protein folding
Hvordan sker evolution? Ved et tilfælde, bliver vi fortalt. Ting sker bare. Ethvert trin i evolutionen er et tilfælde. Den model, vi lærer i skolen, siger, at evolution sker ved tilfældige mutationer og naturlig selektion. Naturlig selektion antages at sortere det gode fra det dårlige, så den eneste mekanisme, der skaber nogen "ny" information er mutation. Mutation beløber sig til tilfældige fejl i DNA'et. (Ja, det kan lyde besynderligt, men det er teorien. Du er resultatet af milliarder af år af akkumulerede fejl. Du var et bakterie, dengang du var fejlfri.) Hvis disse fejl viser sig at være "hjælpsomme" [Eng: "helpful"] (også et lidt besynderligt begreb), så overlever organismen og reproduceres bedre end andre og videregiver den nye genetiske information videre. Som vi ved, er de fleste mutationer skadelige. De gavnlige er sjældne. Så hvis evolution kun sker ved tilfældigheder og de gode mutationer er sjældne, må vi spørge os selv, hvor sandsynligt er evolution?


Kommentar: Delvist oversat af Sott.net fra The Probability of Evolution


The thing obvious to most mathematicians (these are the people who actually understand probability) who have ever considered this question is that it's not probable at all. In fact, it's extremely improbable, and they've been raising this issue since the 1960s. Mathematicians find it hard to take this theory seriously, because they can do the math. Neo-Darwinists, on the other hand, are not so good at doing the math and insist that, while everything about evolution indeed is improbable, given enough time, this improbability can be overcome. But is that true? Can this improbability really be overcome by time? As we will see, it can not. The idea that it can is rooted in a strong conviction that it must, wrapped in hazy assumptions devoid of any connection to real world data, and thus it is a delusion. Real world data paint a different picture. It's one thing to vaguely acknowledge something is improbable. It's a whole different thing to do the calculations and see just how crushing the improbability is.

Let's recapitulate the basics quickly. The genetic information in the DNA is encoded in a long string of sequences of four letters - A, T, C, G. So it looks like 'TACGATGCTAGCAT...' and so on. What mutations do is they randomly change some of these letters. These sequences are then used as a template to code for proteins. Different sequence -> different protein. That is, if you're super-extremely lucky. If you're not, then it's different sequence -> nothing. You'd just get a polypeptide that won't fold and is thus useless. If you're still somewhat lucky, it gets cleared away by the sophisticated machinery in the cell. If not, these failed products can accumulate, stick together, and cause diseases. Mutations are pretty destructive. Everyone (except Darwinists) knows that.

Evolution is something that supposedly improves things over time. But the only thing that, according to the theory, provides new information is literally 'random errors' in something that worked in the first place. It shouldn't take a genius to acquire a vague suspicion that this sounds rather improbable, to say the least.

This article will contain a lot of numbers, but for those not mathematically inclined, here's a good simple analogy. Imagine you have a book, say, the Bible. I know, terrible example of a book, but don't worry - we'll mutate it into something better. Now imagine we're in the old days before printing, and books are copied by hand. They're copied by people who aren't perfect and make mistakes sometimes, and who often don't understand the language of the book. So every now and then, there's a missing letter or word, or words are misspelled, and so on. Let's say this process goes on for millions of years, until the text has little resemblance to the original book.

With the genetic code, the idea is that a fish started mutating hundreds of millions of years ago, and after all that time, ended up becoming a monkey. To understand how laughable this idea is, imagine that the Bible that's being copied countless times slowly becomes a different book, like The Lord of the Rings. Wouldn't that be amazing? Sure would, but even if your mathematical skills are inferior, you can easily figure out that this is never going to happen. To get The Lord of the Rings, somebody has to deliberately and consciously write it. The story has to be planned, and every letter in the book has to be quite specific. It's never going to arise from random copying errors. Noah is not going to become Frodo by accident, much less by a series of thousands of small steps. (Though it would certainly be fun to imagine all the intermediate stages. "Thou shalt bring two animals of each species to Mordor!") And yet, we're supposed to believe that exactly that kind of thing happened between the fish and the monkey. Anybody smell a rat yet?

