Tag: evolution

Probability and the Problem of Life

Yesterday, I observed that most biologists and believers in evolution have a poor grasp of probability. In the subsequent discussion, the otherwise perspicacious wrf3 demonstrated that he is not entirely clear on the difference between math and philosophy, two fields it is rather important to distinguish between despite their occasional overlap:

If you’re going to claim that the occurrence of low probability events is evidence of behind-the-scenes tampering in nature, then you’re going to have to show how the math for that works without assuming your conclusion. Otherwise, you’re a fraud.

That is incorrect and is is an indication of subscribing to the conventional fetish-myth of math. Logic does not require math or even any quantification. A correct syllogism holds true regardless of whether it contains any quantities or not.

Consider the following two syllogisms:

  1. All cats are named Tom.
  2. I have a cat.
  3. Therefore, my cat’s name is Tom.
  1. Mike is shorter than Alan.
  2. Zeke shorter than Mike.
  3. Therefore, Alan is taller than Zeke.

Both syllogisms are impeccably correct, without having any need to show how the math for them works. Sure, in the case of the latter we could treat the names as variables, retroactively assign some quantities to them, and thereby confirm the correctness of the logic with math, but that would be redundant. It’s not necessary. We already know that the syllogism is correct because its logical construction is correct. The conclusion follows correctly from the propositions.

Here is the relevant syllogism:

  1. No low-probability event has been observed to take place without tampering in nature.
  2. A low-probability event has taken place.
  3. Therefore, nature was tampered in.

There is nothing fraudulent about that. There is no need for any math, or even any precise measurement of how low the relevant probability is in order to correctly conclude that nature has, in fact, been tampered in. Indeed, that is the only possible conclusion that is dictated by the logic.

Now, one can argue either of the first two propositions. One can claim either a) a low-probability event has been observed to take pace without tampering in nature or b) a low-probability event has NOT taken place to reject the conclusion. Only in the case of evolution, argument b) cannot possibly apply. We are here, after all.

 This leaves argument a) a low-probability event has been observed to take pace without tampering in nature. Very well. That is the only correct objection to the argument, so the burden thus falls on wrf3 or anyone who wishes to argue that there has not been any tampering with nature, be it Divine, divine, or merely alien, in the origin of the various species. I do hope no one is so haplessly midwitted that they fall into the obvious and incorrect trap for the intellectually careless here.

Furthermore, for the stubbornly pedantic, I will note that impossible is NOT a synonym for zero probability. Yesterday’s pedantry was not only foolish and irrelevant, it was technically incorrect and didn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia.

Imagine throwing a dart at a unit square (i.e. a square
with area 1) wherein the dart will impact exactly one point, and imagine
that this square is the only thing in the universe besides the dart and
the thrower. There is physically nowhere else for the dart to land.
Then, the event that “the dart hits the square” is a sure event. No other alternative is imaginable.

Now, notice that since the square has area 1, the probability that
the dart will hit any particular sub-region of the square equals the
area of that sub-region. For example, the probability that the dart will
hit the right half of the square is 0.5, since the right half has area
0.5.

Next, consider the event that “the dart hits the diagonal of the unit
square exactly”. Since the area of the diagonal of the square is zero,
the probability that the dart lands exactly on the diagonal is zero. So,
the dart will almost never land on the diagonal (i.e. it will almost surely not
land on the diagonal). Nonetheless the set of points on the diagonal is
not empty and a point on the diagonal is no less possible than any
other point, therefore theoretically it is possible that the dart
actually hits the diagonal.

The same may be said of any point on the square. Any such point P
will contain zero area and so will have zero probability of being hit
by the dart. However, the dart clearly must hit the square somewhere.
Therefore, in this case, it is not only possible or imaginable that an
event with zero probability will occur; one must occur. Thus, we would
not want to say we were certain that a given event would not occur, but
rather almost certain.

Or to put it another way: “Consider selecting a point x from the uniform distribution with p.d.f. f over the unit circle D. P(x = r) = int_{{r}}f = 0 for all r in D. However, clearly x is in D.”

