One wealthy rodent…
During my recent sojourn in Disney World, I began thinking about really big numbers as I tried to calculate the total value of that enterprise as a whole.
I knew the Magic Kingdom theme park was built in the early 1970s, at the cost of roughly $331 million dollars.
More than two decades later, Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park was added at the cost of a cool $1 billion.
Epcot cost about $1.4 billion to construct, more than twice its estimated budget.
Golf courses, hotels, shopping malls, Hollywood studios, infrastructure: it was pretty easy to estimate the net worth of the forty-seven square mile intelligently designed world of alternate reality would run into the hundreds of billions, perhaps as much as $1 trillion dollars.
Mickey Mouse is worth a considerable amount of money.
We’re talking about some really big numbers.
Given the fact that advocates of evolution seem to frequently argue that I fail to grasp the significance of a really big number, as I rode around on the monorail and pondered the value of Walt Disney World, the idea for writing this article popped into my head while I watched a river of cash flow through the Magic Kingdom.
If only that were the case…I almost wish that I couldn’t grasp the concept of a really big number.
After all, ignorance can be bliss. The sad truth is that I’m constantly worried about big numbers.
I’m painfully aware that the amount of outstanding federal debt for the United States is currently well over $16 trillion dollars. Granted, it is more money than I’ve ever seen, but the numbers do follow a logical progression from thousands to millions, billions and trillions.
Just because I don’t have it doesn’t mean I can’t imagine it.
Of course, the big numbers of evolution don’t involve money, but time. We aren’t talking about millions and billions of dollars, but years.
Blog reader Andrey Pavlov recently speculated that big numbers were causing me problems accepting evolution theory when he commented, [all emphasis original]
Yes, a finch growing a larger beak over the course of a few hundred years may seem trivial, but give those very same processes MILLIONS and BILLIONS of years and the effects can – and are – truly astronomical and amazing. The Cambrian explosion is not a “mystery” to evolutionary biologists in the sense that deniers would wish it were. It is a mystery because we find a spurt of speciation indicating to us that a novel fitness peak was reached which allowed for the spurt and must have spread far and wide. What exactly that fitness peak was is a “mystery” which solving would give us further insight into life; was it a new protein fold? a new protein motif? a new way of handling superoxides produced in oxidative phosphorylation? an environmental change? all of these? Deniers like to frame it as a “sudden” event, an “explosion” such that natural processes could not account for it – it was much to “quick” ergo goddidit. But something on the order of 70-80 MILLION years is sudden only from a geological sense – not from any other reasonable sense. With a new fitness peak in play that is indeed ample time for significant speciation to occur and hardly “sudden” in the sense used by deniers of evolution.
The intuitive sense of how big is “big” and how big something can get (or how old something is) tends to be VERY misleading. Dr. Sam Harris made an excellent point where he asked a simple question: If you take a piece of A4 paper and fold it in half, and then fold the halves successively 25 times, how thick would the subsequent piece of paper be? (In other words, 25 successive doublings of the thickness). For my example, I’ll assume very thin paper of only 0.1mm in thickness.
Have the answer you think is right? How much would you like to bet you are in the right ballpark? Or even the right order of magnitude?
If you guessed “More than 100,000 LIGHTYEARS thick” then your intuition may be better than I gave you credit for. Yes, in doing the math you find that 0.1mm folded in half 25 times (0.1mm*10^25) is, in fact, 105,702.341 light years thick.
But I digress.
To expound on something you wrote on Mr. Leblanc about development which I believe is also missed by many naysayers of evolutionary theory. PZ Myers said it well that genes are not a BLUEPRINT for an animal but a RECIPE. What does this mean? I can give you a blueprint for an angel food cake and you can reproduce it. I can give you another for a pound cake and you could reproduce that. Or a souffle. But if you asked the ingredients – the “genes” of the cake, if you will – you find they are nearly the same – flour, sugar, butter, water, eggs, etc. Yet vastly different “forms” arise because you use the ingredients in different proportions, mix them differently, and bake them differently. Throwing in minor changes (berries or chocolate) can also yield significantly different outcomes.
And THAT is what speciation is and discovering that is yet more evidence to support evolution rather than design.
Lastly, I’ll expound that reproductive isolation not only needn’t arise from geographical isolation or from changes in the environment, but can arise because of an already existing environmental niche that simply hasn’t been exploited yet. Land being a prime and primary example. It is almost certain life arose in the seas – the land was always there. It didn’t suddenly appear and nor did the seas suddenly disappear in order to drive selection pressure for land animals. It was merely that life became sufficiently capable to be able to expand to land and resources and competition sufficiently scarce in the sea that a new niche was taken advantage of. And once that began – slowly at first, with cautious and temporary forays onto land – a whole new environment of niches arose to be exploited.
Okay…if I may, in the immortal words of Samuel L. Jackson, “Well, allow me to retort.”
