pz

OK, how many genes do you think it would require?

If you were to observe the process of assembly of this intricate creature, what specific steps do you see as insuperable without the intervention of supernatural processes?

Can you show me the mathematics that you have done to demonstrate that the evolution of the horse would require more than 20 billion years?

Happy Wonderer

I think that it is difficult to visualize all of the dimensions involved.

To begin with, I think it is easily apparent that the time frame for an organism has to be in terms of generations, since that is where genetic novelty can come from.

One species of bacteria replicates about 17 times per day (resulting in about 131,000 individuals if my math is right.) That is about 6000 generations a year (or 10^180 potential individuals if my math is right.) This is an extremely large number of individuals in a [i]single[\i] year. In a billion years it is an unfathomable number of individuals (UI.)


But wait, that's not all! There is another enomous dimension to consider. It is an open question of exactly how many billions of earth-like planets now exist, but there is no evidence that the process that created our solar system is unique. There is evidence of other solar systems, and abundent evidence of other sun-like stars. So you now have another dimension to multiply to the (UI) numbers of bacterial divisions: even a one-in-a-million chance event is going to be highly probable if you have billions of planets to experiment on.

Now of course evolution isn't chance: natural selection is one of the least random processes around. However, there is [i]yet one more[\i] huge dimension to consider: the amount of time that the universe will be in a form to sustain the astronomical processes that now occur.

There is no particular reason that life had to happen on a planet five billion years after the universe began. The process could just have well happened any point until the universe goes dark. That gives us another 100 trillion years to experiment with.

When you multiply all of these unfathomably large numbers together, you realize that some of the complaints about chance hold no weight. When you begin your preposition with "somewhere out of the billions of earth-like planets, within 100 trillion years ..." the mere probability arguments hold no water. (So to speak.)

hw

Note carefully the discussion. The argument isn't that given enough time impossible things can happen. The laws of physics will not be violated -- a bacteria will not suddenly spring up with horns and a jet pack on its back. The argument is more of a response to questions like "it seems unlikely that such and such a gene translocation will just happen to occur in the 'right' place to cause this wonderful effect." Many trillions of time it isn't...

Eric H

Quote Asha'man

Since you like horses, look at the difference between a pony, a thoroughbred, and a Clydesdale. These are not natural breeds, they were all produced by man in the last few thousand years. How did man do it? Clearly, we didn’t use advanced genetic engineering. We did the exact same thing that a pack of wolves or a couple of saber-toothed tigers would have done: we made sure that certain horses didn’t breed. Only the fastest ones were allowed to breed, and soon they were all faster. Only the largest ones were allowed to breed, and soon they were all larger. Look how far this process can take a horse in only a few thousand years! Now look at the differences between dogs, like a toy Poodle and a St. Bernard!
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You are starting of by using horses, which work perfectly, and by selective breeding you are just exaggerating traits that already exist.
This is not producing horses with six legs and two heads and three tails as a new species of horse.

As I understand it life on Earth started of by some sort of single cell life like bacteria, which has no intelligence or purpose to exist.

Somehow this becomes a larger object, with more, complex additions continuously being multiplied over many generations.

I think Richard Dawkins explains this by the use of some all-knowing replicater, which somehow arranges each cell in a group in the right place.

As I understand it takes about a hundred million-million cells to make up the mass of an average adult human. I get the feeling that this replicater would have to be pretty cunning to get this amount of detail right.

I know that life today mostly starts from just a single male and female cell, but they are already programmed.




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quote
The question to ask is how often do mutations happen? How many of them are fatal, how many are neutral, and how many are (or eventually will be) favorable? How many new traits exist simultaneously in a population? And how many mutations are required to achieve a specific amount of change or complexity? (For example, how many genetic differences are required to separate a pony from a thoroughbred?)
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Would you say that a population of about two hundred would constitute a sort of minimum number for a species to survive?