In other words, quibbling over the difference between impossible and very highly improbable is totally pointless, because the sufficiently intelligent can also manage to do so over the difference between impossible and zero probability. It’s all beside the point anyhow, as the aforementioned logical syllogism should suffice to demonstrate.

Now, one can, if one wishes, attempt to quibble over the precise level of probability that defines “low-probability event”, but here it suffices to cite Borel’s Law of Chance (which is actually more of a Heuristic of Chance) that states: “Phenomena with very small probabilities do not occur”. However, Borel also directly addressed the Problem of Life directly in Probability and Certainty, p. 124-126:

The Problem of Life.

In conclusion, I feel it is necessary to say a few words
regarding a question that does not really come within
the scope of this book, but that certain readers might nevertheless
reproach me for having entirely neglected. I mean the problem of
the appearance of life on our planet (and eventually on other planets
in the universe) and the probability that this appearance may have
been due to chance. If this problem seems to me to lie outside
our subject, this is because the probability in question is too
complex for us to be able to calculate its order of magnitude. It
is on this point that I wish to make several explanatory comments.

When we calculated the probability of reproducing by mere chance
a work of literature, in one or more volumes, we certainly observed
that, if this work was printed, it must have emanated from a human
brain. Now the complexity of that brain must therefore have been
even richer than the particular work to which it gave birth. Is it
not possible to infer that the probability that this brain may have
been produced by the blind forces of chance is even slighter than
the probability of the typewriting miracle?

It is obviously the same as if we asked ourselves whether we could
know if it was possible actually to create a human being by combining
at random a certain number of simple bodies. But this is not
the way that the problem of the origin of life presents itself: it
is generally held that living beings are the result of a slow process
of evolution, beginning with elementary organisms, and that this
process of evolution involves certain properties of living matter that
prevent us from asserting that the process was accomplished in
accordance with the laws of chance.

Moreover, certain of these properties of living matter also belong
to inanimate matter, when it takes certain forms, such as that of
crystals. It does not seem possible to apply the laws of probability
calculus to the phenomenon of the formation of a crystal in a
more or less supersaturated solution. At least, it would not be
possible to treat this as a problem of probability without taking
account of certain properties of matter, properties that facilitate
the formation of crystals and that we are certainly obliged to verify.
We ought, it seems to me, to consider it likely that the formation
of elementary living organisms, and the evolution of those organisms,
are also governed by elementary properties of matter that we do
not understand perfectly but whose existence we ought nevertheless
admit.

This is often cited as evidence that it is not possible to apply the laws of probability calculus to the question of evolution. John Stockwell wrote: “In short, Borel says what many a talk.origins poster has said
time and time again when confronted with such creationist arguments:
namely, that probability estimates that ignore the non-random elements predetermined
by physics and chemistry are meaningless.”

However, the elementary properties of matter that Émile Borel, who died in 1956, did not understand are better understood today. We now know that the probability of the beneficial mutations required for the theory of natural selection are very low; we have also observed that the number of generations needed for even fairly small selective changes to spread across a population are too great to fit the timescales required. So, Borel’s arguments for the inapplicability of probability calculus to the problem of life is outdated, leaving us with one more logical construction to consider.

  1. The Law of Chance states that phenomena with very small probabilities do not occur
  2. We do not understand the elementary properties of matter that govern the formation
    of elementary living organisms and the evolution of those organisms. 
  3. Therefore, we cannot apply the Law of Chance to the Problem of Life.

That may have been true in the 1950s. But in 2015, we possess considerably more information and we sufficiently understand those elementary properties of matter in order to estimate enough of the probabilities concerned to characterize them as “very small”. This falsifies proposition two, leaving us with the inescapable conclusion that the Law of Chance does apply to the Problem of Life, and therefore evolution by natural selection has not occurred. Which then brings us back to the original point and forces us to conclude that if evolution has taken place, it is the result of artificial selection.

Lamarck lives!

And the Neo-Darwinian wall continues to crumble:

LANDMARK Adelaide research showing that sperm and eggs appear to carry genetic memories of events well before conception, may force a rethink of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, scientists say.

It also suggests the bad habits developed through a parent’s lifetime could be passed on genetically to their children.The University of Adelaide research, published internationally today, shows that babies may be prone to their parents’ youthful behaviour, from gorging as obese teenagers to a preference for fruit or even dislike of smells.

