Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Somewhat against my better instincts, I will respond to this. Some people can't get it into their minds that there aren't just biblical creationists on the one hand, and on the other, those who think evolution is a genuine phenomenon attributable to RM + NS, with no gradations between.

The best evidence shows that evolution has occurred: the fossil record alone confirms that. But what the fossil record doesn't confirm is that natural selection, working on random and minuscule mutations, gradually generates cumulative macroevolutionary change.

The most marked evidence against Darwinism is the fact that macroevolutionary changes appear in relatively short periods of time with very little, if any, evidence of gradualism: witness  the several different "explosions", such as the Cambrian (in which most of today's known animal phyla made their appearance), and those subsequent to that, such as the mammalian, avian, and angiosperm radiations in plants, all of which seem to have happened relatively quickly.

I mean, at the time Darwin wrote, it was possible, because of the then paucity of the fossil record, to posit that eventually lots of intermediate forms would be found to confirm the theory. But now, over 150 years after the Origin was published, they still haven't been found despite enormous efforts. Every now and then some rare fossil is found that is posited to be a "missing link", but apart from that, bupkis. If gradualism were true, fossiliferous strata should have by now provided ample evidence of intermediary forms.

The overwhelming evidence against RM + NS being the primary driving force of evolution is as plain as plain can be. No one is denying that RM and NS actually occur, but they can only account for microevolutionary changes: at best from one species within the same genus to another, but not for gross, macroevolutionary changes.

A better evolutionary theory than Darwinism would have to account for the empirical evidence found in the fossil record; would have to explain in some plausible way why we don't find gradualism, but rather periodic and rapid increases in complexity, as if there are sudden injections of information from time to time. As it is, however, all the Darwinists have been able to come up with are the ad-hoc hand-wavings of narrative spinners. The fact that they expect Joe Public to swallow these narratives, nay, try to label anyone who doesn't as a creationist loon, only emphasises their desperation.

Whence come periodic injections of information? If one can't have a purposeless gradualism because the empirical evidence flat out proves one wrong, then what can one have? How can one come up with plausible and completely blind mechanisms that account for the generation of new information in living beings that causes them to evolve? RM + NS is the only explanation people have so far been able to come up with, and it's woefully inadequate. The only reason it blunders on, zombie-like, is its superficial claim to plausibility because RM and NS do actually occur, albeit don't provide adequate explanation for macroevolutionary change.

The only other line of thought we've been able to posit so far is based on the known creative powers of conscious intelligence, of some sort, being in operation. If anyone could come up with a way of circumventing that conclusion without imperious and dismissive hand-waving, then I'd be prepared to examine the evidence. The third-way people don't seem to me to have an answer; I applaud their willingness to think out of the Darwinian box and take on board relatively recent discoveries in epigenetics, horizontal gene transfer, Margulian symbiosis, and so on, but they still haven't been able to crack the crucial question of whence comes new information enabling macroevolution to occur. They're still skirting around that question, still desperately trying to salvage some kind of role for blind process.

I've mainly touched on the fossil evidence, but there's also the combinatorial issues, problems such as those discussed in the article on galls, not to mention the challenge of abiogenesis. It seems to me that Darwin came up with the only half-way plausible blind mechanism for evolution, but that time has proven it utterly incapable of explaining how macroevolution can have occurred.

Make no mistake, I and many other people are 100% sold on the idea that evolution has, and continues to, happen. It's just that we don't buy into Darwinism being the only explanation in town. The only thing we can think of that provides an explanation would seem to have to involve some kind of intelligent input. Maybe that's just a testament to our inability to come up with a purely naturalistic alternative, but if that's our failing, it's also the failing of Darwinists, who also haven't been able to come up with anything better than Darwinism.

No one claims Darwin is the only way.
I don't think you appreciate how overstated this thought is.

Are you sure?

29+ Evidences[url=http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/evidences.html][/url] for Macroevolution

The Scientific Case for Common Descent
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Transitional Fossils
http://transitionalfossils.com/

http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/EvoEd.v2n2.html

Can I ask a completely ignorant question?

Is it possible to take a concrete example - for example the development of a particular biological structure - and make an estimate of the time that would be required for it to develop by random mutation, unassisted by any natural selection pressure, and then to compare that with the time actually taken, as estimated from the fossil record? Obviously the first estimate would depend on assumptions about population size and mutation rates and so on.

Or is the argument a purely qualitative one?

Not that I've ever heard of.

Can I ask a completely ignorant question?

Is it possible to take a concrete example - for example the development of a particular biological structure - and make an estimate of the time that would be required for it to develop by random mutation, unassisted by any natural selection pressure, and then to compare that with the time actually taken, as estimated from the fossil record? Obviously the first estimate would depend on assumptions about population size and mutation rates and so on.

