A Mathematician's View of Evolution

In 1996, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe published a book entitled "Darwin's Black Box" [Free Press], whose central theme is that every living cell is loaded with features and biochemical processes which are "irreducibly complex"--that is, they require the existence of numerous complex components, each essential for function. Thus, these features and processes cannot be explained by gradual Darwinian improvements, because until all the components are in place, these assemblages are completely useless, and thus provide no selective advantage. Behe spends over 100 pages describing some of these irreducibly complex biochemical systems in detail, then summarizes the results of an exhaustive search of the biochemical literature for Darwinian explanations. He concludes that while biochemistry texts often pay lip-service to the idea that natural selection of random mutations can explain everything in the cell, such claims are pure "bluster", because "there is no publication in the scientific literature that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex, biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred."

When Dr. Behe was at the University of Texas El Paso in May of 1997 to give an invited talk, I told him that I thought he would find more support for his ideas in mathematics, physics and computer science departments than in his own field. I know a good many mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists who, like me, are appalled that Darwin's explanation for the development of life is so widely accepted in the life sciences. Few of them ever speak out or write on this issue, however--perhaps because they feel the question is simply out of their domain. However, I believe there are two central arguments against Darwinism, and both seem to be most readily appreciated by those in the more mathematical sciences.

1. The cornerstone of Darwinism is the idea that major (complex) improvements can be built up through many minor improvements; that the new organs and new systems of organs which gave rise to new orders, classes and phyla developed gradually, through many very minor improvements. We should first note that the fossil record does not support this idea, for example, Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson ["The History of Life," in Volume I of "Evolution after Darwin," University of Chicago Press, 1960] writes:

"It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution...This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?"

An April, 1982, Life Magazine article (excerpted from Francis Hitching's book, "The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong") contains the following report:

"When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren't there...'Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life', writes David M. Raup, a curator of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, 'what geologists of Darwin's time and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the fossil sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence, then abruptly disappear.' These are not negligible gaps. They are periods, in all the major evolutionary transitions, when immense physiological changes had to take place."

Even among biologists, the idea that new organs, and thus higher categories, could develop gradually through tiny improvements has often been challenged. How could the "survival of the fittest" guide the development of new organs through their initial useless stages, during which they obviously present no selective advantage? (This is often referred to as the "problem of novelties".) Or guide the development of entire new systems, such as nervous, circulatory, digestive, respiratory and reproductive systems, which would require the simultaneous development of several new interdependent organs, none of which is useful, or provides any selective advantage, by itself? French biologist Jean Rostand, for example, wrote ["A Biologist's View," Wm. Heinemann Ltd. 1956]:

"It does not seem strictly impossible that mutations should have introduced into the animal kingdom the differences which exist between one species and the next...hence it is very tempting to lay also at their door the differences between classes, families and orders, and, in short, the whole of evolution. But it is obvious that such an extrapolation involves the gratuitous attribution to the mutations of the past of a magnitude and power of innovation much greater than is shown by those of today."

Behe's book is primarily a challenge to this cornerstone of Darwinism at the microscopic level. Although we may not be familiar with the complex biochemical systems discussed in this book, I believe mathematicians are well qualified to appreciate the general ideas involved. And although an analogy is only an analogy, perhaps the best way to understand Behe's argument is by comparing the development of the genetic code of life with the development of a computer program. Suppose an engineer attempts to design a structural analysis computer program, writing it in a machine language that is totally unknown to him. He simply types out random characters at his keyboard, and periodically runs tests on the program to recognize and select out chance improvements when they occur. The improvements are permanently incorporated into the program while the other changes are discarded. If our engineer continues this process of random changes and testing for a long enough time, could he eventually develop a sophisticated structural analysis program? (Of course, when intelligent humans decide what constitutes an "improvement", this is really artificial selection, so the analogy is far too generous.)

If a billion engineers were to type at the rate of one random character per second, there is virtually no chance that any one of them would, given the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth to work on it, accidentally duplicate a given 20-character improvement. Thus our engineer cannot count on making any major improvements through chance alone. But could he not perhaps make progress through the accumulation of very small improvements? The Darwinist would presumably say, yes, but to anyone who has had minimal programming experience this idea is equally implausible.

Major improvements to a computer program often require the addition or modification of hundreds of interdependent lines, no one of which makes any sense, or results in any improvement, when added by itself. Even the smallest improvements usually require adding several new lines. It is conceivable that a programmer unable to look ahead more than 5 or 6 characters at a time might be able to make some very slight improvements to a computer program, but it is inconceivable that he could design anything sophisticated without the ability to plan far ahead and to guide his changes toward that plan.

