein. But it is just one (and not the biggest!) part of the photosynthesis process. Photosynthesis itself requires all the bits at once or it’s useless. It’s like arguing that a transmission will spontaneously create itself, and then be driven by any engine to power any car. Each of them follows similar mathematical improbabilities.
And before them? A cell wall. Something so simple, so irreducible, that there’s no way it should form to hold all of the bits inside. Only once?
Just not (mathematically) credible. There are other ways to do photosynthesis, certainly. But to walk up on a jumbo jet sitting in a desert and say that it created itself to wait for man?
Nah.
Random Chance Evolution was invented and propounded by a man with a grudge against a God, with an abysmally lacking understanding of the sheer mathematics involved.
A single DNA strand contains 3.2GB of data.
You didn’t have a computer big enough to hold that much data until 2011, after 40 years of the world’s top engineers working to cram that into a PC did that.
And of course, 4GB thumb drives used to spring whole from trees that grew from transistor seeds, for millenia, until somebody finally started harvesting and selling them in the 2020s. NOT.
RuBisCO is but one example of the unimagined complexity of the biological and physical universe.
Evolutionists are simply the profoundest retards in the class, who couldn’t pass 4th grade math, trying to explain that. After bong hits, and dropping acid.
There are similar complexities involved in the physiological and biochemical processes that allow anyone to read this sentence, just in the vision process. All but one version of which result in total blindness. Even with all the physiological structures (which would be completely worthless in only one chain of events) in place.
It’s as farcical to suggest that’s “blind chance” (see what I did there?) as it is to suggest that if you threw a 10 pound sack of dimes up in the air, they’d randomly arrange themselves by heads and tails into the exact binary sequence to decode something with a 256-bit crypto key. Over and over again. Flawlessly. EVERY. SINGLE. Time.
Other than that, it’s a great theory, if you don’t mind 4th grade dropout retards on drugs explaining the origins of all life on earth.
A nice expansion comment on Johns work. Thanks.
Our human body is an amazing self-repairing, self-replicating creation. Designed with powerful immune system.
Nothing random about that.
As I’ve mentioned to another comment, RuBisCO is only one bit – think of things like cell walls. Eyes. Ears. The pathway is too narrow for these things to mathematically exist. And don’t get me started on genetic drift . . . .
Agree with everything you wrote.
DNA is a construct of the white male patriarchy. (honk!)
No bugs, pods, Bidenville Shanty towns without burning it all down better.
No vote on the climate lockdown SMART (stupid) cities.
You should be able to get everything done in 800 meters as that is all that is allowed.
That is so cute when peasants think that they have a say in anything.
This just in from the internationalists-WTF are you gonna do about it?
I’ve been told by Reliable Sources that the word Internationalists is hate speech and bad think.
Darn, I thought you were going to make the case that Pharma should not be messing around with spike proteins, based on how little we truly know about our DNA.
No, I think Pharma already made that point, and the graves are filling up to nail that psyche out down.
Just thing how much shorter a Stephen King novel would be if he left out all those knuckleheaded lefty political lectures he seems to think all his readers need, or want. That guy is a real POS.
Yup. He went totally deranged after he got off coke and booze. Someone buy that man a scotch!
“This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO2 so grass can eat CO2 and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch”.
My ears were burning so I read and found these which are all in my top 5 desires. Only mistake was reading Macanudo as menudo’s and thought, “most people have no idea what menudo’s are”. I like the puffed ones in the bag from the grocery store personally.
Hahahaha!
Had a Macanudo tonight. Mmmmmmm. Mebbee I’ll grab a scotch.
“300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years”
“To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds”
Well, I suppose the question is, how many milliseconds are there in 8 billion years times the number of planets? If you find that number, then the odds of RuBisCO forming by RANDOM CHANCE are considerably better.
But really, it’s not about random chance. The theory is called Natural Selection for a reason. Look at those words and tell me how they really mean Random Chance. As Aesop would say, be ready to show your work.
I’m not saying I know the answer (as you should know by now Uncertainty is my superpower). But one should not make the error of equating Natural Selection with Random Chance, or solve one mystery by proposing another, bigger mystery.
Sold!
There are 252,288,000,000,000,000,000 milliseconds in 8 billion years. Look back up at the number of folds. Look back up at the number of zeros in the number of combinations. add in that number of planets? Just add (almost 9) zeros. Nowhere near the 300 required.
It. Simply. Does. Not. Work.
It doesn’t work. Better? Certainly. Probable? No, not at all. And I do believe in natural selection, but it cannot account for a single protein. It can’t. I’m not the only one who says this, but I am the most handsome one who says this.
I’m just sayin’, that design is far, far, far (by a factor of 300-28 zeros) more likely than chance plus natural selection.
Or we live in a simulation. Or it’s the PEZ that brought us here.
0≠1?
🙂
The chance on one planet over (4.5 – 1.25) 3.25 billion years is the only thing that counts. One protein (among many thousands, not including all the other components of a single cell in a complex body) not just forming and then folding correctly, but doing so on command, 100% reliably, and hereditably. In a system where if one thing fails, everything stops.
Math is hard.
Natural Selection explains variation within a species.
Darwin, however, specifically said he was explaining the Origin of The [i.e. all] Species.
But it does not explain how you get from Nothing to Everything.
Darwinian handwaving aside (because he was fundamentally and profoundly ignorant of the complexity of the processes he cavalierly dismissed as “easy steps”), in fact, Natural Selection proves that you cannot get from Nothing to Everything.
0≠∞.
QED
And OBTW … this is a brilliant exposition! I’m thankful that your neural pathways mapped out the way they did. Your combination of logic and wit are a perfectly rare steak indeed!
Thank you! I’m still working on the crispy crust.