Unfortunately, you mention the use of misleading language, and then proceed to describe the width of paper in terms of light years, bizarrely asserting that the speed of light would be an intuitive and translatable standard measurement preferable to millimeters or fractions of an inch, a unit of measurement that almost everyone should easily comprehend.
That argument, I freely admit, I didn’t get.
You might get away with calling light years a “clever” but nebulous metric, certainly not intuitive as the means by which to measure the width of a piece of paper.
In fact, the exercise began by stipulating the width of unfolded paper as .01 millimeters thick.
On the other hand, I’m fairly sure that I do understand the concept of a light year.as well as the use of very large and quite small numbers, in proper context of my Big Picture.
For example, I do understand the interpretation of the scientific evidence used to make such a claim, similar to what Dr. Coyne wrote in Why Evolution is True when he suggested a new species could emerge only once every 200 million years, and modern life would exist.
If the fossil record indicated that complex life was present on earth billions of years ago, that claim might be true.
However, very few multi-cellular organisms existed prior to the Cambrian Explosion, which occurred 530 million years ago, not “billions” as suggested.
Whether intentional or not, Dr. Coyne has obviously created a false impression. If speciation truly occurs, it must happen within the span of few million years at most.
That’s still more time than humans can live to observe so, according to the definition by Karl Popper, speciation theory cannot be falsified. That would seem to demote the theory the status of a philosophy, unless we “cheat” and classify diversification within the genome of an existing species as the creation of a new species.
Regrettably, Mr. Pavlov, you apparently don’t have the time that you think you do.
If the scientific evidence can be trusted, speciation has really only been taking place since the Cambrian Explosion. Before that remarkable event, LUCA mostly remained a single-celled organism that simply replicated.
I don’t try to deny or diminish any of the evidence, Mr. Pavlov. I only try to make sense of it and understand what it might mean.
I do believe that the Cambrian Explosion is significant–not because I say so, but because the experts in their field do. In Counterargument for God, you won’t find any shortage of quotes from experts in their respective fields.
If the paleontologists are correct in their consensus, every major phyla that has ever existed in the history of the earth appeared within a relatively brief 15 million year time span during the Cambrian Explosion.
While consensus does not make good science, it is useful to frame the argument and gauge the potential strength of the counterargument. That’s an incredibly condensed span of geologic time, especially in context of the Big Scheme of Things.
The first creatures formed according to those body plans may have come and gone, but the basic body plans remain the same, 500 million years later.
To be perfectly clear: my counterargument is not that evolution is utterly impossible, but to say that application of the theory proves remarkably improbable compared to the only real alternative. Either a series of highly unlikely occurrences all happened due to serendipitous good fortune, or supernatural intelligence served as the catalyst.
The amount of time available for evolution’s diversity becomes compressed by multiple mass extinctions. If the paleontologists can be trusted, over ninety percent of the existing terrestrial animal population was decimated by the Permian extinction event that occurred only 250 million years ago.
If almost every modern species evolved since the last extinction, every living organism we can observe emerged within the last 65 million years.
Dinosaurs allegedly came and went in the span of 150 million years, either becoming extinct or they allegedly shape-shifted into completely different organisms. Yet horseshoe crabs have remained the same since the Permian Extinction. There is no rhyme or reason to the rate of evolutionary change.
The reason Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge proposed punctuated equilibrium theory is that the impression created by neo-Darwinist beliefs simply doesn’t match the fossil record. In short, you don’t have nearly the time you think. If evolution is really true, it most likely occurs as a jerky, episodic event as opposed to a smooth and gradual process.
Goldschmidt didn’t propose his hopeful monster hypothesis because he didn’t like Darwin. He was forced to accommodate the scientific evidence he saw in the fossil record.
However, I would never argue that evolution, or change, is impossible.
Instead, my counterargument is that DNA manipulation by some form of supernatural intelligence is much more plausible than undirected good luck. As I make clear in Counterargument for God, even if you believe natural selection has nothing to do with luck, the Big Bang and abiogenesis cannot be described without liberal use of the word.
My concern is that you don’t have a true appreciation for the significance with the really small numbers associated with the probability involved with our existential questions. I’m talking about the statistical probability that evolution really is true.
This value is created by compounding the probability of each scientific theory necessary to see the Big Picture. Please allow me to explain.
Physicist Sir Martin Rees once calculated the statistical probability of our universe coming into existence as something along the lines of 1 in 10 to the 300th power.
When he was alive, Douglas Adams might have said that such a number was so small it was mind-boggling.
In other words, the probability that the Big Bang was the result of fortuitous accident, yet produced our fine-tuned universe, is astronomically low.
Because evolution requires the Big Bang to occur, the probability that speciation occurs without the assistance of supernatural intelligence can be no greater than the probability of a Big Bang that accidentally produced a universe allegedly “just right for life,” at least here on Earth.
In other words, the probability of the Big Bang and speciation may as well be the same, though arguably the probability of speciation is even lower because the improbabilities of the Big Bang and abiogenesis compound.
