The Evolution Cycle: Watch Out For That Last Step, It’s a Doozy

Just Like the Movies

You know the pattern: First they deny the evidence and blackball, then they acknowledge with caveats, and finally they incorporate the evidence and celebrate. First you’re told you don’t know what you’re talking about, and then you’re told they knew it all along. But beware of that final phase, for as with the Star Wars bar fight scene, when the dust settles nothing has changed. It’s the same old lies, just with new data. Or as Ned Ryerson put it, “It’s a Doozy.” To wit, here is Denis Noble’s new paper on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetics, physiology, and all that, where Noble admits there was denial but, in fact, evolutionists really knew it all along and, in any case, evolution will simply subsume the once denied evidence anyway:

The “Modern Synthesis” (Neo-Darwinism) is a mid-twentieth century gene-centric view of evolution, based on random mutations accumulating to produce gradual change through natural selection. Any role of physiological function in influencing genetic inheritance was excluded. The organism became a mere carrier of the real objects of selection: its genes. We now know that genetic change is far from random and often not gradual. Molecular genetics and genome sequencing have deconstructed this unnecessarily restrictive view of evolution in a way that reintroduces physiological function and interactions with the environment as factors influencing the speed and nature of inherited change. Acquired characteristics can be inherited, and in a few but growing number of cases that inheritance has now been shown to be robust for many generations. The twenty-first century can look forward to a new synthesis that will reintegrate physiology with evolutionary biology.

That would be a new new synthesis. Actually a new new new new new new synthesis, but who’s counting? Like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, evolution rises up every time after getting shot down by the evidence. Non random genetic change that responds rapidly to environmental shifts? No problem, evolution did it. It’s a Doozy.

Look at This Incredible Insect Wing Design

A Rational Design

It is intuitively obvious that insect wings, such as these shown from the desert locust, did not evolve from random chance events as evolutionists insist they did, and new research is helping to elucidate the underlying reasons. One glance at the insect wings pictured here reveals something special, but what is it? There is a definite pattern revealed by the crisscrossing veins and the new research demonstrates that the cells formed by the intersecting veins are optimized to minimize the weight of the wing while maximizing the wing’s resistance to cracks. Specifically, the cell’s are sized according to the so-called “critical crack length” which is the length at which a crack becomes a structural threat—a property of the wing material. Cracks shorter than this length tend not to grow and so need not be stopped. So the mechanical properties of the wing material (cuticle), and the structural design of the veins, work together to form an optimized wing. As the research concluded:

the biomechanical properties and the morphology of locust wings are functionally correlated in locusts, providing a mechanically ‘optimal’ solution with high toughness and low weight.

The research also found that distribution of the cell size across the wing followed the pattern of smaller cells tending to cluster along the wing edges where cracks might be more likely to begin. As one of the researchers concluded:

Thanks to this precise spacing of the cross veins, the cracks are always stopped before they can reach this critical length and start growing themselves. Nature has found a mechanically “optimal” solution for the locust wings, with a high toughness and a low weight.

It is another example that, as William Bialek has pointed out, biological designs are rational. That is, rather than explaining that the species are the way they are because that is the way they happened to evolve, the species have designs that can be understood according to the underlying engineering and physics principles.

And so using this rational, mathematical, approach to biology the researchers were able to do something that consistently eludes evolutionists—produce a successful prediction:

An optimal cell size of a grid-like structure such as the wing can be predicted using the “critical crack length” of the membrane, which is determined by the material’s fracture toughness and the stress applied. … An “optimal” wing cell should have a diameter of around 1132 µm. Is this the case in locust wings? Our results show that the distribution of the wing cell size in locust wings corresponds very well to this prediction, with the most common wing-cell “class” being between 1000 and 1100 µm.

These wing designs enable the desert locust to achieve tremendous feats of flying, and the designs are yet another example of evolution’s anti-realism. Biological structures certainly appear to be designed but, evolutionists insist, it is a case of false appearances. The designs are that way because that is how they happened to evolve. That, evolutionists say, is a scientific fact that we must not question.

