Evolution is a faith. People that deny such are denying reality. So many arguments are not made and so many questions are not asked. Common ancestry supporters often foeget to calculate if the supposed ancestor could have had the necessarry number of mutations in the time frame of supposed evolutionary movement. Most of the time the andswer is no do the math. Human and chimp 4% 6 million years sounds like a lot but if you take the faster mutating of the two have every mutation in the right direction with none of them reversals or corrections you end up with 4 million generations to achieve that number of mutations. Generational spans of at least 10 years would support minimum of 40 million year transition. If you take the end result mutation rates for humans it would be 20 million generations for that much differentiation. Even if it was a controlled path. Also over 99 percent of mutations on active enzyme sequences are fatal. Mal formed enzyme almost always equals death.
A very large portion of our dna is made of viral encodings that are cross species. And regional often common ancestory could be concluded when only geographical correlation is reality. Hence the huge correlation between non intermixing human groups genetic variations when exposed to common viral afflictions. Commoner and royal blood lines etc. You can still pinpoint region when no direct genetic intermixing. And you compared to global populations would calculate a more recent. Common ancestor even if their wasnt one. How dna folds can actually be more important than the sequence. A little more math on the mutation rate side disproves alot of supposed common ancestors even if you assume perfect linear mutations towards the divergent goal.
Hi Clint,
Iām no moderator, just a common Joe on the Forum, but let me be the first to welcome you here! Always glad to see new participants, especially those with divergent views.
To get the most targeted response to your comments, you may want to start a new thread. This is a slightly older thread, and so people may not click on it if theyāre not aware thereās a new guy posting here.
May I humbly recommend that youāll get the best response if you make each of your points separately and clearly? You have quite a few issues that you bring up here in rapid succession without much background or explanation. If your goal is to vent at the bad-guy evolutionists, well then thatās all well and good. But if you want to engage with people and maybe even convince them, then you may want to put in the time to explain your thoughts coherently. (It wouldnāt hurt to use spell-check and maybe grammar check, too. I honestly donāt normally comment on that, because can be perceived as kind of rude to do so, but it was distracting for me as I read your post so it may be distracting for others as well.)
Lastly, if you want to convince people, you may also want to learn what they believe. Some of these issues you address have been discussed before on the Forum and in BioLogos blogs; it only takes a moment to do site-wide searches for things like āmutation ratesā to see what kind of pushback you might expect from your target audience.
Peace and blessings to you, brother.
AMW
Hi Clint, welcome to the forum. I moved your post to its own topic since it did not really directly address anything in the article it was posted under.
The biggest problem with this post, beyond its scientific inaccuracy, is the implicit claim that āfaithā means believing something outlandish in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Years ago, when I read Dawkinsā The God Delusion as a Christian, I was offended and angered by this shallow misrepresentation of faith. Dawkins called it āblind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.ā If thatās what faith is, then it is truly insane. I think that most believers here at BioLogos find that view of faith offensive or at least way wrong.
In the kind of ironic twist that is tragically typical of āscience-faith conversations,ā your post seems to be a celebration of that kind of faith: accepting an outlandish proposal, in the teeth of the evidence. That proposal being: that millions of well-read people, and thousands of brilliant scientists, have somehow overlooked a simple arithmetic refutation of common descent. My friends on BL would (and should) be offended if I called that āfaith.ā
Well said, Stephen.
Unfortunately, the english word āfaithā has taken on this range of meaning - and Dawkins and the like are more than happy to claim that sort of meaning for the āfaithā that is described in the Bible.
The greek word for āfaithā is pistis - and it carries a range of meanings: belief, trust, loyalty, and allegiance. The idea of āblind faithā or ābelief in spite of the evidenceā isnāt part of that range.
I have this on the brain because I recently spoke on this topic at our church - those interested can find a video of it here.
Here is a nice primer on molecular clocks that can get us a little more on the same page perhaps:
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/neutrality-and-molecular-clocks-100492542
Genetics is fairly complicated- is there anything specific youād like to focus on for the science side in addition to perhaps being open to the fact that evolution is not a āblind faithā as you appear to be using the phrase.