Technically, the relative probability of speciation without supernatural intelligence is adversely affected by the improbabilities associated with the origin of the universe and the origin of life. However, after the Big Bang, the improbability of random chance as a satisfactory answer becomes so low it’s hardly worth adjusting the numbers further.
We can’t truly comprehend the significance of numbers that small, that close to absolute zero.
The argument that the Big Bang and speciation have absolutely nothing to do with each other is completely fallacious and fatally flawed. The theories have everything to do with each other, for one simple reason.
Life cannot evolve until it exists. Life cannot exist without a universe capable of supporting life.
Though Dr. Leblanc protested that the origin of matter didn’t matter to the theory of evolution, his argument is a non sequitur. After all, he first admits that life can’t evolve before it exists.
To say that evolution has no requirement to examine the hypothesis of abiogenesis is like saying the theory of chicken has nothing to do with the egg.
Mr. Leonard,
Thank you for taking the time to respond. You proffer only the same well-countered arguments standard to evolution denial. I am pressed for time, but managed to find some downtime until my fiance flies into town.
I’ll quote you and respond. I likely will not have time to make it to every point, but I will try. I will link references whenever possible, but if you find something unreferenced that you disagree with feel free to point it out and I will gladly rectify it as soon as I can.
First we start with the standard non-relevant nitpick as the basis for an argument:
“Unfortunately, you mention the use of misleading language, and then proceed to describe the width of paper in terms of light years, bizarrely asserting that the speed of light would be an intuitive and translatable standard measurement preferable to millimeters or fractions of an inch, a unit of measurement that almost everyone should easily comprehend.”
Bizarre? My 9 year old nephew knows what a lightyear is. But you are correct, I could have made it perhaps even more accessible.
It is 6.21371192 × 10^17 miles. Or 621371192 × 10^9 if you prefer.
The point was that taking something 0.1mm thick (not 0.01, but lets not get nit-picky) and folding it a mere 25 times yields a thickness unimaginably huge. That what we think of as “not that big” or “not that long” is, in fact, an unfathomably huge amount, despite our protestations that “Oh yes, *I* certainly can grasp the concept of what BILLIONS of years of processes can actually lead to… and it ain’t evolution!”
“If the fossil record indicated that complex life was present on earth billions of years ago, that claim might be true.”
“Before that remarkable event, LUCA mostly remained a single-celled organism that simply replicated.”
The concept comes through here quite clearly. For the purposes of your current argument such complexity simply cannot exist that far in the past because before that was *only* a single-celled organism that “simply replicated.”
Yet it is commonly understood, and well argued by pretty much all creationists, that the cell is *so fantastically complex even PARTS of it CAN’T have evolved.”
Your comment here is completely nullified by the fact that soft-bodied creatures don’t fossilize well and that dramatic changes in phenotype – turning into something hard bodied – is incredibly trivial and minor in change once the complexity of single and then multi-cellular soft bodied life arose. You did read my cake analogy, didn’t you?
This is nothing that in any way detracts from the veracity and predictive power of evolutionary theory.
“If the paleontologists are correct in their consensus, every major phyla that has ever existed in the history of the earth appeared within a relatively brief 15 million year time span during the Cambrian Explosion.”
Perhaps an unintentional straw man, but no scientists thinks that ALL major phyla arose during the Cambrian Explosion. You can even just look at the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
It was a period that lasted 542 million years and only that *last* 70-80 million are the focus of the incredibly rapid “explosion”… which was still 70 MILLION years.
This does not pose a problem for evolution of species based on any criteria except your incredulity that these numbers are too small. All whilst ignoring the distinction between hard and soft bodied animals and what one can *reasonably expect* from the fossil record. And then not reconciling that with the myriad *other* lines of evidence that make it a *theory* not a philosophy (molecular genetics being the strongest and can, all by itself, carry the theory because of how incredibly clear, prolific, and overwhelming the evidence is).
“While consensus does not make good science”
A common trope of science deniers. Perhaps you have a better way to decide the veracity of a statement *besides* the consensus of those most highly educated and well versed in the field in question? Are they always perfect? Of course not. But you can’t make a coherent argument as to who or what might actually be *better*. All you can say is it is not good *enough*… by whatever standard fits the argument.
Or perhaps next time you have a serious medical ailment you would like an English professor to weigh in alongside the Tumor Board (there is such a thing – we get together for the toughest of cancer cases and discuss it; surgeons, plastic surgeons, oncologists, rad-onc, pathology, genetics: and we look at the case, everyone weighs in their knowledge, we reference the best evidence and render a decision to the best of our capacity.)? Because undoubtedly his or her opinion would be valued and question the consensus?
“To be perfectly clear: my counterargument is not that evolution is utterly impossible, but to say that application of the theory proves remarkably improbable compared to the only real alternative. Either a series of highly unlikely occurrences all happened due to serendipitous good fortune, or supernatural intelligence served as the catalyst.”
