Except it comes to mind that really Darwinism only works in computer theory, when you can boil everything down to one or two essential factors and create an arms race out of it. In biological systems, there are more factors involved (something that Darwinists continually forget) meaning that an increase in one aspect does not necessarily translate into an increase in fitness across the board.

But with computer programs and spam bots, the theory works just fine.

Except not really (original link: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/rs.html) (expand the “People” section and look at Religions). Russia is 15-20% Russian Orthodox and a whole 2% “other” Christian (which I’m sure includes cults like Mormons). Combining those only yields 22% (and note that the Russian Orthodox Church, as far as I’ve heard, isn’t YEC anyway).

Yet still, the new atheists always lament the existence of religion as the primary cause of doubt in science, especially regarding the doctrines of Darwin. And they are confident that if we just get rid of religion, “reason” will be victorious. That’s why we’re treated to books like The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism by Niles Eldredge, or Why Intelligent Design Fails (edited by Taner Edis and Matt Young).

But when you look at a country where religion was persecuted for 70 years, where less than half the people are religious at all (this includes the non-Christian groups, such as Muslims, etc.), you quickly discover that this lack of belief doesn’t seem to have much impact at all on whether someone will accept the “scientific” worldview.

Naturally, the poll given is only one sample, and so strong conclusions cannot be drawn from it. Still, the conclusion arrived at by those conducting the poll is that science is not taught very well in Russia, and that is probably true. But even so, there’s very little religious pressure in Russia to cause people to believe dinosaurs and people co-existed, and these people have heard enough of the science to know what a dinosaur is.

As you examine the scene further, you notice there are two pairs of footprints leading up to the area of the snowdrift, then what looks like a bunch of hectic overlapping footprints, and finally one set that staggers off to the drift, and another that look like someone ran off in the other direction. In that area, you also see several drops of blood.

Given this evidence, you conclude, “Some kind of non-intelligent forces were involved that just happened to come together at this point in time to make it look like the man’s death was by design.” And then you go happily on your way.

For you are, after all, a Darwinist, and you know full well that any evidence of design must be a hidden God of the Gaps argument.

When it comes to evolutionary pressures, it is important to keep in mind that even Darwinists must acknowledge the limitations of such pressures. While you listed the example of a giraffe’s neck or a cheetah’s speed, even those run into the problem of “islands” of fitness. While we think of evolution as progressing to better and better organisms, the fact is that this sort of concept is highly anthropomorphic because even secularists want humans to occupy the “highest” niche. For ease of understanding, however, I believe it’s better to reverse the direction.

Suppose that you have a ball on the top of a steep hill. If you release the ball, it will roll down the hill because of the force of gravity. For this illustration, let’s assume that the ball is a species’ genetic characteristics, gravity is evolutionary pressures (such as the environment, competition, and anything else that would result in survival of the fittest), and the farther down the hill you progress the more highly suited the species is for the environment.

Now, if the hill was perfectly smooth, the ball would roll all the way to the base and you’d have the perfect organisms being produced at sea level. But that’s not a realistic perspective. I live in Colorado, and in my backyard stands Pikes Peak. Suppose we were to start with a ball on the top of Pikes Peak and we were going to try to roll the ball to the ocean using nothing but gravity. Would that work?

Obviously not. For while the ball could roll quite some distance from the top of the Peak, eventually it will encounter a section that is uphill in all directions before it gets to the ocean. In fact, there are countless uphill sections from Pikes Peak to the sea, no matter which way you try to roll the ball. If you’re lucky, you might be able to get the ball to roll from the summit (at just over 14,000 feet elevation) down to maybe 10,000 feet, although in most cases you probably wouldn’t get it to roll more than a few dozen feet before it would be stopped by some rocks creating a local valley.

While the actual distance isn’t really that important, the point is that eventually the ball will settle into a localized valley where every direction around the ball is uphill. Let’s stipulate the ball we drop runs into this problem at 10,000 feet elevation. Now obviously, 10,000 feet is long way above sea level, where the ball “wants” to go. If it had the means, it would roll down to sea level—but locally, it is trapped. Every direction is uphill. It cannot go lower using gravity alone, because it is stuck in its valley.

Evolution runs into the same problems. There are valleys that a species will fall into, where they could develop into an even more “advanced” species, but they are so adapted to their niche that any movement the species makes is against natural selection. That is, once in the valley, natural selection will keep the organism in the valley, and ultimately natural selection itself will select AGAINST further evolution.

Ernst Mayr pointed this out when talking about gene flow and genetic drift:

Gene flow is a conservative factor that prevents the divergence of only partially isolated populations and is a major reason for the stability of widespread species and for the stasis of populous species.

…

In a small population alleles may be lost simply through errors of sampling (stochastic processes); this is known as genetic drift. Indeed, such a random loss of alleles may occur even in rather large populations. This is usually of no consequence in widespread species, because such locally lost genes will be quickly replaced by gene flow in subsequent generations. However, small founder populations, beyond the periphery of the range of a species, may have a rather unbalanced sampling of the gene pool of the parental population. This may facilitate a restructuring of the genotype of such populations.

(Mayr, Ernst. 2001. What Evolution Is . New York: Basic Books. p 98, 99).

