By Slugsie, on May 29th, 2009It’s quite common whilst reading creationist material for them to state that they have no problem with the idea of Microevolution. They’re quite happy with the idea that any given species will have small variations over time – i.e. Darwin’s Finches. But creationists have a major problem with accepting that Micro evolution, plus lots (and lots) of time leads to Macroevolution. They state that it’s impossible for one species to evolve into another species, no matter how many small variations you come up with.
First of, I’d just like to say that to evolutionary biologists there is no difference between the two. Evolution is evolution, the amount of it is irrelevant, it’s the fact of it that counts.
Secondly, I’m not about to come up with some magical evolutionary trick that shows that micro changes will lead to macro changes in an animal. I’m not a biologist, I wouldn’t really know where to begin. But what I can do is show how many small changes can easily make a big difference, even though each change is almost irrelevant.
Imagine you’re utterly destitute, you have not a penny to your name. You are without doubt poor. Now, one day along comes a stranger and gives you a dollar. Now, by any western standards, you’re still undoubtedly poor. Next day, the stranger comes by again, and gives you another dollar. You now have $2, you’re definitely better off than you were two days ago, but poor is still what you are. This stranger keeps coming by, day after day, dollar after dollar. After nearly 3 years, he’s given you around $1000! If we stretch this out a bit, and ignore normal human life-spans after nearly 2800 years you have $1,000,000! By most peoples standards you could be considered a rich man. But when did that happen exactly? If you’re rich at $1,000,000, aren’t you to all intents and purposes rich at $999,999?
The point I’m trying to get across is that each change made little difference to your wealth. Each day you weren’t really any better off than you were the day before. It’s only in the context of thousands of years that you could considered to have become wealthy.
May 29th, 2009 | 
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This thread is getting muddy, so here’s to making it worse. Here’s my response to Tom’s logic in a nutshell. Or at least in one post.
The first issue with Tom’s logic was in assuming that evolution only works by deletion of information, which he’s already acknowledged was mistaken. Perhaps Allen missed that. Does evolution = de-evolution and does speciation mean a permanent net loss of genetic code? Absolutely not, and we established that with a single example. Any bottleneck in a population will limit genetic variation temporarily, yes, but evolution responds by creating new variants and generating new code, and the process by which it does this is no secret. We can not only duplicate, merge, or delete small segments of genes, but also entire genes and even chromosomes, and that explains how different species can have different amounts of DNA. None of this is any secret or new finding, and yet a quick google showed me at dozens creationist sites that are still touting this as impossible.
Secondly, there’s no such thing as de-evolution. Absolutely no such thing. And in all seriousness, you cannot claim to understand evolution and believe otherwise. Even in the case where a species loses functionality or genes or even chromosomes, its still evolution because its still a reaction to some factor in the environment, and because evolution is not a race to complexity.
The other problem with design logic in general is in framing evolutionary problems in terms of modern genetic solutions.
So if DNA needs enzymes to elongate and duplicate it, and those enzymes are built from code in the DNA, then they must be designed because evolution couldn’t have built them one after the other, right? Wrong. DNA doesn’t need the enzymes, it needs the work that those enzymes do, and we know that that work can be done with simple chemistry. We’ve already proven it. Modern DNA uses the enzymes, but ancient DNA only needed the chemistry of its environment while it was busy evolving its enzymes to handle that work itself. DNA before enzymes.
Same for phosphorylation and PCR which build the building blocks of DNA and assemble them into DNA. How can we have DNA without these genetic tools? By using the simpler solution, chemistry. Again, we don’t need those specific tools as long as the work gets done. This is not a hypothesis or an educated guess, it’s been proven. Chemical processes can build the amino acids, sugars and nucleotides so that DNA can copy itself. So we can have phosphorylation and nucleotide genesis without any enzymatic activity or coding in the DNA for it.
But how can we evolve a glucose based metabolism before photosynthesis evolves to provide us with glucose? Because fortunately there are other ways to get glucose. You can make it or you can consume it. We know there was free glucose in the primordial soup made by the same chemical processes that made the free amino acids. So again, it’s a bad question. We are not required to evolve glucose synthesis in order to consume glucose and that allows the evolution of glucose synthesis to happen after we’re already using it. In fact, we’re looking at it backwards. We now synthesize glucose because it was a free fuel in our early evolution. Organisms used it and grew so dependent on it that they were forced to evolve mechanisms to make it to survive in environments where it’s lacking.
Another argument is that its statistically impossible for evolution of L-amino acid synthesis to have happened in the timeframe of 300 million years (the 2^80 odds posts). The math for this is not original, its been cited by creationists for years and here I have largely ignored it because its not as relevant as the other material. For example, you could just as easily argue that I am statistically impossible given my genetic makeup and all the possible combinations of sperm and eggs from all the people in the world that existed when I was conceived, and yet here I am. When you leave the parameters wide open, when you don’t consider the constraints you’re dealing with, anything can look impossible.
But there are several bad assumptions of note that the 1 in 2^80 math makes. First is that it assumes that mutations occur in series, which doesn’t pass the common sense test. It also assumes 1000 mutations per second, which seems generous but is actually a small fraction of the real figure given that we know that the entire planet was populated with billions upon billions of single celled organisms before photosynthesis evolved. And it assumes that the mutations that build the amino acid synthesis enzymes all evolved entirely independently when in reality we know some are as much as 80% identical, meaning most can be traced to a single origin. Transaminases, for example, which react with amino acids to ensure that we get the correct L form, nearly all descend from a common ancestor. This alone invalidates the 1 in 2^80 odds on them evolving.
Evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Of course not. A cursory reading of the law will show that low entropy open systems are not only allowable, but that they can even decrease in entropy. No one on the planet can show that this is a violation of the 2nd law.
Tom’s entire argument on the 2nd law is actually in reference to the 1st law (conservation of energy), and is based on the idea that it’s violated prior to the evolution of photosynthesis because there was no glucose for energy. Except that there was glucose, and I proved it. No violation.
I still owe you (Tom) responses on the circular DNA and on chirality, which I partially addressed here. Might be missing one. One of these days …
do you know what discrete math is? Can’t you show a model for macroevolution in a theorem and then prove it. Stop arguing in abstract language and build a real model… If it works, it shouldn’t be hard to show.