Fredwin On Evolution

I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.

The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, “In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in a rock, a skim formed a membrane, and life began its immense journey.” I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn’t been true, scientists would not have said that it was.

In those days I read Scientific American and New Scientist, the latter then still being thoughtfully written in good English. I noticed that not infrequently they offered differing speculation as to the origin of life. The belief in the instrumentality of chemical accident was constant, but the nature of the primeval soup changed to fit varying attempts at explanation.

For a while, life was thought to have come about on clay in shallow water in seas of a particular composition, later in tidal pools with another chemical solution, then in the open ocean in another solution. This continues. Recently, geothermal vents have been offered as the home of the first life. Today (Feb 24, 2005) on the BBC website, I learn that life evolved below the oceanic floor. (“There is evidence that life evolved in the deep sediments," co-author John Parkes, of Cardiff University, UK, told the BBC News website.” Link at bottom.)

The frequent shifting of ground bothered me. If we knew how life began, why did we have so many prospective mechanisms, none of which really worked? Evolution began to look like a theory in search of a soup. Forty-five years later, it still does.

I was probably in college when I found myself asking what seemed to me straightforward questions about the chemical origin of life. In particular:

(1) Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted? Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or really, really wish.

The answer was, and is, “no.” We have no dried residue, no remaining pools, and the science of planetogenesis isn’t nearly good enough to provide a quantitative analysis.

(2) Had the creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory? No, it hadn’t, and hasn’t. (Note 1)

(3) Did we know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about? No, we didn’t, and don’t.

(4) Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that a cell would form, given any soup whatever? No, it couldn’t, and can’t. (At least not without cooking the assumptions.) (Note 2)

Well, I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don’t know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can’t reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can’t show it to be statistically probable—why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?

My point was not that evolutionists were necessarily wrong. I simply didn’t see the evidence. While they couldn’t demonstrate that life had begun by chemical accident, I couldn’t show that it hadn’t. An inability to prove that something is statistically possible is not the same as proving that it is not possible. Not being able to reproduce an event in the laboratory does not establish that it didn’t happen in nature. Etc.

I just didn’t know how life came about. I still don’t. Neither do evolutionists.

Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.

As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.

Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn’t have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But…is any of this established?

Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And of course almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.

Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does—except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions—overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn’t a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use)—of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.

This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. “Creationist” is to evolution what “racist” is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science.

I have been on several lists on the internet that deal with matters such as evolution, have written on the subject, and have discussed evolution with various of its adherents. These men (almost all of them are) have frequently been very bright indeed, often Ivy League professors, some of them with names you would recognize. They are not amateurs of evolution or high-school principals in Kansas eager to prove their modernity. I asked them the questions in the foregoing (about whether we really know what the primeval seas consisted of, etc.) I knew the answers; I wanted to see how serious proponents of evolutionary biology would respond to awkward questions.

It was like giving a bobcat a prostate exam. I got everything but answers. They told me I was a crank, implied over and over that I was a Creationist, said that I was an enemy of science (someone who asks for evidence is an enemy of science). They said that I was trying to pull down modern biology (if you ask questions about an aspect of biology, you want to pull down biology). They told me I didn’t know anything (that’s why I was asking questions), and that I was a mere journalist (the validity of a question depends on its source rather than its content).

But they didn’t answer the questions. They ducked and dodged and evaded. After thirty years in journalism, I know ducking and dodging when I see it. It was like cross-examining hostile witnesses. I tried to force the issue, pointing out that the available answers were “Yes,” “No,” “I don’t know,” or “The question is not legitimate,” followed by any desired discussion. Still no straight answer. They would neither tell me of what the early oceans consisted, nor admit that they didn’t know.

This is the behavior not of scientists, but of advocates, of True Believers. I used to think that science was about asking questions, not about defending things you didn’t really know. Religion, I thought, was the other way around. I guess I was wrong.

A few things that worry those who are not doctrinaire evolutionists. (Incidentally, it is worth noting that by no means all involved in the life sciences are doctrinaire. A friend of mine, a (Jewish, atheist) biochemist, says “It doesn’t make sense.” He may be wrong, but a Creationist he isn’t.)

To work, a theory presumably must (a) be internally consistent and (b) map onto reality. You have to have both. Classical mechanics for example is (so far as I know) internally consistent, but is not at all points congruent with reality. Evolution has a great deal of elaborate, Protean, and often fuzzy theory. How closely does it correspond to what we actually see? Do the sweeping principles fit the grubby details?

For example, how did a giraffe get a long neck? One reads as a matter of vague philosophical principle that a proto-giraffe by chance happened to be taller than its herdmates, could eat more altitudinous leaves than its confreres, was therefore better fed, consequently rutted with abandon, and produced more child giraffes of height. This felicitous adaptation therefore spread and we ended up…well, up—with taller giraffes. It sounds reasonable. In evolution that is enough.

But what are the practical details? Do we have an unambiguous record of giraffes with longer and longer necks? (Maybe we do. I’m just asking.) Presumably modern giraffes have more vertebrae then did proto-giraffes. (The alternative is the same number of vertebrae, but longer ones. I have known giraffes. They were flexible rather than hinged.) This, note, requires a structural change as distinct from an increase in size.

Evolution is said to proceed by the accretion of successful point mutations. Does a random point mutation cause the appearance of an extra vertebra? If so, which mutation? (It would have to be a pretty vigorous point mutation.) How can you tell, given that we have no DNA from proto-giraffes? If not one, then how many random point mutations? Which ones? What virtue did these have that they were conserved until all were present? Did this happen once per additional vertebra—the multiply repeated chance appearance of identical mutations? Or did they appear all at once? If so, the heart must have changed simultaneously to get blood way up there.

[After I posted this a reader wrote to say that giraffes do have longer instead of more vertebra. Substitute "a snake" for " giraffe," snakes sometimes having hundrds of vertebrae, and the same questions questions hold.]

There may be perfectly good, clear, demonstrable answers to a few of these questions. I’m not a paleontological giraffologist. But if evolutionists want people to accept evolution, they need to provide answers—clear, concrete, non-metaphysical answers without gaping logical lacunae. They do not. When passionate believers do not provide answers that would substantiate their assertions, a reasonable presumption is that they do not have them.

The matter of the giraffe is a simple example of a question that inevitably occurs to the independently thoughtful: How do you get evolutionarily from A to B? Can you get from A to B by the mechanisms assumed? Without practical details, evolution looks like an assertion that the better survives the worse; throw in ionizing radiation and such to provide things to do the surviving, and we’re off to the races. But…can we get there from here? Do we actually know the intermediate steps and the associated genetic mechanics? If we don’t know what the steps were, can we at least show unambiguously a series of steps that would work?

Lots of evolutionary changes just don’t look manageable by random mutation. Some orchestrated jump seems necessary. How does an animal evolve color vision, given that doing so would require elaborate changes in eye chemistry, useless without simultaneous elaborate changes in the brain to interpret the incoming impulses, which changes would themselves be useless without the retinal changes?

Or consider caterpillars. A caterpillar has no obvious resemblance to a butterfly. The disparity in engineering is huge. The caterpillar has no legs, properly speaking, certainly no wings, no proboscis. How did a species that did not undergo metamorphosis evolve into one that did? Pupating looks like something you do well or not at all: If you don’t turn into something practical at the end, you don’t get another chance.

