In Six Days (A Biology PHD looks at Evolution)

Timothy G. Standish, biology First published in In Six Days Science and origins testimony #9

Dr. Standish is associate professor of biology at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He holds a B.S. in zoology from Andrews University, an M.S. in biology from Andrews University, and a Ph.D. in biology and public policy from George Mason University (University of Virginia), Charlottesville, Virginia. He teaches genetics at Andrews University and is currently researching the genetics of cricket (Achita domesticus) behavior.

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Reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins was a pivotal experience for me. I had recently started my Ph.D. program at George Mason University and eagerly signed up for a class entitled “Problems in Evolutionary Theory.” The Blind Watchmaker was required reading, and with growing enthusiasm I noted glowing endorsements printed on the cover. According to The Economist, this book was “as readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as has been published since 1859.” Lee Dembart, writing for the Los Angeles Times, was even more effusive: “Every page rings of truth. It is one of the best science books—of the best of any books—I have ever read.” A book that was “Winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award” must contain nothing but undistilled brilliance. I felt smug with confidence as I paid for the book and left the store, brimming with ebullience to start reading.

After wading through all the hyperbole, I was stunned by the ideas put forward by Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker. Rhetoric burnished the arguments with a glittering sheen, briefly giving the impression that pebbles were gems. But once each metaphor was stripped aside, the core ideas did not support the idea that natural selection could account for the origin of life and the meaningful complexity of organisms. Most startling to me was the realization that, one of the book’s core theses, in fact, violated the principle of natural selection.

Dawkins wove two ideas together in supporting Darwinism. The first idea was that, given enough chances, the improbable becomes probable. For example, flipping a coin ten times in a row and getting heads each time is very unlikely; one would only expect it to happen about 1 in 1,024 tries. Most of us would not sit around flipping coins just to see it happen, but if we had a million people flipping coins, we would see it happen many times. This phenomenon is publicized in the newspapers when lottery winners are announced. Winning a million-dollar jackpot is unlikely, but with millions of people purchasing tickets, eventually someone wins.

Dawkins admits that the odds on life starting from a random collection of chemicals is very slim, but given an immense universe and the billions of years it has existed, the improbable becomes probable. In this is echoed the logic of Ernst Haeckel, who wrote in his book The Riddle of the Universe, published in 1900:

Many of the stars, the light of which has taken thousands of years to reach us, are certainly suns like our own mother-sun, and are girt about with planets and moons, just as in our solar system. We are justified in supposing that thousands of these planets are in a similar stage of development to that of our earth … and that from its nitrogenous compounds, protoplasm has been evolved—that wonderful substance which alone, as far as our knowledge goes, is the possessor of organic life.

Haeckel was optimistic about the presence of conditions that could support life on planets other than earth, and it is in this that one of the problems with Dawkins’ argument emerges. While the universe is immense, those places where life as we know it could survive, let alone come into being, seem to be few and far between. So far, only one place has been discovered where conditions for life are present, and we are already living on it. Thus, there is not much cause for optimism that the universe is teeming with planets bathed in a primordial soup from which life might evolve. Dawkins wrote glibly of the immensity of the universe and its age, but failed to provide one example, other than the earth, where the unlikely event of spontaneous generation of life might occur. Even if the universe were teeming with proto-earths, and the spans of time suggested by modern science were available, this is still not a great argument, as if something is impossible—in other words, the odds of it happening are zero—then it will never happen, not even in an infinite amount of time. For example, even if we had our million people flipping coins, each with ten flips in a row, the odds on any one of them flipping and getting 11 heads in ten tries is zero because the odds of getting 11 heads in ten tries with one person is zero. The bottom line is that the odds on life evolving from nonliving precursors is essentially zero. Ironically, this was the stronger of the two ideas, or arguments, presented by Dawkins.

The second argument was presented as an analogy: imagine a monkey typing on a typewriter with 27 keys, all the letters in the English alphabet and the space bar. How long would it take for the monkey to type something that made any sense? Dawkins suggests the sentence spoken by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet who, in describing a cloud, pronounces, “Methinks it is like a weasel.” It is not a long sentence and contains very little meaning, but it works for argument’s sake. How many attempts at typing this sentence would it take a monkey, which would presumably be hitting keys randomly, to type the sentence?

