Posted on 02/17/2005 3:10:32 PM PST by DannyTN
Timothy G. Standish, biology First published in In Six Days Science and origins testimony #9
Edited by John F. Ashton
Dr. Standish is associate professor of biology at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. He holds a B.S. in zoology from Andrews University, an M.S. in biology from Andrews University, and a Ph.D. in biology and public policy from George Mason University (University of Virginia), Charlottesville, Virginia. He teaches genetics at Andrews University and is currently researching the genetics of cricket (Achita domesticus) behavior.
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Reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins was a pivotal experience for me. I had recently started my Ph.D. program at George Mason University and eagerly signed up for a class entitled “Problems in Evolutionary Theory.” The Blind Watchmaker was required reading, and with growing enthusiasm I noted glowing endorsements printed on the cover. According to The Economist, this book was “as readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as has been published since 1859.” Lee Dembart, writing for the Los Angeles Times, was even more effusive: “Every page rings of truth. It is one of the best science books—of the best of any books—I have ever read.” A book that was “Winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award” must contain nothing but undistilled brilliance. I felt smug with confidence as I paid for the book and left the store, brimming with ebullience to start reading.
After wading through all the hyperbole, I was stunned by the ideas put forward by Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker. Rhetoric burnished the arguments with a glittering sheen, briefly giving the impression that pebbles were gems. But once each metaphor was stripped aside, the core ideas did not support the idea that natural selection could account for the origin of life and the meaningful complexity of organisms. Most startling to me was the realization that, one of the book’s core theses, in fact, violated the principle of natural selection.
Dawkins wove two ideas together in supporting Darwinism. The first idea was that, given enough chances, the improbable becomes probable. For example, flipping a coin ten times in a row and getting heads each time is very unlikely; one would only expect it to happen about 1 in 1,024 tries. Most of us would not sit around flipping coins just to see it happen, but if we had a million people flipping coins, we would see it happen many times. This phenomenon is publicized in the newspapers when lottery winners are announced. Winning a million-dollar jackpot is unlikely, but with millions of people purchasing tickets, eventually someone wins.
Dawkins admits that the odds on life starting from a random collection of chemicals is very slim, but given an immense universe and the billions of years it has existed, the improbable becomes probable. In this is echoed the logic of Ernst Haeckel, who wrote in his book The Riddle of the Universe, published in 1900:
Many of the stars, the light of which has taken thousands of years to reach us, are certainly suns like our own mother-sun, and are girt about with planets and moons, just as in our solar system. We are justified in supposing that thousands of these planets are in a similar stage of development to that of our earth … and that from its nitrogenous compounds, protoplasm has been evolved—that wonderful substance which alone, as far as our knowledge goes, is the possessor of organic life.
Haeckel was optimistic about the presence of conditions that could support life on planets other than earth, and it is in this that one of the problems with Dawkins’ argument emerges. While the universe is immense, those places where life as we know it could survive, let alone come into being, seem to be few and far between. So far, only one place has been discovered where conditions for life are present, and we are already living on it. Thus, there is not much cause for optimism that the universe is teeming with planets bathed in a primordial soup from which life might evolve. Dawkins wrote glibly of the immensity of the universe and its age, but failed to provide one example, other than the earth, where the unlikely event of spontaneous generation of life might occur. Even if the universe were teeming with proto-earths, and the spans of time suggested by modern science were available, this is still not a great argument, as if something is impossible—in other words, the odds of it happening are zero—then it will never happen, not even in an infinite amount of time. For example, even if we had our million people flipping coins, each with ten flips in a row, the odds on any one of them flipping and getting 11 heads in ten tries is zero because the odds of getting 11 heads in ten tries with one person is zero. The bottom line is that the odds on life evolving from nonliving precursors is essentially zero. Ironically, this was the stronger of the two ideas, or arguments, presented by Dawkins.
The second argument was presented as an analogy: imagine a monkey typing on a typewriter with 27 keys, all the letters in the English alphabet and the space bar. How long would it take for the monkey to type something that made any sense? Dawkins suggests the sentence spoken by William Shakespeare’s Hamlet who, in describing a cloud, pronounces, “Methinks it is like a weasel.” It is not a long sentence and contains very little meaning, but it works for argument’s sake. How many attempts at typing this sentence would it take a monkey, which would presumably be hitting keys randomly, to type the sentence?
