Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | May 26, 2012 | FRANK ELTMAN

[eekitsagreek]

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.

Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."

"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges."

[OldNavyVet]

The more we know, the less there is to know.

[rawcatslyentist]

Leakey has water on the brain.

Did ya ever think we were created at different locations on this planet out of slightly different types of clay? Seriously, if you are going through the trouble of seeding a planet, do you just create one thing in one place?

No, they believe in nothing. Everything just miraculously sprang into existence all by itself. Then life just miraculously sprang into existence all by itself. Then sentient beings slow cooked in the miracle soup for a long time, before miraculously springing into existence.

Freakin atheists sure do have a lot of faith.

[varmintman]

The problem is with the basic laws of mathematics and probability, with which evolution is essentially incompatible. The (proportionally) biggest group of people not buying into evoloserism is mathematicians, and not Christians.

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a system for pivoting flight feathers so that they open on up strokes and close on down strokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and a high efficiency heart, a specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters, a beak (since you won't have hands any more...) etc. etc. etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening at once (which is what you'd need), best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. For the pieces of being a flying bird to evolve piecemeal would be much harder. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now:
OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools.

2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...

3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.

4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

[BigCinBigD]

It already is to some of us.

[Gil4]

“Did ya ever think we were created at different locations on this planet out of slightly different types of clay?”

Why would anyone think that? The evolutionist would reject it out of hand. The creationist would reject it on biblical and scientific grounds. The concept of original sin is lost if there is more than one Adam and Eve, and there is no need for more than 1 pair of initial ancestors to produce the (fairly limited) genetic diversity that we see today.

[Persevero]

I guess he expects they’ll find the

(non existent)

missing links.

[MacMattico]

I have no problem with the theory of evolution as instigated by God. But why does this article just seem like it's saying, “See, we're all Kenyan now!”

[OldNavyVet]

Darwin's concluding words in his "Origin of the Species."

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

[RichInOC]

If they haven’t done it in the last 150 years, I find the notion that they’re going to do so in the next 15 to 30 engagingly naive.

[nathanbedford]

From a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle of May 26, 1975:

The leaky team unearthed a fossil of an ape man walking upright and concluded that it proved global cooling.

Can someone explain to me why training in breaking rocks and speculating about the origins of man, and then speculating anew when the original hypotheses have been proved wrong, qualifies one as an expert on global climate? Does peering at fossils teach one much about sunspots? Polar alignment? Our path around the sun?

Even more, how do such speculations qualify one as a theologian?

If I throw three bones of a dead rabbit on the ground will their alignment tell me more or less about the destiny of the universe than looking at three shards of a 50,000-year-old fossil?

If I form my epistemology from looking at old stones, will I have a grander view of the meaning of it all if I look at the stones piled atop one another at Stonehenge?

[HiTech RedNeck]

Once a species exists, however it got put there, nothing keeps it from evolving variations. The biggest differences between humans are only micro-evolutionary steps apart.

Land bridges existed sufficiently short times ago that mankind doesn’t need to be more than several tens of thousands of years old to be able to explain how it got to everywhere it did. There could have been early hominids superficially “like” humans as we know them, for example the Neandertal, but none of them would need to have been the source of mankind.

[rawcatslyentist]

Think like a farmer. A global farmer with abilities far above our imagination. Do you plant just one seed on the whole planet?

A & E were created separately and specifically. It doesn't mean they were the ONLY ones, just special.

[eclecticEel]

I see no reason why you shouldn't go through your life thinking if you're a good citizen, you'll get a better future in the afterlife ....

His view of morality is how well you serve the state? I would say I was shocked, if such statism wasn't so very common.

[Allen In Texas Hill Country]

Its “Snap Your Finger” time.......:<)))))

[Valpal1]

Liberal atheists believe the universe and all life happend spontaneously, and evolved on it’s own. But suddenly, NOW, every living thing, up to and including Earth, must be micromanaged for the betterment of all.

[gunsequalfreedom]

Easy enough to figure this one out. Could never understand all the controversy. God created evolution.

[Jim from C-Town]

Superb, Blown away! Outstanding!

I have often thought the same thing about Darwinism and evolution. It requires significantly more faith in the unprovable than a belief in a creator of some sort. To think that out right chance occurred hundreds of trillions of times throughout the history of the Universe is hard to accept.

[Terry Mross]

So, if we’re all Kenyans, obama is eligible to be president.

[bkopto]

Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it."

So, it sounds like Leakey is saying that the "science" will soon be settled. Where have I heard that before?

Evolution will be a science when its hypotheses are demonstrated in a wet laboratory, culminating in artificial life, from rudimentary chemicals. Or, when biologists change drosophila melanogaster into some other self replicating creature. Until then, evolution is nothing more than mental masturbation, in my opinion.