Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Would you bet on Evolution?

I have been told by believers in Darwinian evolution that it is a fact and that it is how life came about from non-life. So in an effort to research it as fairly as possible I went to that secular source of all knowledge; Wikipedia. I thought that if anywhere would provide a pro-evolution view Wikipedia would be the place, and Wikipedia lived up to my expectations in that regard.

To get started I simply went to the evolution page on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
To find the very origin point of life according to evolutionary theory, the starting point if you will, the very first organism, I thought the best place to look is on the evolutionist "tree of life" which is supposed to graph the accent of life from its first origins according to evolutionary theory.
So here is the evolutionist's supposed tree of life as presented by Wikipedia.

You may need to zoom in to read the text on the picture.
Even when you do you will find it confusing because the tree does not actually tell us what is at the root. Yes thats correct, the first life form is unidentified by evolutionary theory.
So if you try to take the next step and see what that first life-form evolved into next, you will find that it is going in two different branches, but the forks in those branches which represent the next step in evolution are not identified either, so you don't know what is the first step and you don't know what the second step is either, then you go to the next branch and you find that fork is not identified either. In fact NONE of the the forks in the branches of the evolutionist “tree of life” are identified to show what the alleged common ancestors are of the eventual final life forms.
Well lets ignore that obvious hole in their evidence, and go to the lowest identifiable life form in the tree presented to us.
It is the the Nonoarchaeum Equitans and here is what Wikipedia has to say about it. (and remember they are pro-evolution)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoarchaeum_equitans

“Nanoarchaeum equitans
is a species of tiny microbe, discovered in 2002 in a hydrothermal vent off the coast of Iceland by Karl Stetter. Since it grows in temperatures approaching boiling, it is considered to be a thermophile. Nanoarchaeum appears to be an obligatory symbiont on the archaeon Ignicoccus; it must be in contact with the host organism to survive. Its cells are only 400 nm in diameter, making it the next smallest known living organism, excepting possibly nanobacteria and nanobes, whose status as living organisms are controversial. Its genome is only 490,885 nucleotides long; the smallest non-viral genome ever sequenced next to C. ruddii's in 2006.” (emphasis added)

Now considering that it has 490,885 nucleotides, and there are four types of nucleotides (A,T,G & C) then the chance of getting these connected in the right sequence by accident is 4 to the power of 490,885. which is a number big enough to blow up my calculator, so I could not calculate it exactly but it is something in the order of 10 to the power of 30,000. which means a 1 with 30,000 zeros added after it.

Here is the details on its symbiont partner organism

Now what about that even smaller proteobacterium the C.ruddii? I hear you ask.
Well here is the article about it on Wikipedia.
It lives in a symbiotic relationship with psyllids (plant sap eating insects)
But hold on, this is the smallest non-viral genome ever sequenced and the closest to that all important first life form, so why is it dependent upon its survival for a higher life form to first exist that it can be in symbiotic relationship with? And also how can the psyllid have come about before the arrival of the C.Ruddi which it needs to digest its food?
Now the C.Ruddi only has a DNA nucleotide sequence of 159,662 pairs so the chances of getting this to happen by chance are much better at just 4 to the power of 159,662.
Again the number is big enough to blow up my calculator but it comes out to something like 10 to the power of 9000, which is a 1 with 9000 zeros added after it.

Then when you look at the psyllid (plant sap eating insect) you will find that it first requires plants to have existed that they can feed from. (sounds logical to me)

Well maybe we are barking up the wrong tree with these symbiont forms of life. What we need is to look at the smallest free-living form of life.
It is the Mycoplasma Genitalium and here is the article about it on Wikipedia:
The following is a quote from that article:
Mycoplasma genitalium is a small parasitic bacterium which lives on the ciliated epithelial cells of the primate genital and respiratory tracts. M. genitalium is the smallest known free-living bacterium, and the second-smallest bacterium after the recently-discovered endosymbiont Carsonella ruddii. Until the discovery of Nanoarchaeum in 2002, M. genitalium was also considered to be the organism with the smallest genome.[1]” (emphasis added)

Well well well, it is not symbiotic, but it is parasitic, and so it still needs higher forms of life to survive. In fact it is living in the genitalia of a higher life form which means that it is parasitic on sexually reproducing life forms; so was it the ancestor of the sexually reproducing animal or was it a descendant of them? Considering that it needs the host in order to survive, it must have waited a long time for these sexually reproducing life forms to come along before it could first evolve.
Additionally to this nightmare of logic, the number of nucleotide base pairs for the Mycoplasma Genitalium is 582,970.
Sorry but thats worse than all the others. There is statistically no chance of its DNA sequence being randomly generated by evolutionary processes; and it owes me a new calculator!

For point of reference, your chances of winning the lottery are 1 in 45,379,620 which is 4.5 times 10 to the power of 7.
So compare that with 10 to the power of 9000 (or more) to win the evolutionary lotto.  Realistically you got no chance at all.

You wouldn't bet your life on winning the lottery, so don't bet your life on evolution; its a long odds horse, and a nag which is sure to die before it finishes the race. In fact with odds like that it will probably die before it reaches the starting gate.
Is there a divine Creator of life? You can bet there is.


3 comments:

  1. If it doesn't make sense to you, shouldn't you assume that you're missing something? You should be doing more research and asking questions instead of assuming you've discovered a simple logical fallacy that billions of dedicated scientists have overlooked for hundreds of years.

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  2. Thank you for your comments Thomas.
    You asked "If it doesn’t make sense to you, shouldn't you assume that you're missing something?"
    Empirical inductive science requires evidence on which to base a conclusion. If the empirical evidence to support a conclusion is missing, then it is not inductive reasoning to maintain the same conclusion and keep searching for evidence to support it. That is the opposite of inductive science.
    Please refer to my article “What is scientism”.
    http://thephilosophiserchannel.blogspot.com/2010/03/what-is-scientism.html
    Considering that the number of people who have lived in the past 150 years since evolutionary theory began does not exceed 8 billion you are asserting that 25% of the world's population in modern history have been scientists who support Darwinistic evolution. This is simply not true and if it was true would still not prove them to be correct in their beliefs.
    If a problem of logic and reason is presented in science, then the proper response is to provide an answer in logic and reason rather than to assert that the dissenter should stop questioning the establishment.

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  3. As far as I've understood, nobody knows what the first life-form was. Nobody knows exactly how it started. The reason there's no name for the first branches might be simply because there's no feature including them in the script that generated the tree.

    Another possible reason is science hasn't agreed on what exactly that life-form was. I think the linkage between the different branches into the trunk is an inference from factual observations, that all of these organisms share some portion of their DNA.

    I would guess it's quite possible science will never know for sure what exactly was the first life-form on earth. They're making models for it now, and I guess it won't be long until they find a working model for abiogenesis. But there will probably be quite a few possible paths.

    I'm no expert, but I got the idea that there's a chance the bit of DNA that would have coded the original life-form might be long gone, due to life simply "cleaning out the attic". As soon as an alternative script for self-replication was assembled, there was no need for the original one, and it would have made no difference if it dropped off, in which case the records of it ever existing would be gone.

    So I don't think science will ever know exactly how life started, but they'll have a perfectly working explanation that would make it happen on a new world with the same conditions, like if they simulated it.

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