Motivation

• In a completely rational world, the theory of evolution would have disappeared decades ago. What is not commonly understood is how very weak the arguments for evolution are, how overwhelming a number of the arguments against it are, and how thoroughly the doctrine has been disproved over the last century.

There are several lines of argument against evolution which should have killed it off by now, and I mean that any one of these arguments alone should have sufficed to kill it. 

The List of Such Arguments Includes:

Arguments from the realm of mathematics and probability:

• "The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of Evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence."

Sir Fred HoyleNature, Nov 12, 1981, p. 148

• Beginning in the mid 1960s at a number of symposia at the Wistar center in Philadelphia a number of the world's best mathematicians tried to explain the nature of reality to evolutionists, who are still in denial:

http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/20hist12.htm

See also:

http://evolutionisimpossible.com/math.html

Fruit fly experiments:  • Fruit flies breed new generations every couple of days, so that

breeding them for 20 or 30 years will involve more generations of fruit flies than there have ever been of humans or anything resembling humans on the Earth.  This was in fact done in the early decades of the 1900s in an all out effort to produce macroevolution in the lab.  They subjected the flies to heat, cold, shock, blast, radiation, noise, and everything else known to produce mutations and then recombined mutants every possible way, and all they ever got were fruit flies.  The results were so striking that several of the scientists involved publiclly renounced evolution including the famous case of Richard Goldschmidt who afterwards claimed he was being subjected by colleagues to something akin to the 10-minute hate sessions which George Orwell described.

http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/10mut10.htm

Questions involving thermodynamics (our other paper tonight)

The fossil record:

• The fossil record simply does not show the kinds of intermediate fossils which darwinism demanded.  It shows animal species going for long periods of time without changing (STASIS), and the abrupt emergence of new kinds of animals.

• The recent Gould/Eldredge "punctuated equilibria" variation of evolution attempts to deal with this problem but has major kinds of problems of its own. 

Neanderthal DNA studies:

• Studies of neanderthal DNA in the late 1990s have eliminated the neanderthal as a plausible ancestor for modern man and all other hominids are further removed from modern man than the neanderthal.

• This leaves no possible evolutionary antecedent for modern man on our planet.

Dinosaurs: • There is now overwhelming evidence that

humans were dealing with at least leftover dinosaurs just a few thousand years ago, and then last summer they turned up soft tissue inside a tyranosaur bone which looks much like hamburger you'd buy at the grocery store:

• http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/

Tyrannosaur Meat:

Stegosaur petroglyph at Lake Ontario, Agawa Rock

And Today’s Topic:

• Arguments from population genetics, and the Haldane Dilemma: 

Basically, to spread any genetic change (good, bad, or indifferent) through any large population of animals would take longer than the Earth has been here:

The Haldane dilemma is named after the mathematical geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who described the problem in a paper in 1957. Haldane was a committed evolutionist who nonetheless turned up a problem for evolution which many view as fatal.

Biotic Message

• The other name involved with this topic is that of Walter Remine, author of a book titled “The Biotic Message”. Haldane would have been happy to allow his fellow evolutionists ignore the problem to death and into oblivion. Remine’s book is the main thing which has prevented this.

Evolving whole populations

How do you get from here to there?

Rational and Quasi-rational possibilities:

• Apes all die, God creates man.

• God kills apes, creates man.

• Apes are still here, God creates man.

• Man genetically re-engineered from apes or glorified apes (australopithecines).

• Man imported from elsewhere in cosmos, apes either still here or have died out.

• Etc. etc. etc.

Irrational possibilities:

• “Beneficial” point mutations are substituted into the herd of chimps or “ape-like ancestors” over a long period of time until, five or ten million years later, all that is left is a herd of humans.

• Evolutionites live in a sort of a fantasy universe in which magical creatures like “beneficial mutations” and “balancing deaths” walk about freely.

• Bestiary creatures will be marked in red in this presentation.

