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Life is a very embarrassing problem for atheists. Life is so much more complicated than the world of dead matter that until Darwinism became popular most people had thought that life must have been designed and that the God of the Bible did it. These days however there is the theory of evolution and believers in this theory say that it can explain the origin of living things. When evolution is stated in just plain words it is a very attractive theory to many people because it seems to present a reasonable theory of where all forms of life came from without the need for God. I used to believe in it since it was SCIENCE not RELIGION and science made sense but religion was mumbo-jumbo. Some time after becoming a Christian I looked more closely and found out that the case for evolution is being drastically over-stated by scientists. As it stands I can't find ANY compelling evidence for evolution, everything evolutionists offer up is either a fraud, a guess or a highly debatable opinion. At the true nuts and bolts level of the subject nothing suggests that evolution is a reasonable theory because every mathematical analysis that has been done shows that evolution is wildly improbable. Also in researching the subject I was surprised to find that mainstream scientists (not young Earth creationists) have actually produced evidence that life must have been the work of an intelligent designer. The case for evolution is as weak as the case for young Earth creationism and both evolutionists and young Earth creationists make the same fundamental errors. (For more on this see the additional pages: Eerie Similarities between Evolutionists and Young Earth Creationists and What Went Wrong?)
Belief in evolution comes in several forms. Atheists believe the mutations happened by chance so that there is no need for a God to explain the origin of life or guide the process of evolution. Other people will believe in evolution because supposedly there is a lot of science to back it up and because it does sound pretty reasonable when you look at it in just plain words. Some Bible believers fall into this category because they figure evolution supplies the details of how God created life on Earth. These people can be divided into two categories. One category believes that all of the mutations that were going on happened at God's direction. This is called theistic evolution. I think this should be called a form of creation instead.
The second category believes that all the evolution really was totally random. God set up initial conditions and then waited to see what happens. People who believe in the God of the Bible and evolution that proceeds at random are not on good ground theologically. First, of course it is given that the God of the Bible does have everything under his control, thus to say that evolution is random is to say that everything is not under his control and this is simply wrong. Moreover, the god who actually lets everything happen by chance is a god who does not really care about anyone at all. Who would want such a god? If humanity happened "at random" then God simply did not care enough to make us. Then all the good and bad happen at random and have no meaning or purpose? And if, at random, humanity ends up wiping itself out in a nuclear holocaust, it seems that the god who lets things happen at random won't care at all. I know of an evolutionist who believed in "god" but not the God of the Bible claim that God does things at random just to see what sort of surprises come up. I told him I thought his god was sick to favor petty surprises over the suffering of people. People who are interested in the God of the Bible want to feel His love and to love Him back. They want meaning, purpose and hope as well. How satisfying would it be to have a god who doesn't care for you? The god who does things at random does not match up with the God of the Bible at all. Evolutionists frequently assert they are only teaching Science in the schools but when they endorse the idea that things happen at random they are promoting either Atheism or a theology that goes against the Bible so either way they have crossed over into religion..
There is another interesting development going on in science these days that scientists are finding it difficult to appreciate. Results from physics in recent years actually points to the idea that our physical universe is already finished. The whole of it has to be there or else none of it will work. You can't have a now unless you also have a specific future already out there because the past, present and future are all inextricably connected. I like to say it like this: God figured it all out the way an author writes and book and then the whole universe was "published" just as a book is published once it is finished. So I think it won't be long before science has to concede that random simply isn't possible. But all this is a story for another page: Modern Physics and the Bible.
Some believers in evolution are committed enough to say that evolution is a proven fact while others will acknowledge there are serious problems that have to be overcome before evolution should be talked about as a fact. The people who acknowledge the problems simply have faith that a solution can be found that does not involve God.
Belief in creation comes in two different varieties. The most well-known variety is young Earth creationism. People here believe that God made the world and all living things about 6000 years ago. With a 6000 year old Earth there was clearly no time for any evolution to occur so to try to disprove evolution young Earth creationists try to prove the Earth really is 6000 years old. Also in this interpretation God made each species individually, probably materializing them out of thin air or moulding them from the dust of the Earth the way an artist might do a sculpture. Strangely enough some of them believe all life currently on Earth evolved from a small number of species that were on Noah's ark. It is pretty obvious that the ark was small and only a small number of species could have fit on it and therefore they guess that there was rapid evolution (!) of those few species after the ark landed. It is also strange to note that young Earth creationists are doing a splendid job of promoting evolution. In their zeal to promote a young Earth they come up with so much nonsense that evolutionists can easily discredit them and then what has happened is that everyone gets the idea that evolution must be true because young Earth creationism and the Bible are false.
But there is a second creationist position called old Earth creationism. Here you find Bible believers interpreting the Bible differently, the world is as old as science says it is but evolution by chance is wildly improbable. Within this viewpoint God is still responsible for the creation of all life. There are three possible ways He could have done the creation. First He could make all living things out of thin air or the dust of the Earth "like magic", all fully formed and finished from the very beginning. Second, he could make the drastic mutations that create radically new creatures using old creatures so for example one day a lizard might produce eggs that hatch into birds. Third, God might have proceeded as Darwin suggested and made small changes to existing species that accumulated over time to produce a new species. You should note that the fossil record does not support this last option, the smooth transitions are just not found. Some evolutionists have therefore proposed the punctuated equilibrium model to explain the missing links. God could then be behind the punctuated equilibrium model. Of course God could have used any combination of these three methods and so I find it is pointless to argue for one over all the others.
The old Earth creationist position is actually in good accord with what science has been uncovering in recent years. Scientists have found out that living cells are so complex (they are in effect miniature factories consisting of molecular machines) that it's extremely unlikely that cells could just happen by chance, they must have been carefully designed and built. Second, if you calculate the probability that evolution can produce the complex mechanisms and organs found in single and multi-celled creatures the chance is vanishingly small. Third the fossil record shows species appearing out of nowhere rather than appearing by the gradual changes proposed by evolution. The most dramatic example is the Cambrian Explosion where highly complex creatures appear out of nowhere in virtually no time at all, they appear so quickly that evolution is too slow a process to be a viable option to explain their appearance.
There is also another option for the origin of life on Earth but only a small number of people take it seriously. Astronomer and mathematician Sir Fred Hoyle has promoted the idea that snippets of DNA have been coming from outer space in showers of debris from time to time. Once the DNA arrives Hoyle found out that a tiny amount of evolution can occur but nothing like the scenario that evolutionists believe in. He and a few others believe that this model explains the history of life on Earth far better than evolution. Hoyle, now dead, has some followers who have set up a web-site to promote the idea that life came from outer space, see: http://www.panspermia.org
What follows on this page describes various details about life and the evolution vs. creation debate. Evolution has been a key item used by modern people to discredit the Bible and Christianity but evolution has nothing going for it while the evidence suggests that the old Earth creationist interpretation is the correct one.
Before worrying about how the evolution of life or the formation of the first cell could happen it is necessary to look at just what goes on inside a cell. By understanding how a cell works it will be pretty obvious to almost everyone that life did not happen by chance.
A living cell is a tiny factory filled with molecular machines. The components of each machine are protein molecules manufactured by the cell. The molecules fit together like Legos except the molecules come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Molecules of tubulin lock together to form hollow microtubules that form a skeleton for a cell and they help transport molecules throughout the cell. Other proteins lock together to form the cell membrane. Some called enzymes catalyze chemical reactions.
