A. E. Wilder-Smith; Huxley's Typewriter and Equilibrium

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Caution: contains Middle English in the beginning and ending prayer.

Please listen to the whole of this before posting on this thread.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=6pbm5Z_OYXY[/youtube]

One part of interest to me is this:
Basically, the equilibrium

(amino acids) <-> (proteins)

is weighted toward the reactants. Naturally they don't form proteins without the coding on the genome and the translation by the RNA.

This basically dismantles Huxley's typewriter. Another item of interest on this topic is, http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/1257 which discusses probability and time required by Huxley's typewriter to type part of a verse and relates it to DNA.
I watched the whole of this, thus I ask you to also (whether you agree with it or not.)

The 'Middle English' is antiquated Modern English - the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (which I was raised on) was first issued in 1549, and it coincided with the standardization of the language and the end of Middle English.

"Huxley's Typewriter" has been attributed to Thomas Huxley in 1860 by anti-evolutionists. Strangely, the typewriter had not been invented in 1860!

Huxley's typewriter is a metaphor that can be 'disproven' if it is taken literally and linearly. In the original metaphor, there were 6 typewriters and 6 immortal monkeys, which would take a very long time to work. In practice, there were trillions of moles (6.02 x 10^23) of amino acids and nucleotides. There was a selection/feedback process, where certain combinations were more successful and they multiplied. Additionally, the process cannot be reduced to a single equation - although the K values may predict that equillibrium shifts towards the raw reagents in a pure system, in the complex system that life evolved in, there were other factors at work - for example, a polypeptide might form a complex with some other molecule, which would stabilize it. One of the problems of the random monkeys is that no provision is made for learning or error correction. With selection, the successful DNA 'learns' and multiplies itself, gradually 'trying' new things with mutation. So your 'disproof' is off by many orders of magnitude and cannot be accepted.

Also, statistical theory indicates that while it may take a very long time to replicate humans identically across even a billion petri dish planets, it would be rather easy to evolve other very interesting forms of life on a small number of suitable planets.

I have worked a bit with computational techniques including neural networks and genetic algorithms, and can tell you that they do work and are quite useful for many types of problems. Massively parallel DNA computing also makes it possible to do in a few hours what might take many years to do on one (or 6) computers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing

No, I did not watch all 78 minutes. They guy is an interminable bore, and his arguments fall apart long before the end of the video.