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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Try to compose an English sentence of 390 letters from which you can get another good sentence by shifting the framing of the words one letter to the right. It simply can’t be done. The probability of getting sense is effectively zero.

It's also been pointed out that unlike the English language, every three-letter DNA codon has meaning.  If every possible three letter word in English had meaning, your odds of getting a good sentence would be pretty good.[/quote]

I noticed the same thing about using English to compare with three-letter codons, and found that an unsatisfying comparison.  The codes of English and DNA are completely different.

But we are circling back to the definition of a code.  This seemed to make people really crazy, and I already experienced the code argument on the Infidels forum, so no need to resurrect it here.  But if you have a personal critique of this definition of a code, I would appreciate if you want to share it:

“Coded information” is defined as a system of symbols used by an encoding and decoding mechanism, which transmits a message that is independent of the communication medium."

Otherwise, in regards to your other comment:

[quote]However, this overlapping gene pair is not unique. And scientists have asked a really good question, which is whether the frequency of such overlapping genes is random or not.

And the answer is that it is not.

Does this vindicate your creationist essay writer? No. You already read Dawkins' weasel program. So you know that selection pressure can result in non-random outcomes. In order for these overlapping genes to occur more frequently than random, all that is required is that it makes the organism more fit. Whether it makes the genome more compact and therefore less fragile, whether sometimes it results in the creation of related proteins, or whether there is some other cause, it does not matter. If it confers fitness, it will be over-represented.[/quote]

I understand the theory that natural selection can result in non-random outcomes.  (PPs previously went ballistic on me for not getting that, but they were referencing other PPs, not OP.)  I am no expert, though, and am always looking for a deeper understanding.

Could you discuss the ratio of beneficial to harmful mutations?  Isn't the ratio tipped vastly in favor of harmful mutations?  And what about the degree of harm or benefit?  Even a highly beneficial mutation is unlikely to have a huge overall positive effect on the organism, whereas even a small harmful mutation could be fatal.  Beneficial mutations would seem to need some sort of amplification to survive over the more frequent and more significant harmful mutations.

Since I am dreadful at math, I can't do my own probability calculations, but the odds seem stacked against progress, even with unfathomable amounts of time.  In other words, a fundamental problem with random mutations is they are evenly distributed, and destruction of information always exceeds the gain.[/quote]

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