Mathematical challenges.
Problem number one is the mathematical. I won’t dwell on this one, because it’s written up in many books and widely acknowledged by evolutionists themselves as a serious problem for their theory.
Fortunately, mutations are very rare.
They occur on an average of perhaps once in every ten million duplications of a DNA molecule (10'7, a one followed by seven zeroes).
That’s fairly rare. On the other hand, it’s not that rare.
Our bodies contain nearly 100 trillion cells (10'14).
So the odds are quite good that we have a couple of cells with a mutated form of almost any gene.
A test tube can hold millions of bacteria, so, again, the odds are quite good that there will be mutant forms among them.
The mathematical problem for evolution comes when you want a series of related mutations.
The odds of getting two mutations that are related to one another is the product of the separate probabilities: one in 10'7 x 10'7, or 10'14.
That’s a one followed by 14 zeroes, a hundred trillion!
Any two mutations might produce no more than a fly with a wavy edge on a bent wing.
That’s a long way from producing a truly new structure, and certainly a long way from changing a fly into some new kind of organism.
You need more mutations for that. So, what are the odds of getting three mutations in a row? That’s one in a billion trillion (10'21). Suddenly, the ocean isn’t big enough to hold enough bacteria to make it likely for you to find a bacterium with three simultaneous or sequential related mutations.
What about trying for four related mutations? One in 10'28. Suddenly, the earth isn’t big enough to hold enough organisms to make that very likely.
And we’re talking about only four mutations. It would take many more than that to change a fish into a philosopher, or even a fish into a frog. Four mutations don’t even make a start toward any real evolution. But already at this point some evolutionists have given up the classic idea of evolution, because it just plainly doesn’t work.
It was at this level (just four related mutations) that microbiologists gave up on the idea that mutations could explain why some bacteria are resistant to four different antibiotics at the same time.
The odds against the mutation explanation were simply too great, so they began to look for another mechanism—and they found it. First of all, using cultures that are routinely kept for long periods of time, they found out that bacteria were resistant to antibiotics, even before commercial antibiotics were “invented.” Genetic variability was “built right into” the bacteria.
Did the nonresistant varieties get resistant by mutation? No. Resistant forms were already present. Furthermore, certain bacteria have little rings of DNA, called plasmids, that they trade around among themselves, and they passed on their resistance to antibiotics in that way.
It wasn’t mutation and asexual reproduction at all, just ordinary recombination and variation within kind.
Bacteria can be made antibiotic resistant by mutation, but biologist Novick9 calls such forms “evolutionary cripples.” The mutation typically damages a growth factor, so that the mutationally crippled bacteria can scarcely survive outside the lab. The antibiotic resistance carried by plasmids results from enzymes produced to break down the antibiotic. Such bacteria do not have their growth crippled by mutation.
Their resistance is by design.
Contrary to popular opinion, drug resistance in bacteria does not demonstrate evolution. It doesn’t even demonstrate the production of favorable mutations.
It does demonstrate natural selection (or a sort of artificial selection, in this case), but only selection among already existing variations within a kind.
It also demonstrates that when the odds that a particular process will produce a given effect get too low, good scientists normally look for a better explanation, such as the plasmid explanation for resistance to multiple antibiotics.
At this point, evolutionists often say that “Time is the hero of the plot.” That’s what I used to say to my students. “Sure, the odds are low, but there’s all that time, nearly 5 billion years!” But 5 billion years is only about 10'17 seconds, and the whole universe contains fewer than 10'80 atoms.
So even by the wildest “guesstimates,” the universe isn’t old enough or big enough to reach odds like the 1 in 103,000,000 that Huxley, an evolutionist, estimated as the odds against the evolution of the horse.
Way back in 1967, a prestigious group of internationally known biologists and mathematicians gathered at the Wistar Institute to consider Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution.
10 All present were evolutionists, and they agreed, as the preface clearly states, that no one would be questioning evolution itself. The only question was, could mutations serve as the basis—with natural selection—as a mechanism for evolutionary change? The answer of the mathematicians: no. Just plain no!
Emotions ran high. After a particularly telling paper by Marcel Schutzenberger of the University of Paris, the chairman of the gathering, C. H. Waddington, said, “Your argument is simply that life must have come about by special creation!” The stenographer records, “Schutzenberger: No! Voices: No!” Anything but creation; it wasn’t even fair (in spite of the evidence!) to bring up the word.
Dr. Waddington later called himself, impressively, a “post-neo-Darwinist,” someone who believes in evolution, but who also believes that mutation-selection cannot explain how evolution can occur. Many research evolutionists (but not many textbook writers or teachers) recognize the need for a new generation of evolutionists to forge the “post-neo-Darwinian synthesis.”
In his chapter “Beyond the Reach of Chance,” Denton11 discusses attempts to simulate evolutionary processes on computers. He concludes with these strong words:
If complex computer programs cannot be changed by random mechanisms, then surely the same must apply to the genetic programs of living organisms. The fact that systems in every way analogous to living organisms cannot undergo evolution by pure trial and error [i.e., by mutation and selection] and that their functional distribution invariably conforms to an improbable discontinuum comes, in my opinion, very close to a formal disproof of the whole Darwinian paradigm of nature.
By what strange capacity do living organisms defy the laws of chance which are apparently obeyed by all analogous complex systems? (Emphasis added).
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Originally Posted by purba
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