Written by: Bjørn Østman
Primary Source: Pleiotropy
Take a look at this lovely slide:
That is a fantastic point. I have not seen it made before. The point is that if there were only 7,000 “kinds” on Noah’s Arc, then with the conservative estimate of 16 million species today, then an average of 11 new species should have evolved (even in Ham’s creationist model) every day. There should have, in Bill Nye’s words, a daily newspaper column listing the new species. Yet nothing like that has ever been observed.
So that was one thing that made this whole debate really enjoyable or me.
Bill Nye did the right thing. In his opening 30 minutes he went right for the jugular of the creationism model. The question to debate was “Is creation a viable model of origins?”, and Nye attacked that directly by making several points that shows that it is direct contradiction with science:
- Antarctic ice-cores show that the first snow that fell and made the bottom layer of the ice is 680,000 years old.
- There are trees that are more than 9,000 years old.
- Grand Canyon is many millions of years old.
These are all dated by different scientific methods, and directly contradict an Earth that would be only 6,000 years old.
Other points from the opening remarks:
- If fossils all died during the flood, then similar species should not necessarily be found in the same sedimentary layers, but should be mixed.
- If kangaroos walked from Mount Ararat to Australia (via a land-bridge for which there is no evidence), then there should be remains of dead kangaroos along the way, and yet there is not a trace.
- The Arc as described in the Bible is simply too large to function when made of wood.
– See more at: http://pleiotropy.fieldofscience.com/2014/02/bill-nye-totally-won-that-debate.html#sthash.nIE4knET.dpuf

I am interested in many aspects of evolution. I work in computational biology, using various approaches to learn about fundamental processes of evolution. Bioinformatics is good for learning about real genes (data generously supplied by other researchers), and simulations are good for testing the mechanisms of evolution. I am particularly interested in how populations and organisms adapt to changing environments, both at the genetic and phenotypic level. Lately my research has focused on the evolutionary dynamics of populations evolving in rugged fitness landscapes.

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