Human evolution: Ardipithecus, humans, and chimps
| December 21, 2009 | Posted by O'Leary under Darwinism, Human evolution |
Someone wrote to me recently, asking
Ever since the reporting of Ardi, I expected a commentary of it on your blog but so far I have found none unless I missed it. I’m curious to what you have to say about it since the researchers of Ardi claim chimps may have descended from us. That being the case then evolution’s tree of life would have to be reimagined. Thoughts?
I think Jean Auel did the best job in Clan of the Cave Bear, and she even admitted that she was writing fiction. Which, in my view, puts her way ahead of dozens of profs who can tell me exactly how long-dead people – who never left any writings behind – thought about stuff like religion and family life.
Anyway, I am putting this to the commenters. What do you think about Ardipithecus? An ancestor of us? Of chimps? Both?
By the way, this blog is a volunteer enterprise. Unlike the Darwinists, we are not part of your tax burden. If you feel like contributing financially, don’t let me deter you. We could expand our coverage and services if we had more resources. Otherwise, you see only what a volunteer found time to contribute. That’s hardly a quarter of what we could say.
70 Responses to Human evolution: Ardipithecus, humans, and chimps
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Zachriel:
I just checked online at two blogs and the number I gave is the correct number, which turns out to be 635,013,559,600. Using 100,000 people shuffling and dealing twice a minute, 24-7, it would take six years, on average, to come up with a particular deal. Ouch! IOW, if everyone in the world shuffled and dealt once every Sunday, it would take less than 3 years to get your specific deal. A bit deflating, isn’t it?
It’s 52!/(13!^4). The point is that any particular hand is incredibly unlikely.
The 52!/(13!)^4 is the multinomial coefficient, and would include the various orderings of a bridge hand. But when we play bridge, whether the ace of Spades is dealt to you first or last doesn’t really matter. So in terms of your normal bridge hands, the binomial coefficient works, which is 635 billion or so. Anyways, it’s a large number.
No, that’s not true. Any bridge hand is likely. The probability of dealing a bridge hand is 100% = 1.0.
When you shuffle and deal a bridge hand, you can immediately play. Why? Because you’re not looking for any particular hand. But when you say that you can’t play until someone gets a hand with nothing other than one suit of cards, then what happens? You end up having to shuffle and deal for a long time. What if you want to generate a sequence of integers 1 to 100 randomly, and you’re not concerned with a particular sequence. Well, then, every generation of such a sequence will suffice. But if you wanted a particular sequence, then it would require, per your numbers, 10^200 generations of sequences before you could be assured of arriving at that particular sequence. Does it matter which sequence you select? No, it can be any one of the 10^200 possibilities. This means that improbabilities arise ONLY when some particular combination is required.
So, for example, with state lotteries, the reason that it becomes an improbable event is because a particular sequence of numbers is selected, and your guess has to match that. If no particular sequence is required, then everyone wins. All you have to do is pick six numbers. So, too, with the genome: if particular nucleotides differ between species A and species B, given the huge length of the genome, and the relatively low rate of mutation, and with the further complications of a needed change spreading through a population without it first getting eliminated because of some deleterious mutation someplace else on the genome, it becomes mathematiclly improbable—to the point of impossibility—to arrive at species B from species A if the differences are great enough. My calculation of 10^70,000 makes that point.
The mechanisms that Darwinian evolutionists propose don’t have the power to bring about these “particular” changes via random, and/or, guided processes (assuming that NS is a ‘guiding’ process). Unless a mechanism can be proposed that overcomes the difficulties that “particular” nucleotide sequences present, then we have to look for some other mechanism. Behe’s EoE points out the limitations of Darwinian mechanisms. Can so-called Darwinian mechanisms bring about changes in the genome? Yes. But they’re extremely limited, almost to the point of being completely trivial. Please feel free to enlighten me, but unless viable mechanisms are proposed, I remain a Darwinian skeptic.
[BTW, I tried to get Kimura's book out of the library, but it appears it's been stolen, so I can't get you the quote I was hoping for.]
Zachriel [60]:
The number of permutations of 100 objects is 100! = roughly 10^158 per my calculations. But, if you get up to 150!, I’m sure that your number of 10^200 is exceeded. But, again, unless you’re considering a “particular” sequence, this improbability doesn’t apply. Now, if YOU are doing the specifying, then your very act of specifying a sequence brings the sequence into existence, and the probability of its existence is 1.0. However, if your friend wrote down a sequence and asked you to guess what it is, then your effort at guessing it would have the probability of being correct of 1 in 10^158. Well, “nature” is doing the specifying in the case of genomes. And that is why the improbabilities apply. The specification exists because species A and B both exist. And any natural explanation for this transformation has to overcome the improbabilities that these specifications bring into existence.
