Transcript Document
The Origin of Life on Earth Two Really Different Stories
Evolution vs. Creation
Sean D. Pitman, M.D.
www.naturalselection.0catch.com
Evolution – All living things have a common ancestor – Change has occurred from very simple to very complex via mindless processes alone – Required millions and billions of years – No direct intelligent guidance required or detectable Creation (My View) – All living “kinds” have a common designer – Change only occurs from complex to simple without input of higher-order information – Doesn’t require hardly any time at all, relatively speaking – Intelligence required that leaves detectable evidence
Which Story is True?
The Scientific Method of Finding Truth 1. Observation 2. Hypothesis with Testable Predictions 3. Testing Predictions 4. Hypothesis Falsified or Need Revision?
5. Repeat Steps 2 – 4
Relevant Topics of Observation and Hypothesis
• Geology • Fossils • Genetics
Observations in Geology
• Very flat sedimentary layers • Very high erosion rates • Strange layering • Neatly matching continents • Moving contaminants in “ancient” ice • Historical resistance of uniformitarian scientists to catastrophic processes clearly evidenced in the geologic record
The Geologic Column of the Grand Canyon
Notice the very flat and even layering (relative to the layers themselves) of the Colorado Plateau and Grand Canyon region. Many of these layers extend for hundreds of thousands of square miles.
Question
Why are the layers so flat and smooth?
If each layer of the geologic column was once the surface of the ground, lake bed, or ocean floor, over the course of tens of millions of years, why are they so flat? Shouldn’t uneven erosion make their surfaces more uneven over such an extended course of time?
Notice Red Butte has not been eroded away yet the surrounding erosion was relatively flat, smooth and even over a huge area.
Monument Valley
- selective erosion over millions of years?
“Flat” Erosion?
• W.M. Davis: Harvard geomorphologist who was popular about a century ago – Postulated that under special conditions "flat erosion" could be achieved that would indeed form a "peneplain" (almost a plane) • Davis Model no longer accepted – "The peneplain is Davis's 'old age' landscape. It has been called an imaginary landform. Perhaps it is." - Garner, 1974 – “Unfortunately, none [examples of peneplain erosion] are known" - Bloom 1969 – “Although demonstrable unconformities abound, even W. M. Davis admitted that it was difficult to point to a clear present-day example of a peneplain." - Pitty, 1982
Flat Deposition?
• Cretaceous Dakota Formation – Averages 30 meters thick (max 220 meters) – Spread out very evenly over 815,000 square kilometers – Reflects not only unusual depositional factors, but the extremely flat topography necessary to accommodate the spread of such a thin formation – Nothing on earth so flat as to allow this sort of flat and even deposition today – Many such layers found throughout the geologic column (Very widespread flat deposition is the rule, not the exception in the geologic column)
Average Erosion Rates
• Continental Shelves = ~6cm/ky – Equal to 600 vertical meters in just 10 million years – “North America is being denuded at a rate that could level it in a mere 10 million years, or, to put it another way, at the same rate, ten North Americas could have been eroded since middle Cretaceous time 100 m.y. ago.” – Dot and Batten
• "Some of these rates [of erosion] are obviously staggering; the Yellow River could peneplain [flatten out] an area with the average height that of Everest in 10 million years. The student has two courses open to him: to accept long extrapolations of short-term denudation [erosion] figures and doubt the reality of the erosion surfaces, or to accept the erosion surfaces and be skeptical about the validity of long extrapolations of present erosion rates." – B. W. Sparks,
Geomorphology
Mountain Erosion
• Mountain erosion = ~20cm/kr • Mt. Everest though to be over 60 million years old and is covered by a Mississippian crinoidal limestone (only 1/2 way down the column) • Should have experienced about 12,000 meters of erosion during this time • Areas with a “complete” column are no more than 5,000 meters thick (Do the Math) • Why is there still a relatively thick sedimentary layer on mountains as old as Mt. Everest?
