[Savagemom]

My statistical problem:

You have an organism which supposedly "evolved" from a different organism. Take any one organ, system, etc... and look at the differences between the two. On the surface, they look pretty similar. The new one is slightly improved. That's what Darwin saw. For just one small improvement to arise by chance would be feasable. But modern science will tell us that there is more than one change, one piece of DNA, one protein different in the "new" species. In one organ alone, there is a vast number of changes, all of which had to take place by chance. And that's only in one organ. Multiply that by all of the structural, cellular, biochemical, behavioral, etc... changes that have to occur to evolve from one species to another, even given hundreds of thousands of years for them to happen gradually, the odds of this working out are astronomical. Apply Occam's Razor - this is not the best explanation for the diversity of life.

[JeffAtlanta]

My statistical problem:

Your problem is several problems. (1) the selection component of evolution is ignored and just left up to chance and (2) your problem involves one member of a species - evolution occurs in a parallel fashion, that is, thousands if not millions members of a species would be taking part in the process.

These two issues alone drastically reduce the time needed.

[narby]

In a specific species, these changes don't occur serially one after another. They occur in parallel, which massivly increases the rate of change.

And examine the statistics of the time it takes for one "species" to evolve into another. If that takes a million years (which it probably doesn't), then after 1 million years you have two species. After 2 million years, you have 4. After 3 million you have 8.

At 8 million years, you have 256 species. At 16 million years, you have 64 thousand species. The earth is a couple orders of magnitude older than that, need I go on?

The number of species grows exponentially, and any problem you have with the statistics goes away.

Trust me, this has been looked into by serious folks who have researched this completly, and there is no statistical problem with Evolution.

You have been misinformed by people who have agendas. Sorry.

[Mulch]

True. For evolution to occur in the time alloted it would be necessary for each evolving animal to have forethought about what it was evolving into and then judiciously and perfectly coordinate the timing of all those evolving systems. In other words, it takes more than a pair of wings to make a bird.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Two mistakes in your analysis.

You are assuming that the changes take place at the same time.

You are assuming that the end result is given. This is identical to assuming a particular deal of a set of cards will occur (odds 1 in about 10**67) whereas some deal will occur.