Notice, therefore, that in the vast majority of populations, natural selection will seek to keep organisms AS THEY ALREADY ARE. In fact, Mayr says:

With drastic selection taking place in every generation, it is legitimate to ask why evolution is normally so slow. The major reason is that owing to the hundreds or thousands of generations that have undergone preceding selection, a natural population will be close to the optimal genotype. The selection to which such a population has been exposed is normalizing or stabilizing selection. This selection eliminates all of those individuals of a population who deviate from the optimal phenotype. Such culling drastically reduces the variance in every generation. And unless there has been a major change in the environment, the optimal phenotype is most likely that of the immediately preceding generations. All the mutations of which this genotype is capable and that could lead to an improvement of this standard phenotype have already been incorporated in previous generations. Other mutations are apt to lead to a deterioration and these will be eliminated by normalizing selection.

(ibid, 135)

So, on the one hand, natural selection is supposed to be the driving force behind evolution, but on the other hand, natural selection is the very thing keeping organisms from changing. Indeed, as far as the second method goes, I firmly accept the validity of natural selection! We can actually observe that process in work. Natural selection reduces variety; it does not create it. Indeed, Mayr acknowledges this, calling selection “an elimination process”:

Selection is not teleological (goal-directed). Indeed, how could an elimination process be teleological?

(ibid, 121)

So, whether one accepts Darwinism or Creationism, it only makes sense that organisms right now are as close to their “peak” (or, given our illustration, as close to sea level) as possible. Under Creationism, it’s because they were created that way; under Darwinism, it’s because they’ve had millions of years to evolve to their environment. In both instances, natural selection now seeks to keep organisms the way they are, because they are already as adapted as they can be to their environment. The only way to change this is to change the environment in some radical way.

But notice that most of the radical alterations of an environment do not grant us any new species, but rather only makes certain other species go extinct. For instance, the dodo bird was easy prey when Westerners arrived with their pets. The dodo didn’t evolve—it died out. On the other hand, when rabbits were introduced into Australia, their population exploded. In the process, they’ve driven several native species to the brink of extinction too. But notice that neither the rabbit themselves, nor the organisms that are dying out, have significantly altered their genotype in the face of this extremely different environment. The changes are too abrupt, and even granting Darwinism every advantage, there simply isn’t enough time for the species to garner sufficient mutations to avoid doom. The only way they could would be to have the environment slowly change, giving each species time to adapt to the slowly changing environment. Abrupt changes only result in mass extinction.

As far as your argument from incredulity, that it’s unlikely that “mistakes” would result in these types of happy occurrences, I believe that is a fairly strong argument, actually. First of all, life looks like it is designed. This is the strength of Paley’s watch argument. The default assumptions any reasonable person would make, when looking at life, would be to conclude that it is designed. As a result, the impetus really is on the Darwinist to prove that this sort of thing can happen without teleology. When something appears to be designed, the default is to assume that it is designed until it is proven otherwise, so the Darwinism does have the burden of proof here.

Furthermore, the Darwinist himself cannot escape teleological terminology. In fact, Darwinism is seeped with teleological terms. The very fact that they say, “Nature selects the fittest organism” is itself a teleological claim. First of all, there is the claim that nature is actually doing a selection, and selection implies a choice. Secondly, what is selected is the “fittest” and “fittest” implies that the organism has a specific role to play, and it plays that role “the best.” So, “natural selection” itself is a term loaded with teleology—it is claiming that nature is choosing the best organism to play a specific role. But that simply IS an affirmation of design. Darwinists try to get around this by claiming they are just using language metaphorically, but I have yet to find anyone who can explain Darwinism without resorting to teleological statements. And I daresay that if you cannot describe a process without reference to design, then you’re better just admitting that what you’re looking at IS design.

I mean, put it this way. There are certain crystals that have properties that make them take on very cool geometrical shapes and patterns. We know that these processes occur naturally without any apparent design in nature, and we can mimic this in a lab and create these crystal shapes ourselves, etc. A physicist may use teleological language at some point to talk about it—say, “A salt crystal wants to be cubic.” But the same physicist can also describe the chemical bonds and how the sodium and chlorine react to create this structure without using any teleological language at all, if the physicist so chooses.

But I have yet to read a biologist who can explain Darwinism in that way. Now, some may very well claim that trying to explain an entire ecosystem is vastly more complicated than trying to explain the interactions of two elements forming a salt crystal, so the biologist is forced to use teleological metaphors. But given that biology needs to deny teleology, the impetus really is on them to stop using teleological language.

So, as I said, I see nothing wrong with you arguing from incredulity. You are perfectly justified in being incredulous. The Darwinist has told you a counter-intuitive story that he supports with language that he specifically says is disallowed. Why shouldn’t you be incredulous?

More to the point, there are many examples that seem to affirm Behe’s irreducibly complexity argument. It is incumbent upon the Darwinist to explain how those types of systems can arise. The Darwinist likes to just assume Darwinism is true, and then fit all observation into that theory. But that is begging the question. To be scientific, he must derive his theory from the observations, not force the observations to fit his theory.

One of the strongest arguments Darwinists use is based on the fact that many different creatures look similar to each other in some fairly foundational ways, including sometimes in the genome itself. Even Michael Behe (of Darwin’s Black Box fame) believes in common decent in part because of a broken gene that is found in both chimps and humans. The assumption is that if some feature is the same in two different population groups, they must have a common ancestor with that same feature.

It is certainly plausible to assume that common features indicate a common cause, and common decent is one possible way that that could occur (whether likely or not is a different issue). But it is by no means the only way. Indeed, a common environment could just as easily explain certain common traits. That is, suppose that a gene is mutated due to radiation in the environment, and two species have that same gene and share the same environment. There is a good possibility that the gene will be mutated identically in both populations simply because of the environment, and it has nothing to do with lineage.

