Basic evolutionist time sandwich

Forums: Spirituality And Religion, Science, Evolution, Natural Selection, Human Evolution
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Something a friend posted on FR recently:

Assuming macroevolutionary scenarios were possible (they aren't), the question arises, how much time would you actually need for them? The basic answer to that question is known as the Haldane Dilemma:

http://designeduniverse.com/webthink/haldane.ppt

after the famous mathematician and population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane who published his work in the mid 1950s. The basic answer is that you would need trillions and quadrillions of years, and not just the tens of millions commonly supposed. Walter Remine puts a simplified version of the idea thusly:

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.

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 evolutionists 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.

So much for the amount of time evolutionists NEED (i.e. so much for the slice of wonderbread on the bottom of the basic evolutionist time sandwich. What about the slice on the top of the sandwich, i.e. how much time do they actually HAVE?

Consider the case of dinosaurs, which we are told died out 70 million years ago. Last summer, scientists trying to get a tyrannosaur leg bone out of a remote area by helicopter, broke the bone into two pieces, and this is what they found inside the bone:

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/050324/050324_trex_softtissue_hlg10a.hlarge.jpg

This is the Reuters/MSNBC version of the story

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

That meat clearly is not 70 million years old; I've seen week-old roadkill which looked worse.

Vine DeLoria, the well-known Native American author and past presidentg of the National Council of Amnerican Indians informs us that Indian oral traditions speak of Indian ancestors having to deal with dinosaurs on a regular basis, and that Indians view the 70 million year thing as a sort of a whiteman's fairytale:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555913881/002-6238375-5725632?v=glance&n=283155

http://buy.overstock.com/images/products/bnt/FC1555913881.JPG

In fact, we appear to have one state named after a dinosaur, Mississippi being a variation of the Ojibway name "Mishipishu", which means "water panther", or stegosaur. DeLoria notes that Indian traditions describe Mishipishu as having red fur, a sawblade back, and a "great spiked tail" which he used as a weapon.

In fact you find pictures (petroglyphs) of Mishipishu around rivers and lakes and Lewis and Clark noted that their Indian guides were in mortal terror of these since they originally signified as much as "One of these LIVES here, be careful".

The pictograph at Agawa Rock at Lake Superior shows the sawblade back fairly clearly:

http://www.cci-icc.gc.ca/services/images/aborig5.gif

and the close-eyed will note that stegosaurs did not have horns; nonetheless such glyphs survive only because Indians have always gone back and touched them up every couple of decades, and the horns were added very much later after the creature itself had perished from the Earth.

You add the questions of other dinosaur petroglyphs and Ica stones and what not into the mix and it seems fairly obvious that something is massively wrong with the common perception that dinosaurs died out tens of millions of years ago.

That is basically what I call the evolutionist time sandwich. They need trillions or quadrillions of years, and all they have is a few thousand.

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Re: Basic evolutionist time sandwich

gungasnake wrote:

They need trillions or quadrillions of years, and all they have is a few thousand.

Says a member of the flat earth society. Why aren't you out dancing around a fire and howling at the moon with the rest of the nut jobs?

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You lunatics are a f@cking infection. For all the good things about the internet, one of worst is it provides a mouthpiece for you demented brain damaged freaks to spread your mental disease around.

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And them's his good points.

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edgarblythe wrote:

And them's his good points.

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"Haldane's "cost of natural selection" stemmed from an invalid simplifying assumption in his calculations. He divided by a fitness constant in a way that invalidated his assumption of constant population size, and his cost of selection is an artifact of the changed population size. He also assumed that two mutations would take twice as long to reach fixation as one, but because of sexual recombination, the two can be selected simultaneously and both reach fixation sooner. With corrected calculations, the cost disappears (source)."

Mishipishu/Mishipizheu does mean "water panther" but in no way does it mean stegosaur. That is wishful thinking at best. First and foremost, stegosaurs do not have fur. Second, the necks of stegosaurs probably would not be able to bend like what is shown in the pictograph because the blades on their neck would collide and prevent further bending. Third, the hind legs of a stegosaur are twice as long as their front legs while that pictograph shows them being the same length. Fourth, the blades on a stegosaur range from small ones near the neck and tail and get much larger near the center of the spine while the pictograph makes no diction in size--if anybody saw a stegosaur and decided to paint it you can be certain that the large blades in the center would be emphasized in the painting. There is no way one can interpret that image. Fifth, copper nuggets were considered sacred to the Indians because Mishipizheu's bones supposedly turned to copper when it died and paleontologists certainly haven't found any copper stegosaur fossils. Sixth, Mishipizheu was a completely mythological creature who is said to have had the power to shape shift and it would be logical for Indians, who may have been charged by herds of buffalo, to be afraid of horns and incorporate that motif into their artwork. Seventh, the lines on the back are called "power lines" and symbolized the power of the creature--much like Chevrons on military uniforms--and were not actual spikes on the spiritual shape-shifting being itself.