That “Inexorable March of Science” Has Finally Reached its Goal

But to the Victors Go the Spoils

Aristotle explained how objects in the sky move laterally whereas objects here on Earth move vertically, but how did it all start? The philosopher needed his Prime Mover to avoid an infinite regress in motion. The Unmoved Mover initiated motion without any prior motion. Isaac Newton overthrew Aristotle, but while the physicist’s new laws explained cosmic motion, they did not explain how the cosmos originated. For that a Creator was needed. Immanuel Kant provided an early version of how the cosmos could have evolved, but he remained in awe of the moral law within. Charles Darwin explained how the species, including any so-called moral laws, evolved, but how did life begin? Did not the Creator breath to life “a few forms”? In the twentieth century evolutionists explained how life could begin, but cosmologists discovered that the universe itself had a beginning. Did not that mean there was an Initiator? Now finally in the twenty first century cosmologists such as Lawrence Krauss explain how even the universe and its natural laws could have originated. It is the ultimate example of something from nothing.

To be sure evolutionists will agree that these great breakthroughs can be improved. Researchers don’t know everything and there are always details to be explored. But nonetheless the inexorable march of science is undeniable. Do not plug God in to handle the unsolved problems, they warn, for one day, in its inexorable march, science will replace your “God of the gaps.”

Well now that warning appears to have reached its ultimate fulfillment. If everything came from nothing then it is pretty obvious that the naturalistic origins narrative has succeeded. That inexorable march has finally reached its goal.

There’s just one problem: None of this is real.

That is, there is no “inexorable march” of science providing scientific explanations for the origins of the world. What Kant provided were powerful religious arguments for why God never would have designed or created the solar system. Kant then added to this a few bits of vague speculation of how the sun and planets formed by themselves. After Kant cosmologists never looked back.

Likewise for Darwin. The Sage of Kent issued all manner of theological mandates for the naturalistic origin of the species. And ever since 1859 those mandates have only become stronger.

This isn’t science, this is religion. Yes there is an “inexorable march,” but it is not of science but rather of religion wrapped in a scientific patina.

Evolutionists insist there is no teleology, no final causes and no design. The world must have arisen by itself. Imagine you have a box with nothing in it. Then later there is an entire universe inside the box, with all manner of cosmic structures and life forms of untold complexity. This, according to evolutionists, occurred. The universe and everything in it arose spontaneously.

Evolutionists view their work and results as a great triumph. But their triumph is their very downfall, for their religious mandates have led to absurdity.

To the victors go the spoils.

Evolution: A Course for Educators

Now You Too Can Be Indoctrinated

Evolutionist Joel Cracraft’s course Evolution: A Course for Educators is “informed” by those Next Generation Science Standards. That reminds us of how after the 2005 Dover trial, kangaroo-court Judge John Jones explained that his education for the case came from popular culture. And in this case, “popular culture” means evolutionary lies:

When I went to law school in the late ’70s, I followed the progression of cases that we talked about before. I understood the general theme. I'd seen Inherit the Wind. 

For anyone, much less a federal judge, to cite Inherit the Wind as a legitimate, educational resource reveals how deeply evolutionary thought and its lies have penetrated the culture. The only educational value of Inherit the Wind is its lesson in evolutionary lies, and just how far they will go.

You see the main tools of evolutionists are lies, and if evolution is to survive they must indoctrinate students with those lies, and if students are to be indoctrinated then teachers must first be indoctrinated. Enter Joel Cracraft who will teach educators about the “evidence” that supports evolution. While he is at it perhaps he can include the “evidence” that supports blood-letting and the flat Earth.

Oops, Feathers Came Before Flight

Another Revolution in our Knowledge of Evolution

Your evolution instructor informed you that feathers evolved so creatures could fly but now it seems that could not have occurred. As a new paper explains:

Until recently, evolutionary hypotheses envisioned their [feathers] origin through elongation of broad, flat scales driven by selection for aerial locomotion such as gliding or flapping flight. Over the course of the past two decades, fossil discoveries, especially from northeast China, have revealed that the early precursors of feathers were filament-like rather than expanded scales and that branched pinnate feathers of modern aspect predate the origin of active flight. The revolution in our understanding of feather evolution continues, driven by rapid fossil discoveries and by new information from the study of extant birds.

