Interesting Challenge to the Discovery Institute and ID

Nice. Simple, and it would do the job perfectly.

And always good to show that scientists don't fear ID being true - just they'll have to come up with some decent data first.

The math is bad in that video

Let me see if i understand this:

"No homology for other genes exist" IE it's not similar to any other gene?
defined as "20% protein identity over more than 100 amino acids"

then it says, .05 "raised to at least the power of 20".... the .05 is from 1/20, representing the 20 different amino acids. Now, assuming all amino acids are equally likely (bad assumption...), .05 "raised to at least the power of 20" that would be the odds of finding 20 of the correct amino acid in the row, not "20% protein identity over more than 100 amino acids".

.05^20 is wrong... that would be the odds of having 20 strait amino acids that were the same, not any 20 out of 100.

it should be, (.05^20)*(.95^80)*(100! / 80!) / 20!

edit: accidentally wrote - when i meant / .

which comes out to roughly 8 * 10^-8 if my math is right (edit: or 1 in 12,500,000)... considering how many genes there are, it wouldn't be surprising if they could find a homology just by pure luck, and that's just one of the filter criteria they're using. i don't think this is a very good challenge.

edit: my math isn't right, i just realized. it's actually more likely than i thought... see below post.

Ok i need to go back to school. the math i did above calculates the odds of exactly 20 out of 100 amino acids being the same. I don't remember the formula for calculating the odds of 20 or more amino acids out of 100 are the same

( well, besides
(.05^20)*(.95^80)*(100! / 80! / 20!) +
(.05^21)*(.95^79)*(100! / 79! / 21!) +
(.05^22)*(.95^78)*(100! / 78! / 22!) +
etc etc
but i don't feel like doing that)

In any case .05 ^ 20 used in the video is not accurate and this challenge should be regarded as very difficult whether ID is true or not.

In any case, I think the challenge would be better if they upped the requirements of a homology to 30% or something.