If archeologists of some future society were to unearth the many versions of my PDE solver, PDE2D , which I have produced over the last 20 years, they would certainly note a steady increase in complexity over time, and they would see many obvious similarities between each new version and the previous one. In the beginning it was only able to solve a single linear, steady-state, 2D equation in a polygonal region. Since then, PDE2D has developed many new abilities: it now solves nonlinear problems, time-dependent and eigenvalue problems, systems of simultaneous equations, and it now handles general curved 2D regions.

Over the years, many new types of graphical output capabilities have evolved, and in 1991 it developed an interactive preprocessor, and more recently PDE2D has adapted to 3D and 1D problems. An archeologist attempting to explain the evolution of this computer program in terms of many tiny improvements might be puzzled to find that each of these major advances (new classes or phyla??) appeared suddenly in new versions; for example, the ability to solve 3D problems first appeared in version 4.0. Less major improvements (new families or orders??) appeared suddenly in new subversions, for example, the ability to solve 3D problems with periodic boundary conditions first appeared in version 5.6. In fact, the record of PDE2D's development would be similar to the fossil record, with large gaps where major new features appeared, and smaller gaps where minor ones appeared. That is because the multitude of intermediate programs between versions or subversions which the archeologist might expect to find never existed, because-- for example--none of the changes I made for edition 4.0 made any sense, or provided PDE2D any advantage whatever in solving 3D problems (or anything else) until hundreds of lines had been added.

Whether at the microscopic or macroscopic level, major, complex, evolutionary advances, involving new features (as opposed to minor, quantitative changes such as an increase in the length of the giraffe's neck*, or the darkening of the wings of a moth, which clearly could occur gradually) also involve the addition of many interrelated and interdependent pieces. These complex advances, like those made to computer programs, are not always "irreducibly complex"--sometimes there are intermediate useful stages. But just as major improvements to a computer program cannot be made 5 or 6 characters at a time, certainly no major evolutionary advance is reducible to a chain of tiny improvements, each small enough to be bridged by a single random mutation.

2. The other point is very simple, but also seems to be appreciated only by more mathematically-oriented people. It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it--and to it alone, of all known natural "forces"--the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder. It is often argued that since the Earth is not a closed system--it receives energy from the Sun, for example-- the second law is not applicable in this case. It is true that order can increase locally, if the local increase is compensated by a decrease elsewhere, ie, an open system can be taken to a less probable state by importing order from outside. For example, we could transport a truckload of encyclopedias and computers to the moon, thereby increasing the order on the moon, without violating the second law. But the second law of thermodynamics--at least the underlying principle behind this law--simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen**, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.

The biologist studies the details of natural history, and when he looks at the similarities between two species of butterflies, he is understandably reluctant to attribute the small differences to the supernatural. But the mathematician or physicist is likely to take the broader view. I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.

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*Ironically, W.E.Loennig's article "The Evolution of the Long-necked Giraffe," has since convinced me that even this feature could not, and did not, arise gradually.

**An unfortunate choice of words, for which I was severely chastised. I should have said, the underlying principle behind the second law is that natural forces do not do macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view. See "A Second Look at the Second Law," for a more thorough treatment of this point.

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Granville Sewell completed his PhD at Purdue University. He has subsequently been employed by (in chronological order) Universidad Simon Bolivar (Caracas), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Purdue University, IMSL (Houston), The University of Texas Center for High Performance Computing (Austin), and the University of Texas El Paso; he spent Fall 1999 at Universidad Nacional de Tucuman in Argentina on a Fulbright grant. He has written three books on numerical analysis.

Once again, no evidence of this, it's outside the realm of the observable. You assume something does exist "out there," and you're taking it on faith that it is God as you think of him and not something or someone else.

Yet you call other people "brainwashed."

It's time, once again, to play "Pin the tail on the strawman!"

With new, improved Flame Retardant^TM.

Actually, a lot of it comes down to methodology as well as to presuppositions.

Garden-variety scientific empiricism is designed to minimize mistakes in the form of (if you will) false positives. "We will sell no metaphysics before its time" or "ECREE".

The problem is, in its effort to exclude everything which cannot be demonstrated to within some level of confidence (see also the oft-repeated "non-falsifiable"), there are a lot of things which are rejected -- not, as popularly claimed, because there is *NO* evidence, but because the evidence is either not of a form which science can test. Examples being argument from authority, hearsay, "old wives' tales", etc.

This is NOT to say that all old wives' tales are *TRUE*, but that by the scientific method, they are *assumed* to be false unless or until their claims can be rigorously tested. However, many things in common experience cannot be systematically tested; and therefore they are not given scientific credence.