So in other words, feathers evolved, and as luck would have it they were a great solution for flight. So with feathers already available, flying later evolved. Evolution got lucky again. And here all along we thought feathers evolved so creatures could fly.

It’s another giant leap forward in our knowledge of how the world came to be. It is literally a revolution in our knowledge of evolution. But how, on the one hand, can our knowledge be so flawed while, on the other hand, we can know for certain that evolution is a fact?

ATPsynthase: A Case Study of Evolutionary Blowback

What Goes Around Comes Around

A generator converts water pressure behind a dam into electrical energy and at the molecular level ATPsynthase converts proton “pressure” behind a membrane into chemical energy. ATPsynthase is a fantastic machine and it hardly conjures up images of chance mutation and spontaneous evolution doing the creating. Yet that is precisely how evolutionists reflexively describe it.

When I pointed out this basic problem an evolutionist scathingly criticized me for issuing “propaganda” and  ignoring “scientific facts.” And what were those “scientific facts” that I was ignoring? He cited a paper describing the evolution of these types of machines. The paper is even entitled “The evolution of A-, F-, and V-type ATP synthases and ATPases: reversals in function and changes in the H+/ATP coupling ratio.”

From the title it might appear that evolutionists have already solved the problem of how these fantastic molecular machines evolved. After all, does the paper not demonstrate “the evolution of … ATP synthases and ATPases”?

Unfortunately this is an all too common misinterpretation of the evolution literature. It is important to understand evolutionary thought and the genre of literature that has grown around it. Evolutionists believe evolution is a fact, no less than gravity, cancer or the roundness of the earth. In other words, evolution may be false but only if our entire existence is some sort of fiction.

Such certainty that the world arose spontaneously from random chance events lies at the foundation of evolutionary thought and its literature. From popular works to textbooks to research papers, evolution is simply assumed from the outset. The evolution literature does not demonstrate or prove that evolution occurred. It does not confirm the fact of evolution. Rather it presupposes the fact of evolution.

This explains how research papers such as the one above can speak of “The evolution of A-, F-, and V-type ATP synthases and ATPases” without explaining how such wonders actually evolved. The machines are simply assumed to have evolved.

From there, this paper explores what must have occurred in order for such evolution to occur. Functions were gained, functions were lost, genes evolved, devolved, turned on and off, and so forth. It would be like explaining that automobiles evolved from motorcycles by adding some tires, increasing the engine size, and making a few other changes.

Of course this does not prove or demonstrate evolution. Rather, it is a high-level discussion of how evolution must have worked, assuming that it did work.

Unfortunately students too often misunderstand the evolution genre. They see research papers such as this one and think that evolution has been demonstrated and confirmed. Instead, the initial belief that evolution is true drives the interpretation of empirical evidence and its presentation, leading readers to false conclusions. There is no “fact” of ATPsynthase evolution, in this or any other paper. Rather, it is the ultimate example of blowback.

Religion drives science and it matters.

ATPsynthase: It’s Elegant, It’s Conserved, It’s Magnificent, It’s Efficient, It’s Fast, It’s Reversible … It Evolved?

Worshipping the Creation

Still think the world evolved? Wondering why anyone would doubt the unquestionable fact that random chance events created everything? Well there’s nothing like an ATPsynthase animation to awaken one out of one’s slumber. Or you can believe ATPsynthase, and everything else for that matter, just spontaneously self-assembled billions of years ago for no reason in some warm little pond from various parts that, as luck would have it, just happened to be “lying around,” and subsequently was “selected” by no one or no thing and has been with us ever since. That’s just good solid scientific research.

Do Genes Switch Between Opposing DNA Strands For Adaptive Purposes?

As Luck Would Have it

In recent decades biologists have discovered that organisms possess a variety of adaptation mechanisms far more sophisticated than ever imagined. Some of these mechanisms are regulatory in that they influence which genes are used at a given time. Other mechanisms change the genes themselves by mutating the DNA sequences. These adaptive mutations respond to the current environmental challenge and such findings contradict contemporary evolution’s view that mutations are blind to need and are preserved only by the action of natural selection. Now, new research suggests yet another adaptive mutation mechanism.