Naturally, I’m not saying that’s what happened with the broken gene found in both chimps and humans. I haven’t studied that particular issue enough to know either way; but I do know enough to not assume ipso facto that commonality must require common decent. Indeed, there is a specific example of which I am familiar that demonstrates just how dangerous it is for scientists to dogmatically claim decent in such a manner.

It’s called the marsupials of Australia (they also exist here and there in South America and Asia, but they reign in Australia).

Marsupials differ from placental mammals in that marsupials will give birth to their young prematurely, and then the offspring will move into a pouch (called the “marsupium”) in females, and they be raised in that pouch until they are fully developed. In contrast, placental mammals carry their offspring to full term before birth. These differences result in some anatomical differences, mostly in soft tissue, between placental mammals and marsupial mammals.

That said, there are many marsupials that look virtually identical to placental versions of the same animal, as pointed out in this article:

In some cases, placental and marsupial mammals physically resemble each other: the pouched marsupial mouse and the harvest mouse, the marsupial mole and the common mole, the marsupial wombat and the marmot, the tasmanian wolf and the wolf.

The comparison between animals is such that, for instance, in the case of the wolf it is virtually impossible for the untrained eye to tell the difference between an Australian marsupial wolf skeleton and a European placental wolf skeleton.

Let us assume Darwinism is true for this argument. If we see a marsupial wolf that looks almost exactly like a placental wolf, we would immediately argue that this proves that marsupial and placental wolves had a common wolf ancestor that diverged into two lineages: one placental and one marsupial. And indeed, for a time, this is what Darwinists believed. Likewise with the marsupial mouse and the placental mouse: they too would have had a common mouse ancestor that diverged into two lineages.

But Darwinists must also consider the case of the wolf and the mouse together. The assumption is that since both are mammals (regardless of whether marsupial or placental animals are in view) then at some point each had a common ancestor that diverged into different lineages, one of which lead to the mouse line and one of which lead to the wolf line. Thus far, the Darwinist is not in any trouble.

The problem comes when he tries to handle both of these. The Darwinist needs to account for how both the wolf and the mouse diverged into marsupial and placental lines. It seems fairly logical to say that the differences between a marsupial wolf and a placental wolf are not as extreme as the differences between a wolf and a mouse (after all, even the untrained eye can distinguish between the skeleton of a mouse and the skeleton of a wolf despite not being able to distinguish between the marsupial and placental skeletons of a wolf). This would mean that, in order of precedence, the mammal lineage should have split into the mouse lineage and the wolf lineage before each branch then split into placental and marsupial lineages.

Yet that would mean that the marsupial split needed to happen multiple times. Not just twice, but there are about twenty such species that have marsupial members with corresponding placental members, and there are also several marsupial species that only exist as marsupials.

To make matters worse, even if we could stipulate that for some unknown reason, marsupials just happen to arise a lot in the fossil record, we also have to deal with the timeline. Australia and Antarctica broke off from Gondwanaland roughly 45-80 million years ago, according to which modern geological timeline you pick. As most of us have heard repeatedly, dinosaurs ruled the world until about 65 million years ago, and the only mammals alive at the time were small shrew-like creatures. This means if we assume Australia broke off only 45 million years ago, mammals only had 20 million years to co-evolve before those mammals on Australia were isolated from the rest of the world. If Australia broke off closer to 80 million years ago, we’d only have those shrew-like creatures to develop all the species of marsupials in Australia.

Which is it? Well, today most Darwinists on this issue believe all the marsupials in Australia have come from just one species: microbiotheria. In other words, Darwinists today believe that the marsupial/placental split only happened once. After that, placental mammals developed into the wide variety of animals that exist in Europe and North America, and the marsupial mammals developed into the wide variety of animals that exist in Australia and parts of South America. In the meantime, certain lineages just happened to evolve such that the Tasmanian wolf looks exactly like a European wolf to all but the trained observer. And the marsupial mouse looks like the placental mouse. And the placental flying squirrel looks like the marsupial flying squirrel. Etc, etc, etc.

Never fear though. Darwinists already know about this and have proposed an explanation! It’s called convergent evolution. Convergence is the idea that two organisms from separate species follow similar evolutionary paths due to identical environmental pressure. Thus, according to Darwinists, there was one species on Australia that also lived on the rest of the continents with mammal life. Because the environment was similar, the decedents of organisms on either side of the divide both evolved along similar pathways, to the point that the marsupial wolf, mouse, mole, and squirrel look almost identical to the placental wolf, mouse, mole, and squirrel.

Unfortunately, Darwinists don’t see how this undercuts their best evidence for common descent: the similarity of features. For you see, one broken gene that is the same in chimps and humans is proof of common decent, but having an entire skeleton that looks indistinguishable to another organism isn’t proof of common decent—it is proof of convergence. I would think that if the environment is sufficient to explain widespread morphologic similarities between marsupial and placental mammals, it must be sufficient to explain one broken gene.

Yet when you consider the vast difference between a mouse and a wolf, there is really no reason to think that an environment that would so alter the reproductive system of certain types of mammals—such that one becomes marsupial and one becomes placental—that that same environment would somehow “magically” zero in on the exact phenotype of the wolf or mouse. Indeed, on Darwinian principles alone, would this not actually suggest that given a shrew-like mammal on Earth, it was inevitable that wolf-like creatures would come about? Doesn’t all this suggest some kind of teleology? It certainly doesn’t seem to make sense from a process of random mutation followed by natural selection. That may get you the difference between placental and marsupial mammals, but it certainly cannot explain the existence of similar placental and marsupial wolves, given how far along the Darwinian lineage they each are from their shrew-like predecessor.