Colorado Plateau Erosion
• Colorado River removes 390,000 tons of sandstone per day from the Colorado Plateau - 5.6 million cubic feet per day • Age of Colorado River = 5.5 million years – ~11 trillion cubic feet of erosion – About 850 vertical meters from the Colorado basin – About 15cm/kr • Age of Colorado Plateau = 70 million years – About 10,500 vertical meters of sediment – Enough erosion to wash all the sedimentary layers down to the underlying granite completely away three times over (all CP layers less than 3,500 meters thick)
• "Even if it is accepted that estimates of the contemporary rate of degradation of land surfaces are several orders too high to provide an accurate yardstick of erosion in the geological past there has surely been ample time for the very ancient features preserved in the present landscape to have been eradicated several times over. Yet the silcreted land surface of central Australia has survived perhaps 20 m.y. of weathering and erosion under varied climatic conditions, as has the laterite surface of the northern areas of the continent. The laterite surface of the Gulfs region of South Australia is even more remarkable, for it has persisted through some 200 m.y. of epigene [surface] attack. The forms preserved on the granite residuals of Eyre Peninsula have likewise withstood long periods of exposure and yet remain recognizably the landforms that developed under weathering attack many millions of years ago . . . The survival of these paleoforms [as Kangaroo Island] is in some degree an embarrassment to all of the commonly accepted models of landscape development.“ - C. R. Twidale,
American Journal of Science,
1976
Paraconformities
•
Little weathering between widely spaced (in time) layers
"A remarkable aspect of paraconformities in limestone sequences is general lack of evidence of leaching of the undersurface. Residual sods and karst surfaces that might be expected to result from long subaerial exposure are lacking or unrecognized. . . The origin of paraconformities is uncertain, and I certainly do not have a simple solution to this problem.“ - N.D. Newell,
Princeton University Press
, 1984
Strange Layering
Clastic Dikes
Neatly Matching Continents
The continents were once connected and have since “drifted” apart
Pangea
• Original Supercontinent • Thought to have broken up some 200 million years ago • Continents have been slowly drifting apart ever since
Problem with Continental Drift
• It obviously happened, but how long did it take? – currently drifting at 1-2 in/yr.
• Continental Coastal Erosion/Deposition – Change the shape of continental edges – Even very small changes add up over time – How much change should be expected after 200 million years?
Coastal Erosion/Deposition
• Ephesus a seaport city 300 years before Christ. Within 800 years, it was an “inland” city and now it is located some 5 miles inland • $500 million spent annually on US east and west coast erosion prevention • Florida alone spends $8 million on erosion prevention • Some Washington State coastlines have regressed over 300 meters in just 50 years • Texas is being eroded at between 1 an 50 feet per year • Louisiana coastline loss = 25 sq. miles/yr
What if . . .
• What if the erosion of an average continental coastline was only 1cm/yr over time? – not enough to worry anyone right?
• Over 200 million years = 2,000 kilometers (over 1,200 miles) of erosion or almost half way through N. America from all sides! • Why is N. America still so big and why do the coastlines still match each other?
Ancient Ice
The Isotope Movement Problem
• Every year the snow melts and liquid water percolates through the snowy firn dragging isotopes and other impurities with it – for hundreds and even thousands of years before the snow turns to ice • Gravitational forces alone influences molecular diffusion at different rates depending upon the differences in ion density • Lorius
et al
., in a 1985
Nature
article: – “Further detailed isotope studies showed that seasonal delta 18 O variations are rapidly smoothed by diffusion indicating that reliable dating cannot be obtained from isotope stratigraphy”
Volcanic Signatures
• Tephra and H 2 SO 4 • Electrical conductivity measurements (ECM) increase
Volcanic Signature Problems
• Tephra not often found because it falls out of the atmosphere before it makes it to the ice sheet • Below 10,000 layers the ice becomes too alkaline to reliably identify the acid spikes associated with volcanic eruptions • Volcanic eruption rates: 30 per year on average – The farther back in history, the fewer of even large volcanic eruptions are known – only 11 eruptions were recorded from between 1 and 100 AD – “The desire to link such phenomena [volcanic eruptions] and the stretching of the dating frameworks involved is an attractive but questionable practice. All such attempts to link (and hence infer associations between) historic eruptions and environmental phenomena and human "impacts", rely on the accurate and precise association in time of the two events. . . A more general investigation of eruption chronologies constructed since 1970 suggest that such associations are frequently
unreliable when based on eruption data gathered earlier than the twentieth century
.” • Baille 1991 http://www.aber.ac.uk/iges/cti-g/volcano/lecture2.html
Mt. Mazama
• Crater Lake in Oregon was once a much larger mountain (Mt. Mazama) before it blew up as a volcano • 1960s: Radiocarbon dated at 6,500 yrs • 1979: 9,000 yrs via sagebrush bark sandals • 2000: 6,400 yrs via “direct count of ice core layers • 2003: 5,600 yrs at 16 th INQUA conference attended by over 1,000 scientists
Cyclic Dust Deposits
• Thought to be one of the most reliable annual markers • Dust is alkaline and shows up as a low ECM reading • Greenland: More dust in summer than winter
• Real time studies of modern atmospheric dust deposition in the 1990’s on the Penny Ice Cap, Baffin Island, Arctic Canada – Zdanowicz et al., the University of New Hampshire – Grumet et al., American Geophysical Union • Chloride, nitrate, methane-sulphonic acid (MSA) and H 2 O 2 (hydrogen peroxide) are “greatly affected” by post-depositional effects – Mainly re-emission in the atmosphere in upper layers and the movement of acid species in the deep ice layers • SO 4 , NO 3 , NH 4 ions and Cl and Mg and Na + ++ are the most mobile are the most stable
• Yearly dust cycle marked by two fall/spring peaks instead of one yearly peak as previous thought • • Evidence that “microparticles are remobilized by meltwater in such a way that seasonal (and stratigraphic) differences are obscured” • This remobilization of the microparticles of dust in the snow was found to affect both fine and coarse particles in an uneven way. The resulting “dust profiles” displayed “considerable structure and variability with multiple well defined peaks” for any given yearly deposit of snow.
– Correlates very well with ice layers formed by warm melts – Ice layers create a physical barrier (can be many per year)
Problems limit the resolution of this method to “multiannual to decadal averages”
–
Note:
100 x more dust during last “ice age” - with increased precipitation?
•
Nature (
May, 2001): Suggests that chemicals trapped in ancient glacial or polar ice can move substantial distances within the ice (up to 50cm in deep ice). That means past analyses of historic climate changes gleaned from ice core samples might not be entirely accurate. –
“The point of the paper is to suggest that the ice core community go back and redo the chemistry.”
• In deep ice: “Bulk anomalies in the H 2 SO 4 concentration are separated from ices of the same age by about 50cm. This suggests the potential for misinterpretation of paleoclimate signals when comparing soluble and insoluble constituents at high spatial resolution.” J.W. Wettlaufer (University of Washington), Premelting and anomalous diffusion in ancient ice,
FOCUS session
, March 16, 2001
The Warm Age
•
Hipsithermal
(
Middle Holocene) Age
– A warm period from 9,000 to 4,000 years ago – 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit – 1°F increase in average global temperature = 7 °F increase in average arctic basin temperature with a 17 °F increase in the average December temperature – Without the Arctic ice cap, winters in Canada and Siberia would rise 20 to 50 °F while over the Arctic Ocean temperatures would rise 35 to 70 °F M. Warshaw and R. R. Rapp, "An Experiment on the Sensitivity of a Global Circulation Model," Journal of Applied Meteorology 12 (1973): 43-49.
Ice Sheets in Warm Age?
