November 2010 Awake argument against evolution: does it make sense?

by behemot 24 Replies latest jw friends

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  behemot

  The November 2010 issue of Awake (downloadable here: http://www.jw.org/index.html?option=nBZR ) contains an article about a Czeck scientist (Frantisek Vyskocil) who became a JW.

  He relates that one of the things that made him rethink his position about evolution was something he was told by an unnamed “famous Russian scientist and professor” in the early 1970’s. The argument runs like this:

  “Simple bacteria can divide about every 20 minutes and have many hundreds of different proteins, each containing 20 types of amino acids arranged in chains that might be several hundred long. For bacteria to evolve by beneficial mutations one at a time would take much, much longer than three or four billion years, the time that many scientists believe life has existed on earth.”

  Not being very good at maths, I’m scratching my head to understand what this means. Could someone smarter please help? What does this argument mean? Does it make sense? How can it be debunked?
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  Designer Stubble

  You yourself started as a single cell, which divided into trillions within a nine month period.

  Every 20 minutes for 46 million centuries seems enough to me, 93% of the scientific community and 100% of the nobel prize winning scientists.

  Also note the Awake article stresses that this exisiting BY CHANCE is impossible, even Dawkins acknowledges this. However, by NATURAL SELECTION, it is a whole different story.

  So, this guy in all his wisdom, can be counted in the 7% of believing scientists. Further, not that this guy is NOT A JW, he simply believes the Bible.
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  teel

  It's the most basic mistake the Awake and just about every creationist makes when trying to be smart: evolution did not rely on chance! Since that guy made this mistake, I highly doubt he has any basic idea about evolution, probably he is a math scientist Did you notice that his credentials are missing? Or even his name so that we can check it? Why should we care about a mathematician's oppinion about evolution?

  Using the pregnancy analogy, it's like saying the baby can't be born, each proto-cell could evolve into hundreds of different type of cells, just calculate what are the odds that exactly the right type of cell is born at the right location. Math shows you that you sir do not exist

  There, debunking over.
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  bohm

  Well, they obviously botched the quote because its completely nonsensical as it is. Lets say the chance that a single beneficial mutation occur is p. Then lets say there are a meager N = 10^30 bacteria on earth. Let C be the number of copies made in a billion years, lets say the bacteria divide 50 times a day. This give approximately C = 10^18. Thus the number of beneficial mutations are about

  p*C*N = p*10^48.

  Thats a metric shitload of potentially beneficial mutations (consider there is about 10^6 bits of information in the bacteria genomen).

  But it gets better since in early-life enviroment bacteria swapped large chunks of genetic information and hence did not assemble "one good mutation at a time"; that throw a giant wrench into the calculation.
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  behemot

  ha-ha! now I see why the guy kept the "famous Russian scientist and professor" anonymous. His reasoning does not hold water.

  Thanks to everybody, I'll keep this information handy in case some JWs comes up with this quote to back up his belief.

  Behe
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  bohm

  behemot: Its very hard to quantize how much information is accumulated by evolution and how quickly. Still, there is some theory on the subject, and the usual back-of-an-envelope calculations you see creationists throw around (which are somewhat similar to mine) completely overlook this. The IMHO most interesting result is that there are very good reasons (from an entirely information-theoretic) POW why we have 2 sexes:

  Very simplified, if we just copied ourselves like bacteria, we would essentially only pass on 1 bit of information in each generation that described how good our genomen is: Did we survive or not. And even that one bit would be subject to noise. But when there are two sexes, we can pass along a very large number of bits, namely what mate we choose out of all the potential mates.

  It is this reshuffling of genes (and unlike in the simple model above, bacteria does this to in the real world) which AFAIK is the engine behind evolution, and why it is such a good idea to store genetic information in subunits like genes and chromosomes which can be passed around.

  But i digress. The best evidence against claims such as the above are those found in the laboratory. Recently, i stumbled on an article where researchers had randomized the genes in a virus which create its proteine coating (the proteine coating is used to trick a cell to let the virus in and is highly specialized). The randomized virus worked very poorly, but after a while the virus quickly evolved and regained their ability. I think its very hard to argue (usefull) information was not created in that event.
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  metatron

  Why not turn Creationism on its head? Those bacteria can do that stuff because they are 'God'!

  That's Pantheism in a nutshell. You stop worrying about an Angry Guy on a Throne issuing Commandments and accept God as a universal system, working miracles everywhere, all the time.

  It creates dinosaurs and nasty viruses and parasites and everything else. It has no moral or ethical interest, as we would judge, in anything.

  It is creation, it is evolution. It's everywhere at once, holding the laws of physics together here and in the most distant galaxy.

  metatron
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  WTWizard

  I notice they always disregard the most blatant evidence. No matter how long the odds of something happening, if it happens, it proves that it can. And, if you get infinity chances, you are eventually going to get it right. We have no way of knowing whether this is the first time or the 10^200,000,000,000th try. Besides, the laws of chemistry lock certain patterns out, greatly improving the odds that something will turn out right in the first place.

  No wonder those dodos want children flunking basic high school math and science.
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  BurnTheShips

  “Simple bacteria can divide about every 20 minutes and have many hundreds of different proteins, each containing 20 types of amino acids arranged in chains that might be several hundred long. For bacteria to evolve by beneficial mutations one at a time would take much, much longer than three or four billion years, the time that many scientists believe life has existed on earth.”

  Yet the Watchtower publishes articles talking about antibiotic resistant bacteria. These are bacteria that have evolved defenses against our antibiotics.

  This article is a tacit acceptance of bacterial evolution:

  http://www.watchtower.org/e/20031022/article_02.htm

  The astounding resilience of everyday germs has proved a major problem, one not generally anticipated. Yet, in hindsight, that germs would develop immunity to drugs should have been anticipated. Why? Consider, for example, something related that happened with the introduction of the insecticide DDT in the mid-1940's.# At that time dairymen rejoiced as flies essentially disappeared with the spraying of DDT. But a few flies survived, and their offspring inherited immunity to DDT. Soon these flies, unaffected by DDT, multiplied in vast numbers.

  Even before DDT was used, and before penicillin became commercially available in 1944, harmful bacteria gave foregleams of their prodigious defensive weaponry. Dr. Alexander Fleming, penicillin's discoverer, became aware of this. In his laboratory he watched as succeeding generations of Staphylococcus aureus (hospital staph) developed cell walls increasingly impervious to the drug that he had discovered.

  This led Dr. Fleming to warn some 60 years ago that harmful bacteria in an infected person could develop resistance to penicillin. So if doses of penicillin did not kill sufficient numbers of the harmful bacteria, their resistant offspring would multiply. As a result, there would be a rebound of the disease that penicillin could not cure.

  BTS
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  BurnTheShips

  “Simple bacteria can divide about every 20 minutes and have many hundreds of different proteins, each containing 20 types of amino acids arranged in chains that might be several hundred long. For bacteria to evolve by beneficial mutations one at a time would take much, much longer than three or four billion years, the time that many scientists believe life has existed on earth.”

  OK. I have to jump back on this one. Notice the bolded. That is a huge assumption. It is not one that exists in reality. At any given time, there are selection pressures on hundreds, thousands, or even millions of alleles.

  It is a huge fallacy to treat evolution as happening in series, one gene or mutation at a time.

  What is truly happening is not serial, it is massively, massively parallel.

  Creationists on this board sometimes trot out Haldane's paradox. It is only a paradox if you assume serial, single mutation per generation.

  BTS