Criticism of evolution

Overview

This page relates to general criticisms of evolution that are seemingly independent of comparison to any alternate theory.

Mathematical

• Criticism: The odds of arriving at the exact genetic code of a viable organism by sheer chance are so vanishingly small that it cannot possibly have happened that way.
• Details: Even Mycoplasma genitalium, the organism with the shortest-known DNA sequence, has approximately 580,000 Base pairs. Each base pair can be one of 4 possible configurations (A-T, C-G, G-C, or T-A), leading to a total of 4^580,000 possible genetic codes to try before arriving at a working Mycoplasma genitalium. 4^580,000 works out to a number with about 116 thousand zeros in it. Therefore the odds of life appearing at random, as the evolutionists claim, is about one in ten to the 116th power – or so close to zero that if you you rolled the "dice" one million times a second for 4.5 billion years (the evolutionarily-claimed age of the earth) you would bring the odds of creating the Mycoplasma genome all the way up to – wait for it! – 1 in 10⁹²!
• Notes: This argument leaves the door open for the obvious "therefore, organisms must have been intelligently designed".
• Response:

This is a bit of a straw man argument, as it seriously misrepresents the evolutionary process. That process is not a long series of random coin-tosses somehow resulting in the creation of all Earth's organisms after enough lucky hits, but rather an ongoing competition for survival. The organisms which are best at making more of themselves get to do so, over and over, for however many millions of years it takes.

An example: In computing, there is a technique known as genetic algorithms. A set of programs is generated randomly; each program is evaluated for how well it solves the "target problem". Programs that pass the "test" (to oversimplify the process a bit) have copies made, with random changes (mutations) made to most of the copies; programs that fail the "test" are not copied, and die out. This process eventually results in something that's not only workable, but is often better than anything anyone had been able to "intelligently design" by hand.

If you took those programs and tried to arrive at them by random coin-tosses the probability of arriving at something that would even run, much less work, much less work well, would be so close to zero that it might as well be zero. The filtering process of natural selection can, over time, build something enormously complex and "designed"-looking – and this is only simulations running rather slowly in a computer over days or weeks, not millions of years.