Posted on 07/23/2006 9:36:42 AM PDT by tomzz
Assuming macroevolutionary scenarios were possible (they aren't), the question arises, how much time would you actually need for them? The basic answer to that question is known as the Haldane Dilemma, after the famous mathematician and population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who published his work in the mid 1950s. The basic answer is that you would need trillions and quadrillions of years, and not just the tens of millions commonly supposed. Walter Remine puts a simplified version of the idea thusly:
Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or “proto-humans” ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a “beneficial mutation”. Imagine also that this population has the human or proto-human generation cycle time of roughly 20 years.Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 other die out immediately (from jealousy), and that the pair with the beneficial mutation has 100,000 kids and thus replenishes the herd.
Imagine that this process goes on like that for ten million years, which is more than anybody claims is involved in “human evolution”. The max number of such “beneficial mutations” which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from neanderthals.
That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.
But nobody ever accused evolutionists of being rational. Surely, they will argue, the problem might be resolved by having many mutations being passed through the herd simultaneously.
Most of the answer involves the fact that the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal. ANY creature which starts mutating willy nilly will perish.
So much for the amount of time evolutionists NEED (i.e. so much for the slice of wonderbread on the bottom of the basic evolutionist time sandwich. What about the slice on the top of the sandwich, i.e. how much time do they actually HAVE?
Consider the case of dinosaurs, which we are told died out 70 million years ago. Last summer, scientists trying to get a tyrannosaur leg bone out of a remote area by helicopter, broke the bone into two pieces, and this is what they found inside the bone:
This is the Reuters/MSNBC version of the story
That meat clearly is not 70 million years old; I've seen week-old roadkill which looked worse.
In fact, we appear to have one state named after a dinosaur, Mississippi being a variation of the Ojibway name "Mishipishu", which means "water panther", or stegosaur. DeLoria notes that Indian traditions describe Mishipishu as having red fur, a sawblade back, and a "great spiked tail" which he used as a weapon.
In fact you find pictures (petroglyphs) of Mishipishu around rivers and lakes and Lewis and Clark noted that their Indian guides were in mortal terror of these since they originally signified as much as "One of these LIVES here, be careful".
The pictograph at Agawa Rock at Lake Ontario shows the sawblade back fairly clearly:
and the close-eyed will note that stegosaurs did not have horns; nonetheless such glyphs survive only because Indians have always gone back and touched them up every couple of decades, and the horns were added very much later after the creature itself had perished from the Earth.
You add the questions of other dinosaur petroglyphs and Ica stones and what not into the mix and it seems fairly obvious that something is massively wrong with the common perception that dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years ago.
That is basically what I call the evolutionist time sandwich. They need trillions or quadrillions of years, and all they have is a few thousand.
Don't forget Saturn hovering over the north pole.
Bwahahahahaha!
fyi
Feral chickens? The magical gravity-reducing properties of Saturn in a polar orbit?
Sorry, but actual scientific data trumps simplistic calculations based off of arbitrary parameters and inaccurate models.
Maybe it is better not to donate to the March of Dimes, because with the right Birth Defects we could grow wings, and simply fly where we wanted to go, if the weather was nice, and the traffic was bad.
The only thing not to like in Haldane's original formulation of the problem was his describing it in terms of "genetic death". For those who would raise that as an objection, Walter Remine has a couple of new papers out which describe the problem entirely in terms of birth rates.
Typical evolutionist knee-jerk response.
If you stopped for a moment to consider all the starving African children who could be saved if they were provided with one basic evolutionist time sandwich a day, then you'd change your tune.
Why do you think making fun of unfortunate people constitutes a good joke?
Yikes! That would be bad for those of us who work at the only commercial-airplane company in the U.S. By the way, I have never seen any model of airplane - ever after "16 billion years" - mysteriously show up on the flight line. Maybe it will take another 16 billion years???
If Birth Defects are how we evolved, they are a good thing, and who are we to challenge life evolving processes.
Besides it may be fun to fly. After all, with Evolution, all things are possible!
"That meat clearly is not 70 million years old; I've seen week-old roadkill which looked worse. "
Really ?
Just how old do you think it "clearly" is ?
a week ? a decade ? a thousand years ?
Malcolm Muggeridge ? surely not the well known homosexual and Drury Lane Fairy.
mark for later
I'd GUESS a few thousand years, possibly as much as ten or twelve thousand. After 60 million years, all that would be left would be petrified material.
You're talking about making real sandwiches out of evolutionists? Don't know if anybody would want to EAT that....
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