The Origin of Life

Maybe the greatest problem for the whole Darwinian game of "there is absolutely no intelligence involved in producing life" is the question of how life originated in the first place. It's not strictly a matter of evolution, but it's closely related. One thing the Darwinists absolutely insist on is that there can be no designer. (Design really freaks them out, for some reason.) If there was a designer for the first living cell, then there would be little point in insisting that no design is involved in evolution itself, so Darwinists must also insist that even the first cell arose only out of some natural processes, with no intelligence involved. They have no idea how it would happen and have been arguing about it for decades, but they all agree that no intelligence could possibly have been involved (because intelligence is scary). This is rather ridiculous, since all evidence so far has shown that no unintelligent processes can account for creating even a fragment of a living cell, but these scientists, convinced that materialism must be true, refuse to give up on their unworkable theory and accept reality.

The general idea then is that the first living cell arose through natural processes, simply by means of the laws of physics and chance. But all such theories have failed to convince more than a handful of people, and for good reason, like, for example, that they make no sense. Let's look at what such a cell would need in order to function and reproduce.

Most of the smallest bacteria have hundreds of thousands of nucleotides in their DNA and code for hundreds of proteins. The smallest bacterium I could find is Carsonella ruddi, with 160,000 base pairs, coding for 182 proteins. And this is only because some of the functions necessary for its life are performed by its insect host (so it could never be the first cell, as it cannot survive on its own). In terms of producing this by chance, though, this is still huge. There has to be a specific sequence of 160,000 letters that codes for 182 very specific sequences of amino acids. Imagine typing 160,000 random letters blindfolded on a keyboard with mixed-up letters. How much of the result do you think would be useful in any way? Would it produce at least one sentence? How about a book? Or an instruction manual for building a robot? (Preferably one that can duplicate itself.)

To give another simple analogy, let's consider the proverbial needle in a haystack. If you think it's hard to find a needle in a haystack, then allow me to inform you that you would sooner find a trillion separate needles in a trillion separate haystacks than produce a single protein by chance. Randomly creating the DNA of a small living cell would be like typing 160,000 random characters and ending up with a functional computer program. As a matter of fact, I have written many scripts in two programming languages. I have one that has over 150,000 characters, so this is a good comparison. I can tell you it was a lot of work to write it and required lots of thinking, planning, and many hours of testing and debugging. Now, for most of the characters in this script, if you changed the character to anything else, at least one function of the script would break, possibly the whole thing. There are actually many ways of breaking the whole script just by one typo. So it takes lots of effort and planning to make something this complex work at all. The idea that it could be written by random typing wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone.

So why is anyone taking seriously the idea of a cell arising by chance, when we've never seen anything even remotely similar happen? This idea just doesn't reflect our experience with the real world at all. What we've seen in the example of my script is that all the information is very specific. Specificity is by definition basically the opposite of randomness. So how can randomness create specificity? It seems like the worst possible candidate for the job. It's like expecting gravity to cause flying, or falling into mud to make you cleaner.

But things are much more complicated than just getting the right sequence of nucleotides. Once a living cell is complete, things may go smoothly from there in terms of reproducing, but assembling the first cell without a parent cell is infinitely more difficult. Let's say we somehow got the DNA with all the code for all proteins. What now? Well, now nothing. We need 12 proteins to transcribe DNA to RNA before we can make any proteins. And to make the proteins from RNA, we need 106 proteins to do the job. We need functional ribosomes, which, aside from containing about 50 of those 106 proteins, also need several thousand nucleotides worth of RNA, all very specific. (See top image to appreciate the complexity of a ribosome.) We need twenty different aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases - enzymes of hundreds of amino acids each - to assign correct amino acids to 20 different types of tRNA molecules. (This is more or less what determines the genetic 'code'.) So you see the problem here. We need a DNA blueprint for all the required proteins and RNA, but over a hundred of those proteins and a lot of the RNA are needed to read the blueprint and make proteins. It's the chicken-and-egg problem on steroids. For life to start accidentally, there would have to be more than a hundred complex things, each of them highly improbable to ever arise by chance, all appearing at about the same time.

