Probably trillions, given that something in the (Fermi estimate) ballpark of 100 mutations per generation is typical for large genomes, and bacteria probably had something like (Fermi estimate again) a trillion generations before Eukaryotes appears.
Modification of an existing function over deep time is a pretty good summary of evolution, though somewhat incomplete.
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Good grief. This is a rather unique conversation then, is it not?
One commenter says that he/she is a biologist and finds irreducible complexity around every corner, then another commenter answers that statement by saying he/she has never heard of an example of irreducible complexity that “stands up to scrutiny” and asks for examples that are “valid”.
After entering the conversation, I then find out that the irreducible organization that allows the cell to specify itself in an encoded memory is (apparently) disallowed in the question of valid examples of IC because it appears prior to the onset of Darwinian evolution.
One wonders where this imposing rule comes from; it certainly doesn’t appear in the original comments that launched the topic of irreducible complexity in this thread to begin with. And it certainly couldn’t be imposed on the grounds that we know nothing about nature of the organization in question — giving the fact that it was predicted to exist prior to being confirmed by experiment.
A strange conversation indeed.
Simple: their main tenet comes from scientific materialism, which is atheistic at root. The idea that to be true something has to be 100% scientifically and historically true isn’t found anywhere in the Bible, it comes from scientific materialism.
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YEC states that there is no conflict between scripture and science. That means that if we understand scripture correctly, and properly interpret the evidence from nature, there will be no conflict. Of course, we may not–actually do not–completely understand either the Bible or the evidence from nature. Scripture doesn’t change, although our understanding of it may. There is continually new evidence discovered from God’s creation which we can learn from and interpret from a biblical worldview.
And isn’t scientific materialism the basis for evolutionary science, to which YEC does not hold?
Here is a quote from wikipedia: Young Earth creationism (YEC ) is a form of creationism which holds as a central tenet that the Earth and its lifeforms were created by supernatural acts of the Abrahamic God between approximately 6,000 and 10,000 years ago
Scientific materialism asserts that only the material world exists. That is a far cry from YEC.
This is 180 degrees–the exact opposite–of what you have stated.
YEC insists that the scriptures are 100% scientifically and historically accurate. That is not an idea from the scriptures, it’s an idea from scientific materialism.
Actually it isn’t. It can be, isn’t necessarily. One foundation for evolutionary science is the belief that God speaks in nature.
By relying on the premise that the scriptures are 100% scientifically and historically correct YEC is basing its beliefs on scientific materialism.
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So do I and many others here who understand the antiquity of the cosmos and affirm that God used evolution as a creative process.
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Actually, those ideas are scriptural ideas–directly from scripture. It seems rather incongruous to assert otherwise.
Jesus is the truth according to scripture. So when God speaks through scripture, it is also completely truth. All truth is God’s truth, whether found in scripture or found in nature. Here are two of many of the passages in the Bible that clearly refute your assertion.
2 Timothy 3:16, 17 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. All scripture is God-breathed–inspired by God.
Further, Romans 1:20 states-- For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. God reveals himself through creation, what he has made.
Contrary to your assertion, these are truths directly from the Bible. I take history to mean the history as recorded in scripture. The Bible is God’s history book of the world, and the YEC view is that it includes the history of creation. That is completely contrary to scientific materialism.
Does anyone else in this thread want to weigh in? Does anyone else here believe that the YEC view of creation is atheistic?
I believe that the YEC view elevates science above scripture by insisting that ancient literature has to be correct according to modern science while understanding neither.
I also believe that the YEC view conflates philosophical naturalism with methodological naturalism in their misunderstanding of how science works.
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Thanks for your comment. I understand and appreciate that. My statement was to clarify the YEC position, and not to exclude those who hold to EC.
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You did not fully understand the implications because I am in accord with @St.Roymond.
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No, they aren’t. They’re actually fairly recent ideas in human history. Scripture has no concept of science anywhere, and several literary genres in scripture record events in ways that are not meant to be taken literally.
What’s “incongruous” is interpreting ancient literature without bothering to ask what its worldview is and what type of literature it is and what the author meant by his words.
Yes – including through an ancient universe, and an ancient Earth, and evolution.
