Dear Students and Faculty of Granite City High School,
I grew up in Granite City and graduated from GCHS in 1964. My Hero, Gene Armes, my older brother, sent me a one-way bus ticket to Los Angeles so I could live with him and start college at Santa Ana College - the beginning of my new life that was beyond my wildest dreams.
I met my college sweetheart in Santa Ana, California and have been married to her for fifty-five wonderful years.
We had two daughters, Erin and Teri, and they gave us five grandchildren, Samuel, Grace, Ashley, Samantha and Trent.
We've traveled the world and taken family with us often, but through it all, my mind often goes back to my roots in Granite City. So, I created this weblog especially for GCHS students, your parents and teachers.
I will update it from time to time and invite you to notify me of any errors so that I may correct them. Should any GCHS student have something interesting to add to this website, please forward it to me and earn $20, or more. You will be recognized here by name.
I love teaching as much as I love learning.
Your friend,
John Phillip Jaeger
Author of Brilliant Creations - The Wonder of Nature and Life
JohnJaeger@live.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program
In chapter 3 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, (biologist Richard) Dawkins gave the following introduction to the program, referencing the well-known infinite monkey theorem*:
I don't know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare. The operative phrase is, of course, given enough time. Let us limit the task facing our monkey somewhat. Suppose that he has to produce, not the complete works of Shakespeare but just the short sentence 'Methinks it is like a weasel', and we shall make it relatively easy by giving him a typewriter with a restricted keyboard, one with just the 26 (capital) letters, and a space bar. How long will he take to write this one little sentence?
[NOTE: How lazy of Richard Dawkins to fail to look up the author of this monkey business. It was Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944). British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington presented a classical illustration of chance in his book, The Nature of the Physical World, chapter 4, page 72 (1928): “If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.”
Eddington called this “a rather classical illustration of chance.”
This is nonsense compounding nonsense. And yet my high school math teacher presented this proposition to his classes in the 1960’s.
First, an “army of monkeys” wouldn’t be very interested in hitting typewriter keys repeatedly. There is nothing for them to gain in so doing.
Second, those who did hit the keys would quickly get to the end of the line, and not be familiar with returning the carriage to type the second line.
Third, those very few who overcame the first and second hurdles, repeatedly, would find that the paper was ejected from the carriage, and they are hopelessly unable to replace the first page with a fresh sheet of paper.
Fourth, we will never get to the fourth problem of exhausting the ink in the typewriter ribbons because the “army of monkeys” would have defecated on, damaged, or otherwise ruined every typewriter.
Fifth, Sir Arthur Eddington never began to consider the statistics of monkeys “selecting” 1 out of approximately 100 different keys, counting upper and lower case of all letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. A page of an average book has 250 – 300 words. (https://hotghostwriter.com/blogs/blog/novel-length-how-long-is-long-enough)
*Finally, the largest
army in the world is the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China, with over
2,000,000 troops. This is hardly “infinite”
in number. (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/)
The average word has 6.47 letters. (https://capitalizemytitle.com/character-count/100-characters/)
Using the lower value of 250 words per page, times 6.47 letters equals 1,617 characters in a page.
1/100 to the 1,617th power is 10-3,234, for just one page, much less “all the books in the British Museum.”
Emil Borel, a famous statistician, defined “impossible” as an event with a probability of 10-50 or less.
(https://owlcation.com/stem/Borels-Law-of-Probability)
This definition of "impossible" is equivalent to finding one unique marble, in 923,400 billion billion spheres the size of earth, all full of identical marbles except for one, on your first and only attempt.
You do not get an infinite number of attempts, not even two. It’s “1 in 10-50.
Calculations: (105 marbles/km)3 = 1015 marbles per cubic km
1015 marbles/cubic km x 1.083 x 1012 cubic
kilometers/earth =1.083 x 1027 marbles to fill one earth sphere the
size of earth.
1050 marbles / 1.083 x 1027 marbles/earth size
sphere = 9.234 x 1023 earth-size spheres full of marbles, which is
to say 923,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 (923,400 billion billion) earth-size
spheres full to search and find the unique marble on your first and only try.
Personally, I would call it impossible to find that unique marble in just one
earth-sized sphere full of them.
Dawkins then goes on to show that a process of cumulative selection can take far fewer steps to reach any given target. In Dawkins' words:
We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before ... it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error - 'mutation' – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.
By repeating the procedure, a randomly generated sequence of 28 letters and spaces will be gradually changed each generation. The sequences progress through each generation:
Generation 01: WDLTMNLT DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO P [2]
Generation 02: WDLTMNLT DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO P
Generation 10: MDLDMNLS ITJISWHRZREZ MECS P
Generation 20: MELDINLS IT ISWPRKE Z WECSEL
Generation 30: METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL
Generation 40: METHINKS IT IS LIKE I WEASEL
Generation 43: METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Dawkins continues:
The exact time taken by the computer to reach the target doesn't matter. If you want to know, it completed the whole exercise for me, the first time, while I was out to lunch. It took about half an hour. (Computer enthusiasts may think this unduly slow. The reason is that the program was written in BASIC, a sort of computer baby-talk. When I rewrote it in Pascal, it took 11 seconds.) Computers are a bit faster at this kind of thing than monkeys, but the difference really isn't significant. What matters is the difference between the time taken by cumulative selection, and the time which the same computer, working flat out at the same rate, would take to reach the target phrase if it were forced to use the other procedure of single-step selection: about a million million million million million years. This is more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far existed.