Proteins are quite interesting because they are very complex objects. Proteins are made by using directions encoded in DNA and RNA to string together 20 different amino acids in strings from 50 to 1000 units long. Then the string folds up. If you chain together 20 amino acids in strings 100 long there are 20^100 or about 10^130 possible combinations. The vast majority of such chains are not functional at all making them utterly useless. If you start stringing together amino acids at random your chance of hitting on a functional protein is fairly remote. In this page by Michael Behe: Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of Proteins to be Highly Isolated from Each Other he gives the result that if you start stringing together amino acids at random in strings 100 amino acids long you only have one chance in 10^65 of hitting on a functional protein. This rarity of functional proteins causes severe problems for the formation of living cells (abiogenesis) as well as for evolution. These problems will come up later.
Here I am just preserving Behe's references in case the above page goes away somehow:
1. Yockey, H. P. (1978) "A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory", Journal of Theoretical Biology 67, 377-398.
2. Lau, K. F., & Dill, K. A. (1989) "A Lattice Statistical Mechanics Model of the Conformational and Sequence Spaces of Proteins", Macromolecules 22, 3986-3994.
3. Chan, H. S., & Dill, K. A. (1990) "Origins of Structure in Globular Proteins", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 87, 6388-6392.
4. Bowie, J. U., & Sauer, R. T. (1989) "Identifying Determinants of Folding and Activity for a Protein of Unknown Structure", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 86, 2152-2156.
5. Bowie, J. U., Reidhaar-Olson, J. F., Lim, W. A., & Sauer, R. T. (1990) "Deciphering the Message in Protein Sequences: Tolerance to Amino Acid Substitution", Science 247, 1306-1310.
6. Reidhaar-Olson, J. F., & Sauer, R. T. (1990) "Functionally Acceptable Substitutions in Two -Helical Regions of Repressor", Proteins: Structure, Function, and Genetics 7, 306-316.
7. Yockey, H. P. (1981) "Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory", Journal of Theoretical Biology 91, 13-31.
A whole lot of work is needed here, a description of how a cell is designed and operates is called for. For the time being see for instance chapter 10 of Michael Denton's 1986 book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis or the appendix of Michael Behe's 1996 book. Darwin's Black Box. Or the appendix of Lee Spetner's book, Not by Chance.) Once a person appreciates how intricate a cell is you can't help but think that the first cell must have been more carefully designed than modern day computers.) You can also appreciate the nature of a cell and it's molecular machinery by looking at online examples by Michael Behe. The code for making and assembling the parts of a cell are in the DNA but the parts have to exist before the cell can make these parts. So here we have the classic problem to deal with: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Just a little background on the spur of the moment. DNA is copied to RNA and the RNA is used together with other molecules in the cell to actually make proteins.
DNA codes a lot of information and how all this DNA is used is is not yet fully understood. Some of the DNA in higher organisms codes for the production of proteins however there are also sequences that have been called "junk DNA" because when these sequences were first discovered this "junk" did not code for proteins. Evolutionists then pointed to the junk as evidence of bad design and proposed that the junk is left over from the evolutionary process. They also propose that new genes can form within this junk by random mutations. As time has gone by however more uses are being found for the "junk", for this reason it is now called noncoding DNA. The noncoding DNA seems to regulating the activity of the protein coding genes. A good review is: Genome 2.0: Science News Online, Sept. 8, 2007 In one case the noncoding DNA was found to influence animal behavior (see the press release by the National Institute for Mental Health: NIMH: Rodent Social Behavior Encoded in Junk DNA for the announcement of an article by Larry Young and Elizabeth Young in the June 10, 2005 issue of Science. Here are some other links on the usefulness of noncoding DNA see: http://www.junkdna.com. Here are some individual pages that review the uses that have been found for the noncoding DNA:
In addition the following paper: Systematic Analysis of Coding and Noncoding DNA Sequences Using Methods of Statistical Linguistics shows that the strings of noncoding DNA may be a language of sorts, though not a human-type of language. The result is not a proof that there is a language there but it is suggestive. If uses are found for all the noncoding DNA it is a neat way to disprove evolution because it would not leave any unused DNA around to generate new genes. Since generating new genes from random DNA sequences is extremely unlikely in the first place this proposal should have been a non-starter from the very beginning but as will be shown later on evolutionists don't believe in taking the mathematical analysis seriously so if you want to try to convince them that evolution is false you have to show it to them in a non-mathematical way.
"Junk DNA" is an example of a pattern of mis-information you get from evolutionists. People who believe in evolution to start with will take some new discovery or proposal to boost evolution before the situation is fully understood and then use it make converts. Years later when there is an explanation that is not favorable to evolution the new explanation will be largely ignored but the damage will have already been done, naive people will have accepted evolution on the basis of the mis-information. Of course by then evolutionists will have come up with some new piece of mis-information and use it to support their cause.
It is also fairly common for evolutionists to say that there is one DNA (genetic) code and claim that one code as evidence for evolution, as proof that all life descended from a common ancestor. There are two problems with this claim. The first problem is that the existence of one code doesn't prove anything. Maybe there is only one good way to code biological information and so the designer did not have any choice in the matter. And if there is more than one way of coding information a designer may still want to use just one coding scheme for some other reason. The existence of just one code would mean nothing, it cannot be used as evidence for evolution. On the other hand the existence of more than one code would be evidence against evolution and in favor of design.
The second problem with the one genetic code claim is that it is simply false, there are many DNA codes. It started in 1979 when an exception was found in the mitochondrial DNA of vertebrates and many other exceptions have been found since then. Experts expect many more codes to be found as more living things are studied. For a current listing see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Utils/wprintgc.cgi. The last I looked there were 17 different codes listed. So what we really have here with the multiple codes is evidence AGAINST evolution and in favor of design. This is also another case of evolutionists making a guess based on insufficient information and using it to promote evolution.
See also these pages on the subject:
This discovery puts evolutionists in a bad position but they naturally assume that the codes evolved. :-) Unfortunately for them the different codes leave evolutionists some interesting problems to resolve. First there is the matter of how the codes could evolve. If you change the code then a very large number of proteins will come out wrong and guarantee death for the organism. A lot of changes have to be coordinated across the entire organism to make this work. Second there is the question of why the codes should evolve at all. Vertebrates have one code for their nuclear DNA but a different code in their mitochondrial DNA. Why would two systems in identical environments need different codes? Why are two codes better than one? Then the invertebrate mitochondrial code is different from the vertebrate mitochondrial code yet vertebrates supposedly evolved from vertebrates. Why didn't the code simply get passed on as is? Some researchers noted that the code appears to be optimal in the sense of minimizing errors. For more persective see the article "Regegade Code" in New Scientist, vol 179, issue 2410, 30 August 2003, page 34. The cute thing about this article is that the yeast has done what scientists thought was impossible, make a radical change in it's code. Before they found it, it was impossible, and they could give you good reasons why, now, because it's happened they just accept that evolution could do it. A better explanation would be is that yeast was simply designed that way, but, no, that would be heresy.
Evolutionists will also often argue that the fact that all living systems so far known use the same 4 bases to code and the same 20 amino acids for proteins is evidence for common descent as well. There is a possible answer to this. In the following three papers:
DNA also contains structures called pseudogenes. Pseudogenes have often been used to promote evolution. Pseudogenes look much like normal genes but there are what evolutionists have been calling errors introduced into the gene that prevents it from coding for a protein. One of the most common instances that evolutionists cite is a pseudogene in humans and chimpanzees that looks an awful lot like a gene used in other animals to code for the production of vitamin C. Evolutionists have assumed that once upon a time some animal lower on the chain of evolution had a working copy that produced vitamin C but that copying errors destroyed that capability and this error has been passed on ever since. And of course they say that this is possible because if the environment contains enough vitamin C in it then a gene to produce vitamin C isn't really necessary. Actually, of course, it goes against something else evolutionists always say, they always say that when a favorable mutation occurs, "however slight" it is passed on to the rest of the species. Here we have a mutation that would hurt, so it is something that ought not to be passed on, the individuals with the working copy of the gene are the ones most fit to survive!