While I have only just started it, the book has thus far been underwhelming. The introduction simply asserts repeatedly that evolution is true and only fundamentalists don’t believe it. For example (all italics mine):

What [Dover trial Judge] Jones had done was imply prevent an established truth from being muddled by biased and dogmatic opponents (xiii).

But evolution is far more than a “theory,” let alone a theory in crisis. Evolution is a fact (xiii).

…this volume gives a succinct summary of why modern science recognizes evolution as true (xiv).

Evolution gives us the true account of our origins, replacing the myths that satisfied us for thousands of years (xv).

But it is more than just a good theory, or even a beautiful one. It also happens to be true (xvi).

Indeed, if ever there was a time when Darwinism was “just a theory,” or was “in crisis,” it was the latter half of the nineteenth century, when evidence for the mechanism of evolution was not clear, and the means by which it worked—genetics—was still obscure. This was all sorted out in the first few decades of the twentieth century… (xvii).

True, evolution is as solidly established as any scientific fact (it is, as we will learn, more than “just a theory”), and scientists need no more convincing (xvii).

In 2006, for example, adults in thirty-two countries were asked to respond to the assertion “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” by answering whether they considered it true, false, or were unsure. Now, this statement is flatly true… (xviii).

Why teach a discredited, religiously based theory, even one widely believed, alongside a theory so obviously true? (xix).

My first through reading all that was: “The gentleman doth protest too much.” But the above isn’t why I wrote this post. Instead, I want to move on to one of Coyne’s analogies. Coyne writes:

Starting with the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1635, biologists began classifying animals and plants, discovering that they consistently fell into what was called a “natural” classification. Strikingly, different biologists came up with nearly identical groupings. This means that these groupings are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify, but tell us something real and fundamental about nature. But nobody knew what that something was until Darwin came along and showed that the nested arrangement of life is precisely what evolution predicts. Creatures with recent common ancestors share many traits, while those whose common ancestors lay in the distant past are more dissimilar. The “natural” classification is itself strong evidence for evolution.

Why? Because we don’t see such a nested arrangement if we’re trying to arrange objects that haven’t arisen by an evolutionary process of splitting and descent. Take cardboard books of matches, which I used to collect. They don’t fall into a natural classification in the same way as living species. You could, for example, sort matchbooks hierarchically beginning with size, and then by country within size, color within country, and so on. Or you could start with the type of product advertised, sorting thereafter by color and then by date. There are many ways to order them, and everyone will do it differently. There is no sorting system that all collectors agree on. This is because rather than evolving, so that each matchbook gives rise to another that is only slightly different, each design was created from scratch by human whim.

Matchbooks resemble the kinds of creatures expected under a creationist explanation of life. In such a case, organisms would not have common ancestry, but would simply result from an instantaneous creation of forms designed de novo to fit their environments. Under this scenario, we wouldn’t expect to see species falling into a nested hierarchy of forms that is recognized by all biologists (pp. 9-10).

Of course, Coyne’s entire premise is false. First off, it is not at all surprising that biologists tend to classify animals similarly when you realize that they are classifying animals for similar reasons. After all, Coyne makes a big deal about how you can sort matchbooks by “size” or “color” seeming to forget that there’s nothing stopping biologists from arranging animals by size or color too. But biologists don’t do that. Why? Because when they begin their classification, they start with the assumption that the animals are related, and then sort based on those assumptions. They are not looking to classify by size; they are looking to classify by how organisms are related.

I daresay that if you hand several matchbooks to various random collectors and tell them, “These are all related to each other and we want to see if you can find out how” they will come up with many arrangements that are similar to each other. Similarity in organization does not, as Coyne claims, prove these classifications “are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify.” That would only be true if each person came to classification without any prior concept of how they should be classified and still classified everything the same way. Furthermore, there are lots of dissimilarities in various classification schemes that are simply glossed over here by Coyne.

Coyne is also in error when he says “we don’t see such a nested arrangement if we’re trying to arrange objects that haven’t arisen by an evolutionary process of splitting and descent.” Has Coyne never seen a fractal, used a computer, or examined the management of a corporation? We see hierarchical sorting and nested arrangement all the time in intelligently created processes and objects.

Consider computer programs in more detail. With the advent of object oriented programming, the structure of all but the simplest of programs must be hierarchical. It is the most efficient means of writing complex programs across multiple platforms by hundreds of different programmers.

Furthermore, computer programs will often use the exact same libraries. Not because one program evolved from another, but because someone designed a bit of code that performed a specific function useful in many different applications, so the code snippet gets put in a library for other programmers to use. Entire modules can be created in the same way, and various different programs assembled from these modules. If someone was not aware that the programs were designed that way, it would be quite facile for someone to imagine the programs came about by descent with modification instead of being tailor made from bits of previously designed code. The evidence would seem compelling, but only because one starts off with the assumption that intelligence is not involved.

Coyne also has the following endnote that damages his matchbook analogy:

Unlike matchbooks, human languages do fall into a nested hierarchy, with some (like English and German) resembling each other far more than they do others (e.g., Chinese). You can, in fact, construct an evolutionary tree of languages based on the similarity of words and grammar. The reason languages can be so arranged is because they underwent their own form of evolution, changing gradually through time and diverging as people moved to new regions and lost contact with one another. Like species, languages have speciation and common ancestry. It was Darwin who first noticed this analogy (endnote 2, p. 235).

