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).

Actually you are the www.yahoo.com. YOu have no idea what you are talking about. The missing link is a transitional form of a species, a mouse with wings that is turing into a bat for example.

Please provide a source for your claim that evolutionists think bats evolved from mice. The Germans call a bat a "Fliedermaus." That's about as close as it gets and it's not very close.

It is some species that is supposedly mutating into another species.

I have provided you with links to fossil series. You are simply repeating the foaming at the mouth which prompted me to ask in the first place, what is missing and why are the fossil series we do have not it? We have reptiles turning into mammals. We have dinosaurs turing into birds. We have land animals turning into whales. We have apes turning into humans.

None of the fossils in those series were known when Darwin published Origin in 1859 setting out the theory that all the life forms on Earth are connected via gradual evolution in a tree of common descent. That should now be credited as a great prediction, but we have instead this class of wilfull idiots asking "Where are the missing links?"

I'm going to ask you again. I'm going to type slowly so you can read my fingers.

Why is nothing we have this funny missing link thing? What would it take for something to be "it?"

We already both know you're going to claim the above picture is not it. Your job is to say why and how that's not it and say what "it" is.

While bats did not come from mice, birds did come from dinosaurs. Here's a saurian foreclaw in the act of turning into a wing.

That's the dino-bird counterpart to your mouse-bat thing that nobody even thinks happened. But we have the evidence in this case (and lots more where that came from). But we both know you're going to say that's not "it" either.

You're going to say that because nothing we ever have can be allowed to be "it." And what kind of game is it to pretend you would accept something as "the missing link" (were it only to be presented) when you think you'd go to Hell for acknowledging the truth? And what kind of God tells people to act like you?

I am just a curious willful idiot, but why do we not see transitional creatures living today?

Yes.

Is evolution over with?

No.

Why are there no creatures with partial arms or halfway between one species and another, with a partial arm(that will be an arm in 2 million years) walking around today.

Evolution doesn't work like that. Why is all of "creation science" so heavily dependent upon the ignorance of creationists? If you don't know what evolution even is, how it works, what you can expect from it... how do you know it's wrong?

All speciation must be over with.

Google on speciation some time and learn what it is. You have it confused with some kind of handicap.

Learn a little bit about what you're talking about. Then you'll at least know something about what you're talking about.

I've read alot about speciation and species and that is another area where evolutionists talk out of both sides of their mouth.

Where? At ICR? AiG? Why don't you know the first thing about it?

That funny half-a-claw half-a-wing fossil? There were once lots and lots and lots and lots of those. A whole population over some large area in China. Populations evolve, and it's gradual in the generation-by-generation sense if not always the geological sense.

First you show us a fossil of a something halfway between one species and another.

I was throwing antihannity's dumb-bleeping back in his face. Evolution does not mean one day a dinosaur somewhere in the world turned into a bird. Only a creationist could be this clueless, know it himself, and still be sure he's right.

The worse news is you aren't even doing creation science wrong. You're doing it about average.

And you say I am the idiot.

It's worth repeating. You are the idiot.

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

So you were lying when you posted all those supposed transitional fossils. That is good to know for future reference that you admit there are not transitional fossils... because evolution does not work that way.

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.

The worse news is you aren't even doing creation science wrong. You're doing it about average.

I am not a creationist. I just do not believe evolution is correct. Science does well when its theories can be verified empirically, and macroevolution cannot.

It's worth repeating. You are the idiot.

Since you admitted you are a liar, are you sure you are not lying when you call me an idiot?

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.

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

Third The way that most Darwinists today claim that species evolve is through mutations. Mutations are too rare to be produce even the necessary traits for just one life form to survive let alone the thousand upon thousands of species in the world today. Mutations are almost always harmful, and they are never beneficial. NOT ONCE has there ever been a truly beneficial mutation documeted out of the hundreds of thousands of experiements done. Sickle Cell Anemia is the "one good" mutation evolutionists point too, but it causes serious anemia, pain and death in those aflicted with it

Dinosaurs and humans did not co-exist.

There is some weak evidence that perhaps they did. This includes the Bibical references to a couple of creatures one of which was described as having a tail like a cedar tree. There are the references to dragons in multiple cultures. There is a reference in the Bible to King David having a "dragon pit". Whether this held animals or not, who knows? There is some peruvian pottery that shows drawings of men with dinosaurs that is "supposedly" old. There have been cave drawings found. But we haven't found fossil evidence. At least none that has been independently confirmed. And until that occurs, the evidence is weak at best.

Carbon dating does tell us how old organic material is.

Up to a point. all carbon 14 should deplete by 90,000 years. But no fossils have been found that have been fully depleted. And the levels are higher than what are thought to be due to contamination. Even if it is from contamination, that casts doubt on other radiometric techniques.

Other radiometric techniques date for longer ages than Carbon, but there are problems with all of them. The most common one was Potassium Argon dating. It was assumed that all argon boiled out of lava upon eruption and therefore lava could be dated since the argon ratio would initially be 0. But it has turned out to be a false assumption. 16 different vocanoes of recent eruptions all tested with long dates due to excess argon. What's more argon is a gas that may seep through the ground like Radon contaminating samples.