The DNA double helix consists of two long strands wrapped around each other. Protein-coding genes can be on either strand, but one strand is more prone to mutations. This is because on that strand the DNA copying (replication) machine and the gene copying (transcription) machine move in opposing directions, and so head-on confrontations can occur. The new paper makes good arguments that these confrontations result in a higher mutation rate for genes on that strand.

Yet there are many genes on the “head-on” DNA strand. Why would that be? The new paper provides multiple evidences that not only these genes have incurred more mutations than normal, but that those mutations have often been helpful. That is, those mutations often have been adaptive.

So the paper hypothesizes that those genes are in the “head-on” orientation for good reason. They were genes that needed more mutations. The authors hypothesize a “replication–transcription conflict-mediated mutagenesis” strategy where genes that the organism particularly needs to modify are in the “head-on” DNA orientation.

This new hypothesis is not without its questions. For instance, while the “head-on” genes seem to reveal elevated levels of adaptive mutations, they do not show higher levels of mutations that do nothing to the protein’s amino acid sequence (the so-called synonymous mutations). Synonymous mutations are normally taken to reflect the underlying mutation rate. So if the mutation rate is higher due to a “head-on” orientation, then one would expect the synonymous mutation rate to be higher. That is standard evolutionary reasoning.

Another question is how and why do the genes switch from one DNA strand to the other, in the first place? In other words, this new strategy requires that genes switch from one strand to the other at some regular frequency. Whatever the mechanism, it must perform this switching at a rate that is not too low (or else very few genes would ever switch and evolutionary experimentation would be impossible) and not too high (or else the distribution between strands would be more random).

Finally there is, once again, the issue of serendipity. Under this new hypothesis evolution must have created a gene strand switching mechanism with an appropriate frequency. Such a mechanism would not provide any fitness improvement immediately. Instead the mechanism would set about switching, at random, genes from the strand they are on to the opposing strand.

And any such switches would also fail to provide fitness improvement immediately. But over time, some switches would help when certain genes undergo higher mutation rates. All of this means that evolution would have to create a sophisticated mechanism that only much later would provide benefit.

A typical explanation is that the new mechanism was simply a result of the combining of existing parts that were “lying around.” But this does nothing to reduce the serendipity involved. The bottom line here is that the new evidence forces evolutionary theory to take on even more complexity and serendipity. Evolution creates evolution.

More Warfare Thesis Lies, This Time From CNN

The Battle Continues

When nineteenth century evolutionist Andrew Dickson White constructed a false history of science, casting evolutionists as the latest in a long history of heroic truth seekers who faced religious intolerance and opposition at every turn, he set in motion a powerful genre that would be difficult to stop. From White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom to the mythical Inherit the Wind, a fictional account of the famous 1925 Monkey Trial that evolutionists use to indoctrinate students such as Judge Jones, to today’s pundits and even President Obama, the false Warfare Thesis, which pits religion against science, is too powerful and alluring to allow the truth to get in the way. And so it is no surprise that with all the news surrounding the new Pope taking charge, evolutionists would be sure to reinforce and remind everyone of their whig history we are supposed to believe. Enter Florence Davey-Attlee and her recent CNN piece where she wrote, among other things that:

Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher who argued that the universe was infinite, was burned at the stake.

The key to a good lie is to leverage the truth as much as possible. In this instance, we have two truths juxtaposed to make a lie. You see Bruno did argue for an infinite universe, and he was burned at the stake. But those are two distinct and separate facts. The implication is that the Church burned Bruno at the stake because of his scientific investigations about the universe—a perfect example of the Warfare Thesis. And it is a perfect example because it is false, as is the Warfare Thesis. But that doesn’t mean evolutionists won’t teach it.