Yet another asked and answered ad nauseum tropes. This is merely the “Infinite Monkey Theorem”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Which simply does not apply to the concept of evolution. No evolutionary scientist even REMOTELY thinks that the complexity of life is merely an accumulation of pure luck and chance. If it were, we would expect complexity to bounce in at out of existence extremely rapidly. We don’t see that – we see slow gradual change, punctuated at times. Which is exactly what we would expect if the *good* random changes replicated *better* and the worse changes replicated worse. I am certain you have heard of natural selection.
“Dinosaurs allegedly came and went in the span of 150 million years, either becoming extinct or they allegedly shape-shifted into completely different organisms.”
As if 150 million years is a SHORT amount of time?
And “allegedly shape-shifted?” No allegations here – evidence. Both molecular AND paleontologic. You can go right ahead a see a list of the transitional fossils.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_forms#Dinosaur_to_bird.5B15.5D
Or even go to a museum them and see them yourself.
” Yet horseshoe crabs have remained the same since the Permian Extinction. There is no rhyme or reason to the rate of evolutionary change.”
Firstly, the “living fossil” argument – there is no such thing. The horseshoe crab is VASTLY different from its ancestral form and cousins:
In fact, Dr. Coyne himself has addressed that point!
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/horseshoe-crabs-arent-living-fossils-2/
And even if that WERE true, there is of course rhyme and reason. Your argument amounts to “some things evolve and some things don’t. That makes no sense! Everything should evolve!” Why? Why should it? Evolution doesn’t say organisms MUST evolve and predicts numerous situations – once again from molecular to phenotypic – instances where VERY little change should occur. And then when we look, that is exactly what we see. And we can see evidence for when and why DNA is *lost*.
We called them “conserved genes” or “conserved traits”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conserved_sequence
And they can occur for many (obvious) reasons – it’s called a fitness peak. So the first point is not factual and the second is not actually an argument against what evolutionary theory *actually says and predicts*
“Instead, my counterargument is that DNA manipulation by some form of supernatural intelligence is much more plausible than undirected good luck”
A Youtube user called cdk007 has an excellent explanation of why this doesn’t make sense:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3yDOp8Dv8Y
“As I make clear in Counterargument for God, even if you believe natural selection has nothing to do with luck, the Big Bang and abiogenesis cannot be described without liberal use of the word.”
And as has been stated innumerable times, evolutionary theory explains how life EVOLVED not how it BEGAN nor how the *universe* began. How on earth can it be an indictment against a theory that it doesn’t describe what it never claims to describe? Would the theory of gravity be “just a philosophy” because it doesn’t explain how how electron shells are arranged or how tectonic plates move.
I will make a side note that I – and many scientists – think that the *principles* evolution can and do describe abiogenesis and the universe as well, that is beyond the level of our evidence and say so confidently so I, and we, tend to refrain. But we *can* say with confidence that evolution is without any reasonable doubt the theory that best describes the diversity of life on the planet.
“My concern is that you don’t have a true appreciation for the significance with the really small numbers associated with the probability involved with our existential questions. I’m talking about the statistical probability that evolution really is true.”
And now you belie your genuine lack of appreciation of large numbers. Exactly what you nit-picked me on about at the very start. Your argument above is:
“Tiny things cannot become really, really, really, really, really big things”
I demonstrated how one tenth of one millimeter can become thick enough TO BE AS WIDE AS THE ENTIRE MILKY WAY GALAXY in only 25 doublings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_way
(For reference 0.1mm*10^25 = 106 lightyears and the Milky Way is 100-120,000 light years across).
Perhaps my point about not truly grasping the concept of how large is large makes more sense now?
You are arguing from incredulity. Which in and of itself is already a logical fallacy and offers nothing to the conversation about evolution. It is like when I told me nephew last night at his brother’s baseball game that time travels more slowly when an object is moving faster. He just looked at me, crossed his arms, and said “nuh uh!”
But *even if I grant your incredulity* it still fails. Assign some sort of infinitesimally small (but non-zero) probability and there is STILL enough time for it to have happened. 13.4 billion years and a subsequent 4.55 billion, despite your protestations otherwise, are numbers that you do not truly appreciate the power of.
As another example, I will try quickly to explain a particular type of leukemia. I used this as an example once and I actually did the math but I don’t have it handy, so extend some charity and hang with me for a minute.
This particular leukemia has whats called the Philadelphia chromosome:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_chromosome
basically, two parts of a person’s chromosomes broke and reattached. Which happens, but not all *that* commonly. And a LOT of DNA is non-coding. And you can imagine that a LOT of genes getting spliced together just simply wouldn’t work, would they? After all, they are very complicated and intelligently designed.
In any event, when these two parts break it just happens to make a brand new protein – one that does not exist “naturally” in people. And it works. And it makes cells grow and reproduce. All by chance. With each step being so incredibly unlikely. And yet over the course of a lifetime, we make a LOT of white blood cells and give that a large enough number and such an incredibly unlikely series of events happens and you get cancer. Which is why it makes sense that we see it most commonly in older people, and people with other inherited problem to “help” them on their way. Cancer *is* evolutionary theory.
13.4 billion years is 13.4*10^9. That means that if you felt like the odds of complex life forming totally randomly was 0.0000000001% that would *still* be a *100* chance of happening. And that is STILL 56911 times MORE LIKELY than winning the California Mega Millions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Millions#Winning_and_probability
(And yes, I actually did the math – feel free to check it, but it should be accurate).
I do hope my original discussion about large numbers is becoming more clear now.
So complex life? Seems over 5,000 times more likely than what I would think is so incredibly unlikely that I don’t waste my dollar, yet has happened numerous times in my own lifetime.
Now you shift gears to the universe. I’ll stress again, that you are conflated THREE separate theories from three separate fields of expertise, none of which I shall venture to guess you are expert in (and only one of which I am much more than the average person, but certainly not “expert” like Drs. Coyne or Leblanc).
“Physicist Sir Martin Rees once calculated the statistical probability of our universe coming into existence as something along the lines of 1 in 10 to the 300th power”
Ok. How many universes have existed? 1 that we know of. Firstly we don’t have a solid numerator, but even if accept Rees’ statement, you still don’t know the denominator of the equation to actually calculate a probability for THIS universe to exist. Once again nothing more than argument from incredulity.
“In other words, the probability that the Big Bang was the result of fortuitous accident, yet produced our fine-tuned universe, is astronomically low.”
The puddle finds how convenient its hole fits it. The fine tuning is fine because we are discovering it more precisely, not because there is some dial that was set somewhere. And the VAST, VAST, VAST, VAST, (add another 10^100 of those) majority of it is clearly hostile to life – including much of our planet. And interesting how we see more life and diversity in less adverse environments and less in harsh biomes.
And once again, the argument from incredulity.
“Because evolution requires the Big Bang to occur, the probability that speciation occurs without the assistance of supernatural intelligence can be no greater than the probability of a Big Bang that accidentally produced a universe allegedly “just right for life,” at least here on Earth.”
Now you have linked two things which have no logical reason to be linked. They are independent events. Agreed that they must be *sequential* events, but there is absolutely no reason to infer that the probability of life *must* be a factor of the probability of the universe existing.
It could *just as easily* be that the probability of life is extremely and mind-bogglingly low. But that the probability of universes is incredibly high. Or universe is low and life is high. The results are indistinguishable to *anyone.* And only the theistic tend to be so narcissistic as to they they do know.
And yet, once again, different theories. And the likelihood of the big bang or abiogenesis DOES NOT AFFECT THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION. The evolution is there. Your god could have snapped the universe and earth into existence and *evolution would still be a valid, supported, and working theory.* The fields of physics and biochemistry (amongst others) demonstrate no need for god either, thus closing the case, but that is not the point of our discussion; evolution is.
To try and pre-emptively counter you try and say:
“Life cannot evolve until it exists. Life cannot exist without a universe capable of supporting life.”
Yet the probabilities of that statement STILL do not entwine, as I describe above. I agree that life cannot exist without a universe. I’ll even agree that life cannot evolve until it exists. But why is it that the universe existing MAKES THE PROBABILITY OF LIFE *LESS* THEN? By simple probabilities and logic, the universe existing would INCREASE the probability of life because before it was *zero*.
And, once again, none of that in any way actually address the theory of evolution nor the overwhelming evidence for it.
“Though Dr. Leblanc protested that the origin of matter didn’t matter to the theory of evolution, his argument is a non sequitur. After all, he first admits that life can’t evolve before it exists.
To say that evolution has no requirement to examine the hypothesis of abiogenesis is like saying the theory of chicken has nothing to do with the egg.”
I’ll try and hammer it in again:
We can study the chicken. We can KNOW IT EXISTS. We can describe it fully. We can use it to make predictions and become convinced enough of its existence to base our scientific progress on it. We can even know that the egg exists. But if that is ALL we know about the egg, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE, that LACK of knowledge does not change what we DO know about the chicken.
I hope you can see past the typical denialist rhetoric you espouse and see that you haven’t argued anything except for straw men and expressed your own incredulity. Just like how my nephew won’t believe that time slows down and eventually stops as you move faster and faster.
Rather than try and explain why you just can’t believe such things happen (despite clear evidence is *has* happened), try and demonstrate what besides evolution explains how and why molecular evidence converges on the same nested hierarchy so incredibly accurately and why that matches geographic distributions and that matches fossil records and conservation of body plans. Try not to point out the minor exceptions and uncertainties. Look at the literally millions of converging lines of evidence which drown out the exceptions so thoroughly you can only see them if you are ideologically determined to do so.
Mr. Pavlov,
I will respond to you in kindness, but not in kind. I haven’t lost total interest in having a dialogue with you, but I would like to caution you about a couple of basic violations in etiquette.