Think about this. The ancestor of a modern caterpillar necessarily was something that could reproduce already. To get to be a butterfly-producing sort of organism, it would have to evolve silk-extruding organs, since they are what you make a cocoon with. OK, maybe it did this to tie leaves together, or maybe the beast resembled a tent-caterpillar. (Again, plausibility over evidence.) Then some mutation caused it to wrap itself experimentally in silk. (What mutation? Are we serious?) It then died, wrapped, because it had no machinery to cause it to undergo the fantastically complex transformation into a butterfly. Death is usually a discouragement to reproduction.

Tell me how the beast can gradually acquire, by accident, the capacity gradually to undergo all the formidably elaborate changes from worm to butterfly, so that each intermediate form is a practical organism that survives. If evolutionists cannot answer such questions, the theory fails.

Here the evolutionist will say, “Fred, caterpillars are soft, squashy things and don’t leave good fossils, so it’s unreasonable to expect us to find proof.” I see the problem. But it is unreasonable to expect me to accept something on the grounds that it can’t be proved. Yes, it is possible that an explanation exists and that we just haven’t found it. But you can say that of anything whatever. Is it good science to assume that evidence will be forthcoming because we sure would like it to be? I’ll gladly give you evidence Wednesday for a theory today?

Note that I am not asking evolutionists to give detailed mechanics for the evolution of everything that lives. If they gave convincing evidence for a few of the hard cases—proof of principle, so to speak--I would be inclined to believe that equally good evidence existed for the others. But they haven’t.
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Evolution breaks down into at least three logically separable components: First, that life arose by chemical accident; second, that it then evolved into the life we see today; and third, that the mechanism was the accretion of chance mutations. Evolutionists, not particularly logical, refuse to see this separability.

The first, chance formation of life, simply hasn’t been established. It isn’t science, but faith.

The second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then evolved into the life of today, is more solid. In very old rocks you find fish, then things, like coelacanth and the ichthyostega, that look like transitional forms, and finally us. They seem to have gotten from A to B somehow. A process of evolution, however driven, looks reasonable. It is hard to imagine that they appeared magically from nowhere, one after the other.

The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky. If it cannot account for the simultaneous appearance of complex, functionally interdependent characteristics, as in the case of caterpillars, it fails. Thus far, it hasn’t accounted for them.

It is interesting to note that evolutionists switch stories regarding the mechanism of transformation. The standard Neo-Darwinian view is that evolution proceeds very slowly. But when it proves impossible to find evidence of gradual evolution, some evolutionists turn to “punctuated equilibrium,” (2) which says that evolution happens by sudden undetectable spurts. The idea isn’t foolish, just unestablished. Then there are the evolutionists who, in opposition to those who maintain that point-mutations continue to account for evolution, say that now cultural evolution has taken over.

Finally, when things do not happen according to script—when, for example, human intelligence appears too rapidly—then we have the theory of “privileged genes,” which evolved at breakneck speed because of assumed but unestablished selective pressures. That is, the existence of the pressures is inferred from the changes, and then the changes are attributed to the pressures. Oh.

When you have patched a tire too many times, you start thinking about getting a new tire.

As previously mentioned, evolutionists depend heavily on plausibility unabetted by evidence. There is also the matter of implausibility. Suppose that I showed you two tiny gear wheels, such as one might find in an old watch, and said, “See? I turn this little wheel, and the other little wheel turns too. Isn’t that cute?” You would not find this surprising. Suppose I then showed you a whole mechanical watch, with thirty little gear wheels and a little lever that said tickticktick. You would have no trouble accepting that they all worked together.

If I then told you of a mechanism consisting of a hundred billion little wheels that worked for seventy years, repairing itself, wouldn’t you suspect either that I was smoking something really good—or that something beyond simple mechanics must be involved?

Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.

Does the theory, however reasonable and plausible (or not), in fact map onto what we actually see? A principle of evolution is that traits conferring fitness become general within a population. Do they?

Again, consider intelligence. Presumably it increases fitness. (Or maybe it does. An obvious question is why, if intelligence is adaptive—i.e., promotes survival--it didn’t evolve earlier; and if it is not adaptive, why did it evolve at all? You get various unsubstantiated answers, such as that intelligence is of no use without an opposable thumb, or speech, or something.)

Those who deal in human evolution usually hold The Bell Curve in high regard. (So do I. It’s almost as good as Shotgun News or, more appropriate in this context, the Journal of Irreproducible Results.) A point the book makes is that in the United States the highly intelligent tend to go into fields requiring intelligence, as for example the sciences, computing, and law. They live together, work together, and marry each other, thus tending to concentrate intelligence instead of making it general in the population. They also produce children at below the level of replacement. Perhaps fitness leads to extinction.

Black sub-Saharan Africans (say many evolutionists) have a mean IQ somewhere near 70, live in wretched poverty, and breed enthusiastically. White Europeans, reasonably bright at IQ 100 and quite prosperous, are losing population. Jews, very bright indeed at a mean IQ of 115 and very prosperous, are positively scarce, always have been, and seem to be losing ground. From this I conclude either that (a) intelligence does not increase fitness or (b) reproduction is inversely proportional to fitness.

I’m being a bit of a smart-ass here, but…the facts really don’t seem to match the theory.

In human populations, do the fit really reproduce with each other? It is a matter of daily observation that men prefer cute, sexy women. It then becomes crucial for evolutionists to show that cute and sexy are more fit than strong, smart, and ugly. Thus large breasts are said to produce more milk (Evidence? Chimpanzees have no breasts yet produce ample milk.) and that broad hips imply a large birth canal. (But men are not attracted to broad hips, but to broad hips in conjunction with a narrow waist.) Curvaceous legs are curvaceous because of underlying muscle, important for fitness.

Of course Chinese women do not have muscular legs or buttocks, wide hips, or large breasts, and seem to reproduce satisfactorily. (White and Asian women are more physically delicate than African women, as witness the lower rates of training injuries among black women in the American army. Thus European women, said to have emigrated from Africa and evolved to be Caucasians, lost sturdiness. Why?)

Then it is said that ugly woman are hypertestosteronal, and therefore have more spontaneous abortions. A sophomore logic student with a hangover could point out the problems and unsaid things in this argument.

There is an air of desperation about all of it. Transparently they begin with their conclusion and craft their reasoning to reach it.

To the evolutionarily unbaptised, it seems that evolution might occur slowly, by the gradual accretion of random point-mutations over millions of years, but certainly could occur rapidly by the spread of genes already available in the population. For example, genes presumably exist among us for the eyes of Ted Williams, the endurance of marathon runners, the general physical plant of Mohammed Ali, the intelligence of Gauss, and so on. (This of course assumes genetic determinism, which not all geneticists buy.) Are, or were, these becoming general? Perhaps. Show me. If not, one must conclude either that these qualities do not confer fitness, or that fitness does not become general. It seems odd to believe that massive structural changes can occur slowly through the accumulation of accidental changes, but much more rapid increases in fitness do not occur through existent genes. Can we get answers, please? Concrete, non-metaphysical, demonstrable answers?

