Posted: Mar 31, 2010 11:21 am
by rainbow
byofrcs wrote:.....

What clues?
Was it RNA, DNA, polypeptides, a vesicle based on fatty acids?
A metabolic cycle perhaps?
Pray tell.

We are not looking for one magic reaction, but a simple replicator. Something that can evolve into something more complex.

Well it's the "evolve into something more complex" that is the gotcha isn't it ?.

If we measure complexity as simply a molecular weight then clearly polymers get more "complex".

...which would be wrong.
If we measure complex as the steps in a chain then is something like Glycolysis is more complex than each step.

I'm not sure what you're saying here.

It is suggesting that complexity is the number of steps in metabolic pathway. More steps means more complex, less steps is less complex.

It's only a suggestion - you said "complex".

How do you measure complex ?

Admittedly a difficult one, complexity is difficult to define, and understand.
There is an example that invokes design, but I'll avoid that as it will most likely invoke mass hysteria. I won't.

Mass hilarity more like - The ID claim is that the presence of a designer is implied by the existence of some step that was irreducibly complexity. Not unsurprising the offered processes fall apart into reducibly un-complex steps.

Actually I was thinking more in terms of what was said by He-whose-name-may-not-be-spake in The Blind Watchmaker - complexity arises if its parts are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone."