{"id":182,"date":"2007-05-05T04:10:16","date_gmt":"2007-05-05T09:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/2007\/05\/05\/mathematics-of-neo-darwinian-evolution\/"},"modified":"2007-05-05T04:13:54","modified_gmt":"2007-05-05T09:13:54","slug":"mathematics-of-neo-darwinian-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/2007\/05\/05\/mathematics-of-neo-darwinian-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Mathematics of Neo-Darwinian Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read an interesting series of emails<\/a> (posted on a web site) today that more or less echoed my grave concern that mathematics, and hence logic, contradict some fundamental parts of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.<\/p>\n

I’ve had the same thoughts for years. Please don’t understand this to be a claim to have thought of this first; as I read more, it seems to me that this is an obvious thought that I’d been taught to repress as heretical. At some point the sheer enormity of the problems with so-called “macro evolution” convinced me that it is at least<\/em> a big of a leap of faith to believe in evolution as it is to believe in a creator God.<\/p>\n

This leads me to another point that’s been on my mind lately. A friend quoted a bit from James Randi<\/a>‘s site – the guy with the $1 million paranormal challenge – and so I hopped on over there and read for a while. I must admit that I’ve always appreciated the guy’s brutally direct, honest approach to the supernatural. I must also admit that I don’t have nearly the same amount of faith in science as he clearly does. Simply put, my objection is thus: only perfect facts can be rendered by logic to produce perfect conclusions.<\/em> Incomplete facts can lead to inaccurate assumptions; logic applied to this of course tends to result in plausible yet, to some degree or another, incorrect deductions.<\/p>\n

Science is still discovering the nature of reality, an endeavor that requires as much objectivity as is possible. I applaud scientists who hold to this ideal; but while my faith in logic does not waver, my faith in the completeness of facts produced by scientific observation is on considerably less stable ground.<\/p>\n

Does it bother you, dear reader, that the age of the universe is currently estimated to be only about 4.3 x 10^17 seconds? What does this mean when we consider the probability of the genetic mutations necessary and required in the evolutionary path from single-celled organisms to Homo sapiens, as it pertains to the amount of time required? [Note that I’m explicitly granting the (scientifically laughable) proposition that some form of life arrived from space. The Earth has reportedly only existed for about a quarter of that time.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Call me a heretic if you like, or irrational, or a nutcase. I have to conclude that the answer laid out in Genesis 1 is a lot easier to accept than the alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read an interesting series of emails (posted on a web site) today that more or less echoed my grave concern that mathematics, and hence logic, contradict some fundamental parts of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. I’ve had the same thoughts for years. Please don’t understand this to be a claim to have thought of this first; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p706FH-2W","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clank.org\/pundit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}