With evolution the sciences run into the problem of consciousness, which they are poorly equipped to handle. This is important. You don’t need to consider consciousness in, say, physical chemistry, which gives the correct answers without it. But evolution is a study of living things, of which consciousness is at least sometimes a quality. Evolutionists know this, and so write unwittingly fatuous articles on the evolution of consciousness. They believe that they are being scientific. But…are they?

Obvious questions: What is consciousness? Does it have a derived definition, like f = ma? Or is it an undefined primitive, like “line” or “point”? With what instrument do you detect it? Is something either conscious or not, or do you have shades and degrees? Is a tree conscious, or a rock? How do you know? Evolution means a continuous change over time. How do you document such changes? Do we have fossilized consciousness, consciousness preserved in amber? Does consciousness have physical existence? If it does, is it electromagnetic, gravitational, or what? If it doesn’t have physical existence, what kind of existence does it have?

If you cannot define it, detect it, or measure it, how do you study its evolution, if any? Indeed, how do the sciences, based on physics, handle the physically undetectable?

Speculation disguised as science never ends. For example, some say that consciousness is just a side-effect of complexity. How do they know? Complexity defined how? If a man is conscious because he’s complex, then a whole room full of people must be even more conscious, because the total complexity would have to be more than any one fellow’s complexity. The universe has got to be more complex than anything in it, so it must be motingator conscious.

Ah, but the crucial questions, though: (Again, the possible answers are, “Yes,” “No,” “I don’t know,” or “The question doesn’t make sense.”)

First, does consciousness interact with matter? It seems to. When I drop a cinder block on my foot, it sure interacts with my consciousness. And if I consciously tell my hand to move, it does.

Second, if consciousness interacts with matter, then don’t you have to take it into account in describing physical systems?

Humans are said to have a poor sense of smell because they evolved to stand upright in the savanna where you can see forever and don’t need to smell things. This makes no sense: Anyone can see that the better your senses of smell and hearing, especially at night but even in daytime if you have lions that look like dirt and know how to sneak up on things, you are better off. I note that horses have good vision and eyes at about the same altitude as ours, but they have great noses.

Then the evolutionist says, well, people’s noses retracted into their faces, and there wasn’t room for good olfaction. How much olfactory tissue does a house cat have? They can sure smell things better than we can. Oh, then says the Evolutionist, a large olfactory center in the brain would impose too much metabolic strain and require that people eat more, and so they would die of starvation in bad times. Evidence? Demonstration?

My favorite example, which does not reach the level of plausibility, is such artifacts as the tail of a peacock which obviously make the bird easier to see and eat. So help me, I have several times seen the assertion that females figure that any male who can survive such a horrendous disadvantage must really be tough, and therefore good mating material. The tail increases fitness by decreasing fitness. A Boy Named Sue.

Supposedly traits that kill off an animal die out of the population, and things that help the beast survive spread till they all have them. That makes sense. But does it happen?

That it does is certainly an article of faith. I once asked a doctor why Rh negative people stayed in the population. Fifteen percent of white women are negative, so they are usually going to mate with positive men, with the consequent possibility that children will suffer from hemolytic disease. Well, said the doctor, being Rh negative obviously must have some survival value, or it wouldn’t exist. (Then why hasn’t it become general? Or is it doing so?) She simply believed.

She then rolled out sickle-cell anemia, the poster child of evolution, which is caused by a point mutation on the beta chain of hemoglobin and, when heterozygous, helps people survive malaria.

Maybe Rh negativity does have some survival value, which can be shown to be greater than its non-survival value. Maybe asthma does too, and fatal allergies to bee stings, and migraines, schizophrenia, panic, cluster headaches, anaphylactic shock in general, homosexuality in males, allergies, a thousand genetic diseases, suicide, and so on. (I suppose you could argue that being a suicide bomber ensures wide dispersal of one’s genetic material.)

For that matter, why are there so many traits that have no obvious value? For example, kidneys have well developed nerves. Kidney stones are agonizing. Yet there is absolutely nothing an animal can do about a kidney stone. How do those nerves increase fitness?

Evolutionists don’t ask. Always the question is How does this fit in with evolution, instead of, Does this fit in with evolution?

An interesting thought that drives evolutionists mad is called Intelligent Design, or ID. It is the view that things that appear to have been done deliberately might have been. Some look at, say, the human eye and think, “This looks like really good engineering. Elaborate retina of twelve layers, marvelously transparent cornea, pump system to keep the whole thing inflated, suspensory ligaments, really slick lens, the underlying cell biology. Very clever.”

I gather that a lot of ID folk are in fact Christian apologists trying to drape Genesis in scientific respectability. That is, things looked to have been designed, therefore there must be a designer, now will Yahweh step forward. Yet an idea is not intellectually disreputable because some of the people who hold it are. The genuine defects of ID are the lack of a detectible designer, and that evolution appears to have occurred. This leads some to the thought that consciousness is involved and evolution may be shaping itself. I can think of no way to test the idea.

In any event, to anyone of modest rationality, the evolutionist’s hostility to Intelligent Design is amusing. Many evolutionists argue, perhaps correctly, that Any Day Now we will create life in the laboratory, which would be intelligent design. Believing that life arose by chemical accident, they will argue (reasonably, given their assumptions) that life must have evolved countless times throughout the universe. It follows then that, if we will soon be able to design life, someone else might have designed us.

To evolutionists I say, “I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don’t expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology.”

I once told my daughters, “Whatever you most ardently believe, remember that there is another side. Try, however hard it may be, to put yourself in the shoes of those whose views you most dislike. Force yourself to make a reasoned argument for their position. Do that, think long and hard, and conclude as you will. You can do no better, and you may be surprised.”

(1) An example, for anyone interested, of the sort of unlogic to which I was exposed by evolutionists: Some simple viruses are strings of nucleotides in a particular order. In 2002 Eckhard Wimmer, at the University of New York at Stony Brook, downloaded the sequence for polio from the internet, bought the necessary nucleotides from a biological supply house, strung them together, and got a functioning virus that caused polio in mice. It was a slick piece of work.

When I ask evolutionists whether the chance creation of life has been demonstrated in the laboratory, I get email offering Wimmer’s work as evidence that it has been done. But (even stipulating that viruses are alive) what Wimmer did was to put OTS nucleotides together according to a known pattern in a well-equipped laboratory. This is intelligent design, or at least intelligent plagiarism. It is not chance anything. At least some of the men who offered Wimmer’s work as what it wasn’t are far too intelligent not to see the illogic—except when they are defending the faith.

(2) Many Evolutionists respond to skepticism about life’s starting by chance by appealing to the vastness of time. “Fred, there were billions and billions of gallons of ocean, for billions of years, or billions of generations of spiders or bugs or little funny things with too many legs, so the odds are in all that time….” Give something long enough and it has to happen, they say. Maybe. But probabilities don’t always work they way they look like they ought.

Someone is said to have said that a monkey banging at random on a typewriter would eventually type all the books in the British Museum. (Some of the books suggest that this may have happened, but never mind.) Well, yes. The monkey would. But it could be a wait. The size of the wait is worth pondering.

Let’s consider the chance that the chimp would type a particular book. To make the arithmetic easy, let’s take a bestseller with 200,000 words. By a common newspaper estimate of five letters per word on average, that’s a million letters. What’s the chance the monkey will get the book in a given string of a million characters?