1. You don’t need to “shout” all the time. My hearing is fine. I can see okay too. When you type in ALL CAPS, it is considered shouting.
2. Name-calling is an ad-hominem attack. Repeatedly calling me a “denier” of evolution is an admittedly feeble attempt at word association, ala “Holocaust deniers.” But at its heart the tactic is really a rather insidious, and not worthy of measured or deliberate response. While “denier” is one of the nicer things people have called me since I began speaking out, it still carries a certain connotation that I do not appreciate and don’t have to accept, quite frankly. When someone changes the subject or begins calling me names, I consider the argument won. If you persist, I will see no need in further conversation with you, the debate already having been won. If you call me names, you admit defeat.
3. Perhaps if you spend more time in contemplation and less time composing a knee-jerk reaction, you’d realize that these blogs have deliberately avoided the heart of the debate, which was Dr. Leblanc’s post, save the final point. The next blog is the “whole enchilada” argument about Darwinism, which I am beginning to understand is more of a religion for you than a belief or knowledge-based fact.
4. I recommend using better sources than Wikipedia and YouTube for your strongest arguments.
5. If you don’t want me to write about a tangential point, don’t bring it up to begin with. Sam Harris made a stupid, nonsensical comparison of a light year to a very small measurement, the width of a piece of paper. You are absolutely correct; I could care less if it’s .01 or .1 millimeters, unless I need to take an accurate measurement and plan to use it. For a pure exercise in futility like making Sam Harris sound brilliant when he’s really being ridiculous, I don’t care about the precision. So it’s .1, fine. If you fold the paper 25 times, 25 x .1 is 2.5 millimeters. That is something my 9 year old grandson would understand. You may have a 9 year old nephew, but I daresay he would only define a light year as “the distance light would travel in a year” at best, certainly not a specific and correct numeric value. My grandson would probably ask if you meant Buzz Lightyear. With all due respect, if you’re going to try to humiliate my intellect by comparing me to your nine-year-old nephew, I’m not going to bother giving you serious answers, because you aren’t really interested.
There’s an unwritten rule somewhere, I’m sure: if you don’t want a stupid answer, don’t ask a stupid question.
Now, in summation, I would point you to the salient part of Dr. Leblanc’s initial response to my question, how can life evolve until it exists?
Answer: it can’t.
Therefore, your nonsense about “separate theories” is just that. Evolution theory as described by Dawkins, Coyne, and you is totally irrelevant, if you can’t ever get to the theory without making fantastic assumptions that are completely unprovable. Not once have you hesitated long enough to look at “my” evidence. You’ve been too busy dismissing it.
You haven’t, and presumably won’t read my book. Your bloviating from ignorance has been duly noted. I shall finish my response to Dr. Leblanc, but I believe this reply will be about all I have left to say to you.
Should you wish to attempt mutually respectful and serious dialog in the future, you’ll always know where to find me.
Asfor calling you a denier… That is not an ad hominem – it is merely descriptive. What else does one call someone who denies the veracity of the consensus of every expert in the field and states that the evidence provided simply cannot be and that two theories MUST be linked merely because YOU say so? If I were to tell a particle physicist that the standard model and tectonic theory MUST be linked, don’t you think he would laugh at me? Don’t you think that the actual experts – those who forms their lives studying this – are perhaps just a little more qualified than you to determine what the theory is actually intended to say? And what does it say that your prime argument against evolution is by insisting it should say something that the very prior who expert in and developed the theory say it doesn’t address?
I
I did say, however, I
S Iorry, posting mobile quickly….
I did say, however, that I had limited time and my referencing would be sparse.furthermore, wikipedia is actually an excellent reference, with the journal Nature having noted it has lower error rate than encyclopedia Britannica. However, it is quite notable that you didn’t actually address any of the evidence, merely dismissed it out of hand by deciding you didn’t like the source. Quite convenient.
Lastly, yes my 9 year old nephew would know. It really isn’t that uncommon a metric for anyone studying astronomical sciences, even at the primary school level like he is. But the point was making was your tack was not to comment that I used an esoteric metric, then move on and actually address my point… You used that idea ad the basis for your counter argument. And still miss the point and never addressed the accrual numbers I used to make mine.
I’ll take some more time to respond by Monday afternoon, but in the meantime feel free to actually address the points rather than just pontificate about howYOU think evolutionary theory SHOULD be and how improbable YOU think something is. Because those are very, very weak arguments
Hello again Mr. Leonard,
I am on a layover before flying to Philadelphia to present some of my research with my colleagues. I will attempt to hone in a bit, though I must honestly say that after reading your references in your original post, I am not hopeful of making headway. You seem quite ideologically set in your a priori conclusion that there is an intelligent designer (which is, of course, your Christian god undoubtedly) and that the only purpose of evolutionary theory is to find a way out of your “requirement” that there be such a designer. Furthermore, while you see fit to dismiss evidence against your position by claiming my source – Wikipedia – is not sufficiently rigorous, you present your own “evidence” with a citation to yourself. One which you claim central to your denial of evolution – that the probability of life evolving is a compounded probability with the likelihood of life existing and the universe existing and that evolution cannot be a theory without describing all three completely separate, although sequential, events. In citing yourself, you could hypothetically be citing good evidence – sometimes I do cite some of my own previous writings rather than re-writing something, but in this case your self-references are all also quite incorrect in the characterization of what evolutionary theory says and what the evidence actually is.