As it turns out, the odds can be easily calculated as the probability of getting each letter or space correct raised to the power of the number of positions at which they have to be correct. In this case, the probability of the monkey typing “m” at the first position of the sentence is 1/27 (we won’t worry about capitalization). The sentence has 28 characters in it, so the probability is (1/27)28 or 1.2 x 10–40. That is about one chance in 12,000 million million million million million million! You would want a lot of monkeys typing very fast for a long time if you ever wanted to see this happen!
To overcome this problem with probability, Dawkins proposed that natural selection could help by fixing each letter in place once it was correct and thus lowering the odds massively. In other words, as a monkey types away, it is not unlikely that at least one of the characters it types will be in the correct position on the first try. If this letter was then kept and the monkey was only allowed to type in the remaining letters until it finally had the correct letter at each position, the odds fall to the point that the average diligent monkey could probably finish the task in an afternoon and still have time to gather bananas and peanuts from admiring observers. Dawkins got his computer to do it in between 40 and 70 tries.
Luckily I had taken biochemistry before reading The Blind Watchmaker. Organisms are made of cells, and those cells are composed of little protein machines that do the work of the cell. Proteins can be thought of as sentences like “Methinks it is like a weasel,” the difference being that proteins are made up of 20 different subunits called amino acids instead of the 27 different characters in our example. The evolution of a functional protein would presumably start out as a random series of amino acids one or two of which would be in the right position to do the function the protein is designed to do. According to Dawkins’ theory, those amino acids in the right location in the protein would be fixed by natural selection, while those that needed to be modified would continue to change until they were correct, and a functional protein was produced in relatively short order. Unfortunately, this ascribes an attribute to natural selection that even its most ardent proponents would question, the ability to select one nonfunctional protein from a pool of millions of other nonfunctional proteins.
Changing even one amino acid in a protein can alter its function dramatically. A famous example of this is the mutation that causes sickle cell anemia in humans. This disease causes a multitude of symptoms, ranging from liver failure to tower skull syndrome. It is caused by the replacement of an amino acid called glutamate, normally at position number six, with another amino acid called valine. This single change causes a massive difference in how the alpha globin subunit of hemoglobin works. The ultimate sad consequence of this seemingly insignificant mutation in the protein causes premature death in thousands of individuals each year. In other proteins, mutations to some, but not all, areas can result in a complete loss of function. This is particularly true if the protein is an enzyme, and the mutation is in its active site.
What Dawkins is suggesting is that a very large group of proteins, none of which is functional, can be acted on by natural selection to select out a few that, while they do not quite do the job yet, with some modification via mutation, can do the job in the future. This suggests that natural selection has some direction or goal in mind, a great heresy to those who believe evolutionary theory.
This idea of natural selection fixing amino acids as it constructs functional proteins is also unsupported by the data. Cells do not churn out large pools of random proteins on which natural selection can then act. If anything, precisely the opposite is true. Cells only produce the proteins they need to make at that time. Making other proteins, even unneeded functional ones, would be a wasteful thing for cells to do, and in many cases, could destroy the ability of the cell to function. Most cells only make about 10% of the proteins they are capable of producing. This is what makes liver cells different from those in the skin or brain. If all proteins were expressed all the time, all cells would be identical.
In reality, the problem of evolving life is much more complex than generation of a single functional protein. In fact, a single protein is just the tip of the iceberg. A living organism must have many functional proteins, all of which work together in a coordinated way. In the course of my research, I frequently physically disrupt cells by grinding them in liquid nitrogen. Sometimes I do this to obtain functional proteins, but more often to get the nucleic acids RNA or DNA. In any case, I have yet to find that the protein or nucleic acid I was working on was not functional after being removed from the cell, and yet, even though all the cell components were present and functional following disruption, I have never observed a single cell start to function again as a living organism, or even part of a living organism. For natural selection to occur, all proteins on which it is to act must be part of a living organism composed of a host of other functional protein machines. In other words, the entire system must exist prior to selection occurring, not just a single protein.
“Problems in Evolutionary Theory” was a class that made me realize the difficulties those who discount the possibility of a Creator have with their own theories. The problems with evolutionary theory were real, and there were no simple convincing resolutions.
