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Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
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Speaker 1 (00:01.39)
Hello there, welcome to the Polymath World channel and as these have proven more popular than the interviews it seems, I'm going to be reacting to a couple more pseudoscience videos. This one is from a Christian apologetics ministry called Reasons for Hope and it is called Evolution is a Fact Debunked. So let's see these guys debunk evolution. I'm not too familiar, but I did just have a quick look at their site and they are two...
Older guys, they could be my uncles and they seem very, very friendly and warm. So let's see what they have to say and how they're going to debunk evolution.
Speaker 2 (00:44.43)
Matter to man, protein to purpose, accident to president, and poo poo to paw paw. Welcome to the evolution revolution, my stardust siblings. It's all the rage, you know. Profs at prestigious universities, top notch high school teachers, and all kinds of scientists the world over insist that evolution is a bona fide fact. But is it? Well, we're gonna gander at the biggie and take it on mano a mano.
Wow. Wow.
go.
the odds that an undirected mindless process like evolution could produce just one single protein molecule fit for life. Let's keep it simple. The size of a protein with a stable structure called the fold ranges between about 75 and 30,000 amino acids. Let's just take a small number like 150. Fair enough? Great. So if each amino acid in the chain of 150 has roughly 20 possible variations, that would mean a life permitting protein forming by chance would be 20 to the 150th. Now you reduce that down, pass it around, you get 10 to the 150th.
the wall. That's a one with 195 zeros after just in case you didn't know. But there are other rare sequences that can work and we would have to factor that into the equation. But I'll be honest, I just don't want to do that. Thankfully, Doug Axe, a molecular biologist has and he found that the odds of a relatively short protein to properly function are less than one in 10 to the 77th, which is true for a large number of proteins. So that's a one with 77 zeros. Now you throw the peptide and the left-handed amino acid problems in there, you get something close to
Speaker 2 (03:05.84)
10 to the 164th. Now keep in mind that scientists define the occurrence of anything with less than 1 in 10 to the 50th as absurd, but we're way beyond absurd here. Allow me to paint a visual. It would be like traveling the universe in an accidentally manufactured spacecraft, stopping on a whim, then reaching out blindfolded into a sea of 10 to the 80th different colored atoms and retrieving the only red one.
All this mind you just to get one protein and you need roughly 300 to form the simplest living cell we know of. But the point is this, you can't get a protein, you can't get a cell, and you can't get a life. That's just, well, life. So deal with it. But at least be honest with me, you wouldn't bet on the next hand after your opponent dealt himself a royal flush, would you? And that's far more likely to happen than our protein problem. So please, don't bet something more precious on an absurdity. And that's all I got for now. But rest assured, this chuckle-some notion that blind, undirected processes can
produce even a single protein let alone life has been dare I say mathematically anyway debunked. Adios.
Okay, right. A lot of problems, unfortunately. Okay, so actually before we start, can I just make a point about definitions? Because every video I've dealt with does the same thing. They want to start by defining evolution. They say, well, isn't it important to start by defining evolution? Let's define evolution. And then it...
It comes with something like, microevolution. Of course, we all agree on that. If you just mean change over time, of course we all agree with that. But with macroevolution, which seems to be the challenge here with this video as well, have you noticed all religious apologists do this of every kind? And I don't think it's an accident, actually. I think there is within that an attempt to appear considered and thoughtful.
Speaker 1 (05:06.862)
like no what we thought about it. Obviously we agree with all the scientific obviously stuff It's just the the macroevolution stuff now. No, that's impossible It's an attempt to look considerate and thoughtful, but that's not what's actually going on. It's just a It's just a way of defining your terms to suit you because I don't find scientists doing this at all actually Right, let's get into the content. So at the beginning he's
Mistakenly says proteins are the building blocks of life, you know, DNA RNA That's the building blocks really that we're dealing with Proteins do all the jobs of life But let's let that one go You must have an exact amino acid sequence. What does he mean? He goes on to say talk about rare sequences It seems like he thinks that for a protein to exist
you can only have one possible sequence of amino acids and if you were to change one it wouldn't work or it would die like mutation just erodes it. This is demonstrably false. I mean there's a lot of redundancy in proteins because there are different amino acids that can code for the same codon. Some amino acids can be coded for by even three or four codons.