All that said, I’ll try and keep it simple and pointed. I’ve already demonstrated why your arguments against evolution amount to nothing more than an Argument from Incredulity and I’ve demonstrated why the Big Bang, abiogenesis, and evolution are not the same theories and evolution does not need to describe either two things in order to be a robust and correct theory (even using your own chicken-and-egg analogy). I’ve also demonstrated why the probability of life evolving is sequential to, but not contingent upon the probability of life or the universe starting.
So, I’ll back up just a bit and explain what a theory actually means and how we decide something is a correct theory specifically in regards to evolution.
Life exists. That much I believe we can agree upon. The questions then arise “How did life come to exist?” and “How did so much different life come to exist?” One can imagine a world where only one single life form exists. And we can obviously imagine our own with so much life. So the two are indeed very separate questions which is why evolution need not explain abiogenesis. So, lets focus on the second question.
“How did so much different life come to exist?”
Darwin speculated that it was gradual change over time with common descent. He cited natural and sexual selection as the mechanisms driving the direction of change and random mutation as the source of the variation.
If this were true, what would we expect to find if we started looking? We would expect to see differences and similarities that settle into nested hierarchies demonstrating common descent – in other words, a cladogram.
How can we test this? Fossils for one. We can see transitional forms, we can see adaptive radiation, and we can see the gradual change over geologic time. But the fossil record is, necessarily, incomplete. As I’ve pointed out soft-bodied organisms, no matter how complex, would not be well fossilized, if at all. So we can use the fossil record to be reasonably certain back to that point in evolution. But at that point we would be reasonably left asking “Well, what about before that? Is this pattern conserved all the way back? Or did some intelligent designer make all the cells and body plans at once and then evolution took over? Or something else?” So we look at other evidence. The most robust is molecular. In fact, molecular biology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics each could have single-handedly shown evolutionary theory to be false. If we looked and did not find a consistent pattern of nested hierarchies of change, we would have been forced to throw out Darwin’s idea as nothing but a really good try.
Yet that didn’t happen. For every single gene we look at and map the differences in, we find the same nested hierarchy come out. Even for pseudogenes – genes that are defunct in the animal, remnants of the past – we find the same nested hierarchy. No matter what gene, what animal, what plant, it all just keeps fitting together. The same with protein structures and molecular pathways. No matter how we look at it, the same pattern keeps coming up over and over again.
So we look at this evidence and have to decide what explains it the best. Did an intelligent designer come in and make every animal, plant, virus, bacteria, archea, everything and then make them fantastically complex and yet make it look like each one descended from previous common ancestors? And then make what we have of the fossil record corroborate this? And make comparative anatomy studies corroborate it?
We have the evidence – and I know that you believe in it for everything besides evolution. Unless I am mistaken and you believe that modern medical genetics and the genes discovered for cancer are completely false. Because the exact same methods that give us those answers give us those nested hierarchies of gene studies. The same methods we use to exploit molecular pathways in cancer (the monoclonal antibody treatments) are used to compare living organisms proteins and molecular pathways for the same results.
So, now that we have the evidence we need to explain it. The best, most parsimonious, most predictive explanation is the theory of evolution. You are trying to posit some sort of “design” which leaves you the burden of demonstrating why your idea explains the evidence better. The best way to do this – what a theory actually is – is to use it to predict something. What does intelligent design predict? The answer is nothing – if your mechanism of action is divine and undetectable intervention, then how can we predict what the next intervention will be? If the next intervention is exactly the same as I would predict using evolutionary theory without invoking anything else, why would a designer make any sense to invoke?
So sitting here trying to poke holes in evolution does not disprove evolution. In fact, that is exactly what evolutionary scientists try and do every day. That is how they become famous and well regarded! By demonstrating a deficit, flaw, or other incompleteness of evolutionary theory and then filling in the gap! It is clear what will falsify evolution – and it never has happened. But to demonstrate a designer, it is you who needs to actually make a better theory. Even if you proved evolution false that still wouldn’t prove an intelligent designer! It would just disprove evolution.
So, I challenge you to demonstrate why an intelligent designer is needed in order to explain the molecular evidence for evolution.
I’d also like to ask you what you think – with evidence, if you have it – the probability of life existing and evolving is. Your argument is that it is “so improbable it can’t have happened” yet you haven’t actually defined that probability to demonstrate your claim. As I pointed out, the odds of winning the California Mega Millions Lottery is astronomically low and yet it has happened multiple times in our own lifetimes and with far fewer games played than are needed to actually win even once, just by statistical chance!