Or is the argument a purely qualitative one?

There would be many new proteins required to make a new organ, e.g. one for the whale's echo location system, and if one estimates each protein would be a minimum of 300 amino acids, then there would be 20^300 possible combinations for each one (because there are 20 different amino acids, any one of which could be in any position).

Okay, because of the redundancy of the genetic code, in some cases different combinations of  the 64 nucleotide triplets can specify the same amino acid. So the number of combinations might come down a bit. Let's be extremely generous and say there are effectively 20^100 combinations of triplets for the one protein. We're still talking gargantuan numbers and there's only so much time available to produce even one specific protein.

Even if we assume 1 mutation per second per individual in a stable population of a billion, that's only 31,563,000,000,000,000 (around 3*10^16) mutations per year for the whole population. For the hell of it, let's multiply that by 100,000,000 years: (3*10^16)*(10^8) = 3*10^24, which is still a tiny fraction of the 20^100 combinations for a single 300-amino-acid protein. Even using 4*10^9 (the putative age of the earth) as a multiplier, we would have (3*10^16)*(4*10^9) = 1.2*10^26, still a small fraction of 20^100.

When one bears in mind that many proteins would be required for a new organ or structure, one can get a feeling for just how hopeless the task is, because proteins often work in symphony with other proteins and getting the right protein in one case might not work if another protein isn't exactly the right one.

Hope my maths is correct, by the way!

There would be many new proteins required to make a new organ, e.g. one for the whale's echo location system, and if one estimates each protein would be a minimum of 300 amino acids, then there would be 20^300 possible combinations for each one (because there are 20 different amino acids, any one of which could be in any position).

Okay, because of the redundancy of the genetic code, in some cases different combinations of  the 64 nucleotide triplets can specify the same amino acid. So the number of combinations might come down a bit. Let's be extremely generous and say there are effectively 20^100 combinations of triplets for the one protein. We're still talking gargantuan numbers and there's only so much time available to produce even one specific protein.

Even if we assume 1 mutation per second per individual in a stable population of a billion, that's only 31,563,000,000,000,000 (around 3*10^16) mutations per year for the whole population. For the hell of it, let's multiply that by 100,000,000 years: (3*10^16)*(10^8) = 3*10^24, which is still a tiny fraction of the 20^100 combinations for a single 300-amino-acid protein. Even using 4*10^9 (the putative age of the earth) as a multiplier, we would have (3*10^16)*(4*10^9) = 1.2*10^25, still a small fraction of 20^100.

When one bears in mind that many proteins would be required for a new organ or structure, one can get a feeling for just how hopeless the task is, because proteins often work in symphony with other proteins and getting the right protein in one case might not work if another protein isn't exactly the right one.

Hope my maths is correct, by the way!

I probably don't understand enough about proteins to follow the argument. But does the composition of the protein really have to be specified to that extent for it to do the job?

I probably don't understand enough about proteins to follow the argument. But does the composition of the protein really have to be specified to that extent for it to do the job?

Yes. Remember that a random change in just one amino acid in a protein can render it useless or even harmful. But even if 10 random changes were allowable, that would reduce the number of combinations from 20^100 to 20^90, still an enormous number far greater than could be accounted for by the amount of time since the earth, or even the whole universe, formed (always supposing that Big Bang theory is correct).

Just to jump back to the article I linked in the original post, with regard to the maths (which is all pretty much over my head), here's a quote from that article:

Eyeing the Argument from Time

A matter that needs to be gotten out of the way before continuing is the insistence that, given billions of years–more accurately, about  four billion–life had to from just because of all that time. This is by no means clear. In questions of the probability of complex events, time can mean surprisingly little. Consider the assertion famously made by James Jeans, often cited in connection with evolution, that a monkey typing randomly at a keyboard would eventually write all the books in the British Museum. This sounds plausible and, in a purely mathematical sense, is true. What are the odds?
Consider a fair-sized book of 200,000 words that, by newspaper average, would contain about a million letters. To make it easy on the monkey, we will ignore upper case and punctuation and let him work with an alphabet of 26 letters. What are his prospects of getting the book in a given string of a million letters?

The chance of getting the first letter correctly is 1/26 times the chance of getting the second letter, 1/26, and so on, making the chance of getting the entire book 1/261,000,000. Since 26 equals 10log 26, (log 26 being about 1.41) the chance of getting the entire book is 1 in 10 log 26 x 1000,000 or about 101,400,000. Innocent  looking numbers like this are remarkably intractable. For example, a billion billion monkeys (more monkeys than Iwant) typing a billion billion characters a second for a billion billion times the estimated age of the universe (1018 seconds ) would  have essentially zero chance of getting the book.