Progressing in my studies, I slowly realized that evolution survives as a paradigm only as long as the evidence is picked and chosen and the great pool of data that is accumulating on life is ignored. As the depth and breadth of human knowledge increases, it washes over us a flood of evidence deep and wide, all pointing to the conclusion that life is the result of design. Only a small subset of evidence, chosen carefully, may be used to construct a story of life evolving from nonliving precursors. Science does not work on the basis of picking and choosing data to suit a treasured theory. I chose the path of science which also happens to be the path of faith in the Creator.
I believe God provides evidence of His creative power for all to experience personally in our lives. To know the Creator does not require an advanced degree in science or theology. Each one of us has the opportunity to experience His creative power in re-creating His character within us, step by step, day by day.
This chapter from the book In Six Days, published and graciously provided at no charge to Answers in Genesis by Master Books, a division of New Leaf Press (Green Forest, Arkansas).
I don't believe in Evolution at all, I only believe in Creation. But I don't know that days have always been limited to 24 hours, or that an hour has always been limited to 60 minutes. God may have changed all that when He created life.
Obviously, there is much physical evidence to dispute the argument that God created the universe in six days some 6,000 years ago. The religious response to that seems to be that God created a "mature" universe that looks to us like it is billions of years old when in fact it is not.
My question, then, is why would God try to trick us like that? Seems a bit cruel to me, and conflicts with my understanding of a God who loves those he created in his image. So, to the extent one believes that God had a hand in creating the universe, it seems one must acknowledge that the six days mentioned in Genesis are a metaphor for the eons of time that have passed since creation.
That's not the only religious response. I think we have misinterpreted the data and when rightly understood it won't show billions of years old at all.
Evolution: "An elaborate intellectual edifice built on very few facts"
I suppose he will do until they can get somebody smart on the project. Maybe somebody who's not stymied by complicated stuff like subtraction, addition's tricky pal.
You had me going there-- until I spotted the capital "E". So you agree that there are things that 'evolve'. When ever I run into someone who calls hisself an 'athiest' I usually say "I don't believe in the the same god that you don't believe in. So I can confidently say I don't believe in "Evolution" but I believe in "evolution".
Of course, if you start asking me to define my terms then you're making life difficult for me. ;-)
If it the evidence for God's existence took no effort to see and were completely un-rationalizable, then one would be insane to not follow the Judeo-Christian religion's every command, and to the T.
What would the challenge be in that?
I'm not a scientist who works in this field, but I just can't believe that the thousands of people who do this science every day (and the thousands who have done it in the past) can all be wrong. Dinosaurs and humans did not co-exist. Carbon dating does tell us how old organic material is. Light travels at a set speed, and millions of years must have passed for us to see starts that are millions of light years away. I'm not saying that humans know everything, but in so many fields and in so many ways, the universe demonstrates to us that is much older than a literal reading of the Bible would have us believe.
Andrews University is a 7th Day Adventist school, at least it was 30 years ago when I visited there.
Their Science Program was pathetic. I wonder if it has evolved in 30 years? Their student body hasn't grown much, so I doubt it. Anybody been there lately?
Wow! His bulb must burn mighty dim. Either that or he's simply lying about his "smug" expectations on opening Dawkins' book to make his "witness" more appealing to the sheeple.
Without all the psycho-babble this is exactly what ID is stating. The more into the mircobial world we go the more pronounced that life is not random or by chance.
I suppose the documeted evidence of rocks that formed during the mt. st. helens erruption and are less than 25 years old and have been dated at 220,000 years old might have something to do with it
Bingo! We have a winner!
it's very simple...
Micah 6:8 - He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
The rest of the Bible is teaching us how to do that. It's simple but nobody has done it.
How about that the lava flows at the top of the Grand Canyon have been dated older than those at the bottom?....(Add your favorite example below)
What data do you feel we have misinterpreted?
It's simple but nobody has done it.
Well then, lead!
PS I read a post about your daughter earlier. Congrats on a sharp specimen, but you'd better watch when she turns 14 (unfortunate voice of experience, sigh) :))
My God the writer COMPLETELY missed the point of Dawkins' example.
Cumulative selection is the key to understanding evolution. No one in their right mind (except creationists) argues that proteins and other macro-molecules arose in one step.
Evolution by its very definition postulates that these processes occured gradually.