As for the T.Rex tissue, it is an interesting find but nothing too spectacular. Most bones around that age are never cracked open to see if there is anything inside them. This one was cracked apart because they had no choice. Now they are asking other scientists to crack a few open and see if there is anything inside them. When one thinks about it, you would expect a great deal of fossilization to occur if it is preserved by 1,000 cubic yards of sandstone. And the fact that roadkill can look worse is not surprising, that is outside tissue exposed to the atmosphere. Why do you think foods are vacuum-packed? The only *real* discovery is that paleontologists have been a bit naive in how they studied fossils.

The entire argument is one of quackery. So because Indians worshipped a water spirit and a 70,000,000 year old bone was broken dinosaurs and man roamed the Earth together a few thousand years ago? Drunk

There is no other word to describe your friend but "quack." Please pass my compliments to the chef for this "quack quack" soup.

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Some more responses to Haldane's Dilemma:

Haldane's Dilemma: Should We Worry?
Population Genetics Made Simple (there is a section on Haldane's Dilemma)
ReMine's Dilemma, OR Size DOES Matter

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megamanXplosion wrote:

"source"...

Your "source" i.e. talk.origins, is basically worthless.

http://www.trueorigin.org/

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gungasnake wrote:

megamanXplosion wrote:

"source"...

Your "source" i.e. talk.origins, is basically worthless.

http://www.trueorigin.org/

Feel free to read the sources provided by Shapeless or this one on Evowiki (copy and paste because this forum doesn't like the link): http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Cost_of_natural_selection_is_prohibitive_(Haldane's_dilemma)

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J.B.S. Haldane was an absolute first rate mathematician; the best talk.origins has would barely be fit to shine his shoes.

The only thing not to like about Haldane's original formulation of the dilemma was his describing it in terms of "genetic deaths"; Walter Remine has new papers which desdribe the phenomenon totally in terms of birth rates for anybody who is bothered by "genetic deaths".

Other than that, the basic concept is not complicated and the logic of it is straightforward enough. Once again:

Quote:

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.

What the unbiased observer will note is that evolutites are good at name-calling, but they do not really have any answers to things like that.

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Since your method of response was to reiterate your first post, I'll do the same by (re)directing "unbiased readers" to the links I posted which challenge both Haldane and ReMine.

gungasnake wrote:

What the unbiased observer will note is that evolutites are good at name-calling...

gungasnake wrote:

J.B.S. Haldane was an absolute first rate mathematician; the best talk.origins has would barely be fit to shine his shoes.

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They keep going back to this "it is a zillion to one against it happening without design in such a short time" horseshyt...and actually get mathematicians to back up this silliness.

Folks...if it happens that the universe is eternal and infinite....

..."a zillion to one against" is goddam near a sure thing.

In fact, a zillion to one to a power of a gazillion to one...is goddam near a sure thing.

If the universe and existence "always was"...and "always will be" and if the universe is infinite...a distinct possibility...

...then arriving where we humans happen to be at the moment (without the intervention of design)...is so close to inevitable...that it cannot be distinguished from inevitable.

And wherever and whenever it happens....sentient beings will argue against it "simply happening" rather than being "intelligently designed."

That argument sucks. It evaporates in the face of the possibility of eternity and infinity...and that "possibility" is an absolute. IT IS POSSIBLE. In fact, it is reasonable and logical to assume that it is the way things are.

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gungasnake wrote:

J.B.S. Haldane was an absolute first rate mathematician; the best talk.origins has would barely be fit to shine his shoes.

The only thing not to like about Haldane's original formulation of the dilemma was his describing it in terms of "genetic deaths"; Walter Remine has new papers which desdribe the phenomenon totally in terms of birth rates for anybody who is bothered by "genetic deaths".

Other than that, the basic concept is not complicated and the logic of it is straightforward enough. Once again:

Quote:

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.

What the unbiased observer will note is that evolutites are good at name-calling, but they do not really have any answers to things like that.

Your first paragraph is nothing but posturing and commits the logical fallacy of argument from authority. It doesn't matter who makes the claim, if the claim isn't accurate then the claim isn't accurate.

Your second paragraph completely ignored what I posted. There is more than just "genetic deaths" that is undesirable. It is possible for many in a generation to have small mutations that may be beneficial and when you wipe that slate clean each time a mutation occurs you may also be wiping out some of the mutations that have occurred. Some mutations occur during the life of an organism and not just through the birth cycle. It should also be remembered that Homo sapiens sapiens is a subspecie of Homo sapiens (Cro Magnons) and it is quite possible that the Cromagnons may have mated with Neanderthals and had hybrid offspring and those hybrid offspring would inherit beneficial mutations from both species. It is quite possible that this happened with their ancestors too. Then there is the problem of figuring out whether or not 1,667 beneficial alleles is enough to account for the differences between us and our ancestors. Neanderthal was a different branch on the evolutionary tree of life, as are chimpanzees, and I haven't seen any information provided about our actual ancestors. I think that will explain why we are asked to imagine them.

