Chapter six: Three major controversies

“There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods, and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be. (Charles Sanders Pierce)”

Page 189

The problem is that evolutionists are so wedded to their belief they refuse to take the scientific arguments of creationists seriously, as is the case in this book where they are either ignored altogether, or glossed over with little attempt to produce a rational argument.

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“The goal of this book is not to provide a laundry list of creationist complaints and scientific answers, partly because that would be an exercise of limited use, but also because it has been done so much more thoroughly by other people.”

Page 190

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Firstly, note his claim that creationists give “complaints” while evolutionists provide “scientific answers:” yet one more example of his patronising denigration of scientists who are just as well qualified in their field as he is, but who accept the claims of creationism. Secondly, we now have the excuse for his ignoring some of the key issues of the debate: someone else has given the answers! So this book is padded out with material that may be of interest and have minor implications to the debate, but the heart of the matter is frequently barely given a mention. Therefore, anyone wishing to read about the main issues in the creation/evolution debate is obliged to look elsewhere by Pigliucci’s own definition: they will not find them in his book. The problem is that, having read some of these other people’s work, I am well aware that they are just as unable as he is to answer the questions satisfactorily. A glaring example is Dawkins’ ‘Greatest Show on Earth’. See here for my discussion on the book.

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Pigliucci’s summary on page 193 of the creationists' reasoning regarding the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) is reasonable (except I would substitute ‘bring about and maintain’ in place of ‘maintain’ in point 2):

“(1) The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the amount of disorder is bound to increase and can never decrease.

(2) Living organisms, on the other hand, are a clear example of highly ordered systems. Therefore their very existence contradicts the second principle, unless supernatural intervention is called upon to maintain their existence.

(3) Furthermore, evolution is a process whose main characteristic is to increase in complexity over time. Therefore it flies in the face of the second principle, which predicts that eventually the universe will reach the state of maximum disorder known as thermal death. (4) Hence, either the second law or evolution is wrong. Since the second law is accepted by every physicist, it has been repeatedly confirmed experimentally, and we do not know of any exception to the principle, evolution must be discarded.”

Regarding the laws of thermodynamics he says:

“Morris (a creationist) maintains that the simple availability of energy from outside a given system… is not enough to allow the evolutionary process to take place… On the one hand there must be a “program,” so that the process can be directed toward a particular outcome… On the other hand there has to be a “conversion mechanism” that transforms raw energy (e.g. from the sun) into high-quality energy that can be used by the system to do the work… If one just has bricks and energy, the house will never be built. Although the biosphere has materials (provided by Earth) and energy (provided by the sun), Morris maintains that it lacks both a program and a conversion system. Therefore evolution is impossible.”

Page 194

“In order for evolution not to be at odds with thermodynamics, whatever order is created during the evolutionary process simply must be more than offset by the disorder created by the same process. This is exactly what happens because the entire biosphere receives huge quantities of energy from outside sources, mostly the sun.”

Page 196

However, this in no way answers the point that Morris made: without a program and a conversion mechanism, the sun’s energy can do nothing. ‘Evolution of species’ has neither of these things.

“…contrary to the statement by Morris… evolution is not defined as “change outward and upward.” First of all, “out” and “up” with respect to what?"

Page 197

With respect to the point from which the life forms began to evolve, of course!

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Even though most biologists would agree that evolutionary change has been accompanied by an increase, in one form or another, in the complexity of living organisms, there are many exceptions to the pattern. For example, parasites are usually less complex than their close evolutionary relatives, and cave animals tend to lose their eyes, which are among the most complex structures in the animal kingdom. Since the appearance of parasites and of forms adapted to caves is the result of evolutionary processes, it follows that evolution is not necessarily a process that increases complexity.”

Page 197

This is a typical example of looking at ‘natural selection’ and calling it ‘evolution of species’. It proves my point that he is looking at ‘decrease’ and calling it ‘increase’. His muddy thinking on this is like seeing a building being demolished and saying it is an example of a building being built. Because he calls both processes ‘evolution’ he is then free to use the vast amount of evidence of detrimental change and call it proof that things become more complex, better and bigger.

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Note that he says “…eyes are among the most complex structures…” as though the loss of such complexity is more significant than the loss of simple structures. This is self-evidently untrue: one example being the demolished building just mentioned: its building requires architects, blueprints or plans from the architect, bricklayers, joiners, plasterers, electricians, plumbers, (to name a few), transport of materials to the site and at least weeks of skilled work. To destroy it, all is required is a random, unintelligent earthquake, hurricane or flood, happening in just minutes. But to Pigliucci the building and destroying processes are the same!