If this is the case then somehow the evolutionary process has to make around two hundred creatures independently with similar traits that could mate and start a species lets say the rat species because it is a lot smaller than a horse. That would also means eight hundred legs all working in a forward direction, with working hip joints, knee joints and all the toe joints.

And at the same sort of time it has to also make around two hundred of each; of a thousand other species, some of these would be many times the size of an elephant.


Five will divide into five billion years a billion times, I do not believe mathematically that a billion generations is enough to get from single cell to a working rat size life model, through a constant evolutionary process.

Being fair when you are talking about evolution of single cells, and multi cells in the early stages of life in a young Earth it may only take hours or days to multiply. So evolution may have a thousand billion generation to evolve life to be what we see today.

This may be enough if every evolutionary process was a success; and also an improvement and an extension on the previous generation.

However if a thousand billion generation is needed to go from single cell life to arrive at what we see today, we must take death before mating into account.

If death of a large percentage of a species happened; then surely the whole species would die over a period of time. They could be the victims of a predator, a virus, lack of food, a non competitive species, might not have enough skills to survive, etc. How many times would this happen over a period of a thousand billion generations of evolutionary processes? Would it be one in a hundred generations, one in a thousand generations, once in a million generations?

I believe that life on Earth would still be some form of simple bacteria, if death of a species occurred even once every million generations, because this means it could happen a million times.

I can look at skeletons of animals, with fins or legs and see the similarity, and I only perceive a vast amount of detail that has to work in a correct way for success to happen.



Peace

Eric




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Quote pz
Can you show me the mathematics that you have done to demonstrate that the evolution of the horse would require more than 20 billion years?
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Design of many features, is an exceedingly boring and tedious but necessary pastime. Components have to work together with very fine tolerances for error.

I am starting with the premise that life started from some sort of single cell with no intelligence or purpose in mind.

Supposing it got to the shape of a horse body, it now needs four legs.

For a reality check on this take an elongated potato for the body and four matches for the legs. See how many wrong places for a leg there are by sticking the first match in different places on the potato.

Put the first match in a correct place for a leg and see how many wrong places there are to put the second, repeat with the third and forth match.
Work out the odds of getting four legs in the right place on the body..

Look at the hip joint of each leg, the front right joint will only work on the front right and so on.

Look at the ball and socket joint, it doesn’t have to be that because there is no blue print.
The ball could have been a square, or triangle, rectangle, or any amount of bumpy variations,
Likewise the socket also

Work out the odds of how many wrong possibilities there could be for each joint, if it is ten then you would have to say 10x10 for one hip joint multiplied by 10x10x10x10x10x10 to one chances for all four hip joints.

What are the chances of each of these joints working in a forward directions, you could say that there is ten variations of 36 degrees, making it a ten to one chance of the joint working in a forward motion That would be 10x10x10x10 to one chances of this happening.

Look at a skeleton closely, ask lots of questions, what are the reasonable odds of any one particular part being right and working in line with its neighbour?

There could be around two hundred bones in a body, about the same amount of tendons, and muscles.

I look at these components in a similar way as a mechanical object, they have to be flexible, withstand great forces, and be able to self repair to a degree.

Now if there is only a ten to one chance of each of these component being right for its job you now have odds with a number with six hundred digits to one. I think more searching questions could be found to find greater odds. But I do not want to go into the realms of exaggerations.

If you need one male and one female then you would have to multiply a number with 600 digits times another number with 600 digits. That makes a number with 360,000 digits.

Now if evolution has the opportunity of 1000,000,000,000 generations which is a number with 13 digits.

You just divide a number with 360,000 digits by a number with thirteen digits to see roughly the work each generation would have to do.

If it needs a population of 100 to start a species that’s too many digits for my liking.

This could all be a lot of crap, but I have tried to look at complexity in an honest way as possible from my own perspective.

Anyway you are all free to tear this to bits, its 3am, and I have some serious sleep to catch up on.

