Tähän liittyen on ilmestynyt pari uutta hittikirjaa, joissa käsitellään evoluutiota ja väitetään, että se on matemaattisesti mahdotonta (Probability Zero: The Mathematical Impossibility of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection ja The Frozen Gene: The End of Human Evolution). Olen vähän lueskellut debattia, mutta en osaa seurata tarkemmin.No jopas ! Mikroevoluutiosta kun seuraa se, että kun sitä tarkastellaan hieman pidemmältä ajanjaksolta, se on ihan makroevoluutiota.
AndrewC:n ekan kirjan arvostelusta:
Vox has tackled the question of evolutionary math with this book. He takes the models and equations that evolutionary biologists currently use and the latest empirical data, and checks if they add up. This is exactly the math I was expecting in college. Following the math in Vox's book, we find that the natural mechanics for evolution cannot do the work, by orders of magnitude. For those who are not engineers, being orders of magnitude wrong is an urgent red flag. It suggests a project is impossible to complete and everything needs to be put on hold until the math is sorted out. More than that, this is not a single error from one equation. Vox spends a chapter each on every known and proposed mechanism for evolutionary change, and demonstrates each one is incapable and insufficient for the mathematical problem they are supposed to solve, which is the accumulation of millions and billions of genetic changes within a specific period of time. Life is an engineering problem and the math has to work, but it is mathematically impossible for Darwinian evolution to produce the life that we can see and observe.
The highlight of this book for me is Vox's recap of the Wistar conference in 1966. Mathematicians much smarter than an average engineering college student had analyzed the models for Darwinian evolution and found these problems long ago. They met with top evolutionary biologists at a conference to ask hard questions that have still not been answered 60 years later. As a field, biologists buried their heads in the sand and hoped their faith in evolution would be vindicated by future science. But as Vox catalogs in his book, the future science is now here, and the empirical genetic data has buried the mathematical possibility of Darwinian evolution.
Vastaukseksi evoluution matemaattiseen mahdottomuuteen tarjotaan "älykästä geneettistä manipulaatiota."