Structure of RNA
The structure of the RNA for the large ribosomal subunit in E. Coli. (About 3000 nucleotides.) The ribosome also has a small RNA sub unit (~1500 nt) and about 50 proteins. A happy accident?
There are numerous difficulties with this scenario, other than just needing hundreds of thousands of things to connect together in the right sequence by chance. For example, there's chirality. Amino acids come in left-handed and right-handed forms (mirror images of one another), which occur with about the same frequency. Yet for a functional protein, all the amino acids must have the same chirality. And not only that. In fact, all proteins in living organisms consist strictly of the left-handed versions of amino acids. How random does that sound to you?

So for a protein to form, not only do you need, say, 200 amino acids in a precise order, but also with the same chirality. The chances of just getting the chirality right are like flipping 200 coins and getting all heads or all tails (about one in 1060, in this case). The same problem also exists in the DNA and its sugar deoxyribose. The sugar also comes in both forms, and for DNA to work, it again needs everything to have the same chirality. Also, one side of the DNA ladder has the deoxyribose rotated by 180 degrees in relation to that of the other side. In other words, the two strands always run in opposite directions. So again, if the process of assembly is random, how come the result is so specific?

On top of that, the amino acids in proteins need to form peptide bonds. When they react naturally, they form peptide and non-peptide bonds with about the same incidence. Once the wrong bond is formed, random processes have no way of fixing it. So every amino acid has a 5% chance of being the right one (there are 20 amino acids), a 50% chance of having the right chirality and a 50% chance of forming a peptide bond, but hundreds of them have to assemble in the right order, have the right chirality, form the right bond, and the first cell would need a few hundred of these proteins at least. So making just one is akin to picking 200 people randomly and ending up with all women, all left-handed, all between the ages of 36-40, and lined up in the alphabetical order of their last names.

The cell also needs a very specific membrane that's smart about what can or cannot go in and out of the cell, which is no easy task, but it's absolutely necessary for the cell to function and survive. (A whole chapter could be written about the cell membrane, its complexity, and its numerous amazing properties.) And that's still far from being all the problems with this scenario. If the process is supposed to happen slowly, over a long period of time, then there's the issue that things degrade far faster than they can assemble. Proteins are stable for up to a day or two in a cell, and RNA degrades within minutes. How, then, is this supposed to happen slowly over millions of years? Try to cook your dinner slowly, over about 100 days, when many ingredients get spoiled in a day or two. Or try to create a slow explosion that lasts about 3 hours. Things simply don't work like that.

Cellular membrane
Cellular membrane. Probability of occurring randomly: 0.
Most things tend to react with other things we need them not to react with, rather than with the ones we need them to. Everything has a stronger tendency to break than to build, which is logical if the second law of thermodynamics is true. Some reactions require energy, which is provided by the complex machinery in the cell, but here, we don't have a cell yet. We're trying to build one.