• Greenland’s northeastern glaciers are currently losing ice far faster than it was being formed with just a 1 ° increase in average global temperature • Oceans 10m higher than today during hipsithermal period • Warm water mollusks that are 750 miles farther south today • Mediterranean vertebrates • Large trees • Fruit trees and other fruiting plants • Peat – requiring warmer climate above 32°F ave., adequate drainage, and 40in of rainfall
Modern Changes
• 1°F increase in ave. global temperature • In 100 years: Glacier National Park has gone from 150 glaciers to just 35 today • Many of the glaciers that remain have lost over 90% of their volume • The speed of glacial demise is only recently being appreciated by scientists who are stunned now that they realize that glaciers around the world, like those of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas just beneath Mt. Everest, the high Andes, Swiss Alps and even Iceland, will be completely gone within just 30 years – at current rates.
Hipsithermal Period
• 5,500 years of very warm weather • If the ice sheets were lost at a conservative 1.5m of thickness/yr – this would be over 8,000m of vertical ice lost • Greenland’s ice sheet is currently around 3,000m thick • A 4° or 5°F rise in global temperature would have melted Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets at a far greater rate.
Ancient Ice Summary
• Stuff in ice MOVES • Multiple snowy layers can be laid down in one year • Multiple warms spells can happen in one year • Each warm spell creates an icy barrier layer in the firn which can trap mobile impurities - creating apparent annual patterns • Volcanic signatures are unreliable beyond a few hundred years at best • The Hipsithermal warm period would probably have melted Greenland’s ice cap and many other ice sheets completely within recent history (around 4,000 years ago)
Harlen Bretz
• Ph.D. in Geology from University of Chicago • First to seriously challenge uniformitarian dogma within the geology community • Proposed the insane theory that the Scablands of Eastern Washington St. were formed rapidly, instead of over millions of years, by a huge flood • Proved right after 50 years of ridicule (started trying in 1923)
Joseph Thomas Pardee helped Bretz by proposing the source for the floodwaters as well as the huge current ripples 2000 foot wall water rushed out of Lake Missoula
Bretz is not so crazy looking now, though the evidence for huge catastrophe and rapid scabland formation was overwhelming from the beginning. Why then did it take the discovery of the origin for the floodwaters to make most geologists believe?
Observations of Fossils
• Exquisite preservation • Widespread orientation • Lack of expected decay • “Lazarus” Fossils • Wet deserts and critters going uphill • Layered “forests” with matching tree rings • Early Man
Exquisite Preservation
Protoceratops and a Velociraptor frozen in life and death struggle Ichthyosaur giving birth 100 whales in 2km sq, Peru
Widespread Orientation
Lack of Expected Decay
• Mary Schweitzer, Ph.D from Montana State University, discovered fairly intact red blood cells inside a non-fossilized 65 million year old
T. rex
bone • Specific immune response to hemoglobin in laboratory rats • Required over 30% of original hemoglobin molecule to be intact • Hemoglobin should have been completely decayed in less than 100 thousand much less 65 million years
“Annual” Varves
Note the very durable leaf extending through several “annual” layers
“Lazarus” Fossils
•
Coelacanths
• Died out 80 million years ago from fossil record • Still alive – Madagascar, Indonesia, Mozambique, and Comoran islands • Classified as different genus groups
Wet Deserts and Critters Going Only Uphill – for millions of years!
Layered Forests
• Yellowstone’s stacked forests – No branches or bark – Only short roots remain – Tree orientation (standing and fallen) – Sorted “soil” – No soil decay from top to bottom – 25% with no soil – No animal remains of any kind – 4 chemical volcanic signatures found interdigitating throughout – Matching tree rings in different layers
Early Man
Piltdown Man
•
Eanthropus dawsoni
or "dawn man" • Hoax that successfully fooled the scientific community for almost 40 years • Very strong bias and blindness go hand in hand
Nebraska Man
•
Hesperopithecus haroldcookii
• Mr. Harold Cook discovered one tooth in 1922 in the “Pliocene” deposits of Nebraska • An attempt was made to use Nebraska Man as evidence in Scopes “Monkey” Trial • Drawing published in Illustrated London News, 1922 • Turned out to be a tooth from a pig (peccary)
Ramapithecus lufengensis
• First branch of ape to evolve into humans • Only a jawbone and a few teeth • Obviously walked upright
“A group of creatures once thought to be our oldest ancestors may have been firmly bumped out of the human family tree. Many paleontologists have maintained that Ramamorphs are our oldest known ancestors. These conclusions were drawn from little more than a few jawbones and some teeth. Truthfully, it appears to be nothing more than an orangutan ancestor.”