In other words, TRUST "need not" be the same as "being brainwashed." But there is such a thing as "being taken for a ride" as well. There are just some things out there which the methods of formal scientific inquiry are inadequate to differentiate.

Full Disclosure: The other misunderstanding is the hobgoblin about absolute logical consistency and "uniformity of treatment" -- that is, if someone agrees (for whatever odd reason) to accept supernatural or miraculous claims on behalf of *ONE* religion, the skeptic somehow feels triumphantly vindicated by pointing out that the believer is "inconsistent" (and therefore presumably, if not presumptively, WRONG) if the believer does not also blindly accept ALL OTHER religions.

There are three issues at work:

1) Religion / the supernatural claim to be at the behest of a personal, purposeful agent--and therefore not necessarily strictly mechanistically reproducible

2) Religion is based on trust--and trust is an *individual* thing -- even if you trust one salesman, you need not trust any of the others

3) Since religion claims to deal with "personal" agents, rather than entities which are *necessarily* subject to fixed laws, falsifying a particular claim does not invalidate the whole structure, since it was never claimed there was an unyielding framework to which the supernatural agents' behaviour *must* conform. No "conservation principles" if you will ;-)
But since the scientists are SO used to dealing with these elements as the very framework of their thought and treatment of things, it is quite difficult for them to conceive of stepping outside of this framework as anything other that "sloppy thinking" to "special pleading" to "lies".

Cheers!

I can't imagine where you're going with that. Let me review where this conversation has gone thus far lest anyone have trouble believing it.

Posts 220 and 276 detail hideous levels of untruth, illogic, and hyperbole in Ann Coulter's evolution chapters of Godless.
Tribune7 "refutes" the dissections thus: "This pretty much shoots down any reason as to why you should take it seriously: Coulter claims several times that the fossil record in no way supports Darwin's theory of evolution." That is, we all know that the fossil record refutes evolution so forget criticisms of Ann which get that elementary "fact" wrong.
I defend the fossil record as matching our expectations very well.
You attempt some wave-away of a particular fossil series, as if that were all the problem someone being an anti-E faces.

I should rather have noted the sheer inanity of the alleged refutation against the content of the web page in question.

Here's the link given in 220 . It contains the sentence you quote.

It goes on as follows.

Scientists have compiled a well-documented case demonstrating "large-scale, progressive, continuous, gradual, and geochronologically successive morphologic change" between reptiles and mammals. Coulter argues, on Page 228, that scientists "have no idea if the reptiles are even related to the mammal-like reptiles, much less to the mammals." However, contrary to Coulter's claim, science has observed links between reptiles and mammals through an existing succession of transitional fossils. Skeletal features are used to distinguish between reptilian fossils and mammalian fossils. While many characteristics differ between reptiles and mammals, scientists have observed reptilian fossils that over time took on characteristics of mammals, such as the construction of the lower jaw. Reptiles' lower jaw consists of multiple bones, while mammals' lower jaw is a single large bone. Additionally, most bones in reptiles and mammals are homologous, which suggests that the bones are of common origin. The most important homologous bones between reptiles and mammals are several skull and jaw bones of reptiles and middle ear bones of mammals. Furthermore, synapsids (a particular group of reptiles) share an additional homologous structure with mammals -- an opening behind the eye socket in the skull. This is very characteristic of mammals, which is why synapsids are referred to as mammal-like reptiles.

Note that the first sentence of the above contains a link to the Cuffey article well known to crevo thread participants who don't suffer from creationist amnesia. I can't believe you think you rebut real evidence by unfounded assertions, amnesia, and inability to read.

As for where you're going trying to nitpick one particular series to death: don't know, don't care. Try nitpicking the reptile-mammal series while you're at it.

It is often impractical and dopey to insist on taxonomical

But not in a discussion about evolution.

Time for another of my patented Bonehead^TM questions.

Apparently in the earlier days of evolution, many of the "family trees" etc. were created on the basis of taxonomic evidence.

But, as one of the earlier posts on the thread pointed out, the eye in the fruit fly, and in the octopus, have very different structures though a common purpose...they are both "eyes". Similarly, since whales came from land animals, the fins developed independently from those of fish.

So what methods or safeguards are put in place to prevent misclassification based upon structural similarities which may turn out to be of completely independent origin?

(Or is it a moot point since that type of thing happens so seldom...?)

Cheers!

I've had orientation in my department all day and it's taken a while to settle down and catch up.

First, it's quite presumptuous of you to tell me I don't believe in God.