The work by the university’s Robinson Research Institute appears on Friday in the international journal Science after being put through scrupulous peer review.

It paves the way for a review of the work of French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose theory that an organism can pass to its offspring characteristics acquired during its lifetime was largely ignored after Darwin’s publication of On The Origin of Species in the mid-1800s, that work defining evolution as a process of incidental, random mutation between generations.

I’m just curious how much more the theory has to be shown to have gotten wrong before its advocates decide that it is time to start viewing it as just another scientific hypothesis rather than unquestionable dogma. The conceptual epicycles are stacking up at an ever-increasing rate.

It should be readily apparent that genetic memory would be a considerably more powerful mechanism than waiting for random mutations, then gradually selecting for those genes across an entire population, one favored mating survivor at a time.

Fred calls out Derbyshire and the Darwinists

Fred Reed, who is “a thoroughgoing agnostic”, poses a few questions based on his inferences from observation for the advocates of the Theorum of Evolution by (mostly) Natural Selection In Addition To A Panoply of Less Famous Evolutionary Mechanisms:

Over the years I have occasionally expressed doubts over the tenets of evolutionism which, perhaps wrongly, has seemed to me a sort of political correctness of science, or maybe a metaphysics somewhat related to science. As a consequence I have been severely reprimanded. The editor of a site devoted to genetic expression furiously began deleting any mention of me from his readers. Others, to include Mr. John Derbyshire of Taki’s Magazine, have expressed disdain, though disdaining to explain just why.

In all of this, my inability to get straight answers that do not shift has frustrated me. I decided to address my questions to an expert in the field, preferably one who loathed me and thus might produce his best arguments so as to stick it to me. To this end I have settled on Mr. Derbyshire….

  1. what selective pressures lead to a desire not to reproduce, and how does this fit into a Darwinian framework?
  2. Why should I not indulge my hobby of torturing to death the severely genetically retarded?
  3. How many years would have to pass without replication of the [Abiogenesis]
    event, if indeed it be not replicated, before one might begin to suspect
    that it didn’t happen? 
  4. What are the viable steps needed to evolve from [two-cycle insect] to [four-cycle insect]? Or from anything to four-cycle? 
  5. Does not genetic determinism (with which I have no disagreement) lead to a paradox: that the thoughts we think we are thinking we only think to be thoughts when they are really utterly predetermined by the inexorable working of physics and chemistry? 
  6. Why do seemingly trivial traits proliferate while clearly important ones do not?
  7. If one believes in or suspects the existence of God or gods, how
    does one exclude the possibility that He, She, or It meddles in the
    universe—directing evolution, for example?  

Of course, anyone here who still subscribes to believe in abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection is more than welcome to take a crack at one or more of these themselves. However, before answering any of them, I would highly recommend reading the complete article, as Fred goes into more details regarding why he is asking each of the questions there.

The mysteries of TENS

Dr. James M. Tour of Rice University confesses he simply cannot grasp what everyone at Scienceblogs and the Panda’s Thumb and Richarddawkins.net just knows to be true. Because science.

I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.

But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.

The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.

Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.

I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.”

Smells like quality science. And before the usual science fetishists leap in to assert the obvious and declare: “yeah, well, that doesn’t prove God exists,” I will readily admit that it does not. But, (and here is the point), it does prove that there are very rational reasons to doubt the unevidenced assertion that “evolution is a fact”.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, I am an evolution skeptic, not an evolution denier. I do not judge the truth of the belief by the behavior of the believer, although if I did, the behavior of the evolutionary true believers would be sufficient to convince me that the existence of unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns combined is considerably more likely than fish magically turning into monkeys over time due to beneficial mutations taking advantage of the multitude of changes in the water.

“A nightmare for science”

It is remarkable how evolution enthusiasts can’t seem to reach the logical conclusion concerning their repeated inability to successfully debate creationists. Then again, if they had as solid a grasp on logic and statistics as they do on the various epicycles of their ever-evolving “theory”, they would not be evangelical evolutionists in the first place:

In a much-hyped showdown, “the Science Guy” tried to defend evolution against creationist Ken Ham, and proved how slick science-deniers can be. How did the guy who’s right go so wrong?