As it turns out, the odds can be easily calculated as the probability of getting each letter or space correct raised to the power of the number of positions at which they have to be correct. In this case, the probability of the monkey typing “m” at the first position of the sentence is 1/27 (we won’t worry about capitalization). The sentence has 28 characters in it, so the probability is (1/27)28 or 1.2 x 10–40. That is about one chance in 12,000 million million million million million million! You would want a lot of monkeys typing very fast for a long time if you ever wanted to see this happen!

To overcome this problem with probability, Dawkins proposed that natural selection could help by fixing each letter in place once it was correct and thus lowering the odds massively. In other words, as a monkey types away, it is not unlikely that at least one of the characters it types will be in the correct position on the first try. If this letter was then kept and the monkey was only allowed to type in the remaining letters until it finally had the correct letter at each position, the odds fall to the point that the average diligent monkey could probably finish the task in an afternoon and still have time to gather bananas and peanuts from admiring observers. Dawkins got his computer to do it in between 40 and 70 tries.

Luckily I had taken biochemistry before reading The Blind Watchmaker. Organisms are made of cells, and those cells are composed of little protein machines that do the work of the cell. Proteins can be thought of as sentences like “Methinks it is like a weasel,” the difference being that proteins are made up of 20 different subunits called amino acids instead of the 27 different characters in our example. The evolution of a functional protein would presumably start out as a random series of amino acids one or two of which would be in the right position to do the function the protein is designed to do. According to Dawkins’ theory, those amino acids in the right location in the protein would be fixed by natural selection, while those that needed to be modified would continue to change until they were correct, and a functional protein was produced in relatively short order. Unfortunately, this ascribes an attribute to natural selection that even its most ardent proponents would question, the ability to select one nonfunctional protein from a pool of millions of other nonfunctional proteins.

Changing even one amino acid in a protein can alter its function dramatically. A famous example of this is the mutation that causes sickle cell anemia in humans. This disease causes a multitude of symptoms, ranging from liver failure to tower skull syndrome. It is caused by the replacement of an amino acid called glutamate, normally at position number six, with another amino acid called valine. This single change causes a massive difference in how the alpha globin subunit of hemoglobin works. The ultimate sad consequence of this seemingly insignificant mutation in the protein causes premature death in thousands of individuals each year. In other proteins, mutations to some, but not all, areas can result in a complete loss of function. This is particularly true if the protein is an enzyme, and the mutation is in its active site.

What Dawkins is suggesting is that a very large group of proteins, none of which is functional, can be acted on by natural selection to select out a few that, while they do not quite do the job yet, with some modification via mutation, can do the job in the future. This suggests that natural selection has some direction or goal in mind, a great heresy to those who believe evolutionary theory.

This idea of natural selection fixing amino acids as it constructs functional proteins is also unsupported by the data. Cells do not churn out large pools of random proteins on which natural selection can then act. If anything, precisely the opposite is true. Cells only produce the proteins they need to make at that time. Making other proteins, even unneeded functional ones, would be a wasteful thing for cells to do, and in many cases, could destroy the ability of the cell to function. Most cells only make about 10% of the proteins they are capable of producing. This is what makes liver cells different from those in the skin or brain. If all proteins were expressed all the time, all cells would be identical.

In reality, the problem of evolving life is much more complex than generation of a single functional protein. In fact, a single protein is just the tip of the iceberg. A living organism must have many functional proteins, all of which work together in a coordinated way. In the course of my research, I frequently physically disrupt cells by grinding them in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes I do this to obtain functional proteins, but more often to get the nucleic acids RNA or DNA. In any case, I have yet to find that the protein or nucleic acid I was working on was not functional after being removed from the cell, and yet, even though all the cell components were present and functional following disruption, I have never observed a single cell start to function again as a living organism, or even part of a living organism. For natural selection to occur, all proteins on which it is to act must be part of a living organism composed of a host of other functional protein machines. In other words, the entire system must exist prior to selection occurring, not just a single protein.

“Problems in Evolutionary Theory” was a class that made me realize the difficulties those who discount the possibility of a Creator have with their own theories. The problems with evolutionary theory were real, and there were no simple convincing resolutions.