The pseudogene argument has been a reasonably good argument for random evolution and against intelligent design. The reasoning went as follows. Why would an intelligent designer put these errors into more advanced life forms? Isn't is more likely that once the error came up the error was simply copied into the new species? On the other hand it has only been a GUESS that the pseudogenes are errors in the DNA that produce useless genes and they GUESS that because the pseudogenes cannot produce proteins. But then, like the other DNA that once was called "junk" they could also be good for something. The first case of this was found in a supposedly useless pseudogene called makorin. See: ISCID Forums: An expressed pseudogene regulates the messenger-RNA stability of its homologous ...
Or taken from the May 6 weekly email update from http://www.bibleandscience.com
Nature 423, 91 - 96 (2003); doi:10.1038/nature01535
An expressed pseudogene regulates the messenger-RNA stability of its homologous coding gene
SHINJI HIROTSUNE, NORIYUKI YOSHIDA, AMY CHEN, LISA GARRETT, FUMIHIRO SUGIYAMA, SATORU TAKAHASHI, KEN-ICHI YAGAMI, ANTHONY WYNSHAW-BORIS & ATSUSHI YOSHIKI
A pseudogene is a gene copy that does not produce a functional, full-length protein. The human genome is estimated to contain up to 20,000 pseudogenes. Although much effort has been devoted to understanding the function of pseudogenes, their biological roles remain largely unknown. Here we report the role of an expressed pseudogene—regulation of messenger-RNA stability—in a transgene-insertion mouse mutant exhibiting polycystic kidneys and bone deformity. The transgene was integrated into the vicinity of the expressing pseudogene of Makorin1, called Makorin1-p1. This insertion reduced transcription of Makorin1-p1, resulting in destabilization of Makorin1 mRNA in trans by way of a cis-acting RNA decay element within the 5' region of Makorin1 that is homologous between Makorin1 and Makorin1-p1. Either Makorin1 or Makorin1-p1 transgenes could rescue these phenotypes. Our findings demonstrate a specific regulatory role of an expressed pseudogene, and point to the functional significance of non-coding RNAs.
Obviously given that this pseudogene has a use it now becomes likely that other pseudogenes are also useful. The pseudogene argument is thus turning into another case of biologists not understanding something and attributing it to evolution.
| People used to say that if you had a million monkeys and you gave them a million typewriters they would eventually produce all of Shakespeare's plays. Now thanks to the Internet we know this isn't true. |
| -- Robert Wilensky |
Once you appreciate the complexity of a cell most people will immediately conclude that the cell was designed. This corresponds to the old argument for the design of life from William Paley: if you were walking on a heath and you found a stone it is reasonable to think that it was formed by natural processes. However if you found a watch you would certainly attribute it to design. Of course evolutionists note that it is not possible to evolve a watch and then claim that it is reasonable to think that living things could have evolved. Alas, though, a cell is much more complicated than a watch and analysis indicates a cell can't be evolved just as a watch cannot be evolved. (Here's a link to a nice description of how cells duplicate themselves, when you see this sort of thing normal people realize life must have been designed: "Peering into Darwin's Black Box: The cell division processes required for bacterial life".)
The problems for the formation of life begin with the early Earth. Evolutionists ASSUME that the chemicals of life were present on the early Earth in what they call a prebiotic soup. Chance combinations of the molecules gave rise to more complex molecules that eventually were able to produce copies of themselves until finally a living cell appeared. There are multiple problems with this scenario. The first problem is that there is no evidence that there ever was a prebiotic soup on Earth and there is no reason to think that there could have been one. The prebiotic soup has been an assumption that has to be made and believed in or else evolutionists would have to admit life appeared by means of intelligent design. The second problem is that EVEN IF there was a prebiotic soup the formation of life is pretty unlikely.
Right here I have to cover the lack of evidence for the prebiotic soup.
| The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it .... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of Evolution. |
| -- Sir Fred Hoyle |
Right here I have to show how unlikely life is. There will be two strands to this. One, show that the direct formation of a living cell is darn unlikely. The reasons include the handedness of molecules, the inability to produce proteins in water and finally the unlikelihood of all the right proteins coming together. Even evolutionists agree with this however the number crunching that is involved will set you up for other analysis I do later. DNA and RNA make proteins yet proteins make DNA and RNA, the chicken and egg problem again.
The second strand is to note that evolutionists assume there were simpler replicating molecules that evolved into something more complicated and eventually became like our current form of life. Even this is unlikely because eventually the simple replicating molecules have to start forming genes that code for proteins and the formation of genes that produce proteins is highly unlikely.
Now here's a little bit of the problems involved in the origin of DNA and RNA. It's very unlikely the parts could have happened by chance. DNA consists of four bases that when strung together into a strand of DNA describe what proteins are made.
One of the problems with RNA is that part of it consists of a sugar called ribose (DNA uses deoxyribose, another sugar). No one has a clue what sort of chemical reactions in the prebiotic soup could produce this molecule. Moreover it is unstable in water and it will rapidly decay away. Sometimes people propose that in the beginning RNA used some sugar molecule other than ribose however research has not yet found a substitute and other people think the idea that there was a substitution is pretty unlikely. So if there's no ribose, there's no DNA, no RNA and no life at all. (See an interesting article: Creation-Evolution Headlines where a leader in the field, Stephen Benner is reported as joking that the problems involved in origin of life research are so hard he might have to become a creationist.)
A second interesting problem is that some molecules have an ordinary form called right handed and a mirror image form called left handed. In ordinary chemical reactions the molecules produced can be right handed or the mirror image, left-handed. All of life uses left handed molecules. How in the world did life manage to use all left-handed molecules if there were equal numbers of left and right handed molecules available in the alleged pre-biotic soup? Moreover when you place a right-handed base into DNA or RNA it ruins the molecule. No one can imagine any way for a chemical process to produce all molecules of the same handedness and no way to keep a molecule of the other handedness from stepping in and ruining the molecule. In the literature this is called the chirality problem. See the page: Evolution: Possible or Impossible? by Dr. James F. Coppedge
Next we will look at the idea that in the beginning there were simpler replicating molecules that evolved into more complicated systems that evolved into our current form of life. Research so far has not found any alternative DNA/RNA type molecule that can store information and given the requirements it seems unlikely that one will be found.
In chapter 1 of The Mathematics of Evolution Sir Fred Hoyle did an analysis of the evolution of organisms by division such as occur in bacteria. It applies equally well to the replicating molecules scenario that evolutionists believe in. The major result was:
Favorable mutations become swallowed in the flood of bad ones, as we have already noted above, so that systems which follow a single parent-to-offspring model cannot evolve in a Darwinian sense. The best that can be done is to hold the position, which is basically what bacteria have done for almost 4000 million years.
You also need to know that Hoyle shows in a later chapter of The Mathematics of Evolution that
It is only when the present asexual model is changed to the sophisticated model of sexual reproduction accompanied by crossover that the theory can be made to work even in the limited degree to be discussed in chapter 6.
This result has relevance for the pre-biotic soup as well. In the quote below lambda is the number of mutations per chromosome per generation.
