Quote from axeman:
I will skip many points of contention in your post and jump to the meat of it.
"Now, here's my question for you? Do you really believe that tens and tens of thousands of mutations could have occurred in the right sequence to create this sort of Super Cray computer housed in our craniums in just a 100 million years or less? I'm not trying to be combative, but I can't believe that anyone who knows probabiility and stats at even a base level could believe that. "
This is just another version of finding a watch on the beach.
We have been through this before. You have NO idea what the probability is period. You are CLAIMING that it is very low, but have zero evidence to support this notion.
Let's get down to some #s - that hopefully will be a little less emotional for us. We both love #s, right?
Let's take a simpler example than the above. Let's take the reptile to bird transition. We both know that virtually every aspect of a reptile has to be completely altered in order to change into a bird. Bone density, bone configuration, skeleton, scales to feathers, feet to claws, tail to bird tail for flight, flight instincts, tree dwelling instincts, care for the young, circulation, heart beat, vision, motor skills, warm bloodedness, muscle reconfiguration, digestion, migratory skills, lung oxigenation, visual acuity, and on and on. (A biologist could come up with several more major structural and biochemical examples as well I feel confident.) Everything must radically change. Now a car probably has around 10,000 parts so let's give evolution the benefit of the doubt and conservatively estimate that a bird has around 1,000 parts (and we both know this is WAY too low - it should be at least as much as a car!) each of which requires a 100 good mutations.
And let's say for each 99 bad mutations there's 1 good mutation. (Again, that's much better than real mutation rates in real creatures.) And let's say the average lifespan for these missing links is 1 year and that it takes generally 25 years on average for the mutation to propogate significantly throughout the species.
If you add it up: that's 250 million years. And this is only if the mutations happen serially in the EXACT order necessary to sustain life (and if my ridiculously favorable-to-Darwin estimates are true). For example, if the bird develops wings before hollow bones, it will be easy prey, i.e cat food. If the bird develops wings but does not have the altered muscular structure or rapid heart rate, etc., etc. it will not be able to sustain flight.
So this is not a Watchmaker argument. This doesn't mean there's a low probability - it means it can't happen. Why? Because secular archaeologists estimate the time for this to be < 10 million years!
Plus, you and I both know that if we did a probabilistic study the time for this to occur would be in the billions of trillions of years.
And please don't give me a pat answer. It is a problem and this is what great Darwinist minds such as Gould have struggled with. Of course, Gould still believed in evolution until his dying day, but nevertheless, he had the intellectual honesty to say that this was problematic. From what I've seen Darwinism does not have a mechanism to explain this problem.
But if you've seen a recent paper on this, let me know...