On many mornings, I wake up and think, “You know what this country needs? More culture war.” As I scramble up a couple eggs, I find myself wishing—fervently wishing—that we could spend more time reducing substantive issues to mere spectacle. Later, as I scrub the pan, I’ll fantasize about how those very spectacles might even funnel money toward some of the country’s most politicized religious groups.

Fortunately, Bill “the Science Guy” Nye has heard my wish—which, really, is the wish of a nation. Why else would he have traveled to Kentucky this week in order to debate Ken Ham, the young-earth creationist founder of Answers in Genesis, about the origins of the world?

Actually, there are two other reasons that Nye might have done so, and I’ve given both possibilities a great deal of thought in the past few days. The first is that Nye, for all his bow-tied charm, is at heart a publicity-hungry cynic, eager to reestablish the national reputation he once had as the host of a PBS show. When his stint on Dancing With the Stars ended quickly, Nye turned to the only other channel that could launch him back to national attention: a sensationalized debate, replete with the media buzz that he craves.

Possibility number two is that Nye is clueless—that, for all his skill as a science communicator, Nye has less political acumen than your average wombat.

After watching the debate, I’m leaning toward that second possibility. Last night, it was easy to pick out the smarter man on the stage. Oddly, it was the same man who was arguing that the earth is 6,000 years old. It was like watching the Broncos play the Seahawks. Nye never had a chance.

I didn’t watch the “debate”. I had no interest in it, surmising correctly, (as it turns out), that neither side would actually be debating, but were instead engaged in mutual preaching to their own choirs. And it is amusing to observe the wrestling with the temptation intellectual dishonesty poses to the evolutionists as a result of their frustration with their own inability to successful defend their faith

For example, the writer claims it is bullshit to distinguish between scientific evidence and historical extrapolation. He asserts: “We can use evidence from the present to extrapolate about the past.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t disprove Ham’s point, which isn’t so much a point as a basic fact. An extrapolation is not, by definition, an observation. Nor can a historical extrapolation be tested.

For some reason, science fetishists who understand very well that it is impossible to use science to prove that Abraham Lincoln succeeded George Washington as president do not understand that it is equally impossible to use science to prove that species X transformed into species Y. Extrapolation only takes us to the hypothesis part of the scientific equation, it does not get us past the necessary testing and observation aspects. Barring a time machine, it is history, not science.

And in the end, the author throws in the towel, admits defeat, and advocates a full-blown retreat:

You don’t need to be Sun Tzu to realize that, when it comes to guys like Ken Ham, you can’t really win. If you refuse to debate them, they claim to be censored. If you agree to debate them, you give them a public platform on which to argue that, yep, they’re being censored. Better not to engage at all, at least directly.

Needless to say, the side that dares not directly engage is the side that knows it cannot successfully make its case. And the more the evangelical Darwinians appeal to an increasingly threadbare scientific authority, the weaker their case is observed to be by all impartial parties. When they’re saying: “you don’t understand the biology” and their critics are saying: “you don’t understand the math”, well, as it turns out, we have an excellent means of determining whose claims are founded in fact and whose are not.

And what we can readily test and observe with these two competing hypotheses is that the scientific evidence here does not favor those appealing to scientific authority.

Mailvox: pressing for the kill

Revan put some of my arguments to the test and finds they are effective in practice:

Your posts have inspired me to start debating atheists and the early results are amusing to say the least…. In short, arguments presented on your blog were able to put them on their heels and quickly retreating toward rationalization mode.  The problem I’m having is being able to go in for the kill and expose their weakness for what it is. If you or any of the Ilk have suggestions on how I can improve then I would appreciate it.

I posed versions of three questions that I have read on your blog:

  1. What is the average rate of speciation?
  2. How many mutations, on average, are required per speciation?
  3. Even if it can be demonstrated that speciation has occurred then what is the evidence that the various mechanisms are sufficient enough to make a creator unnecessary?

The first response I received was a wall of talking points:

• All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heritability, catalysis, and metabolism.