This presents an insuperable problem for the notion that life arose out of an abiological organic soup through the development of a primitive replicating system. A primitive replicating system could not have copied itself with anything like the fidelity of present-day systems (on which the estimate of lambda ~= 0.3 depends). With only poor copying fidelity, a primitive system could carry little genetic information without lambda becoming unbearably large, and how a primitive system could then improve its fidelity and also evolve into a sexual system with crossover beggars the imagination.
Or in other words, what he said is that you can start out life with our present system but nothing less capable than the one we have would work, the errors produced by a lesser system would would lead to certain death for the organisms that used it.
Given the complexity of a cell it is incredible that at one point in time scientists were optimistic that a cell could form by itself. Here is one such burst of optimism from George Wald, a professor of biology and Nobel laureate (Scientific American, August 1954, quoted from Schroeder's book):
Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the "impossible" becomes the possible, the possible probable and the probably virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.
Unfortunately for Wald, in the 1970s fossilized cells as old as 3.5 to 3.8 billion years were found. This was immediately after the Earth had cooled to the point where liquid water was present, thus there was virtually no time available for random chemical reactions to form the first cell. Theoretical work also showed it would take considerably more than two billion years for the first cell to form by chance. Thus in 1979, Scientific American in a special publication called: Life: Origin and Evolution reprinted the article with a retraction written by C. Folsome:
Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book Energy Flow and Biology, computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of it's molecules were the only driving force.
The quote by Wald shows a fundamental error in the reasoning of evolutionists. Evolutionists routinely assume that a million years or a billion years will solve any problem however many of these scenarios are SO unlikely that millions or billions of years will not do the trick. Evolutionists frequently "neglect" to run the numbers and thus many improbable scenarios are accepted as reasonable even when they are effectively impossible. It appears to me that biologists are not even used to running the numbers in various scenarios the way physicists and engineers do and this failure to do logical reasoning with quantities enables them to accept anything with just an argument based on words that includes the phrase "millions of years".
| Q: | How many evolutionists does it take to change a light bulb? |
| A: | None. Evolutionists don't change light bulbs, they simply wait for the tungsten atoms to evolve back into to filament however unlikely that may be. |
People who want to keep God out of it were undaunted. One of them, Sir Francis Crick who shared a Nobel prize for the discovery and functioning of DNA said (copying from Schroeder):
Given the weaknesses of all theories of terrestrial genesis [the origin of life on Earth], directed panspermia [the deliberate planting of life on Earth] should still be considered a serious possibility.
Invoking life from outer space is iffy: if there was not enough time to evolve life on Earth there was even less time for life to form on some other planet and then for those intelligent beings to get it here. Some new theories of the origin of the universe say there could have been a universe before the Big Bang. Another option is that life of some other kind did evolve quickly somewhere within our universe, that form of life became intelligent and designed our very complicated form of life and they started seeding it into space.
Here is another lovely quote, this one from NASA scientist David McKay (NOTE):
Either life on Earth began whole, like the goddess Athena springing whole from the head of Zeus or it began somewhere else.
McKay's thought is that life could have originated on Mars and then was brought to Earth when asteroids hit Mars and the rocks from Mars landed on Earth. But again, given the amount of time necessary for a cell to form by chance it's unlikely life began there.
Here is a collection of quotes about the origin of life: http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/origins/quotes/OL.html
The term "mutation" is an unfortunate one to use when talking about evolution. In the beginning mutation referred to a significant visible change in an organism. A significant visible change can come about in two different ways. The first type occurs when DNA is copied and an error is made giving a new strand of DNA that does something that the original DNA did not do. This is the only category that is important for analyzing evolution. Most such mutations produce problems, usually fatal problems and not improvements. Moreover evolutionists will always tell you that any time a favorable mutation however slight comes up it will quickly be incorporated into the entire population however this is not true. Even a favorable mutation has only about 1 chance in 500 of spreading to the rest of the population (I'm using Lee Spetner's book for this result, he bases it on work done by some biologist, it's a math result.) In 499 cases out of 500 the improvement will be lost.
There are other mutations going on that simply involve turning on or off existing genes. These mutations can produce obvious visible results yet the DNA has not been altered. For evolution to produce new mechanisms in the cell you need some GENUINELY NEW DNA. For instance there are many different species of beetle in the world (God must have loved beetles because he made so many of them). Some of them are lightning bugs, flying beetles that flash at night to help males and females find each other. If you start with a beetle without the ability to light up you're going to need many new, never before seen genes to produce the lightning effect. I haven't run into a single case where scientists have observed the formation of many new genes that produce a really novel new feature in an organism.
Nevertheless evolutionists use mutations to make you think you think that evolution is plausible. For example in wheat there are many different genes that control protein production in the cell. When a mutation comes up by chance in a plant that turns on or off a gene involved in protein production and that change results in an increase in protein production then that plant can be bred with other such plants with increased protein production to produce a new variety with yet more protein in it than the parents had. You can get a virtual continuum of protein production this way. This makes it look like living things can be modified indefinitely to produce whole new species. But notice that these were genes that were present but unused to start with and the amount of variation you can get is strictly limited by what was there in the first place. As another example, consider the plant, Eustoma grandiflorum, one common name is the Texas bluebell, so yes, in the wild the flower is blue. But it is an attractive flower and breeders kept growing them and when an odd color like pink or white came up they start breeding those plants and thereby produced a whole new variety. The genes for these colors were there in the first place but they just don't get turned on or off very often. Likewise most dogs are thought to be descended from one original species but breeding has produced all sorts of different looking breeds but all the genes were there to start with.
There is Lee Spetner's idea that characteristics can be inherited by life forms passing on hormones not just DNA and the hormones control which genes are turned on or off. Hormones are influenced by environmental factors. Changes in environmental factors can quickly produce changes in a given population. This mechanism makes it appear that evolution can work very quickly but there is still no new DNA being produced. Some day I will probably put some of his examples here, in the meantime see his book, Not By Chance.
Evolutionists frequently invoke gene duplication followed by mutation, this topic is covered below. They are on thin ice.
Evolutionists frequently say genes can be transferred from organism to organism by viruses and bacteria however merely copying existing genes does not get you a new, useful gene. Only copying errors of various sorts are available to build up NEW genes and this process is quite ineffective.
One of the oft-cited examples of a beneficial mutation is the "mutation" that resulted in "nylon eating" bacteriums in two different species. I searched on this and found out that the bacterium isn't eating nylon at all, it is eating a water-soluable chemical associated with the manufacture of nylon. It has been claimed that the alleged mutation is the result of a "frame shift".
The alleged mutation has more recently been attributed to "plasmids". Bacteria store some of their DNA in little pieces called plasmids and they can exchange this DNA with other bacteria and so it may well be that the gene existed long before nylon was developed. See for instance the page: The adaptation of bacteria to feeding on nylon waste
In an article by Lee Spetner he has pointed out that two enzymes (two genes) are responsible for the ability to break down the nylon related chemical. The fact that two genes have to mutate makes the "it happened by chance" scenario less likely. Evolutionists will tell you that the second enzyme is due to a frame shift however Spetner points out there were also 140 point mutations, 47 of which change the protein. So a lot more went on than a frame shift. A frame shift is only one mutation and one mutation is pretty believeable and thus evolutionists like to talk about the frame shift but not about all the other mutations involved. The other mutations make the new enzyme highly unlikely to have happened by chance. This must be why evolutionists have been neglecting to mention the other mutations! Spetner calculated that the probability of just 6 of the 47 important mutations to have happened by chance in 30 years is 3 x 10 -35. Spetner thinks the environment triggered this mutation that was built-in from the start.