Progressing in my studies, I slowly realized that evolution survives as a paradigm only as long as the evidence is picked and chosen and the great pool of data that is accumulating on life is ignored. As the depth and breadth of human knowledge increases, it washes over us a flood of evidence deep and wide, all pointing to the conclusion that life is the result of design. Only a small subset of evidence, chosen carefully, may be used to construct a story of life evolving from nonliving precursors. Science does not work on the basis of picking and choosing data to suit a treasured theory. I chose the path of science which also happens to be the path of faith in the Creator.

I believe God provides evidence of His creative power for all to experience personally in our lives. To know the Creator does not require an advanced degree in science or theology. Each one of us has the opportunity to experience His creative power in re-creating His character within us, step by step, day by day.

This chapter from the book In Six Days, published and graciously provided at no charge to Answers in Genesis by Master Books, a division of New Leaf Press (Green Forest, Arkansas).

VadeRetro: I was throwing antihannity's dumb-bleeping back in his face.

microgood: So you were lying when you posted all those supposed transitional fossils.

Always, always you bludgeon with your ability to misunderstand. This doesn't make you a scientist. It simply forces people to ask themselves whether you're telling the truth about what you know. Did no one before me ever try to explain this stuff to you? You've said as much. That seems improbable, given that you've been on these threads a bit. And yet you really don't seem to know anything.

Will you be back again dumb as a stump on the next thread claiming no one ever explains evolution to you? Even if we believe that, again, how do you know it's wrong if no one has ever even explained it to you and you've never tried to Google it on your own or went to the library and checked out a non-cretinist book?

What's supposed to be a lie about the fossil evidence? How do petrified bones lie?

The fossils posted inline and/or linked are real. Those arranged in a series occur in the fossil record in the order shown. They indeed show a transformation in progress. Creationist strawman versions of evolution like yours and antihannity's say this progress should reveal a dinosaur changing into a bird or a mouse changing into a bat--one actual individual or mouse fossilized mid-transformation in one generation. And how would the fossil of one individual even show that? All a fossil can do is just lay there.

Evolution says whole populations change over time. The average genetic makeup of the average individual within the population changes. "A shift in allele frequences," is a common term. I prefer the classical Darwinian "variation and natural selection," which is still accurate anyway.

So now you're going to know this, right? Wrong! You're a back-again-dumb-as-a-stumper.

So now if I go along with gradual evolution than you have to see transitional fossils but you have just stated there aren't any so I have to buy into punctuated equilibrium, which is good for you evolutionists because then I would not see any fossils. I guess this means you are a punctuated equilibrium type like Gould.

Puctuated equilibrium is a Darwinian model. I suppose no one has ever tried to tell you about that, either. I post the following web sites so the lurkers can learn something. One thing they'll learn is that there's no excuse for you showing up on the next thread as ignorant as you are today, which you will do come Hell or high water.

Speciation by Punctuated Equilibrium, including lots of links to lots of examples.

All you need to know about Punctuated Equilibrium (almost). Nicely documents how little new there is to punk-eek.

I am not a creationist.

No, you're a lying a$$hole.

I just do not believe evolution is correct.

People generally don't twist themselves into pretzel shapes for no reason. Your behavior is absolutely classic militant Holy Warrior Syndrome. Think more about what your story is before the next thread where you show up knowing nothing nothing nothing but spewing away nevertheless.

I have been all over talkorigins.org. It treats evolution as a religion.

Then you obviously didn't understand it. No, it does not.

The section on transitional species convinced me even more that there is no macroevolution

How on *earth* did it do that?

and I have read all 29 of the supposed evidences of macroevolution.

And yet you still don't get it?

But for me macroevolution goes all the way back.

Well, of course.

If it cannot show how we got from a single cell to a human being,

It can, so there you have it.

I will not believe it can go from an ape

Even though there is overwhelming evidence that it has?

or as of this week a platypus to a human.

What *are* you babbling about here?

To go from a single cell to a creature with arms and legs and a brain and even over 100 trillion years by random mutation is simply not believable.

Fortunately, reality is not limited to what you personally are able to find "believable".