Light travels at a set speed, and millions of years must have passed for us to see starts that are millions of light years away.

This is the most difficult observation to reconcile to a literal interpretation of the Bible. But there are a couple of possibilities.

There is a theory on speed of light changing (dubious but not entirely impossible),
there are theories about inflation of the universe and relativistic and temporal effects that may have resulted in the universe aging at a different rate than Earth,
There's a theory I have about God and time. God interacts with time differently than we do. This must be true for Him to be able to tell us the future, and yet we have free will. But If He can tell us now about the future because He's been there, then He can also go into the past from here and change things. It's possible that He created the Earth when there were no stars, go to day 4 of the Creation week and created the stars, but created them at a point in time, far enough back to have the light arrive at Day 4. This wouldn't be deceptive. It would just be a demonstration of His power, that we arrogantly took to mean He had lied, because we didn't understand the scope of His power.
There is a theory that God created the light from the stars in transit when He created the stars. Again, there are some who say, that He would be lying, but if the purpose was to give light, then He wouldn't really. There's no reason He should wait millions of years just to keep a few arrogant men from assuming He lied.

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 remember reading that early winged dinosaurs could not truly fly, but climbed up trees and glided down. While that sounds like fun, I'm wondering what the big evolutionary advantage was to such behavior. A few squirrles do that. Are they evolving into birds, too?

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. Okay, you've got a picture of something that might be a lizard with some sort of little wing. What does that say about the mechanism by which that turns into a bird?

Also, what do all the skulls prove? It is accepted that there were different hominids that were not ancestors of Homo Sapiens. There are also gross differences even among skulls of modern Homo Sapiens (of different races).

What land animals turned into whales? Darwin thought it was bears. My kid's science book speculated it might have been dogs that hung around the water too long (Labs no doubt). How do these transformations come about? How do mutants, who are not specialized to their environment nonetheless prosper so well they stick with their in-between forms long enough to develop a winning strategy in the evolutionary sweepstakes?

How do you get multiple system components that make no sense individually coming together beautifully at just the right time? Why is complexity favored when simplicity can do the job of blindly transmitting the genes at a heck of a lot less energy expended?

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.

Bottom line is, once you have proven the regular transformation of one species into a completely different one (and I'm not sure that's been done) you still have to explain why and how that happens. A theory that mutations confer survival benefits even during the transitional period where they would seem to be less useful than the preceeding form is illogical.

Here are some examples from biology textbooks (high school and junior college) that convey to the student in no uncertain terms that the origin of life and its subsequent evolution is understood, and that it is a fact the it occurred by purely natural means.

Miller & Levine Biology Prentice-Hall (1993), pp.342-348:

"From the jumbled mixture of molecules in the organic soup that formed in Earth's oceans, the highly organized structures of RNA and DNA must somehow have evolved." "Although the origin of the first true cells is uncertain, we can identify several of their characteristics with certainty."

"At some point, an ancient form of photosynthesis evolved in early cells"

"Between 1.4 and 1.6 billion years ago, the first eukaryotic cells evolved, fully adapted to an aerobic world."

"A few hundred million years after the evolution of sexual reproduction, evolving life forms crossed another great threshold: the development of multicellular organisms from single-celled organisms. In the blink of an evolutionary eye these first multicellular organisms experienced a great adaptive radiation. Earth's parade of life was well on its way."

The following quotes are from Camp & Arms, Exploring Biology (1984) Saunders College Publishing, which has been used as a textbook in junior colleges in California, and may still be used today:

"Most scientists today believed that chance chemical events, occurring over a time span of more than a billion years, built up increasingly complex and life-like clusters of chemicals; some of these eventually became cells." (293).

"So, unlikely as living systems are, they had so much time to evolve that their origin was probably inevitable!" (296).

"Slowly, over a long timespan, some aggregates evolved coordinated chemical pathways that could carry on the functions of life: metabolism, information transfer, and faithful reproduction." (305). Dr. Lee Spetner

You were saying?

"Yeah, and certain creationists thought that having the definite article in front of the English "day" meant that yom meant a 24 hour day, until someone pointed out to them that the Hebrew does not contain the definite article in any of the 6 days of creation. "

Doesn't matter. The Bible reiterates Morning and Night. That article can be missing all it wants, you don't get a super long eon, morning and night.

What's more evolution as it has been presented to us, includes man. The Bible says God created woman from Adam's rib. So how do you reconcile that with evolution?

It says each animal was created from the ground after it's own kind. I suppose that is subject to interpretation, but it's at best an extremely awkward way of saying "each animal was modified from the other animals"?

Yep, the Bible is read gud siance:

These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat. (Le 11:13-19).

“‘All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you.
(Le 11:20).

There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper.
The Holy Bible (Le 11:21-22).

That is the bird kind with the bat and let's count the legs on an insect:

Won, too, twee, eight, fifteen FOUR. OK lets check that:

Six, a thousand, won, Four. OK, RAAAAGT

Ahh want all maa childuns to larn siance frum de Baabul,

but that's only a theory and I am not wearing a shubi industries aluminum hat.

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