Feedback for July 2005

John Barrow's work was also cited in feedback for March 2000; this also explains some legitimate work on the varying speed of light, and the references also consider possible impacts on cosmology.

In May you requested comment on The problem of genetic improbability by Ashby Camp, and How did the human brain evolve? by Helen Fryman; both articles at Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. In brief, the first is nonsense, and the second is mostly quite sensible. In more detail....

1. The problem of genetic improbability.

The article by Ashby Camp is arrant nonsense from start to finish. The difficulty is that almost every sentence introduces a new error or misconception, and a detailed response would be much longer than the original article.

Archive files that are relevant include:

• Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations. Camp's article is not on abiogenesis, but it does make many of the elementary errors in statistics and probability explained in this FAQ.
• Most of section CB100 in the Index to Creationist Claims, on genetics.
• Are Mutations Harmful; this also touches upon numbers and rates of mutation.

In Camp's article itself:

• It opens with a poorly cited reference to a Professor Ambrose for 5 being the minimum number of mutations necessary to produce the simplest new structure. Camp is probably referring to Professor Edmund J Ambrose, author of The Nature and Origin of the Biological World (John Wiley & Sons, 1982), but his only references are to secondary sources.

  It's unclear what this even means. Evolution invariably modifies existing structures and puts them to new purposes; it does not just introduce new structures with a few mutations. But the serious error is that Camp's "analysis" merely assumes all the mutations for new structures must occur in a single generation, and it fails to consider that many different changes are possible other than the ones which actually end up becoming fixed in a population. He's making the usual error of shooting the arrow and then drawing a target around where it lands.

• The next paragraph cites some statistics: 1 mutation every 100,000 gene replications; 10,000 genes for the first single celled organism, based on E. coli, and 1 in 1000 mutations being non-harmful. It does not really matter what numbers Camp invokes, since the analysis is so fundamentally wrong, but for what it is worth, his numbers are wrong as well.

  The cited mutation rate is high, but roughly in the ball park. The number of genes for the simplest organism is merely silly. Why pick on E. coli? Mycoplasma genitalium has only 470 genes, and experiments have shown that they continue to survive with less than 300 of those. But neither of these is a credible model for the first cells, which probably did not use DNA at all; but may have used RNA or something else entirely. Camp's proportion of deleterious mutations is also out of touch with reality. Many mutations are "silent"; they make no change at all to gene expression. Of those that result in amino acid variations, estimates of the proportion that are deleterious range from around 38% to 85%; nowhere near Camp's 99.9%.

• The errors above pale into insignificance beside the ludicrous calculations that follow, in which Camp simply multiplies a lot of big numbers together. This "analysis" completely ignores all evolutionary processes such as accumulation of change over many generations and the effects of selection. It also takes no account of the mindbogglingly enormous number of other changes that might occur instead. Calculating probabilities after fact for what happened to occur is foolishness.

It's a low grade snow job.

2. How the human brain evolve?

The article by Helen Fryman is almost entirely correct, and I commend it as interesting and thoughtful. It is given as a question and answer, and the original question incorporates a popular misconception, that we use only a fraction of our brain's capacity.

Ms Fryman focuses primarily on correcting that mistake. She also gives a link for more information. It was a dead link when you quoted it; I have let CARM know the correct link, and they have updated it.

The only point with which I disagree is the final line, and this is the only portion that directly addresses the question of the title. It reads as follows: "One last note -- how did the brain evolve? It didn't. It was created."

Ms Fryman offers no actual argument to refute, so I am content to disagree on this one point while being in enthusiastic agreement with the rest. Though I am not a Christian myself, do note that the range of Christian perspectives on the theology of creation includes the view that the entire natural world is God's creation, and that God is creator of every flower that grows, every cloud that rains, and every species or organ that evolves.

Cheers -- Chris Ho-Stuart

The most important point to grasp is that it is irrelevant. Fossils are not dated by how long they take to form, any more than you estimate the age of a book by how long it took to write.

