Professor Jerry Coyne has recently written a post titled, Atheism of the gaps, in which he urges skeptics to “make believers read about unbelief” before listening to their arguments, and “make atheism-of-the-gaps arguments.” In the first section of his post, Professor Coyne throws down the gauntlet: If people can fault us for not reading Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian and (ugh) Alvin Plantinga and David Bentley Hart, well, then, we can do the same to them. If they haven’t read extensively in the honorable intellectual tradition of nonbelief, then they have no credibility as believers. Frankly, Salon should publish a piece that says this. And what does he suggest that believers read? Tell believers that we won’t pay any attention to Read More ›

One of the wonderful things about the internet is the jaw-dropping amount of information available – literally at our fingertips.  Never before in history has the common individual had so much knowledge and experience and expertise available for the learning.  To be sure, there is plenty on the internet that is incomplete, wrong, or downright deceptive, but today I want to celebrate the positive side of the information explosion. Among the interesting developments to come out of all this is the availability of university-level courses online. For free. Many universities now offer free online courses, including some of the most prestigious institutions around.  While it is true that upper-level and graduate-level courses, particularly those with lab requirements, may be difficult Read More ›

Most of biological ID literature is focused on Irreducible Complexity and Specified Complexity (Specified Improbability) and information theory, no free lunch, critique of OOL, the Cambrian explosion, etc, But there is another line of argument that is devastating to the claims of mindless evolution that has been underappreciated partly because it is highly technical, and in many cases most biologists will not even learn it in detail, namely that most molecular evolution is non-Darwinian. Here is the simplest way to understand why evolution is mostly non-Darwinian. The ability to select for or against a trait involves the cost of sacrificing individual lives. When we spend money we have a limited budget to buy things. From our budget we can select Read More ›

If there was any time the human population was very small, fixation was likely inevitable as discussed in Neutral Evolution for Newbies, Part 2. The time for required for fixation in a population according to standard population genetics is approximately 4 Ne, where Ne is the effective population size.

For example, for an Ne of six individuals, the approximate time to fixation using this approximation is:

4 x 6 = 24 generations

In 24 generations, assuming they don’t die from inbreeding depression, everyone will be pretty much genetically identical according to standard theory. Even if their differences were huge (maybe millions of nucleotides), they should fix in 24 generations using this approximation.

In contrast consider the current human population of 7 Billion, and suppose the effective reproductively viable population is 1.5 billion. Using the approximation, the time to fixation with Ne = 1.5 billion is

4 x 1,500,000,000 = 6 billion generations
Read More ›