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Another example is sickle cell anaemia, which is the result of a single letter change in DNA. It takes many DNA letters to code for the complex functions in blood, yet the change of just one is enough to create a massive dysfunction and early death. It would be an enormous task for mutation to assemble all this DNA in the correct sequence, overcoming irreducible complexity, to create everything necessary for blood to function, yet one simple mistake is all that is takes to put it well along the path to becoming useless. See Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe for a description of the huge complexity of the blood clotting mechanism.

According to the creationist model, everything began perfectly and is now on a ‘downward’ slope, with mutation eating into what was originally perfect DNA and creating damage to all living systems. So parasites becoming less complex and creatures losing their eyes (‘natural selection’) is exactly what this model would expect. Evolutionists, however, claim everything developed from a single cell, which means that there has to be a constant increase in complexity (‘evolution of species’), in order for new features to emerge. That is the opposite of what Pigliucci has just described. It is this kind of woolly thinking that has enabled the theory of evolution to survive as long as it has.

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“It would be a truly unexplainable phenomenon if very complex life forms popped out of nothing without any previous history connecting them to simpler forms. Then the creationist explanation of the world would have an advantage over naturalist evolution.”

Page 198

But this is precisely what is seen in the fossil record! There are no undisputed connecting forms between any of the life forms there; and even the simplest organism that evolutionists can conjecture, which is supposed to have sprung from the primordial soup, is still very highly complex in its molecular structure. At best is a handful of disputed specimens. There is no clear and undisputed example of a creature at a part-way stage in developing an organ or progressing from one life form to another.

“The argument is that even allowing for energy and materials to come into the biosphere from outside, thereby rendering it an open system, does not necessarily imply the existence of a process such as evolution that creates a new order. There is no doubt that creationists are completely right in this sense… Two more elements are needed: a program to guide the construction process (the blueprints) and a conversion mechanism that translates this program into the final product (the workers who can read the blueprints and assemble the materials in the proper way, while using the correct amount of energy). Therefore, just saying that Earth and the sun provide materials and energy to the biosphere does not explain the existence of an evolutionary process that creates order. That is entirely correct… evolution needs a flow of energy (from the sun) and materials (from the Earth) to occur, but these are not the whole story. A program and conversion mechanism are indeed necessary”

Page 199 (Emphasis mine)

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So after explaining the second law and how it relates to ‘open’ and ‘closed’ systems, we reach the admission that the creationist position in this regard is correct and more than a flow of energy from the sun is indeed required. Then he goes into another “creationists don’t understand the issues” attack. He claims that they have shifted the topic: now they claim that evolution needs “more than thermodynamics to occur,” when at first they were claiming “evolution is incompatible with the second principle.”

It would seem it is Pigliucci who does not understand the issue. As his quote (shown above) from Morris says, the creationist’s position is that the reason evolution is incompatible with the second principle is that it proves that evolution cannot take place with no outside source to guide mutation (for example).

In the same way the second law proves a perpetual motion machine is impossible, as he says in note 3, page 102; but while an outside source – man – keeps a machine maintained and fed with fuel, it can continue to work without stopping. So it is all an intrinsic part of the same argument. Once again he is nit-picking.

Having established that the creationist is correct in saying a program (or ‘blueprint’) and a conversion mechanism are indeed necessary, he then says science does have an answer. (Actually this is another example of his poor use of language – he actually means ‘evolutionists have an answer’ since both parties are scientists applying science to their answers). So what is the answer?

“The blueprint is the genetic instructions encoded in the DNA (or other nucleic acids, such as RNA) of any living organism. The conversion mechanism is (mostly but not uniquely) photosynthesis.”
Page 200

Here he contradicts Dawkins, who in the Greatest Show on Earth says DNA is not a blueprint!

So having accused creationists of switching the argument, he now does the same thing himself and switches his answer. DNA is not a blueprint for evolution of species, it is a blueprint for all the needs of life in its present form. Photosynthesis is not a conversion mechanism for evolution of species, it is a conversion mechanism to produce energy from the sun for existing life forms to continue to exist – it has no power to change those forms into a new species. As Pigliucci has made clear, mutation is the only means by which the new information required for new species to form can appear in the DNA. But mutation is entirely random, as he has also pointed out; so by his own definition there is nothing in the coding of DNA to guide mutation in any direction. Since random activity will always reduce the orderliness of a system of specified complexity and result in entropy, any change produced by mutation will always be ‘downhill’: therefore something more than DNA is required in order for evolution to do what Pigliucci claims. What and where is that ‘something more?’ Pigliucci clearly does not know!