Second, your sarcastic post made little sense. I study computational math, and I'm interested in physical modeling. All those games and movies you watch which use CGI, most of those are based on physics engines. The simple facts that the algorithms we create to approximate nature are designed and the computers we use to integrate these algorithms are designed make no statement as to the "design-edness" of the system being modeled - we attempt to recreate natural events from initial conditions as closely as possible using the fundamental principles and forces of nature... without intervention.

Your analogy is wrought with falacies. I'll name a few:
1. the "Fitness function" of biological evolution is not designed, it is completely circumstatial and arbitrary.
2. nature provides a very effective means of determining which "programs won't compile" - death. In the analogy, the decision algorithm required is actually undecidable - Halting problem reduction.
3. The rest is even more absurd jibbering, which I won't address. I'm not partial to analogies... way too easy to fall into falacies.

Which brings me to my last point. Interestingly, the one thing I find missing most from these threads is... biology. Being an applied mathenatician, I prefer to apply theories to toy examples and get used to how they function, what are some common pitfalls, and how they may be overcome. One of my favorite links is a list of these specimins:

http://www.freewebs.com/oolon/SMOGGM.htm

Now, the knee-jerk reactions to the Blind Cavefish:

Creationist: Why are you questioning god's... I mean the creator's... judgement?

Biologist: This fish is likely the descendent of a freshwater fish which had eyes. A population of these fish likely broke off and found a niche - a place where they could live with little competition - in a cave. A good place to start would be to try and find "cousins" of these fish. We do this genetically and morhpologically.

So what methods or safeguards are put in place to prevent misclassification based upon structural similarities which may turn out to be of completely independent origin?

Mis-classification has certainly happened before... in both directions.

Check out convergent evolution. Mimic species are populations of animals which have evolved to "mimic" morphologically those characteristics of a successfull species. IIRC, two species of a horned lizard were classified as the same for a good period of time (decades?) until someone found small DNA discrepancies that should be impossible on the sub-species scale. Further study showed they're were tiny, but reliable, differences in morphology (like leg and body length) as well but were so small (< 5%) they had been overlooked.

Interestingly, it can happen in the opposite direction as well. The female angler fish is the popular large, menacing deep sea fish with a huge mouth and a light bulb on it's head. The male kinda looks like a guppy. They were classified as two separate species for a time because morphologically they were so different and practically they were so hard to observe and study (we still don't have a complete, comprehensive taxonimic classification for this clade).

Scientists are not infallable and it can be quite exciting and surprising when an oops is uncovered. But by no means does this taint science or evolution as a whole. Evolutionary Theory itself felt no tremors when these (legitimate) mistakes were corrected because the theory is not dependent on the male Angler fish or "one" species of horned lizard.

Since this is the thread to discuss the "The Mathematician's View of Evolution" by Sewell

and there was an updated version of the paper posted here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1704943/posts?page=329#329

'thought it would be prudent [at this juncture : ) ] to highlight a few quotes from the updated article.

Quotes from updated Sewell article:

"....to understand the real problem with Darwinism: it is simply that it is extremely improbable."

"Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it. The second law is all about probability. The reason natural forces may turn a spaceship into a pile of rubble but not vice-versa is probability: of all the possible arrangements atoms could take, only a very small percentage could fly to the moon and back.”

“So I wrote a reply, ‘Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?’”….interesting discussion here w/ equations in appendix

“…..I offered the tautology that ‘if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes the increase not extremely improbable.’ The fact that order is disappearing in the next room does not make it any easier for computers to appear in our room—unless this order is disappearing *into* our room, and then only if it is a type of order that makes the appearance of computers not extremely improbable, for example, computers…..”

“But there is no other phenomenon anywhere that gives such an extreme impression of violating the second law; the development of life on Earth is completely unique. I believe the development of life has indeed violated the “supreme” law of Nature, in a most spectacular way, but perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it only seems extremely improbable, but really isn’t, that, under the right conditions, the influx of stellar energy could cause atoms to arrange themselves into computers and nuclear power plants and spaceships. But one would think that at least this would be considered an open question, and people who argue that it really is extremely improbable, and thus contrary to the basic principle underlying the second law, would be given a measure of respect……”

These are quotes.
Any quote is by definition "quote-mining".
All "quote-mining" is by definition false.

Therefore all quotes must certainly be false.
There is never a quote which could ever be true.

Pardon the sarcasm, however the absurdity and improbability of a purely chance universe having life that spontaneously generates has put me in a sarcastic mood:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1704943/posts?page=246#246

Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses." Addendum: "Theories do not grow up to be laws. Theories explain laws." (Courtesy of VadeRetro.)

