# Do most mathematicians really think evolution is impossible? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 16, 2013, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033 "2013-11-16T02:26:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 8:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/21 "2013-11-16T08:18:53Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > **John Mace** , you sound as if Behe is a completely unreliable source. I don’t know who he is, so if you could take a moment and enlighten me I’d appreciate it. Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, as your source said. The author of that piece is a mathematician, I suppose. Behe claims that some structures can’t be explained by evolution - but he also admits that many structures can be. In fact he has publish OpEds in the NY Times stating clearly that he accepts evolution in general, but thinks that there are a few places where a designer must have been involved. Evolutionary mechanisms have been suggested for all the stuff he has come up with, but you clearly can’t prove that no such structure exists. When talking to creationist audiences I think he sings a different tune. He gets a lot more fame and money selling out than he would in the career he has been trained for. I have a PhD in computer science, and know lots of mathematicians, some famous, and know of none who are creationists. I’m sure there are some dumb programmers out there who are. BTW I wrote a humorous column in a computer design magazine about God using CAD tools to design life with the devil cast as a software salesman, If there were any creationists in the audience they kept quiet. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 8:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/22 "2013-11-16T08:50:07Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > Though my friends concede that Nagel isn’t a mathematician, they claim he represents mathematicians’ thinking on the matter. And my friends aren’t the only creationists making this claim about mathetmaticians. [Here](http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/mathint.html) a mathematician also makes the claim that evolution is mathematically impossible. Is it true that most mathematicians think this? Or is it true that a significant portion of them think this? Sewell is an ass. Notice that his references are quite old. 1. “Gaps” in the fossil record and sudden change. Fossils are very rare, since the conditions which form them are quite rare. However we keep finding them and filling in the gaps. Long after the referenced article Gould came up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium. I’m not doing it justice, but species are relatively stable if their environment is stable, but change will happen when there are new selective pressures. What he is doing is like someone quoting an elderly scientist who claimed that travel to the moon is impossible in a 1950s article - and never bothering to mention Apollo. 2. His discussion of computer programs is particularly ignorant since we have developed genetic algorithms which basically design programs in exactly the way he claims is impossible. The first of these was done at IBM in 1959, by the way. They work by mutating a program several ways, and then pruning the variants based on how close they are to the desired goal - just like natural selection. They take a lot longer than a designed program - just like it took a long time to get to where we are now - and they have some odd structures (but so do we.) The ability of people to design does not preclude evolution - in fact Darwin was inspired by observing the directed breeding of plants and animals. Nature only selects for survival of course, (actually reproductive advantage) but the idea is the same. 3. Of course he is lying about the Second Law. It does not say improbable things do not occur. Somehow he got forced to admit where the energy for change comes from (and the sun gets less organized as it gives off energy) and then gets incoherent. If he claims that simple things don’t get more complex I can only guess that he does not have a garden, where complex (and quite large) vegetables arise from very simple seeds. As far as improbability goes, here is the analogy I use. Imagine a lock with 1,000 stages of 10 digits each. To unlock the lock you must select each correct digit in turn. There are 10\*\*1000 possible combinations - so the lock is totally impossible to open without the designer giving you the right sequence. But I forgot to mention something. At each stage, if you turn the dial to the right number you get an audible click. Now at most you have to try 10,000 numbers, very possible. The audible click represents the fact that we don’t go directly from molecules to man, but pause at each stage with a reproductively successful species. It is actually better since the lock has a goal, and evolution does not, so it is more like if there are thousands of combinations which will unlock the lock. So there is no mathematical reason to reject evolution. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/23 "2013-11-16T09:56:36Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > Some creationist friends of mine are making the argument that modern biologists are blinded by bias and that they should should listen to mathematicians, a group which my creationist friends assume to be overwhelmingly skeptical about the odds of evolution’s having occured. I’m not a professional mathematician, but their argument is utter drivel. You want to look at the Drake equation. And **Voyager** ’s lock analogy is very good. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/24 "2013-11-16T10:01:09Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > No. I agree. As just one counterexample to the notion that useful organs spring from nothing, consider gills and lungs. Ancient gills adapted in fish to supplement oxygen intake; the lungs were then redundant but useful as swim bladders. Land creatures didn’t need to supplement lungs; their gills developed into other cranial structures. Another fact that might help to convince is that several seemingly different vegatables – cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, etc. – all developed from a single species due to human cultivation. If man can do that in a few centuries, imagine what “Mother Nature” can do with many millions of generations. There may be many serendipities that contributed to the origin of life. Water has various unique properties that make it ideal for life; recently a Doper mentioned another: without the peculiar property that water gets less dense when it freezes, the Earth might not have liquid oceans. And long-lived stars might not even exist without precise values of physical constants. Tides induced by a massive Moon may have contributed to the development of land life. Et cetera. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 10:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/25 "2013-11-16T10:17:18Z")
Besides, odds don’t always say that much. These bear repeating; > [@](#): > > The calculation of odds ignores the fact that innumerable trials would have been occurring simultaneously. > [@](#): > > Morris… calculated the odds that a random assembly of nucleic acids would produce…the DNA of a specific retinal cell in the left eye of a specific giraffe that lived 1700 years ago. No other possible cell; just that one. What are the odds of winning a couple of million in the lottery? The odds of me winning that are a “_scary number_” to 1. Yet, aren’t there people all over the world winning lotteries? There must have been hundreds of winners over the past few decades. Another one; I hold a deck of cards and ask you to draw one. You draw the 3 of clubs. My God! the _3 of clubs_! what are the odds that you would draw the 3 of clubs specifically? Who cares what the odds were? That is the card you drew, it happened. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/26 "2013-11-16T13:07:06Z")
The typical creationist mathematics argument looks at the odds of forming this exact state of the universe. Those odds are astronomical. They also have nothing to do with nature, which wanders around aimlessly with no defined end state. The second approach is to argue that any end state with organization is mathematically unlikely. If nature is aimless and tends toward increasing entropy, we should see no organization anywhere. I am not a physicist, but it seems to me this assumes total entropy of the universe demands smooth disorganization for every subcomponent, which is clearly incorrect. Finally, a mathematician who argues that “mathematics” disproves evolution has a problem with the rocks, which say otherwise. So unless he is a pretty dull mathematician, it seems to me he should conclude his math is wrong. If I mathematically prove something which is verifiable by direct observation, all I have done is show my grasp of math to be insufficient. In general, the creationist approach is to take something they want to be true and distort science enough to make arguments persuasive to others also desperately hoping nature is not what it appears to be. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/27 "2013-11-16T13:15:51Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Denying evolution at this point is very much like denying gravity; there’s that much evidence for it. The theory of evolution is far stronger, has more evidence, and is much better understood than gravity. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/28 "2013-11-16T13:36:42Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > The theory of evolution is far stronger, has more evidence, and is much better understood than gravity. I agree that evolution is far better understood than gravity. As for quantity of evidence, what is the unit of measure for evidence? And how do you measure the number of units? By that measure, how many units do evolution and gravity have respectively? As can be guessed from the last sentence, I’ve never understood why bringing up gravity is supposed to help prove the theory of evolution. Having said that, the answer to the thread question is obviously: No. It is so obviously no that I am a bit flummoxed on how you prove that. Suppose you tried to test it by, say, sending a survey to every math prof taken from the catalog of 100 randomly chosen colleges and university. The professors would think the survey was a joke and throw it out. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 1:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/29 "2013-11-16T13:54:05Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > As for quantity of evidence, what is the unit of measure for evidence? And how do you measure the number of units? By that measure, how many units do evolution and gravity have respectively? Perhaps a more accurate statement would be that gravity fails to explain some rather important observations - hence dark matter and dark energy - while there is not a single observation, fact, or experimental result that is inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Less pithy, though. ---
**Author:** ![Farin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e79b87/32.png) [@Farin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Farin)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/30 "2013-11-16T15:10:16Z")
Just because the circumstances are rare (or statistically improbable) doesn’t provide evidence for or against a God or gods having a place in the cosmos to make it happen. All it says is that the circumstances that made it happen are rare. Set a basketball on flat ground underneath a basketball net. What are the odds of it being bounced into the net without intentional biological interaction? Statistically improbable on any kind of human time scale. But not impossible. Our entire race may not exist when it happens, but it can still happen. ---
