All,
The following is some notes I made from book: The Language of God by Francis Collins, a well known geneticists who, in his book, tries to reconcile what he believes are overwhelming evidence for God and for evolution.
I believed most of what he wrote about God prior to reading the book and, at this point, find my self believing in some sort of evolution after reading his book.
Here is a summary of some of, what I concider, are overwhelming evidence for some macroevolution (to misquote C.S. Lewis, I find myself being the most dejected and reluctant evolutionary convert in all of America
); the following is my summary of some of the arguments Collins makes in his book.
Can anyone show me where these agruments faulter and point me to the truth?
A. Argument for a common ancestor between man and mouse. We have the whole genome of each.
1. Genes on both DNA ( man and mouse) are generally maintained in the same order on both DNA.
2. There are so called jumping genes , a group of base pairs that can insert itself at random positions into the genome and does so at a low level today. Some of these genes have a lot of mutations (I guess not so many that you can’t still recognize the jumping gene), (these are called ARE’s , ancient repetitive elements). They are called ancient because they have lots of mutations. Some of the ARE’s are truncated (this can happen when they moved from one section of the DNA to another. In some cases some truncated ARE’s can be found in the same position on the genome of the mouse and human (ie between genes A and B for example)(apparently these examples are ARE’s with exact same sequences of base pairs). Because they are in the same position and old they are thought to have come from a common ancestor a long time ago, ie the genome of a creature that diverged and became man and a mouse.
B Another argument for a common ancestor.
Human and apes have a lot of physical features in common. Their DNA is also 96% similar and a 3rd reason to surmise that they come from a common ancestor: chimps and apes have 24 chromosomes (this is the DNA that can be seen during cell division) while humans have 23. The size of the 24 chromosomes suggest that two of them fused together in the past to make the 23 chromosomes of humans (that is, the size of all the chromosomes is the same for the chimp and man except one of the man chromosomes is equal to two of the chimp chromosomes). Also if look at the details of the suspected chromosomes that appeared to have fused together these is more evidence that they fused together: there are special sequences of base pairs that occur at the end of chromosomes and these sequences are generally not found elsewhere in the chromosomes, but these sequences are found in the middle of the chromosome of the man that appeared to have had fused together.
C Another argument for evolution.
One gene, caspase-12, is found in same place on chimp and human genomes. In humans, however, it has several mutations unlike the gene in the chimps so it does not work in humans; it does work in chimps. This suggests man evolved from chimps and over time the caspase-12 gene received some mutations. There are apparently other genes where a similar argument could be made.
CASE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN (ID) (See pp 189-190 in Language of God).
ID was initially (still?) a case against evolution but now new advances in the inspection of the genome have made strong cases for evolution.
ID still holds to the impossibility (shown mathematically) that certain complex systems, like the blood clotting cascade, human eye, bacterial flagellum could not have been developed by the gradualism of evolution. But there have been some advances that have weakened that claim. For example, the blood clotting cascade is claimed by believers in ID that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex, that is, unless all of it was created at one time it could not have evolved. It is just too complicated to come about by random mutations in the known amount of time; and this has been shown to be true in some cases mathematically. But because of a recent discovery, a new model has been proposed that made the evolution of the blood clot cascade more plausible. The discovery is that of gene duplication. Genes duplicate themselves sometimes. Also the proteins (a gene makes a protein) for the blood clot cascade are not that different from each other. Therefore, a plausible model for the evolution of the blood clot cascade is as follows: a gene for a simple blood clot mechanism evolved and then this gene was duplicated several times. Then random mutation working on these duplicate genes developed the other genes in the blood clot cascade. This model does not require the whole blood clot cascade group of genes to be developed at once from simple molecules.
Some complex systems still seem to be irreducibly complex but as has been shown in the case of the blood clot cascade new discoveries are making the claims less likely to be true.
Here is a quick list of where I still find fault in evolution; I don't have time right now to develop these more.
CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION; or that evolution does not explain all of the phenomenon in life
1. Paucity of intermediates.
2. Cambrian explosion.
3. Man’s sense of morality (how can you get an aught from an is?)
4. Complexity of life (ie did God get life going and then evolution took over; maybe somewhat directed by God)
5. Existence of anything; seems there is always some place for some creation; the Big Bang for example. Seems whenever something happens there is a cause; big bangs just don't go bang on their own; seems to imply a creator.
6. Seems the universe was made for life: all the various physical constants that if they were just slightly slightly different then life as we know it could not exist.