For simplicity, assume a keyboard of 100 keys. The monkey has a 1/100 chance of getting the first letter, times 1/100 of getting the second letter, and so on. His chance of getting the book is therefore one in 1 in 100 exp 1,000,000, or 1 in 10 exp 2,000,000. (I don’t offhand know log 3 but, thirty being greater than ten, a 30-character keyboard would give well in excess of 10 exp 1,000,000.)

Now, let’s be fair to the Bandar Log. Instead of one monkey, let’s use 10 exp 100 monkeys. Given that the number of subatomic particles in the universe is supposed to be 10 exp 87 (or something), that seems to be a fair dose of monkeys. (I picture a cowering electron surrounded by 10 exp 13 monkeys.) Let’s say they type 10 exp 10 characters per second per each, for 10 exp 100 seconds which, considering that the age of the universe (I read somewhere) is 10 exp 18 seconds, seems more than fair.

Do the arithmetic. For practical purposes, those monkeys have no more chance of getting the book than the single monkey had, which, for practical purposes, was none.

Now, I don’t suggest that the foregoing calculation has any direct application to the chance formation of life. (I will get seriously stupid email from people who ignore the foregoing sentence.) But neither do I know that the chance appearance of a cell does not involve paralyzing improbabilities. Without unambiguous numbers arising from unarguable assumptions, invoking time as a substitute for knowledge can be hazardous.

Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism,

ROFL! Apparently this guy is ignorant of the fact that the majority of evolutionists in America are themselves *Christians*.

with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat.

Gee, might it have something to do with the way that evolution is under constant attack by folks calling themselves creationists? Or is that too obvious for the author to grasp?

This is peculiar to them.

Because the creationists' attacks are "peculiar to evolution" (not to mention "peculiar" in the other sense). I don't see anyone going to court to try to force astronomy textbooks to carry "disclaimers"... And I haven't heard of anyone starting an "anti-astronomy league".

Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas.

Neither would evolutionists (and for a long time they *didn't*) if the creationists didn't keep popping out of the woodwork to attack evolution and evolutionists, including but not limited to in school boards and in the courts. Not surprisingly, the evolutionists are defending themselves from the attacks.

Nobody does—except evolutionists.

See above.

We are dealing with competing religions

Yawn -- *that* stupid claim again? Evolutionary biology is science. It only looks like "religion" to those people who are so steeped in their own religions that they can't conceive of any other way of acquiring knowledge. It's like the old saying, "when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

—overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

We've got absolutely no problem with "skepticism". Read any science journals and you'll see plenty of "skepeticism" of *everything*, including evolution. Science thrives on skepticism, it's part of the scientific method.

However, you will see some "fury of response" to the endless waves of IGNORANT, FLAWED, KNEE-JERK skepticism by people most of whom couldn't even pass a freshman biology course. It gets *really* old after the first several hundred times.

Speaking of things "peculiar to evolution", could someone tell me why it is that while most folks would never dream of presuming to know enough about, say, relativistic physics, to denounce that field of science as a "fraud" or "a religion" or "metaphysics", blah blah blah -- and yet endless waves of people seem to feel imminently qualified to make such pronoucements about evolutionary biology in complete confidence, without bothering to learn much if anything about it?

...and then you wonder why those of us who *do* know quite a bit about the field get a little cranky at the vast numbers of arrogant know-nothings who dismiss 150 years of research as "fraud" and worse?

The last straw for me was a post where a Freeper declared that even her nine-year old daughter was able to spot the "flaw" in evolution. My response to that post explains why evolutionists often get fed up to *here* with the frequent attacks an insults (note, a recent change at NCBI has broken a lot of these links, but you can still find those papers by Googling for their titles):

LOL.. well duh. My nine year old figured that out. LOL. She has seen my pics of micro- organisms plus the macroscopic world. With no federal funding and no advanced degrees- she figured out it would be statistically impossible no matter how many millions of years for each organism to develop from one common cellular structure. She thought that even after a gamillion years we would be lucky to have a small portion of living organisms today.
Yes, indeed, anti-evolutionist "analysis" is about on the level of sophistication and knowledge as a nine-year-old. Thanks for the example.
Meanwhile, could you ask your little girl for her critique of the following papers? It sure would be a boon to the world of science if your nine-year-old could shed some light on these ongoing productive lines of research. Thanks.