• Common descent predicts a nested hierarchy pattern, or groups within groups. We see just such an arrangement in a unique, consistent, well-defined hierarchy, the so-called tree of life.

• Different lines of evidence give the same arrangement of the tree of life. We get essentially the same results whether we look at morphological, biochemical, or genetic traits.

• Fossil animals fit in the same tree of life. We find several cases of transitional forms in the fossil record.

• The fossils appear in a chronological order, showing change consistent with common descent over hundreds of millions of years and inconsistent with sudden creation.

• Many organisms show rudimentary, vestigial characters, such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight.

• Atavisms sometimes occur. An atavism is the reappearance of a character present in a distant ancestor but lost in the organism’s immediate ancestors. We only see atavisms consistent with organisms’ evolutionary histories.

• Ontogeny (embryology and developmental biology) gives information about the historical pathway of an organism’s evolution. For example, as embryos whales and many snakes develop hind limbs that are reabsorbed before birth.

• The distribution of species is consistent with their evolutionary history. For example, marsupials are mostly limited to Australia, and the exceptions are explained by continental drift. Remote islands often have species groups that are highly diverse in habits and general appearance but closely related genetically. Squirrel diversity coincides with tectonic and sea level changes (Mercer and Roth 2003). Such consistency still holds when the distribution of fossil species is included.

• Evolution predicts that new structures are adapted from other structures that already exist, and thus similarity in structures should reflect evolutionary history rather than function. We see this frequently. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structure despite their different functions.

• The same principle applies on a molecular level. Humans share a large percentage of their genes, probably more than 70 percent, with a fruit fly or a nematode worm.

• When two organisms evolve the same function independently, different structures are often recruited. For example, wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures. Gliding has been implemented in many additional ways. Again, this applies on a molecular level, too.

• The constraints of evolutionary history sometimes lead to suboptimal structures and functions. For example, the human throat and respiratory system make it impossible to breathe and swallow at the same time and make us susceptible to choking.

• Suboptimality appears also on the molecular level. For example, much DNA is nonfunctional.

• Some nonfunctional DNA, such as certain transposons, pseudogenes, and endogenous viruses, show a pattern of inheritance indicating common ancestry.

• Speciation has been observed.

• The day-to-day aspects of evolution — heritable genetic change, morphological variation and change, functional change, and natural selection — are seen to occur at rates consistent with common descent. Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about eighty million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also is found in fruiting plants and fruit flies. The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.

When I pressed them to answer the first question I got this:

That’s impossible to quantify. Mutations are random and we cannot predict exactly how the environment will determine which mutations survive and which will not. Those kind of predictions in evolution are like meteorologists trying to predict the weather next year. Both evolution and the weather are chaos systems.

I’ll leave it up to the Dread Ilk to indicate how Revan can best press for the kill once it has become apparent that the advocates of evolution by natural selection have no ability to quantify the very processes they claim to be incontrovertible fact. But rest assured there are several effective lines of attack. The key is to not permit them to do what they will almost always try to do, which is to change the subject away from the specific matter at hand.

Remember, concepts which cannot be quantified may exist, but they cannot be reasonably described as either mathematic or scientific except as axioms or hypotheses.

The implications of complexity

I find it remarkable that despite this apparent order of magnitude, (or more), change in the complexity of the DNA code, (now codes), even the genetic scientists who made the discovery are failing to grasp its obvious implications with regards to conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionism:

“For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

The genetic code is similar for all organisms and is stored in one of the two DNA strands as non-overlapping, linear sequence of nitrogenous bases Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T). These four letters are the ‘alphabet’ of the genetic code and are used to write code words. The code consists of three-letter words (also called triplets or codons). There are a total of 64 codons.

Now, researchers have found that the codons, which they refer to as duons, can be used for gene control. The team says that about 15 percent of codons could act as duons and that these bilingual genetic codes have shaped protein evolution.

At this point, one is beginning to wonder if the scientists are so focused on the evolutionary trees that even a copyright notice would somehow escape their attention. Copyright (c) 6000 BC God. All rights reserved. “Well, obviously that is a codal pattern that evolved early in a common ancestor and merely happens to look like alphabetical characters, from which the various divergent mutations didn’t happen to provide any selection advantages.”