David Pilbeam,
Science
, 1982
•
Pithecanthropus erectus
• Found by Eugene Dubois in 1891-92 • Association of a human like femur with a very large gibbon-like skullcap, found 12 meters apart of course
“The skull has a deep suture between the low vault and the upper edge of the orbits. Such a suture is found only in apes, not in man. Thus the skull must belong to an ape. In my opinion this creature was an animal, a giant gibbon in fact. The thigh bone has not the slightest connection with the skull.”
- Dr Rudolph Virchow, Director of the Berlin Society for Anthropology and founder of the science of pathology
Java Man
Australopithecus africanus
•
Australopithecus
means "southern ape" – found in S. Africa • Position of opening in base of skull (foramen magnum) = intermediate upright human/ape posture
“Multivariate studies of several anatomical regions, shoulder, pelvis, ankle, foot, elbow, and hand are now available for the australopithecines. These suggest that the common view, that these fossils are similar to modern man, may be incorrect. Most of the fossil fragments are in fact uniquely different from both man and man's nearest living genetic relatives, the chimpanzee and gorilla.”
- Charles Oxnard,
Nature
258:389.
Australopithecus
afarensis "LUCY"
• Discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson • Angle of knee joint matched that of humans = obviously walked upright • The joint angle also matched that of tree climbing apes • Also had curved toes bones, high arm to leg length ratio, and many other features identical to tree climbing apes • Was Lucy just a tree climbing ape or did she walk upright?
Semicircular Canals
• Fred Spoor, early 1990s • Used CT-scanner on fossil hominids • Results: The canals of
Australopithecus africanus
and
robustus
were most similar to the great apes
“The labyrinthine evidence is consistent with proposals that bipedalism in australopithecines was characterized by a substantial postural component [non-bipedal], and by the absence of more complex movements such as running and jumping.”
- Fred Spoor,
Nature
, 1994
Homo Habilis
• “Handy Man” – first discovered in 1959 by Mary Leakey • Found with stone tools and evidence of “butchered” animals • 1470 with larger dome-shaped skull, higher forehead, small brow ridges, and associated human like femur and leg bones found in the same layer just a few kilometers away
"When it [KNM-ER 1470] was first reconstructed, the face was fitted to the cranium in an almost vertical position, much like the flat faces of modern humans. But recent studies of anatomical relationships show that in life the face must have jutted out considerably, creating an ape-like aspect, rather like the faces of
Australopithecus
." – Bromage,
New Scientist,
1992
According to Dr. Spoor, his research on semicircular canals of
H. erectus
,
Australopithecus
, and many other hominids that
H. habilis
"relied less on bipedal behaviour than the
australopithecines
." And yet, H. Habilis is supposed to be more advanced than australopithecines. Does this make any sense at all?
It’s All Just a Big Very Subjective Mess "More recently, fossil species have been assigned to Homo on the basis of absolute brain size, inferences about language ability and hand function, and retrodictions about their ability to fashion stone tools. With only a few exceptions, the definition and use of the genus within human evolution, and the demarcation of Homo, have been treated as if they are unproblematic. But ... recent data, fresh interpretations of the existing evidence, and the limitations of the paleoanthropological record invalidate existing criteria for attributing taxa to Homo....
in practice fossil hominin species are assigned to Homo on the basis of one or more out of four criteria. ... It is now evident, however, that none of these criteria is satisfactory.
The Cerebral Rubicon is problematic because absolute cranial capacity is of questionable biological significance. Likewise, there is compelling evidence that language function cannot be reliably inferred from the gross appearance of the brain, and that the language-related parts of the brain are not as well localized as earlier studies had implied...