There is also the interesting result that in the laboratory one of the bacteria species developed the ability to break down the enzyme in less than 9 days! (Someone needs to compare the DNA of the lab experiment with the field experiments to see if the DNA is identical. If it is, it is strong additional evidence against random evolution.)
The numbers certainly tell us it didn't happen by chance yet evolutionists persist in thinking that things like this do indeed happen by chance, see the web page Evolution and INFORMATION - the Nylon Bug!. Mathematics is simply logical reasoning done with quantities but evolutionists quickly abandon math (i.e. REASON) when math does not produce the answer they want.
There is another interesting topic I need to study in detail before I can say a lot about it. Two frequently cited examples of evolution are 1) bacteria become resistant to antibiotics and 2) insects become resistant to insecticides. What happens in both cases however is that the mutations that protect the organism also make it less vigorous. Bacteria resistant to an antibiotic don't grow as quickly as the wild form. Insecticides typically hurt the insect's nervous system and make the insect less coordinated. When these new evolved varieties have to compete in the wild against the wild type they don't perform as well as the wild type, evolution therefore selects for the wild type and the "evolution" gets undone.
Another cute thing happens. It appears that a given species comes up with mutations that help it survive stressful conditions by turning on and off existing genes or as is the case in bacteria by plasmid transfer. If a species has this ability to cope with changing conditions then there is actually no need to evolve a whole new species!
Human genes and the genes of higher animals are more complex than the genes of bacteria in that one gene can code for many different proteins, even for 50 or more. This is done by reading the strand of DNA in different ways. The first thing of course is that you have to wonder how you can get a gene that is good for 50 different proteins in the first place. The chance of hitting on a SINGLE functional protein using 100 different amino acids is around 1 in 10^65, the chance of hitting on a string that will make 50 different proteins would then be around 1 in (10^65)^50. (Search on alternate reading frame, for instance there is this article: this article
Furthermore, given a gene that codes for 50 proteins it means that a single copying error can wreck 50 or more proteins and make the individual die rather than evolve. This explains pleiotropy, how a change to one gene can alter several different visible characteristics of an organism. It is easy to see that when one gene produces multiple proteins you've got a great way to prevent evolution. Suppose there is 1 chance out of 2 that a mutation to a gene happens to destroy the protein's function. The gene that codes for one protein will have 1 chance out of 2 that the function works after the mutation. If the gene codes for two proteins then there is a (1/2)^2 (or 0.25) chance that the change does not wreck either protein. If the gene codes for 3 proteins there is a (1/2)^3 chance (or 0.125) that the change does not wreck any of the three proteins. If the gene produces 50 proteins the chance that ALL goes well is of course (1/2)^50 or 8.8817*10^-16, pretty small. Now I'm not sure that the chance that one change wrecks a protein is only 1/2, I have heard that it is much less than that maybe on the order of 999/1000 in which case things go really bad but I have yet to research what that chance of failure really is. Strangely enough what you are liable to hear from an evolutionist is that one mutation can improve 50 proteins at once! This shows their profound ignorance of math.
(As a sidenote, recall that there are various genetically engineered plant and animal species being produced by copying a gene from one species into another species. Note, then that when the genetically engineered species receives a gene from another species, the gene is liable to produce other things as well and you have to wonder how far you can go with this or if it is even safe.)
This is just a short note designed to put these URLs in a convenient spot. This one deals with the interesting fact that some genes are overlapping and this helps make it hard for the genes to evolve: The Role of Population Size, Pleiotropy, and Fitness Effects of Mutations in the Evolution of Overlapping Gene Functions.
Here is an article that does not explain the one gene, multiple protein concept very well: Genes-To-Proteins Connection May Have New Twist.
Another article on multiple proteins coming from one gene: UNRAVELING THE DNA MYTH The spurious foundation of genetic engineering Barry Commoner / Harper's Magazine Feb02 This one primarily argues that genetic engineering is unsafe but it also describes the mechanisms involved.
Another article on multiple proteins coming from one gene: Creation Science Association, Articles This one notes that one guy from Celera who was working on "decoding" the human genome got the impression that the whole thing was designed by a "huge intelligence". This references an article for which there is a copy at ARN In the News: Human Genome Map has Scientists Talking about the Divine -- Surprisingly low number of genes raises big questions: Abate, Tom
The central concept of evolution is that small changes accumulate over time to the point where a new better life form appears. In Darwin's time no one knew how living cells were designed and how changes could occur. Darwin was lucky in that respect. If Darwin were to propose today what he proposed in 1859 and attempt to publish it in a physics journal it would be rejected by the scientific review process. The reviewers would tell him to calculate the probability that evolution could happen. If he took their advice and did the math he would quickly find out that evolution could not happen fast enough to account for much of anything and his theory would never be published. Unfortunately even today biologists are not as rigorous as physicists and the theory of evolution has had a long time to become a traditional belief among biologists. Evolutionists typically don't appreciate how remote the chances for evolution are and they simply think that a million years or a billion years is enough to solve any problem however the numbers involved with evolution are so extreme that no amount of time will solve the problems. The analysis has been done over and over and various versions of it can be found in the following sources:
The first big problem for evolution came from a special conference at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. The mathematicians found that evolution just would not work while the biologists were uncomprehending. Philip E. Johnson in his book, Darwin on Trial reports:
the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that "Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred."Johnson goes on to quote a French mathematician, Schutzenberger from the conference who concluded that:
there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwin theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of Biology.
If you are not math-enabled then perhaps the most telling and easiest to understand concept is that there is NO mathematical analysis saying that evolution can happen, if it existed it would be their absolute number 1 piece of evidence.
Evolutionists are stuck in a really bizarre situation. They keep urging everyone to forget the supernatural and look to natural law to explain life but the reality is that when you apply natural law to the problem, natural law says evolution cannot happen.
There are a couple of fairly simple analyses that can be done that show how unlikely evolution is. The first one has to do with the chances that an organism can create a single new protein by chance. In most cases the development of a single new gene will not help much, a single new gene might code for an enzyme that will degrade some environmental chemical but that is about it. A single gene can't account for a whole system within a living thing, thus a single gene can't take a trilobite with no eye and suddenly make it have an eye. It can't take a beetle and turn it into a lightning bug and it can't take a bacterium and produce a flagellum. You need a whole set of perfectly matched genes to do this. This is really improbable.
First we will do an analysis of how hard it is to take a random string of DNA and turn it into a gene that codes for a protein. Recall that much of the DNA in higher organisms consists of what was originally called junk and now is called noncoding because while it does not produce proteins it does influence protein production. Evolutionists GUESSED that the noncoding DNA represented junk that accumulated over time and new genes could be formed within this junk. For the sake of this analysis I'll allow this unsupportable assumption and say that the junk DNA is useless. Humans have about 3*10^9 base pairs in their DNA and about 97% of the DNA is "junk". The rate at which DNA mutates is one in 10^10 base pairs, thus about every 3 reproductions a single base pair is changed by bad copying. But I can afford to be generous. Let's say we have organisms where every one gets a mutation every time it reproduces rather than just one of three. Also assume that none of the mutations are fatal, in fact assume that every one of them just happens to fall within the "junk" portion of the DNA. Assume the organisms reproduce once a year and there are a trillion (10^12) of them so each year the organisms will produce a trillion new genes that code for a trillion candidates for a protein. Now using the result that only one out of 10^65 proteins will be a functional protein, how many years on the average will it take to get your first functional protein? So we have the problem:
That would make x = 10^53 years. If you're not astounded yet then recall that the whole universe is on the order of 10^10 years old.