On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells William Martin and Michael J. Russell
Abstract: All life is organized as cells. Physical compartmentation from the environment and self-organization of self-contained redox reactions are the most conserved attributes of living things, hence inorganic matter with such attributes would be life’s most likely forebear. We propose that life evolved in structured iron monosulphide precipitates in a seepage site hydrothermal mound at a redox, pH and temperature gradient between sulphide-rich hydrothermal fluid and iron(II)-containing waters of the Hadean ocean floor. The naturally arising, three-dimensional compartmentation observed within fossilized seepage-site metal sulphide precipitates indicates that these inorganic compartments were the precursors of cell walls and membranes found in free-living prokaryotes. The known capability of FeS and NiS to catalyse the synthesis of the acetyl-methylsulphide from carbon monoxide and methylsulphide, constituents of hydrothermal fluid, indicates that pre-biotic syntheses occurred at the inner surfaces of these metal-sulphide-walled compartments, which furthermore restrained reacted products from diffusion into the ocean, providing sufficient concentrations of reactants to forge the transition from geochemistry to biochemistry. The chemistry of what is known as the RNA-world could have taken place within these naturally forming, catalyticwalled compartments to give rise to replicating systems. Sufficient concentrations of precursors to support replication would have been synthesized in situ geochemically and biogeochemically, with FeS (and NiS) centres playing the central catalytic role. The universal ancestor we infer was not a free-living cell, but rather was confined to the naturally chemiosmotic, FeS compartments within which the synthesis of its constituents occurred. The first free-living cells are suggested to have been eubacterial and archaebacterial chemoautotrophs that emerged more than 3.8 Gyr ago from their inorganic confines. We propose that the emergence of these prokaryotic lineages from inorganic confines occurred independently, facilitated by the independent origins of membrane-lipid biosynthesis: isoprenoid ether membranes in the archaebacterial and fatty acid ester membranes in the eubacterial lineage. The eukaryotes, all of which are ancestrally heterotrophs and possess eubacterial lipids, are suggested to have arisen ca. 2 Gyr ago through symbiosis involving an autotrophic archaebacterial host and a heterotrophic eubacterial symbiont, the common ancestor of mitochondria and hydrogenosomes. The attributes shared by all prokaryotes are viewed as inheritances from their confined universal ancestor. The attributes that distinguish eubacteria and archaebacteria, yet are uniform within the groups, are viewed as relics of their phase of differentiation after divergence from the non-free-living universal ancestor and before the origin of the free-living chemoautotrophic lifestyle. The attributes shared by eukaryotes with eubacteria and archaebacteria, respectively, are viewed as inheritances via symbiosis. The attributes unique to eukaryotes are viewed as inventions specific to their lineage. The origin of the eukaryotic endomembrane system and nuclear membrane are suggested to be the fortuitous result of the expression of genes for eubacterial membrane lipid synthesis by an archaebacterial genetic apparatus in a compartment that was not fully prepared to accommodate such compounds, resulting in vesicles of eubacterial lipids that accumulated in the cytosol around their site of synthesis. Under these premises, the most ancient divide in the living world is that between eubacteria and archaebacteria, yet the steepest evolutionary grade is that between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
And:
The emergence of life from iron monosulphide bubbles at a submarine hydrothermal redox and pH front M. J. RUSSELL & A. J. HALL: Department of Geology and Applied Geology, University of Glasgow
Abstract: Here we argue that life emerged on Earth from a redox and pH front at c. 4.2 Ga. This front occurred where hot (c. 150)C), extremely reduced, alkaline, bisulphide-bearing, submarine seepage waters interfaced with the acid, warm (c. 90)C), iron-bearing Hadean ocean. The low pH of the ocean was imparted by the ten bars of CO2 considered to dominate the Hadean atmosphere/hydrosphere. Disequilibrium between the two solutions was maintained by the spontaneous precipitation of a colloidal FeS membrane. Iron monosulphide bubbles comprising this membrane were inflated by the hydrothermal solution upon sulphide mounds at the seepage sites. Our hypothesis is that the FeS membrane, laced with nickel, acted as a semipermeable catalytic boundary between the two fluids, encouraging synthesis of organic anions by hydrogenation and carboxylation of hydrothermal organic primers. The ocean provided carbonate, phosphate, iron, nickel and protons; the hydrothermal solution was the source of ammonia, acetate, HS", H2 and tungsten, as well as minor concentrations of organic sulphides and perhaps cyanide and acetaldehyde. The mean redox potential (ÄEh) across the membrane, with the energy to drive synthesis, would have approximated to 300 millivolts. The generation of organic anions would have led to an increase in osmotic pressure within the FeS bubbles. Thus osmotic pressure could take over from hydraulic pressure as the driving force for distension, budding and reproduction of the bubbles. Condensation of the organic molecules to polymers, particularly organic sulphides, was driven by pyrophosphate hydrolysis. Regeneration of pyrophosphate from the monophosphate in the membrane was facilitated by protons contributed from the Hadean ocean. This was the first use by a metabolizing system of protonmotive force (driven by natural ÄpH) which also would have amounted to c. 300 millivolts. Protonmotive force is the universal energy transduction mechanism of life. Taken together with the redox potential across the membrane, the total electrochemical and chemical energy available for protometabolism amounted to a continuous supply at more than half a volt. The role of the iron sulphide membrane in keeping the two solutions separated was appropriated by the newly synthesized organic sulphide polymers. This organic take-over of the membrane material led to the miniaturization of the metabolizing system. Information systems to govern replication could have developed penecontemporaneously in this same milieu. But iron, sulphur and phosphate, inorganic components of earliest life, continued to be involved in metabolism.
And:
The Path from the RNA World Anthony M. Poole, Daniel C. Jeffares, David Penny: Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Massey University
Abstract: We describe a sequential (step by step) Darwinian model for the evolution of life from the late stages of the RNA world through to the emergence of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. The starting point is our model, derived from current RNA activity, of the RNA world just prior to the advent of genetically-encoded protein synthesis. By focusing on the function of the protoribosome we develop a plausible model for the evolution of a protein-synthesizing ribosome from a high-fidelity RNA polymerase that incorporated triplets of oligonucleotides. With the standard assumption that during the evolution of enzymatic activity, catalysis is transferred from RNA M RNP M protein, the first proteins in the ``breakthrough organism'' (the first to have encoded protein synthesis) would be nonspecific chaperone-like proteins rather than catalytic. Moreover, because some RNA molecules that pre-date protein synthesis under this model now occur as introns in some of the very earliest proteins, the model predicts these particular introns are older than the exons surrounding them, the ``introns-first'' theory. Many features of the model for the genome organization in the final RNA world ribo-organism are more prevalent in the eukaryotic genome and we suggest that the prokaryotic genome organization (a single, circular genome with one center of replication) was derived from a ``eukaryotic-like'' genome organization (a fragmented linear genome with multiple centers of replication). The steps from the proposed ribo-organism RNA genome M eukaryotic-like DNA genome M prokaryotic-like DNA genome are all relatively straightforward, whereas the transition prokaryotic-like genome M eukaryotic-like genome appears impossible under a Darwinian mechanism of evolution, given the assumption of the transition RNA M RNP M protein. A likely molecular mechanism, ``plasmid transfer,'' is available for the origin of prokaryotic-type genomes from an eukaryotic-like architecture. Under this model prokaryotes are considered specialized and derived with reduced dependence on ssRNA biochemistry. A functional explanation is that prokaryote ancestors underwent selection for thermophily (high temperature) and/or for rapid reproduction (r selection) at least once in their history.
(Note: The above papers are a few years old -- anyone who tries to rebut them without familiarity with the amount of confirmation of those scenarios which has already come flooding in the past few years is only going to make an ass of themselves...)
Also:

