In article <473cb774$1@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> > single living cell). Accepting the former but doubting the latter is
> > considered contradictory.
> >   Regardless of what is the truth, that logic is flawed.
> 
> Check this out for why it makes sense to doubt that:
> 
> http://denbeste.nu/essays/cake.shtml
> 
Wouldn't that be, "Why it doesn't make sense to doubt it?" Mind you, 
this guy makes some common mistakes. First one is suggesting that their 
are some huge number of *possible* combinations that would work. Really? 
How does he determine this? Yeah, the math would seem to suggest that is 
the case, but we are not dealing with arbitrary objects, which one can 
"presume" all interconnect in functional ways, no matter how you arrange 
them. Lets put it this way. Take a processor. There may be an infinite 
number of ways you "could" combine the instructions, but some **won't** 
do anything at all, such as INC X followed immediately by DEC X. 
Chemistry is far more complex than a processor. Just because you can 
imagine combining A with G in umptenth billion ways, or even imagine 
other chemicals in place of it, doesn't mean that every combination or 
chemical that could happen would work. Some may be too unstable, some 
too stable. Some sequences could cause folding errors, which would 
destabilize the whole mechanism and prevent *any* of it working. Unless 
he has some way to *test* every possible chemical, or every possible 
combination, and lay out a statistical table that specifies what works 
and what just doesn't at all, his "REALLY BIG NUMBER" might be a really 
small number. We don't have the data to produce such a table (we still 
don't know how every chemical in existence has an effect on every other 
chemical in *every* situation, let alone how every DNA molecule 
can/would effect arbitrary sequences of genetic code.) Claiming that you 
can make predictions of what is/isn't possible, when you don't even have 
the data to make a vague guess, is a bad idea. And this is just what he 
is doing: "Since we have virtually **no** data to determine what 
possible combinations *can* or *do* work, lets just assume they all 
work, then make up some 'really big number' based on that assumption."

Sorry, but such a number is meaningless, since it presumes facts you 
don't have.

But none of that really matters, since the article says *nothing* about 
the likelihood of macro vs. micro, and only supports the idea that it 
all works, based on the existing "chart". A fact that would **support** 
the idea that it all started from a single cell, since, even if there 
where a thousand possible "working" solutions, the only way you get only 
*one* solution that works, on all scales, is via common descent.

Well, ok, you could get it via engineered DNA, but if so, the engineer 
is an idiot, in as much that nothing in our DNA is engineered to be 
robust or stable, just "good enough". Engineers don't design things to 
be, "Barely good enough to stay afloat.", and that is what you get when 
you start looking at the hacks, screwy solutions, and bad designs in 
biological systems. The other claim is a, "genetic map", leading from 
the first versions to the newest ones, which plays out like some sort of 
master program. But.. Oops, that doesn't work either, since lots of 
species don't have near enough unused "data" in them to do that 
(including viruses), some viruses and the like have barely enough to 
function at all, for example, let alone contain "code" to define how 
they got from the first cell to now, and we are finding the function of 
most of the "junk" DNA in humans and other animals. This pretty much 
only leaves the "damaged" DNA, which are regions containing copies of 
things that are broken, like the Vitamin C gene, which exists in humans, 
in a damaged form, but isn't functional, which is why *we* get scurvy, 
while non-primates don't. We know what it *should* have done, what it 
does in other animals, and that it **is** broken. And that is the point, 
we survive *despite* it being broken, since we can get what it used to 
produce from other sources. If we couldn't, then we *would* die out.

There is nothing in there that would suggest denial of common descent of 
macro evolution.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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