There are ways to improve the results. A trillion organisms is quite a lot for a higher animal or a plant so if a higher animals or plant is going to produce a gene that codes for a new protein the numbers are really bad. However let's try the same thing with bacteria. I don't know how many bacteria there could be in the world but I can make a guess. I once saw the result that there could never be more than 10^40 proteins on the entire Earth. If each bacteria uses 10^10 proteins then the most we could have on Earth at one time is 10^30. Bacterial DNA is shorter but bacteria do less to correct for errors than do the higher animals so just to be quick about it (for now, someday I must look up these details) let's have one mutation per bacteria. I think bacteria reproduce on the order of 3 times a day so for a year that would be 1000 tries/year/bacterium and with 10^30 bacteria that would be 10^33 tries/year. So now we have the problem:
Now it only takes 10^32 years, a big improvement but not enough to make a difference.
The only way to make this scenario work is if functional proteins are much more more common than one in 10^65.
A couple of other cases need to be analyzed as well. First it is widely believed that organisms copy genes from time to time and these copies show up in the DNA. I'm not so sure that these copies are completely useless, when I have a copy of something on my computer hard drive it is because I don't want to accidentally lose it. So if I saw a copy in DNA I would suspect the same, however believers in evolution GUESS that the copied gene could be turned off and allowed to mutate and turn into something else. For instance there are 4 genes in humans that produce various forms of hemoglobin, named alpha, beta and gamma hemoglobin and myogobin. Evolutionists believe this complex of four genes arose when an original hemoglobin gene was copied and then proceeded to mutate. You could just as easily assume they are all there for a good reason. From the following page: WISTAR DESTROYS EVOLUTION we also have the results:
Hemoglobin has two chains, called alpha and beta. A minimum of 120 mutations would be required to convert alpha to beta. At least 34 of those changes require changeovers in 2 or 3 nucleotides. Yet, Eden pointed out that, if a single nucleotide change occurs through mutation, the result ruins the blood and kills the organism!George Wald stood up and explained that he had done extensive research on hemoglobin also,—and discovered that if just ONE mutational change of any kind was made in it, the hemoglobin would not function properly. For example, the change of one amino acid out of 287 in hemoglobin causes sickle-cell anemia. A glutamic acid unit has been changed to a valine unit—and, as a result, 25% of those suffering with this anemia die.
I don't quite believe that they really know that a single mutation of ANY kind would ruin hemoglobin, the only way to know this, I think, is to test all the possible changes and I doubt they did it and I don't think any theoretical studies could say that because we don't have computers that can predict how a protein will fold up but at any rate the chance that one turns into another runs somewhere from pretty small down to exactly zero.
The gene duplication and mutation problem is harder to analyze because once you have a functional protein there is a much greater chance that a single mutation will produce another functional protein. It is thought that certain proteins like cytochrome C are quite common and thus if the organism copies the cytochrome C gene and a mutation happens to it there may be a reasonable chance the organism will get another functional cytochrome C. This does not do much good because if you have one that works you don't need another.
This gene duplication and mutation scenario is widely used in the literature on evolution, but is it a valid scenario? I ran into this page which quotes some analysis on gene duplication: Icons Still Standing-Jonathan Wells Comes Up Clean Despite Harsh Criticism: Luskin, Casey. The context below has to do with a specific scenario involving the evolution of a snail however the quotes on gene duplication are valid in general:
This paper, like many others in the literature of evolutionary biology, bases most of its genetic evolution of biochemistry off of the mechanism of gene duplication. However, when trying to evolve something, the gene-duplication-explanation doesn't help the issue much, because once you duplicate a gene, you have a new piece of genetic information to play around with, but what good is that to you? If complex systems need specific parts, what sort of evidence is there that these duplicated genes will be the parts you need? Lynch and Conery found that the average gene duplicates about once every 100 million years [108] --that's pretty rare. If cone snails have a 1 year generation time, and the gene you need duplicates once every 100,000,000 generations, that doesn't give you a very good chance of getting it when you need it. Furthermore, it has been found that, "the vast majority of gene duplicates are silenced within a few million years, with the few survivors subsequently experiencing strong purifying selection" [108]. Another study showed duplicated genes are not very free to mutate around at all, that there is strong selection pressure on them [107]. This supports the statement by Conery and Lynch that the actual mechanisms by which gene duplication contributes to evolution are not very well understood:"However, it is unclear how duplicate genes successfully navigate an evolutionary trajectory from an initial state of complete redundancy, wherein one copy is likely to be expendable, to a stable situation in which both copies are maintained by natural selection. Nor is it clear how often these events occur." [108]
The bottom line is that the gene duplication explanation still leaves the details to the dice, and this pathway definitely hasn't been experimentally verified. All Espiritu et al. have found are protein homologies, and then inferred a vague ancestral pathway of gene creation. This explanation for the origin of real evolutionary novelty lacks a reliable mechanism and is little better than hand waving.
[107] Huges, Austin L., "Adaptive Evolution of Genes and Genomes". (see chapter 7, "Evolution of New Protein Function" pp 143-180. (Oxford University Press, New York, 1999).
[108] Lynch, M., Conery, J. S., "The Evolutionary Fate and Consequence of Duplicate Genes" Science 290:1151-1155 (Nov 10, 2000).
So, it's like I figured, there is no real justification for gene duplication and mutation. It is one of those things that you have to ASSUME or else you're sunk. More on gene duplication can be found at: gene duplication where you can obtain a pdf version of reference 108. The study done in 108 of course assumes evolution is true so that similar genes are the result of duplication and mutation. I will not necessarily buy that, similar genes might be due to design, the similar gene might really be good for something.
Here is another nice paper that promotes the idea of stasis in living things: Stasis Considered by Michael Thomas. In it Thomas notes there is a process called gene conversion that works to destroy bad copies of genes. So let a gene g be duplicated, then let the copy mutate to a new gene g'. Gene conversion will give you an organism that has two copies of g or two copies of g'. If the organism has g' it is likely to be bad if not fatal so no new DNA shows up, if it has g then no change has been made. Thus the system inhibits evolution.
There are other cases as well, for the time being I am going to take the cheap out here and refer you to someone else who has analyzed the odds of forming a new protein:
There is another example of twisted logic in the gene mutation scenario. There is an important process going on in a cell that requires a molecule called Cytochrome C. It turns out that, like hemoglobin, the cytochrome C molecule in each species is slightly different from every other species. When the species are closely related the differences are smaller than when the species are vastly different. This same thing happens for many biological molecules. Evolutionists assume that this is because evolution (changes) have been going on for a longer period of time for the species that are vastly different. They broke off from that tree of life earlier on. This is the "molecular clock" idea. The changes over time is called "genetic drift".
This scenario makes me recall what evolutionists say about the genetic code. They say it is the same for all species (of course it isn't) and this is evidence that all life evolved from the same original cell. If you apply the same reasoning to these biological molecules like cytochrome c then every living thing ought to have the same cytochrome c molecule instead of every living thing having a different version of the molecule. That would be evidence for a common origin of cytochrome C and for all life! Instead the differences can be interpreted as evidence for a unique design for every species!
The genetic drift idea is also peculiar because if there is this genetic drift going around then we ought to be finding different versions of these molecules within the same species! I've never seen anyone cite an example of this except for one that should not count. I know that some humans have an altered form of the hemoglobin molecule and that altered form causes sickle cell anemia. But find me a species with two different versions of a biological molecule where both versions are equally good.
