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**Anonymouse** · 03-14-2005, 11:52 AM

The full article is available at

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed59.html

I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science. The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, “In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in … Continue reading →

for purposes of clarity I only quoted parts of the article as it is rather long.

The Metaphysics of Evolution
by Fred Reed

What Distinguishes Evolution from Other Science

Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.

As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.

Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can't see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and xxxxatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn't have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But...is any of this established?

Second, evolution seemed more a metaphysics or ideology than a science. The sciences, as I knew them, gave clear answers. Evolution involved intense faith in fuzzy principles. You demonstrated chemistry, but believed evolution. If you have ever debated a Marxist, or a serious liberal or conservative, or a feminist or Christian, you will have noticed that, although they can be exceedingly bright and well informed, they display a maddening imprecision. You never get a straight answer if it is one they do not want to give. Nothing is ever firmly established. Crucial assertions do not to tie to observable reality. Invariably the Marxist (or evolutionist) assumes that a detailed knowledge of economic conditions under the reign of Nicholas II or whatever substitutes for being able to answer simple questions, such as why Marxism has never worked: the Fallacy of Irrelevant Knowledge. And of course almost anything can be made believable by considering only favorable evidence and interpreting hard.

Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC. Astronomers pay not the slightest attention to creationist ideas. Nobody does � except evolutionists. We are dealing with competing religions � overarching explanations of origin and destiny. Thus the fury of their response to skepticism.

I found it pointless to tell them that I wasn't a Creationist. They refused to believe it. If they had, they would have had to answer questions that they would rather avoid. Like any zealots, they cannot recognize their own zealotry. Thus their constant classification of skeptics as enemies (a word they often use) � of truth, of science, of Darwin, of progress.

This tactical demonization is not unique to evolution. "Creationist" is to evolution what "racist" is to politics: A way of preventing discussion of what you do not want to discuss. Evolution is the political correctness of science.

Evolution, Like Gaul, Is Divided Into Three Parts

Evolution breaks down into at least three logically separable components: First, that life arose by chemical accident; second, that it then evolved into the life we see today; and third, that the mechanism was the accretion of chance mutations. Evolutionists, not particularly logical, refuse to see this separability.

The first, chance formation of life, simply hasn't been established. It isn't science, but faith.

The second proposition, that life, having arisen by unknown means, then evolved into the life of today, is more solid. In very old rocks you find fish, then things, like coelacanth and the ichthyostega, that look like transitional forms, and finally us. They seem to have gotten from A to B somehow. A process of evolution, however driven, looks reasonable. It is hard to imagine that they appeared magically from nowhere, one after the other.

The third proposition, that the mechanism of evolutions is chance mutation, though sacrosanct among its proponents, is shaky. If it cannot account for the simultaneous appearance of complex, functionally interdependent characteristics, as in the case of caterpillars, it fails. Thus far, it hasn't accounted for them.

It is interesting to note that evolutionists switch stories regarding the mechanism of transformation. The standard Neo-Darwinian view is that evolution proceeds very slowly. But when it proves impossible to find evidence of gradual evolution, some evolutionists turn to "punctuated equilibrium," (2) which says that evolution happens by sudden undetectable spurts. The idea isn't foolish, just unestablished. Then there are the evolutionists who, in opposition to those who maintain that point-mutations continue to account for evolution, say that now cultural evolution has taken over.

Finally, when things do not happen according to script � when, for example, human intelligence appears too rapidly � then we have the theory of "privileged genes," which evolved at breakneck speed because of assumed but unestablished selective pressures. That is, the existence of the pressures is inferred from the changes, and then the changes are attributed to the pressures. Oh.

When you have patched a tire too many times, you start thinking about getting a new tire.

The Theory of Implausibility

As previously mentioned, evolutionists depend heavily on plausibility unabetted by evidence. There is also the matter of implausibility. Suppose that I showed you two tiny gear wheels, such as one might find in an old watch, and said, "See? I turn this little wheel, and the other little wheel turns too. Isn't that cute?" You would not find this surprising. Suppose I then showed you a whole mechanical watch, with thirty little gear wheels and a little lever that said tickticktick. You would have no trouble accepting that they all worked together.