Why is this simple concept so repeatedly misunderstood?
Can you site a source for that?
bttt for later read.
Dinosaurs and humans did not co-exist.
Where is your evidence. If you read the Bible there are various passages about dragons and the leviathan. Dinosaur is a relatively new term invented in the 1800s I believe,
Carbon dating does tell us how old organic material is.
But it is frequently misused and is inaccuarate over a certain number of years
Light travels at a set speed, and millions of years must have passed for us to see starts that are millions of light years away.
Tere is evidence that the speed of light has slowed from the mid 1800s and if calculated backwards is near infinite 6000 years ago.
Its bad for science, yet its even worse for religion.
There is way too much evidence that says the universe is billions of years old. Fortunately there was and event called SN1987A that gave us conclusive evidence that out distance measurement methodologies are valid.
I believe the Institute for Creation Research has a very good web site www.icr.org with many other interesting facts that Darwinists overlook
Never mind that we are not yet able to detect a planet the size of the earth at a similar distance from a similar star, even if that star were as close as Alpha Centari, Epsilon Eridani or other very very nearby stars.
IOW, if we were near one of those nearby stars, we couldn't detect the earth!.
This is the same argument that I've heard wherein a Catholic Priest, when questioned on some theology replied: "Well my son, I don't know about that, but if we are going to hell, there are 500,000,000 of us going together."
Other than by the copious radio frequency emissions, but even that method is only possible out to less than 100 light years, since we've not been putting out much of that stuff any longer than that.
Thanks for the ping, but I'm not going to bother the evolution list for stuff like this.
Well, as anti-evolutionists are keen to point out, you cannot prove a negative. (You cannot prove that God didn't create the world, for example) But you can have enough evidence to make any rational person believe a negative has been disproved. In this case, the overwhelming evidnce (and lack of evidence to the contrary) would lead any rational person to believe that humans and dinosaurs did not co-exist.
Well then to quote you "But you can have enough evidence to make any rational person believe a negative has been disproved. In this case, the overwhelming evidnce (and lack of evidence to the contrary) would lead any rational person to believe" that there is no MISSING link, as one has never been found despite the many fraudulent attempts.
Frequent misuse does not mean it is wrong. I frequently misuse my calculator; that doesn't mean the calculator is wrong.. And apparently science has figured out that it can be inaccurate after a certain time period, and thus we know when and when not to rely on it so we're not being fooled.
How ever you are wrong if you go around touting that incorrect number on your calculator as correct
It's just irrational to believe that hundreds of thousands of scientists have for centuries been involved in a consiracy to distort evidence in order to deny the biblical account of creation.
However evolution has only been around for a about 170 years, as for your conspiracy theory, how about the lack of discourse in public schools. Secular educators refuse to even acknowledge that evolution has problems. Although one is sincere, they can be sincerely wrong.
You've found an amino acid that can self replicate?
"As for this "intelligent design" concept, it's just a cop-out. It finds God to be wherever you can't explain, and conversely finds him in nothing that you can explain. Just because you don't understand how something works doesn't mean that there isn't a natural reason why it works."
Or
"As for this "evolution" concept, it's just a cop-out. It finds evolution to be wherever you can't explain, and conversely finds it in nothing that you can explain. Just because you don't understand how something works doesn't mean that there isn't a Supernatural reason why it works."
I'm sorry, but you presume incorrectly. How could anybody get a PhD in biology when they are capable of committing a howler like this?
This is not what evolution says happens for proteins, and I defy any creationist to find a serious biologist that would support this guy's version of evolution of proteins.
This is standard creationist rhetoric - putting up a fraudulent strawman, and claiming that's what evolution means.
bump
"As for this "evolution" concept, it's just a cop-out. It finds evolution to be wherever you can't explain, and conversely finds it in nothing that you can explain. Just because you don't understand how something works doesn't mean that there isn't a Supernatural reason why it works."
Umm, evolution is found everywhere we can't explain? Evolution is science. It is a theory meant to explain. Your statement makes no sense.
Not so, but a "fake coin" would have this property, but a real coin can "randomly" create any pattern.
Take 10 identical coins and mark them 1 to 10. Place them in your pocket. Now take one out...there is one chance in 10 that you will get the number 1.