I’ll note here in passing that back before Galileo ever heard of a lens Hebrew scholars who grew up with the language examined the text of Genesis 1 and determined that:
- the universe began as something smaller than a grain of mustard (i.e. the smallest possible size)
- the universe is ancient beyond human comprehension
- the universe, full of fluid, expanded rapidly beyond comprehension, until
- the fluid thinned and light could shine, so God ordered light into existence
- the Earth is also ancient, beyond human counting
Good scholars of the scriptures believed the universe and Earth were ancient before astronomy or geology came along, let alone evolution.
That’s a distortion of what I said, which was that YEC is founded on a premise from an atheistic worldview. It’s why atheists so often make arguments with the same erroneous reasoning.
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I don’t think that YECism is atheistic in nature. I think it’s the opposite of atheism. It’s obviously very theistic. But it is very anti science. YECism is extremely anti science. They use a lot of scientific jargon to make their pseudoscience concepts seem more legitimate. Same for old earth creationism. They just use a dash of science and blend it into their pseudoscience. Anything that is intelligent design based at some point has to leave science behind and some don’t mess with the science, they just step into a gap in science and fill that gap in with god. Which is what all the Christians in here do. Myself included. I believe God at some point had something to do with creation. A part of me thinks that god was somehow developed during creation and just super advanced, but I can’t find anything to really justify it theology as much as I try and so I just put that concept in a box and don’t really use it.
Im also not a deist. I think the Holy Spirit operates within creation. I think God is very active in our life, just that he was not guiding things like abiogenesis, evolution and so on.
But nothing in creation demands that a supernatural intelligence was required for it to work.
Oh dear – that paper. It’s an absolute train wreck, conceptually speaking. I won’t go into the details here. You can read about the biggest problem with the paper in this post, or in the series of posts that start with this one.
There are two core problems with all of these attempts to show that specific biological systems are highly improbable. The first is that to do the calculation, you have to estimate the probability that the system would occur by the proposed mechanisms, i.e. by evolution. But no one can do that. Calculating the probability of a protein forming by the random assembly of amino acids is just pointless.
The second problem is that calculating the probability of any specific structure forming is also pointless, since evolution isn’t aiming for a particular structure. It’s like calculating the probability that I would have exactly the genetic variants I do, given all of the possible offspring that my ancestors could have produced. The probability is vanishingly small, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything supernatural about my genetics: it just means that I’m one of a vast number of possible offspring that could have been produced. Similarly, for assessing evolution, we have to calculate the probability that any functional structure will form, and that’s not something we have the remotest idea of how to do – it’s a much harder problem than the first one, and even the first one is far beyond our ability.
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There are no rules (other than basic ones about civility and forum scope). Everyone, including you, can say what they like and ignore what they like.
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Did you read the scientific publication of Thorvaldson yourself?
I suggest you google ‘Stephen Schaffner’ and note the one associated with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
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I’m wondering if any of the YEC folks writing for the YEC sites have ever taken a rudimentary course in probability.
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I’d seen it before but never read it through. In response to your question here, though, I decided to read it in detail (skimming some of the boilerplate about frequentist and Bayesian statistics and the like). Holy cow – it’s worse than I thought. Pretty much all of the work that they cite to support their conclusions comes from a handful of ID and creationists sources, while many of the references to the conventional scientific literature seem to be window dressing.
Take section 4.1. There, the authors center their evaluation of the rarity of functional proteins on a single study by Axe (a Discovery Institute guy) on beta-lactamase, which is one source of antibiotic resistance. That study concluded that much less than 1 protein in 10^50 would have beta-lactamase activity. Axe’s approach has grave problems and even in principle is simply not capable of estimating what they’re citing it to estimate. More importantly, it’s flatly contradicted by other experimental work, e.g. a study of a random peptide library that found three with beta-lactamase activity out of ~10^9. That’s a difference of 41 orders of magnitude.
Thorvaldson and Hössjer do cite (even if they actually cite the wrong paper) a much better study that searched for a different specific function (ATP binding) among random proteins. This study found that 1 protein in 10^11 had the desired function, again vastly higher than the estimate accepted these authors end up using. The lower estimate is consistent with other studies, like the beta-lactamase one I mentioned above, that have found functional proteins occurring in the ballpark of once per 10^10, give or take a couple of orders of magnitude. Even though they cite this study, though, the authors don’t seriously engage with it or with any of the rest of the extensive literature on the subject. Instead, they immediately dismiss it all, citing one study – which turns out to be a preprint (never published anywhere) written by two creationists and posted on a preprint server devoted to fringe science. This is not how one does science.
