Is Earth old enough for DNA to evolve?

You've not followed evolutionary theory correctly. There are plenty of known mechanisms that increase the length of the genome other than single nucleotide insertions. This alone completely ruins your argument. I don't think you've thought about this very carefully. HUmans may have a generation time of ~20 years; but you're trying to talk about the whole evolutionary process from single-celled organisms onwards. Prokaryotes, for example, typically have generation times of between 1 and 3 hours. A single-celled eukaryote, such as yeast, 90 minutes. This is something you'd have to take into account. Again, you haven't thought this through.Remember, a mutation is something that happens in the first place to an individual and not a population. So long as there are beneficial mutations coming along and being fixed by natural selection at the necessary rate (whatever that is) it doesn't matter how many deleterious mutations are coming along and being removed by natural selection. Do bear in mind that a neutral mutation which made the genome longer can go on to be fixed by genetic drift just as a beneficial one can be fixed by natural selection. Since your argument relates to the length of the genome rather than its function, you can't discount neutral mutations. Not really. A mutation in the wrong order would not be beneficial. Once we've noted that not all mutations are beneficial, the point doesn't need making twice. Well, since life is still here, this would appear to be a valid "assumption". If, by analogy, I was to try to estimate the time it took for you to type your post, I should do so under the "assumption" that when you wrote it you were not dead. It is true that if you were then your typing speed would drop to zero, but I can be fairly sure that you weren't.Of course, some things did go extinct, but we know that none of our ancestral species went extinct, because here we are. See the answer to b. There were doubtless lots of negative errors along the way. The proportion of them that got fixed in the gene pool must have been tiny; also, it has nothing to do with your argument, which is about the size of the genome. Perhaps we do have some deleterious mutations fixed in our gene pool. What of it? And that's only one of the things that is wrong with your argument. Yes, you left natural selection out of an atempt at analyzing an evolutionary process, thus leading to several of your more egregious errors. Next time, try leaving it in. Or just textbooks.If you don't know that there are mutations other than single nucleotide insertions that increase the length of a genome, then you haven't really tried to understand the basics, have you? You could have gotten hold of a book called something like Introduction To Genetics and read it, but you didn't, did you?Now, don't get me wrong, I like your style. It's a nice try. Only ... you're basing your argument not on facts that scientists have discovered, but on things that you vaguely think are true but you can't really say where you got your "facts" from. Every time I do that, I make a fool of myself --- and just 'cos you think God is on your side ... well, God won't save you from making mistakes.---Let me give you a non-religious example. I talked with a woman who was going to completely destroy the idea that bad diet is a major cause of heart disease. Her argument was that the people of New Guinea have more heart disease than anywhere in the world, and they don't eat a western diet.A couple of minutes with google would have been her friend. The people of New Guinea have the unhealthiest diet in the world, they shovel down corned beef and buffalo wings like there's no tomorrow. They eat fat and salt like there's no tomorrow ... which in many cases there isn't.Before she cited her "fact" she should have made sure that it was a fact. Otherwise her argument might have convinced her, and it might have convinced people ignorant of the facts, but it's never going to convince people who know the facts.--- You've got to get it right. I'm not closed-minded, maybe if you try really hard to debunk evolution you will succeed. I'm rooting for you. But you have to do so with respect to real facts that are actually true, not by appealing to stuff that you kind of think that you're fairly sure that you've heard somewhere.

But your concept is trying to be quantitative. Your concept is that so-and-so many generations have passed, and so such-and-such an amount of evolution can't have taken place.So if your numbers are no good --- if, as you yourself admit, "of course the lengths are bogus", then you don't have an argument. You don't have a quantitative argument against evolution if you yourself admit that your numbers are "bogus".

Well, you didn't actually ask the "underlying question", which is why I didn't address it.Some calculations have been done. For example, you mention the eye: you might want to look at Nilsson and Pelger's paper: "A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve".I'm not sure that anyone's tried to make an estimate of how long the whole thing would take. I think if anyone tried,they'd have to make so many guesses that by the time they'd added up all the vagueness they'd be lucky to get within a couple of orders of magnitude; whereas using radiometric dating you actually get the right answer. But you have to take into account the generation time, is my point. Which is just one of the things you'd have to guess at. If you look at (for example) one-celled eukaryotes, you get quite a wide spread of generation times, depending on species and environment. Then we might ask ourselves how this would apply to primitive one-celled eukaryotes. It would not be unreasonable to speculate that the earliest, crudest versions took ten or even a hundred times longer to reproduce than the modern versions. And then you've got two orders of magnitude of potential error right there. And I pointed out why it wouldn't. Well, you sounded more sure of yourself then than you do now. I thought I was being tactful. This is admittedly something I'm not good at.

Wikipedia says it's "an octoploid and suspected allopolyploid hybrid of four species". So its genome has been duplicated twice, and also is made up of the genomes of several different species of plants which have bred together by a weird genetic accident, each donating its entire genome to the mix rather than half each as in normal reproduction.It's stuff like this that, again, makes it hard to figure out how long the evolution of something ought to take --- because we couldn't figure out a priori that this stuff would happen on the way to Paris japonica, we have to look after the fact and note that it did.In the same way, it's perfectly possible that one of the things that happened on the way to humans was the lateral gene transfer of the entire genome of one species of single-celled organism to another, doubling the genome size at a single stroke. When calculating how long our genome took to evolve, what can we say about such an event except that it did happen or it didn't? So there's more room for some more error.

I know that that can happen within species, I don't know if it's ever happened between species (I mean the transfer of an entire genome, partial transfers are common). But I don't see why it shouldn't.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I'm not sure exactly what more the science community should be doing. The information is out there, there are books, there are websites --- should they also be going round knocking on doors asking: "Have you heard the good news about genetics?"

I don't think it's remotely like that. It's not like that because the nuts and bolts of the subject aren't in fact abstruse mathematical concepts, but something much more graspable by intuition; the underlying bits and pieces are just normal objects only smaller, and the abstraction in the subject actually makes it simpler, since it involves saying things like: "OK, ignore the biochemistry of how a ribosome works, and let's think about what it does." Instead of abstracting to an four-dimensional integral of a tensor expression or whatever, it's more like abstracting the way a car works by saying: "Without going into details, let's just say the engine produces rotary motion and leave it at that for the moment."That it's complicated is true, but it's the sort of complexity we can cope with, because it's only complicated because there are a lot of processes to be taken into account. In that sense it's complicated, but that doesn't really make it difficult. It's like my "introduction to geology" thread. What makes geology complicated is that there are lots of geological processes. Most of them are fairly easy to understand. Wind transports sand. Glaciers drop rocks when they melt. Coccoliths sink. And so on.