Agreed
Now put it back in your pocket. Pull a coin. The chances that 2 will follow 1 are not 1 in 10 , but 1 in a hundred
I don't understand here, are you trying for a two on a single draw? Or are you now trying for a 1 - 2 draw in sequence. If the latter I agree it will be 1/100 to have this occur. But if you are trying for a 2 (ignoring the first draw) then the odds are one in ten just like they were for drawing a one. The coins have no idea what you drew the time before.
Yeah, everyone once thought for long periods due to deep science that the earth was flat. I just can't imagine how they could be wrong.
Sure, but Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker is right from the flim flam man. It deserves all the approbation it gets.
Confessions of a Trueborn Liberal
By Timothy G. Standish
I'm a liberal. I realize that publicly "outing" myself like this could mean that I will be labeled and marginalized by conservatives, but I can't help it-I was born this way. I'm incapable of leaving the prevailing dogma unquestioned; I'm skeptical of the pronouncements of leaders and, frankly, hope that they are wrong.
Being a true liberal means that I am frustrated by conservatives who masquerade as liberals, I call them pseudo-liberals. These pseudo-liberals give us real liberals a bad name. The problem with pseudo-liberals is that they live in very small ponds. Within the pond, a different orthodoxy may be held than in the big bad ocean. Pseudo-liberals think they are being true liberals when questioning the orthodoxy in the little pond by simply presenting the orthodoxy out in the "ocean." In other words, they are not questioning the real orthodoxy; they are piling on against the unorthodox little pond view. A true liberal honors little-pond views. That does not mean accepting every detail, but it does mean embracing the fact that differing views exist and should be respected as a challenge to any hegemony of the real majority. Pseudo-liberals are simply devious bullies when they cloak themselves in the garment of a minority while fighting to impose the majority view on real minorities.
While proudly wearing the liberal badge, pseudo-liberals may argue enthusiastically, and sometimes incoherently, for trendy ideas in both science and theology. How is this liberal? In the context of science, there is little doubt that evolution is the prevailing orthodoxy. In addition, the minority who question this orthodoxy out in the "ocean" may be subject to withering hyperbole, find their employment and social status threatened and-even worse-they may be labeled as conservatives! It seems strange to hear people calling themselves "liberals" while kowtowing to the majority and attacking free thinking about evolution.
I am a scientist who is open to questioning current scientific dogma; thus I am a true liberal. The same would be true of liberal theologians; they would be willing to question popular ideas in theology: things like the higher critical approach to understanding scripture or the flawed idea of theistic evolution. It is pseudo-liberal theologians who simply embrace these currently popular views and act as if they are introducing new ideas for those of us in the little pond of Seventh-day Adventism to embrace. It is embarrassing to see pseudo-liberal theologians join hands with their close cousins, the pseudo-intellectuals, contorting their theology in an effort to cloak fuzzy thinking in the weighty mantle of modern science. This wholesale surrender of one academic discipline, theology, to another, science, is both humiliating and unwarranted.
The Adventist Church needs more liberals like me and you--if you are willing to join me-- liberals who embrace different ideas because they are better; liberals who reject conservative pseudo-liberal parroting of old ideas trawled from the great big intellectual ocean. Those ideas were long ago evaluated and rejected. Imagine the positive change our church would see if there were more real liberals, people with the intellectual confidence to question prevailing ideas in the fallen world where we live and work. I believe that it will be a fully liberal church that sees the ultimate liberal, Jesus Christ, returning in clouds of glory.
Dr. Timothy Standish is a research scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute.
Would you agree that the explanatory value of evolution has been, on occasion, overstated in an effort to cow believers with science? "Sparky" the self-replicating amino acid is a conjecture that may or may not be a fact, but the complexities that we see in biology, many of which required parallel evolution of system components that make no sense by themselves leave leave some honest, not-too-stupid laymen suspicious about evolution as the ultimate answer. I am not saying the world was created in six 24 hour periods. Nor am I saying that if all the apparent deficiencies in the theory were convincingly resolved in favor of evolution my faith would be crushed. What I am saying is that I am neither convinced nor satisfied by the theory, so I don't feel like drying up and blowing away when someone with a different post-graduate degree than mine shakes the voodoo mask of Science in my direction while making spooky noises.
Like I always tell people when I am preparing them for cross-examination. There's nothing wrong with saying "I don't know" if that's the honest answer.
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