Wednesday, March 6, 2013

#29 Mathematics


Mathematicians have completely refuted the possibility of random action as the source for life or the development of species. The problem is that you have never heard about it and the statements are buried away by deniers of anything but a godless evolution.

After the development of superfast computers it became possible for researchers to test out theories by creating computer models. Randomness and survival of the fittest (natural selection) were totally refuted mathematically as the process that could produce advanced species.

I invite you to read up on the Wistar Institute Symposium: Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution that took place in Philadelphia back in April, 1966 [1]. It was chaired by the Nobel Prize winner, Sir Peter Medawar and only the most distinguished authorities in their fields were invited.

As an example of one of presentations, Dr. Murray Eden [2] demonstrated that even a single ordered pair of genes could not evolve in the whole life span of the earth. His example started with a preposterous amount of E. Coli bacteria (5 trillion tons covering the planet nearly an inch deep) and showed it was mathematically impossible for a protein to develop. See below for other quotes from the Wistar meeting from Ulam [3] and Schutzenberger [4].

Wistar was followed up by other meetings in Alpbach in 1969 and Chicago in 1980. Each conference became more and more contentious as evolutionists fought against the mathematicians.

As a result, Darwinists had to give up on randomness and gradual change as the process of evolution. So they made up new ideas such as “punctuated equilibrium” which is essentially stating that sudden gigantic changes took place. Never mind that this is the opposite of Darwin’s theory of slow, gradual changes. Also, of course, unexplained sudden and dramatic changes which resulted in new species occurred by an unknown process which they had not discovered yet. By the way it also has to violate known laws of chemistry, physics, and biology.

Many evolutionists hold onto “natural selection” as the magic formula. Somehow it selects out the good developments and bad ones disappear. But we know that a simple bacteria has millions of ingredients that must be correct for it to survive. It’s inconceivable that all those ingredients were added one at a time and at each step the resultant being was better adapted to its environment and so was sole survivor in place for the next stage to follow. Even allowing for sudden change and multiple steps at once, we still cannot make enough changes to account for all the necessary developments to get a simple bacteria. What about all the millions of higher order species that are thousands or millions of times more complicated? See Sewell below [5].

We know that researchers on mutations have not been able to produce any new species in all their efforts, only change within a species. In fact, the chances of a “possibly beneficial” mutation are about 1 in more than 1000. That means 999 are harmful or neutral.

Let’s ignore that for a second and use a simple to understand example. Let’s say we flip a coin. Heads means we have a beneficial mutation. Tales means we have a harmful or neutral mutation. Every time you get a “head”, then you move one step forward in evolution. Every time you get a “tail”, you move back one step. Just using the laws of probability, how far will you have moved after millions of years???…exactly no where. You are in the same place. In this example, you had a 50/50 chance of moving forward in evolution by mutations. But as we know, the odds of a beneficial mutation are not even close to 50/50.

The believers in “natural selection” would say that when certain good things happen, then there is no going backwards. That’s like saying every time you get 3 “heads” in a row, you make permanent progress toward some unknown destination where you want to end up. So even if you get 3 “tails” in a row, there’s no going back. How natural selection really works is a mystery since no one has ever seen it in an experiment. Also, there is no explanation why it goes in a certain direction.

It’s like saying “natural selection” got us where we are because we are here. That does not contain proof of anything. Understandable, right? That’s about the essence of the evolution theory. We know we are here and we must have gotten here by natural selection because there is no God.

I read lots of articles about mathematical calculations for evolution and such and I invite you to read them and make up your own mind who has a plausible explanation.

Just for fun here is one number that I read which fascinated me. A mathematician [6] calculated the time it would take under very suitable conditions for a usable protein to hook up from available amino acids. That number was 10 x (power 171) years. When we start getting into really big numbers, they are very hard to comprehend. That doesn’t seem like such a big number. (Actually there are only 10 x (power 80) atoms in the universe.) Here is what that number would be in some sense by our reality. If you gave an amoeba 10 x (power 171) years, he could carry every single atom in the universe, one by one, all the way across the universe and back (30 billion light years), more than 600,000 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times if he were traveling at the unbelievably slow speed of 1 inch every 15 billion years (the age of the universe). I love it.

There are 3,000 trillion atoms in the period at the end of this sentence.

So if a mathematician calculates the odds of life developing randomly at 1 in 10 x (power 1,000), then I would say the argument is over. That’s just the kind of impossibly high number we’re talking about.

There must be God.

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[1] Paul S. Moorehead, Martin M. Kaplan (eds.), Mathematical Challenges to the NeoDarwinist Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph Number 5 (Philadelphia, PA: The Wistar Institute Press, 1967)

[2] Dr. Murray Eden, professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T. Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory. http://www.examiner.com/article/mathematical-challenges-to-the-neo-darwinian-interpretation-of-evolution

[3] Stanislaw M. Ulam "[I]t seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent." (Stanislaw M. Ulam, "How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 21)

[4] Marcel Schutzenberger "We do not know any general principle which would explain how to match blueprints viewed as typographic objects and the things they are supposed to control. The only example we have of such a situation (apart from the evolution of life itself) is the attempt to build self-adapting programs by workers in the field of artificial intelligence. Their experience is quite conclusive to most of the observers: without some built-in matching, nothing interesting can occur. Thus, to conclude, we believe that there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology."
(Marcel Schutzenberger, "Algorithms and Neo-Darwinian Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 75)

[5] Granville Sewell In "A Mathematician’s View of Evolution," (The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol 22 (4) (2000) pp 5-7), Sewell notes that there are "a good many mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists who ...are appalled that Darwin's explanation for the development of life is so widely accepted in the life sciences." Sewell compares the genetic code of life to a computer program--a comparison also made by computer gurus such as Bill Gates and evolutionary biologists such as Richard Dawkins. He notes that experience teaches that software depends on many separate functionally-coordinated elements. For this reason "[m]ajor improvements to a computer program often require the addition or modification of hundreds of interdependent lines, no one of which makes any sense, or results in any improvement, when added by itself." “…But just as major improvements to a computer program cannot be made 5 or 6 characters at a time, certainly no major evolutionary advance is reducible to a chain of tiny improvements, each small enough to be bridged by a single random mutation.”

[6] James F. Coppedge, Evolution: Possible or Impossible?, pp., 118-120. http://creationsafaris.com/epoi_c07.htm

1 comment:

  1. Hi Jim, Keep up the good work. I love this stuff. I have for a long time thought that probabilities were at least one powerful key against the random aspect of evolutionary theory, but haven't found any studies on it, or even much talk about it. Thanks
    Dominic

    ReplyDelete