And of course many evolutionists back away from that and just do the ape to human stuff,

Huh? Who exactly "backs away from that"?

but it still does not answer the basic question of why if we came from a single cell, and there are not creatures turning into different species with partially formed arms or legs (since such a complex thing cannot occur in one mutation).

Could you rephrase that into an actual sentence which makes sense?

Thus the latest inference is punctuated equilibrium and here we are.

Horse manure. Punctuated equilibrium was described by Darwin in 1859. It's a logical consequence of the dynamics of evolutionoary processes.

...which you'd know if you had actually bothered reading the talkorigins.org site for educational purposes.

What survival benefit does a half-leg/half-wing give a mutated freak? Why would such a clumsy fellow, who could neither fly nor run on all fours, nor easily seize prey with his forelimbs, survive better than his more ordinary neighbors to live to reproduce and continue on the road to birdhood? Until he has a useful wing (and the musculature and know-how to take advantage of it), the thing is a liability, if anything.

I posted the picture and you think you wish it away by not understanding how it lived? The limb in question is on an early (Cretaceous) bird. Before someone brings it up, it wasn't the most "modern" (as we would now consider it) bird species in the world at the time, but I'd say that's a good answer to your attempted point. It had an adaptation. Its seeming "throwback" status (being less developed in one certain direction than some other bird) did not hurt it at the time. The wing has unfused "hand" bones which clearly show the creature's quite recent saurian descent, but the bird could fly. Maybe it still made some use of the forelimb as a grasping claw from time to time, or maybe that potential was a useless vestige by then.

Not every bird is a wonderful flyer now. Some of them can't fly at all now. There are or were in recent times flightless bird species on many of the islands of the world. It is always one species per island except in the case of swimmers like penguins and auks. That's either because each island evolved its own species that originally flew there but lost flight over time, or else The Designer never resuses designs for flightless birds unless they can swim.

Maybe I'm confused about the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing, but even if something is shown to have come about slowly, incrementally, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is the product of blind chance.

Yes, you are confused. (That's how Creation Science is done!)

Natural selection is not blind chance. Variation is more or less random, a distribution about a population average. Natural selection is a bias, a pruning.

I don't think I'm an idiot, too (although that's never a safe assumption). These are questions that should be easily answered, since they are pretty common-sense ones, really, and I'm sure have been asked many times before.

Ah, the wail of unsatisfied intellectual curiosity! I'll help you out. Here's the hurdle you're stumbling over. Most people in the middle of these debates suspect that those who really want to learn about evolution will go to the library and check out a book, or Google up a non-creationist website. Everyone is born innocently ignorant of everything. Past a certain age, they address it in school or by self-education in various ways.

The people who wander through these discussions bludgeoning evolution with their ability to play "Twist and Shout" upon it and slaughter strawman versions of it are suspected of not maybe telling the whole truth about who they are and what they are up to. Especially since none of them ever remember Jack from one thread to the next.

So that's your problem. One burning question of these threads is whether "ID," the accumulated disingenuous misunderstandings to date of seething evoluton deniers (99 percent of whom only know the kind of "science" available on sites like ICR and AiG) deserves a slice of the science curriculum in High School.

I'm curious. You concede you might be confused. Are you willing to go into a High School and present your confusion as evidence against evolution? I've been debating creationists for six years now on FR. There are no good pennies among the creation/ID arguments. I don't know of one that bears up under examination. Any and all can be torn to shreds by any of several posters that I can name. I see it done repeatedly, and it never matters. The essence of the opposition is that, so long as they are confused, they're right.

I suppose the documeted evidence of rocks that formed during the mt. st. helens erruption and are less than 25 years old and have been dated at 220,000 years old might have something to do with it

Congratulations, you fell for a creationist's lie. How proud you must be.