If I then told you of a mechanism consisting of a hundred billion little wheels that worked for seventy years, repairing itself, wouldn't you suspect either that I was smoking something really good � or that something beyond simple mechanics must be involved?

Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.

If something looks implausible, it probably is.

More Questions on the Fit with Reality

Does the theory, however reasonable and plausible (or not), in fact map onto what we actually see? A principle of evolution is that traits conferring fitness become general within a population. Do they?

Again, consider intelligence. Presumably it increases fitness. (Or maybe it does. An obvious question is why, if intelligence is adaptive � i.e., promotes survival � it didn't evolve earlier; and if it is not adaptive, why did it evolve at all? You get various unsubstantiated answers, such as that intelligence is of no use without an opposable thumb, or speech, or something.)

Those who deal in human evolution usually hold The Bell Curve in high regard. (So do I. It's almost as good as Shotgun News or, more appropriate in this context, the Journal of Irreproducible Results.) A point the book makes is that in the United States the highly intelligent tend to go into fields requiring intelligence, as for example the sciences, computing, and law. They live together, work together, and marry each other, thus tending to concentrate intelligence instead of making it general in the population. They also produce children at below the level of replacement. Perhaps fitness leads to extinction.

Black sub-Saharan Africans (say many evolutionists) have a mean IQ somewhere near 70, live in wretched poverty, and breed enthusiastically. White Europeans, reasonably bright at IQ 100 and quite prosperous, are losing population. Jews, very bright indeed at a mean IQ of 115 and very prosperous, are positively scarce, always have been, and seem to be losing ground. From this I conclude either that (a) intelligence does not increase fitness or (b) reproduction is inversely proportional to fitness.

I'm being a bit of a smart-ass here, but...the facts really don't seem to match the theory.

In human populations, do the fit really reproduce with each other? It is a matter of daily observation that men prefer cute, sexy women. It then becomes crucial for evolutionists to show that cute and sexy are more fit than strong, smart, and ugly. Thus large breasts are said to produce more milk (Evidence? Chimpanzees have no breasts yet produce ample milk.) and that broad hips imply a large birth canal. (But men are not attracted to broad hips, but to broad hips in conjunction with a narrow waist.) Curvaceous legs are curvaceous because of underlying muscle, important for fitness.

Of course Chinese women do not have muscular legs or buttocks, wide hips, or large breasts, and seem to reproduce satisfactorily. (White and Asian women are more physically delicate than African women, as witness the lower rates of training injuries among black women in the American army. Thus European women, said to have emigrated from Africa and evolved to be Caucasians, lost sturdiness. Why?)

Then it is said that ugly woman are hypertestosteronal, and therefore have more spontaneous abortions. A sophomore logic student with a hangover could point out the problems and unsaid things in this argument.

There is an air of desperation about all of it. Transparently they begin with their conclusion and craft their reasoning to reach it.

Intelligent Design

An interesting thought that drives evolutionists mad is called Intelligent Design, or ID. It is the view that things that appear to have been done deliberately might have been. Some look at, say, the human eye and think, "This looks like really good engineering. Elaborate retina of twelve layers, marvelously transparent cornea, pump system to keep the whole thing inflated, suspensory ligaments, really slick lens, the underlying cell biology. Very clever."

I gather that a lot of ID folk are in fact Christian apologists trying to drape Genesis in scientific respectability. That is, things looked to have been designed, therefore there must be a designer, now will Yahweh step forward. Yet an idea is not intellectually disreputable because some of the people who hold it are. The genuine defects of ID are the lack of a detectible designer, and that evolution appears to have occurred. This leads some to the thought that consciousness is involved and evolution may be shaping itself. I can think of no way to test the idea.

