Okay, I was talking with one of my friends about evo/creation and he said something that was very convincing to him was a math problem that said that in order for the initial organism to mutate into a human being, mutations would have to happen every few seconds (or something to that effect).
He didn’t really want to get into it further (work/busy) and has left me wondering what he’s talking about.
I’m 100% positive that it is typical creationist tactic to try to dismiss evolution, but I’d like to know what the entire premise of the argument is, so that I can see what’s wrong with it.
I have not heard this one, but if he posits a 6,000 year old creation, it would certainly take a lot of quick mutations to get a human by the time we had recorded history.
I think he probably means the probability of a human evolving from single cell is near impossible.
I heard the analogy that is it similar to taking all the parts of an airplane apart. Each wire, each piece and then throwing it up in the air. What are the chances of it becoming an airplane? Even if you do it for billions of years… will it become a functioning airplane.
I’ve heard that one to, that’s an argument for design. I think the one I’m referring to is strictly to refute evolution.
I asked him for more details but he didn’t have any, only saying that his brother had brought it up to him. I know his brother very well, I also know that his brother doesn’t “make-up” the creationist propaganda-he recites them verbatim from a source.
Possibly, but my friend leads me to believe there’s more math involved. I don’t know if that’s true, or if he’s just building on a construction of a memory of an argument with his brother.
In any event, FTR I think my friend accepts evolution-which is a recent development (so he still has questions). I’ll figure it out later on this week, it’s just I wanted a head start on a rebuttal.
AFAIK, nobody has calculated (not ‘made up,’ but calculated) the number of differences between a single-celled organism and a human, which would be a number you’d need to come up with the thing your friend said.
You’d also need a good grasp on what percentage of mutations are adaptive.
Anyway, once life covers enough of the globe, you probably do get mutations every few seconds.
I’ve heard something like this before, and IIRC the flaw in the premise is that it uses the biblical timeline, where someone went in and added up all the begats and stuff and came up with the supposed age of Earth.
It’s like 10K years or something, which is, by any argument, way too short a time for almost anything to evolve other than maybe your friendly neighborhood flesh-eating bacteria.
So if that’s what they’re saying, then it just boils back down to: if you believe in evolution, you also believe the world’s been here for millions of years, if you’re a creationist, you think it just spung up recently.
Here’s another thing to consider. Say there’s a mutation that allows an organism to survive better in a very cold environment. If the climate stays warm, perhaps that gene get passed on or perhaps noy, because the environment is not selecting for this trait.
But if the mutation occurs in the first severe winter of an ice age, it’s conceivable there could be a massive die-off of that species, and in a few generation perhaps most representatives of the species will be descended from the single organism.
It’s all a matter of timing.
I have heard this arguement (your friend’s) arguement in general terms too. IMO there is no real math involved, just a “sense of logic” that says the world hasn’t been around long enough for all the mutations necessary to get from an amoeba to a man.
D’you have a specific Mr. Pope in mind? 'Cause the guy with the funny hat in Rome has never condemned Evolutionary science and he and several of his predecessors have mentioned that Evolution and church teachings are not in opposition.
[ / minor hijack ]
I don’t even know how to formulate the question of how many mutations separate us from primordial slime. Let us pretend that the first organism had one chromosome (although it probably had nothing we would call a chromosome) while we have 23 pairs. This is a change that didn’t arise from one or a billion single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) meaning a change in one base pair. There are a lot of other changes involved. There are duplications and to get diploidy and sex there must have been fusion of two cells. Then the mechanisms that allowed crossover and controls to prevent crossing in the wrong place and all sorts of other changes that are not SNPs had to happen. Then all the SNPs, but that seems like the easy part. But 4 billion years is an unimaginably long time.
Isn’t the result of sexual reproduction a “mutation” every time? You end up with a different set of genes than you started with.
By that defination, looking at the average amount of life on earth over just about any time period you’d care to name, you come up with a butt-load of mutations per second. In the millions per second range seems reasonable. Anyone want to do the math.
The argument is hooey, and I remember a Raellian trying it on me, though instead of an airplane he described throwing a million letter tiles in a bag, giving it a good shake, and pulling out a dictionary.
It’s true that you couldn’t re-assemble an airplane out of a million random parts in one shot, but if you started connecting parts together and seeing if they worked, and kept adding parts to your work in progress, you could eventually re-assemble a plane (or at least something) that worked. One-celled lifeforms added complexity slowly over a billion years until the end result was pretty impressive, i.e. human beings.
A) This is surprising to me, but upon further reflection I can’t recall any specific reference either, which leads us to point…
B) I’d love to argue here, but the truth is, when I typed that the first time, in my head, it was “Sorry Jesus, …” but I chickened out and “Mr. Pope” just kinda popped outta my head. I’m a pagan now, but I guess the “don’t mess with Jesus” thing kinda sticks with you. I don’t wanna piss him off, I could be wrong.
I apologize, sincerely.
My SO is the daughter of a Pentacostal Minister. We are constantly arguing Creation vs. Evolution. The funny thing is that she’s getting her BioMed degree and she specializes in DNA and stuff like that, so she oughta be arguing MY side, but…aggghhhh!
I shoulda picked on the Pentacostals. They have pretty good track record on this subject.
Evolution is accepted by Catholic doctrine, infact evolution is accepted by nearly all the large dnominations, (The orthodox churches, the episcopalian church, many other protestant denominations), it is only generally the various churches the US that refuse to accept it, the kind of debate of Creation vs Evolution ended in an absolute victory for evolution in countries like the UK sometime in about 1900-1920 and you’d have to go even further back in time to find anything like the same level as it is today in the US (I just do not know who the last UK prime minster would be stupid enough to say that evolution and creation are still scientifically competing theories like Mr. Bush has said in the past).
But see, evolution’s not about the point mutations that this guy is talking about. Sure, they increase genetic diversity in the population, and they get passed around and spread out, and when conditions change, only the ones who breed successfully (needs good reproductive mechanisms and good behavioural mechanisms to get kids that can breed themselves) matter. If you don’t breed, you don’t count, as far as evolution goes. Because it doesn’t happen to individuals. No single organism evolves. That’s not a concept with any sense. Evolution happens to populations, over time. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it’s drawn out, but it’s not a question of one thing, one lifetime changing everything.
I don’t think you can figure out how many mutations it would take to get to the human genome, because we don’t know what the first genome looked like, the one that was the grandaddy of them all.
I think this claim must be using numbers derived from the number of gentic similarities and differences between species on earth . . . that which is in common with everything probably dates back to the original organism (if you are going to follow the theory, which isn’t necessary if you don’t want to, because it’s a bit specious). Of course, we haven’t done enough work to calculate even that number at all accurately. And I also think it’s using the biblical theory of the history of the Earth, which is a few orders of magnitude shorter than some other peoples.
So, I say, yeah. More creationist fast talking. Not that I’m trying to insult creationist claptrap. It’s quite entertaining, and good mental exercise (can’t let the ol brain get flabby)
Creationists miss an important point: We are here. Therefore, it doesn’t matter how low the probalility of our evolution was. If we hadn’t evolved, we wouldn’t be around to discuss it. So the probalility could have been as low as one over infinity minus one, which I realize is mathematically unsound but serves to illustrate the point.
Creationists assume they are outsiders observing a process, when in fact they are the objects of that process.