[SirLinksalot]

This is a statement of the main points of why a lot of mathematicians, when they consider the evidence, tend to be skeptical about the Darwinian theory of evolution.

[ClearCase_guy]

I'll make some popcorn.

[Red Badger]

If evolution is an ongoing process, and all living things start at the same point, then by now there should be not only sentient humans, but fish, birds and reptiles, etc. Why would just one of the myriad species evolve to a superior position, and not the others......

[the anti-liberal]

Bookmarked - thanks for posting.

[WriteOn]

$1,000,000 reward to the first evolutionist to get life to evolve from any sort of primordial soup in a reproducible fashion. Or shut up.

[colorado tanker]

IMHO, random genetic mutation is almost certainly not the change agent of evolution. I'm not saying I know what is, but the evidence is against this.

[Phantom4]

It is amusing to watch all this dialog about irreduceable complexity, as if it had suddenly been "discovered" by the Intelligent Design "movement." William Paley (1743-1805) spoke of this very thing in his Natural Theology, showing how ecological interrelationships and interdependences made no sense under evolutionary assumptions; but he did not have the tools then to extend his argument all the way into topics like mitochondrial processes, the intricacies of repair and replication of DNA or RNA etc.

Evolutionists used to reject the teleological argument (design logic) until, they said, someone could show that certain natural assemblages in nature had a machinelike quality. Modern biochemistry has now shone exactly this--over, and over, and over.

[SuziQ]

Ping!

[RoadTest]

Evolution: The Hopeful Monster Theory :-)

[ArGee]

Even among biologists, the idea that new organs, and thus higher categories, could develop gradually through tiny improvements has often been challenged. How could the "survival of the fittest" guide the development of new organs through their initial useless stages, during which they obviously present no selective advantage?

The problem is that this is not an issue of the evidence or the facts but the stories that connect the evidence and the facts. That is, can I concoct a credible explaination for the facts I see?

The answer is, of course I can. And when I do, I will concoct one that fits with my worldview because that's the framework from which I view the evidence.

Today's scientists try to pretend they have no worldview and therefore the stories are as valid as the evidence or the facts they use to construct them. If they want to make their research really useful, they will admit the worldview at the start. This gives them both a coherent framework within which to work, and a view of that framework from which to critique their work. Both are invaluable in moving from the story to the truth.

Shalom.

[Physicist]

If a billion engineers were to type at the rate of one random character per second, there is virtually no chance that any one of them would, given the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth to work on it, accidentally duplicate a given 20-character improvement.

There's the flaw in his argument. He's demanding a specific change, and saying it either requires long odds or teleology. He's right...but that's not how evolution works.

In the real world, random changes occur first, and only afterwards is it selected based upon fitness. But fit for what purpose? Even that is unspecified before the change occurs! Organisms either find uses for the changes that their given, or they don't. If they find a use, and it helps the organism survive, then the change looks somehow preordained, and the odds against it seem long. But it's only teleological in the Pee-wee Herman sense: "I meant to do that!"

[MineralMan]

I'm wondering why this six-year-old publication is in News/Activism. It's not news. I'm betting it should have been put in General/Chat.

[taxesareforever]

"When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren't there...'Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life', writes David M. Raup, a curator of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, 'what geologists of Darwin's time and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the fossil sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence, then abruptly disappear.

Is this supposed to surprise creos? No, but I bet the evos go into attack mode.

[DManA]

Don't really have a dog in this fight but one thing that bothers me about evolution - evolution operates on years to million years time frames but survival is a second by second proposition. I can't quite reconcile the different time scales.

[DungeonMaster]

Waiting for the ole "abiogenesis is not our problem" dodge always used by Darwinists.

[betty boop]

It is conceivable that a programmer unable to look ahead more than 5 or 6 characters at a time might be able to make some very slight improvements to a computer program, but it is inconceivable that he could design anything sophisticated without the ability to plan far ahead and to guide his changes toward that plan.

That's a reference to Aristotle's "final cause" of his Four Causes above.

“The final cause is an end which is not for the sake of anything else, but for the sake of which everything [else] is. So if there is to be a last term of this kind, the process will not be infinite; and if there is no such term there will be no final cause. Those who maintain an infinite series do not realize that they are destroying the very nature of the Good, although no one would try to do anything if he were not likely to reach some limit (peras); nor would there be reason in the world (nous), for the reasonable man always acts for the sake of an end — which is a limit.” [Metaphysics, Book 12, Part 7]

Funny thing is the life sciences seem not to recognize formal and final causes, evidently believing instead that material and efficient causes explain everything you need to know. But as Chandra Wickramasingh has pointed out, that is tantamount to the expectation that a typhoon blowing through a junk yard will produce a Boeing 747.

Great post, SirLinksalot. Thank you so much!

[FreedomProtector]

The last paragraph makes a good point and is well written. There is a funny line in last paragraph. It is quite funny because of the size of understatement. (Meiosis is a figure of speech that intentionally understates something --sort of an opposite of hyperbole/exaggeration)

"Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much."


The first point an evolutionist will make whenever anyone advocating intelligent design mentions anything remotely close to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics [The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. Every isolated system becomes disordered w/ time.]....the first thing an evolutionist will point out is that sunlight provides the necessary energy to increase entropy....i.e. the earth is not a closed system; sunlight (with low entropy) shines on it and heat (with higher entropy) radiates off


for example from Tim M. Berra, "Evolution and the Myth of Creationism"

"For example, an unassembled bicycle that arrives at your house in a shipping carton is in a state of disorder. You supply the energy of your muscles (which you get from food that came ultimately from sunlight) to assemble the bike. You have got order from disorder by supplying energy. The Sun is the source of energy input to the earth's living systems and allows them to evolve."


This is funny in a couple of ways:

1) there is intelligence putting the bike together

2) It is so improbable that it is funny that someone could believe that sunlight+some ridiculous amount to time+chance and natural processes could arrive at life as we observe it today.


last paragraph deserves repeating...


Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.

[Quix]

THANKS MUCH.

BUMP

Hope you have your hazmat suit on.

Great doc.

[murphE]

BTTT

[muir_redwoods]

"A Mathematician's View of Evolution"

Coming up next, a Geologist's view of Neurology