Yes, some kinds of fossils can form in a few millennia, or less. After all, a fossil is by definition any trace left in the geological record by living creatures, and they can take many forms. Some fossils form very quickly indeed; others take much longer. None of them are dated by considering how long they take to form.

Another back of the envelope method is to assume that the number of days in a year is decreasing at a constant rate. The 0.0015 seconds per day per century means that each century a day becomes about 1.5 milliseconds longer, which works out to having about 6.3×10^-8 more days in each successive year. Go back 4.5 billion years, and you have about 285 more days in the year, and the day is about 13.5 hours long.

The formulae for these two approximations are as follows: Let R be the slowdown rate in seconds per day per century. Let N be a number of years in the past. The two approximations for the number of hours in a day are as follows:

• If hours per day increases at a fixed rate: use 24*(1 - R*N/100/86400)
• If days per year decreases at a fixed rate: use 24/(1 + R*N/100/86400)

Neither of these methods is a good way to extrapolate back over several billion years; but the second method is a bit more reasonable.

The energy lost by slowing rotation is made up by the gradual recession of the Moon, and the major mechanism by which this energy transfer is achieved is by tides. The files in the archive which are most relevant to this topic are:

• Creationist claim numbers CE011 and CE110.
• The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System.

A consequence of the Earth's slowing rotation is that we need to resynchronize our clocks from time to time. The average length of the day was around 86400 seconds in 1820. Now it is more like 86400.002 seconds. You have given us a very timely feedback question, because it has just been announced by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) that there is to be a leap second added to clocks at the end of this year. The final minute of 2005 (UTC) will be 61 seconds long.

When you are counting in the next New Year, please start your countdown at 11 rather than at 10, or you'll be kissing your main squeeze too soon. Thank you.

But more importantly, there is no reason at all to think gene transfer has the slightest connection at all with homosexuality.

See creationist claim CB403 for more detail on the relationship of homosexuality and evolution. In brief:

• The major causes of homosexuality appear not to be genetic. At most, genes might make a difference in propensities.
• It does not go against any homosexual premise to have and raise a child. It is rather about the kinds of relationships to which you are inclined; and believe it or not, there are all kinds of circumstances in which homosexuals may opt to procreate while still having their major loving and/or erotic relationships within their own geneder.
• In some environments, there can be selective advantages for a proportion your relatives to have a propensity to homosexuality, or for other characteristics linked to homosexuality. If there is a genetic contribution, the effects of selection can be more complex than you may think.

Even if we did, it does not follow that we could reproduce those conditions. For example, one of the conditions might be "bake gently for one million years". But at present, we just don't know.

We do not have a good up to date FAQ on notions relating to the origin of life. It is a fast moving field, and one with many more questions than answers. For an excellent historical background, check out Spontaneous Generation and the Origin of Life by our resident philosopher; and the associated Modern Origin of Life references bibliography.

We are not a debate site (you can find a debate forum at the talk.origins Usenet group), but an information source, with definite answers to the questions that arise. We provide a comprehensive exploration of the creationism and evolution debate from the perspective of mainstream science. In our view, this is the perspective that makes sense of the issues, whereas the creationist view is incorrect and gets nearly everything wrong. Whatever your own view, however, you are very welcome to come at anytime. There may even be resources you could find useful, like our enormous list of links to creationist sources.

Far from shoving off, what we'd really like is for you to sit down and read the whole site through carefully from start to finish. ☺

But I guess that would be asking a bit much. I've not even done that myself. So I invite you to stay, and read even if you disagree. But in any case, thanks for visiting, and please feel free to return at any time.

Evolutionary biology provides a powerful demonstration of the deep equivalence of so-called human races, and the triviality of racist distinctions made long before evolution came along. Africa turns out to be the cradle of all humanity, and many Africans take pride in this. We are all the children dark skinned Africans; showing plainly our common heritage, however much it may be denied by those who don't understand evolution and who fixate on trivial variation in color that can be found within the human species.

There is a growing number of fine evolutionary scientists in Africa. A recent article on this trend can be found in "Africans Begin to Make Their Mark in Human-Origins Research", Science, Vol 301, No 5637, pp 1178-1179, 29 Aug 2003.

These are not ancestors, but cousins. The species that were common ancestors of primates and bats, or primates and dogs, are no longer around as identifiable species.

Here is a good summary, and here is another.

• Although intelligent design is not founded on strict biblical literalism, it is still driven by religious presumptions; and the notion that God works by intervention, in constrast with natural processes. There is no good empirical basis for denying the capacity of the natural world to give rise to complexity. In my opinion, the proper refutation of intelligent design is theological; with recognition that God is creator of the entire natural world, and that He is just as involved in what is simple and well understood as what is subtle and obscure.
• The brain develops over several years as an organism grows naturally from a single celled egg. How counter intuitive is that? Furthermore, there is a natural variety in the all aspects of our individual physical forms. Some people have a natural propensity for abstraction; others for memory; others for imagination and empathy; and many other diverse capacities. Is this variety by design, or is it random? Does someone design the capacities your new born child shall develop? Christians typically acknowledge God as their individual creator; but they sell this short by comparing it to the human phenomenon of design. God is supposed to be the entity who ordained the very laws of nature to which mere designers must conform.
• You say that "Practically all instances of mutations are detrimental." That is false. In fact, the vast majority of mutations have no effect on the final form of an organism. They occur in parts of the genome that are not expressed in the organism; or they switch codons without actually changing the sequence of an expressed protein; or they switch amino acids that don't actually make much difference to the function of an expressed protein.

  Of the small number of mutations that actually alter protein sequences, estimates of the detrimental proportion range from 38% to 85% or so; definitely not "practically all". This is to be expected. The occasional beneficial or adaptive mutations tend to become fixed by selection, resulting in better adapted organisms with correspondingly more scope for adaptation to be disrupted. See feedback above on the alleged problem of genetic improbability.

• You speak of extra, out of place limbs. That is not usually a result of mutation at all, but of problems that can arise during development even with a perfectly normal genome. Still, your underlying point is solid; mutations can sometimes have dramatic effects, and large effects in one generation are invariably detrimental. But smaller effects are common, and they accumulate to have large effects over many generations. Viability is maintained by selection.

  Bear in mind that the brain is nothing like a computer. Our computers are brittle devices, subject to catastrophic failure with the smallest change. A brain, by contrast, is startlingly robust; and has a natural capacity to grow. It accumulates neurons as a child grows, which integrate seamlessly into a working whole. This capacity for growth also gives a capacity to evolve, as small changes in the genome can be expressed as more neurons, or fewer neurons, or changes in their interconnections, or any number of other varieties. It is a mistake to think bigger brains is always better. The circumstance of environment may drive this in either direction, and selection will always tend to drive a population to a local fitness peak.

• The vestigial pelvis and leg bones in whales show plainly their evolutionary antecedents as limbs. It is normal for evolution to adapt such vestiges to new purposes; but their form retains obvious associations to prior forms; rather than being new bones designed for a new purpose. The forelimbs of whales are their flippers.

Invoke a designer if you like; but before you presume that evolution is in conflict with this notion, consider whether you might not be denying the very capacity ordained by God for development of life. Nothing in your feedback presents the slightest difficulty for evolutionary biology.

Additionally, "macroevolution" has been observed as described in "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent", and "Observed Instances of Speciation".

Professor Haeckel in his Generelle Morphologie and in other works, has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters, but receives aid from homologous and rudimentary organs, as well as from the successive periods at which the various forms of life are believed to have first appeared in our geological formations. He has thus boldly made a great beginning, and shows us how classification will in the future be treated.

Later in the same chapter (and elsewhere in the book) Darwin discusses embryos at some length but does not mention Haeckel at all in that context. There is only one illustration in the OoS and it is of an idealized phylogenetic tree, not embryos. The point being, your suspicion that Darwin did not rely on Haeckel with regards to evidence from comparative embryology in the OoS is correct.

Darwin did mention Haeckel numerous times in his book The Descent of Man (1871), and does mention in a caption to some illustrations of embryos that Haeckel has similar drawings of embryos in his book Natürliche Schopfungsgeschichte (“The History of Creation”, 1868):

The human embryo (see upper fig.) is from Ecker, Icones Phys., 1851-1859, tab. xxx., fig. 2. The drawing of this embryo is much magnified. The embryo of the dog is from Bischoff, Entwicklungsgeschichte des Hunde-Eies, 1845, tab. xi., fig. 42 B. This drawing is magnified, the embryo being twenty-five days old. The internal viscera have been omitted, and the uterine appendages in both drawings removed. I was directed to these figures by Prof. Huxley, from whose work, Man's Place in Nature, the idea of giving them was taken. Haeckel has also given analogous drawings in his Schopfungsgeschichte.

While the drawings by Haeckel that Darwin refers to here have been criticized by antievolutionists (unfairly in my opinion) they are not the famous illustrations that Jonathan Wells and others have more recently been attacking (those are from the 3rd edition of Haeckel’s book “The Evolution of Man”, 1874). And in any case as Darwin makes clear in the above caption he did not rely on Haeckel as a source for the drawings in The Descent of Man.

Again, you are correct in thinking that with regards to comparative embryology Darwin did not rely on Haeckel’s embryo illustrations in making his case for descent with modification, this is something manufactured in the minds of antievolutionists.

Olivia Judson's Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation is way cool.

As to the meaning of life - it's your life. What would you like it to mean?

I suspect humans are the species with the most developed capacity for thought at the present time; but there is nothing in evolutionary theory that implies this must be the case. Ten million years from now, the descendents of dolphins might be the smartest species around.

Teaching "Intelligent Design" would not merely compromise science. It would also compromise engineering, since the design of ID has no resemblance to the design used by competent designers. Real design involves experimentation, testing, selection, recombination, and, in a word, evolution. Not exactly the same as biological evolution, but a lot closer than creationists would like to think. Teaching ID would also compromise theology, because it teaches that the designers are incompetent and are directly responsible for evils such as diseases.

The stupid notion that "fitness" is the same as "living a long while" or "dying in a macho, or approved common way" is pervasive and wrong. You will find several TalkOrigins papers on the notion of 'fitness' starting with, "The Evolution of Improved Fitness : By Random Mutation Plus Selection"

PS: Too few people know what a 'nit' is, and the opportunity to highlight the word took over.

You are mixing up your creationist confusions here. The magnitude of gravitational forces from the moon is easily calculated, and they account for tides just fine. The rate of recession actually depends on tidal friction, which is much harder to calculate, but the details are covered in the FAQ. So the answer to your question is: of course not. Tidal effects are not negligible, and they can be calculated, though the models are complicated. The current rate of recession is actually about 3.82±0.07 cm/year, which is unusually high. The FAQ explains the factors that bear upon the recession rate; it is not uniformitarian except in the trivial sense of using the same laws of physics.

The figure you give corresponds to recession about 650 million years ago. That kind of recession rate suggests that the Moon has receded roughly 20,000 km over those 650 million years. The Moon is currently about 400,000 km away, and our current leading model for formation of the moon is the mother of all catastrophes about 4.5 billion years ago.

[So many errors, so little interest.]

I of course disagree that the effort to correct the errors and out-right lies promoted by creationists about science is wasted. We face many critical issues regarding the preservation of genetic diversity, medical practice, and global energy use which must be decided by a well informed population if we are to avoid disaster.

Evolution is not Natural Selection.