Here is the point that so many die-hard evolutionists can’t seem to grasp. Let me try to walk them through the logic of my skepticism with a simple analogy.

Charlie has a car. Charlie is speaking to you in Minneapolis. Charlie says he left Chicago seven hours ago and drove to Minneapolis on a single tank of gas. However, in the car, you discover two receipts, both dated today, from gas stations in Colorado Springs and Sioux Falls.

Now, if you can understand how this indicates that Charlie’s story is false, you should be able to understand how adding an additional order of magnitude of complexity to the DNA programming process completely rules out the time-scale of the conventional Neo-Darwinian selectionist model. There were already real problems with the model, hence the development of hypothesized excuses such as Punctuated Equilibrium.

But by adding the time needed for another level of mutation on top of what was already required by the previous single-code model, I don’t see how it is possible to seriously insist that the conventional natural selection model can hold up in light of this discovery. Now, perhaps I’m missing something, but it seems to me that either the DNA mutation process has to take place considerably faster than has been observed over the past 50 years or a new model will be required.

My guess is that the initial explanatory defense will be that the mutations are more frequent, but more significant using the two-code process, but this is a defense unlikely to do more than buy a little time, as it will soon be possible to observe whether such mutations are actually taking place or not. Remember, the main reason that TENS has been able to survive so long is that its long timescales required resisted observation. If the timescales are shorter and the mutations selected more frequent, then we can observe and falsify them.

And, of course, even if the new, faster model turns out to be correct, this opens up a whole new can of worms that Jonathan Haidt correctly identifies as the likely consequences of a faster evolutionary model:

A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But the writing is on the wall.

More highly evolved

It should be interesting to see how those who are true believers in both a) the religion of TENS and b) the myth of human equality react to this scientific claim from Penn State that Africans are less evolved than Europeans:

Light skin in Europeans stems from a gene mutation from a single person who lived 10,000 years ago. This is according to a new U.S. study that claims the colour is due to an ancient ancestor who lived somewhere between the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Scientists made the discovery after identifying a key gene that contributes to lighter skin colour in Europeans.

In earlier research, Keith Cheng from Penn State College of Medicine reported that one amino acid difference in the gene SLC24A5 is a key contributor to the skin colour difference between Europeans and West Africans. ‘The mutation in SLC24A5 changes just one building block in the protein, and contributes about a third of the visually striking differences in skin tone between peoples of African and European ancestry,’ he said.

We already know that the three major continental groups are not even equally human on the genetic level, with Africans being the only pure homo sapiens sapiens. This new claim indicates that Africans are lower in the evolutionary order, not that the skin color gene can be described as a speciation event. Regardless, one wonders why those who stubbornly, and ignorantly, continue to insist on human equality despite these undeniable genetic differences which are much more than skin deep are not yet tarred by the label “science denier”.

What I find amusing is that the scientists have already leaped in with some strained explanations to cram natural selection into the process when it is very clear from modern human behavior that the rapidity of the growth of the mutation would much more likely have stemmed from sexual selection. There need not be any environmental advantage to lighter skin for it to be preferred. Of course, that would also be a hate fact, as it would be scientific evidence that whites are more attractive than blacks. That being said, a fact is a fact.

However, that’s not the intriguing stuff. Here’s a much more interesting thought. The 10,000 year time frame is not all that far off from Bishop Usher’s famous 6,000 year estimation for the Age of the Earth. But most forget that the bishop’s estimate was based on Adam, not the Earth. So, what if it can eventually be determined that the single genetic mutation was actually an artificial one? That would certainly set the cat among the equality pigeons.

Mailvox: Atheist Philosophy in action

BH is bemused by a PhD’s resort to an amusing variant of the very atheist logic I mocked six years ago in TIA:

I’ve been parrying on FB with an honest-to-God PhD engineer at IBM who asserts “evolution must be true because GPS works.” His logic: because general relativity is learned from observing the stars, and the stars are billions of years old, therefore evolution is true.