This does not square with what other scientists believe:

It is extremely important to distinguish between facts and theories in science, and in every other subject also, because facts usually remain the same and theories often change. They are not always easy to differentiate, and even scientists forget to do it. And the people who write science text books nearly always forget to do it. So I'll try to give you some guidelines so you can do it yourself, because twenty years from now the facts will be the same, but the theories may have changed a lot. I know because I've had to relearn some theories since I taught this class 25 years ago, but the facts are the same. For example, the universe has doubled in age since I was a boy,which gives you an idea of just how old I am. In this class, we will try to spend about 2/3 of the time on facts, so that you won't need to relearn the entire class when the theories change. Of course, we can't ignore the theories altogether, because they are our best explanations of the facts; it's just that we shouldn't consider them to be absolute truth. When some people see a scientific theory disproven and replaced by another, they lose confidence in all of science, which is a big mistake. That is how science progresses, and it is a wonderful way to learn about our world. So let's begin by reviewing the scientific method, to see just how facts and theories interact. - John Pratt, Fact or Theory

I'm curious . . . what is the current . . . EVO . . . doctrine of faith about PANSPERMIA? Seems to me that the mathematician's calculations are muchmore in sympathy with Panspermia conjectures than with evolution. I've also read recently somewhere that even some former evolutionists who are still hostile to ID are saying that evolution's days are numbered as an explanation.

Here's an article from Linda Moulton Howe's site re a protoge of Astronomer Fred Holye and the red rain organisms in India which do not seem to have earthly DNA but which replicate. Excerpts follow from:

http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=1129&category=Science HERE

EXCERPTS

Red Rain Cells of Kerala, India - Still No Definite DNA

August 19, 2006 Cardiff, Wales - Nearly half a century ago in 1960, a mathematics graduate student from Colombo, Sri Lanka, set off on his first international trip to Cambridge, England. His name is Chandra Wickramasinghe. He was fascinated by stars in the night skies, wondered about other life Out There, and his Cambridge University advanced degree was in Astronomy. His faculty supervisor was the famous Cambridge astronomer, Fred Hoyle. The two men had the curiosity and courage to look for other life in the universe by studying cosmic dust. Their controversial panspermia hypothesis was that the universe is teeming with at least microbial life, which can be transported from one cosmic location to another. In their collaboration, the two astronomers felt strongly that the double helix DNA found in all Earth life had been seeded here by comets or other cosmic bodies and that same DNA would be found in all life forms throughout the cosmos.

. . .

Dr. Louis reported as many as 15 “daughter cells” budded within one “mother cell” and then broke out of the adult cell. That was clearly a process of replication. In normal Earth biology, replication requires the presence of DNA. But Dr. Louis could not find evidence of DNA in the multiplying cells in his test tubes.

. . .

Eight months ago, in January of 2006, Dr. Louis contacted astrobiologist, Chandra Wickramasinghe, now at Cardiff University in Wales. Soon Prof. Wickramasinghe had some vials of the red rainwater to study and sent some to biologists at Sheffield University in England. America’s Cornell University also received some red rain samples to analyze isotopic ratios. Elements confirmed so far are hydrogen, silicon, oxygen, carbon, and aluminum. But, there still is no definitive confirmation of DNA, or what makes the cell walls red.

This month on August 7 to 8, I was in the Microbiology Lab at Cardiff University to see the red rainwater for myself and to talk with Prof. Wickramasinghe and his graduate student, Nori Miyake. Nori has tried to break open the cells to amplify whatever DNA might be there. Nori showed me the pale pink rainwater in test tubes. You can see photographs at my news website, www.Earthfiles.com. At the top of the Headlines page is a hot link to this red rain report with photographs and microscopic images.

Nori told me he has never seen such thick, hard cell walls, which he could only partially penetrate. He is concerned about contamination in the fluorescent techniques he tried, which indicate there might be DNA. But in his fluorescent research, there have been variables, which might be false positives. He does not even know if he ever extracted anything from the red cells because the walls were so thick and hard to break.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

I think it will be interesting to see how quickly, slowly, with what levels of resistence different spheres of the Unholy See of evolution surrenders to some of the alternative explanations without tolerating any support of ID.

Certainly the change is coming. The globalists will shift the 'science,' if nothing else. The impersonal evolutionary explanation fits their goals only up to a point. At some point, they will most likely have to shift the explanation to something like panspermia etc. I figure doing so will be necessary to fit their arising scenarios and contentions "requiring" the world to submit to a global government.

It seems to me that the mathematician's calculations in support of ID or some such are much more solid; simple, clean, much more in keeping with Occam's Razor etc. than any other explanation.

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