In other words, with the hypodigms of H. habilis and H. rudolfensis assigned to it, the genus Homo is not a good genus
.
Thus, H. habilis and H. rudolfensis (or Homo habilis sensu lato for those who do not subscribe to the taxonomic subdivision of "early Homo") should be removed from Homo. The obvious taxonomic alternative, which is to transfer one or both of the taxa to one of the existing early hominin genera, is not without problems, but we habilis and H. rudolfensis should be transferred to the genus
Australopithecus
."
recommend that, for the time being, both H.
- Bernard Wood and Mark Collardm,
Science,
April 1999
Observations in Genetics
• Pseudogenes • Mutation rates • Antibiotic and drug resistance • The cat and the hat • Limited evolutionary potential
Pseudogenes
• Originally called “pseudo” because they looked sort of like genes but were thought to have no function – just evolutionary “junk” • The same “junk” in different organisms must be “common ancestry since to designer would have put the exact same “mistakes” in two different places
Not “Pseudo” After All
“An extensive and fast-increasing literature does not justify a sharp division between genes and pseudogenes that would place pseudogenes in the class of genomic "junk" DNA that lacks function and is not subject to natural selection. Pseudogenes are often extremely conserved and transcriptionally active. . .
There seems to be the case that some functionality has been discovered in all cases, or nearly, whenever this possibility has been pursued with suitable investigations. One may well conclude that most pseudogenes retain or acquire some functionality and, thus, that it may not be appropriate to define pseudogenes as nonfunctional sequences of genomic DNA originally derived from functional genes, or as "genes that are no longer expressed but bear sequence similarity to active genes".
Balakirev and Ayala, Pseudogenes: Are they ‘Junk’ or Functional DNA, Annual Review of Genetics, Dec. 2003
Mutation Rates
• “Mitochondrial Eve” – Based on human-chimp time of divergence, the mtDNA mutation rate was calculated – Mitochondrial Eve (mother of all modern humans) estimated to live some
200,000 years ago
• Real time studies of mtDNA in historically known families showed the actual mutation rate to be “twenty-fold higher than estimates derived from phylogenetic analyses” -Thomas Parsons,
Nature Genetics,
1997 – Makes Mitochondrial Eve a mere “
6,500 years old
”!
NucDNA Mutation Rates
• About 200 random mutations per human by birth in each generation • Of these about 3 of them will be detrimental and none will be beneficial (1000:1 odds) • If harmful mutations enter the gene pool faster than they can be removed, extinction is inevitable • To avoid eventual extinction every woman would have to give birth to over 40 offspring in each generation!
“The reduction in fitness (i.e., the genetic load) due to deleterious mutations with multiplicative effects is given by 1 - e -U (Kimura and Moruyama 1966). For U = 3, [detrimental mutation rate] the average fitness is reduced to 0.05, or put differently,
each female would need to produce 40 offspring
for 2 to survive and maintain the population at constant size. This assumes that all mortality is due to selection and so the actual number of offspring required to maintain a constant population size is probably higher.” - Nuchman, Michael W., Crowell, Susan L.,
Estimate of the Mutation Rate per Nucleotide in Humans
, Genetics, September 2000, 156: 297-304 “According to standard population genetics theory, the figure of three harmful mutations per person per generation implies that three people would have to die prematurely in each generation (or fail to reproduce) for each person who reproduced in order to eliminate the now absent deleterious mutations [75% death rate]. Humans do not reproduce fast enough to support such a huge death toll.” - Beardsley, Tim,
The Degeneration of Man
, Scientific American, April, 1999
De Novo
Antibiotic Resistance
• True evolution in action • Works at the lowest level of informational/functional complexity • Generally requires just one or two point mutations in a target sequence • Destroys or disrupts the pre-established antibiotic target interaction • Much easier to destroy than to create • Is therefore very rapid
Enzyme-Based Antibiotic Resistance
• Penicillinase – Fairly complex enzyme (~350aa) – Independent function (does not disrupt a pre-established interaction) – Resistance via direct attack on the penicillin antibiotic – Code obtained either via vertical or horizontal transfer – Has never been shown to evolve in real time
The Cat and the Hat
Codes and Information Systems • Cat – Hat – Bat – Bad – Big – Dig – Dog • Evolution? – Yes!