Because I learned to eat crumbs that fall from the table of the most able Internet Cruelty Artist, I’ve been mercilessly pointing out his errors in reasoning, illustrating his absurdities, etc., while laughing at him.  He demanded acceptance with the premise that “ALL science requires that evolution be true.” (He repeated it over and over, comment after comment… gee, Aspergers much?)  So I asked him if my dentist needs to believe in evolution in order to clean my teeth.  ‘Yes, they need to understand that bacteria evolved 500 mya before they can clean teeth.’

I hadn’t personally encountered this level of idiocy before.

As I have occasionally noted, it takes a considerable amount of education to reduce a formerly intelligent individual to the level of a complete idiot. A PhD isn’t absolutely necessary, but it does appear to help. The IBM engineer is merely engaged in the usual bait-and-switch; he’s trying to defend evolution by cloaking it in the protective veil of real science that provides reliable results.

Fred meets evolutionists, wins

After his long article expressing his fundamental skepticism towards the cult of TENS, a number of Neo-Darwinists didn’t hesitate to try to inform Fred that his skepticism was misplaced. This was a tactical error, as Fred responded to their various attempts to correct his heretical thinking..

The Argument from Time
Even a Federal Bureaucrat Can Get A Job Done, Given Forever

A staple of evolutionary evasion is time, lots of it. This is particularly applied to the putative formation of the OC (Original Critter). One intones “billions and billions and billions of years,” the implication being that with so very, very, very much time, so many billions of gallons of sea water, surely an OC would have to form. Why, it could hardly help it.

Not necessarily. Probabilities can be more daunting than one might expect. Things that seem intuitively likely sometimes just flat are not. To illustrate the point:

We’ve all heard Sir James Jeans’ assertion that a monkey, pecking randomly on a typewriter, would eventually produce all the books in the British Museum. This may sound reasonable, even obvious, at first glance. But would the monkey in fact ever get even one book?

No. Not in any practical sense.

Consider a thickish book of, say, 200,000 words. By the newspaper estimate that there are on average five letters per word, that’s a million letters. What is the likelihood that our monkey, typing continuously (we ignore upper case and punctuation), will get the book in a given string of a million letters?

He has a 1/26 chance of getting the first letter, times a 1/26 chance of the second, and so on. The chance of getting the book in a million characters is therefore one in 26 to the millionth power. I don’t have a calculator handy, but we can get an approximation. Since 26 = 10(log 26), then 261,000,000 = 10(log 26 x 1,000,000). Since log 10 = 1 and log 100 = 2, log 26 has to be between, somewhere on the low end. Call it 1.2.

The monkey thus has one chance in 1 followed by 1,200,000 zeros. That is what mathematicians call a GBH (Gret Big Honker). For practical purposes, one divided by that rascal is zero. If you had a billion billion monkeys (more monkeys than I want) typing a billion billion letters a second, for a billion billion times the estimated age of the universe (1018 seconds is sometimes given), the chance of getting the book would still be essentially zero.

Well, you might say, that is asking a lot of our monkey. How about the chance that the monkey would get the mere title of a book—say, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the  Struggle for Life, the original title of Darwin´s book. If my finger count was correct, that´s 117 letters and spaces. Then the probability is 1 in 26117, or 10(log 26 x  117), giving 10140 and change. Now, again taking the age of the universe as 1018 seconds, our monkey would have, sigh, essentially zero chance of getting even the title. Ain´t gonna happen.

Does the chance formation of an Original Critter involve such forbidding numbers? I don´t know that it does. Nor that it doesn´t. It is difficult to calculate the probability of an unknown process of unknown complexity under unknown conditions.

As we have repeatedly observed, biologists are reliably inept when it comes to math. This is why they repeatedly turn to the LOTS AND LOTS OF TIME argument, which is nothing more than an appeal to their own credulity. What they forget to account for properly is the even more extraordinary numbers that are required in order to account for the probabilities of the necessary mutations a) happening and b) proving to be of superior fitness.

It has been asked before why so many economists, whose own “science’ is entirely debatable, tend to be skeptical of evolution by natural selection. The answer is twofold. First, if you don’t get the math right in economics, the error will be immediately obvious even in theory. No economists will blithely carry on with his model if it produces 10,000 percent unemployment or an estimated 8 billion unmarried households in America. Second, every economics major has seen an awful lot of theoretical bullshit. So, we recognize it when we see it.