Human Evolution: Faster Than Lightspeed?
Draft sketch
Evolutionists believe humans and chimps descended from a common ancestor who existed perhaps ten million years ago (give or take millions of years). Let's look at how fast evolution would have to be occuring for this to be true.
Studies suggest that the level of divergence in genetic material between humans and chimps is around 3.8% (See "Apes & Humans 99% Similar?" factoid). Don't take that figure as gospel. However, it is a best estimate for the present time and likely roughly correct. (As an aside, I understand the maximum divergence among humans is roughly .12%.)
Now, let us assume chimps and humans each have evolved an equal amount since they diverged from a common ancestor. (Unequal divergence would just demand an even faster rate of evolution in one species, and equal divergence fits with the molecular clock hypothesis anyhow.) This would suggest that at least 1.9% of the information contained in human DNA has been evolved through a process of mutation and natural selection in roughly ten million years.
How much information does it take to code for a human being? You've probably all read estimates about how it would take 1,000 books of five hundred pages or so to contain the same amount of information as each cell of your body contains in the form of DNA molecules. That's the amount of information stored in 3,000,000,000 (that's three billion) base pairs of DNA found in each of our cells.
If 1.9% of this information has developed in the last 10,000,000 (ten million) years, that works out to 57,000,000 (fifty seven million) base pairs. In like manner, 57 million base pairs of new information would also have to develop among chimps.
This works out to a pace of 5.7 base pairs per year. If we assume the rather low figure of ten years, average, per generation, that works out to an accumulation of 57 base pairs of new information per generation, on average. That strikes me as an awful lot for an average (not extreme) value to be maintained over millions of years. That doesn't even consider the countless good mutations that would not survive to be incorporated into the gene pool (for by no means is it guaranteed that a helpful mutation will survive once it is first formed).
Without even considering any other challenges to the formation and propagation of new information, is it reasonable to believe such a pace could happen and beachieved and maintained by natural, evolutionary processes? The evolutionist geneticist J.B.S. Haldane asked this question half a century ago. Haldane's Dilemma, as it has come to be known, is based on the discovery that humans and other higher vertebrates cannot have evolved within the "brief" time spans of millions of year alloted by the evolutionary timescale. Haldane's Dilemma stands as a disproof to the standard genetic model for evolution and that fact has been ignored and obscured for too long.
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