Right in here I need to do an analysis of an irreducibly complex system. It won't be completely airtight because some important information is missing but by seeing how the situation shapes up it is easy to tell which way the wind is blowing.
In recent years one person who has tried to make the problems clear to the general public is Michael J. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University who wrote the book Darwin's Black Box In this book Behe makes clear what has been obvious to biochemists for a while now: cells are in effect miniature factories consisting of molecular machines, they are so complex there is no chance they could have evolved, they must have been designed.
The response to Behe's book and argument are fairly predictable. Among the less deceptive believers in evolution you get the response that they simply have faith that ways will eventually be found to evolve all the complex systems that Behe says cannot be evolved. That is a reasonable position to take if you WANT to preserve your belief in evolution. The people who are determined to have you believe in evolution will spin the facts so as to make you think Behe is dead wrong. One person doing this is John Catalano, an admirer of Dawkins who set up pages at http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/box/behe.htm. Catalano wanted to prove that Behe was wrong when Behe asserted that: "There has never been a meeting, or a book, or a paper on details of the evolution of complex biochemical systems." (Behe 1996) (p. 179). So Catalano asked for his readers to supply citations from people who knew of papers that described the evolution of molecular systems. They are found in a section called "Alive and Published". A second person to take up the challenge is David Ussery, an associate research professor of biotechnology at The Technical University of Denmark, his page on the web is: A biochemist's response to "The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution" . Ussery's page features flashing text to announce that the articles that Behe says do not exist do in fact exist. Ussery found the articles by doing a simple search of some databases for the term "molecular evolution".
The catch is that the articles cited by Catalano and Ussery do not address the issue that Behe is talking about. Lots of papers can contain the words "molecular" and " evolution" and still not address the issue of how irreducibly complex systems can evolve. Some honest analysis by other believers in evolution show how deceptive Catalano and Ussery are. In Behe's response to critics: Irreducible Complexity and the Evolutionary Literature: - Response to Critics Behe writes:
For example microbiologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago declared in National Review that "There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." (Shapiro 1996). In Nature University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne stated, "There is no doubt that the pathways described by Behe are dauntingly complex, and their evolution will be hard to unravel. . . . [W]e may forever be unable to envisage the first proto-pathways." (Coyne 1996)In a particularly scathing review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution Tom Cavalier-Smith, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, nonetheless wrote, "For none of the cases mentioned by Behe is there yet a comprehensive and detailed explanation of the probable steps in the evolution of the observed complexity. The problems have indeed been sorely neglected--though Behe repeatedly exaggerates this neglect with such hyperboles as 'an eerie and complete silence.'" (Cavalier-Smith 1997)
So experts who believe in evolution agree that Behe is right while other believers in evolution spin the facts to deceive the public. It is yet another indication that they know evolution is in trouble.
In Darwin's Black Box, Behe writes:
The result of the cumulative efforts to investigate the cell -- to investigate life at the molecular level -- is a loud, clear, piercing cry of "design". The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science....
This triumph of science should evoke cries of "Eureka!" from ten thousand throats, should occasion much hand-slapping and high-fiving, and perhaps even be an excuse to take a day off.
But no bottles have been uncorked, no hands slapped. Instead, a curious, embarrassed silence surrounds the stark complexity of the cell. When the subject comes up in public, feet start to shuffle, and breathing gets a bit labored. In private people are a bit more relaxed; many explicitly admit the obvious but then stare at the ground, shake their heads, and let it go at that.
Why does the scientific community not greedily embrace it's startling discovery? Why is the observation of design handled with intellectual gloves? The dilemma is that while one side of the elephant is labeled intelligent design, the other side might be labeled God.
So, really there it is, if life was designed this suggests maybe there is a God and the scientific faith is wrong. To be fair about it the atheists do have some possible escapes: life could have been designed by little green men from another planet, spirits from the spirit world or humans who sent it back from the future.
One of the standard arguments for evolution is the fact that there are a very large number of species that are quite similar to each other. Evolution ASSUMES that these similar species all came from a common ancestor. For instance, evolution assumes that both humans and chimpanzees evolved from some distant ancestor. If evolution did happen then you would expect to find many very similar species here on Earth and since we do the data fits the theory. But this does not force one to the conclusion that evolution is true because these similarities could just as easily have happened BY DESIGN.
I'm into gardening and I've taken a special interest in growing the plants that are native to the Chicago region or at least native to Eastern North America. One of the nicer plants is the Black-Eyed Susan also called Rudbeckia hirta. There are many well-bred varieties of this species in the gardening catalogs. It is an annual or hardy annual and typically starts blooming on the prairie in June. In terms of looks, it is a yellow daisy with a dark brown center and it is very popular because of its good looks. Now if you're a designer and you hit upon such a good looking flower it makes sense to try out similar designs as well. One of them here in the Chicago area is the Brown-Eyed Susan, Rudbeckia triloba. I'm seeing it mostly on the edge of the woods. Unlike R. hirta it is a perennial and it blooms around September with smaller daisy-like flowers. You can also find Sweet Coneflower, R. subtomentosa on the prairie, a tall perennial with larger flowers than R. hirta. A little to the east of Chicago you can find Rudbeckia fulgida, also a perennial but typically found in wooded areas. It's called Orange Coneflower because in the wild the inner half of each petal is orange. There is a variety of this called sullivanti where the petals are all yellow and the well-bred variety found in gardens is called 'Goldsturm'. It blooms around July and August. And there are more flowers with this daisy pattern, an awful lot more, some have lots of small purple or pink petals like say, New England Aster or large pinkish-purple petals like: Purple Coneflower." And there are many others in various colors and sizes in different environments and with different bloom times. And so we have a beautiful pattern repeating itself over and over, at different times and in different environments and this is just what you'd expect a designer to do.
You can do the same argument with butterflies, birds, and every sort of living thing. Proponents of design will also have you look at cars. The designs evolve year by year. Cars with similar designs are close to each other in terms of years but after many years the older design and the final design can be quite different. This happens by design just as it would if cars were evolving all by themselves.
Since the tree of life argument could point to either evolution by chance or intelligent design it does not help you decide between evolution or design. You can't use it as evidence for evolution by chance.
Using the fossil record to support evolution is hardly an objective way of assessing evolution. If you believe in evolution to start with you typically end up seeing evidence for it in the fossil record. On the other hand if you just look at the evidence it can be hard to conclude that evolution is true, indeed many paleontologists who have looked at the record and who believe in evolution to start with have said that the evidence is missing. Assessing the fossils is difficult because the fossils don't show the internal organs of the animal that was fossilized, neither do you have any DNA to compare except for some very recent species. Without this data it is hard to tell exactly what you've got and the experts often disagree with each other.
The doctrine of Darwinism is that one species gradually turns into a new species better suited to it's environment. The fossil record should show this happening, but it doesn't, it didn't in 1859 when Darwin wrote:
why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transition forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?
And it still doesn't. In Darwin's time he could hope that the "missing links" would someday be found but today they still are missing.
It really needs to be made clear exactly what should show up in the fossil record if Darwin was right. One of the most dramatic possible missing links that has appeared over the years is Archaeopteryx. It appears to be intermediate between reptiles and birds. Some of the body looks lizard-like with claws on its wings and teeth in its mouth. Some experts will tell you that Archaeopteryx is just an odd bird and so it should not count as an intermediate form at all. But let's suppose it might be. Six fossils of it have been found and they are all identical. What's needed in addition to these identical fossils are the fossils of animals that look less like Archaeopteryx and more like a lizard and the fossils of animals that look less like Archaeopteryx and more like a bird. The continuum from reptile to bird is needed and it doesn't exist.