This is not some minor point: how rare functional proteins are is central to the ID claim that new proteins should only very, very rarely be able to evolve naturally. Axe’s estimate would, if accurate, really be problematic for evolution, while the estimates coming from mainstream science aren’t. (Note that these estimates are for randomly finding one or a few specific functions; given the vast number of possible functions, finding any functional protein is much easier.) Oh, another interesting study. One researcher tried looking for specific functions by randomly combining fragments of existing proteins, rather than creating them from random sequence, and found them at a rate of more than 1 per 10^5.
It’s a good thing for all of us that functional proteins are not really that hard to find: we’d all be dead if they were. Our adaptive immune system deals with pathogens its never seen before by developing antibodies, which are proteins with the specific function of binding to the invader. Out of a repertoire of something like 10^8 existing antibodies, which were generated by a process of random mutation, our bodies consistently find a functional match to each invader, which they then refine by means of further mutation and selection. The result is an exquisitely tuned protein, produced by random processes in less than a week with no intelligent intervention.
What I mean about window dressing can be illustrated by this passage, which is about the probability of configuring multiple proteins to work together: ‘P(Ac) can still pose huge obstacles to the chance configuration of the quaternary structure of operative biological systems (Csermely et al., 2010). This problem of estimating P(Ac) seems quite intractable, but it may be addressed by performing perturbation experiments (Antal et al., 2009). The idea is to take a functional system, perturb it, and determine how perturbation affects the probability of retaining function.’ Nothing in the Csermely et al. study says anything about there being huge obstacles to chance configuration of the parts, and the summary of Antal et al. is quite wrong: the perturbation approach in that paper has nothing to do with evolving proteins or the probability of retaining function – it’s about modeling the dynamic behavior of complex protein networks in a living cell. These citations really have nothing to do with the statements they’re supposed to be supporting.
I quit reading when I got to this: ‘Haldane (1932) asked the question whether natural selection is capable of removing deleterious mutations as they arrive within a species over time. If not, they may cause a mutational load that increases to such an extent that the survival of the species is threatened (Lynch et al., 1993). Such an increased mutational load corresponds to an increase of genetic entropy (Sanford, 2008)…’ Just about everything here is wrong. That’s not what Haldane was asking, Lynch’s paper only applies to asexual species with tiny populations, and Sanford’s genetic entropy is about mutations whose effect is too small to be removed by natural selection, which is a different issue. Genetic entropy also happens to be a crackpot idea that has zero evidence to support it and abundant evidence refuting it, and that only makes sense in a young earth creationist context.
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The scientific method is the basis for the theory of evolution, just as it is for all theories in science. If YEC rejects the scientific method then they need to explain why they seem to argue for a young Earth, a recent global flood, and the unrelatedness of species in language that tries its hardest to sound scientific. In this very thread we have people arguing that evolution can not produce certain features, and they sure sound like they are couching their arguments in the scientific method. If this isn’t the case then they should say so.
If you are saying that all of the evidence is consistent with an old Earth, no recent global flood, and the relatedness of all species if we use the scientific method then make it plain. If the only way to arrive at YEC is to throw out the scientific method then say so.
More to the point, why do YEC’s use the scientific method as much as they do? When YEC’s go to the doctor, car mechanic, or plumber they expect those people to use the scientific method. Why?
I can’t help but think of Cardinal Bellarmine’s letter from 1615:
The parallels with YEC are obvious. At least Bellarmine had the temerity to admit that if the evidence came down on the side of Heliocentrism that they would have to rethink their interpretation of scripture. I have yet to see any such concession from most YEC’s.
It’s not as if EC’s decide to be EC’s because they feel like it. EC’s are EC’s because there is mountains and mountains of evidence for an old Earth, a lack of a recent global flood, and evolution. They aren’t choosing an ideology. They are following the evidence. If the YEC response is to poison the well by calling the evidence “scientific materialism” or “atheism” then they are ignoring why EC’s are EC’s, or worse yet the YEC is tacitly admitting that they evidence is not on their side. A few quotes from Galileo Galilei also come to mind:
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