Evolution is disproved by Statistics?

No, they don’t ignore the numbers; they refute them. Again and again.

No, quite the opposite.
Now, there is a possibility that statistics “disprove” god.
Well at least the one in the bible.

How old is the planet, again?
If you answered in the 4 digits, please don’t have any children.

ID supporters are the ones ignoring numbers, like how many candles to put on earth’s birthday cake. (They’re are off by several billion.)

There are over 6 billion people on the planet, I am one of them. What are the odds that I should just happen to answer this question out of all those people? and yet, here I am.

There are trillions of grains of rice in the world, the next time you eat rice, ask your self what the probability of you eating those grains of rice in that particular order are. Then ask your self if you really did eat, seeing as it was so improbable.

Today, I went to the office, had a business meeting that went hours overtime, brought a partner’s briefcase to his home, went outside in the pitch dark to chase the deer out of the garden, came in and sat down here at exactly 9:54 PM . Get it? 9:54! 5+4= 9! Wow! What are the odds of that? Why, it’s so improbable it never could have happened without divine intervention. (What? He doesn’t have anything better to do?)

I recall having a long debate with some Creationist on Answerbag about this. What his disproof of Evolution boiled down to was the assertion that ( 1 / 10^50 ) = 0. In other words, he claimed that “highly improbable” meant “utterly impossible”.

Of course, numbers can prove whatever you want them to prove anyways. You know the old saying: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”.

I can’t add to the excellent answers above, except to point out that irreducible complexity arguments are really just arguments from ignorance wearing a stolen lab-coat.

The ID crowd are those guilty of ignoring evidence and numbers. THey come at the problem not looking for whatever truth they find, but armed with scriptures they believe to be the ultimate truth, and determined to find some way to spin and obfuscate to make their beliefs agree with observed facts.

Evolution seems terrifically improbable to us human beings, even the scientists among us who see the evidence, because deep time is an impossible concept to get your gut around. I know intellectually that the Universe is approximately 13.75 billion years old and that the solar system formed about 3.6 billion years ago. Life on earth began about 3.8 billion years ago. Anyone can look up those numbers and recite them. But understanding them?

Our lives are so infintesimally short compared to deep time that we can only begin to grasp the enormity of time it took for complex life to develop through metaphor. For instance, the English measurement, 1 yard (3 feet or 36 inches or 0.9144 meters) originated with the measurement of the distance from the tip of King Henry I’s nose to the tip his index finger on his outstretched arm. If we represented all life on Earth as being that distance, then a single light brush of a nail file on Henry’s index fingernail would erase all of human history from the time our family branch split away from the other great apes about 13 million years ago to today.

A lot of improbable things can and will happen in 3.8 billion years.

My shoulder is killing me. My doctor showed me what the muscles, tendons, bones, and other crap were involved. From an Engineering point of view, it is the stupidest design I can think of. Either the “Intelligent Designer” is really stupid, or my shoulder came about by random events on top of other random events. The design works most of the time, and probably contributed to the survival of the species. Still, it looks like a random ball of organic stuff rolled together.

@RocketGuy Just think of the inconvenience of having to eat, drink, breath and vomit through a single tube. We routinely choke to death when something going gown or coming back up gets stuck in there, making it impossible to breathe. How much more convenient to have a blowhole separate of your esophagus like dolphins and whales do.

And whose idea was it to route the body’s sewerage disposal lines right through the middle of a recreational area?

@NKH12

Any comments or questions on what’s been posted so far?

Are the people who believe the Earth is only several thousand years old completely unaware of the many methods we have of disproving that the Earth is so young? Forget about carbon dating and radioactive decay! How about:

1. Dendrochronology, the study of dating by studying tree rings, shows that the Earth is at least 12,000 years old. Using different species of trees in different locations on the planet, the tree rings of younger trees can be matched to older trees, going back for thousands and thousands of years.

2. The analysis of varves, the layers of sediment deposited at the base of lakes, shows the Earth to be ancient. The layers are easily distinguished between coarse summer sediment and finer winter sediment patterns that repeat and can be counted. Depending on which site you check the varve record for, the age of the Earth can be anywhere from 12,000 to several million years old.

3. Ice layers at both poles can be visually distinguished by the difference in the size of summer and winter snow crystals, the dust deposited by strong spring winds or the acidity changes in the layers (summer snow has higher acid levels). Each technique of analyzing ice layers corroborates the others. These techniques suggest a minimum age of 110,000 years for our planet.

The visual evidence for these things is out there in the world to see. How can the Earth be only 6,000 years old in the face of these facts?

@drdoombot They are often quite aware… and they dismiss those proofs as forgeries, “bad science” etcetera.

Lying with statistics is easy, in fact it can be easily performed by mathematical-amateurs.

