Natures wonders: plant and fungus in symbiosis (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 23, 2017, 01:48 (2770 days ago) @ dhw

From the article on “whales”:
QUOTE: "With this new fossil find, however, dating to 49 million years ago (bear in mind that Pakicetus lived around 53 million years ago), this means that the first fully aquatic whales now date to around the time when walking whales (Ambulocetus) first appear. This substantially reduces the window of time in which the Darwinian mechanism has to accomplish truly radical engineering innovations and genetic rewiring to perhaps just five million years — or perhaps even less."

David’s comment: The planning required for these changes is very complex and requires intricate and complicated coordination for it all to work. Only God's mind can do it in the known time frame.

dhw: Nobody knows how innovation occurs or how long it would take an intelligent organism to redesign itself. Five million years hardly represents a saltation. If we allow ten years for each generation, we have 500,000 generations of pre-whales to design these innovations. Please tell me on what authority anyone can state that 500,000 generations of intelligent organisms are not enough to design the engineering and do the rewiring.

The article has a discussion of mutation rates, which is different than looking at generational rates:

"The equations of population genetics predict that – assuming an effective population size of 100,000 individuals per generation, and a generation turnover time of 5 years (according to Richard Sternberg’s calculations and based on equations of population genetics applied in the Durrett and Schmidt paper), that one may reasonably expect two specific co-ordinated mutations to achieve fixation in the timeframe of around 43.3 million years. When one considers the magnitude of the engineering fete, such a scenario is found to be devoid of credibility."