Having said that DNA and photosynthesis are the answers, on page 200 he then asks the obvious creationist question,

“Where did DNA and photosynthesis come from? That is another very good question on which scientists are working very hard, and to which we have only partial answers.”

So once again it all boils down to ‘I don’t know but we will do one day!’ Having belittled creationists for their ‘take’ on this issue, at its heart his response is the unscientific ‘I believe it but can’t give you the proof’ argument that has been the bedrock of evolution ever since Darwin said that the fossil evidence of his theory would be found one day. 'On the Origin of Species' was published in 1859; so we have been waiting 162 years for the scientific evidence of the theory (as opposed to the viewpoints of some scientists). How much longer do we have to wait?

He says,

“Now we have satisfactory answers to the relationship between thermodynamics and evolution, and – additionally – we have even shown how evolution has all necessary and sufficient elements to proceed without violating any law of physics”
page 200

Really? Where? Certainly not in this book! He has not given any answer to the question, “How can there be no entropy in DNA when mutation takes place?” The fact that we can see over 1,000 human ailments as the result of mutation proves that the specified complexity of our DNA is definitely reducing. Furthermore, since Pigliucci accepts a ‘blueprint’ is essential, where is the blueprint for the origin of life? No DNA existed at that time, so even he cannot claim it was the blueprint there!

“Having begun by appealing to physics, the creationists’ turning to the existence of a supernatural God definitely violates not only all four principles of thermodynamics, but all laws that physics has established so far!”
Page 201

Utter nonsense! As I have already pointed out, when all the laws we can observe are unable to explain how things are begun but rather demonstrate fatal flaws in the evolutionary explanation (and Pigliucci has been unable to demonstrate to the contrary), then the existence of an intelligent designer is the only other alternative. Indeed, the scientific method was founded and developed by Christian scientists like Isaac Newton who believed that the God of the Bible is unchanging and would therefore create a universe that functions on unchanging laws, which could therefore be observed and investigated.

“There is no such thing as a modern-day “primitive” organism that we can examine to tell what our earliest ancestors looked like.”
Page 203

Since it is obvious that the highly complex structure of the simplest living organism capable of independent life could not spring up out of inanimate matter, this impossible obstacle is avoided by claiming there must be viable simpler life forms, although no-one has been able to show how a simpler life form could fulfil the functions that define ‘life’ from ‘nonlife’ (described on page 211). However, since there is no undisputable evidence anywhere on the planet to show they ever existed, and no scientist has ever been able even to conjecture what they would look like, we must, yet again, take the evolutionists’ word for it and believe it by faith.

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“Chirality is a property of any chemical structure characterised by the three-dimensional arrangement of that structure’s atoms and molecules. For example, all amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can in theory come in two versions, which are mirror images of each other. They are called left-handed and right-handed forms… the organic compounds (a general term for carbon-based compounds…) found in space or in meteorites come in equal portions of right- and left-handed forms. This is not true of the compounds that are actually used by living organisms on Earth, which are found in only one version.”

Page 205

Chirality is one more argument against the primordial soup (or pizza) theory. How could a 50/50 mixture of right- and left-handed elements arrange themselves into single chirality? In addition, at death single chirality begins to break down, ultimately becoming a 50/50 mix, and one method of determining the time of death is by measuring the chirality. So the only place in the universe where single chirality can be found is in a living cell, where the ‘machinery’ can maintain it.

In this section Pigliucci uses chirality as the evidence that life could not have come from outer space, because all compounds coming from there are in “equal portions of right-and left-handed forms;” but this is exactly the case on the Earth. It is noticeable that on this page he says...

“…extraterrestrial organic compounds have random chirality…”

...carefully avoiding to mention that all terrestrial inanimate matter is exactly the same in this respect! So if it makes life from space impossible, by the same argument it makes life springing up on Earth impossible too. This is yet another example of having his cake and eating it! Let’s make this abundantly clear: when Pigliucci cites chirality as proof life could not spring up from space, this is science; when creationists cite chirality as proof life could not spring up on earth, this is not science! Quote:

“Creationism is not a viable theory of anything, and it is certainly not a scientific theory.”
Page 2

That’s the kind of evolutionist logic we have come to know and love! It is also noticeable that nowhere in the book does he mention chirality as a creationist argument that requires a response! Another example of leaving out the things he can’t answer and only including the things he thinks he can.

