In a recent post, Professor Larry Moran accused me of shifting the goalposts, in order to avoid a discussion about whether evolution could account for the fixation of 22.4 million mutations in the human lineage, since we broke away from the chimps, five million years ago. Not being one to run away from a controversy, I’ve decided to make this question the topic of today’s post. I’d like to begin by defining the neutral theory of evolution: “This neutral theory claims that the overwhelming majority of evolutionary changes at the molecular level are not caused by selection acting on advantageous mutants, but by random fixation of selectively neutral or very nearly neutral mutants through the cumulative effect of sampling drift Read More ›

Recently we have been discussing Dr. Sewell’s thermodynamics-related paper/video on this thread.  In addition to some excellent discussion on the Second Law, the question of abiogenesis has naturally arisen.  Though related to the Second Law issue (by way of the compensation argument), I would like to move discussion of the abiogenesis question to this new thread, both so we can keep the other thread more focused on the Second Law, and also so we can have a more in-depth discussion here on this most fascinating topic of abiogenesis. —– I find posts that go on for dozens of pages to be rather tedious.  Notwithstanding my original intent, this post grew in length as I laid out the various points.  In Read More ›