ACCIDENTAL ADAPTATION?

Darwinians are celebrating the adaptation of a Puerto Rican forest lizard to urban life. In an article entitled Forest Lizards Genetically Morph to Survive Life in the City, the adaptation is ballyhooed as proof of Darwin's theory of evolution. This may be a fine example of evolution, but I don't think it supports the neo-Darwinist theory of Natural Selection. According to that theory, random mutations of the DNA molecule are selected to survive because they give the DNA an advantage in the struggle for survival. "Random mutation" equals "Accidental change." Accidents are more often disastrous than serendipitous. 

Which is more reasonable? That when the lizards moved into the city, their genes were randomly modified and the modifications gave the lizards longer legs and modified scales which helped them to better survive in the city? Or that when the lizards came into the city, their DNA recognized the need for longer legs and modified scales and reprogrammed itself to make city life easier?

If evolution is random, why does DNA keep coming up with the same solutions to the same problems? This phenomenon is called "convergent evolution," and convergent evolution has given us the Ichthyosaurus, the Shark, and the Killer Whale, all of which are basically the same. It has also given us Hyenas and Wolves--two very different genera which survive in much the same way. Then we can look at Ants and Termites; pterodactyls, bats, and birds; and myriads of other unrelated species which have "convergently evolved" the same sort of solutions to the same problems.

One of my favorite examples of convergent evolution is the Panda's thumb. The Panda, like primates and people, needed an opposable thumb for grasping things (in the Panda's case it was bamboo shoots). To meet this need the Panda evolved a thumb. It's a very different thumb than the human thumb, but it still is a thumb.

I once read a joke that claimed DNA invented human beings because it wanted to explore extraterrestrial opportunities for replication. The joke was funny because it advanced the "ridiculous" theory that DNA had some form of intelligence, and that evolution was purposeful.

I think Darwinists are allergic to the idea that some sort of intelligence drives evolution because they see the term "Intelligent Design" as a code word for God. If they could remove God from the process of evolution and retain some sort of directing force, they would probably drop Natural Selection like a hot potato.

Henri Bergson, the atheist French philosopher, could accept neither the theory that accident drove  evolution nor the theory that God controlled it. He posited a theory that there was some sort of "elan vital," or "life force," which drove evolution by seeing needs and opportunities and modifying life to meet those needs and opportunities.

I'm not a scientist, a philosopher, or a theologian, but I think I can see a theory of evolution which can satisfy both the proponents of materialistic evolution and theistic evolution. I'll discuss it in my next post.

QUORA QUESTION: How do lawyers evaluate the truthfulness of eye witness testimony?

At a bare minimum, you should look at the demeanor of the witness, the inherent probability of the account, any internal inconsistencies in the account, whether the account is consistent with previous statements by the witness, whether the witness has any bias against the accused or any family or group to which the accused belongs, whether the evidence at the crime scene supports the account, and whether the witness’s testimony is supported by the testimony of other witnesses. Uncorroborated eyewitness testimony is highly suspect. Most DNA exonerations in wrongful conviction cases come from convictions based on uncorroborated eyewitness testimony.

TWO BITS, FOUR BITS, THE GENETIC CODE VERSUS COMPUTER CODE

I just read Evolution 2.0 by Perry Marshall and was intrigued by his argument that the genetic code is actually a code just like a computer code. That got me to thinking: if this is true, how does the information storage power of the genetic code stack up against computer code. This is what I came up with:

The building blocks of computer code are bits. A bit can only be either a 1 or a 0. Eight bits equals a byte, and bytes are how we measure storage capacity--kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. If we work out all the different combinations of 1's and 0's in a byte, we come up with 256 different bytes.

Now I'm dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to any kind of math above 2+2, and even dumber than that when it comes to computer programming, but it seems to me that when we write a computer program, we've got 256 "letters" to put together into words to tell our story. We can cram a lot of information into a small space with an alphabet that large.

Now let's look at DNA code. The basic building blocks of DNA code are guanine, adenine, cytosine, and thymine. Guanine (G) and cytosine (C) always combine to make a rung of the DNA ladder, and adenine (A) and thymine (T) always combine to make a rung of the DNA ladder. This makes it look like we've only got two choices for a bit, just like computer code. But the rungs can be put on with either one of the blocks first, like this: GC, CG, AT, TA. So instead of the two possible bits of computer code, we've got four possible bits of DNA code.

With four possible bits instead of two, we have an exponentially larger number of possible bytes (65,536 if my math is correct). That's a huge alphabet for writing our genetic story. Thus, while the number of possible byte combinations in a megabyte of computer code are mind-boggling, they are miniscule when compared to the number of possible byte combinations in a megabyte of DNA code. If I were a betting man (which I'm not) I'd be willing to bet that the number of possible combinations in a kilobyte of DNA code dwarfs the possible combinations in megabyte of computer code.

Does what I am saying make sense? Does DNA's vastly larger "alphabet" make for more powerful coding than computer coding? I'd be glad to hear polite comments on my ruminations.