As you can see from the introduction to that paper, calculating from the interspecies difference with chimps is one of three main approaches to estimating the mutation rate.
There is some discrepancy between estimates from the different methods, but you’ve got the direction wrong. ~80 mutations per generation per person, or 40 mutations/genome copy, is a rate of 1.4e-8 mutations/base-pair/generation. Five million years at 28 years/generation (a currently fashionable estimate, I believe) gives 179,000 generations. Assuming the same generation time for chimps, that would give a total divergence for single base substitutions of 0.5%, which is much lower than the observed 1.2% difference.
A big factor that’s missing here is ancestral variation. The ancestral population had plenty of variation in it, i.e. the time to the most common ancestor of a piece of chimp DNA and the homologous piece of human DNA is substantially longer than the time to the species split. That adds an extra 4Nµ to the divergence, where N is the effective size of the pre-split population. If that was, say, 50,000, that would add an extra 0.28% to the divergence.
Sounds like you are saying evolution is a logical necessity. This is Dawkins argument at the end of TBW, also, that Darwinian evolution is the only way in principle to get organized complexity.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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As there is, can be, nothing else rationally on offer, Dawkins has no choice. Neither does any one else rationally.
Philosophically speaking, this is flawed. If our reason is entirely a result of evolution, it is first a survival mechanism, not a truth seeking mechanism. Whatever it is has been selected for and has survived. Its actual relationship to truth is unknowable. (Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies has a much more comprehensive discussion.)
On the other hand, if God exists and is a rational being, that provides a sound foundation for rationality in humans, and for our reason being truth oriented, not survival oriented. Since it is very reasonable to believe in God, and that he may indeed act, evolution may have gotten help. Perfectly reasonable. In this post I’m not arguing that it happened that way, just that reason soundly supports both the existence of God and the possibility of his acting.
Dawkins is a sloppy philosopher, and an embarrassment to many thoughtful atheists.
I will agree there. I don’t have a philosophy degree, but a comp sci degree, and Dawkins makes numerous claims that are false from a CS perspective. E.g. his argument at the end that God has to be more complex than His creation is easy to present a counter example by comparing finite automata and Turing machines. That appears to be the lynchpin to his claim that Darwinism is the only possible source of organized complexity, so his whole argument falls apart.
He’s a great writer, and great at popular level argument, but very ignorant of numerous relevant academic fields.
Well, whether there is a defensible counter example or not, whatever gave rise to the Big Bang is almost certainly more complex than our universe. So his assertion that this is an argument against God is just plain dumb.
Thanks for those thoughts. Yes, I have also heard the basic idea that God so intricately and carefully designed the physical laws, and the initial conditions, to allow all manner of complexity. And philosophically, I take no issue with that. It seems in principle a reasonable attempt to account for the extraordinary complexity and design of life. But in practice, I simply can’t grasp the idea’s efficacy, given how we see the basic laws of the universe currently functioning, Otherwise I could learn to cheat at poker, and try to tell people that my extraordinary success was the result of God favoring me by having set up the laws of the universe and the initial starting conditions such that I would always come ahead when I play poker.
It is one thing to stack the deck beforehand, but another entirely to deal a Royal Flush whenever desired after someone else has shuffled the deck.
i was dumbfounded, when i first read God Delusion, just how often this writer - who spent a whole chapter explaining that morality is merely the Darwinian byproduct reinforcing ancestral behavior - would call something “evil”… and he clearly meant it in an objective, absolute, universal sense.
@Daniel_Fisher, the ideal system is not the one where the right people win. It is where everybody wins. God is not interested in stacking the deck for some people or some creatures, but for all.
The dinosaurs had their say for millions of years. They were not failures because they did not last forever. No one lives forever. Everyone lives and everyone dies. We have faith that the saved will live forever with Jesus, but that is icing on the cake as far as I am concerned, but important icing on the cake.
God’s desire is that everyone play the “game” of life fairly. It is not whether you are rich or poor, but how you play the same, that is do you love God, which wants us to do good and do you love others, which is doing good.
God created the rules of evolution also. Plants grow and feed animals. Animals help plants. We all live together in the balance of nature or ecology. God does not waste resources in fighting as humans do. God tells us not to worry about the future and to struggle against others. Jesus was anti-Darwin and pro-Margulis.
Please read my essay, God and Freedom on Academia.edu.
He isn’t arguing against God in that chapter. What Dawkins is arguing is that claiming God did it doesn’t solve the basic problem of explaining the origin of complexity. Even if God did create immediately or through jostling evolution, Dawkins argues God must therefore be even more complex, and so the problem of explaining conplexity is just kicked down the road. In which case we would then need to explain where God’s complexity came from.
To put it another way, it is not that Dawkins sees creation and evolution as two competing explanations. Rather, creation, even if true, explains nothing. Darwinism is the only sort of thing that can explain complexity.
In Dawkins’ view, the great benefit of Darwinian evolution is it provides a rationally understandable mechanism that allows reality to iteratively build up complexity from nothing. Dawkins thinks it is the only such mechanism logically possible. Which is why he believes in Darwinism on principle.
Dawkins would probably say that if God did create the universe, it is necessary that God Himself evolved.
Well, if I understand you correctly, the question is if one can apply randomness to biology. I have not read the whole thread. In my opinion, I don’t think that things are totally random—it’s too abstract of an idea to apply to biology.
I’ve got a family of 5 (3 children), too. Thanks for your discussion and time.
Thanks.
I, by the way, do believe in God; I am a Christian. I think God’s existence is more than as an originator–not that by disagreeing with ID am I in any way removing God as Creator–but it’s an interesting devotion to muse over. I’m sure you do, too. I wonder where we can agree. I find my purpose is much tangled up in God’s existence. I remember my father saying, “Of course, God is a crutch for me. I don’t know that I could survive without God.” I echo that. However, my bias can get in the way of my understanding. I need others to critique me.
One of my profs asked if God doesn’t just push the question of origins back further. I think that’s a good question. (of course, only if one thinks God’s purpose is to originate things–not to provide justice, hope, the ultimate Good, etc).
Good comment. I see some Christians argue that the existence of God answers the question of origins, and your prof is right that it does not. He may provide an origin to reason and morality in his nature and in his design of life. But existence itself remains a mystery - why does anything exist instead of nothing?