There are actually several separate problems that all need to be solved for a living cell to arise.
  1. Chemicals must assemble in completely improbable ways, creating DNA and proteins
  2. Something must determine the code, i.e. which codons code for which amino acids
  3. Random sequences must produce functional proteins
  4. Proteins & RNA must do specific jobs
  5. All these jobs together must create a single functioning organism
This is ridiculously implausible. Each of these problems alone would be extremely unlikely to ever be solved.
  1. Chemicals don't naturally assemble to form DNA or proteins. Problems include reactivity with wrong chemicals, chirality, type of bonds, degradation, energy requirements, etc.
  2. The genetic code requires 20 different aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, each made of hundreds of amino acids. This would be difficult to invent, so expecting it to occur randomly is just stupid. It's like expecting a programming language to occur randomly. When these 20 enzymes first appeared, there was supposedly exactly zero intelligence around and no idea of a code. It's difficult to create a code when you're trying to create a code. It's impossible when you're not trying. Nobody has a damn clue how the genetic code came to be. Most evolutionists won't even touch this problem.
  3. Randomness doesn't create order, specificity, complexity, functionality, or anything like that. The idea that a ribosome, made of thousands of nucleotides of RNA and dozens of proteins, which happens to somehow know how to make proteins out of RNA, just kind of 'happened' is so far in the realm of fantasy that one has to be properly brainwashed to not notice how idiotic it is in the real world.
  4. Try making a tool that will perform a specific job without having a clue what the job would be. It makes no sense. If a protein were to be made accidentally, which in itself is pretty much impossible, nothing in the cell would know what to do with it. If a ribosome was somehow accidentally made (fat chance), how would anything know that it can translate RNA into proteins? How would anything know to give it the RNA (or to transcribe it in the first place) when no protein translation existed before that? What would prepare all the tRNA stuff for the ribosome to work with? What would know where to transport the finished proteins and what to do with them when no proteins had ever been made before? I mean, if you gave a caveman a microwave oven, what use would it be? At best it would become a neat table. Just like the caveman would need to know what it is, what it does, what to put inside, and how to supply electricity, the cell needs to know the ribosome can translate RNA, uses tRNA with amino acids attached by the tRNA synthetases, and makes proteins, and it needs to know where to take the proteins and how to use them. How do Darwinists deal with such problems? They don't. They just ignore them.
  5. This is never even considered. How are the thousands of things happening in a cell coordinated to produce 'life' with zero intelligence behind it? You can put 20 sophisticated machines into a room, but when there's no intelligence involved and the machines were put there accidentally, there won't be much going on. The coordinated cooperation of everything in the cell is mind-boggling. The stupidity of ascribing that to accident is even more so.
All attempts at solving this puzzle have only lead to shunting the problems from one place to another. For example the 'RNA world' hypothesis suggests that RNA was first and DNA and proteins came later. But there's no viable way this could work, and it doesn't get rid of almost any of the problems outlined above. Stable RNA that lasts more than several hours exists only in fantasy. Self-replicating RNA exists only in fantasy. RNA 'evolving' into DNA exists only in fantasy. None of this stuff has ever existed even with scientists doing their best to make it happen in a lab, much less randomly in nature.

This sort of ridiculous theory only exists because somebody starts with "We must have a theory for life arising randomly because our belief in materialism is unshakeable" and they're willing to ignore countless problems for a faint chance that one of these idiotic ideas might work. They don't. There's no solution in sight and never will be under a materialist flag. "Stuff happened randomly because materialism is true" is just as retarded as "God did everything because the Bible says so". Both ideas are based on faith and not science. If we ever want to get real answers, this sort of stupidity has to stop.

See here for more on the problems with the origin of life.

Evolution

Ignoring the origin problem, we still need to get from bacteria to everything else. How likely is that? We have to distinguish between two things - small mutations that lead to adaptation, and making new genes, which would lead to the big changes that are necessary to create different species, genera, and higher up. We can call these micro-evolution and macro-evolution. It is rather incomprehensible how most evolutionists completely fail to distinguish between the two. How significant is the difference? Well, simple adaptation is about as easy as learning to ride a bike. Creating new genes is about as easy as a squirrel writing a scientific article accidentally. We're still waiting for that one to happen. Yet we see people like Richard Dawkins regularly claim that just accumulating small changes will do the trick, completely ignoring the issue of new genes (along with other things, like, you know, common sense).