Peace

Eric





















You would have great difficulty replacing parts in a Ford car engine with components made for a Ford car of fifty years ago, or with components made for Citroen, Mercedes, and Fiat.

scigirl

Eric H -

I want to take the time to point out that I think your questions are good and valid - and it's great to see someone who is truly interested in the how's and why's of evolution. When you think of all the complex changes that had to occur for humans to inhabit the earth - no doubt about it, it is truly amazing. Some people choose to insert their religious beliefs here, but I simply marvel at life and leave it at that. But . . . to each his own I guess.

The truth is - there are still many unanswered questions as to the hows and whys. We know it occured - just too darn much evidence for evolution not to be true. Now we have the fun part of piecing together how it happened - by doing all sorts of exciting studies. That's what is so damn cool about science - we don't have (and don't pretend to have) all of the answers, and when we are faced with an unanswered question we don't resort to the default "goddidit" but instead try to answer the question with more science. I must ask though, Eric, if you believe in God mainly due to the unanswered questions in science, be prepared to have your god narrowed as we research and discover. Gods and goddesses used to be the explanation for a lot of natural phenomenon.

scigirl

scigirl

Well it's not really a math issue, to me it's more of a 'how development works' issue. Think about this - every animal develops from a single cell in a very short time. How is this possible? Again, the turning on and off of genes in a specific order. Alter this order even a bit - and you can get a different body plan - 6 legs instead of 4, lungs instead of gills, etc. We aren't built the same way as a computer or a building - the way in which we develop from a mass of tissue is indicative of the ways in which creatures can evolve.

I hope that makes sense - I've been studying GI physiology all day and my brain is a bit fried. . . .

scigirl

scigirl

Heh double post.

Eric I'll let others discuss your last post but I do want to add:

You asked about deaths and how they work into evolutionary theory. Well - mass exctinctions. These have happened. Also, lots of organisms die and never get to breed. 1/3 to 1/2 of all human fertilizations die in utero (often before the woman even knows she is pregnant). That's a lot wouldn't you say? I think it's evidence that evolutionary mechanisms are constantly going on - our genomes are constantly producing diversity and a lot of what they produce is crap. Hence, lots of miscarriages unfortunately. But every now and then - a novel mutation arises which makes the offspring better.

It takes a long time. I think it's hard for humans to truly comprehend what 3 billion years is.

scigirl

yguy

Summoning forth the Probability Boogeyman to account for evolution is somewhat understandable, but it makes quite a bit less sense when applied to the transformation of a zygote into a mature animal.

To make it simple, lets substitute an amoeba for the horse. If probabililty has anything to do with it, we should be able to break an amoeba into its component parts down to the molecular level, agitate, disturb with mutagens and varying environmental conditions, and otherwise tweak the whole mess until, within a finite period of time, it becomes once again an amoeba. When has this been accomplished?

Coragyps

Widely off topic, but not that widely: A young woman I know is expecting her first pretty soon. Her Ob/Gyn told her that early miscarriages seem to have increased a lot in the last decade, but that the entire increase appears to be due to the high accuracy of at-home pregnancy tests. What used to be thought to just be a late period is now known to be a pregnancy - one which would have aborted naturally either in 1820 or now.

< back to the thread...

Principia

Why? Because you say so, yguy?
This is just a gibberish of words, yguy. How does any of this follow the premise, "If probability has anything to do with it..."? Let's see, my point was about the development of a multicellular organism from a unicellular zygote. Your argument had to do with an unicelllular organism, and breaking it apart, and "tweak[ing] the whole mess."

Nope, try as I may, I don't think you have an argument at all.

yguy

Ah, yes... I have fond memories of being an 8 year old. Thanks for the flashback.

Which do you think would be a more likely chance occurrence: the spontaneous construction from raw materials of a single celled organism, or a multicelled organism? I mean hell, dude - I was trying to make it easy on ya.

If you're trying to do anything, it is to remain blind to the point I'm getting at.