Your last paragraph is jumping to conclusions. Remine hasn't met the burden of proof. Until that happens there is no reason to even bother trying to refute it, no more than trying to refute that there is an invisible elf on your shoulder that you can see but I can't. When Remine quits evading attempts to get clarifications on what justifies his position, such as when he was grilled by Robert Rapier, then the issue will be worth discussing.

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megamanXplosion wrote:

There is more than just "genetic deaths" that is undesirable. It is possible for many in a generation to have small mutations that may be beneficial and when you wipe that slate clean each time a mutation occurs you may also be wiping out some of the mutations that have occurred. ...

I see, the old argument about mutations being passed around simultaneously...

First, Remine's little thought experiment in which 99,998 people die out each generation is meant to simply show what happens in the most extreme case possible. In real life, Haldane determined that it would take something like 300 generations on average for any one genetic change to get fixed in the population.

In other words, the fastest rate of evolution which is even possible in thought experiments is many times too slow for what is needed.

Moreover, the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal and you are never going to see "many little beneficial mutations" in one generation of such a group of creatures. Best possible would be one beneficial mutation, assuming there even is such a thing, and the rest part of the reason the others die out. You go passing those others around and the whole species will vanish.

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gungasnake wrote:

megamanXplosion wrote:

There is more than just "genetic deaths" that is undesirable. It is possible for many in a generation to have small mutations that may be beneficial and when you wipe that slate clean each time a mutation occurs you may also be wiping out some of the mutations that have occurred. ...

I see, the old argument about mutations being passed around simultaneously...

First, Remine's little thought experiment in which 99,998 people die out each generation is meant to simply show what happens in the most extreme case possible. In real life, Haldane determined that it would take something like 300 generations on average for any one genetic change to get fixed in the population.

In other words, the fastest rate of evolution which is even possible in thought experiments is many times too slow for what is needed.

Bullshyt!

Quote:

Moreover, the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal and you are never going to see "many little beneficial mutations" in one generation of such a group of creatures. Best possible would be one beneficial mutation, assuming there even is such a thing, and the rest part of the reason the others die out. You go passing those others around and the whole species will vanish.

Bullshyt!

In an eternal, infinite universe this is not only possible...it is likely...almost a sure thing.

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gungasnake wrote:

Moreover, the vast bulk of all mutations are harmful or fatal and you are never going to see "many little beneficial mutations" in one generation of such a group of creatures.

That's an empty statement unless you also specify in what environment your sample is coming from, since the benefit or harm of a mutation is partly determined by the species's surroundings.

Quote:

Best possible would be one beneficial mutation, assuming there even is such a thing, and the rest part of the reason the others die out. You go passing those others around and the whole species will vanish.

That is true only if you disregard neutral mutations and assume that a mutation can have only a positive effect or a negative effect. While there are more harmful mutations than beneficial mutations, many biologists believe that neutral mutations outnumber both.

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Again for the benefit of anybody wishing to read about the Haldane Dilemma, there is the presentation which was given in the McLean Bible Church a few weeks ago in PPT format:

http://designeduniverse.com/webthink/haldane.ppt

and for those wanting to read all the egory details:

http://www1.minn.net/~science/

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We are aware that your buddy Tomzz gave a presentation at McLean Bible Church (and Jurassic Park.) You do not need to repeat yourself. This is a place of discussion, not one for preaching by repetition.

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megamanXplosion wrote:

You do not need to repeat yourself. This is a place of discussion, not one for preaching by repetition.

Believe it or not, I don't particularly care what you or others like you think about science topics which you're clearly not qualified to talk about. I'm putting this info up for the benefit of anybody who might come across it and who might also be able to benefit from it.

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gungasnake wrote:

megamanXplosion wrote:
You do not need to repeat yourself. This is a place of discussion, not one for preaching by repetition.

Believe it or not, I don't particularly care what you or others like you think about science topics which you're clearly not qualified to talk about. I'm putting this info up for the benefit of anybody who might come across it and who might also be able to benefit from it.

I fail to see how you are helping others "benefit from it." So, telling people that copper-boned shape-shifting water-spirit cats and broken bones that are 70,000,000 years old are proof that man walked alongside furry red stegosaurs a few thousand years ago is "helping" them? Under your definition of "help" it would be equally beneficial to drink a cocktail of battery acid and pesticide.

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Basic evolutionist time sandwich

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