Without new genes, bacteria would forever remain bacteria. No new species, no new organs, no evolution. New genes are essential for anything significant to happen. A gene is a section of DNA that codes for a protein. So it's really about getting new proteins. The gene is the instruction manual. (You can think of it as a sequence of 1s and 0s [the gene] translating into an mp3 file [the protein].) The reason we cannot get a new protein step by step is the high specificity it requires for functioning. Among other things, a protein has to fold correctly. If it folds incorrectly or not at all, it can't do any work. What makes it fold correctly? Well, for starters, it needs to be at least about 70 amino acids long, or it doesn't fold at all. So it's ridiculous to state that it can evolve one little step at a time. It can't. One amino acid requires three nucleotides to code for it, so 70 amino acids means a sequence of 210 nucleotides in the DNA. So the smallest step here is to get a sequence of about 200 letters accidentally that will code for something very specific, which is really not small at all. You can try typing 200 letters randomly and see how often that will produce sentences or computer code. (Presumably, though, it's easy after that. You just randomly add more characters slowly, one at a time, until you end up writing either a sequel to Hamlet of Windows 25. Either one is acceptable.)

folded protein
A folded protein. Each ball is one amino acid. The active site has to contain the correct ones in a correct configuration in order to perform the right job.
But that's not all, of course. The gene also needs a control sequence that regulates when and where to make the protein, so there has to be another specific chunk of DNA that does that. A gene without a control sequence is useless, and a control sequence without a gene is useless. If one appears without the other, it will degrade by deleterious mutations, which occur rather frequently. (And in fact, the mutations will pile up faster than usual because natural selection has no reason to eliminate them, since the whole thing isn't doing anything yet. If you think about it, the destruction is happening even before the new gene is complete, so in fact, the construction will never finish in the first place.) So the gene and the control sequence would both have to appear at about the same time.

Even just the chance of these two things appearing synchronously (assuming wrongly that neither one of them is difficult on its own) is really low. It's like accidentally making a new component for a computer and at the same time accidentally writing drivers for the use of this component. Imagine you're sitting at work and suddenly say, "Oh, I just built something. I don't know what it is, but it looks like maybe it could go into a computer." And your colleague says, "Oh, really? I just wrote some code here. I don't know what it's for, but it looks like maybe it could work as drivers for something. Let's try if it works together with your thing." And then, of course, it works. Computer evolution right before your eyes.

But back to reality. Remember that nothing in the organism is supposed to have any clue what to do with the new gene, should one arise. We need two very improbable accidents that perfectly match one another. That in itself is a ridiculous requirement for random mutations to ever fulfill. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

One of the most crucial questions in regard to the probability of evolution is: What are the chances of randomly creating a nucleotide sequence that will produce a chain of amino acids that will fold into a protein able to perform a job? Douglas Axe spent a lot of time figuring out the answer. According to his research, for a sequence of 150 amino acids, only one such sequence out of 1074 would fold. One out of 1077 (1 with 77 zeros) possible sequences will be able to do the required job. The number of atoms in the whole universe is estimated to be about 1078-1082, so this is close. To imagine what this means, think of it this way. Out of all possible 150-amino-acid sequences, the chance to randomly get one that works is about the same as if you and I got teleported to two random places in the whole Universe, and we would meet. Not going to happen. And this is just the probability to make one relatively short protein.

But that's only with one try, so let's see how many tries we can have. There have been about 1017 seconds since the beginning of the universe. If there was one try for this protein every second since the beginning, the chance would be one in 1077/1017, which is one in 1060. This is still hopeless. What if we had a billion tries every second? We get one in 1051. This is getting us nowhere near any realistic chance. We would need about 1060 attempts every second to have a reasonable chance. The Earth doesn't even have enough resources for something like that. In fact, calculations were made by Stephen Meyer, David Swift, and others to see if utilizing the power of the whole Universe would help. This included using all the atoms in the Universe, all the time available (13.8 billion years) and as many attempts per second as the laws of physics allow. This is of course far from what's realistically possible. Life on Earth only had the atoms in Earth's oceans (or whatever there really was then) to work with, not all the atoms in the Universe. The needed reactions take time, so it's nonsense to think there could be trillions upon trillions of tries every second. But even with all the theoretically available power, the result was nowhere near a realistic chance to get anything useful.

