Genetic drift doesn’t require any mutations. It can and does occur simply by culling or preferentially propagating existing genes.
Of course recomnbinations of genes are mutations, they are genetic pattern snot seenin either parent. If you are using muation to mean “no novel proetin expression” then the answer to the question is an unambiguous “yes”.
Over time genes will be replicated and jump between chromosomes, happens all the time. However once a gene has jumped in a population things start getting funny. The gene on the “original” chromosome can then be eliminated completely, its function having been taken over by the copy in the new location. As soon as that happens you have lost a degree of compatibility with the original genotype. Any individual resulting from hybridisation will receive only one copy of the gene at least 25% of the time. As more and more genes jump between chromosomes the probability of recieving single gene copies increases until eventually the two groups are totally incompatible.
Note that none of this requires any mutations that produce novel proteins. Exactly the same protens areproduced by excatly the same alleles in exactly the same quantities. The only thing that has changed is where the genes are located. Genes have been rearranged and produced total incompatibility without any true genetic novelty having been rrequired.
However there are several things wrong with your assumptions. In the first place no one claimes that the first life was made of genetic strands millions of attomes long. All that is required is a molecule that can reproduce itself, but not exactly and that the environment selects which of the mutations survive to reproduce themselves.
Second. Atoms do not combine by chance. They follow definite rules that are determined by electrical forces as laid out in chemistry and physics.
And third, ater something has happened its improbability doesn’t imply that it resulted from the action of an intelligent entity. The probability that any automobile accident happend in just the way it did is virtually zero. Yet automobile accidenta happen every day.
Incidentally, if it clarifies for anyone what I was saying, I was using “mutation” to mean “errors” in copying of DNA/RNA; that is, the things which can cause some alleles in a creature to end up non-identical to the corresponding ones in the parent from whom the allele was inherited.
Feynman had a good line regarding this sort of thing:
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”
Or to put it in direct terms to the OP: Which is more unlikely? A bunch of random occurences eventually leading to the creation of life? Or a bunch of random occurences eventually leading to the creation of an intelligent designer who then set out to create life?
As has been pointed out, evolution is not random. But even if it was, so what?
I mean, how many tractor-trailer units full of dice would have to crash in front of you on the freeway before each and every die came up six? Hell, you’d be there all day. But it’s going to happen sooner or later. Surely, out of millions of galaxies, each hosting millions of stars, you’d get that magic combo somewhere, sometime.
And so, what might that look like? Well, look around you. It would look a lot like this, wouldn’t you say? Silly blobs of carbon-based chemistry firing ones and zeros at each other down copper lines.
And what of the other countless combos that failed to form life? Oh, they’re out there too, doing Sweet F*** All.
But I have to ask, are you one of those people who wonders why street lamps only burn out when you pass by? See what I’m getting at there?
Anyway, let me throw a Carl Sagan quote at you. Or two. You see, this guy’s signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely through the roof, and I never pass up on an opportunity to share. It’s the little things.
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” -CS (Nice one, CS. Fearless.)
“If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?” -CS (Also very good. Humility is beautiful)
“Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?” -CS (Nothin’ but net!!)
So, you know, take from them what you can. Personally, I like to swirl them in my head, not unlike one does with a fine wine in the mouth. To do so takes me back to those heady, Nintendo-less days in kindergarten when Miss Whatever said, “One plus one equals two. Get it??” and we said, “Yes!!”
Hell, I wasn’t even there a single time when CS expelled air from his lungs so as to vibrate his vocal chords, so I don’t really know if he uttered those words at all. Regardless, they stand true on their own, through the virtue of logic.
Hey! Wait a minute! LOGIC. My favorite! Its what’s for dinner.
You might be jumping to unreasonable conclusions if you did that - I submit for your consideration, Chesil Beach.
It’s a straight formation of shingle, 18 miles long, 200 metres wide and 18 metres high. The stones on the beach are sorted by size - starting with pea shingle at the north-western end - graded all the way along to large cobbles at the south-eastern end. It is a natural formation - the rocks got this way without any intelligent direction.
How about if he has no beard? No form? That he is just pure energy, will and intention? That brings us down to one, right?
What if he willed the unverse into existence and what he created was the big bang? And then he never intervened? The we’d have a world that operates just as science predicts, with the exception of the cause that caused the prime mover. Theists (sans any religion) believe that this extra-natural “thing” to be God, i.e., something able to operate outside the laws of the universe. That is an explanation. One based on logic. That doesn’t make it necessarily correct, simply a reasonable explanation.
What is the non-theistic theory of how our universe came into being? I’m talking pre-Big Bang, as the BB seeks to explain only what transpired after the event began.
I believe that given that something from nothing don’t work, there never was a time before the Big Bang. Everything always existed. Nothing was ever created. There just was never nothing.
Does there have to be one? As I understand it, the theory is that what happened before the Big Bang is unknowable, in the same way as other things outside our universe are unknowable. Because we cannot get evidence of what happened/happens outside our piece of space-time, you can have all the theories you like, but you can’t test them.
I often find it strange that the folks who claim order can’t arise undirected (in the context of the creation/evolution debate), are the very same folks who want us to accept that the order abundantly observable in the fossil record is the result of hydrologic sorting during a single (chaotic) global flood event.
No, that still leaves us with the immense complexity that “will and intention” imply. And the laws that govern the energy you say he’s made of. And it doesn’t explain where he comes from. And it explains nothing.
No, like religious beliefs always are, it’s stupid and useless. There’s no evidence for any such thing, nor any reason to believe it. It’s simply yet another version of the God of the Gaps. It predicts nothing, it explains nothing, it’s just another desperate attempt to give God the credit.
I asked this question on another board, but I’ll ask it again here:
What is ID? - What methodologies does it propose? How does it work and why?
I can tell you what I learned in my first few science classes - it included the scientific method, empiricism, documenting experiments. What would I learn in my first few ID classes?
I ask, because in all of my discussions with supporters of ID, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a straight, definitive answer on what ID actually is, what it does, how it works, and how we’d know if it works - all that ever seems to happen is that someone asks a question like “isn’t it just like a God-of-the-gaps argument?”, or “doesn’t it require us to assume the existence of unnecessary entities?”, and the answer comes back “Oh no, ID isn’t like that/doesn’t do that/doesn’t state that/doesn’t work like that”.
OK, so I know lots about what it isn’t. But what IS it?