In any event, to anyone of modest rationality, the evolutionist's hostility to Intelligent Design is amusing. Many evolutionists argue, perhaps correctly, that Any Day Now we will create life in the laboratory, which would be intelligent design. Believing that life arose by chemical accident, they will argue (reasonably, given their assumptions) that life must have evolved countless times throughout the universe. It follows then that, if we will soon be able to design life, someone else might have designed us.

In Conclusion

To evolutionists I say, "I am perfectly willing to believe what you can actually establish. Reproducibly create life in a test tube, and I will accept that it can be done. Do it under conditions that reasonably may have existed long ago, and I will accept as likely the proposition that such conditions existed and gave rise to life. I bear no animus against the theory, and champion no competing creed. But don't expect me to accept fluid speculation, sloppy logic, and secular theology."

I once told my daughters, "Whatever you most ardently believe, remember that there is another side. Try, however hard it may be, to put yourself in the shoes of those whose views you most dislike. Force yourself to make a reasoned argument for their position. Do that, think long and hard, and conclude as you will. You can do no better, and you may be surprised."

**winoman** · 03-14-2005, 01:00 PM

I disagree with the proposition that evolution is different then say Astronomy - or any other science. Astonomers will tell you all about ccompositions of stars and their various life cycles and that cerain types of stars will evolve (OMG I said the "E" word! - commonly accepted in most all sciences BTW...) in certain ways - some becomming supernovas, some collapsing into black holes or brown dwarfs - etc etc - OkK - so prove it to me. Yeah thats right - I've never seen this - no one has - prove that these assumptions - and our belief of such is true...etc etc - yet no religious fanatics are out there berating Astronomers. Questioning their science - their assemblege of obsevations and data and telling everyone that it isn't so (without any alternative BTW - but belief from some religious books). SO what makes it different? Its not biologists who are suspect is it? Are scientists with biology degrees somehow parnoid and inept - but Astromers - really smart folks? I think not. SO funny that this article attempts to portray the biologists as the ones with the problem (obsession with creationists/christions) - who are somehow going after the bible believers....and not the other way around. Please. I'm sure Astronmers and archeologists would be just as worked up if (and perhaps when) the religious nuts demand that religious explanations replace their particualr science in the calssroom as well....

Likewise the rest of this presentation is flawed. The theory of evolution is seperate from the issue/question of how life itself began - so the arthor is addressing something seperate here. He postulates that eveolution is improbable - why - because he said so - for no other reason - and really this is his central point - because he cannot imagine it being so - it cannot be - have to come up with something better dude. And the issue of fast versus slow eveolution is likewise a red herring. As Science progresses it fine tunes and in some case throws out explanations that may have seemd valid at the time - but are being refined as the tools and observations etc continue. So is every aspect of what we term evolution set in stone - no - but this is no different then any other science. Ask Newton. The basic tennents of evolution - that higher forms such as ourselves evolved from lower - is entirely sound. It is as good science as any - and it is one of the prime concepts underpinning of our knowledge of biology today. And don't forget genetics...yeah...

**winoman** · 03-14-2005, 01:12 PM

Life's Grand Design (no such thing as perfection - ie no Intelligent Design)

appeared in Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation in February/March 1994.

The case for evolution does not depend, even for a minute, upon a claim that living organisms are not complex or intricate. One case in point is a structure often cited as a perfect example of intelligent design: the human eye.

The eye, like a top-of-the-line modern camera, contains a self-adjusting aperture, an automatic focus system, and an inner surface that minimizes the scattering of stray light. But the sensitivity range of the eye, which gives us excellent vision in both sunlight and moonlight, far surpasses that of any film. Its neural circuitry enables the eye to automatically enhance contrast. And its color-analysis system enables it to quickly adjust to lighting conditions (incandescent, fluorescent, or sunlight) that would require a photographer to change filters and films.

The proponents of intelligent design assert that the combination of nerves, sensory cells, muscles, and lens tissue in the eye could only have been "designed" from scratch. After all, how could evolution, acting on one gene at a time, start with a sightless organism and produce an eye with so many independent parts, such as a retina, which would itself be useless without a lens, or a lens, which would be useless without a retina?