Many scientists, like most theologians, forgot or never took first year probability and statistics. I just read a lecture by Werner Heisenberg (donāt have it with me) in which he describes the ālaws of scienceā as predicting the probability of an event, not the event, itself. My gut tells me that this conclusion also applies to Godās Laws.
For example, Acts tells us that God killed two people for ālying to the Holy Spirit.ā If The Law Of God forbids lying then Godās justice is not impartial.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for joining in the discussion. Itās always good to have a new friend join.
Rather than accuse an entire scientific community of utter incompetence in their own field of study, perhaps we could have a constructive discussion if you were to document a specific set of data that seem to clash with the prevailing theory.
In your initial post, you did not link to any peer-reviewed articles (best) or summary articles that cite the peer-reviewed literature (very good). Without such references, I am unable to weigh the value of your evidence and the strength of your argument. I suspect other readers would have the same problem.
I offer this feedback so that our discussion might become more fruitful.
Thanks,
Chris Falter
Iām not a scientistā¦ and I took a year of probability and statistics just to major in Psychology?
I donāt think you can make a sweeping statement that āMany scientistsā are guilty of not knowing probabilities and statisticsā¦ unless you are taking a very small percentage like 0.001 (one tenth of one one percent) and multiplying it times millions of scientistsā¦ like:
0.001 x 10,000,000 = 10,000. This would be 10,000 scientists in the whole world (if there are 10 million scientists).
Soā¦ I have to sayā¦ 10,000 scientists would be MANY ā¦ but not a LOT of many ā¦
I confess I have deficits in math, stemming back to poor instruction in high school. But even we ātechniciansā of science in medicine are trained a bit in prob. and statistics and have to know the basics in order to evaluate the validity of studies and such. I confess, the calculations our computational genetics brothers and sisters expose us to here stretch the boundaries of my understanding, but any practicing scientist has to have a good working knowledge of such things to function.
So, back to the statement of āevolution is a faith.ā At least in my case, I would say rather that it is a conclusion, but you are correct that that conclusion is based on faith stances. I believe that the evidence of an old earth is accurate and true, I believe we can trust our senses and our minds. I believe that God is truth and wants us to come into relationship with him, and would not deceive in such a way as to push us away. I believe these things can be reconciled and integrated into faith in Jesus Christ.
Well, letās see if that adds up.
The observed human mutation rate is about 50 to 100 mutations per person per generation, so letās go with the lower number of 50. Letās use 25 years for each generation, 5 million years since the chimp and human lineages split, and a constant population of 1 million individuals.
Over those 5 million years there would have been 200,000 generations. With 1 million in each generation and 50 mutations per person that would have been 50 million mutations per generation. That puts us at 10 trillion mutations that would have occurred in the human lineage.
There are about 40 million mutations that separate the human and chimp lineages (35 million substitutions and 5 million indels), so letās split that in half and say that 20 million of those mutations occurred in the human lineage. This means that out of the 10 trillion mutations that did occur in the human lineage we only needed to keep 20 million of them, which is just 0.0002% of the mutations that did occur.
Iām not seeing any major problems in this math.
Do you have a reference for this claim? Just for a comparison, the cytochrome c gene in yeast and humans differs by 40% or so, and all of those differences are not lethal in either humans or yeast.
Endogenous retroviruses make up about 4% of the human genome which isnāt much relative to the rest of the genome. Not sure where you are going with these statements.
Say 7.5 million years since the last common ancestor, 25 years/generation in both species, thatās 300,000 generations.
Say 100 mutations/person/generation (mostly effectively neutral). Expect genetic drift to fix 100 mutations/generation. (Thatās the standard assumption.) Thatās 30 million mutations fixed by genetic drift per species.
3 billion base pairs in the genome (similar for both species) so thatās 1% in each species; 2% difference between species.
Please note, Richard Buggs is the expert, not me, so Iām accepting his figures.
The average is 88.9% so letās round up to 90%. Neutral theory can account for about 1/5 of the genetic difference.
However since these are neutral mutation they probably have very little effect on the phenotypical differences between humans and chimps.
If we look at beneficial mutations ReMine has calculated that only 1670 beneficial mutations can have been fixed in 10 million years through natural selection. (ReMineās paper was rejected by Nature not because of any error in his maths or conclusions but because the reviewers thought this was already well known.)