The word “bestiary” stopped one of our leaders at first.

600 Years ago common people like ourselves did not own books. One of the more common things you’d have found in the collections of those who did own books would be a bestiary, basically a book describing all of the mythical animals which supposedly lived on far islands or in far Asia. Like the “beneficial mutation” leading in the direction of a change in animal kind, the creatures of the bestiary did not actually exist.

Page from a medieval bestiary

Beneficial Mutations

• In the real world, the common English term for “mutation” is “birth defect”, and virtually all mutations have names. None of them are terribly beneficial:

• The Wikipedia (very long) list of genetic disorders (another term for “mutations”):

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetic_disorders

Two more evolutionite bestiary creatures)

Remine: Nearly three decades ago, new techniques allowed measurement of genetic variation for the first time. The results were a surprise. In most populations, each gene has many versions (known as alleles). In fact, there is much more genetic variation than can be reconciled with the classical selection theory. This unanticipated result prompted various theoretical developments to accommodate it.

The selectionists modified their theory by adding several mechanisms for actively maintaining genetic diversity. These mechanisms are called heterozygote advantage and balancing selection. These special types of selection work to keep variation.

Neutral Selection…

• Another evolutionite bestiary creature.

• Want to ruin an evolutionite’s day? Ask him if he’d ever considered the possibility that “neutral selection” might be an oxymoron…

Harvard geneticist, Richard Lewontin:

– “For many years population genetics was an immensely rich and powerful theory with virtually no suitable facts on which to operate. It was like a complex and exquisite machine, designed to process a raw material that no one had succeeded in mining. Quite suddenly the situation has changed. The mother-lode has been tapped and facts in profusion have been poured into the hoppers of this theory machine. And from the other end has issued - nothing. It is not that the machinery does not work, for a great clashing of gears is clearly audible, if not deafening, but it somehow cannot transform into a finished product the great volume of raw material that has been provided. The entire relationship between the theory and the facts needs to be reconsidered.” (Lewontin, 1974, p 189)

Military Acronyms

• FUBAR (Fouled Up Beyond Any Recognition).

• FUBAR appears to be a good description of the situation Lewontin is describing.

Terminology:

Remine: substituted traits are simple changes having arisen by mutation, which include DNA inversion, gene duplication, or deletion, or a new location of a gene on a chromosome but, according to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, are typically a new version of a gene - an allele. The new substituted gene typically differs from the old gene by one newly mutated nucleotide.

The Haldane Dilemma: Higher Arithmatic• Walter Remine (email):

• Haldane's calculation goes something like this (when all the logic is filled in). Take the reproduction rate of a higher vertebrate (especially the problematic species with low reproduction rates, such as cows, humans, apes, whales, elephants). Next, subtract the reproduction rate that must account for random loss in the population (anything that affects the fit and unfit alike. That would include large components of the losses suffered in floods, fires, diseases, famines, and much more). Next subtract 1.0, which is the reproduction rate required merely to continue the population into the next generation. Next subtract the reproduction rate that must account for harmful mutations (because many of the fit progeny suffer harmful mutation too). Next subtract the reproduction rate that must account for the maintenance of polymorphisms in the population. And so forth down the list of costs. When you're all done, you have a reproduction rate of 0.1 leftover (according to Haldane) for paying the cost of substitution. Then, if the total cost is 30, and it is paid in installments of 0.1 per generation, then it takes 300 generations to complete one substitution.

Remine’s Simple Version:

• Imagine a population of 100,000 apes or “proto-humans” ten million years ago which are all genetically alike other than for two with a “beneficial mutation”. Imagine also that this population has the human or proto-human generation cycle time of roughly 20 years.

• Imagine that the beneficial mutation in question is so good, that all 99,998 other die out immediately (from jealousy), and that the pair with the beneficial mutation has 100,000 kids and thus replenishes the herd.