In a Darwinian world, the exquisite adaptations and specializations of living organisms are the products of natural selection, a process whereby the genetic variations -- such as size, shape, and coloration -- that give individuals the best chance to survive and reproduce are passed on to subsequent generations.

The pathway by which evolution can produce complex structures has been brilliantly explained in The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, a biologist at Oxford University. The essence of Dawkins�s explanation is simple. Given enough time (thousands of years) and material (millions of individuals in a species), many genetic changes will occur that result in slight improvements in a system or structure such as the eye. However slight that improvement, as long as it is genuine, natural selection will favor its spread throughout the species over several generations.

Little by little, one improvement at a time, the system becomes more and more complex, eventually resulting in the fully functioning, well-adapted organ that we call the eye. The retina and the lens did not have to evolve separately because they evolved together.

Evolution can be used as an explanation for complex structures if we can imagine a series of small, intermediate steps leading from the simple to the complex. Further, because natural selection will act on every one of those intermediate steps, no single one can be justified on the basis of the final structure toward which it may be leading. Each step must stand on its own as an improvement that confers an advantage on the organism that possesses it.

This step-by-step criterion can easily be applied to a complex organ like the eye. We begin with the simplest possible case: a small animal with a few light-sensitive cells. We could then ask, at each stage, whether natural selection would favor the incremental changes that are shown, knowing that if it would not, the final structure could not have evolved, no matter how beneficial. Starting with the simplest light-sensing device, a single photoreceptor cell, it is possible to draw a series of incremental changes that would lead directly to the lens-and-retina eye. None of the intermediate stages are unreasonable, since each requires nothing more than an incremental change in structure: an increase in cell number, a change in surface curvature, a slight increase in transparency.

This incremental process is the real reason why it is unfair to characterize evolution as mere chance. Chance plays a role in presenting random genetic variations. But natural selection, which is not random, determines which variations will become fixed in the species

Critics might ask what good that first tiny step, perhaps only five percent of an eye, might be. As the saying goes, in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Likewise, in a population with limited ability to sense light, every improvement in vision, no matter how slight, would be favored -- and favored dramatically -- by natural selection.

Another way to respond to the theory of intelligent design is to carefully examine complex biological systems for errors that no intelligent designer would have committed. Because intelligent design works from a clean sheet of paper, it should produce organisms that have been optimally designed for the tasks they perform. Conversely, because evolution is confined to modifying existing structures, it should not necessarily produce perfection. Which is it?

The eye, that supposed paragon of intelligent design, offers an answer. We have already sung the virtues of this extraordinary organ, but we have not considered specific aspects of its design, such as the neural wiring of its light-sensing units. These photoreceptor cells, located in the retina, pass impulses to a series of interconnecting cells that eventually pass information to the cells of the optic nerve, which leads to the brain.

An intelligent designer, working with the components of this wiring, would choose the orientation that produces the highest degree of visual quality. No one, for example, would suggest that the neural connections should be placed in front of the photoreceptor cells -- thus blocking the light from reaching them -- rather than behind the retina.

Incredibly, this is exactly how the human retina is constructed. Visual quality is degraded because light scatters as it passes through several layers of cellular wiring before reaching the retina. Granted, this scattering has been minimized because the nerve cells are nearly transparent, but it cannot be eliminated because of the basic design flaw. Moreover, the effects are compounded because a network of vessels, which is needed to supply the nerve cells with a rich supply of blood, also sits directly in front of the light-sensitive layer, another feature that no engineer would propose.

A more serious flaw occurs because the neural wiring must poke directly through the wall of the retina to carry the nerve impulses produced by photoreceptor cells to the brain. The result is a blind spot in the retina -- a region where thousands of impulse-carrying cells have pushed the sensory cells aside. Each human retina has a blind spot roughly a millimeter in diameter -- one that would not exist if only the eye were designed with its sensory wiring behind rather than in front of the photoreceptors.

