Back to School Part VIII

We continue to examine the work of authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos in their biology textbook, The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008). In their chapter on evolution and natural selection, these accomplished evolutionists begin by (1) misrepresenting the relationship between microevolution and macroevolution and biological variation here, (2) making a non scientific, metaphysical, truth claim that just happens to mandate the truth of evolution here, (3) making the grossly false statement that the fossils themselves are a factual observation that macroevolution has occurred here and here, (4) making a series of misrepresentations by carefully selecting the evidence to provide to the student and protecting it with circular reasoning here, (5) misrepresenting the molecular evidence here, (6) presenting the student with a blatantly false history of evolutionary theory here, (7) introducing the usual if-and-only-if evolutionary reasoning here, and (8) repeating the centuries old religious argument that bad design proves evolution here.

Johnson and Losos’ next move is to make the erroneous, yet typical, argument that evolution is not improbable by manipulating statistics. The old joke that there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics is fully exemplified in the evolutionist’s pretzel logic. Here is what they write, first presenting an argument that evolution is improbable and then responding to it:

Proteins are too improbable. “Hemoglobin has 141 amino acids. The probability that the first one would be leucine is 1/20, and that all 141 would be the ones they are by chance is (1/20)^141, an impossibly rare event.” You cannot use probability to argue backward. The probability that a student in a classroom has a particular birthday is 1/365; arguing this way, the probability that everyone in a class of 50 would have the birthdays they do is (1/365)^50, and yet there the class sits. [302]

Those who are unfamiliar with the evolution genre don’t realize how badly evolution has damaged science. Here we have an example. Remember that Johnson and Losos are professors at leading universities (Washington University and Harvard University, respectively). And remember that the text was reviewed by a small army of evolutionists.

Yet this silly argument that Johnson and Losos present cannot even fool young biology students. Their analogy is, of course, ludicrous. The amino acid sequence folds up into a phenomenal molecular machine whereas a list of birthdays is, well, a list of birthdays.

And what does this molecular blueprint produce? The hemoglobin blood protein carries carbon dioxide to the lungs where it is exposed to inhaled air across a gas-permeable membrane. Here the blood and air trade oxygen for carbon dioxide and the replenished blood is drawn back to the heart to begin another cycle.

Hemoglobin is a complex of four similar proteins attached together. When the blood passes by the lungs it picks up oxygen molecules from the air. But the blood can hold only so much oxygen—while it gains oxygen atoms from the air it also loses oxygen atoms to the air. Hemoglobin solves this problem. It binds the oxygen so it cannot escape back to the air. The result is the blood can carry much more oxygen.

When the blood then moves on to the various parts of the body the hemoglobin molecules unload the oxygen where needed. But time is of the essence and as hemoglobin loads and unloads oxygen it must do so quickly. Consider a dump truck carrying a load of dirt. The truck would be practically worthless if it couldn’t tilt up its box to quickly dump the dirt. Likewise, as the hemoglobin passes by the lung there is little time to load its complement of oxygen, and as it passes by an oxygen-starved muscle there is little time to unload the oxygen.

Hemoglobin speeds things up via small, clever changes in its structure. Small conformational changes in this amazing protein make hemoglobin a quick oxygen loader and unloader.

Amazingly evolutionists think hemoglobin’s special amino acid sequence encoding for this machine is no different than any random list, such a list of birthdays. To be sensible Johnson’s and Losos’ analogy would need the list of birthdays to provide something fantastic, such as the answers to the biology class final exam.

And how special is hemoglobin’s amino acid sequence? It is a research question, but what science is telling us is that not very many different sequences encode for proteins such as hemoglobin. Of the 20^141 (a 1 with more than 180 zeros trailing it) total number of sequences, those that lead to a functional hemoglobin protein—or any functional protein for that matter—is tiny. Intermediates are hard to come by, and most proteins are much longer than hemoglobin. The odds of evolution finding these wonders involve numbers with hundreds of zeros—literally astronomical long shots.

The evolutionist’s analogy between protein sequences and random lists signifying nothing, such as a list of birthdays, is absurd. It is another example of evolution’s undermining of science. Religion drives science, and it matters.