That’s right, after telling us that the nested arrangement proves that species were not created, Coyne shows a nested hierarchy of language. Yes, language. One of the indicators of intelligence. Talk about evolved irony!

Even if we agree with Coyne that language shows a “form of evolution” that form of evolution is most certainly NOT Darwinist. There are no random mutations followed by survival of the fittest; there is instead intelligent agents tinkering with their language. To the extent that language is an analogy of evolution, it is an analogy of theistic evolution, not Darwinism.

Thus far, Coyne’s arguments are far from persuasive. Indeed, Coyne seems to operate from a very simplistic viewpoint. He seems to believe that anything that indicates evolution must be proof of Darwinism, when in fact Darwinism is not the only theory of evolution (indeed, no one believes in Darwin’s Darwinism these days). Furthermore, Coyne seems to think that anything that looks like evolution cannot be equally explained by intelligent design either. Both of these flaws render his arguments considerably less than sound.

Perhaps he will improve as I get further in the book. But given past experience reading all the other “definitive” books on Darwinism, I won’t be holding my breath.

Do you, personally, believe in the theory of evolution, do you not believe in evolution, or don’t you have an opinion either way?

There are a couple of things to note with this question. First: “Do you, personally, believe…” As opposed to what? Do I corporately believe? Do I impersonally believe? That’s a dumb way of phrasing the question.

But even dumber is the “in the theory of evolution.” There is no such thing as THE theory of evolution. There are many competing (no pun intended) theories of evolution, of which neo-Darwinism is the most prolific currently.

So my answer to that question would have to be a “depends on how it’s defined.”

Because of the poor wording, the numbers we get back are probably not very relevant. In any case, according to Gallup, only 39% of Americans believe in evolution, while 36% have no opinion either way and 25% do not believe in evolution. Interestingly enough, Gallup is spinning this result as: “Only 4 in 10 Believe in Evolution” whereas I’m sure most Darwinists would rather spin it as: “Only 1 in 4 Do Not Believe in Evolution.”

You can read the Gallup article to see how they’ve tried to correlate belief in evolution to lack of church attendance and increased education, but I find it more interesting that despite a monopoly on publik edjukashun and despite a monopoly in the universities, only 55% of Americans could correctly answer Can you tell me with which scientific theory Charles Darwin is associated?

(BTW, not to be overly picky, but I actually think no one got this question right. The correct response is not, as Gallup indicated, “Evolution, natural selection, etc.” but rather “Yes” or “No.” The question asked is CAN you tell me, not Please tell me.)

Darwinists can complain that their message just isn’t being taught correctly all they want, but there remains an interesting correlation in the Gallup poll that must be explained:

Younger Americans, who are less likely to be religious than those who are older, are also more likely to believe in evolution. Still, just about half of those aged 18 to 34 say they believe in evolution.

Younger Americans are more likely to have not yet gone through college, since they aren’t old enough to be post-docs. Which to me seems like a contradiction to the rest of the poll. Namely, if younger Americans believe in evolution at the rate of 49% to 18% who don’t, then how is it that those who are only high school educated disbelieve it at such a high rate? The way I see it, the only way to reconcile that is to say that the sample of those with only a high school education must include an awful lot of people who are older than 34 years to “correct” for the high younger American statistics.

And by the way, if that is the case, then I don’t find it at all amazing that someone who last studied Darwinism 20, 30, 40 years ago won’t remember what it was, exactly.

I think if I were to spin this poll myself, I’d say that what it actually shows us is that those who are currently studying the theory of evolution believe it. And that, too, is logical since the dissent is never presented while you are studying the theory, and when you have intellectual peer pressure being put upon you to conform to the will of the professor (or high school teacher), you’re going to go with the crowd. Once you get out on your own, you realize two important facts: 1) Darwinism means absolutely nothing to you in your day-to-day living and 2) there are actually arguments against Darwinism out there.

That’s my take. I figure it’s worth just as much as anyone else who wants to cherry pick data from a Gallup poll.

First, notice that it’s a non-comparison comparison. Yeah, it doesn’t tell you what it tastes more like regular Dr Pepper than… That is, it could be “It tastes more like regular Dr Pepper than dirt.” Or it could be “It tastes more like regulard Dr Pepper than Pepsi tastes like regular Dr Pepper.” There’s so many ways to take that.

But more fundamentally, I noticed a simple fact. Diet Dr Pepper says it tastes more like regular Dr Pepper. But this is a uni-directional comparison. You never hear “Regular Dr Pepper tastes more like Diet Dr Pepper!”

That’s because regular Dr Pepper tastes so much better than Diet Dr Pepper that it would never want to make that comparison.

In the same way, of course, Darwinists will say, “Darwinism is just as proven as Einstein’s theory of relativity.” But you never hear a physicist say, “Einstein’s theory of relativity is just as proven as Darwin’s theory of evolution.” Yeah, that’s another uni-directional comparison.

Great sign that the comparison is bogus.

A) DNA is information.
B) Information cannot arise from a random, non-directed process.
C) Darwinism requires DNA to have arisen from a random, non-directed process.
D) Therefore, Darwinism cannot explain DNA.

In my first post, I demonstrated A) DNA is information. In this post, I will demonstrate B) Information cannot arise from a random, non-directed process.

The first thing to note is an example that Apolonio brought up. He said:

For example, we can conceive of a case where a person knocks over a scrabble box and the letters I Love You comes out with that order.