52!/(13!^4) = 53 octillion is the number of deals. 52!/13!/39! = 600 billion is the number of individual hands. These are the same numbers originally posted above (#56).
Somewhat more than your original calculation (#51) of 10^5.
The probability of any *particular* hand is highly unlikely. The probability of *some* bridge hand is 1.
That’s right. And humans are not requried. They’re just one hand of many that could have been dealt. Just within the human family tree, there are many branches that could now be occupying the niche now occupied by Homo sapiens, e.g. Homo neanderthalensis.
You’re still assuming that there had to be a particular result. There didn’t. We know there were lots of branchings and many possible avenues evolution could have taken. It’s not a particular hand, it some hand that was dealt (only some of which were then subject to selection). Even within extant humans there can be millions of differences in genomes, including copy number variations.
Zachriel:
Have you ever heard of the expression: He strains gnats and swallows elephants? Well, what does 10^5, or even 10^27 , matter as compared to 10^70,000? If you put thirty zeroes on each of thirty lines on a piece of paper, then 10^27 would consist of 26 zeroes followed by a 1, all fitting on the first line of the first page, whereas 10^70,000 would require roughly 75 pages completely filled with zeroes, and, finally, a 1 at the end. Each card hand can be played; but only the rarest of mutations will be both beneficial and fixed. And there simply isn’t enough of them. Under one of the most optimistic scenarios imaginable for RM+NS, the likelihood of chimps becoming humans by mere chance is 1 in 10^70,000. How in the world is it that anyone takes Darwinism seriously anymore?
Only humans understand improbabilities. Only humans play bridge.
As to your larger point that improbabilities arise in nature without human assistance, I would wholeheartedly agree. It is the task of NS to overcome these improbabilities. And, as my previous calculations have demonstrated, NS is not up to the task. Now, if you had 52 cards, face-up, on a table, and you had a chimp separate them randomly into four hands of 13 cards each, with each hand consisting of one of the four suits of cards, and with them ordered from the Ace down to the two, then, on average, it would 53 octillion tries for the chimp to do it randomly. But I assure, I could do it on my first attempt. It’s amazing, isn’t it, at what improbabilites intelligence can make go away.
In reference to my calculations, you replied thusly:
My friend, Zachriel, where are these “intermediates”? If you mean these to be Homo neanderthalis, Homo erectus, etc, that’s fine. But let’s point out the problem with this: namely, that if you invoke these other races as intermediates on the way to humankind, then this restricts the amount of time between each such intermediate. If there is not enough time (meaning enough mutations) between chimps and apes to account for genetic differences, well then, while fewer mutations may be needed to go from a chimp to some putative intermediate, nonetheless, a lesser amount of time is available. It seems like that puts us right back where we started from—-unless you can find lots more “intermediates”. Ironically, every attempt to justify Darwinism, starting with Darwin himself, ends up relying on the presence of intermediates. And, of course, they’re nowhere to be found.
[RM+NS is not an optimization program, but a stabilization program, around which adaptation can occur. But, of course, this is the bill of goods that Darwinists sell everywhere.]
Consider a baby. Even assuming that each mating was destined by fate, there are millions of sperm with each coupling. Looking back over just the last few generations, the probability of this particular baby with this particular genome being born is astronomically unlikely. Yet babies are born every day.
You are correct that the presence of intermediates doesn’t reduce the amount of total change required. Nevertheless, Your calculation assumes a specific result. The Theory of Evolution posits that it is just one of many possible paths that could have been taken.
The correct calcuation is that the rate at which mutations accumulate must be sufficient to account for the differences in the genomes. You start some place, you move about, and you end up someplace else.
Many of the relevant mutations are neutral (and of those, many have no phenotypic effect whatsoever). Hence, they are precisely like shuffling a deck and dealing a typical hand.
Voice Coil (#55)
You argue that my views on the radical cognitive discontinuity between humans and other animals are incompatible with my affirmation of common descent:
Just to be clear: (i) the neural changes in our ancestors’ brains were a necessary but not sufficient condition for the transition from non-human to human; (ii) I do not think that the neural changes occurred as a result of an undirected process, as the brain is the most complex structure known to exist; (iii) at the present time, I have no idea how many mutations were required to effect this transformation, and I don’t know anyone else who would know, either.
You’re being a bit inconsistent. Cleary, there are primitive hominids that predate modern hominids.