Do these design problems exist because it is impossible to construct an eye that is wired properly, so that the light-sensitive cells face the incoming image? Not at all. Many organisms have eyes in which the neural wiring is neatly tucked away behind the photoreceptor layer. The squid and the octopus, for example, have a lens-and-retina eye quite similar to our own, but their eyes are wired right-side out, with no light-scattering nerve cells or blood vessels in front of the photoreceptors, and no blind spot.

Evolution, which works by repeatedly modifying preexisting structures, can explain the inside-out nature of our eyes quite simply. The vertebrate retina evolved as a modification of the outer layer of the brain. Over time, evolution progressively modified this part of the brain for light sensitivity. Although the layer of light-sensitive cells gradually assumed a retina-like shape, it retained its original orientation, including a series of nerve connections on its surface. Conversely, mollusk eyes are wired optimally because rather than evolving from brain cells, which have wiring on the surface, they evolved from skin cells, which retained their original orientation with the wiring below the surface.

The living world is filled with examples of many other organs and structures that clearly have their roots in the opportunistic modification of a preexisting structure rather than the clean elegance of design. This does not, despite the fears of "intelligent design" advocates, amount to evidence against the existence of a Deity. Properly understood, as Darwin himself pointed out, it only deepens our respect for the power and subtlety of the Creator's remarkable ways.

**Anonymouse** · 03-14-2005, 01:16 PM

Originally posted by winoman

I disagree with the proposition that evolution is different then say Astronomy - or any other science. Astonomers will tell you all about ccompositions of stars and their various life cycles and that cerain types of stars will evolve (OMG I said the "E" word! - commonly accepted in most all sciences BTW...) in certain ways - some becomming supernovas, some collapsing into black holes or brown dwarfs - etc etc - OkK - so prove it to me. Yeah thats right - I've never seen this - no one has - prove that these assumptions - and our belief of such is true...etc etc - yet no religious fanatics are out there berating Astronomers. Questioning their science - their assemblege of obsevations and data and telling everyone that it isn't so (without any alternative BTW - but belief from some religious books). SO what makes it different? Its not biologists who are suspect is it? Are scientists with biology degrees somehow parnoid and inept - but Astromers - really smart folks? I think not. SO funny that this article attempts to portray the biologists as the ones with the problem (obsession with creationists/christions) - who are somehow going after the bible believers....and not the other way around. Please. I'm sure Astronmers and archeologists would be just as worked up if (and perhaps when) the religious nuts demand that religious explanations replace their particualr science in the calssroom as well....

Likewise the rest of this presentation is flawed. The theory of evolution is seperate from the issue/question of how life itself began - so the arthor is addressing something seperate here. He postulates that eveolution is improbable - why - because he said so - for no other reason - and really this is his central point - because he cannot imagine it being so - it cannot be - have to come up with something better dude. And the issue of fast versus slow eveolution is likewise a red herring. As Science progresses it fine tunes and in some case throws out explanations that may have seemd valid at the time - but are being refined as the tools and observations etc continue. So is every aspect of what we term evolution set in stone - no - but this is no different then any other science. Ask Newton. The basic tennents of evolution - that higher forms such as ourselves evolved from lower - is entirely sound. It is as good science as any - and it is one of the prime concepts underpinning of our knowledge of biology today. And don't forget genetics...yeah...

I think the author made a reasonable point about evolution and astronomy highlighting that the dispute is between the origin and development of life. While you personally do not claim evolution deals with the origins, the doctrine itself does, and many evolutionists do. The author was only infering from that.

