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Date
May102021
May
05
May
10
10
2021
Time
19:00:00
Locale
Online Event

Evolution: How Long Would It Take?

An Engineer’s Perspective

The Science and Culture Network Chapter in Colorado invites you to join a webinar on evolution with chapter officer Tom Siewert.

Engineering involves putting together a functional system from disparate components. Thus, it is directly opposed to the action of entropy: the tendency for systems to go to greater disorder. Perhaps this explains why many engineers have difficulty accepting the evolution of complex structures in organisms by random chance. Instead, many engineers intuitively see design behind the incredible complexity of even simple organisms. When evolutionists respond to this issue, they usually counter it by using the powers of trillions of organisms and billions of years. We will construct a simple model to decide whether this is enough time.

Why haven’t you heard or read about this approach before? Well, most biologists have less understanding of the probabilities involved (than most engineers), while most mathematicians have little comprehension of the complexity of the biology. With an engineering mindset, we will take some biological data and combine it with some simple statistics to try to understand what it would take.

When

Monday, May 10, 2021 at 7:00 PM

The event is free and no registration required, but the meeting is limited to 100 participants.

Contact

SCN Colorado Chapter
scncolorado@discovery.org

Speaker

Tom Siewert is trained as a Materials Engineer. As such, he has worked on the development of systems, as well as the investigation of why some high-visibility structures failed. This has given him a perspective on how systems must be designed carefully for robust operation. Along with his wife Betsy, a Biostatistician, he has spent the past few years studying some of the incredibly complex, but tiny, structures we find in biology.