• Imagine that this process goes on like that for ten million years, which is more than anybody claims is involved in “human evolution”. The max number of such “beneficial mutations” which could thus be substituted into the herd would be ten million divided by twenty, or 500,000 point mutations which, Remine notes, is about 1/100 of one percent of the human genome, and a miniscule fraction of the 2 to 3 percent that separates us from chimpanzees, or the half of that which separates us from neanderthals.

• In a rational world, that should be as far as most people need to read.

• That basically says that even given a rate of evolutionary development which is fabulously beyond anything which is possible in the real world, starting from apes, in ten million years the best you could possibly hope for would be an ape with a slightly shorter tail.

• But nobody ever accused evolutionites of being rational. Surely, they will argue, the problem might be resolved by having many mutations being passed through the herd simultaneously.

• Most of the answer involves the fact that the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal. ANY creature which starts mutating willy nilly will perish.

A 100,000 Kid Family??The “COST” of the scenario above was 50,000, i.e.

the birth rate you’d have to have to do it.

Haldane tried to resolve the problem by supposing that the cost of substitution is being paid in installments rather than having one woman have 100,000 kids.

This involves picturing a hose or pipeline representing 10,000,000 years, with apes walking in at one end, and humans walking out at the other.

Aside from the question of intermediate fossils, there is also the question of why we do not see creatures of all stages of such a process still walking around…

• In this hose or pipeline, at every stage as a new trait is substituted into the herd, the old stock dies out, as the substitution of the new trait leads to “genetic death” of the old stock.

• This is in fact the thing which Hitler and other nazis were assuming to be the basic reality of life and which became the core of their doctrine.

• The nazis in fact were not promulgating any failure of logic.

• In other words, if the rise of a new and supposedly better genotype is going to cause the old stock to die out one way or the other, then you are clearly not doing the old stock any favors to prolong the agony. Likewise Curtis LeMay noted regarding the fire raids in WW-II that (his words more or less) you’re not doing a dog with a cancerous tail any favors to cut the tail off in slices.

Remine: Differential survival is required for selective gene substitution, and this causes genetic death. There is no way around it. Some individuals must live, and others must die without heirs. The substitution of a gene incurs some number of genetic deaths. We divide this by the number of survivors who reproductively 'pay' for the genetic deaths, and the ratio is called the cost of substitution. In the 100,000 ape example, the cost was enormous: 49,999.

Problems with the 1-generation 100,000-ape switch scenario aboveRemine cites a number of problems with the simplistic scenario above:.

• Selection in nature is not perfect. It is rarely as intense as this example. When selection is weaker, the substitution requires more time.

• Beneficial mutations are not easily produced. They are rare. A population of 100,000 is not likely to receive a major one every generation.

• The effect of harmful mutations has not been counted. These must be eliminated by differential survival, and this raises the cost of the process.

• The notion of “stasis” has not been accounted for.

• Fifth, to get past fitness barriers, evolutionists have proposed the shifting balance hypothesis which would add to the cost of the process.

• Often the initial traits are not directly replaced by the final traits. There would be many intermediate steps along the way, so traits would typically be substituted many times to achieve the final result.

The 100,000-kid problem…

• The most major problem:

• There is no possible way for females to produce an average of 100,000 offspring each.

Haldane’s model

• Births = Survivors + Genetic Deaths

• Birth = Survivors + Mutation Deaths+ Segregation Deaths+ Balancing Deaths+ Substitution Deaths+ Random Deaths

Divide through by # of survivors:

B -1 =PM+ PX + PB+ PS + PR

B = births per survivor

PS = B - 1 - PM - PX - PB - PR

The quantity PS is the relative number of births available to pay the cost of substitution, i.e. it is what remains of the birth rate after subtracting all other payments. The other P quantities represent the average payments made each generation toward the costs of mutation, segregation, balancing, and random death, respectively.

Haldane estimated that over a variety of circumstances the substitution of a gene incurs an average cost of thirty (genetic deaths). That means that for one person to receive the “beneficial mutation” and the whole pipeline scheme work, thirty people have to die without heirs. Costs rise very rapidly for recessive genes, and also for fast evolution schemes.