“It was (the Russian, Alexander) Oparin, together with the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who came up with the idea of a primordial soup – that is, the possibility that the ancient oceans on Earth were filled with organic matter formed by the interaction between the atmosphere gases and energy provided by volcanic eruptions, powerful electric storms, and solar ultraviolet radiation. We had to wait until the 1950s for Stanley Miller to attempt to reproduce the soup experimentally.”

Page 206

“When lightning, or ultraviolet radiation, hits simple gases in a mixture, more complex organic molecules do indeed form. Even if Miller’s experiments turn out to have been a dead end at explaining the particular problem of the origin of life on Earth, they surely demonstrate that energy can build complexity, in accordance with both the second principle of thermodynamics and the theory of evolution.”

Page 208

The experiment may show greater complexity appearing, but not specified complexity. One reason the experiment signally failed to demonstrate how life could emerge is that the chirality problem remained unsolved: so in accordance with the second principle of thermodynamics, the random effects of lightning etc. could never assemble the required elements in any specified order that would enable a living organism to appear. Therefore Millers experiment demonstrated that the second principle does indeed disprove the theory of evolution. Note in this quote that he accepts Miller’s experiment was a failure at explaining the origin of life – it was “a dead end.”

However it is interesting that having criticised creationists for pointing to abiogenesis as a factor against evolution because this topic is nothing to do with evolution, in this book about creation vs. evolution, he goes into this detail on that very topic!

He explains some of the processes taking place in a cell:

“1. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) encodes the information that eventually will give rise to proteins.

2. Messenger RNA (mRNA) then carries the information to specialised structures know as ribosomes. (RNA stands for ribonucleic acid, which is the same as DNA, but with an extra oxygen atom and a few other chemical differences.) 

3. Inside the ribosomes (which are made of both nucleic acids and proteins), the message is translated into proteins by virtue of a second type of RNA, known as transfer RNA (tRNA). Transfer RNA has the peculiar ability to attach itself to the mRNA on one side and to amino acids (the blocks that make up proteins) on the other side. Thus a chain of mRNA is paralleled by the forming chain of amino acids, which in turn will eventually result in the final protein. 

4. The proteins, most of which (but not all) are enzymes, are the “doers” of the cellular world, in that they are both the building blocks of cell structures and membranes, and the builders themselves, in the form of enzymes capable of catalyzing all sorts of chemical reactions, including the replication of DNA and the transcription of its message into RNA – which, of course, closes the circle!”

Page 208-209

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After explaining a little of the function of DNA and proteins, showing their need for each other to function, he suggests the possibility of a hybrid protein-nucleic acid origin to avoid the chicken/egg problem, but points out that the problem with the primordial soup theory is

“Because the organic compounds would be freely bumping into each other within the ocean, unless their concentration was extremely large, it is difficult to see how dense enough pockets of organic molecules could have formed often enough to allow some significant prebiotic chemistry to occur”

Page 210

As an alternative, he mentions the primordial pizza idea:

“…early organic chemistry occurred in dry environments, most likely on the surface of minerals with physical properties conducive to accumulating and retaining organic molecules in place”

Page 210)

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He admits that no-one has any idea how this alternative idea would work, but...

“We should see some progress in this area in the next few years. But an even bigger question is, “What happened after the primordial pizza? There is still a very large gap between a semicatalytic, semireplicating nucleoprotein and the first living “organism,” whatever that may have been.””

Page 211

So once again, all the scientific evidence for this will appear sometime in the future! He then lists on page 211 his distinction of life from nonlife.

