Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

In Six Days (A Biology PHD looks at Evolution)
In Six Days ^ | 02/17/05 | Timothy G. Standish, PHD biology

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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).


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: bible; blindwatchmaker; bookexcerpt; charlesdarwin; commondescent; creation; creationism; crevo; crevolist; darwin; dawkins; design; evolution; gmu; humanorigins; insixdays; intelligentdesign; origins; richarddawkins; sitchin; treeoflife; uva
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 81-100101-120121-140 ... 281-294 next last
To: DannyTN
"all carbon 14 should deplete by 90,000 years"

The half-life of Carbon 14 is 5,730 years. In 90,000 years it should deplete by to .0019 % of it's original amount. Why would that be the same as disappearing?
101 posted on 02/17/2005 9:10:46 PM PST by Moral Hazard (Sod off, Swampy)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 72 | View Replies]

To: SalukiLawyer

What about scientists who might be seeking Christ and because of the literalist apostasy turn away from religion because they think it is full of ignorant loonies?


102 posted on 02/17/2005 9:11:30 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 97 | View Replies]

To: Havoc

LOL! For starters I was a Navy linguist in Hebrew. I have six years of seminary under my belt and an Ulpan besides.
I have been working on understanding the real meaning of Genesis for over 15 years.


103 posted on 02/17/2005 9:13:35 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 100 | View Replies]

To: Moral Hazard

Carbon dating is only useful to a maximum of 50,000 years.

There are about 40 different methods of dating including K-Ar etc. These can date much older samples.

Synchronous dating is pretty foolproof and all doubts about old Earth should be discarded, if reason was involved in this issue.


104 posted on 02/17/2005 9:16:22 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 101 | View Replies]

To: shubi
If you think macroevolution is any different than the process of microevolution, you are a creationist.

There is no evidence for macroevolution, so to get people to believe it the scientists say it is the same process as microevolution. It is the classic bait and switch, and really not becoming of the scientific community, since they should deal in facts. But the evolutionary sciences have been taken over by rabid atheists who push this on us.

If macroevolution is so based in fact, why did Gould have to come up with punctuated equilibrium in the 70s to try to save it?

I believe we werer created but I do not believe in studying it as a science. Science is a tool, good for some things, bad for others. It is bad at explaining the origin of the universe and the origin of life. Those theories may be useful for scientists but really involve much more speculation than theories that can be scientifically tested.

For example, the concept that since we have similar bone structures to earlier living things that we have a common ancestor is an inference. It is either true or false as an inference independent of the evidence. Since there are many possible explanations for these similarities besides the concept of common descent, I find the inference highly speculative; it certainly cannot be logically proven.
105 posted on 02/17/2005 9:17:09 PM PST by microgood (Washington State: Ukraine without the poison)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 89 | View Replies]

To: DannyTN
"There's a theory I have about God and time. God interacts with time differently than we do. This must be true for Him to be able to tell us the future, and yet we have free will. But If He can tell us now about the future because He's been there, then He can also go into the past from here and change things. It's possible that He created the Earth when there were no stars, go to day 4 of the Creation week and created the stars, but created them at a point in time, far enough back to have the light arrive at Day 4. This wouldn't be deceptive. It would just be a demonstration of His power, that we arrogantly took to mean He had lied, because we didn't understand the scope of His power."

This seems like a bizarre approach to bend science to equate with your religious belief. Two huge problems with this are that:

1)Free will and predeterminism are mutually exclusive. If you can know what state a system will be at any point in time it is by definition a deterministic system.

2)According to the laws of Quantum mechanics, the spin of a particle (to give one example) cannot be known before it is measured, not even by God. Therefore it is impossible for anyone, even God, to know the future.
106 posted on 02/17/2005 9:17:12 PM PST by Moral Hazard (Sod off, Swampy)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 72 | View Replies]

To: DannyTN
Bump
To read later
107 posted on 02/17/2005 9:20:06 PM PST by Fiddlstix (This Tagline for sale. (Presented by TagLines R US))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: shubi

The Navy has Hebrew linguists? What, are we spying on our Israeli allies? LOL (I was an Arabic Linguist 98 Golf 20 years too soon, but I am proud that not a single Arab terrorist harmed the vicinity of Clarkesville TN when I was in the Army in the 70s.)


108 posted on 02/17/2005 9:28:27 PM PST by SalukiLawyer (12" Powerbook, Airport, surfing FR anywhere I want to)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 103 | View Replies]

To: All

And then there's Zecharia Sitchin claiming the answer to the "missing link" is in the Genesis story.

http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc142.htm


109 posted on 02/17/2005 9:29:37 PM PST by 1 spark (see my links)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 107 | View Replies]

To: microgood

"There is no evidence for macroevolution"

I don't think you understand what the definition of macroevolution is. Many have been deceived by the charlatans at ICR or AIG.