The Kermit Gosnell Trial is Finishing Up

But the Media is Avoiding it

Ideas have consequences and evolution, the most influential theory in the history of science, has plenty of them. In addition to science, evolution influences such fields as public policy, media, education, history, philosophy, law, medicine and health care. Evolutionary thought is ubiquitous and underlies assumptions that may seem to be completely unrelated to the origin of species. On the other hand the path to evolution is sometimes easier to trace. For example, evolution encourages a reductionist, materialistic view of life. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” proclaims the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But with evolution the Creator is distant and aloof, more like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover whose main function is simply to initiate motion so we can avoid the problem of an infinite regress. Life just happened to happen. It seems there is no divine spark and consequently life loses an inherent and important property—those God-given unalienable Rights. So not surprisingly it was only a few short decades after Darwin that evolutionists were ramping up the modern eugenics movement. And not long behind was the abortion movement. When I explained the link between evolution and today’s abortion movement evolutionists had two responses. First, they vigorously denied any such link. Second, they vigorously defended abortion. It was another example of an internal contradiction within evolutionary thought which this week is on display in the final phases of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell.

It had all the making of the Trial of the Century. Gruesome and gory murders of innocent babies that are alleged to have been done over many years and with the full knowledge of assistants, peers and even government regulators. The implications are staggering and the trial provided a stream of increasingly shocking daily updates to keep the story alive. It is the kind of trial the media loves. There was only one problem: it was all about abortion.

You may not have heard much about Kermit Gosnell and his murder trial, for the media coverage has been spotty at best. And what coverage there has been has often been more euphemistic than factual. Consider Vivian Yee’s piece for last Sunday’s New York Times which described Gosnell as a doctor charged with killing “viable fetuses.”

For most people what Yee refers to as “viable fetuses” are simply “babies.” But evolutionists use euphemistic terminology to avoid the problem that abortion is a violation of the right to life. In fact the concept of viability is a long-standing attempt to rationalize abortion. Viability refers to the ability of a baby to survive outside the mother’s body. If the baby cannot survive then, so goes the argument, it has no right to life.

You can see the connection with evolution for which death and survival are key. It is natural selection and the survival of the fittest as those that are strong live and participate in evolution, whereas those that are weak die off. Jesus said “Blessed are the meek” but evolution celebrates the strong. As Nietzsche warned, it is the weak “who most undermine life among human beings.” If the baby cannot survive on its own, then it has no right to life.

The Gosnell trial reveals fundamental problems with evolutionary thought. Don’t count on hearing about it on the nightly news.

Evolutionists Are Now Saying They Have Solved the Problem of Evolvability

More Government Waste

It is remotely possible that Joel Lehman’s and Kenneth Stanley’s new paper on evolvability might have some useful, practical application. Perhaps it could help in designing better self-learning systems. Or maybe it could lead to improved training software. I certainly hope it leads to something useful because I paid for it—me and my fellow taxpayers. Unfortunately the paper appears to be yet another waste of taxpayer’s hard earned money in support of the unscientific, religiously-driven belief that the entire world of biology, and everything else for that matter, arose by itself.

One of the fundamental scientific problems with evolution is that in order for evolution to occur, there must be something already existing to evolve. Darwin imagined how one species could evolve into another, but from where did the first one come?

Evolutionists have usually handled this existence problem by either ignoring it or by using vague speculation about how life somehow first began. And if you can go that far, then from there it is all about mutations randomly altering DNA nucleotides and sometimes getting lucky with a better design.

What that simply-sounding narrative doesn’t fully explain is the context of those DNA mutations. For DNA exists in a genome, and genomes are immensely complicated. And furthermore the evolution of new species occurs within populations.

So the existence problem is more than some heritable material in some sort of self-replicating organism. There are genomes, genes, and populations as well.

But that is only the beginning of the existence problem. For in recent decades evolutionists have had to construct a far more bizarre version of evolution in response to scientific findings. For instance, if evolution is true then it must occur via profoundly complex molecular machines and mechanisms. These include horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and regulatory networks.

In other words, we must believe that evolution created unbelievably complex designs which then created more evolution.

Evolutionists call it evolvability, and that is the topic of Lehman’s and Stanley’s new paper. It has been a huge problem for evolutionists to explain this serendipity on steroids, but according to Lehman and Stanley the whole problem is actually rather trivial.

In recent years evolutionists have tried to explain how evolvability evolves because it is needed. In other words, evolvability arises as a consequence of competition. Of course that doesn’t actually explain how horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and regulatory networks evolved.

And so fortunately for evolutionists, Lehman and Stanley have now solved the problem. The answer is that evolvability just kind of happens by itself (sound familiar?):

The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse. When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past. The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure.

