|
Review Summary: Objective math trumps religious evolutionism |
Date: 2006-02-16 |
|
| |
Details: Cohen has done us all a favor by quantifying evolution's supposed "random" chance. Cohen's book has disappeared from the libraries in my county and at the local state university. I recommend readers get their own copy. While it is 20 years old, our understanding of DNA is even more intricate now than when he wrote it.
When I bought my first copy of this book, it came with an insert giving the mathematical calculation for the probability of the smallest self-replicating organism (as described by a biologist named Morowitz) arising from pure random chance. Using Morowitz' biochemical parameters, Cohen showed that the purely mathematical probability AGAINST that organism arising by pure chance is a number with (over) 180,000 zeroes after it (ie., 10 to the 180,000th power.) This is mind-boggling when we consider that superscript numbers, or "powers" tell how many zeroes are in a number.
When dividing superscript numbers, we subtract powers. Since there are 10 to the 80th power seconds in the evolutionary time-frame, there would have had to have been 10 to the 178,920th power random tries PER SECOND for purely random chance to accomplish creation of the SIMPLEST living organism. And that would only get the first organism. Mathematicians consider any probability with a power greater than 50 (that is, a number with 50 zeroes) to be truly "impossible."
There are those who can understand this math, yet still insist life occurred by chance and that all the intricate complexities of the myriad species worldwide were just natural selection of already existing genetic material. But their reasons for clinging to evolution are purely religious, not scientific, as mathematics is the most objective of all the sciences. It is a pity, if not a scientific crime, that so many of them are allowed to teach science to our children. |
| |
|
Review Summary: cummon, man |
Date: 2005-07-08 |
|
| |
Details: The guy who gave this a five below clearly didn't read it, but he gave it five stars anyway because it supports his worldview. This is what simpletons do. I'm not angry, nor am I meaning to spew bile. I'm just calling them as I see them.
Of course a belief in God can't be based in anything other than faith, and that's where it should remain: Science is about skepticism and objectivity, not blind faith. If you want to believe that a book written by a whole bunch of people with political agendas trying their best to piece together oral traditions is the "inspired word of God," then so be it. But read a little bit about your Bible, who has edited it, what's been stuck into it and what's been kept out of it (by kings and popes, committees and clergy and whatnot). If you educate yourself, you'll find it's not such an "inspired" book after all. But then again, why educate yourself when you can have faith...
Anyway, Christian or Muslim or Zoroastrian, the book's just plain bad. It was bad when it was written (20 yrs. ago), but given what we now know from the geological and fossil record it's really, really bad. Not only are the ideas bad, but the title is a lie: there is no "study in probabilities," just some poorly reasoned ideas by a guy who really doesn't understand science. But given that lying seems to be more fashionable than ever nowadays, maybe this book will see a revival.
One more thing. To say that "Darwin was wrong" is like saying that Karl Benz was wrong because we don't make cars like his anymore, or that Karl Marx was wrong because Stalin called his totalitarian dictatorship "Communism," or that Karl Rove was "honest" because he answered to the name "Karl Rove." Like life itself, Darwin's ideas have evolved.
In principle, Darwin was absolutely correct, and the scientific method confirms this. And remember, it's science - not faith - that cures diseases, grows food, keeps your Church warm in the winter, and continues to keep life technoligically and socially progressive. Let faith take care of your afterlife. Science is for the living, and for those who care about the living. |
| |
|
Review Summary: Its all in the presupposition... |
Date: 2005-06-20 |
|
|
| |
Details: If I preassume that God does not exist, whatever evidence I find to suggest a creator will be shrugged off as explainable. Even the amazing complexity of human cells, the cosmos and whatever is beyond. The problem is, of course, my underlying bias.
Likewise a person who believes in God will no doubt point all evidence toward a creator.
Since neither can be totally proven (as God requires us to seek Him by faith), we are left to those on both sides who would insult the other.
I choose not to insult, but to inquire... If Christians are trying to simply show that it is possible that the Bible could be right in saying that the world was created rather than evolved, what would be the harm in that line of thinking?
Maybe some of us are afraid of the implications it suggests:
1. If there is a sovereign God of the universe, does He expect anything of me?
2. If He expects something, what is it?
3. What are the results of a life not concerned with God's expectations?
Of course, I am a Christian and I believe God did create the universe as He said He did in His Word (the Bible). I do not want to argue, but I believe in Christians making a case for their faith.
And as for the many of you who simply want to hurl insults, I encourage you to allow your conscience to speak and ask yourself those three questions above.
Helpful insight may be found at www.FoskeyMinistries.com - look first at the "short test" concerning your eternal destiny. |
| |
|
Review Summary: An exersize in skewed reasoning |
Date: 2002-10-10 |
|
|
| |
|
Details: I encourage everyone to read this book. It is an important example of how scientific results can be misunderstood and misused, and how sloppy thinking can lead to literally *any* conclusion. The probability of being struck by lightning is almost zero, right? Thus being struck by lightning more than once is *really* zero, and thus it *can't* happen, right? As ridiculous as this logic is, this is precisely the reasoning employed in Cohen's "Darwin Was Wrong": The chances of things happening *the way they did* is so remotely small that they couldn't have happened by chance, and so they must be the product of an intervening intelligence. To his credit, Cohen does a nice job giving the reader primers on probability (basic conditional probability and combinatorial mathematics) and cell chemistry (less so regarding his rather simple understanding of DNA, even by 1984 standards). And to his credit, he is correct when he says that the cell and its functions are almost unimaginably complex. However, Mr. Cohen fails to appreciate the complexity of the selection process that led to our rich biology. Throughout his self-proclaimed "objective" look at both sides of the issue, he not so subtly rails against the "established dogma" of the scientific community. It becomes very clear very quickly that Mr. Cohen has little scientific training, little familiarity with the scientific method or hypothesis testing, little understanding of the scientific community and how it operates, and no understanding of the peer-review process. If he had, I'm certain he would rethink his own claims about objectivity. After arguing that Darwin's gradualism is wrong because there just hasn't been enough time (a notion that had been accepted for a decade at the time of Cohen's 1984 book), Cohen describes Gould and Eldrige's theory of punctuated equilibria (PE), which argues that evolution has occured in periodic, abrupt (relatively speaking) bursts. Cohen argues that this theory is merely ex post facto reasoning -- making the theory fit the data (much like Cohen himself did with his "probabilities" argument). There's no "math" to support this claim, just vitriol. Cohen demonstrates he really doesn't understand modern evolutionary theory (or PE) by his repeated use of the term "mutation." The key to understanding PE is the notion of genetic variation (not mutation) and selective isolation. In concert, these two things move evolution along at a rather brisk historical clip, and Cohen's "saying it ain't so" can't negate the literally thousands of pieces of published evidence in support of the theory, nor can it negate laboratory experiments which confirm it, nor can it negate the mathematical modeling that neatly fits the lab results to reality ... In the final analysis, this book represents a kind of paranoia. Cohen, who knows "the real truth" (not only about Darwin, but about Stonehenge, too) is going up against the dogmatic Goliath of the scientific community, and his David complex gets in the way of his ability to think clearly. And sadly, this work *still* serves as ammunition for rigid creationists and other anti-intellectual fundamentalists. Read it, but only so that you know what you are up against. |
| |
|
Review Summary: Math speaks where faith fails |
Date: 2001-08-01 |
|
|
| |
|
Details: This mathematician demonstrates the mathematical immpossiblity of life arising by random processes. Its not his ideas, its pure math. |
| |
|
out of 8 Reviews
