Natures wonders: plant and fungus in symbiosis (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 23, 2017, 10:31 (2769 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: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."

I would suggest that generations are a far more significant factor than time, and this brings us up to a million generations, as opposed to my 500,000! I'm not sure what the authors mean by “two specific co-ordinated mutations”. If mutations (by which I mean changes, not necessarily random) are beneficial, I'd have thought they were bound to be coordinated or they wouldn't survive. And if it is not beyond the bounds of credibility for God to do the engineering within a million generations, why is it beyond the bounds of credibility that a possibly God-given intelligent inventive mechanism could do the same?