You see these clocks? They're going to be keeping time throughout this entire video starting...NOW.
They'll still be running even if they're not on screen.
Here's the thing: only one of them, the green one, is keeping accurate time.
(That is, assuming you're playing this video at
And I mean 60; not that 59.94 crap.)
This is a perfectly accurate clock, used as a basis for comparison.
The others are
Just like most clocks in the real world, you never get a truly precise clock, although atomic clocks come close.
But these clocks weren't designed by any human; they were designed by evolution,
using nothing more than random mutation and natural selection.
They evolved years ago for a YouTube channel called cdk007 featuring videos from Charles Kopec.
Although he hasn't uploaded a video in years, this and other videos of his are still there.
But I thought I'd update this for a more modern audience and show just how evolution can make a clock.
This is important, because creationists say this is impossible, and here's an actual example many of them use:
Get a clock.
Take it apart.
Put the pieces in a box.
Shake the box all around.
Open the box, and notice the pieces don't spontaneously reassemble into a clock.
Therefore, evolution is wrong somehow.
There are variations, like with a 747 or a mousetrap,
and sometimes it's an explosion or a tornado instead of a box being shaken, but it's the same basic argument.
So only God can make a watch, they say, a traditional argument known as the Watchmaker Analogy.
Funny how such a simple experiment
Unless, there's something wrong with it?
Actually, there are
There are probably tons of others you could point to, but mainly:
Clocks do not reproduce.
Clocks do not mutate.
Clocks are not subject to natural selection. And just as importantly,
components of clocks don't have natural affinities for each other like the components of cells do.
But instead of making lengthy arguments as to why it's wrong,
like Richard Dawkins did in his book,
Kopec decided to just try it and see what happens.
What kind of clocks can you get, starting with complete randomness,
followed by descent with mutation and natural selection?
Now, if you're a creationist, before you go deconstructing this, remember:
This is based on an analogy from creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design.
You start with the parts of a clock and see if clocks can assemble.
So you can't brush this off with, "Oh, where did those clock parts come from?" This was
You also can't get around this by claiming that life is more complex than a clock.
Although it certainly is,
And third: Don't even
Kopec released the source code, and his links still work.
If you're having trouble, I have a copy of the source code myself and I'll gladly give it to you.
There are five components: gears, ratchets, hands, springs, and the housing.
To mimic the electrostatic affinities that molecules,
proteins, and other biological components have for each other:
the ratchet can attach by its teeth or its center, gears can attach by their teeth or the center, hands by either end,
and the spring can attach by either end as well. The housing can bind to any other component.
All possible connections between these components are allowed,
meaning that in no way does this direct the formation of a clock.
Each clock has 30 gears, 1 ratchet, 7 hands, 1 spring, and 1 housing.
One variation from the original problem:
by starting with components made for a clock, the gears each had the proper tooth ratios between them.
To make the simulation more difficult, Kopec set it up where gears can have a random number of teeth,
anywhere between 4 and 1000. The proper tooth ratios will have to evolve.
The design of each clock is a matrix, which makes up the clock's genome.
When clocks breed, each child gets, at random, half its entries from its mother and half from its father.
Each child also gets one random mutation.
He started each simulation with a population of a certain size, and each clock's genome was randomly generated.
To evolve the clocks, you remove three at random and evaluate their ability to tell time.
The two better clocks kill the other one, then mate and produce an offspring.
All three clocks are then returned to the population.
So there's no actual boundary separating one generation and the next, just like in reality.
So a generation will be considered to be a number of matings equal to the population size.
So a population of 10,000 will enter its second generation after 10,000 matings.
Starting with a pool of 10,000 completely random clocks, 98% of them did absolutely nothing.
Yet, the other 2% were interesting. They weren't in any way a clock,
but they did have a case where a hand stuck to the housing at one end and a gear at the other,
spontaneously forming a pendulum.
Pendulums are very good at keeping regular time. Galileo used them to time his famous experiments
proving that objects fell at the same rate regardless of mass.