Well that was easy. Thankfully a devastating theoretical problem for evolution has now been resolved. And how did Lehman and Stanley make their profound discovery? Well they, err, wrote a computer program that used a simplified simulation of the evolutionary process. No actual real-life species were modeled.

In fact, those thorny mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and regulatory networks were not explicitly modeled either.

Instead, they used a conceptual algorithm.

That is not to say it was not a complex computer program. The team had to work hard at designing and developing the program. And of course it was written in a language. A language for which there is an interpreter within the computer that translates the program into a low-level set of instructions the computer can understand.

And of course the entire experiment required the computer itself. It also required the electrical energy to run the computer.

In short, a tremendous level of technology, design and labor were required to demonstrate that the most complex structures known, indeed all of biology, required no such technology, design or labor. The biological world just happened to arise, all by itself.

So problems such as evolvability are now known not to be problems after all. That even though the experiment bears little if any resemblance to the real world that evolution would have had to work in. Here is the paper’s final conclusion:

In this view increasing evolvability may simply be an inevitable result of open-ended exploration of a rich genetic space. Importantly, in nature this passive drive towards evolvability may have bootstrapped the evolution of the genotype-phenotype map itself. That is, the genotypic code and biological development themselves are encoded within organisms, and mutations that alter the structure of the genetic space or genotype-phenotype map may also lead to more or less phenotypic possibilities. In this way, the emergence of a complex evolvable genotypic code and biological development may have been bootstrapped from far simpler reproductive processes by similar non-adaptive mechanisms. In other words, there may be no selective benefit for development or a complex genetic system, which may do no more than potentiate greater phenotypic possibilities. In this way the story of biological evolution may be more fundamentally about an accelerating drive towards diversity than competition over limited resources.

Evolvability may be an inevitable result of open-ended exploration of a rich genetic space? I recently paid my taxes and it is disturbing to see public funds wasted on such junk science.

Here is That Fish With Clear Blood

Another Falsification

Unlike most areas of science which ask “how?,” evolution, as Ernst Mayr was fond of pointing out, asks “why?” And these days evolutionists are asking themselves why a fish has clear blood. Yes the Ocellated Ice Fish (see the above video) has no hemoglobin. That makes it unique among all the organisms with bones. Hemoglobin is an incredible molecular machine that consists of two pairs of proteins all working together. In humans it transports oxygen from the lungs to the tissues and returns with carbon dioxide to be released. And for evolutionists, hemoglobin has been a textbook example of how the twentieth century’s molecular evidence confirms the fact of evolution. That has always been a problematic claim, but now even more so.

For decades it has been textbook orthodoxy that genes and proteins, when compared between different species, confirm the expected evolutionary pattern. For example, evolutionists George Johnson and Jonathan Losos in their biology textbook, The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008) tell the student that:

Comparing the hemoglobin amino acid sequence of different species with the human sequence in figure 17.7, you can see that species more closely related to humans have fewer differences in the amino acid structure of their hemoglobin. … Again, the prediction of evolutionary theory is strongly confirmed.

That is, and was in 2008, simply false. You can read more here. Below is another such claim by Johnson, this time co-authored with Peter Raven (Biology, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2004).

While the “predicted pattern” that Johnson and Raven celebrated has long since been falsified, the Ocellated Ice Fish takes the falsification to a whole new level. These textbooks provide unambiguous evolutionary predictions that are undeniably false.

And if a successful prediction is taken as confirming a theory, then the later falsification of said prediction must pose problems for the theory.

In fact this finding of a fish with no hemoglobin—which even evolutionists admit is a mystery—is yet another of myriad examples of biological observations that most definitely do not fit the “expected pattern.”

Biologists have now coined a new phrase for these ever mounting evidences: Lineage specific biology. Lineage specific biology refers to biological structures and other observations that do not fit into an evolutionary tree pattern but rather are unique to a particular lineage, or even species.

Perhaps evolutionists need to start asking themselves why they believe the world spontaneously arose, in spite of the scientific evidence.