If the odds are one in 1077 for a 150-amino-acid sequence, then for 1500 amino acids, it's roughly one in 10770, and for 15,000, one in 107700. (The calculations probably don't work out exactly like that, but a trillion times more or less really makes no difference here.) Would we need that much? Unfortunately, yes. Most proteins have hundreds of amino acids, the average is about 400-500, a lot more than measly 150, and the longest ones known have over 30,000. So this goes way beyond even picking a specific atom in the Universe. There isn't even anything to compare chances this bad with. It's like, "I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 1010000 (1 with 10,000 zeros). Guess the number!" Nobody would try even if the range was only from one to a million, i.e. six zeros. These odds are totally crushing.

For those mathematically impaired, I decided to spell out 1077:
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
If you tried that many times, you might get one protein of 150 amino acids. Copy/paste the zeros 10 times to get 10770.

Another example for those who can only count to 10 would be this: Imagine I travel to a random place on this planet, find a random book somewhere, open it on a random page, and circle a random letter with blue ink. The you travel to a random place, find a random book somewhere, open it on a random page, and circle a random letter with red ink. How likely is it that the same letter is now circled with both blue and red ink? Would you be willing to bet on the chance that we'd select the same letter in the same book? If you believe in evolution, that's the kind of chance you're betting on.

Normally, if your scientific theory is facing odds like that, you know your theory is utter nonsense and you need to flush it down the toilet and look for something else. There's a better chance that Santa Claus really exists and lives at the North Pole. Finding a needle, not in a haystack but in our galaxy, is a piece of cake compared to the odds of evolution happening. Winning the lottery every month for a year would be easier. Outside of evolution, everyone knows that putting any hope in something this improbable would be quite idiotic. Yet evolution can only happen if such odds are overcome all the time (millions of genes must have existed in the history of Earth), and the Darwinists see no problem with that. It's bizarre that evolution is being taken seriously by anyone sufficiently acquainted with the topic.

The Darwinists irrationally dwell on the idea that very small steps and enough time can overcome anything. But we've seen that even all the time in the world isn't nearly enough, and small steps aren't even possible with new genes. It's like thinking that you can make a hammer from a piece of wood in small steps. You can't. At some point you need something that's not wood - like steel - and that's a big step no matter how you look at it. You can't mutate a fish into a bear any more than you can mutate wood into steel. In fact, scientists mock alchemists for believing they could transmute lead into gold, but that's actually far more realistic than mutating a fish into a bear. Who's the primitive medieval moron here?


Above: DNA replication. 32 complex proteins needed. According to true believers, what you see here is an unplanned accident. Stupid atoms just bumped into one another, and this happened.

But let's go further and ignore even these problems for a minute. Let's say new genes can be made with the same ease with which mutations occur in existing genes. Now, if birds evolved from dinosaurs, then how exactly did wings evolve one step at a time (ignoring the genes issue)? First we have to realize that absolutely nothing in the organism is trying to make a wing. Every step leading towards a wing is an accident. Thus the organism could accidentally be building hundreds of other things. A wing may need thousands of mutations. But because the wing is not a goal - there is no goal whatsoever - then for every mutation leading to a wing, there would have to be hundreds or thousands that lead to other things. If we get 20 mutations leading to a wing, we may very well not get another one ever. Like I said, nothing is trying to make a wing. There's no plan, no goal. In the meantime, we might also be getting 20 mutations leading to all kinds of other things. So how is it possible that we end up with 100% of a wing, and 0% of anything else, something unfinished? That's a nonsensical outcome. We should be seeing all kinds of unfinished things everywhere because evolution should always be in the middle of something. But not only do we not see any never-finished things, we don't even see unfinished versions of wings and other things that now do exist, neither in the fossil record nor around us.

Here's another angle on this. "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" (Yes, yes, we didn't evolve from 'monkeys', we evolved from a 'common ancestor' with monkeys. But this ancestor was a goddamn monkey anyway, so shut up, Dawkins.) This is actually easy to explain. Imagine North Koreans would evolve into something that's not human anymore (something better, of course). How would this evolution affect South Africans? It wouldn't. (It's a strictly northern evolution.) And once there is a new species, interbreeding shouldn't be occurring. So if this happened, most humans would remain humans. If something new appears, the old version doesn't usually just disappear, due to geography and other reasons. There will be separate populations in separate places. And if some North Koreans moved and married elsewhere in the middle of this evolution, there would be hybrids in all possible stages. If the whole population doesn't regularly mingle (thus evolving as a whole), there will be all stages existing somewhere. If evolution is random, then it can get stuck at any stage in various geographical places. I mean, if evolving into a new form meant the end of the old form, there would always be only one species, but that's not how it works, clearly. Not only are there monkeys; there are still bacteria.