• Easy – Yes • Why? – High ratio of meaningful vs. meaningless
Meaningful vs. Meaningless
Meaningful • 2-letter words: 96 • 3-letter words: 972 • 7-letter words: 23,109 Potential • 2-letter words: 676 • 3-letter words: 17,576 • 7-letter words: ~8 billion Ratio: Meaningful vs: Meaningless 2-letter words: ~1:7 3-letter words: ~1:18 7-letter words: ~1:350,000 http://www.yak.net/kablooey/scrabble.html
http://www.aivazoglou.gr/2.html
Exponential Expansion of Junk vs. Non-Junk
• Easy to evolve when meaningful sequences are so close together in sequence space bridges to new “beneficial” sequences – like large islands with many interconnecting • Gets exponentially harder with each increase in minimum sequence length • Not so easy to evolve as many 7-letter words vs. 3-letter words or 20-letter sequences vs. 10-letter sequences (try it and see)
Hypothetical Random Walk
• Let Level X = random walk of 10 steps • Let every level increase results in only a 10 fold increase in the average random walk • Level X + 1 = 100 steps • Level X + 2 = 1,000 steps • Level X + 3 = 10,000 steps • Level X + 33 = 10 34 steps – A population of 1 trillion individuals each taking 1 step every second would take a little over 3 trillion years to find something new at Level X + 100 or greater – on average
Real Life Random Walk Times
• De Novo Antibiotic Resistance – All bacteria can evolve resistance to just about any antibiotic in a very short time, often in just one or two generations • Short Independent Protein Functions – Rare bacteria can rapidly evolve a functional protein system of average specificity, such as lactase, nylonase, etc., requiring no more than 300 to 400 amino acid “characters” at minimum – Such evolutionary abilities are very “limited” to those bacteria that happen to have a very fortunate starting point. – Remove starting point = No evolution despite a huge population high reproductive and mutation rates, and over a million generations of observation in some cases • Longer Independent Protein Functions – No protein-based system requiring more than a minimum of 1,000 fairly specified amino acids working together at the same time has ever evolved in real time in a creature with no known ancestral access to that function – period – The islands are just too far apart
Scientific Method
– Observations in Geology • Very flat deposition • Very flat erosion • Very resistant to millions of years of erosion • Little evidence of bioturbation – Observations of Fossils • Very rapid burial on grand scales • Very good preservation • General orientation • Wet tracks in desert sand only going uphill • Matching tree rings in different layers – Observations in Genetics • Quick evolution at low levels of specified complexity • Exponential decline in evolution with each step up the ladder • No evolution after just a few hundred steps up the ladder • Relatively rapid de-evolution of slowly reproducing gene pools
Hypothesis
• Geology – Rapid Catastrophe
OR
– Slow Uniformitarian model?
• Fossils – Rapid Catastrophic Burial with Interesting Sorting
OR
– Slow Uniformitarian Burial
OR
– Widely Spaced Bursts of Catastrophe with Increasing Complexity?
• Genetics – Mendel
OR
Darwin?
– Extremely Limited to the Lowest Levels of Informational Complexity
OR
– Unlimited as far as Informational Complexity is Concerned?
– Mindless Non-directed
OR
Intelligent Purposeful Origin?
Testable Predictions & Predictive Value
• Geology and Fossils – More future evidence of remote catastrophes
OR
– More future evidence of relatively recent catastrophes?
• Genetics – Future examples of evolution in action significantly beyond the lowest levels of informational complexity
OR
– No examples of Darwinian-style evolution in action in any information system (computers, English language, genetics) beyond the lowest levels of meaningful/functional informational complexity?
Which Position is Most Scientific?
Young Life Creationism?
OR