Comparing Evolution to Empirical Observations Such as Gravity

Reveals How Primitive is Evolutionary Thought

In evolutionary thought there is a stark contrast between its scientific ambiguity and its metaphysical certainty. There are all kinds of problems in explaining how the world could have arisen on its own, and yet at the same time evolutionists constantly assure us that evolution is a scientific fact. For example, while Philip Ball urges his fellow evolutionists to admit that we don’t fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level he simultaneously presents the idea as a fact and bemoans those who doubt this new truth. But how can we be so certain the species originated spontaneously when our best attempts to explain how this could have happened continue to fall short? When I pointed this out an evolutionist rebuked me for making the elementary mistake of conflating the details of a theory with its truth value:

We don't fully understand how cancer works. Does that make cancer not a fact?

This rebuttal is worth examining not because it makes sense (it doesn’t) but because it is a standard response.

Evolution standard bearer Stephen J. Gould once compared the certainty of evolution with that of gravity:

Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.

Gould was not the first evolutionist to compare evolution with empirical observations such as gravity. Such comparisons date back practically to Darwin and they have not ceased since then.

This is remarkable because these arguments are fallacious and bankrupt. They tell us much more about the state of evolutionary thought than the supposed truth of evolution.

Whether the comparison is to gravity, or to cancer, or to any empirical observation, we consider it to be a fact because we can observe it. Whether or not we can explain it, and to what degree we can explain it, has no bearing on the observation itself. So Gould is correct that gravity does not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain it.

But we do not observe humans evolving from apelike ancestors. That is the claim of evolution, and it is a claim that suffers from substantial scientific problems. That is not a comment on evolution, it is a scientific fact.

Yes evolutionists do debate rival explanations for how the species originated, but there is no observation of evolution that “doesn’t go away” during the debate. There is no fact of evolution to fall back on while evolutionary explanations encounter scientific problems.

This fallacy in the evolutionist’s comparison with empirical observations is not subtle. In fact the fallacy is so trivial one is embarrassed for evolutionists. And yet there it is. Leading evolutionists have always and continue to use this utterly ridiculous argument. What is important here is not that the argument fails, but that evolutionists believe it is an effective defense of their untenable position. The argument fails in its defense of evolution, but it reveals how bankrupt and vacuous is evolutionary thought.

Evolutionist: Let’s Admit it, We Don’t Fully Understand How Evolution Works

But it’s a Fact Anyway

Philip Ball’s opinion piece in this week’s Nature, the most popular science magazine in the world, is news not because he stated that we don’t fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level, but because he urged his fellow evolutionists to admit it. On this 60th anniversary of the discovery of the DNA double helix, Ball reviews a few of the recent findings that have rebuked the evolution narrative that random mutations created the biological world. Unfortunately Ball fails to take his own advice and ends up doing precisely what he advises other evolutionists against—whitewashing the science.

For instance, evolutionists have had to resort to the explanation that rather than mutations tweaking the DNA’s protein-coding genes to create or improve protein functions, those mutations must have sometimes tweaked regulatory networks that control the expression of said genes. What Ball doesn’t mention is that this new epicycle relies on the prior existence of those regulatory networks and the protein-coding genes they control.

In other words, we now must believe that evolution first constructed the incredible genes and regulatory networks (for which there is no scientific explanation, but that’s another story) which then enabled evolution to proceed.

Such serendipity is unlikely, to put it kindly, but Ball presents it with a straight face:

In a sense this is still natural selection pulling out the best from a bunch of random mutations, but not at the level of the DNA sequence itself.

This is just silly. It is good that Ball admits that we don’t “fully understand” evolution, and it is a positive step for him to urge evolutionists to acknowledge this. But there is a reason why evolutionists avoid the implications of science.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Plant's Epigenome as Varied as Their Environments

A Big Challenge

You probably remember that an organism’s DNA is collectively referred to as the genome and that it contains genes that code for proteins. What you may not know is that the genome is tagged here and there with small molecules helping to determine which genes to express. These small molecules are collectively referred to as the epigenome and one recent study found a tremendous variation between the epigenomes in the same species of plant collected from different locations around the world. As one researcher explained:

We looked at plants collected from around the world and found that their epigenomes are surprisingly different. This additional diversity may create a way for plants to rapidly adapt to diverse environments without any genetic change in their DNA, which takes a very long time.