For this reason, there should be plenty of species with semi-evolved wings and semi-evolved just about anything else. If not around us, we should see them in the fossil record at least. But we don't. There is no bird with a half-arm/half-wing (never mind 20/80, 40/60, and everything else), or with a half-mouth/half-beak, nor an elephant with half-nose/half-trunk, and so on. This precision of results stemming from random processes is inexplicable. If the evolutionary processes are slow, there should be a full range of intermediates not only in the fossil record, but all around us.

Of course the evolutionists believe that natural selection is basically the Jesus of evolution and it can do anything, but this is nonsense. First of all, natural selection can only act on something that actually happens. We've seen that most of the required events will never happen at all. And then, even if a small change does appear, natural selection can't do anything about it. One percent of a new organ (another bizarre idea in and of itself) is not going to make you have more offspring than those around you. Natural selection isn't going to kill off everyone else if one specimen 'evolves' 1% of antlers. Just as natural selection won't kill off those with 24% antlers when something with 25% antlers appears. Even in a world with 100% antlers, individuals with only 10% or no antlers at all can survive and reproduce. And while polite commentators would say that natural selection would be 'very unlikely' to sort through such miniscule differences, I feel like we should use more accurate language and plainly state that such an idea is simply complete bullshit. It's idiotic to propose that natural selection can distinguish between two things that are 0.01% different. The natural variation between surviving specimens is orders of magnitude larger than that. There is no selection for a single mutation unless it has huge impact on survival, which can only happen under massive environmental stress. Otherwise, the non-mutants survive just fine.

It's also incredibly short-sighted and dumb to assume that there's a viable step-by-step pathway between any two things. How would you go from a microwave oven to a bulldozer one step at a time, with every step being more useful? What would you say would be the mid-point between a microwave oven and a bulldozer? I can't imagine. Natural selection is not only pretty useless for evolution but would actually prevent macro-evolution. You can't keep improving a microwave oven until you have a bulldozer, and you can't keep improving a fish until you have a bear. The logical results of incremental improvements in these cases are a very good microwave oven and a very good fish. There's no step-by-step pathway to a bulldozer, and there's no step-by-step pathway to a bear.

Computer Vs living cell
Having done some calculations, we can quickly return to the origin of life. In 1983, Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the odds of producing the proteins necessary for a simple one-celled organism by chance at 1 in 1040000. Douglas Axe did his own calculations several decades later and arrived at 1041000. That's forty-one thousand zeros. It would take you half an hour to even write this number.

So it's about one in 1041000 for the origin of life, and anywhere from roughly one in 1050 to one in 1015000 for single proteins, and we need millions of them. For the whole of evolution, you'd have to multiply all these numbers. And of course there's much more that would have to happen. The overall probability of evolution would be 0.00000000...???...00000001%, where in place of "???" we would have a whole library of books filled with zeros. It may still be 'theoretically possible', but it's physically impossible because, as we've seen, the whole universe doesn't have nearly enough time and atoms to beat the odds.

One fun thing some evolutionists do to overcome the improbability is to invoke a multiverse. If there is an infinite amount of universes, then there's an infinite number of attempts at assembling life randomly. So anything, no matter how improbable, will happen somewhere. Pretty smart, huh? Well, let's just say that if the only way you can make your theory work is to invoke something that makes literally anything work, you're a moron, and your theory is rubbish. You are more desperate than the "God did it" people.

So what does it take to believe in evolution? You have to suck at mathematics, and you have to suck at biology.

Darwinism ignores reality. Macro-evolution is impossible.