Answer to Evolutionist Nonsense
Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving "desirable" (adaptive) features and eliminating "undesirable" (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times.
As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence "TOBEORNOTTOBE." Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet's). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare's entire play in just four and a half days.
Richard Hardison wrote a computer program (which took intelligence!), and that computer program directed the "evolution" of the phrase in a specific direction. And this is supposed to prove evolution is possible sans intelligence?
Let's not forget how complex even one cell is.
"A living cell is a marvel of detailed and complex architecture. Seen through a microscope there is an appearance of almost frantic activity. On a deeper level it is known that molecules are being synthesized at an enormous rate. Almost any enzyme catalyzes the synthesis of more than 100 other molecules per second. In ten minutes, a sizeable fraction of total mass of a metabolizing bacterial cell has been synthesized. The information content of a simple cell had been estimated as around 1012 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica."—*Carl Sagan, "Life" in Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (1974 ed.), pp. 893-894.Exactly how many copies of Hamlet would 1012 letters make? I don't know, but I can imagine quite a few. I bet Richard Hardison won't try to write a computer program for that one. If he did, someone might accuse him of playing God.
"First off, how does "nature" know what is a desirable feature? And how can it "push" evolution in any direction?"
The way you asked the question makes it sound like you really won't listen to an answer, but if you want to hear how a biologist rather than a creationist would answer this, I'll try to oblige.
If you don't really want an answer and just want to vent, then I'll pass. I've got better things to do.
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I would certainly be willing to read anything you want to put forth. Of course, I don't think being a biologist and a creationist are mutually exclusive. Do as you will.
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Do as I will? Wow, you make it sound like you're throwing down the gauntlet. I'll repeat, I really have no time for anyone's venting. Scratch that. I have time for my own. Also, I'm not a biologist by trade or by education. I think I understand, vaguely, some of the principles, though. So here goes my lame attempt at an answer to the two questions you posed above.
1. "First off, how does "nature" know what is a desirable feature?"
I have to start this off by pondering why the word "nature" is in quotes in your sentence. do you not believe in nature? Are you using the word sarcastically? It doesn't matter. It makes no difference to my answer. "Nature," which I'm defining for my own convenience as the sum total of natural laws, doesn't "know" anything. And I put the word "know" in quotes to indicate knowledge as defined in the anthropomorphic sense. I prefer not to think of nature as Mother or Father Nature. Nature just...is. Anyway, nature doesn't know anything, and desirable is subjective. However, whether it is desirable or not, life is geared to propagate. If it were not so, you and I would not be here having this exchange. So something random happens. If it helps the organism survive, it is more likely to be passed on. If it does not help the organism survive, it is less likely to be passed on. "Desirable" is a subjective word scientists use when writing about this stuff because they figure most of us find survival to be a desirable trait. I think, scientifically, they could have picked a more rigorous word. So you calling them on that word was correct, but not for the reason you state.
2. "And how can it "push" evolution in any direction?"
"Push" is maybe a poor choice of words in a scientific article as well, as it implies directedness. Again, though, if life didn't have the directive to survive, we wouldn't be here having this exchange. So the conditions pretty much have to be this way for stuff to happen the way it does. For all I know, stuff cycled for untold billions of years without life ever appearing, and we're the lucky lottery winners of this cycle. And it may go for billions more when we're gone before life emerges again, if ever.
As best I know, that's a basic biological explanation. Ask me how the first life started, I don't know. I'm not that smart. I don't even pretend to have all the answers. Try to trip me up, you probably will. I'm just a dumb hick. Try to trap me with "irreducible complexities," I'll defer to the experts. Life is way too short and I'm having way too much fun to get bogged down in that stuff.
Now if you want to discuss magic, then we're talking! I just picked up some really cool dvds.
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Thank you for writing back. Venting is fun, especially in the dead of winter when one doesn't get out much.
You admit that the article makes poor choices of words when it says natural selection is nonrandom and pushes things in a direction to create new features. But you really haven't explained it other than to say, "Life had a directive to survive, and we're here now, so evolution must be true, even if it "cycled for untold billions of years" before we became the "lucky lottery winners."
You haven't given me a biological explanation. You've given me a religious one. The 2nd law of thermodynamics demand that the universe had a beginning. What wound it up? The laws of genetics demand that all life forms cannot be related to each other.
Biochemical machines like the life forms on earth cannot have "arisen" through chance random processes. When we look at the myriad of systems within our bodies, within the most "basic" cell it becomes obvious that life is irreducibly complex. God is the Great Engineer, the only Being who could arrange all of this for us.
I won't call your response lame, but I will call it inadequate. I look forward to your response.
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Venting is fun? Venting can be helpful, it can be useful, but I've never classified it as fun.
I admitted I'm no biology genius and I made my best shot at answering your question. You followed by telling me, not asking me, what I said. It wasn't what I said, but that didn't stop you from declaring it to be my words.
Since you apparently already know what I think, and since you even declined to acknowledge my offer to talk about a mutually agreeable subject, I think there's no reason for me to be in my half of the conversation. Feel free to carry on as if I was here.
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Bob,
I'm sorry you did not like my response to your post, but I was expressing my conclusions about what you wrote. If you would like to compare and contrast what you said and what I said you said, I'm open to reading those comments as well.
If you'd like to discuss the videos you purchased recently, please feel free to e-mail me privately, and I'm sure the interchange would be fun.
Carrie
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