Friday, September 16, 2005

Unintentional humour, I'm sure.


It's almost painful to watch the intellectual meltdown of someone who's in way over his head. Recall from back here my challenge to Weasel Boy (and anyone else who wanted to play) to identify the one sequence out of the four that represented the opening to human chromosome 6.

Well, apparently, such challenges are just not fair, as Weasel Boy himself explains here. What's amusing is his rationale, which I swear I am not making up:

Remember, if you have an infinite number of monkeys bashing away at an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce - without any sort of design - not only the Gettysburg Address, but also the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, your Aunt Fanny's recipe for pineapple upsidedown cake and the entire nucleotide sequences for the DNA of every living thing on the Earth.

Yeah, that's kind of what we scientists have been saying all along. I just never figured Weasel Boy would get so thoroughly confused that he'd end up making our case for us.

(You'll notice, of course, that WB bandies about the word "design" without really defining or even understanding it. This is what happens when children try to play with grown-ups.)

P.S. I swear, I really am going to have to give you folks a primer on information theory one of these days. It's not that complicated. Really.

P.P.S. If you're feeling ambitious, feel free to point out how WB thoroughly misunderstands the entire concept of design in the first place. That's not that hard, either.

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