While this would be a semi-random process creating information, it is not using foundational forces. The specific example requires a person to knock over the Scrabble box. But even if we adjust for that and make it gravity pulling a box off a shelf or something similar, Scrabble tiles are not foundational in nature; they are designed. So the information still requires a non-foundational force (human ingenuity) to create the tiles which are used to create information in the pattern “I love you.”

Even then, the odds that “I Love You” would form are quite rare. Assuming an equal sample of each letter of the alphabet (as well as an infinite supply of them), you have 8 letters, so the odds of pulling these particular letters would be 1/26⁸, or 1 in 208,827,064,576, which is: 4.79 x 10 ^-12. If you include the space as a character, we have 10 characters and 27 possibilities each draw: 1/27¹⁰, or 4.9 x 10^-15.

In reality, however, Scrabble boxes do not contain an equal sampling of each letter. Instead you have 12 Es; 9 As & Is; 8 Os; 6 Ns, Rs, Ts; 4 Ds, Ls, Ss, Us; 3 Gs; 2 Bs, Cs, Fs, Hs, Ms, Ps, Vs, Ws, and Ys; 1 J, K, Q, X, Z. Finally, there are 2 blanks. This yields 100 total pieces. If we use the blanks as spaces, the odds for each letter in “I [blank] Love [blank] you” are:

I = 9/100
Blank = 2/99
L = 4/98
O = 8/97
V = 2/96
E = 12/95
Blank = 1/94
Y = 2/93
O = 7/92
U = 4/91

Because we are not dealing with an infinite number of tiles, we have to reduce how many are available after each selection. Thus, we have a 9/100 chance of pulling an I on the first draw from the box. If we do so, there are now only 99 tiles remaining, 2 of which will be blanks. That means we have a 2/99 shot for the blank, etc. Note that when a letter repeats (for instance, the O), we have to decrease the number remaining too. Thus, the first draw of an O is 8/97 but the second is 7/92 (because the first draw picks one of the Os). Finally, we get the combined odds by the following:

9/100 x 2/99 x 4/98 x 8/97 x 2/96 x 12/95 x 1/94 x 2/93 x 7/92 x 4/91, which is:

774,144 / 62,815,650,955,529,472,000

Or 1.23 x 10^-14

Which is roughly 1 in 81 trillion. So even though the tiles were created by humans, a random arrangement of them to spell out “I love you” is still extremely rare.

The above does, however, help us understand a bit about DNA. As most are already aware, DNA uses 3-base codons to create amino acids. There are four possible DNA bases (ACGT), and that means that means 4³ (64) possible combinations of those letters. However, there are only 20 amino acids. As a result, amino acids are often encoded by multiple numbers of codons. For instance, Leucine (L) can be encoded by CTT, CTC, CTA, CTG, TTA, and TTG. Which means there are 6 possibilities for L. In fact, quickly going through the amino acids (using their single-letter code name) we find:

I = 3
L = 6
V = 4
F = 2
M = 1
C = 2
A = 4
G = 4
P = 4
T = 4
S = 6
Y = 2
W = 1
Q = 2
N = 2
H = 2
E = 2
D = 2
K = 2
R = 6
Stop = 3

As you can see, all 64 possible combinations would be represented in the above. Therefore, we can say that given a random piece of DNA with 3 codons, there is a 3/64 chance that it is I (Isoleucine) and a 2/64 chance that it is N (Asparagine), etc.

Because base pairs are so prevalent, we can treat them as if there is an infinite supply of them. As a result, if we wanted to calculate what the odds would be that six base pairs will code for Isoleucine and then Asparagine, we would simply multiply 3/64 and 2/64 to yield: 6/4096, or about 1 in 683.

Of course, proteins can have hundreds of amino acids chained together in polypeptides. (In fact, by convention, most scientists do not consider a polypeptide chain to be a protein until it has at least 50 amino acids in it, although that is an arbitrary dividing line.) Because of their size, the odds of even a single 50-amino acid polypeptide forming are quite rare. In fact, even if they were simply a chain of L (Leucine), which has a 6/64 chance of forming for each L, the odds of 50 formulating would be 6⁵⁰ / 64⁵⁰, which is roughly 8 x 10³⁸ / 2 x 10⁹⁰ which is approximately 4 x 10^-52, or 1 chance in 3 x 10⁵¹.

Clearly, this method of explaining DNA is insufficient to explain even a basic protein, let alone complex cells and higher organisms.

This brings us to our next point, which is something that Mighty Pile brought up: the definition of information (i.e., something that is non-repeating, non-random, and not based on foundational forces) seems to exclude the ability of random, non-directed processes in the first place. As such, B) seems to be proven by stipulation, which means it relies on a circular argument.

However, when we examine B) carefully we see that it does not rely on circular reasoning when cashed out. To demonstrate how that is possible, I must first point out that the Darwinist must assert the opposite of B). They must assert that information can arise from random, non-directed processes (as evidenced by premise C)). And this is demonstrated by the fact that you are reading this blog post, which is information.

This blog post has an author. The author is not a random, non-directed process. But, if Darwinism is correct, at some point we can link my existence back to a random, non-directed process. Therefore, in a causative sense, the Darwinist would say that a random, non-directed process somehow created a non-random, directed process that was able to create information.

And it is because this option remains open to the Darwinist that B) does not entail circular reasoning. All the Darwinist needs to do is to show that Information can arise from forces that are non-random, non-repetitive (to exclude crystals) and non-foundational if those forces (we will call them meta-forces) are themselves built on random, non-directed forces. In other words, the Darwinist can argue: “Information comes from meta-forces, which are non-foundational; but meta-forces come from foundational forces.” Putting it into this two-step process would avoid the circular reasoning charge, while also giving the Darwinist a possible route to establishing C).