Stephen Jay Gould, another believer in Evolution said this of the fossil record:
The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:Another believer in evolution, paleontologist Niles Eldredge said:
Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.
Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of it's ancestors; it appears all at once and fully formed.
No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It never seems to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change -- over millions of years, at a rate too slow to account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang, and often with no firm evidence that the fossils did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on somewhere else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution.and quoting from Darwin on Trial Eldredge also says:
We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while really knowing that it does not.
But to cope with the facts, Gould and Eldredge proposed the theory of "punctuated equilibrium". Here evolution takes place rapidly from time to time in small isolated groups of individuals and it takes place so quickly no fossils get left behind thereby explaining the lack of missing links. This is truly a bizarre proposal, if evolution doesn't happen over billions of years how will it happen over much smaller time periods? If the mathematics says it takes a truly enormous amount of time for the lucky mutations to build up what's going to make them happen at a frantic pace every once in a while? The situation is rather like this: little Johnny has failed to do his homework. His teacher asks: "Where is your homework?". Johnny responds: "My dog ate it." Then a voice from the back of the class says: "I've never seen a dog at your house!". And Johnny says: "I do too have a dog, he's invisible, that's all!". Believers in Evolution are taking it on faith that there is a way to explain why all the missing links are missing, just the creation of the punctuated equilibrium theory should prove that.
The worst problem of all for evolutionists is the Cambrian Explosion of life about 530 million years ago. During this time almost all the major body plans (phyla) of animal life appeared. The figure below from the University of California at Santa Barbara shows how the various phyla appear throughout time:
The sediment deposits of this five-million-year span are at places 300 meters thick. Throughout the depth of this sediment, and therefore over the entire five million years, there is little or no change in the morophologies of these animals.
Thus there is no evolution to speak of happening even within the five million year period. A believer in Evolution named Richard Dawkins said this of the life forms that appeared during the Cambrian Explosion (quoted by way of Johnson):
It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history.
A true believer in evolution will tell you that the pre-Cambrian fossils just haven't been found yet, again displaying their faith. Except there are counter-arguments to this. There are LOTS of Cambrian era fossils. If you go back a little bit in time you should reach a point where there are half as many different species that are half as complex as the Cambrian fossils. So, for instance, you should be able to find a trilobite with a much less sophisticated eye or no eye at all. Go back farther in time and you should reach a point where there are one fourth as many different species and they are one fourth as complicated. Given a LOT of Cambrian fossils you should be able to find about 3/4 of a LOT of pre-Cambrian fossils, enough so that some should show up. But everyone admits the predecessors are not there.
The second counter-argument is to note that pre-Cambrian fossils have been found, they're called Ediacarans. They are simple multi-celled creatures that have no resemblance to the Cambrian era fossils. This is actually quite a wonderful find because now no one can claim that fossils from the pre-Cambrian are missing (I saw one believer in evolution propose that fossils with missing links have simply been lost due to plate tectonics moving the fossils out of reach.). Before the edicarans were found one excuse for the missing predecessors was that they were soft-bodied and they would not form fossils, they would simply decay away however the Ediacaran fossils are soft-bodied with some having bits of shells. So the simpler predecessors to the Cambrian era life forms are simply missing.
If the evidence shows that they appeared as if they were planted there then it's reasonable to conclude that they were just planted there. To go on looking for a way to quickly evolve them you really have to WANT to avoid the obvious conclusion. And so the scientific results get "spun" to satisfy the atheists' desire to be rid of God.
More quotations from secular scientists of note can be found at: NATURAL DISCONTINUITIES AND THE FOSSIL RECORD
Another important person says evolution as described by Darwin (the tree-like pattern) simply does not exist:
I think an unbiased person at this point would say that if theory says it can't happen and the experiment shows that it didn't happen then it's pretty safe to stop right there and say it didn't happen. Certainly if theory said it could happen but the experiment failed something is wrong or if the experiment worked but the theory was wrong there's a problem but when theory and experiment agree it's pretty safe to discard the the idea of Evolution. This is how REAL science is done, you look for theory and experiment to be in agreement. With theory and experiment in agreement the most reasonable explanation is that life was designed although you do get a choice as to who's responsible: God, spirits from the spirit world, little green men, humans from the future or it came from outer space.
Believers in God typically are ridiculed by the scientifically minded for believing in hard to believe things like spirit, souls, God, life after death, Heaven and Hell and so on. It's certainly true that people who believe in the Biblical worldview have faith but the point I wanted to make in this essay is that the scientifically minded also have faith in their view of the world. It takes faith to look at a living cell, an object that is an ultra-miniature factory filled with molecular machines and assume there is a way to produce an object of such complexity by a still unknown series of random steps especially considering that there is very little time available in which it can happen. It takes faith to ignore the fact that for three billion years afterward little or nothing happened in terms of evolution and still believe in random evolution. Then it takes faith that in the space of 10 million years or less some unknown conditions produced evolution at such a frantic pace that all the major animal groups appeared and produced creatures with complex features like eyes. It takes faith to look at the fossil record thereafter and see new creatures appear abruptly with no precursors and dismiss it somehow. It takes faith to cope with the fact these species exhibit little or no change before they disappear from the fossil record and still say that living things evolve. It takes faith to ignore the mathematical analysis that shows the evolution can't happen in the amount of time available.
There is absolutely no doubt that people who believe in the Biblical worldview just WANT to live happily every after in Heaven and have an eternity of meaning and purpose. I hope it is equally obvious by now that people who don't WANT there to be a God will go to great lengths to produce theories of the origin of life that exclude God. And that believers in the scientific world view have the same type of faith in things unseen and unknown that they sneer at Bible believers for having.
In recent years there is another odd scientific theory that has been going around: cold fusion. Cold fusion is supposed to result when hydrogen and deuterium atoms are tightly packed within such metals as palladium. The idea is that somehow the atoms get close enough that they can fuse into helium and produce energy in the process. The math in all the conventional models says it cannot happen (people have proposed unconventional models) and if it is happening at all in the laboratory it is pretty rare. Critics happily proclaim that the math says it cannot happen and the lab results show it doesn't so if you believe in it you must be nuts. Still, some researchers have seen enough empirical evidence for fusion that they still study the subject and look for models in which the fusion process may actually work. Well, MAYBE there is something unusual going on in those metals and if there is someone will eventually be able to demonstrate it on demand and someone else will eventually find the model of how it works.
With evolution the situation is much the same as with cold fusion, the math says it can't happen and the fossil results say that it didn't. No one is ever likely to see evolution (on the time scale required to prove it) and no one has a model that shows that it is likely to happen. In the case of cold fusion no religious beliefs are at stake so it is safe to dismiss it but since evolution has become a matter of religious faith for many evolution will not go away easily. Cold fusion has a better chance of being true than does random evolution.
Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, Touchstone 1996.
Shapiro, J. In the details . . . what? National Review, 62-65. 9-16-1996.
Coyne, J. A. (1996). God in the details. Nature 383, 227-228.
Cavalier-Smith, T. (1997). The blind biochemist. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 12, 162-163.
Hoyle, Fred (1981), "Hoyle on Evolution," Nature, Vol. 294, No. 5837, November 12, p. 148
Nilsson, Dan-E., and Susanne Pelger, "A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve," Proc. Royal Soc. London B 256 (1994): 53-58.
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