The Evolution of Improved Fitness by random mutation plus selection
Ancient Jumping DNA May Have Evolved Into Key Component Of Human Immune System
Transposition mediated by RAG1 and RAG2 and its implications for the evolution of the immune system
Evolution of immune reactions
New insights into V(D)J recombination and its role in the evolution of the immune system
Evolution and developmental regulation of the major histocompatibility complex
Evolution of the IL-6/class IB cytokine receptor family in the immune and nervous systems
Layered evolution in the immune system. A model for the ontogeny and development of multiple lymphocyte lineages
Development of an immune system
The ancestor of the adaptive immune system was the CAM system for organogenesis
The evolutionary origins of immunoglobulins and T-cell receptors: possibilities and probabilities
Evolutionary perspectives on amyloid and inflammatory features of Alzheimer disease
Organization of the human RH50A gene (RHAG) and evolution of base composition of the RH gene family.
Molecular evolution of the vertebrate immune system.
Morphostasis: an evolving perspective.
Rapid evolution of immunoglobulin superfamily C2 domains expressed in immune system cells.
Reconstructing the evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation from a consideration of the amino acid sequences of clotting proteins
Evolutionary assembly of blood coagulation proteins
Exon and domain evolution in the proenzymes of blood coagulation and fibrinolysis
Evolution of proteolytic enzymes
Evolution of vertebrate fibrin formation and the process of its dissolution.
Common Parasite Overturns Traditional Beliefs About The Evolution And Role Of Hemoglobin
Scientists Discover How Bacteria Protect Themselves Against Immune System
The Evolution of Hemoglobin
Globins in nonvertebrate species: dispersal by horizontal gene transfer and evolution of the structure-function relationships
Reduction of two functional gamma-globin genes to one: an evolutionary trend in New World monkeys
Evolutionary history of introns in a multidomain globin gene
Hemoglobin A2: origin, evolution, and aftermath
Early evolution of microtubules and undulipodia
Flagellar beat patterns and their possible evolution
A temporary flagellate (mastigote) stage in the vahlkampfiid amoeba Willaertia magna and its possible evolutionary significance
The evolutionary origin and phylogeny of eukaryote flagella
Molecular analysis of archael flagellins: similarity to the type IV pilin-transport superfamily widespread in bacteria
Molecular evolution of the C-terminal cytoplasmic domain of a superfamily of bacterial receptors involved in taxis
Dynein family of motor proteins: present status and future questions
Origins of the nucleate organisms
The evolutionary origin and phylogeny of microtubules, mitotic spindles and eukaryote flagella
The evolution of cellular movement in eukaryotes: the role of microfilaments and microtubules
Kinesin Motor Phylogenetic Tree
Evolution of a dynamic cytoskeleton
Isolation, characterization and evolution of nine pufferfish (Fugu rubripes) actin genes
Evolution of chordate actin genes: evidence from genomic organization and amino acid sequences
Structural comparisons of muscle and nonmuscle actins give insights into the evolution of their functional differences
Molecular evolution of glutamate receptors: a primitive signaling mechanism that existed before plants and animals diverged.
Co-evolution of ligand-receptor pairs in the vasopressin/oxytocin superfamily of bioactive peptides
The evolution of the synapses in the vertebrate central nervous system
Evolutionary origins of multidrug and drug-specific efflux pumps in bacteria.
A comprehensive evolutionary analysis based on nucleotide and amino acid sequences of the alpha- and beta-subunits of glycoprotein hormone gene family.
The puzzle of the Krebs citric acid cycle: assembling the pieces of chemically feasible reactions, and opportunism in the design of metabolic pathways during evolution
The evolution of metabolic cycles
Evolution of the first metabolic cycles
Chemical evolution of the citric acid cycle: sunlight photolysis of the amino acids glutamate and aspartate
Speculations on the origin and evolution of metabolism
The Molecular Anatomy of an Ancient Adaptive Event
New prospects for deducing the evolutionary history of metabolic pathways in prokaryotes: aromatic biosynthesis as a case-in-point
Biochemical pathways in prokaryotes can be traced backward through evolutionary time
Enzyme specialization during the evolution of amino acid biosynthetic pathways
Enzyme recruitment in evolution of new function
Evolution of glycolysis
Bioenergetics: the evolution of molecular mechanisms and the development of bioenergetic concepts
Theoretical approaches to the evolutionary optimization of glycolysis--chemical analysis
The evolution of kinetoplastid glycosomes
Stepwise molecular evolution of bacterial photosynthetic energy conversion
Evolution of photosynthetic reaction centers and light harvesting chlorophyll proteins
Evolution of photosynthetic reaction centers
Early evolution of photosynthesis: clues from nitrogenase and chlorophyll iron proteins
Evolution of the control of pigment and plastid development in photosynthetic organisms
Chemical evolution of photosynthesis
Molecular evolution of ruminant lysozymes
Adaptive evolution of lysozyme: changes in amino acid sequence, regulation
of expression and gene number
Evolution of stomach lysozyme: the pig lysozyme gene
The evolution of trichromatic color vision by opsin gene duplication in New World and Old World primates
The Evolution of Color Vision
Molecular basis for tetrachromatic color vision
Molecular evolution of the Rh3 gene in Drosophila
Interphotoreceptor retinoid-binding protein. Gene characterization, protein repeat structure, and its evolution
Spectral tuning and molecular evolution of rod visual pigments in the species flock of cottoid fish in Lake Baikal
The evolution of rhodopsins and neurotransmitter receptors
Optimization, constraint, and history in the evolution of eyes
A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve
Sequence analysis of teleost retina-specific lactate dehydrogenase C: evolutionary implications for the vertebrate lactate dehydrogenase gene family
The eye of the blind mole rat (Spalax ehrenbergi): regressive evolution at the molecular level
The evolution of eyes.
Programming the Drosophila embryo
Evolution of chordate hox gene clusters
Hox genes in brachiopods and priapulids and protostome evolution.
Radical evolutionary change possible in a few generations
Evolution Re-Sculpted Animal Limbs By Genetic Switches Once Thought Too Drastic For Survival
Flatworms Are Oldest Living Ancestors To Those Of Us With Right And Left Sides Researchers Report In Science
The origin and evolution of animal appendages
Hox genes in evolution: protein surfaces and paralog groups
Evolution of the insect body plan as revealed by the Sex combs reduced expression pattern
Sea urchin Hox genes: insights into the ancestral Hox cluster
Theoretical approaches to the analysis of homeobox gene evolution
Teleost HoxD and HoxA genes: comparison with tetrapods and functional evolution of the HOXD complex
Evolutionary origin of insect wings from ancestral gills
Tracing backbone evolution through a tunicate's lost tail
Classification and phylogeny of the MADS-box multigene family suggest defined roles of MADS-box gene subfamilies in the morphological evolution of eukaryotes
Modification of expression and cis-regulation of Hoxc8 in the evolution of diverged axial morphology.
The ParaHox gene cluster is an evolutionary sister of the Hox gene cluster.
Gene duplications in evolution of archaeal family B DNA polymerases
Adaptive amino acid replacements accompanied by domain fusion in reverse transcriptase
Molecular evolution of genes encoding ribonucleases in ruminant species
Studies on the sites expressing evolutionary changes in the structure of eukaryotic 5S ribosomal RNA
Evolution of a Transfer RNA Gene Through a Point Mutation in the Anticodon
Archaeal translation initiation revisited: the initiation factor 2 and eukaryotic initiation factor 2B alpha-beta-delta subunit families
Universally conserved translation initiation factors
Genetic code in evolution: switching species-specific aminoacylation with a peptide transplant
Evolution of transcriptional regulatory elements within the promoter of a mammalian gene.
Codon reassignment and amino acid composition in hemichordate mitochondria.
Reconstructing the evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation from a consideration of the amino acid sequences of clotting proteins
Determining divergence times of the major kingdoms of living organisms with a protein clock
The multiplicity of domains in proteins
Characterization, primary structure, and evolution of lamprey plasma albumin
The origins and evolution of eukaryotic proteins
Evolution of vertebrate fibrin formation and the process of its dissolution.
Vastly Different Virus Families May Be Related
Selective sweep of a newly evolved sperm-specific gene in Drosophila
Activated acetic acid by carbon fixation on (Fe,Ni)S under primordial conditions
Molecular evolution of the histidine biosynthetic pathway
Accelerated evolution in inhibitor domains of porcine elafin family members
Tandem arrangement of the human serum albumin multigene family in the sub-centromeric region of 4q: evolution and chromosomal direction of transcription
The B12-dependent ribonucleotide reductase from the archaebacterium Thermoplasma acidophila: an evolutionary solution to the ribonucleotide reductase conundrum
Ancient divergence of long and short isoforms of adenylate kinase: molecular evolution of the nucleoside monophosphate kinase family
Convergent evolution of antifreeze glycoproteins in Antarctic notothenioid fish and Arctic cod
Evolution of antifreeze glycoprotein gene from a trypsinogen gene in Antarctic notothenioid fish
Evolution of an antifreeze glycoprotein
A model for the evolution of the plastid sec apparatus inferred from secY gene phylogeny
The evolutionary history of the amylase multigene family in Drosophila pseudoobscura
Accelerated evolution of Trimeresurus okinavensis venom gland phospholipase A2 isozyme-encoding genes
The evolution of an allosteric site in phosphorylase
Molecular evolution of fish neurohypophysial hormones: neutral and selective evolutionary mechanisms
Pseudogenes in ribonuclease evolution: a source of new biomacromolecular function?
Evolution of hemopoietic ligands and their receptors. Influence of positive selection on correlated replacements throughout ligand and receptor proteins
Evolutionary relationships of the carbamoylphosphate synthetase genes
The molecular evolution of the small heat-shock proteins in plants
Phylogenetic analysis of carbamoylphosphate synthetase genes: complex evolutionary history includes an internal duplication within a gene which can root the tree of life
Duplication and functional divergence in the chalcone synthase gene family of Asteraceae: evolution with substrate change and catalytic simplification
Evolutionary history of the 11p15 human mucin gene family.
Molecular evolution of the aldo-keto reductase gene superfamily.
Molecular evolution allows bypass of the requirement for activation loop phosphorylation of the Cdc28 cyclin-dependent kinase.
