[buffyt]

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.

[nyg4168]

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.

[keithtoo]

Evolution: "An elaborate intellectual edifice built on very few facts"

[AmishDude]

Dr. Standish is associate professor of biology

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.

[Stultis]

Here's a guy pursuing a PhD (and so has, presumably, already been exposed to advanced study in grad school) and he expects to discover the essential truths of his field from a popular science book?!?

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.

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

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.

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.

[RightWingNilla]

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!

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?

[Moral Hazard]

This article is pretty much a joke. This guy complains that nobody has found another planet that's like the Earth, when we currently have no ability to find another planet like the Earth. There are approximately 10^22 candidate solar systems out there, and we can't even check one of them other than our own.

He also seems to be of the opinion that evolutionary biology requires fully functioning complex proteins to form spontaneously. This is a bizzare argument. All that is required in the first "spark" is that you have an amino acid that is capable of self-replication. That is, it bonds with the surrounding material in the "primordial ooze" until it's formed two copies of itself, then splits apart from there. That's the logical starting point of evolution. Once there are trillions of copies you might expect some further mutation.

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.

[El Gato]

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.

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!.

[stylin19a]

...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...

Using the 10 heads in a row analogy stinks. It has to assume that once you flip heads 10 times in a row, it will now always be heads on any flip. Randomness can no longer apply

Rather, try this one on for size.

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.
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.
With each new coin taken out, the risk is multiplied by 10.
So that 10 following 9 is 1 in 10,000,000,000.

Now try that with all the things that are required to make life.

Randomness ? Not a chance.

[Joe Bonforte]

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.

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.

[jonno]

bump

[Jeff Gordon]

Do you plan to turn FR into DU?

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.

[185JHP]

Thanks.

[Fiddlstix]

Bump
To read later

[Ichneumon]

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.

NO!! This misrepresents Dawkins's evolutionary algorithm. Contrary to the author's claim, Dawkins's "weasel" example does *NOT* "lock in" any letter which happens to get "lucky". Instead, a "fitness function" merely grades each attempt on how *many* letters it happens to have right, PERIOD. It's like a game of "warmer, colder". Nonetheless, even without any direct feedback on which letters are correct in which positions, the evolutionary process *still* arrives at the target string in an incredibly short period of time. This models how evolution shapes proteins by merely "grading" (via natural selection) those organisms which are better or worse on a survival basis (imagine nature "saying", warmer, warmer, colder... as individuals vary in a population, where "warmer" means you survive and reproduce more effectively, and "colder" can mean you die early).

For a taste of just how *much* evolution can speed up things over purely random processes, here's an older post of mine:

Or are you one of those who insist that a room full of monkeys with keyboards can write the complete works of Shakespeare?

In theory? Yes they can, if you're willing to wait long enough (where "enough" is an amount of time that boggles the imagination). In practice (by simple random output)? No they can't.

But they can do it pretty quickly and easily if a replication and selection process is involved.

You wanted to see a calculation, so let's do one.

Consider the Shakespeare phrase, "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me." That's 109 characters (including spaces and punctuation). Upper and lower case letters, plus digits and puntuaction, make up a pool of about 70 different characters. This means that the odds of producing the Shakespeare phrase in one random trial is 1 out of 70¹⁰⁹, or 1 in 1,305,227,939,201,292,014, 528,313,176,276,968,928,001, 249,110,077,400,839,115,038, 451,821,150,802,274,449,576, 205,527,736,070,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000.

Needless to say, that's a big number. It's so huge that if every atom in the universe (about 10⁸⁰ of them) were a computer capable of making a billion (1,000,000,000) random trials per second, the expected time required to produce the above line from Shakespeare would be 2,585,011,097,170,911,314,802,759,827,024,569,612,393, 783,728,161,759,843,736,212,615,624,189,581,658,716,078, 309,043,891,309 times the expected lifespan of the universe. That's close enough to "never" in my book.

But that's for *purely* random production process. How much do you think an evolutionary process could cut down that figure? Knock a few zeros off the end, maybe?

Well let's try it. Using an evolutionary process, which couples random variation with replication and selection and *nothing* else, the above Shakespeare phrase can be produced on a *single* computer (mine), using a breeding population of 1024 character strings in a whopping... 15 seconds (using this applet):

Generation: 0
Tries <= 1024
Best Critter: "xSeOSEpc3Lm6rnRWnpFYL?QEDY7a67XlfRoJ0e8Len'X'1u'BhdrNqSNaXr7kVjondNozkf2CH9d96SaI?'f43M.CUGJ5XHbqfeR.UJP'tgNP"
Score (0 is best) 101

Generation: 100
Tries <= 26624
Best Critter: "vf,ioV c3RKlooioifBFQXh, PeHTskof!oJ0e,Lrn'X'1u BhkchESNaXr kVjo dNozpanSI div1Qwi8h taQ,jswMkk,us1S'ugYtmm7."
Score (0 is best) 72

[...]

Generation: 1115
Tries <= 286464
Best Critter: "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me."
Score (0 is best) 0

Checked 286464 critters in 15 seconds == 19097 tries/sec.

Hmm, 15 seconds is a hell of a lot faster than zillions of times the lifespan of the universe, isn't it? Evolution sped things up (compared to a purely random process) by a factor of more than 10¹⁹⁵ -- that's a "1" followed by a hundred and ninety-five zeros, or: 1, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.

Lesson: Even simple evolutionary processes are *incredibly* more efficient and effective than simple randomness alone. Evolution can *easily* accomplish things which would be *impossibly* improbable by purely random means.

[Fester Chugabrew]

"Methinks it is like a weasel."

Who could possibly dream up a description more suited to the philosophy of evolution than millions of monkeys, one of which finally arrives at the truth.

What is missing from the equation is the meaning behind that sequence of letters. Monkeys typing randomly are doing just that, so even if they typed out a whole volume of Shakespeare, unless there were a design in place for interpereting the sequence of letters they are just random letters.

[gidget7]

Maybe Bill Maher shold read this book!