So the question now becomes, can random, non-directed processes create non-random and non-repeating meta-processes that could then create information in the form of DNA? DNA is one of the simplest information processes we can think of (compare it to trying to establish the framework for a spoken language), but even it is vastly complicated. In order for DNA to function, it has to store information that is used to create amino acids that bond together to form proteins that then create the mechanism for storing and reading DNA. In other words, in order for DNA to function biologically, we need to have a loop where DNA is used to create the processes needed to create more DNA. DNA is copied via cellular processes that are created with proteins that are themselves created by DNA. Thus, we have a vicious cycle going on.

But before we get to the loop, is there a simple way to just encode amino acids into DNA? Amino acids, after all, are fairly easy to create in a test tube, as Stanley Miller demonstrated (albeit his experiment does not prove what he thought it proved). Using those same “primitive” conditions, however, it is not possible to create DNA.

DNA also presents a problem because, as you’ve seen above, sometimes as many as six different DNA codons can represent a single amino acid. While moving from a DNA codon to an amino acid is easy, moving from the amino acid to a particular strand of DNA is much harder.

Due to the limitations of DNA, Francis Crick proposed that life began based on RNA instead of DNA. RNA is only single stranded, as opposed to the DNA double helix. RNA can also sometimes function similarly to proteins. DNA, however, is much more stable and less prone to errors (which is why an intelligent being would pick DNA instead of RNA to start life off; and which is why Darwinists claim DNA was “selected for” by Natural Selection).

Which brings up an important point. The “central dogma” (as Crick named it) is DNA to RNA to protein. It doesn’t go in the opposite order. (There are a few exceptions to the strictness of the “central dogma”, most notably RNA viruses (like HIV) which go from a single strand of RNA to DNA before then going through the “central dogma”; but there are no instances that I am aware of where proteins go to RNA then to DNA.) This makes it highly unlikely that amino acids bonded to become proteins and then those proteins created RNA that was then made into DNA and eventually stored in cells.

That means we had to start someway with DNA or RNA and then create proteins from that; but in order to create the proteins, it means we must have the structure in place by which RNA can be converted to a protein. Once again, we’re left with the chicken and the egg problem. And this system cannot have arisen by blind chance, since as you’ve seen even a single protein of 50 of the most common amino acids has astronomically long odds at forming randomly.

Regardless of where we start, we have to have some method of going from a random soup of amino acids to a particular sequence of amino acids being coded in information, be it RNA or DNA. But this will only start to happen if there is a reason for the information of a protein’s make-up to be converted to RNA or DNA.

That DNA is useful for life is not debated. Suppose that the amino acid “soup” manages to create a protein that could be used by a cell later on. It would be useful for the cell to have a way to rapidly create this protein. And the protein is created from amino acids that can be stored in DNA. Obviously, if we have this end in mind, we could design the process by which the DNA code comes about. But this requires teleology, which Darwinism denies. We cannot have the end of a working cell in mind; we have to have completely random processes that somehow create the necessary steps involved.

But suppose that we are left with only the random creation of the system to begin the evolutionary process. According to modern materialistic theory, life first became possible about 3.5 billion years ago. That is, the Earth cooled enough, the atmosphere was in the correct state, water existed, etc. so that life would not be extinguished if it was formed. Amazingly enough, according to these same scientists, the first life on Earth appeared roughly 3.5 billion years ago. In other words, as soon as it was possible for life to exist on Earth, life did exist on Earth. This must mean that the creation of life ought to be an “easy” process, given materialistic claims. If it is easy, then it should not rely on a process that has such poor odds of succeeding. Either life’s occurrence on Earth was a miracle against all odds, or else this cannot be how life began on Earth.

NOTE: This post has been updated since it was originally posted to correct the line: “While this would be a random process creating information, it is not using foundational forces” to “While this would be a semi-random process creating information, it is not using foundational forces.”

But more importantly is the fact that Natural Selection, in order to work at all, is an All-Or-Nothing proposition. That is, favorable traits must be selected for while unfavorable traits must die out. In one of his comments, Mighty Pile said:

Some traits DO confer an advantage to a particular organism and its progeny. While fit individuals certainly do die sometimes and unfit individuals certainly do live sometimes, the fit organisms would outcompete the unfit ones in large numbers. One antelope’s chance vs another antelope’s chance may be a 49%-51% split. But in a whole herd, the one that gets eaten will almost always be of the slower variety, or of the sick or injured variety. This is, of course, supposition based on logic. I don’t know how I’d prove it right now; it seems obvious in any context I can come up with for it. The difference between fit and unfit would probably be very small most times, setting up a sort of tipping point situation. I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you, right?

In response, I pointed out that one would be foolish to wager everything he owned for a chance to win a billion dollars if he only had a 51% chance of winning it and a 49% chance of losing it. This did get me to thinking a bit further, however, and I developed the following.

Suppose you start with 100 individuals. Each begins with $100. Each wagers $100 in order to gain $100. The odds are 51% win and 49% lose each bet, but with the following stipulation: as soon as you hit $0, you’re out of the game. You cannot continue. This is important to mimic Natural Selection, because as soon as you die you can no longer reproduce. It’s over. So you need a final set point.

How long will it take for a person to reach $1,000 given this structure? And how many people will hit GR before that occurs?

