Evolution and Time

Despite the fact that so much evidence has been presented before, Galatian has asked for evidence that evolution cannot have occurred or, conversely, that creation did occur. Trying to do so in one thread is impossible. There is simply too much. In the net discussions I have had with evolutionists, however, it seems that there end up being some basic areas of discussion:
time
mutations
natural selection
chance
speciation
intelligent design

At least those six. So I don't mind dealing with them one at a time.

This thread, unless it gets hijacked, should be about evolution and time, OK? Now, my 'granddaughter' has a sleepover here tomorrow night and that will take preparation, watching over, and then cleaning up, so I will not be here as instantly as I would like, but I will keep checking back with this thread until it winds down or gets hijacked. Then we can deal with the other topics one at a time. There is no way, but NO way, I can deal with all the topics at once.

There are a few basic arguments about time where evolution is concerned. The pro argument for evolution is that 3.5 billion years is a really long time and just about anything could happen in that amount of time.

I disagree. I think when I have presented a little bit here, it will become evident that even if evolution was possible genetically, 3.5 billion years is exponentially too short a time for evolution from a proto-bacteria to an elephant or a fern or an ape to have taken place.

First, it has been estimated by standard evolutionary interpretations of the fossil record that it took about one billion years for a single-celled organism to evolve into a multi-celled organism where the cells were somewhat specialized.

There are two kinds of cells -- prokaryotic and eukaryotic. The first is considered 'simple' in that it does not have membrane-bound organelles inside. These are like bacteria. The second, eukaryotic, is considered more advanced, or complex, because it has an organized nucleus and membrane-bound organelles. There are arguments about which type may have been the first recognizable form of life here on earth.

It doesn't really matter. What matters is something called 'generation time.' Generation time is the amount of time the mature cell starts to divide or bud until the resulting cells are mature enough to start replicating. For E.coli, a bacteria we hear a lot about, the generation time is about 20 minutes. That's one reason you can get sick pretty fast from that type of food poisoning. For a lot of insects, the generation time is a year. For apes, the generation time is about ten years.

If the first cell, no matter what it was, could manage ten cell divisions in a 24 hour period, that would be much slower than E.coli, but much faster than most of the life we see around us today. Still, let's run with this slow generation time for this single celled organism, because it will be advantageous to evolution in the long run.

Ten generations in a day is 3650 generations in a year. In a billion years, we are then talking about 3,650,000,000,000 generations (if I counted my zeros right...).

That is what it evidently took for a single celled organism to become a multicelled organism. Over three and a half TRILLION generations. But now we have to get that multicelled organism to diversify into fish and frogs and ferns and butterflies and bears and apes and us. But our generation times are much longer. And we only have 2,500,000,000 years left to get all that done in.

Evolution just ran out of time.

Or consider this:

We have been working with E.coli bacteria for well over a hundred years now. We have thrown every mutagent (mutation agent) in the book at them, singly and in combination, in various temperatures and environments. Given their generation time, that means we have dealt with over 2.5 million linear generations of these little guys. In 2.5 million generations, trying to get them to mutate any way we could, what have we gotten? Mostly dead E.coli. We got some that were fat, and when we disturbed one metabolic pathway (through intelligent human intervention), one population managed to find a way around that by constructing a new metabolic pathway and staying alive.

But they were never anything but E.coli, dead or alive. In 2.5 MILLION generations.

So, my evolutionist friends, how do you deal with the time issue?

 

Yes, there are evolutionists here and let's not derail the time issue! We can deal with mutations later. There's plenty of discussion for everything in its own time!

 

Excuse me, but quit trying to derail the thread. What are the evolutionists going to do about the time issue?

 

I had a feeling this would get derailed and hijacked and altered and ignored, but I didn't think it would be so fast!

EVOLUTIONISTS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT THE TIME PROBLEM?????

AND WOULD YOU OTHERS WHO ARE NOT DEALING WITH THE OPENING POST PLEASE TAKE YOUR ARGUMENTS SOMEPLACE ELSE?

Rant over.
Thank you.

 

In the long run, the answer is yes. Either naturalism is the rule of things, or God is. If God is, then He told us how He did it.

But let's just look at the OP right now. It is not about beginnings, but about what has happened since. The way I see it, from what evolutionists themselves have stated as well as what we have seen in labs around the world, there is not enough time for evolution to have happened. Is this true or not?

 

To Tragic: I respect your thoughts on that, but that is not the subject of the thread.

Does evolution have enough time, given what we looked at in the opening post? THAT is what this thread is supposed to be about.

We are on the second page of this thread and so far no one has even touched the question raised by the OP.

 

"No" that evolution does not have enough time? I was not sure if your 'no' referred to origins or not before.

I apologize for misunderstanding you.