To give our monkey a fighting chance, let’s ask whether he would get even the title of a book, for example On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, which Microsoft Word tells me contains 119 characters. The monkey’s chance of getting the title in a give string of 119 is one in 10119 x x 1.41 or 10168 Thus our billion billion monkey at a billion billion characters a second for the life of the universe is essentially zero.

Is the chance of accidentally forming a living Crittter a similar problem? It would seem so on various technical grounds involving specified information and the mathematics, similar to that of the monkeys, of protein formation. The difficulty of discussion is exacerbated by the inability of  evolutionists totell us what the First Critter was. But it is their responsibility to tell us, first, what of what complexity formed and, second, why the odds are not astronomically against it. The point to take away is that the invocation of long  periods of time can mean  little when speaking of the probability of complex yet unspecified events.

Can I ask a completely ignorant question?

Is it possible to take a concrete example - for example the development of a particular biological structure - and make an estimate of the time that would be required for it to develop by random mutation, unassisted by any natural selection pressure, and then to compare that with the time actually taken, as estimated from the fossil record? Obviously the first estimate would depend on assumptions about population size and mutation rates and so on.

Or is the argument a purely qualitative one?

I think it is precisely the sort of issue that Michael discussed that persuaded me that evolution by natural selection is either false or drastically incomplete as a theory. A partially completed template for a protein has no selective advantage at all - in fact a slight disadvantage, because it costs the cell to produce a useless protein.

I think there is another issue. If you have a functioning cell, or organism, a new protein is desperately unlikely to be beneficial in the short term. I mean at one generation you would have a non-functional protein, and at the next it would be operational as (say) an enzyme. However there would be no control structures in place to tell the cell when to express this new protein, so it would just act to disturb a delicate equilibrium. Perhaps the most obvious example is a protease - an enzyme that decomposes other proteins - the cell obviously needs a control structure in place before a protease is expressed, and yet what possible reason would there be for such a control system to evolve ahead of the protein it is meant to control?

Obviously all the combinatorial arguments are a bit rough and ready, because there are endless complications such as:

1)         Not all mutations are equally probable, and they vary to come extent (I think) at different positions on the chromosome.

2)         Some amino acids can be coded in more than one way.

3)         There are no really good estimates for just how many protein sequences are useful for anything - or anything in particular.

4)         Some mutations cause the protein to fold a different way, which totally changes its behaviour.

However, something like Michael's calculation seems inevitable - and 20^100 = 12676506002282294014967032053760000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

or 1.26 x 10^130

Those numbers are so insanely huge, proponents of evolution can't just hand waive them away.

David

The Scientific Case for Common Descent
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/

Who the heck said anything about common descent? I suspect that there is common descent, but what that has to do with the input of new information, I don't know. The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive.

As for lists of intermediary fossils, please. A lot of them are only posited to be intermediary, but in any case, where are the myriads of fossils there should be, documenting every tiny change from one organism to a completely different one? If these were actually there, you'd have a lot less argument from me.

Yes. Remember that a random change in just one amino acid in a protein can render it useless or even harmful. But even if 10 random changes were allowable, that would reduce the number of useful combinations from 20^100 to 20^90, still an enormous number far greater than could be accounted for by the amount of time since the earth, or even the whole universe, formed (always supposing that Big Bang theory is correct).

I now see there was a discussion of the same question on Skeptiko only a few months ago, with links to quite a lot of literature on both sides of the argument, starting here:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/is...ost-113548

Having had a little look, I think I'll beat a hasty retreat back to the realms of psi ...

Who the heck said anything about common descent? I suspect that there is common descent, but what that has to do with the input of new information, I don't know. The two concepts aren't mutually exclusive.

As for lists of intermediary fossils, please. A lot of them are only posited to be intermediary, but in any case, where are the myriads of fossils there should be, documenting every tiny change from one organism to a completely different one? If these were actually there, you'd have a lot less argument from me.

Those links directly concern Darwinian theory.

I now see there was a discussion of the same question on Skeptiko only a few months ago, with links to quite a lot of literature on both sides of the argument, starting here:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/is...ost-113548

Having had a little look, I think I'll beat a hasty retreat back to the realms of psi ...

I think I know how you feel. I have no educational grounding in biology or chemistry (or anything significant) so the technicalities quickly overwhelm me. Yet I find the subject fascinating from a gut-feel perspective. I have this conviction that people will look back on Darwinism as quaint but rather silly.

My guess is that the so-called Third Way will continue to gain momentum and, together with the current vogue for panpsychism, a new paradigm will emerge positing some kind of "natural" intelligence. I think that we are a long way from the acceptance of anything "supernatural" in the scientific community but I think they could live with some kind of naturally occurring intelligence - as a fundamental element of nature, like gravity or spacetime.