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Anyone in here ever hear of Murry Eden and the 66 Wistar Seminars?

He did a very reasonable thing. He took the theory of genetic mutation, applied a statistic to a codon (set of 3 alleles) being made nonfuntional and then made functional again (the definition of a genetic mutation) as about one in 10 to the minus twenty sixth (memory is faulty here), crunched out the numbers necessary to go from "microbe to man" and tried to find out the requisite age of the universe.... i.e, how long would the evolutionary process take? He was a prof at M I T, so he had what were the hottest puters of the day (not very). The answer? Statistically impossible, at ANY age.

Genetics, computing power and our understanding of both have taken quantum leaps, and has not erased the problems raised by Eden, but rather brought them into sharper focus.

Fredrick Hoyle, the brit mathematician and physicist (who, incidentally, coined the phrase "big bang") came to the conclusion that life as we know it is mathematically impossible without some cosmic "cheating," possibly from "panspermia" or "seeding" cosmic dust with a genetic "head start."

Francis Crick winner of the Nobel Prize for "discovering" (aka ripping off the work of brilliant x ray crystallographer he smeared) the structure of DNA, stated that life must have come from "alien life forms" as Darwinism was "unsupported by any reasonable models we have now" and the other alternative, special creation, was "clearly fantastic." --I am quoting most of this on Crick from memory of a Sunday edition of PUNCH a brit sunday mag of some years ago.

Finally, the most celebrated atheist of our day, Anthony Flew, has recently become a theist...., and it ain't because he heard someone singing amazing grace and fell to his knees in sobbing repentance. Rather, he has abandoned his theism for a kind of deism simply because monistic Darwinism is UNTENABLE scientifically.

All the REAL scientists who are still exclusive naturalists will admit that their efforts to cobble some coherent theory of Darwinism together are facing REAL problems trying to account for the "punctuated equilibra" demonstrated by the fossil record and reconcile that with the statistical improbabilities inherent in genetic theory.

Of course that doesnt stop the halfwit who has gone through organic chemistry at Northwest Appalachicola Community College from braying that "DARWINIAN EVOLUTION IS SCIENCE AND CREATION IS RELIGION" (remember to sneer when you say "religion," sonny). But then again, the orthodox faithful have never really needed facts to back up their belief, have they?

At least, not the stupid ones.

See this kind of reasoning implies there is a conspiracy. Creationists are gathering evidence and so are evolutionists. Currently evolution has more evidence. Tommorrow, who know. But science has changed before. If the evidence is there it will shift, as it has in the past. Plate tectonics. No one belived it, then came the evidence, it became overwhelming and science moved. Quantum, it was weird, Einstein didn't like a lot about it, then came the evidence, and science left Einstein behind. Josephson junctions. An unknown student went up against a luminary of the old guard who said he was wrong. He was right, he had evidence. He won a Nobel prize.

I would just say what I say to all creationists. Do the science, publish in small journals. Convince other scientists, then publish in larger journals, get more evidence, convince more scientists. Then, only then, go to the school board. But you probably won't have to at this point, some scientists will have done it for you already. You can't skip the work, you can't skip the science and go straight to the public school curriculum. Do the science. Prove us wrong!

Murray Eden and the Wistar Institute Seminars, 1966.

Not just old. Patently wrong at the time, as biologists of the time were fully capable of pointing out.

The point was made that to account for some evolutionary changes in hemoglobin, one requires about 120 amino acid substitutions...as individual events, as though it is necessary to get one of them done and spread throughout the whole population before you could start processing the next one...[and] if you add up the time for all those sequential steps, it amounts to quite a long time. But the point the biologists want to make is that that isn't really what is going on at all. We don't need 120 changes one after the other. We know perfectly well of 12 changes which exist in the human population at the present time. There are probably many more which we haven't detected, because they have such slight physiological effects...[so] there [may be] 20 different amino acid sequences in human hemoglobins in the world population at present, all being processed simultaneously...Calculations about the length of time of evolutionary steps have to take into account the fact that we are dealing with gene pools, with a great deal of genetic variability, present simultaneously. To deal with them as sequential steps is going to give you estimates that are wildly out." (pp. 95-6)