They're not anywhere near as good as a clock, but they're better than nothing.
So pendulums quickly dominate the population after just a few generations.
The age of the pendulums goes on for some 600 generations.
But while nothing
As long as these mutations don't destroy the pendulum, they're completely neutral.
(And ones that
So at various points along the way, you'll get: the center of the ratchet binding to the pendulum,
the ratchet teeth binding to a gear,
and a separate gear binding to the spring. These happen here and there.
Now, we just need a
the gear that's connected to the ratchet binds to the gear connected to the spring. This makes a
proto-clock. You no longer have to count pendulum swings to keep time; you can just watch the gear.
Very quickly, proto-clocks will replace pendulums.
But, you still can't look away. That will only happen when one more mutation takes place:
a hand binds to either the gear attached to the spring
or a gear attached to the ratchet. That becomes a true clock: a 1-handed clock. If you turn away
for a certain amount of time and look back, you can still tell how much time has passed.
The true clocks very quickly replace the proto-clocks,
and so they don't remain dominant for very long.
Of course, if you turn away
so there's still room for improvement.
Clocks with multiple hands are more useful.
It's also more useful if it conforms to known time periods like seconds, minutes, and hours.
Of course, there are also deleterious mutations, like a gear that mutates to bind up the works,
but again, those are quickly selected against.
So in his first simulation, after 1000 generations he ended up with 3-handed clocks.
There was a second hand that rotated once every 59.998 seconds,
meaning it will be off by one second every 8 hours and 20 minutes.
There was also a two-minute hand, rotating once every 124.75 seconds,
and a
We have a very complex mechanism that looks designed. But it wasn't.
It happened
He ran the simulation twice more.
On the next run, he got 3-handed clocks with a minute hand, an hour hand, and a
They were accurate to 1 minute every 25 days.
On the third run, he very briefly got 4-handed clocks, but then 3-handed clocks dominated again.
This was
with minute, hour, and day hands.
To prove that the parameters weren't fine-tuned, he ran the simulation with different settings.
Shrinking the population down to just 1000,
he ended up with 4-handed clocks with second, minute, and day hands,
and also one hand that rotated once every two seconds. That's evolution for you.
Going the other way, with a population of 50,000,
he got
as well as a hand that rotated once every 40 seconds. The clocks were accurate to 1 minute every week.
Increasing the mutation rate by a factor of 5, he ended up with 4-handed clocks with second,
minute, hour, and day hands accurate to 1 minute every 41 days.
For the seventh and final run, he made it harder for the clocks: no gear can have over 100 teeth.
He got 4-handed clocks with second, minute, and hour hands,
and also a 4.2 second hand that's just bizarre. It was accurate to 1 minute every 2.3 days.
By the way, take a look at all of these graphs. You'll notice something strange.
Evolution isn't steady; it happens in fits and starts, called "punctuated equilibrium,"
a concept that just gets creationists into conniptions.
The general explanation is that there's a sudden change in the environment or a population bottleneck,
but in these simulations, none of that is in play.
And yet, they all go from, say, 1-handed to 2-handed clocks
leaving few if any of the transitional forms preserved in the fossil record.
There was
And the parameters of many of the simulations varied wildly.
And yet, each time, they went from a pile of gears, springs, ratchets, and hands,
into fully-functional, very accurate clocks.
The most complex clock Kopec evolved had 21 inter-connected, finely-tuned parts.
Complexity is
Oh, and by the way: many of these systems were so fully interdependent
that the removal of a single component broke the whole thing, or at least took it all back to a pendulum.
So it's
So, why don't clocks build themselves? Why is this claim a complete strawman of evolution?
Why does it do absolutely nothing to refute evolution,
only show the incredible ignorance and pigheadedness of creationists?
Because
So, thanks for watching! Please hit Like and Subscribe,
and also share this video and leave a comment, and be sure to check out cdk007's channel.
They're all from years ago, but they're still great. And to support this channel, go to donate.bogosity.tv,
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Thanks so much, and until next time, stay strong and be free.