I have to board my plane very shortly, so I’ll have to leave it at that. However, I would just like to point out a couple simple and simplistic flaws you have made in your self-referenced evidences for your argument:
“It’s the old “multiple universe” trick, as Maxwell Smart would say. But, as with any theory, there are problems.”
Multiple universes seem vastly more likely than an infinitely complex, all powerful, all knowing being that is simultaneously the cause of and yet completely incomprehensible by our universe. Oh, and that needs no explanation for its own existence.
“The odds against the origin of life increase exponentially — the improbabilities do not merely aggregate; they are compounded because the existence of life as we know it is actually predicated on the existence of the universe that supports it.”
You have to demonstrate why this is the case. I’ve already given the example of why it needn’t be. What evidence do you have to differentiate between a universe where the likelihood of life is “ridiculously low” but the odds of a universe existing are very high and one where the odds of life are extremely high but the universe very low? Except for your own incredulity, what means is there to differentiate?
“According to (co-discoverer of DNA) Francis Crick, the random assembly of six billion pieces of information found in the double helix should have taken several billion years to form, leaving practically no time for evolution theory to work its magic.”
We’ve had those several billion years Mr. Leonard. And I find it ironically funny that you claim evolution to be “working magic” whilst at the same time railing against how the point of evolution seems to be to remove the “designer” from the equation; a designer who, by every conceivable meaning of the word, is literally the definition of magic.
“We must also ask: even if our universe could have “accidentally” happened through a fluke related to quantum mechanics, why did entropy fail to break down the chemical compounds before they had time to complete assembly of the first form of life?”
This is answered quite neatly and you only need to actually do a quick search – the entropy of the universe is increasing. Hence the expansion of cooling of the universe. Entropy does not demand that all things decay into disorder, merely that the average entropy state (S) of a closed system is increasing. The earth is not a closed system, nor is our solar system, galaxy, or super-cluster. We aren’t even certain that the universe is actually a closed system, though for now it seems to be. And that system is increasing S.
“Speciation theory allegedly describes the undirected mutations that occur through the mechanism of sexual reproduction. After countless generations, two compatible, paired organisms diversify solely through the mechanisms of sexual reproduction and turn into organisms as unlike as oak trees, sperm whales and humans — all from the same single, original cell called LUCA.”
No, it doesn’t. The mutations occur in many ways besides just during sexual reproduction. And there are many ways of reproduction besides just sexual. It happens that sexual reproduction yields the highest rates of mutation and selection which is why so many things do sexually reproduce. But a huge amount of organisms do not. In fact, some organisms steal genes from others as a means to augment asexual reproduction rather than engage in sexual reproduction. And there is a constant base rate of mutation inherent to the instability of molecules – the entropy of a system – which contributes as well.
“Simply throw away the concept of irreducible complexity, at least for a moment, in order to consider the whole problem.”
Yes, please do, since it is not in any way a problem for evolutionary theory and has been adequately refuted in literally every single instance raised. Just look over the Kitzmiller v Dover trial and the testimony of Michael Behe. Not only is irreducible complexity not a problem for evolution, every proposed case has been found to have a stepwise evolutionary mechanism supported by rigorous empirical evidence.
“The improbabilities of the anthropic universe and abiogenesis adversely affect the odds of speciation happening by random chance, further compounding its improbability factor.
The numbers just don’t logically add up.”
And after plenty of pontification and further self-referencing you come to this conclusion because… just because. You even admit you can’t quantify the numbers and yet are content to conclude that they must be so “ridiculous” as to demonstrate the need for your pre-determined conclusion of an intelligent designer.
Well. time to board. If you actually address the points, use evidence, and stop resorting to arguments from incredulity and patently false arguments (like your “fact” that evolution demands speciation solely through sexual reproduction), then I will be happy to continue to conversation. If not, my high hopes for intelligent and rational discourse will be for naught and I will be forced to admit to my colleagues who question why I bother even trying to explain such things to denialists they were right.
Well, considering that my last comment hasn’t made it past your moderation I don’t expect this one will either. It’s probably for the better anyway since devoting time to this topic really shouldn’t be a priority while I am doing an elective rotation in neurocritical care. However it does, sadly, re-affirm my a priori suspicion that you would indeed not be willing to engage in completely open discourse in which you were truly seeking to learn something new. It is reasonably clear to me at this point (though I can still be proven wrong) that you are not interested in actually learning anything about evolutionary theory or how we actually do science but would rather just try and rationalize your own pre-determined conclusion that evolution is wrong in the guise of being willing to be convinced (much like Peter Hitchens has been saying as of late).
There is a reason why it is nearly always the blogs and writings of theists and apologists who must moderate all comments and do not allow many through – it is hard to defend your position against the rigors of evidence.
If you do feel like actually learning about evolutionary theory please feel free to email me any time. I personally relish any opportunity to be proven wrong… as does any scientist. It is when we learn the most.
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