Remine: Haldane then surveyed the capacity of higher vertebrate species to pay the various costs. He estimated that averaged over the long term these species have a reproductive excess of one tenth (0.1). This means the typical higher vertebrate can reproduce an additional one tenth its population size each generation and devote this excess specifically (and with perfect efficiency) to paying the cost of substitution.

In summary, the cost of substitution is 30 and it is paid off in installments of 0.1 each generation. At that rate it takes 300 generations to pay the cost of substituting one gene. Haldane's conclusion was clear: over the long term, the average rate of gene substitution is no better than one gene every 300 generations.

This is the source of the 1700 substitutions in 10,000,000 years figure you read, and of the use of the term “quadrillions of years” in the literature.

• Walter Remine noticed that Haldane’s presenting the theory in terms of “genetic death” was unnecessary and offered evolutionites ways to argue the case which are basically not legitimate and which they don’t really deserve to have. He (Remine) has a new paper available which presents the theory purely in terms of birth rates, and which offers no room for arguments involving “soft selection” or any such.

Let’s take a bit more of a look at that idea of a “balancing death”…..

From “Biotic Message:

• There turned out to be much more genetic variation in our species than selection theory would allow for.

• The original claim was that heterozygote advantage, for example, actively prevents genetic variation from being removed from the population. Heterozygote advantage occurs due to the mixing of genes from two parents by sexual reproduction. This mixing (known as Mendelian segregation) creates homozygotes and heterozygotes each generation. Heterozygote advantage is when the heterozygote genotype has a survival advantage over the homozygotes. The classic case of heterozygote advantage is sickle-cell anemia.

• …others pointed out that selectionists were employing this explanation too much. It was single-handedly incurring a cost too high for any mammalian species to pay.

“If 2000 overdominant loci are segregating, each with 1% heterozygote advantage, and if the selection is carried out by premature death of less fit homozygotes, each individual must produce on the average roughly 22,000 young in order to maintain the population number constant from generation to generation. (Kimura)

• Soon the selectionists had developed an alternate mechanism for maintaining high levels of genetic variation. The new mechanism, generally called balancing selection, relies on four types of selection. It involves traits whose survival values change depending on environmental conditions of time, space, population density, or gene frequency...

Pseudoscience• The defining characteristic of what scholars refer to as a

“pseudoscience” is unfalsifiability. That is, if it is not possible to devise a test which would falsify a theory or doctrine, the theory is basically outside the realm of science.

• In the case of an ideological doctrine like evolution, when overwhelming disproofs and a long history of nothing but surprises and reversals utterly fails to evoke anything other than further intellectual contortions and gymnastics from the doctrine’s adherents, then a reasonable person assumes the definition of “pseudoscience” has been met.

Relevant Web Sites• Walter Remines Pages dealing with the Haldane

Dilemma”• http://www1.minn.net/~science/Haldane.htm

• Robert Williams’ “refutation”• http://www.gate.net/~rwms/haldane1.html

• Fred Williams’ rebuttal• rebuttalhttp://www.evolutionfairytale.com/

articles_debates/haldane_rebuttal.htm

• Talk.origins FAQ/FGU:• http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB121.html

• The Fossil Record and Haldane Dilemma are the two chief motivations for “Punctuated Equilibria” (Gouldism).

• Consider what Gould and Eldridge et. al. are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious Problems (aside from the ones Remine mentions…)

One, it’s a pure pseudoscience; advocates actually claim that the lack of evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils) validates the theory since that is what would be expected.

Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...). This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that the two of us were secretly married. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...

Two, PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world.

• Three, PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions and billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for billions of years.

Four, PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.

Five, for any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

• The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

There's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's writings:

• They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

• They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event (TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

• ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the• business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

• Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

Such is the quasi official replacement doctrine for classical Darwinian gradualism….