Here's a post I wrote about this on another thread:

In layman’s terms, these volcanic rocks that we know were formed in 1986—less than 20 years ago—were “scientifically” dated to between 290,000 and 3.4 million years old!
No, in layman's terms Austin the creationist is either a fool or a charlatan (perhaps both).
"In layman's terms", here's what he did wrong (I'll leave it to you to decide whether he did so out of dishonesty or incompetence):
1. He chose an analysis lab which CLEARLY STATES that its analysis equipment is not sensitive enough to correctly measure samples less than two million years old. Read that again until it sinks in.
2. Austin then took the first set of measured results, WHICH INDICATED LESS THAN TWO MILLION YEARS OLD, and rather than doing what an honest scientist would have done (which is say, "ah, these results are below the lower bounds of the testing equipment, thus they're just reporting equipment noise"), instead Austin ran around in circles and tried to ridicule K/AR dating for giving him out-of-bounds results that made perfect sense.
3. As for the 2.8 +/- 0.6 Mya sub-sample, Austin sort of "forgets" to inform the reader that almost without exception lava rock contains what are known as "inclusions", which are bits of older crystalline mineral mixed in with the fresh lava flow. A volcanic eruption is a violent and hardly "clean" event and pulverized (but unmelted) minerals are incorporated into the lava as it flows up and outward from the volcano. These inclusions will produce K/Ar dates older than the date of the lava flow because they are, indeed, *older* than the lava flow. A real scientist (unlike, say, Austin) will take a great deal of care to extract inclusions from his sample before sending it to a lab to determine the date when the lava itself flowed, and/or hand-pick a "clean" lava sample which has relatively few inclusions compared to the flow as a whole. That's because they *want* to get as valid a date as possible for the lava flow. Now, guess what Austin didn't do? Gee, now guess *why* he didn't do it? Can you say, "*trying* to get an apparently invalid date so as to have a cheap, dishonest excuse to allege that there's something 'wrong' with K/Ar dating"?
As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out" and Austin (unlike the honest scientists who *want* to produce valid dates) had no interest in getting a clean result -- the more "garbage" the result, the more he could claim a creationist "success". So he *submitted* garbage as his sample (i.e., a sample with inclusions, to a lab unable to date anything younger than roughly two million years).
As Henry Barwood notes, "Bad measurements, like bad science, reflect only on the measurer (Austin), not on the measurement (the procedure)."
For more details, see: Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals. More at: Skeptics Visit the "Museum of Creation and Earth History" .
Here is a link showing similar problems with the Rubidium-Strontium dating method. Where one set of rocks are dated much older than they are known to be.
Exact same issue (lava rock with inclusions) submitted by the exact same creationist "researcher" (Steven A. Austin). He appears to be a one-trick pony.
Whether such problems have been identified in all radiometric dating methods, I do not know.
"Such problems"? Yeah, if you submit "dirty" samples for testing, you get "dirty" results. So what else is new? Honest scientists clean their samples first. Creationist "scientists" don't, then try to discredit the testing methods when they get bogus results. Go figure.
But it certainly casts significant doubt on it.
The only thing it "certainly casts significant doubt on" is the honesty/competence of "creation scientists".

Now, "antihannityguy", I'm curious to know whether you've learned anything about the reliability and honest of "creation scientists" from this experience. And I'm curious to know if you're in any way upset that they lied to you.

I'd also like to see replies from K4Harty and D Rider to those some inquiries, since they hooted approvingly at your repetition of this creationist lie...

Hint: Trying to "learn" about science from a creationist source is like trying to "learn" about conservatism from Michael Moore.

The problem with that skull chart is that it's a lot like lining up cars and saying they evolved from each other.

I can't imagine a transitional series such as evolution actually predicts which cannot be dismissed as evidence by this kind of lawyering. Clearly, you will happily do this indefinitely.

Look at me, Zippy! This is important.

When you claim "The lack of transitionals is evidence against evolution," you imply that there is fossil record evidence you would willingly accept which is both reasonably expected and missing. You are lying.

You don't accept any such evidence. You intend never to do so.

Furthermore, almost as an aside, let me add that what is reasonably expected from the fossil record isn't missing. What is missing isn't reasonably expected. We have about the fossil record we would expect from what we know of evolution and geology in 2005.

Would you agree that the explanatory value of evolution has been, on occasion, overstated in an effort to cow believers with science?

