An evolutionist’s summary of Richard Dawkins’s famous Weasel program, which is still very popular among the innumerate for its explicative proof of the viability of evolution:
In 1986, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins set out to dispel such misunderstandings by implementing a computer program that works—in Dawkins’ own words—like this:
“It […] begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, […] it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – ‘mutation’ – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the ‘progeny’ of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.”
Here’s a more detailed explanation of his weasel program: it starts with a string of 28 random letters. Next, it creates N offspring strings by copying the original 28 random letters N times. When being copied, the chance of a letter being changed into another (random) letter is P. Now that we have a set of N new strings, we compare each string letter by letter against “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” (a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, by the way) and pick the one with the most character matches (the highest match score). This one is deemed the “fittest” and kept as the survivor of the first generation; the other N-1 strings are discarded. We repeat the whole process by creating again N offspring from the survivor, then pick a new survivor and so on until the survivor finally matches “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”.
Let’s choose N to be 100 (one hundred offspring per generation) and P to be 5%, as in Dawkins original experiment. How many generations would it take until we finally reach “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”? Just guess a number, I’ll wait here…
Answer: about 50 generations!
In other words, the program theoretically explains how evolution can achieve fixation within 50 generations. Therefore, the transformation from proto-chimp to human is… well, the math still doesn’t work given the 410 million base pair gap, but we can’t expect a famous biologist to understand long division. The important point that the concept makes sense to the innumerate. Although, obviously, it doesn’t make sense, since as the usual critique correctly points out, the target phrase is known from the start, which is not the case in the evolutionary context.
But never mind that. I am not interested in the usual critique, since the distinction between known and unknown ends is far too abstract for the evolutionists, who have completely failed to comprehend the significance of that distinction for the last 40 years. Let’s try something else, something more simple and basic that even the most determined Neo-Darwinist should be able to grasp: the limits of reproduction.
First, note that Dawkins’s “population of 100” is really just one weasel that has 100 kits a year, where you keep those with the desired letter and kill the others. That’s not a species. A real weasel has about six kits, up to twice a year. So plug in the real animal, with a minimum population of 10,000 so it’s not going extinct, and here’s what changes for the Weasel program.
A phrase letter initially appears in one weasel out of 10,000. For that letter to count toward completing the phrase, all 10,000 weasels have to end up carrying it. And the only way that happens is the slow way: that one weasel’s descendants slightly out-breeding everyone else’s, litter after litter after litter, until the whole population has it. That process is called fixation.
If we apply Dawkins’s proposed 5% advantage to the population in the correct manner, we assume a selection advantage of five percent. Or s=5%. With the appropriate reproductive limit of 12 rather than 100, that means it will take 400 generations for the initial letter M to propagate throughout the species, and 11,000 generations for all 27 letters required to complete the phrase to do so.
However, Dawkins’s 5% probability was referring to the initial mutation, not the actual selection advantage, which is much more subtle, at s=0.1%. And this gives us 20,000 generations for the initial letter M and 540,000 generations to complete the full phrase. So Dawkins’s little program which was meant to demonstrate the viability of evolution by natural selection actually demonstrates the precise opposite, since his estimate of 50 generations was off by four orders of magnitude, or about 11,000x.
Which, to be fair, is actually pretty close for a biologist attempting to math. It’s certainly much closer than any of the biologists insisting that evolution by natural selection can account for the 410 million base pairs that distinguish the modern human from the modern chimpanzee.