[So much for Dawkins’ specious argument in defense of Darwinism, which he proudly claimed, “… made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” - Uncommon Dissent, William A. Dembski, Editor
Twenty-six capital letters plus the space bar equals twenty-seven.
Twenty-seven to the twenty-eighth power equals ten to the fortieth different possible combinations, of which we seek only one specifically. Dawkins admits his definition of “impossible” is 1 chance in 10 to the 40th power.a This is not for all of Shakespeare’s works, but for one short sentence, and even that typed on a dramatically altered keyboard, not of fifty possible keys, lower case, and fifty more keys, upper case, but for only twenty-six keys, all upper case.
Of critical but neglected importance is the fact that for “selection” to occur, the intermediary produced by the random mutation MUST confer a “selective advantage” for the host organism, otherwise it will be lost.
It is therefore incumbent on the advocate for Darwinism to demonstrate, in each case, what that improvement is and how it operates, every single time, without exception. This is easily done when copying short sentences on a sophisticated computer program, but not so easily done when originally constructing over 20,000 proteins in humansb, the largest of which is titin, at 38,138c amino acid residues in length. One out of twenty amino acids “selected” consecutively 38,138 times has a probability of 1 chance in 1049,618. This is for only one protein! Calculating for chirality, i.e. the “selection” of L amino acids instead of D amino acidsd and all peptide bonds rather than the equally probable non-peptide bondse reduces the probability of original naturalistic synthesis to 1 chance in 1072,578. As large as 1050 is, it is practically 0 compared to 1072,578. Twenty thousand more proteins to go! (Please do not invoke the Bible. We are talking science.)
a – Climbing Mount Improbable, page 142
b- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4889822/
c - https://www.omim.org/entry/188840\
d - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480
e - ½ to the 38,138 = 10-11,480
10-49,618 x 10-11,480 x 10-11,480 = 10-72,578 . ]
10-72,578 is equal to 1 over 10 followed by 72,577 zeroes.
Billions of billions is a very small number in comparison to 1072,578
Five billion times five billion is 25 x1018
If you divide 1072,578 by 25 x 1018 you get 4 x 1072,559 (This is 4 followed by 72,559 zeroes. Each multiple of ten is called "an order of magnitude." If you reduce these exponentials by a few thousand, it makes no real difference. "Billions and billions" are equivalent to nothing by comparison.)
_______________________________
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| ________________________________ October 3, 2023 John, I think you were spot on. Well put. I think it's incredibly dumb to take Dawkins' position as fact or even possible. Jason Cardova, PhD, Biochemistry
_______________________ “The reasonable man adapts himself to
the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman Call me unreasonable.
__________________________________  Consensus is not Science; Science is Not Consensus
The Semmelweis
reflex or “Semmelweis
effect” is a metaphor for the reflex-like
tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts
established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.[1] The term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis,
a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality
rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands with a chlorine
solution before moving from one patient to another, or, most particularly,
after an autopsy. (At one of the two maternity wards at the university hospital
where Semmelweis worked, physicians performed autopsies on every deceased
patient.) Semmelweis’s procedure saved many lives by stopping the ongoing
contamination of patients (mostly pregnant women) with what he termed
“cadaverous particles”, twenty years before germ theory was
discovered.[2] Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence,
his fellow doctors rejected his hand-washing suggestions,
often for non-medical reasons. For instance, some doctors refused to believe
that a gentleman’s hands could transmit disease.[3]
In the preface to the fiftieth anniversary edition of his book The Myth of Mental
Illness, Thomas Szasz says
that Semmelweis’s biography impressed upon him at a young age, a “deep sense of
the invincible social power of false truths.”[5] _______________
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its
opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents
eventually die…..” – Max Planck (1858 – 1947) _____________
In 1983, Barry Marshall and John Warren presented a paper to the
Australian Gastroenterological Society claiming that stomach ulcers are caused
by infection of Helicobacter pylori. They never finished their presentation
because they were laughed off the stage.
Twenty-two years later, they
were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 for their discovery.
Doctors and nurses, experts in their fields, kill 250,000 to
400,000 patients a per year through medical malpractice.(www.HopkinsMedicine.org)
___
Here is a thought experiment with an obvious conclusion. In 1895, Lord Kelvin, the President of the
Royal Society, the oldest science organization in the world, declared: “Heavier-than- air human flight is
impossible.”
Imagine that two years later, a distinguished member of the Royal
Society introduced Lloyd and Wilbur Wright to a meeting of The Society, and
they announced, “We have been experimenting with our heavier-than-air invention
and our experiments have confirmed that we can fly it.”
What would the Royal Society members have said? The same thing that doubters have always said
because the Wright Brothers did not have the scientific credentials of Lord
Kelvin. “Throw them out of here!” ___________________________ Climate Change Cultists, like Darwinists, relentlessly censor all who disagree: http://Climate-Change-Cult.blogspot.com __________________________ From the book "Flourish," by psychiatrist Martin Seligman: "We scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested." | ||||
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Enjoy a fascinating journey at:
_________________________________
http://TheEndOfDarwinianEvolution.blogspot.com
_______________________________________
An autographed copy of my book should be available in the GCHS Library, as I mailed a hard cover to the GCHS Librarian. I invite you to read this inspirational book of science. Michael McCartney, D.D.S, said "It should be required reading for every high school student." John Orosz, M.D., said "It is beyond incredible."
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