A Classification of Possible Routes of Darwinian Evolution
Generation of evolutionary novelty by functional shift
Mobile DNA Sequences Could Be The Cause Of Chromosomal Mutations During The Evolution Of Species
A domain model for eukaryotic DNA organization: a molecular basis for cell differentiation and chromosome evolution.
The domain model for eukaryotic DNA organization. 2: A molecular basis for constraints on development and evolution.
Minor Shuffle Makes Protein Fold
Genetic Stowaways May Contribute To Evolutionary Change
Evolutionary Molecular Mechanism In Mammals Found
Complete Genomes
Genetic redundancy caused by gene duplications and its evolution in networks of transcriptional regulators
Strong evolutionary conservation of broadly expressed protein isoforms in the troponin I gene family and other vertebrate gene families
Cases of ancient mobile element DNA insertions that now affect gene regulation
Punctuated evolution caused by selection of rare beneficial mutations
The origin of programmed cell death
The origin and early development of biological catalysts
DNA secondary structures and the evolution of hypervariable tandem arrays
Episodic adaptive evolution of primate lysozymes
Genome plasticity as a paradigm of eubacteria evolution
Evolutionary motif and its biological and structural significance
Neutral and nonneutral mutations: the creative mix--evolution of complexity in gene interaction systems
Exon shuffling and other ways of module exchange
Introns and gene evolution
New Drosophila introns originate by duplication.
Evolution and the structural domains of proteins
The role of constrained self-organization in genome structural evolution
A possible origin of newly-born bacterial genes: significance of GC-rich nonstop frame on antisense strand
The coevolution of gene family trees
The evolution of metabolic cycles
The emergence of major cellular processes in evolution
A hardware interpretation of the evolution of the genetic code
Speculations on the origin and evolution of metabolism
Probabilistic reconstruction of ancestral protein sequences
The contribution of slippage-like processes to genome evolution
Molecular evolution in bacteria
The structural basis of molecular adaptation.
Mitochondrial DNA: molecular fossils in the nucleus
Cases of ancient mobile element DNA insertions that now affect gene regulation
Tiggers and DNA transposon fossils in the human genome
The eye of the blind mole rat (Spalax ehrenbergi): regressive evolution at the molecular level
Tiggers and DNA transposon fossils in the human genome
Gene competition and the possible evolutionary role of tumours
New Scientist Planet Science: Replaying life
Molecular evolution of an arsenate detoxification pathway by DNA shuffling
UB Researcher Developing Method That Employs Evolution To Develop New Drug Leads
Directed evolution of a type I antifreeze protein expressed in Escherichia coli with sodium chloride as selective pressure and its effect on antifreeze tolerance
Directed evolution of biosynthetic pathways. Recruitment of cysteine thioethers for constructing the cell wall of Escherichia coli
Exploring the functional robustness of an enzyme by in vitro evolution
Evolutionary algorithms in computer-aided molecular design
Mutations to the Rescue
Evolution of Enzymes for the Metabolism of New Chemical Inputs into the Environment
Evolution of Amino Acid Metabolism Inferred through Cladistic Analysis
Integrating the Universal Metabolism into a Phylogenetic Analysis
Invertebrate Data Predict an Early Emergence of Vertebrate Fibrillar Collagen Clades and an Anti-incest Model
Tachykinin and Tachykinin Receptor of an Ascidian, Ciona intestinalis: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGIN OF THE VERTEBRATE TACHYKININ FAMILY
DNA Replication Fidelity
Serial segmental duplications during primate evolution result in complex human genome architecture
Phylogeny determined by protein domain content
Evolutionary Genomics of Nuclear Receptors: From Twenty-Five Ancestral Genes to Derived Endocrine Systems
Gene Loss, Protein Sequence Divergence, Gene Dispensability, Expression Level, and Interactivity Are Correlated in Eukaryotic Evolution
The Evolution of Controlled Multitasked Gene Networks: The Role of Introns and Other Noncoding RNAs in the Development of Complex Organisms
Phylogenetic Dating and Characterization of Gene Duplications in Vertebrates: The Cartilaginous Fish Reference
Dating the Tree of Life
An Insect Molecular Clock Dates the Origin of the Insects and Accords with Palaeontological and Biogeographic Landmarks
Diversity, taxonomy and evolution of medium-chain dehydrogenase/reductase superfamily
Molecular archaeology of the Escherichia coli genome
Comparative Genomics of the Eukaryotes
Millions of Years of Evolution Preserved: A Comprehensive Catalog of the Processed Pseudogenes in the Human Genome
Asymmetric Sequence Divergence of Duplicate Genes
The Genetic Core of the Universal Ancestor
Evolutionary History of Chromosome 20
The Complete Mitochondrial DNA Sequence of Scenedesmus obliquus Reflects an Intermediate Stage in the Evolution of the Green Algal Mitochondrial Genome
Reconstructing large regions of an ancestral mammalian genome in silico
Occurrence and Consequences of Coding Sequence Insertions and Deletions in Mammalian Genomes
The Origin of Human Chromosome 1 and Its Homologs in Placental Mammals
Sister grouping of chimpanzees and humans as revealed by genome-wide phylogenetic analysis of brain gene expression profiles
Genome Evolution at the Genus Level: Comparison of Three Complete Genomes of Hyperthermophilic Archaea
The Evolution of Trichromatic Color Vision by Opsin Gene Duplication in New World and Old World Primates
Obcells as Proto-Organisms: Membrane Heredity, Lithophosphorylation, and the Origins of the Genetic Code, the First Cells, and Photosynthesis (Journal of Molecular Evolution, Volume 53 - Number 4/5, 2001)
N-Carbamoyl Amino Acid Solid-Gas Nitrosation by NO/NO_x: A New Route to Oligopeptides via alpha-Amino Acid N-Carboxyanhydride. Prebiotic Implications (Journal of Molecular Evolution, Volume 48 - Number 6, 1999
Chemical interactions between amino acid and RNA: multiplicity of the levels of specificity explains origin of the genetic code (Naturwissenschaften, Volume 89 Number 12 December 2002)
The Nicotinamide Biosynthetic Pathway Is a By-Product of the RNA World (Journal of Molecular Evolution, Volume 52 - Number 1, 2001)
On the RNA World: Evidence in Favor of an Early Ribonucleopeptide World
Inhibition of Ribozymes by Deoxyribonucleotides and the Origin of DNA
Genetic Code Origin: Are the Pathways of Type Glu-tRNAGln to Gln-tRNAGln Molecular Fossils or Not?
Researchers Engineer A Way To Improve T-Cell Receptors
Digital Organisms Give Life To Questions Of Evolution
Lies, Damned lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations
Purdue Study Breathes New Life Into Question Of How Life Began
Ammonia From The Earth's Deep Oceans A Key Step In The Search For Life's Origins
Whitehead Study Supports Existence Of Ancient RNA World Helps Provide Insight Into Early Evolution Of Life
Yale Scientists Recreate Molecular Fossils Now Extinct That May Have Existed At The Beginning Of Life
A whole old world
The path from the RNA world.
Relics from the RNA world.
A supersymmetric model for the evolution of the genetic code.
The hydrogen hypothesis for the first eukaryote.
Kick-start for life on earth
The Beginnings of Life on Earth
Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept? : Addenda to Review of David Foster's The Philosophical Scientists
Really, the world of science is just dying for further helpful insights from your child on these active research topics. Please have her review these and get back to us with her dissertations on them. As your nine-year-old points out, evolution "obviously" couldn't have happened, so something *must* be wrong with all of these findings -- please have your nine-year-old identify the errors for us.
And that goes for the rest of the anti-evolution know-it-alls on this thread as well. Come on, folks, show us what ya got. Since you're such self-proclaimed experts on evolutionary biology, this should be a piece of cake for y'all. Now's your chance, go for it. If evolution is the nonsense you claim it is, feel free to point out what's wrong with each of these papers, and what theory you've got that better explains the results and observations (*ALL* of them, not just one or two isolated observations).
Once you've finished with those, I'll post a few thousand more for you, but hey, that should be no problem for you "experts", you've got it all figured out already, right?
[185JHP wrote:] The hoax is circling the drain. Nothing scientific rests on the hoax, which is a good thing b/c it's laughable nonsense, built on jibberjabber jargn: Blahblahblah "DNA" blahblahblah...
I'm truly impressed with the level of knowledge, rational argument, and unassailable evidence shown by the anti-evolutionists. How could I ever have doubted that you folks truly grasp a century-and-a-half of scientific knowledge well enough to be in a position to critique an entire field of science and declare it completely void of validity in its entirety? Clearly, you've been right all along, and those millions of biologists who have spent their entire careers studying this topic are foolishly mistaken in every respect. I'm really impressed with the way you folks have made your case.
Oh, wait, no I'm not.
...do you ever even *listen* to yourselves? Your towering arrogance on this subject is only equalled by your vast ignorance of it.
Attacking a field of knowledge that you barely know -- and much of what you "know" is wrong thanks to creationist misinformation -- is a waste of *everyone's* time, including your own. Stop mouthing off without knowing what in the hell you're talking about. A lot of us have better things to do than correct all the misinformation y'all spew here on a regular basis. And acting like frothing scientific illiterates (okay, maybe it's *not* an act) really does *not* help the conservative cause -- it turns off large numbers of potential Republican voters in the same way (and for the same reasons) as the wackjob/enviro/feminist/"new-age"/crystal-healing/holistic/etc. "don't-confuse-me-with-science" folks turn off potential Democrat voters.
So if you really do care about conservatism -- go find a new hobby...
Until momincombatboots's little girl knows the difference between an endogenous retrovirus and a retroposon -- and can cogently discuss the pros and cons of maximum parsimony bootstrap consensus tree analysis of each -- (among a ton of other skills and types of evidence) she is *really* unlikely to be able to add any novel insights to the current body of scientific knowledge on this subject. And yes, that goes for you other anti-evolutionists in the peanut gallery as well. You really, really don't understand this topic even a fraction as well as you believe you do.
But maybe you can help me with a question I've been unable to answer: Why is it that folks who wouldn't dream of thinking that they knew enough to attempt to identify any flaws in (for example) quantum physics, have no problem at all feeling "qualified" to "disprove" or outright dismiss just about *everything* in evolutionary biology?