I will not take the bait and get involved in your true bore of a question, evolution.
I just wanted to comment on Lying with statistics

@crisw
Are these answers helpful? Yes, I have really enjoyed the responses and find that now I have at least four responses to the question—- this is what I wanted and why I went to fluther.

On a different note, it is really a shame that the argument from improbability continues to circulate around the ID crowd. If I am not mistaken, this is one of their more common arguments; they have just wrapped it in pretty paper.

Although the ID argument is invalid, the plain fact is that we do not know enough to chart a molecular level DNA mutation path by which one organism evolves into another. It is a daunting task, constrained by the necessity that the organism be viable at each stage.

The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. It is not just some abstract concept, but a working tool. However, until a specific step by step model of an instance of evolution can be constructed, ID proponents will use the wiggle room in our lack of knowledge to proclaim that such a scenario is too improbable to occur.

And then there is the fact that ID and Evolution are not incompatible; it is possible that we were designed to evolve.

@LostInParadise Geneticist are getting smarter and have better tools every day. I have some GM energy crop growing in our test plots. It did not come over on the ark. It was funded with Federal dollars, created in a lab for this type of soil, to produce the most biomass with the highest energy content while leaving low ash. Now that’s what I call intelligent design.

I recommend that you first try to understand the difference between

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics

They are not the same. And this matters when looking at arguments made by evolutionary biologists and ID proponents.

If you are really serious about understanding the whole issue, I recommend the following book:

http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Darwins-God-Scientists-Evolution/dp/0061233501/

written by a superb scientist and believer called Kenneth Miller.

I actually finished Miller’s book a few months ago and was quite impressed. I love how Miller explained the theory without destroying religion (it’s just a scientific theory, is it not?); he did a wonderful job explaining the theory in the ‘modern world’ so to speak.

@NKH12 – That’s wonderful. So do evolutionary scientists ignore the numbers? No, they don’t. And Miller explains why the numbers do not lead to a refutation of evolution.

Another great way of understanding their argument is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circumstellar_molecules

What is the probability of aminoacetonitrile forming in space? It’s a simple organic compound containing both nitrile and amino groups. It is somewhat similar to the simplest amino acid, glycine.

Now think of an ocean or a shallow pond or an underwater volcano. And wait 1 billion years. If complex molecules can form in space what does this mean for their potential on Earth?

There are two interesting versions of ID that I have come across that are compatible, sort of, with evolution. They both assume that random chance cannot account for evolution. One line of thought is that God set up the Universe in such a way that highly improbable events would occur. The other version says that God guides evolution by intervening to choose appropriate mutations.

Since we do not currently have the means for calculating the probability of one species evolving into another, I suppose there is not much harm if a scientist were to believe either of these ideas.

@LostInParadise

‘They both assume that random chance cannot account for evolution”

I think it’s important to point out that this is a common misconception among many people. Evolution is not about “random chance.” Mutation leading to variation is semi-random, but natural selection is not random at all.

@crisw – Exactly. Maybe science communicators need to do a better job getting this message across. Dawkins had a great idea in one of his books, but unlike Carl Sagan he’s a bad science communicator because of his polemics, irritating the people who need to be convinced and sticking to merely preaching to his choir.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem#Evolution

“In a simulation experiment Dawkins has his weasel program produce the Hamlet phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, starting from a randomly typed parent, by “breeding” subsequent generations and always choosing the closest match from progeny that are copies of the parent, with random mutations. The chance of the target phrase appearing in a single step is extremely small, yet Dawkins showed that it could be produced rapidly (in about 40 generations) using cumulative selection of phrases.”

@mattbrowne

That example has its own problem, though. Another common misconception that people have is that evolution has a goal, and that example can forward this misconception, as it has a goal of producing a certain phrase. I’m pretty sure Dawkins himself has discussed this potential misunderstanding; have to see if I can dig up the cite.

Our Intelligent Designer must not be that intelligent if the ultimate goal is us humans, with all of our flaws.

@RocketGuy

Have you ever seen that video of Richard Dawkins dissecting the recurrent laryngeal nerve of a giraffe? Talk about bad design!

@crisw – I know, but the thought experiment is still helpful. The “goal” figuratively speaking is survival for the semi-random mutations. Certain combinations do not have a chance, like too many consonants in one place in the English language. Complexity builds up slowly. And symbiosis is key. Two independent survivers might join for mutual benefit. That’s how independent mitochondria ended up as part of a cell. The ribosomes also have an interesting history.

@crisw If you are still following this question, what do you mean when you say “semi-radom?”

@NKH12

What I mean by that is that mutation isn’t entirely random. There are, for example, some regions of the genome that mutate faster/more often, and some studies have shown that mutation rates are not necessarily random.