Here's another completely stupid creationist video:
"Dr. David Berlinski Destroys Evolution In Under 5 Minutes."
But it really should be called,
“Dr. David Berlinski Makes Himself Look Like An Absolute Ignoramus In Under 5 Minutes.”
"Lots and lots of people are skeptical in the scientific community.
"And many, many very significant figures:
"John von Neumann, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century,
"just laughed at Darwinian theory.
"He hooted at it."
Von Neumann was the creator of the Theory of Self Reproducing Automata.
He worked with creating autonomous systems that could reproduce and improve themselves
in much the same way as evolution works.
I did a comprehensive Google search and cannot find even a single reference,
not even on a Creationist site,
to von Neumann ridiculing Darwin or rejecting evolution.
But let's say he's right.
Let's say von Neumann laughed at Darwin.
There are a few things to consider:
Von Neumann was a mathematician, not a biologist. Evolution wasn't his field.
The adaptor hypothesis of DNA, RNA, and proteins making up the replication mechanism
wasn't presented until 1957,
and von Neumann had died in February of that year.
There's no way he could have known of the mechanism organisms have for descent with modification.
In fact, this mechanism had been completely lacking up to this point.
Not even Darwin knew about it.
Moreover, this is an invalid argument by authority.
Just because Scientist XYZ said so, doesn't make it true.
For example, Lord Kelvin said, "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."
Only eight years later, the Wright Brothers made their first historic flight.
"There's a consistent group of people--
"among mathematicians, among physicists, among some very good speculative biologists--
"who simply don't accept it."
Yeah. You cite some unnamed scientists and pretend that this makes your bogosity true.
The Discovery Institute has tried pulling this crap, too,
except they actually bothered to try and collect some names.
In 2001, they began a petition called "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism."
All their petition said was:
Of course, one should be skeptical of everything,
and there should always be careful examination of the evidence,
so signing this petition wasn't exactly saying you rejected evolution.
As of February 2007, they claimed to have gotten 700 signatures.
That would be a pathetic enough showing as it is--700 signatures in 6 years?
But it gets worse:
by the Discovery Institute's own admission, only about a quarter of those are biologists.
By way of parody, the National Center for Science Education ran their own petition, which says:
You can't get much more unequivocal than that.
From 2003 to the present day, they've received 810 signatures from legitimate scientists--
all named Steve.
Considering that the name Steve only occurs in about 1% of the population,
this is the equivalent of 81,000 signatures.
Yeah, they're poking fun.
Why? Because SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK BY MAJORITY VOTE.
Any time someone tells you a whole bunch of scientists agree with such-and-such,
ignore the argument. It's irrelevant.
"The interesting argument about a whale is that,
"if its origins were land-based originally,
"then we have some crude way of assessing quantitatively
"the scope of the project of transformation."
Can do! Whales evolved from Pakicetus, a land mammal about the size of a wolf.
From there, still on land, they became Indohyus,
and from there moved to the water to become Kutchicetus, Protocetus, Rodhocetus, and many others.
Not only did their limbs gradually get more flipper-like,
their eyes receded back to the sides of their head, allowing the nostrils to move slowly upward,
to eventually become the blow-hole.
By the time Squalodon came along, they had a rudimentary echolocation
and could now evolve into modern whales.
That's the Cliff Notes version; the real story is much more complex and covers a LOT more transitional forms,
but you can get the idea.
His demand is no problem for science.
"You've got a cow.
"You want to teach it how to live all of its life in the open ocean,
"still retaining its air-breathing characteristics.
"What do you have to do from an engineering point of view to change the cow into a whale?"
Oh, how wrong art thee? Let me count the ways.
First of all, you DO NOT EVOLVE AN INDIVIDUAL.
An individual cow never becomes anything but a cow.
Creationists often say this to refute their strawman version of evolution,
but it's not how real evolution works.
Second, you don't teach the cow to do it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with learned behavior.
Third, you don't go from living all its life on land to living all its life on the ocean.
Ambulocetus was amphibious, with its back legs adapted for swimming,
and its front legs for land use.
Probably it lived in shallow waters and caught its prey in the way crocodiles do.
Really, the way this would work is that you would make the cow have a whole lot of babies
and put them in shallow water.
The ones that could live could pass their genes on to the next generation.
Gradually you adapt the environment to require them to spend more and more time in the water,
and over the generations they get better adapted to this environment.
You need to do this slowly over a long period of time--
whales took 40 million years to adapt to the water.
"Since we know that life on Earth and life in the water are fundamentally different enterprises,
"we have some sense of the number of changes."
Not so. We've already seen how the blow-hole evolved gradually from nostrils.
Let's now look at the flipper.
Structurally and functionally, the flipper at first glance
looks entirely different from a mammalian limb.
But let's take a look inside, at the bones.
Can you tell which of these is from the flipper of a whale and which is the hand of an ape?
They look SO similar that, unless you're an expert, telling the difference can be difficult.
It's hard to imagine any transition to a water mammal any more drastic than a hand to a flipper,
but the morphology clearly shows that incremental steps are all that are needed to make it happen.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, the bones of a fish's fin are completely different.
"Here's a chance, actually, to put some numbers on the calculation.
"We're not talking about genetics, we're talking about simple numbers."
Right. Because if you had to deal with genetics, you wouldn't have an argument.
"The calculations are certainly, certainly not hard.
"But they're interesting, because I stopped at 50,000, that is, morphological changes."
Only 50,000? Over 40 million years?
No problem! That's only one tiny change every 800 years. Easy for evolution!
Is that all you got?
"If Darwinian hypotheses are correct, it should suggest an enormous plethora of animals
"intermediary between, say, Ambulocetus and the next step."
But what do you mean by the next step?
If the changes are gradual, how do you put in steps?
Rodhocetus wasn't that different from Ambulocetus,
and yet they're separated by 4 million years. Is that a step?
What about a fossil in between?
Or do you have to wait until Basilosaurus isis, 3 million years after that,
when they lost their ability to walk on their hind legs?
Without defining precisely what you mean by a "step," your question is specious.
"But at least it will put it in the ballpark of a quantitative estimate, which is hardly ever done."
Because it isn't necessary.
Such calculations are pointless, given the plethora of information we have
in both the fossil record and the genetic record for the evolution of cetaceans from land mammals.
Here's the big problem with his way of thinking:
On June 1, 2008, a the numbers for a $40-million dollar lottery was found to match a ticket sold.
The person who purchased this ticket had a 1 in 41,416,353 chance of winning it.
Now imagine someone like Berlinski comes along and does his math.
He says that the chances of him winning the lottery were so high
that it's laughable to think that he has done it,
and he really hasn't won the $40 million at all.
The state of California, who runs the lottery, says otherwise and pays him the $40 million,
but Berlinski sticks to his math.
No matter how much Berlinski tries to justify his denial of this winning lottery ticket,
he is clearly wrong.
Once an event has happened, it has become a certainty.
The lucky person's chances of having won the lottery is now 100%.
No amount of mathematical jiggery-pokery can change that.
And suppose they hadn't evolved into whales at all, but something completely different.
We'd be talking about this new strange animal and not whales,
and he would be saying the exact same thing, not knowing of all of the other possibilities--
which include both whales and extinction,
not to mention lots of other things we can't even imagine--
that make his probability argument another bogus application of the anthropic principle.