Evolution Rate: All Noise, No Signal
Darwinists boast of reducing
noise in evolution data,
but where is the signal?
A high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is always desirable. Noise confuses a communication, like static on a radio broadcast. People want signal! They want to hear the message. So where is the message in a process like Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law? Let’s watch an evolutionary biologist explain how he thinks he has improved the SNR in data that other evolutionists have gathered about how fast evolution works: the “evolution rate” or “diversification rate”—the speed at which evolutionary changes occur, including extinction.
New Tools Filter Noise from Evolution Data (1 Nov 2024, Univ of Tennessee at Knoxville). Professor Brian O’Meara in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is the grinning expert in this press release proudly disseminated by his employer, the University of Texas. “Our work is an important step in showing how substantially error can affect rate estimates,” he boasts of new tools in statistical analysis that he believes find signal in the noise. How could there be noise in evolution data? Weren’t we taught that evolution is a fact, obvious to everyone except those with a religious bias?
While rates of evolution have appeared to accelerate over short time periods, new analysis suggests that statistical noise is affecting the data patterns. A professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his colleague have developed new tools to help researchers filter the data.
An animated figure in the press release shows a noisy graph. Red icons of a stegosaur, a frog and a deer slide up and down along the graph, showing some kind of signal apparently coming into clearer focus as the organisms are adjusted in various positions.
Jeremy Beaulieu, O’Meara’s co-author, is a former postdoctoral researcher at UT who is now an associate professor at the University of Arkansas. First, though, what kind of evolutionary changes are O’Meara and Beaulieu talking about?
“They could be short-term evolutionary changes: a change in bird beak size as only those with large beaks can crush seeds available during a drought, for example,” O’Meara said. “Or they could be things like uncertainty in measurements: How long is a stretchy squid tentacle? Another possibility is short-term ecological changes: a warm summer leading to a taller plant than plants from a cooler summer 50 years ago.”
If that’s all they are talking about, it’s micro-evolution: changes within species or within genera. Changes on that level are not controversial even to young-earth creationists. That’s not the level of change Darwin was interested in. He wanted to explain slime to Einstein over vast periods of time. Calling these minor changes “evolutionary changes” is, therefore, misleading and fallacious. Can a frog become a mammal? Is a stegosaur a step to the human brain? (see Illustra video).
Concerned citizens want to see evidence of major evolutionary change. These two Darwin Party hacks only performed some statistical analysis on flawed data, claiming to see a hint of a possible baby in the bathwater. As astute readers know, statistics can be manipulated to generate fake news.
Is There Any Signal at all?
O’Meara and Beaulieu know that evolutionary rates vary all over the map. Evolution is slow and gradual except when it is fast and supercharged (9 Nov 2019), often explosive in “geologic time” (video). Moreover, molecular rates often differ substantially from fossil rates (12 Mar 2015). Both those rates, though, depend on the prior assumption that evolution has produced all the organisms in biology over vast periods of time. What if that is not true? Then this whole exercise was a waste of time. It’s like claiming that there’s really a movie in the snow on a TV screen disconnected from a broadcast source.
Professor O’Meara is not even sure they have made any gains in Darwin’s snipe hunt: i.e., his promise of “understanding” of biology.
The equation and software they developed assume one kind of error. “It’s likely a pretty good first approximation, but there could be other kinds of error that make interpretations of reconstructed rates still uncertain in unexpected ways,” he said. “I would love for our solution to fully fix the problem, allowing for unlimited examination of residual rates, but I do not think we are quite there yet.”
Once again, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind of Futureware. At least their D-Merit Badges give them job security. Futureware was also the excuse given in their paper published in PLoS Computational Biology on 13 Sept 2024. Interestingly, they compared the noisy data from biological evolution to the well-known “Hubble Tension” problem in cosmology (see quote below,* and Bergman article from 3 July 2024).
Why did we waste your time with the speculations of a couple of know-nothings who admit they haven’t contributed anything solid to their faith in Darwinism? We just wanted to show you (again) that when you examine evolutionary claims outside of the fogma, and look at the assumptions they make, any “science” evaporates into hot air.
Animation by J. Beverly Greene for Creation-Evolution Headlines
*Quote from the paper by O’Meara and Beaulieu:
Our study demonstrates that the pattern of increased evolutionary rates towards the present, observed across various axes of biodiversity, such as contemporary extinction rates and macroevolutionary rates in morphology and molecular studies, closely resembles what we would expect from purely random data. Even within large datasets, the observed hyperbolic pattern closely mirrors noise, except at deeper times where there may be enough signal to overcome the hyperbolic pattern from noise. Furthermore, it is worth noting that while our focus was on ecological and evolutionary datasets, similar conflicts between rates measured over different time scales exist in other fields, including the Hubble tension regarding the cosmic expansion rate.