**Author:** ![simster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/simster/32/1047_2.png) [@simster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/simster)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/31 "2013-11-16T15:17:05Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > **simster** , you said: > > But from a creationist’s standpoint aren’t we begging the question to assume the truth of evolution as grounds for dismissing the creationist’s “odds” of its not having happened? No - as others have said - ‘evolution’ has nothing to do with ‘origin’ itself, and regardless of the ‘odds against’ it (life forming as it did) - it did, in fact, happen. The reality is the odds are manufactured - they have no real data from which to form those odds, they do not know how many times it failed or what actual set of events had to happen for it to happen, therefore it is simply a ‘shell game’ to try and validate their belief in a ‘god/creator’. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/32 "2013-11-16T15:22:03Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > The typical creationist mathematics argument looks at the odds of forming this exact state of the universe. Those odds are astronomical. I see what you did there. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/33 "2013-11-16T15:31:46Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > **John Mace** , you sound as if Behe is a completely unreliable source. I don’t know who he is, so if you could take a moment and enlighten me I’d appreciate it. To expound on what others have said, Behe is the originator of the over-used term, “irreducible complexity.” His thesis is that if any biological structure is found that could not have developed gradually, or assembled from other, already-existing parts, it must have been made by God, and this throws out the entire theory of evolution. It was pointed out in the \*Dover \*trial that his star example, the _bacterial flagellum,_ was _not_ an irreducibly complex structure, but likely to have been formed from similar structures with other uses and there has been much research confirming that concept. It hasn’t stopped the ID crowd from repeating this nonsense. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/34 "2013-11-16T15:33:28Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > ETA: And he was a lousy SF author. But so was Carl Sagan. Sagan may write lousy SF, but he sings a [hell of a catchy tune](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc). ---
**Author:** ![Dostoyevsky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b5a626/32.png) [@Dostoyevsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dostoyevsky)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/35 "2013-11-16T16:12:32Z")
Thanks for fighting my ignorance. BTW, is there a “talking points” page for responding to creationists’ mathematical arguments that’s written in layman’s terms? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/36 "2013-11-16T16:14:09Z")
[Talk.Origins](http://talkorigins.org) ---
**Author:** ![magellan01](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@magellan01](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magellan01)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/37 "2013-11-16T16:28:55Z")
> [@Dostoyevsky](#): > > But from a creationist’s standpoint aren’t we begging the question to assume the truth of evolution as grounds for dismissing the creationist’s “odds” of its not having happened? Even assuming the math is correct and us being here is near an “impossibility”, since we are here, that merely argues against the likelihood of it happening more than once. No? ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/38 "2013-11-16T16:38:36Z")
By far the great majority of believers I know have no doubt about evolution. They feel as I do that it is the only real way God could have started life on a planet. It simply has to be able to evolve. I feel that what we refer to as the spirit world is actually just another demension that we are incapable of comprehending our physical laws do not apply. This would not neccessarily prevent the other demension from being able to comprehend ours or for that matter create it. A scientist would have to say this is rediculous because he specializes in known physical laws, for all intenets and purposes nothing else could exist. ``` On a purely mathematical theory thats only required the building blocks of life to come together by chance, recognizing that any self replicating life form would have a mutation rate that varied greatly and did not require anything more than a planet to evolve sufficent life forms to be able to sustain one another and be capable of evolving within a gradual but ever changing enviroment. And then you stop to consider the astronomical number of living orgaisms that are mutating every second, only a small number of those mutations we need to become viable for a steady and more diverse proresssion of life. With the time element involved and the degree to which life has evolved it looks like a pretty close call as to wether or not it was created or just evolved. It is almost too easy for me to accept either one. I tend to battle with my faith but intuitively feel very strongly toward a superior being. ``` ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/39 "2013-11-16T16:50:48Z")
> [@andros](#): > > But the simple fact of the matter is that maths are about numbers, not cosmology or biology or any single aspect of evolutionary science. I have as much interest in what a mathematician says about the “probability” of evolution as I do what my cat has to say. It’s all just “meow meow meow.” I am reminded of the (notoriously apocryphal) story about the engineer doing some quick napkin math and concluding that by his calculations, bumblebees cannot fly. Which is absolutely correct BTW, or would be if the process by which bumblebees fly was the same as that of birds or aeroplanes. Of course, had the engineer known more about biology in general, and bumblebees in particular, he might not have jotted down the same equation, his math would have yielded a different result and he might have gone “yep, OK, bumblebees fly. Pie for dessert, gents ?”. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2013, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033/40 "2013-11-16T17:01:00Z")
> [@Kobal2](#): > > I am reminded of the (notoriously apocryphal) story about the engineer doing some quick napkin math and concluding that by his calculations, bumblebees cannot fly. Which is absolutely correct BTW, or would be if the process by which bumblebees fly was the same as that of birds or aeroplanes. > Of course, had the engineer known more about biology in general, and bumblebees in particular, he might not have jotted down the same equation, his math would have yielded a different result and he might have gone “yep, OK, bumblebees fly. Pie for dessert, gents ?”. Exactly, I see examples of that all the time. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-most-mathematicians-really-think-evolution-is-impossible/674033.md?page=3)