Here is the conclusion of an article on the subject:

There is no difference between micro- and macroevolution except that genes between species usually diverge, while genes within species usually combine. The same processes that cause within-species evolution are responsible for above-species evolution, except that the processes that cause speciation include things that cannot happen to lesser groups, such as the evolution of different sexual apparatus (because, by definition, once organisms cannot interbreed, they are different species).

The idea that the origin of higher taxa, such as genera (canines versus felines, for example), requires something special is based on the misunderstanding of the way in which new phyla (lineages) arise. The two species that are the origin of canines and felines probably differed very little from their common ancestral species and each other. But once they were reproductively isolated from each other, they evolved more and more differences that they shared but the other lineages didn't. This is true of all lineages back to the first eukaryotic (nuclear) cell. Even the changes in the Cambrian explosion are of this kind, although some (eg, Gould 1989) think that the genomes (gene structures) of these early animals were not as tightly regulated as modern animals, and therefore had more freedom to change.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html

Here is another article on 29 evidences for macroevolution.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/


110 posted on 02/17/2005 9:30:57 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 105 | View Replies]

To: buffyt

the hebrew word for day also is the same word for Period of time.


111 posted on 02/17/2005 9:36:16 PM PST by Walkingfeather (q)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: SalukiLawyer

I could tell you what we were doing, but then I would have to kill you. :-) Just kidding!

Remember the spy ship Liberty? I was going to be a replacement for one of the sailors the Israelis killed.


112 posted on 02/17/2005 9:42:45 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 108 | View Replies]

To: buffyt
I don't believe in Evolution at all, I only believe in Creation.

Why can't you believe in both? I fail to see a contradiction.

113 posted on 02/17/2005 9:45:30 PM PST by montag813
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: shubi
What about scientists who might be seeking Christ and because of the literalist apostasy turn away from religion because they think it is full of ignorant loonies?

What, and they couldn't figure out how to become Episcopalians :-) Well, that's all for me. Good night, and happy evolving!
114 posted on 02/17/2005 9:49:03 PM PST by SalukiLawyer (12" Powerbook, Airport, surfing FR anywhere I want to)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 102 | View Replies]

To: shubi
I don't think you understand what the definition of macroevolution is. Many have been deceived by the charlatans at ICR or AIG.

I have been all over talkorigins.org. It treats evolution as a religion. The section on transitional species convinced me even more that there is no macroevolution and I have read all 29 of the supposed evidences of macroevolution.

But for me macroevolution goes all the way back. If it cannot show how we got from a single cell to a human being, I will not believe it can go from an ape or as of this week a platypus to a human.

To go from a single cell to a creature with arms and legs and a brain and even over 100 trillion years by random mutation is simply not believable. And of course many evolutionists back away from that and just do the ape to human stuff, but it still does not answer the basic question of why if we came from a single cell, and there are not creatures turning into different species with partially formed arms or legs (since such a complex thing cannot occur in one mutation).

Thus the latest inference is punctuated equilibrium and here we are.
115 posted on 02/17/2005 9:49:18 PM PST by microgood (Washington State: Ukraine without the poison)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 110 | View Replies]

To: microgood

OK, for only $19.95 you can get one of my aluminum hats.

My conclusion is you are closed to rational analysis of this subject, but it is just a theory.


116 posted on 02/17/2005 10:02:53 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 115 | View Replies]

To: shubi
.My conclusion is you are closed to rational analysis of this subject, but it is just a theory.

Not at all. Its my philosophy degree. Too much symbolic logic, I guess. Anyway, I do admire and thank you for your service as a Navy linguist.
117 posted on 02/17/2005 10:13:19 PM PST by microgood (Washington State: Ukraine without the poison)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 116 | View Replies]

To: antihannityguy
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...

If dinosaures and humans co-existed cave paintings made by early man would show them hunting T-Rex and Diplodicus as well as mammoth and bison.

The word dinosaur was coined in the 1800's to describe the ancient and gigantic bones that were being unearthed. Before the 1800 many great dinosaur fossils were found and destroyed by people who picked them up and didn't know what they were. Just because something didn't have a name didn't mean it did not exist. The term automobile didn't exist until they actually had to name it.

118 posted on 02/17/2005 11:26:54 PM PST by scottywr (The Dims new strategy..."If we lose enough elections, we'll get the sympathy vote.")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 25 | View Replies]

To: buffyt
In other words what would the Creator consider a day? Would a day to the Creator be like an epoch to us? If so then the order of creation in Genesis would mirror science fairly well. Dwelling on the 24 hour day is the anti-creationists hobbyhorse.
119 posted on 02/18/2005 12:11:11 AM PST by fella
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: fella

"Dwelling on the 24 hour day is the anti-creationists hobbyhorse."

The 24 hr day nonsense is just an example of the empty argument the creationists pose. They try to replace a misinterpretation of the Bible in science classes, harming our kids and our country.

It is a big scam to hide behind psuedo scientific nonsense to get their brand of religion into the schools. The fact is, their brand of religion is less well reasoned than their science, which makes their religion negative on the scale of factual information.


120 posted on 02/18/2005 5:00:16 AM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 119 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 81-100101-120121-140 ... 281-294 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson