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God vs Science

This is an edited extract from Can Science Explain Everything? by John C Lennox (January 2019). The book is the first of a series in a joint venture with the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, Zacharias Institute, and The Good Book Company. “Surely you can’t be...

Objection Overruled

By William A. Dembski & Sean McDowell This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 31, number 5 (2008). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org. Synopsis The controversy...

A “Sign” of the Times

So sorry rabbi… Recently a friend of mine gave me a short clip out of a local newspaper to read (see below) and asked my opinion about what it said.  My friend knows that I’m a Christian and where I stand on issues of faith, but I think he was trying to get me to see...

Starting a Grassroots Apologetics Ministry

Starting an Apologetic Ministry I had the privilege of speaking with Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio about the birth of New York Apologetics and how to start an apologetics ministry.  We know that "unless the Lord builds it, it's laborers labor in vain", so...

Beware the Hebrew Roots Movement

Hebrew Roots is dangerous! In my recent radio interview with Chris Arnzen on the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Show, I was asked a question about the Hebrew Roots movement.  Although I've heard about the movement and knew some basic information, I promised to post some...

Who was Jesus? | NY Minute

We're using the "Handbook of Apologetics" by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli to go over the arguments for the existence of God.  Today, we will be covering the above referenced subject in relation to the existence of God. Dr. Kreeft teaches logic in two major...

The Deity of Jesus: the alternative | NY Minute

We're using the "Handbook of Apologetics" by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli to go over the arguments for the existence of God.  Today, we will be covering the above referenced subject in relation to the existence of God. Dr. Kreeft teaches logic in two major...

Jesus’ Divinity leads to Trustworthiness | NY Minute

We're using the "Handbook of Apologetics" by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli to go over the arguments for the existence of God.  Today, we will be covering the above referenced subject in relation to the existence of God. Dr. Kreeft teaches logic in two major...

Divinity of Jesus Difficulties | NY Minute

We're using the "Handbook of Apologetics" by Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli to go over the arguments for the existence of God.  Today, we will be covering the above referenced subject in relation to the existence of God. Dr. Kreeft teaches logic in two major...

Evolution: Science Fable, or fact?

This hilarious video on evolution illustrates the absurdity of the Theory of Evolution and the consequences that follow.  On evolution, you have no significant value or meaning.  

Written by Stephen C. Meyer

 

Recently at the University of Toronto I had the opportunity to debate atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and theistic evolutionist Denis Lamoureux. The subject was “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe.” Later, I was flattered to learn that famed biologist Richard Dawkins felt it necessary to come to the aid of his friend Dr. Krauss in Krauss’s dispute with me about whether the evolutionary process depends upon an ineliminable element of randomness.

How odd, however, that Professor Dawkins would weigh in for the purpose of defending an obviously incomplete and therefore, indefensible caricature of the standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism. In review of my talk in Toronto, Dawkins wrote at evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog:

Meyer was terrible. . .When will these people understand that calculating how many gazillions of ways you can permute things at random is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant, as Lawrence said, because natural selection is a NONRANDOM process.1

Yes, of course, natural selection is a “nonrandom” process as Dawkins correctly insists. Rates of reproductive success correlate to the traits that organisms possess. Those with fitness advantages will, all other things being equal, out-reproduce those lacking those advantages.Got it. Understood.

Yet, clearly, there is more to the evolutionary mechanism than just natural selection. Instead, the standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism comprises (1) natural selection and/or (2) genetic drift acting on (3) adaptively random genetic variations and mutations (of various kinds). Moreover, as conceived from Darwin to the present, natural selection “selects” or acts to preserve those random variations that confer a fitness (or functional) advantage upon the organisms that possess them. It, further, “selects” only after such functionally advantageous variations (or mutations) have arisen. How could it do otherwise? Selection does not cause novel variations; rather, it sifts what is delivered to it by the random changes (e.g., mutations) that do cause variations. Such has been neo-Darwinian orthodoxy for many decades.

All this means that as a mechanism for the production of novel genetic information, natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base (or amino acid) sequences. Rather it can only preserve such sequences (if they confer a functional advantage) once they have originated. In other words, adaptive advantage only accrues after the generation of new functional genes and proteins — after the fact, that is, of some (presumably) successful random mutational search. It follows that even if natural selection (considered separately from mutation) constitutes a non-random process, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends precisely upon an ineliminable element of randomness, namely, various postulated or observed mutational processes. (Nor is any of the above particularly controversial within evolutionary biology. No less friendly partisans to Krauss and Dawkins as Professors Larry Moran and P.Z. Myers both criticized Krauss for mischaracterizing the neo-Darwinian mechanism as wholly non-random, with Moran specifically blaming Krauss’s uncritical reliance upon Dawkins as the source of his misinformation.2)

In any case, the need for random mutations to generate novel base or amino-acid sequences before natural selection can play a role means that precise quantitative measures of the rarity of genes and proteins within the sequence space of possibilities are highly relevant to assessing the alleged power of mutation-selection mechanism. Indeed, such empirically derived measures of rarity are highly relevant to assessing the alleged plausibility of the mutation-selection mechanism as a means of producing the genetic information necessary to generating a novel protein fold. Moreover, given the empirically based estimates of the rarity (conservatively estimated by Axe3 at 1 in 1077 and within a similar range by others4) the analysis that I presented in Toronto does pose a formidable challenge to those who claim the mutation-natural selection mechanism provides an adequate means for the generation of novel genetic information — at least, again, in amounts sufficient to generate novel protein folds.5

Why a formidable challenge? Because random mutations alone must produce (or “search for”) exceedingly rare functional sequences among a vast combinatorial sea of possible sequences before natural selection can play any significant role. Moreover, as I discussed in Toronto, and show in more detail in Darwin’s Doubt,6 every replication event in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth would not generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein fold. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process (corresponding to the total number of organisms — 1040 — that have ever existed on earth), thus, turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched. The threshold of selectable function exceeds what is reasonable to expect a random search to be able to accomplish given the number of trials available to the search even assuming evolutionary deep time.

As with a hypothetical thief who is confronted with many more combinations than he has time to explore (in my offending bike lock analogy), the mutation and selection mechanism is much more likely to fail than to succeed in generating even a single new gene or protein in the known history of life on Earth. It follows that the neo-Darwinian mechanism — with its reliance on a random mutational search to generate novel gene sequences — is not an adequate mechanism to produce the information necessary for even a single new protein fold, let alone a novel animal form, in available evolutionary deep time.

Or to put the point differently, the hypothesis that a random search (aided after the fact by natural selection) did produce the genetic information necessary to morphological innovation in the history of life is overwhelmingly more likely to be false than true. That is one reason why so many mainstream evolutionary biologists are now abandoning neo-Darwinism and looking for other evolutionary mechanisms to account for fundamental innovations in the history of life.7

Readers who want to know more about the mathematical challenges posed to the neo-Darwinian mechanism may enjoy watching the Information Enigma video posted below, in which I and Doug Axe discuss these issues in greater detail:

 

 

To continue reading click below..

Dawkins’s Dilemma: Misrepresent the Mechanism … or Face the Math | Evolution News

Recently at the University of Toronto I had the opportunity to debate atheist cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and theistic evolutionist Denis Lamoureux. The subject was ” What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe.”

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