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.
Thanks for your post. It's almost as much fun watching the monkey evolutionists fling their crap at the staring onlookers that resemble God.
IMHO, as I under stand it, in the animal kingdom any generic variations are ostracized and are either killed or don't usually get to mate. All of the animal shows I see on TV talk about this. A white wolf has problems. Even in humans we see this. Case in point, what if, and this is a big if, Down Syndrome is just a part of evolution. Abortion or sterilization is the norm for these special people. I don't believe basic animal/human instincts would allow evolution.
Conveniently left out of the article is the fact that the 'meat' didn't look that way when they broke open the bone.
They found the rock hard, dessicated chunk, and a female member of the team spent days rehydrating it, which made it look like it does now.
It wasn't fossilized (which is where the cells of the creature (bone, etc) are leached out and replaced by minerals which cement together into a rock hard 'cast' of the original.
That is the real difference between this find and other previous ones. They were all fossilized. This one wasn't, but looked just like the ones that are.
The media says they don't lie. Well, that is possible. They just don't put certain 'facts' in articles, and look how many are misled.
Great post -- what a classic tune!
Darwin's theory states life began on earth with single cell life forms which evolved into multi celled life forms, which evolved into higher life forms in including man. These all occurred by random mutation followed by natural selection without guidance from any intelligent entity like God.
A single mutation cannot move life much forwards. Even single cell organism with flagellum require 30 parts for the flagellum and 200 parts to the cilium. That is a one cell problem. Imagine the complexity of the eye and so forth. This example is from Behe's (1996), Darwin's Black Box.
Incidentally Dawkins called Behe a coward and an ignoramus, but admitted he couldn't answer the complexity problem. The other problem that you and anyone who believes in random mutations and natural selection is the difference between the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian periods in respect to the number and complexity of life.
Finally, Darwin himself admitted he had no good explanation as to how an eye evolved. He anticipated future records would prove this. After 150 years this has not happened, and more importantly, there should have been found many creatures in between present and past animals and organisms.
No one doubts that by selective breeding and other means we can favor one type of an organism over another. Unfortunately, it is estimated it takes 200 mutations for a flagellum. It is hard to imagine these would have occurred all at once, but that is the current position of evolutionists.
Finally, Francis Crick, discover of DNA and a Nobel Prize winner said "the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule so as to make it absurd." Like many atheists he believes that extraterrestials sent living cells to earth. In this fashion he keeps his sanity and avoids the question.
I have not labeled you anything. If you chose to label yourself a "Darwinist" you do so with your own knowledge of your belief system. My point was people who believe they are ultra rational and scientific when they claim to believe in evolution have taken a leap to faith as much or more than Martin Luther ever did.
see my 65.
The facts are there. Which is more likely? Evolution by natural selection or an invisible man in the sky directing microbiology?
You will have to answer that for yourself.
If this is your strawman version of evolution, it is no wonder you can argue plausibly against it.
However, biologists are not as stupid as you appear to be. New species do not appear in one generation. Evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles in a population over time. There is never a point in which one generation is a different species from the previous species.
That isn't necessary, any more than it is necessary to decide for oneself whether the earth is flat.
Oh, I have, brother. I have.
That isn't necessary, any more than it is necessary to decide for oneself whether the earth is flat.
It is a matter of faith. You may think you have the final answer based on facts but your facts are insufficient to determine your conclusion; hence, you are accepting on faith what you claim to be "science."
Reality isn't hostage to the psychoses of individuals. Science deals with what we can know. It doeas with it very effectively and accumulates reliable knowledge.
What you call faith is indeed a private matter, and arrives at no consensus over time. Faiths tend to splinter rather than converge.
Where you and I differ is you assume that Evolution including random generation of life, random mutation into desirable attributes and, finally, natural selection weeding out the unfit. This is a theory, hypothesis or assumption. It is not IMHO scientific fact. From my perspective if you assume it is scientific fact it is no different than a Christian assuming the virgin birth of Christ. Both require faith and cannot be disproved on the basis of facts and scientific inference.
I am not belittling your beliefs just noting their commonality with other beliefs.
"One who is an atheist or agnostic must by necessity believe in evolution."
You are incorrect. There are other possible world views that an atheist might adopt. For example, an atheist might be able to believe that the universe exists only in his own mind, and that it is generated as he lives. That sort of experiential world has been written about a number of times.
However, most atheists are people who generally accept the theory of evolution to be the mechanism of speciation. If physical evidence pointed in another direction, then they'd consider that, too.
The only explanation that atheists reject out of hand is the idea of a supernatural creator.
This is not a reasonable statement of evolution.
Get your darned velociraptor of my lawn! I'm sick and tired of cleaning up this crap!
"So are "Birth Defects" the driving force of evolution, or not? "
Huh? Uh, no. I had blond hair when I was young. My brother had red hair. My sister had black hair. That's genetic variation. Genetic variation drives evolution, along with the need to survive and reproduce in the existing environment.
You really should read an elementary level book on the theory of Evolution. I will help you not to appear ignorant in your messages. Ask the librarian at your local public library to recommend one for you.
Good points. "Natural Selection is basically an agency of stasis and not change, and that is a major problem for evolutionists. Natural selection weeds out anything an iota to the left or right of the norm for a given species as you note. In the case of humans, abortion and sterilization might be the solution to such cases in fairly recent times; prior to recent times the solution was probably witchcraft trials.
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