• “The ability to replicate

• The ability to react to the environment (behaviour, not limited just to the special meaning that the word has in animals)

• ·Growth (i.e. reduction of internal entropy at the expense of environmental entropy; note that even single cells grow immediately after reproduction, so this is not a property restricted to multicellular life)

• Metabolism (i.e. the capacity of maintaining lower internal entropy, including the ability to self-repair)”

After more description, he lists on page 212

“…the general path leading to the origin of life…”

“1. Primordial soup or pizza (simple organic compounds formed by atmospheric gases and various sources of energy)

2. Nucleoproteins (similar to modern tRNA)

3. Hypercycles (primitive and inefficient biochemical pathways (“made up of self-replicating nucleic acids and semicatalytic proteins that happen to be found together in pockets within the primordial soup or on the primordial pizza” quoted on page 212), characterised by emergent properties)

4. Cellular hypercycles (more complex cycles, eventually enclosed in a primitive cell made of lipids)

5. Progenote (first self-replicating, metabolizing cell, possibly made of RNA and proteins, with DNA entering the picture later)”

“The problem is that each step is really difficult to describe in detail from a theoretical standpoint, and so far (with the exception of the formation of organic molecules in the soup and of some simple hypercycles) has proven remarkably elusive from an empirical perspective.”

Pages 212-213

In other words, “We have no idea,” and the largely failed Miller experiment of 1952 is the best we have! 69 years of experiments have still not produced anything better! Oceans of speculation, not a drop of observational scientific evidence! The description of the requirements for even a single celled organism to live, would require a huge amount of specified complexity in their DNA.

This can be seen in the smallest living organism capable of independent life known to man. The microbe called Pelagibacter. At www.genome we are told it has 1,308,759 nucleotides, with 1,354 protein genes and 35 RNA genes. Although there are smaller organisms, these are incapable of independent life: they require higher organisms in order to survive. No scientific observation can produce anything capable of Pigliucci's list that could be significantly smaller than this; but the possibility of such a large number of elements combining in the correct order by random means is so astronomically small it could never happen - even in an infinite number of universes!

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The stages of development assumes steps that would require huge leaps of change in DNA to create - far greater than any mutation ever observed. No wonder they have "proven remarkably elusive from an empirical perspective!"

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“Consider that the fossil record shows “modern-looking” bacterial cells a few hundred million years after the formation of the Earth – that is, about 3.8 billion years ago. This tells us that whatever happened before the formation of these bacterial cells happened very fast (by geological standards, nothing creationists can exploit), but there is no record of it.”
Page 213

Actually it is exploitable, since it proves that there is very little time for the massive number of possible alternatives to form randomly. The fact there is no record of what happened before these 'modern-looking' cells shows once again it has to be believed by faith, and not by scientific evidence. It is also interesting that he claims the origin of life happened so comparatively quickly, while the development from there to the simplest forms of life we do see in the fossil record took so long. Yet surely the greater problem would have been abiogenesis? Why should the next step have taken so long, when the change from the simplest organism to man was so very much faster?

He finally discusses A. G. Cairns-Smith’s theory of clay crystals (starting on page 213), but discounts it because they do not allow the kind of activity required. It is fascinating that he still makes no mention of chirality – an absence which once again can only be interpreted as meaning he has no idea how it can be surmounted.

In the chapter on fossils he cites, on page 217, punctuated equilibrium as a valid alternative to Darwin’s gradual evolution with many intermediate stages linking one species to another. In fact it is the only explanation he gives for the huge gaps. On page 238 he says:

“The current consensus seems to be that there is enough empirical evidence to grant punctuated equilibrium real existence, although we do not know how this mode of macroevolution occurs when compared with more traditional, gradual, evolutionary change.”

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Punctuated equilibrium is impossible! Look at the challenge to see how much change has to take place in DNA. Even if change takes place in every single generation, the jumps from a single cell organism to modern humans are impossibly high. So this theory, by trying to solve the problem of the missing transitional forms massively increases the problem of the amount of change required when it does take place.

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After summarising the evolutionist position, on page 225 he gives two alternative ‘creationist’ explanations of the fossil record, which I summarise as:

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[1] the Cambrian explosion was when God created life and

[2] if the Cambrian explosion was not when God created life, so many beneficial mutations could not occur in such a short period of time.

However, the first is not accepted by what I would call ‘mainstream creationism’ for some of the reasons Pigliucci gives for his rejection of it (along with the fact they conflict with Bible teaching), and no further information is given about the second. So this adds little to the debate. However he points out:

“Another major point raised by creationists… is that the (Cambrian) “explosion” was simply too rapid to be the result of a natural process… But that can still mean tens of millions of years, and consequently hundreds of thousands or millions of generations…”
Page 228

Yet another example of his “creationists are stupid” claims! Creationists are well aware of the lengths of time involved in evolutionary theory. The fact remains that tens of millions of years simply is not long enough to give time for the amount of change required, and millions of generations not enough for mutation to work the miracle evolution requires. More detail on this later.