I expanded on those points in replies to subsequent responses:

I think your style of debate is called "elephant hurling."
In a sense, maybe, but in this case I was responding to a specific allegation with an appropriate, to-the-point response.
In case it has somehow escaped your attention, the anti-evolutionists on these threads do an awful lot of claiming that there is "no evidence for evolution", that evolution is "not a science", that evolution is "empty" or a "house of cards" or "a theory in crisis" and is about to come crashing down any day now, that it's "only a theory" (in the sense of "guess"), that it "can't be tested", "can't be falsified", "doesn't make predictions", "can't be replicated", "can't be observed", "denies reality", blah blah blah blah blah.
In short, one of the anti-evolutionists' favorite mantra is to repeat the creationist *LIE* that there's really "nothing to" evolutionary biology, that it's just an empty suit masquerading as "real" science and there's actually "no" evidence for it. (How many hundred examples would you like me to repost here?)
The recent "even my nine-year-old can see that it's nonsense" post was just more of the same -- the implication is that evolutionary biology is such a ridiculous, empty shell that even little children can see through it.
In reply to that sort of allegation it is ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE to respond with "elephant hurling". The point is, "since you say this topic is so unsupported and insubstantial, perhaps you'll realize what an idiot you're being when I stampede this herd of elephants in your direction -- does *THAT* feel 'insubstantial'? And that was just a tiny, tiny fraction. There's plenty more where that came from, if you feel like persisting in your ignorant proclamations."
In short, as long as anti-evolutionists persist in pretending that there's "nothing to see" in evolutionary biology, it's entirely appropriate to show them that even a *sliver* of the field is actually overwhelmingly huge, and beyond their level of knowledge.
Look, I've made endless posts responding to "evolution is empty" accusations with "no it isn't, it's supported by overwhelming evidence and endless studies", but somehow that just bounces off the anti-evolutionists' foreheads with a sharp "ping". So fine -- if I have to hit them with a sledgehammer, if I have to stampede them with all the elephants in Africa just to get through to them for a change, so be it. Maybe *then* they'll stop saying these stupid things ad infinitum.
And if even just one anti-evolutionist says, even to himself, "ummm, it seems there's more to this subject than I was led to believe", and tones down the outright LIE of the "evolution is empty" mantra so that those of us who *do* know something about this topic don't have to keep responding to the same old dishonest horsecrap fifty times a day, then I've accomplished something worthwhile.
The questions remains, though (and my past experience does not lead me to be optimistic) -- is even a single one of you folks that smart?

And:

Your nine year old is far wiser than all the intellectually blind evolutionists put together.
You really think so? Then I'll add you to the list of people that post #158 is directed towards. I await your critique, since you've got it all figured out, at least better than "all the intellectually blind evolutionists put together"...
As an X-atheist, evolutionist myself, I can tell you the arrogance and hostility you will encounter here is to be expected.
And, of course, there's nothing "arrogant" or "hostile" about dismissing "all the intellectually blind evolutionists" as having, "put together", less smarts than a single nine-year-old girl, right? You're one hell of a big hypocrite, Jorge.
They are some of the most arrogant and bitter people I have ever encountered.
You don't sound all that humble and sanguine yourself, Jorge.
But hey, now's your chance to put "all us intellectually blind evolutionists" in our place, son -- point out the errors in the papers I list in post #158. As an "X-evolutionist" (is that anything like an "X-Box"?), you should already know this material, right? Go for it.

Any further questions about why evolutionists might get a tad cranky about idiotic and insulting attacks on evolutionary biology, and against the people who are familiar with and work in the field?

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