No, I wouldn't. Would you agree that creationists have, "on occasion", understated or misrepresented evolution and the evidence for it?

but the complexities that we see in biology, many of which required parallel evolution of system components that make no sense by themselves

Name your favorite example, let's see if you actually know the subject, or are parroting a misrepresentation by some creationist source.

leave leave some honest, not-too-stupid laymen suspicious about evolution as the ultimate answer.

See above -- is your "suspicion" based on actual deficits in evolutionary biology, or on creationist misrepresentation or "overstatements" about their own position?

I am not saying the world was created in six 24 hour periods.

That's a good start, anyway.

Nor am I saying that if all the apparent deficiencies in the theory were convincingly resolved in favor of evolution my faith would be crushed.

Good, because there's no need for such a conflict.

What I am saying is that I am neither convinced nor satisfied by the theory, so I don't feel like drying up and blowing away when someone with a different post-graduate degree than mine shakes the voodoo mask of Science in my direction while making spooky noises.

LOL! I like the imagery and your way with words, anyway, even while I disagree with the characterization.

Like I always tell people when I am preparing them for cross-examination. There's nothing wrong with saying "I don't know" if that's the honest answer.

You'll find that the creationists are far less likely to make such an admission than the scientists. :-)

But you remind me of one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes:

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."

First of all your picture of the skull has no label no caption so I have no idea what I am supposed to claim what it is not.

Most people would say that they show a slow morphing of shall we say adjacently similar things into something different. You need labels so you can go Google up some dumb-dumbisms from AiG to throw out some links and make them "missing" again.

I'll fast-forward us if you don't mind. I've already seen all those web pages and can do this faster than you, member since last night, can.

<Cretinism_mode>

Solly Zuckerman said bad stuff about Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis). Toss all the australopithecines.
Some "evolutionists" argue that Homo habilis should be grouped with the australopithecines, so throw that out. Ergaster and erectus are close to the same, and Gish says erectus is some kind of ape. Toss.
Neanderthals are arthritic modern men. Toss. Cro-Magnon is modern man. Toss.
All gone! So where is the evidence?

</Cretinism_mode>

But why does the picture make the picture it does? What would an example of "missing links" look like if not exactly that?

Second Why the personal attacks you sound like a liberal just personal attacking instead of having a polite discourse.

I'm already mad because for six years now I don't get answers and I'm not getting them from you. What are you thumping your chest and demanding? We have plenty of it. Plenty, plenty, plenty. Here's a list of just the vertebrate tree of life up to about 1997.

The whole posturing you guys do is all so bogus. You're never going to allow any evidence. Never. Why pretend otherwise?

Third The way that most Darwinists today claim that species evolve is through mutations.

When you show up demanding hard evidence already there in abundance for anyone who desires, don't expect anyone to care if no one can make you see your own misunderstandings about mechanism. We have incredible amounts of evidence for common descent. I want to see you got that before I waste any time explaining that we also understand a fair amount about how that happens.

I can't imagine a transitional series such as evolution actually predicts which cannot be dismissed as evidence by this kind of lawyering. Clearly, you will happily do this indefinitely.

Indeed. The anti-evolutionists seem to spend a lot of energy making such excuses. Here's my favorite, from a few days ago by another FR anti-evolutionist:

LOL. Nice rant. Doesn't pass for an argument; but, did you get it off your chest. I said it before and I'll say it again. Claiming piles of evidence doesn't make it so. Claiming something is evidence for a specific thing requires more than claiming it so. When it's evidence in support of a one or more other possibilities, it is hardly specific support. I'm saying nothing that first week logic students don't know; but, y'all sure don't act like you've ever been acquainted with it. I understand why you're reticent to just admit it's your "belief"; but, that doesn't make your endless claims any less dishonest or more scientific.

That was his entire post. Note how pristinely devoid of ANY specificity this is. The exact same rant could be used to hand-wave away evidence/arguments for/against *anything* without changing a single word -- global warming, monetary policy, the Holocaust *or* its denial, the war in Iraq, etc. etc.

It's so all-encompassing in its "you can't convince me of anything I don't want to believe" subborness that it's like an archetype of closed-mindedness.

I'd ask you to try to guess who the author was, but the sad thing is that it's pretty typical of so *many* of them...

I think one of these days I may use that exact passage in reply to one of them, just to see how it goes over...

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