I made up an Excel spreadsheet to show this to me (click here for graphic). It assumes a literal 51% – 49% split for each round (in other words, I don’t randomize the data; this is the “ideal”). The vertical axis is how much money people have; the horizontal axis is the number of rounds. The number plotted in each cell is how many people remain for each row (i.e., how many people have whatever money is in that row). The bottom line beneath the graph simply sums how many people remain (i.e., those who did not hit GR). The cell at the far right of the 0 line is the grand total of those who hit GR.

Thus, we begin with 100 people holding $100. After the first round, 49 people are bankrupt and 51 people have $200. In the second round, 51% of those 51 people (26.01) at $200 will gain another $100 for a total of $300, while 49% (24.99) lose $100 to go back to $100 total. For the third round, we again calculate each group: 51% of the 26.01 (13.27) at $300 will go to $400; simultaneously, 49% of the 26.01 (12.74) drop back to $200. In the meantime, 51% of the 24.99 (12.74) who dropped to $100 will gain $100 and make it back to $200. They combine with the 12.74 who lost $100 to drop down to $200 to make 25.49. Finally, 49% of the 24.99 (12.25) who were at $100 will go bust.

Note that unlike in real life (where a whole number of people either win or lose), these calculations are made with the decimal points from the previous numbers still intact. In fact, I used dependent formulas for each cell. If we were rounding before we did the math, the answers would vary slightly.

And the results: It takes 11 rounds for the first person to hit $1,000 (and that’s only if you round 0.58 up to 1; the line does reach in round 9, but the value would round down to 0). In the meantime, 75.93 people have gone bust. That means that in order to get one person from $100 to $1,000, 76 people have to go bankrupt. And that’s starting with 100 people. A 1% advantage does not provide much of an advantage at all under these circumstances.

Natural Selection falls to the same principal. Just because a favorable mutation may confer a 1% advantage onto an antelope does not mean that the antelope really has that much more of an advantage than other antelope. And I should point out that living systems are actually far more complex than even this illustrates.

The key to why this works this way is because the chart is capped at 0. Once you hit 0, it’s over. That provides a literal line in the sand that has a huge impact. Because in Natural Selection death is such a line in the sand, this demonstrates that even a 1% advantage holds no real benefit to the furtherance of a trait in the species.

In reality, survival rarely comes down to a single trait though. Chance encounters are almost always going to outweigh any mutational advantage of a single trait. Consider all the following that mitigate against the classical view of Natural Selection:

* An antelope is born with 1% more speed than any other antelopes who have been born. However, when the antelope is a newborn, he is not as fast as the adults. As a result, despite being 1% faster than all other newborns, he is still slower than the slowest adult; therefore, he remains a preferential target for predators. If he is near adults at the edge of the herd when lions attack, they will go after him rather than the adults. This brings to mind the second point:

* As Mighty Pile pointed out, there is an oft repeated joke that one need only be faster than the slowest prey when a predator attacks. This, however, ignores the fact that if you are faster than me, but you are five feet away from a hungry bear while I am a quarter mile away from the hungry bear, the bear will catch you before you can run far enough to surpass me and make me a target.

* Sometimes pure dumb luck happens. A ram may be the fittest ram ever, but if he slips and breaks his leg, he’ll be eaten. And accidents happen quite often in nature. And even aside from nature. A highly specialized and advanced snake in Baghdad might happen to get hit by a mortar round fired from an insurgent that was not intended to strike the snake, but did. Or a random lightning strike could kill an elk in the forest who was “superior” to the other elk. When it comes to random events, traits have no bearing on survivability. There is no survivability trait for bad luck.

* For that matter, the strongest bull may be cut down by a viral infection that attacks only strong animals, leaving the weak bulls alive. The weak bulls are “more fit” (by definition, since they survived) but once the infection runs its course the herd would have been better off with the stronger bulls.

* A mutation for greater intelligence might occur in a sheep that’s also the least hearty sheep in the herd. Despite the fact that this intelligence trait would benefit the herd as a whole, the sheep dies of an illness before reproducing.

So survival rarely is about any one trait anyway. Instead, to have the best chance at surviving, organisms need to have a wide range of traits, any one of which may or may not be relevant at any particular time. But some traits are mutually exclusive. Because evolution must be blind (in a materialistic world) it cannot predict which trait will be needed in the future. And because it cannot predict what is needed (after all, it is non-teleological; and furthermore, even intelligent agents like weathermen cannot predict what will happen in the environment tomorrow), the random forces of nature will far outweigh any slight statistical advantage that individuals in a herd have.

So the only way to have beneficial mutations that avoid the GR problem is if they grant a far greater than 1% chance upon the individuals (after all, think of mutations, which convey far more than a 1% disadvantage to the individuals and therefore are seen!), or if they occur more often than random mutations would enable them to occur so that more individuals get the trait (remember, we started the above graph with 100 individuals already having $100, and 76 of them went bankrupt before a single person reached $1,000; if you had 1,000 people to begin with, 760 would go bankrupt…but you’d have 10 make it to the $1,000 mark, so clearly having more individuals get the same mutation would help), or the mutation would have to occur in an individual that is already “more fit” due to other traits to begin with (and that brings up the converse: a detrimental mutation can occur in those who are “more fit” due to other traits and therefore be “selected for” simply because it’s riding along with the system; whereas a “less fit” organism might evolve a wonderful trait that cannot overcome the aspects that make it “less fit” and therefore that trait is not “selected for”).

That’s a lot of front-loading you need before you can get the system going. Living systems are far too complex to be affected greatly by any slight advantage in a single trait.