So that's not true. Also, I mean, in my own work testing DNA repair proteins, I've often tried to sabotage them by swapping out sometimes very extreme amino acids and they still dock. I mean, I'll change a positively charged one for a negatively charged one or a hydrophobic one for a hydrophilic one. And sometimes it will still work. So you have highly conserved regions in the protein.
which could be destabilized. But it's not the case that a protein can't exist unless it's just one sequence. And this is the basis of why all the mathematical analogies are wrong. Yes, the protein space is huge, but you can actually replace some amino acids in some proteins and they'll still work just fine. So it's just wrong. He used the phrase, the odds of one mindless, undirected process.
Speaker 1 (07:26.05)
How would you calculate the odds of a directed versus undirected or mindless versus mindful? I don't understand what he means there. The odds of one functional protein or the odds of getting one fold. This is troubling. The odds of one functional protein. For a protein to function, all you need is a start and a stop code on. All you need is the start and the stop code on and everything in between could then be translated.
I don't understand. You can get functional proteins. It's just a case of whether the gene's expressed or... I don't know what he means. The odds of one fold? Well, folds are caused by forces, hydrogen bonding, van der Waals forces, ionic bonding, charged interactions. mean, proteins will fold by virtue of their chemistry and their charges.
and the hydrophobic versus hydrophilic regions. I mean, that's what causes the fold. Let's go on to the maths though. The maths is all wrong. And again, this is just a tactic. It's a classic intelligent design tactic that if I can make it sound really, really improbable and then find analogies of that probability, then I can show that it's nonsense. But this is wrong.
He says Doug Axe. So Doug Axe's work is what is championed over and over and over over again by creationists, intelligent design people. So he wrote this particular paper, think, well, it was over 20 years ago he wrote this paper. There's been response papers to it. The problems with the paper are very well documented. He says 10 to the 77, there was one paper in particular.
that revisited Axe's work shortly afterwards and found that there were 66 orders of magnitude off. So this paper is not good. It's certainly not one that's accepted. It's definitely not a pivotable, world-changing paper like they're seeming to suggest. And this is not just a mathematical problem. We're dealing with biochemistry. We're dealing with living organisms. You can't just resort to maths and say, oh, it's unlikely, therefore it will never ever happen.
Speaker 1 (09:44.31)
I mean, for a start, can find amino acids were found on asteroids. Amino acids have been found in really hostile environments, salt flats, deserts, the bottom of the ocean, deep ocean vents. I mean, it doesn't take much actually to form amino acids. from amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. The Miller-Urey experiment, and there have been dozens and dozens and dozens of this. People talk about Miller-Urey as if it's the only one.
repeated and improved so many times over the years, but just trying to create something like early Earth conditions using electricity like lightning generated some of the basic amino acids spontaneously. So the idea that it's just, it's so impossible. Well, why does it show up all the time then? Why does it show up in the most unlikely places? Why does it show up on asteroids? It's ridiculous to say, it couldn't possibly happen.
Also, think a big fundamental problem with this video, they just don't understand natural selection or population genetics. It's not all random probabilities. Selection acts on what is there. It is developed. Mutation acts on the material that is there. You can get gene duplication, the co-opting of protein domains for other jobs.
It's not just a case of maths in a vacuum. And that's a big problem with these ideas, that the use of Dembski's ideas and Dugaxe's ideas is just wrong. And I come back to what I said about Frank Turek, that the only way you could believe this is if you don't read the scientific literature. The only way you could come to the conclusions they come to is if you don't pay any attention to the science. You don't learn science, you just read intelligent design people and say, there you go, job done.
Job not done. Thank you very much if you watched this far. Hope you enjoyed that, hope it's helpful and look forward to seeing you at the next episode on Wednesday.