While it could be argued that simpler organisms have smaller DNA, which would take less time to evolve, one does not have to go very far along the chain before finding the opposite: for example frogs, which surely must be considered a long way down the evolutionary chain, have more DNA than humans!

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"…current estimates of the length of the Precambrian are on the order of 4 billion years – a much longer time than the period that has elapsed from the beginning of the Cambrian until today (570 million years)."

Page 227

“…when one compounds the odds against soft-body fossilization with extreme antiquity and high degree of disintegration of Precambrian rocks, it is easy to see why it has been so hard to find evidence of life before 570 million years ago.”

Page 228

On the other hand it may simply be that it never existed in the first place!

“Creationists seem to imply that the only naturalistic possibility is for a mind-bogglingly high number of mutations to occur simultaneously, and somehow generate a new type of organism in a single saltational event (such as a fully formed bird from a dinosaur egg).”

Page 229

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This is a fair point: they do! Perhaps not quite such a leap as a fully formed bird from a dinosaur egg - that is the domain of the hopeful-monster brigade! But the point that scales turning into feathers, (remembering that feathers and scales are made from very different material, so one would not naturally arise from the other) or forelegs into wings, for example, could take place gradually over thousands or millions of years is ludicrous, since most of the intermediate forms would be at a serious disadvantage.

“…let us assume we are considering an organism whose generation time is 25 years, the likelihood of occurrence for any given mutation is one in a million (per generation per gene – an empirically reasonable estimate), and the total population size of the species is 1 million individuals (probably a gross underestimation for most species). Given these conditions, on average each gene will mutate within the population once every generation (in different individuals, of course). This means that during the 15 million years of the Cambrian explosion, each gene would have mutated 600,000 times! Certainly this is more than enough change to provide the necessary raw material for natural selection.”

Page 229

If this were the case then we would see millions, if not billions of examples, both fossilised and living, at part-way stages between all life forms.

Here we reach the point where the theory of evolution collapses. When pointing out the facts, agreed by both evolutionist and creationist alike, I have never yet had one give a satisfactory answer to this problem. Pigliucci blithely says each gene will mutate every generation: what does that mean? Will just one nucleotide mutate in every gene, will every nucleotide mutate in them, or just some? Will the gene totally change its function each time, or simply remain the same with a minor variation? How much change is required to produce the next transitional species from the last one? How many generations, and therefore how long, will this take?

Firstly he claims a mutation every generation in a population of one million. He ignores the fact that once a mutation has taken place, the newly formed species is now a population of one! Mutation cannot be spread like a cold! It can only proliferate by the descendants of the mutant multiplying and, through natural selection, displacing the previous species. So if he says a population of one million is required, how long will it take to reach that point? We will use his own figures to calculate this.

Figures on the Internet vary, but a minimum date for homo sapiens first appearing seems to be around 200,000 years ago. To be generous, let’s say just 50,000 years ago. If allowing for massive deaths through disease, disaster, predators, etc., we assumed the population doubled once every 1,000 years (i.e. every 40 generations of 25 years), then by now we should see a population of approx. 569,295,000,000,000 people in the world! Since we do not, one is bound to ask, “If evolution is fact, where is everybody?” Present population growth is a doubling every 39 years. To reach the present world population from one pair of humans requires the population to double just 31.5 times! See here for more details.

However, that is not the point I am making. It was just to demonstrate that if we assume on average the population doubling every generation, then we are being very generous to the evolutionary position. In this case, it would take 20 generations (500 years) to reach a population of 524,288. This is half the number Pigliucci requires: obviously one more generation would be needed. But including all the previous generations, about one million new mutants will have existed.

When I first wrote this piece, according to the Human Genome Project web site there are 3,164,700,000 base pairs in human DNA. It is now accepted there is at least a 5% difference between humans and chimps, although since chimps have over 10% more DNA than humans, it is obviously at least double that! Dr Geoff Barnard (see later for his bio.) has pointed out that while some of our proteins are 99% identical to chimps’ (which presumably is where the 2009 Natural History Museum sponsored book title “99% Ape” comes from), this accounts for less than 2% of the total human DNA! In addition, some of chimps’ proteins are nothing like ours; we have proteins that they do not have, and they have proteins we do not have. There are seven pericentre inversions between chimps and humans on chromosomes 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 17 & 18; and the recombination hotspots are very different between humans and chimps. The difference between ape and human is much greater than the evolutionist would have us believe.