We have already been over the discussion of science and how theories and science change overtime, and that theories are assumptions, not laws, therefore nothing more than a guess. I had to go back to the previous thread on evolution for something I posted about improbability. Evolution, mathematically speaking, is improbable, as any good mathematician will tell you. The first time that mathematics cast doubt on evolution was by evolutionists themselves, during the Wistar Institute Conference in 1966 by Murray Eden of MIT (see Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution 1967, 140 pp. )

"Murray Eden showed that it would be impossible for even a single ordered pair of genes to be produced by DNA mutations in the bacteria, E. coli,�with 5 billion years in which to produce it! His estimate was based on 5 trillion tons of the bacteria covering the planet to a depth of nearly an inch during that 5 billion years. He then explained that the genes of E. coli contain over a trillion (10^12) bits of data. That is the number 10 followed by 12 zeros. *Eden then showed the mathematical impossibility of protein forming by chance. He also reported on his extensive investigations into genetic data on hemoglobin (red blood cells).

Hemoglobin has two chains, called alpha and beta. A minimum of 120 mutations would be required to convert alpha to beta. At least 34 of those changes require changeovers in 2 or 3 nucleotides. Yet, *Eden pointed out that, if a single nucleotide change occurs through mutation, the result ruins the blood and kills the organism!

*George Wald stood up and explained that he had done extensive research on hemoglobin also,�and discovered that if just ONE mutational change of any kind was made in it, the hemoglobin would not function properly. For example, the change of one amino acid out of 287 in hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. A glutamic acid unit has been changed to a valine unit�and, as a result, 25% of those suffering with this anemia die."

**Sip** · 03-14-2005, 01:21 PM

I think the answer is obvious ... God created evolution.

**Anonymouse** · 03-14-2005, 01:24 PM

Originally posted by Sip

I think the answer is obvious ... God created evolution.

It doesn't matter if its God or nothing, because whatever it is, it is a belief.

**Sip** · 03-14-2005, 01:27 PM

So maybe evolution created God

(I borrowed that from a friend of mine)

**Anonymouse** · 03-14-2005, 01:29 PM

Originally posted by Sip

So maybe evolution created God

(I borrowed that from a friend of mine)

Or maybe aliens created both.

**winoman** · 03-14-2005, 01:33 PM

That improbability analysis is inherently flawed bacuse of its misunderstanding of evolutionary change...its not chance...and its not chance upon chance...

This objection has been considered and doesn't change anything. Yes the changes that occured and the events and such that caused such (not random but based on external stimuli - a profound difference) - are likley not repeatable (to arrive at some place - where we are today) - but they did occur and we are here...

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/chance/chance.html

from above:

Darwinism is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance. Mustn't it have done something to provoke this canard? Well, yes, there is something behind the misunderstood rumour, a feeble basis to the distortion. one stage in the Darwinian process is indeed a chance process -- mutation. Mutation is the process by which fresh genetic variation is offered up for selection and it is usually described as random. But Darwinians make the fuss they do about the 'randomness' of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection. It is not necessary that mutation should be random for natural selection to work. Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not. Emphasizing that mutation can be random is our way of calling attention to the crucial fact that, by contrast, selection is sublimely and quintessentially non-random. It is ironic that this emphasis on the contrast between mutation and the non-randomness of selection has led people to think that the whole theory is a theory of chance.

Even mutations are, as a matter of fact, non-random in various senses, although these senses aren't relevant to our discussion because they don't contribute constructively to the improbable perfection of organisms. For example, mutations have well-understood physical causes, and to this extent they are non-random. ... the great majority of mutations, however caused, are random with respect to quality, and that means they are usually bad because there are more ways of getting worse than of getting better. [Dawkins 1996:70-71]

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/fitness/

from above:

suggestion that this mechanism is part of evolutionary theory is false; it is a "straw-man" -- a false creationist caricature of evolution -- used repeatedly by creationists to mislead naive audiences into thinking that evolution is illogical. It is false because it demands a specific sequence in a SINGLE selection step from a pool of random sequences, whereas the real evolutionary model for the origin of protein sequences involves MULTIPLE ROUNDS OF RANDOM MUTATION followed by MULTIPLE selection steps as outlined above.

And make sure to read the Methinks it was a weasel bit just below this quote above...so clearly this statisctical issue - while certainly one that is worth considering - is no imediment - it is - as presented - a straw man argument....

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