Let's study ID: a way to study adaptation times (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 05, 2022, 12:30 (836 days ago) @ David Turell

My apologies for missing a day. Another computer mishap, caused by the monitor "exploding"! I now have a new and better one. Maybe there's some sort of link here with the evolutionary process?!

DAVID: Sudden appearance of a new body part is difficult to explain by chance events.

dhw: I agree. The heading here is misleading, though, because it’s clear that the authors are concerned with innovations rather than adaptations (though sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the two – as in our legs-to-flippers saga). I have absolutely no idea how mathematicians can possibly calculate how long it would take for these innovations to come about, since nobody knows HOW they do so. People have tried to calculate how long random mutations would require, but an all-powerful God could produce changes overnight if he wanted to, and we have absolutely no way of knowing how long it would take autonomously intelligent cells. (As an aside: It occurs to me that climate change might prove eventually to be the next major influence on speciation, though I suspect it will result in mass extinction and certain existing species becoming hugely successful rather than innovating.)

DAVID: Climate change obviously affects species and requests new ones. If you were aware of evolution math, as I am, the Darwinist followers have been using this sort of math for seventy years. And we don't know if God can make instant changes. Cambrians appeared over a thirty million year time period. Evolution says God made humans starting 3.8 bya.

I thought ID-ers had been using maths to show that Darwin’s random mutations theory was impossible:
The Mathematical Impossibility Of Evolution | The ...
https://www.icr.org/article/mathematical-impossibility-evolution

QUOTE: “…the chance that a 200-component organism could be formed by mutation and natural selection is less than one chance out of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion!”
And unless evolution has changed its name to David Turell, it does not say God exists, let alone that he started life with the sole intention of making humans although he also made countless other life forms that had no connection with humans. If he does exist, some folk believe that he is all-powerful, so we can hardly dismiss the idea that an all-powerful being can do whatever he wants, can we? My point remains: how can anyone possibly calculate the time needed for speciation without knowing how speciation takes place?