In other words, different specimens of a given species of plant, all with the same genome, had significantly different epigenomes.

Epigenetics is another example of how the species do not appear to have evolved. Evolution may be true or false, but the scientific evidence presents a great many challenges to the idea. Recall that under evolution the idea is that random biological changes that naturally occur and are inheritable, such as mutations in the germline, might luckily sometimes be an improvement to the organism’s fitness. In those cases the organisms with the change would likely be successful and procreate, thereby passing on the change to future generations.

But epigenetics challenges all this. First, the tagging of DNA does not naturally occur as mutations do. In order for an epigenetic change to occur and have any effect, there must be a small army of coordinated molecular machines that are working according to the same code. Some machines attach the tags according to external, environmental signals. Other machines remove or move the tags, again according to other signals. And yet other machines interpret the tags, thus influencing which proteins are expressed.

This is far more involved than a random mutation occurring that just happens to improve slightly how the organism works. In fact epigenetics would involve literally hundreds (and that is conservative) of changes required before any benefit would be realized.

The tagging machines not only need to be built, or adapted from other machines, but they need to know where in all the genome to place the tags. Likewise for the machines that remove and move the tags. In other words, it is not good enough merely to evolve the machines. They somehow much know where to place the tags given a spectrum of environmental signals.

And then the machines that interpret the tags would have to do so correctly. They would have to know what the tag means. So again, not only must these machines have evolved or adapted, but they must know what they are doing.

That is astronomically unlikely to occur according to our knowledge of science.

But that is not all. For even given such a miracle, such epigenetic tags would not be inheritable. And yet they are. So there are even more machines that must have arisen by chance to preserve the tags when the cell divides.

This brings us to yet another set of problems with epigenetics: the machinery described above is not inheritable unless is evolves in the germline. But in the germline it doesn’t do anybody any good. Only when it is a passed on to the progeny can it help.

But even then the epigenetics capability likely won’t help because this capability gives the organism the ability to respond to a wide range of environmental conditions—conditions that probably won’t even occur in the organism’s lifetime.

In other words, we must believe that an astronomically unlikely capability arose by chance and though most of it wasn’t helpful, it was preserved anyway. Then, in future generations, when a particular environmental shift occurred, the epigenetics came to the rescue.

These problems are highlighted by the new research discussed above, showing how the epigenetic tagging can be so different in the same species of plant, in different locations around the world. Those environments are very different, so the tagging is very different.

But the origin of the epigenetics machinery would have had to anticipate all these different environments, long in advance.

Simply put, this just doesn’t make much sense under evolution. Epigenetics goes against the evolutionary model. Not surprisingly, evolutionists resisted the early epigenetic findings. And when the findings became undeniable evolutionists downplayed their significance.

But these findings are an obvious and dramatic falsification of evolutionary expectations. And this problem comes after several other, equally vexing, problems, many of which were at least somewhat understood in Darwin’s time.

Epigenetics is an example of how the science does not bode well for evolutionary theory. But in evolution the science does not carry the day. The science represents a research problem to be worked out. Otherwise evolution is protected from such show-stoppers because evolution is known to be a fact from non scientific considerations. We may not know how epigenetics and a dozen other contradictions could have evolved, but we know they must have evolved.

For what about all the designs that make no sense, and all the designs that are harmful? No creator would have intended or created such a world. It must have evolved. That was Darwin’s argument and that remains the conviction today. As Stephen Jay Gould once explained:

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.

You see evolution is, quite literally, a religious theory. Sometimes people say evolution is a religious theory because it is so unlikely and therefore requires faith to believe it. Others say evolution is a religious theory because it is driven by atheism.

No, evolution is a religious theory because it entails religious claims about God. Claims that, to a great many people, seem to be a given. These claims, as in Gould’s quote above, are taken to be so obvious that they are in no need of explaining or defending. In fact, they aren’t even religious. They simply are.

And so evolutionists do not understand the objection. They do not understand why their theory would be considered to be religious. Are they not simply reasoning according to evidence and science?

Meanwhile, the science shows evolution to be astronomically unlikely.

Religion drives science, and it matters.