Perhaps some population geneticist can tell us how fixing of beneficial mutations would affect fixing of neutral ones. I assume some would ride on the coat-tails while others would be adversely affected.
Iām seeing major problems in this maths.
Royal blood lines are rarely if ever āpureā and royal and noble males certainly ensured their genes ended up among the ācommonersā. The creation of genealogies to support the ānobilityā or āroyaltyā of oneās bloodline was well known. Also would you care to indicate what regions and groups have no genetic mixing (Iām not sure what you mean by ādirectā here). There are areas where there is less mixing (the caste system in India for instance in the last 1500 years) but never none.
Iām seeing major problems in your switching of units.
If a deletionāa single mutationāremoves 50 bases of a 100-base sequence, what is the percent identity using
???
Hi Chris,
Itās good that youāre doing the math. It seems that your math makes the assumption that every mutation is a point mutation that results in a single, one base-pair difference in the genome.
This is not a valid assumption. Many single-event mutations result in differences of hundreds or thousands of base-pairs. Here are some examples:
- Inversions
- Copy number variation
- Gene duplication
- Transposons
I found a gentle introduction to the concept here. For more detail, if youāre interested, Iād have to refer you to biologists who hang out on the forum, such as @DennisVenema and @T_aquaticus
Grace and peace,
Chris Falter
That would be a total of 60 million mutations. The actual number is around 40 million mutations that separate the human and chimp genomes:
If we are talking about the number of fixed mutations then you have to count a single 500 base pair indel the same as you would a 1 base substitution. Donāt get your units mixed up.
From what I have read, Buggs has confused lack of orthology between the sequenced genomes and lack of orthology in the actual genomes. There are gaps in the sequenced DNA for both humans and chimps, and there are also chunks of DNA that are kept out of alignments because no one knows where that DNA fits into the larger genome.
Added in edit:
There was a thread a while back where Buggs himself discusses these numbers with other posters at BioLogos:
That is correct. Neutral mutations can can become fixed with the rest of the allele when a beneficial mutation occurs.
Even your own math puts the number of mutations at 60 million mutations which is 20 million more than actually exists, according to the chimp genome paper.
An average of 30 mutations per generation and fixing 100 how does that lead to progression it doesent. Most theoretical ranges for mutation rates anticipate 30 to 50 mutations per generation or in actuality depending on conditions .1 to 1 per year so with quicker development of progeny the effective rate decreases because of healthier cells and less probability of negative exposure. So 3 million years with only 1 in 4 shot of giving most mutations to offspring due to multiple chromosones and mutations not being present throughout all of your chromosones etc your tree falls apart. Also a population of a million people is an unreasonable hypothosis throughout almost the entire 3 million year time frame logical estimates would be drastically smaller and intermixing unlikely. So 300000 base pare mutations vs 40000000, genetic material does not and cannot conglomerate in the method you have proposed bc none of them would have the same mutation on both chromosones or from both parents. So likelyhood of passing on mutation to second generation at best 1 in 4 to 1 in 8 depending on the type of mutation. And that progresses throughout future generations as well which is like red hair passing down in background it can happen but is unlikely. None of youre calculations acxount for this. So at most on average you end up with same number of total mutations in a lineage equal to the mutations per year in a single lineage, they do not spread throughout a population as proposed above and are not typically selected for unless drastically benificial. The total number of mutations in a population gives it diversity yes but cannot be combined to form total genetic change. It cannot work that way. If it did then we would evolve that same amount now with every generation. In actuality a larger population eventually leads to stagnation and a virtual impossibility of genetic progression in mathamatical terms.
Thatās 50 mutations PER PERSON per generation. I think you forgot to take that into account.
You are forgetting that each offspring also has 50 new mutations all their own.
āFor a diploid population of size N and neutral mutation rate u, the initial frequency of a novel mutation is simply 1/(2N), and the number of new mutations per generation is 2Nu . Since the fixation rate is the rate of novel neutral mutation multiplied by their probability of fixation, the overall fixation rate is 2Nu x (1/2Nu) = u. Thus, the rate of fixation for a mutation not subject to selection is simply the rate of introduction of such mutations.ā