Evolution is not improbable nor is it based on "chance"

The statement is commonly made by anti-evolutionists that evolution is simply "chance", or they attempt to use an analogy to show that the development of humans is so improbable that the Theory of Evolution is worthless. However, all of these analogies are flawed in a basic way.


Let's consider two challenges that will serve to illustrate the mathematics of the probability involved. This may seem like a mere semantic difference but it's critical.

The first challenge is to roll 100 dice until all of them come up 1's. Each time you roll you must reroll all 100 dice. The probability of this occuring is 1 in 6.5 x 10^77. A computer that could do 1 billion trials per second (which I believe is more than any current computer can do) would take 1.2 x 10^66 (which means 1.2 plus 66 zeroes) *years* to complete this.

The second challenge is to roll 100 dice until all of them come up 1's. However, this time, after each roll, you may pick out the dice that show 1's and not reroll them the next time. So the pool of dice you are rolling will become smaller and smaller until all of them are 1's. This produces the same results as the first challenge, but is much faster -- you could probably do that yourself in 15 minutes or less, and a computer would probably take less than a second to do this.

Creationists always compare evolution to the first challenge when they are discussing how improbable life is. They often compare it to a monkey hammering on a typewriter and trying to produce a play, or wind randomly wearing away at rock to produce the Mount Rushmore carvings.

However, Natural Selection does not start from the beginning with each new generation. The essence of natural selection is that the gains are preserved and the mistakes are eradicated. This makes evolution much closer to the second challenge than the first. And that makes a huge difference, 1 second versus a number of years much larger than the projected life of the universe.

You may not agree with evolution, but there's no point in trying to use an argument against it that is so clearly wrong.

-Chris

Kern you may want to check out Dawin's Black Box by Behe. Not just on the web either, but I recommend that all evolutionists read it. Its not chance, but millions upon millions of chances (undirected mutations)actually that supposedly add up to macro-evolution. A good discussion of Behe's book is going on at the Baptist Board forum.

Oh yes, Behe. It's always fun to watch YEC's invoke Behe, who fully accepts common descent. And, of course, who has suffered the embarassment of making claims about the state of research into biochemical evolution that were flatly contradicted by a quick PubMed search before his book was even written.

However, to address your point:
The mutations are undirected. Evolution is not. How can that be? Oh wait, that must be natural selection.

How embarassing to forget that.

Oh, yes, BaptistBoard. The place where they not only banned all atheists, but deleted every post they had made in the year.

__________________
~~RvFvS~~
Evolution: The change of properties of populations of organisms over time.
Microevolution: Evolution apparent within species.
Macroevolution: Evolution apparent between species.

The accuracy of science cannot be determined by emotion, philosophy, politics, or religion.

But in the end, evolution is not *based* on chance as many anti-evolutionists profess. Chance is part of evolution, but natural selection ensures that the end product is not simply random. If you have a sports tournament with randomly seeded teams, you would not say that the entire tournament is based on chance.

-Chris

Natural selection insures huh? Well, it is more technical than that. I am not surprised BB kicked the athiests off, and manage the creation/evolution debate the way they do. This board appears to be taken over by evolutionists, and its a Christian forum. Yes, I know there are Christian evolutionists but, they are actually the minority of Christians. So it makes sense to me what the BB did. Helen's descriptions of Behe's book are very good though and thats why I mentioned that board.

Are you going to explain it, or should we just assume you're wrong because you didn't?

"It's more technical than that" is not a rebuttal.
Yes. That seemed to be a direct result of one of the more prominent members getting cornered over an accusation she made.

The accusation was seen as insulting by several people, and they hounded her to prove her accusation or apologize.

She did neither, the board was shut down, and three months later brought up under the new format.
Factually incorrect. Creationism is pretty much a product of fundamentalist Protestanism, and is found pretty much solely in the US (and some in Australia).

The vast majority of Christians (Catholics + liberal and mainstream Protestants) have no problems with evolution, and many of them work in the field of biology and evolution.
Only if you don't check her statements. The Galatian did an excellent job of pointing out the flaws in her (and Behe's) logic. The Galatian, by the way, is quite Christian.

Debating you guys can be a full time job, and most people have more things to do than that. When there are more than 2 or three against one, it is easy to get tripped up. I am not making excuses, I just started going to BB this week.

Nope. Read the works of Wright, Fisher, and Haldane from the first half of last century. Natual selection can only occur if survival is not random.

BaptistBoard is in the process of eliminating all non-conservates and deleting all their posts. (Liberal Baptists, like Rev. Joshua will be allowed to stay for now.) It's because the conservatives were loosing badly in the Free-For-All forums and the webmaster was embarrassed. They started with "non-theists," and it appears that Catholics will be getting the axe next.

They began moderating--nay, filtering--the E/C forum after Helen painted herself into a corner and began spamming the board to cover her tracks. As someone who used to post there frequenty, I can tell you that replies to Helen get screened much more heavily than to other posters. One moderator even told me they weren't BB had no interest in science. I've even seen moderating that completely changed the meaning of a person's post. Even with the playing field baised so heavily in favor of YEC, they still lose every time.

Got any statistics to back that up? Or are you just going from the Christians you personally know? Creationists and conservatives don't nearly have the monopoly on Christian faith they think they do.

__________________
~~RvFvS~~
Evolution: The change of properties of populations of organisms over time.
Microevolution: Evolution apparent within species.
Macroevolution: Evolution apparent between species.

The accuracy of science cannot be determined by emotion, philosophy, politics, or religion.

Lanakila,

You can handle debates if you stick to one topic at a time and actually attempt to address criticisms. Don't run off and start a new topic and then claim that you don't have enough time to finish the previous one. Know your limitations and don't spread yourself too thin. If you're rough on subject matter, I'll be happy to address any questions about genetics and/or evolutionary biology you might have.

__________________
~~RvFvS~~
Evolution: The change of properties of populations of organisms over time.
Microevolution: Evolution apparent within species.
Macroevolution: Evolution apparent between species.

The accuracy of science cannot be determined by emotion, philosophy, politics, or religion.