However, calculating on a 5% difference, this means a minimum of 158,235,000 base pairs have changed since the two species branched out from their common ancestor; and if we assume a similar amount of change took place in the two branches, 79,117,500 had to mutate in each branch. It is now known that up to 100 base pairs can mutate per person per generation. That being the case, assuming we could have 100 base pairs mutating ‘accurately’, this would require 791,175 mutations (or transitional species). According to Pigliucci’s calculation requiring 1 million individuals in order to get each required mutation, this would take 395.5 million years: just to produce the difference between chimps and humans! Bearing in mind the time from the beginning of the Cambrian explosion to the present day is supposed to be 570 million years, it is obvious that there is absolutely no time whatsoever for the required amount of changes to take place to produce all the life forms presently seen.

However there are two further problems for the evolutionist. Firstly, the odds of getting an ‘accurate’ mutation of 100 base pairs is so remote (since there are four possibilities for each pair, this is 1 x 4, 100 times) that a population of trillions over trillions of years would be required to have a chance of it happening just once: the odds for any specific combination of 100 are 1 in 6,000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 (6^60: 6 followed by 60 noughts)! Even if there were one billion viable alternative mutations of one hundred base pairs, this only reduces the odds to 1 in 6, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 (6x10^51: 6 followed by 51 zeros)!

Secondly, not only does the mutation have to produce the right kind of change, it also has to be in the right place. Regarding the mutation not of 100, but just of one base pair, Behe says:

“…the probability that one of those mutations will be in the right place is one out of a hundred million.” The odds of getting a double mutation are “about a hundred million times a hundred million (10^16).” “…With a generation time of ten years and an average population size of a million people, on average it should take about a hundred billion years for that particular mutation to arise —much more than the longest evolutionary estimate of the age of the universe”

The Edge of Evolution by Michael J. Behe, page 110

Secondly, University of Rochester evolutionary biologist, H. Allen Orr has said:

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 “Given realistically low mutation rates, double mutants will be so rare that adaptation is essentially constrained to surveying — and substituting — one-mutational step neighbours. Thus if a double-mutant sequence is favourable but all single amino acid mutants are deleterious, adaptation will generally not proceed”

Quoted in The Edge of Evolution, page 106

So if the most that natural selection can favour is a double-mutation, then it would require 39,558,750 different transitional forms to produce chimps and humans from their common ancestor. No room for punctuated equilibrium there!

Thirdly, Dr J C Sanford (Cornell University Professor of genetics for over 25 years, who has published over 70 scientific publications and has been granted over 25 patents), says:

“Man and chimp differ by at least 150 million nucleotides representing at least 40 million hypothetical mutations (Britton, 2002).So if man evolved from a chimp-like creature, then during that process there were at least 20 million mutations fixed within the human lineage (40 million divided by 2), yet natural selection could only have selected for 1,000 of these. All the rest would have had to have been fixed by random drift – creating millions of nearly-neutral deleterious mutations. This would not just have made us inferior to our chimp-like ancestors – it would have surely killed us.”

Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome

He makes it very clear in his book that the downward trend due to mutation is reducing the specified complexity of our DNA: the opposite of the requirements of ‘evolution of species’.

Finally, the only suggestion I have received from an evolutionist, is that the mutations would not be linear, as in my calculations, but taking place across the entire population, thus enabling a lot of mutation to appear quickly. This sounds reasonable, until one realises that all these mutants at some point have to interbreed, in order to bring the mutations into a single species. The problem is that the point is very quickly reached where the differences between these mutants would be so great, conception would be impossible.

I have gone into some detail on this point, because, whichever way you approach it, the demonstrable facts prove that mutation plus natural selection is helpless to create the kind of change required for ‘evolution of species’.

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Once again, in this section on fossils, it is interesting to see what has been omitted. The main-stream creationist argument is that the fossil arrangement can be explained by the world-wide flood, followed by huge but more localised natural disasters. This is confirmed by the scientific observation of the Mount St Helens event showing how geological formations can occur very rapidly – in a matter of days, weeks or months – and the fact that all radiometric dating methods are heavily influenced by assumptions – e.g. that we know what the starting condition were, change has always been constant and no events have ever happened to affect the samples being measured). It is completely ignored here and not answered anywhere in the book.

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