Evolutionists Are Up in Arms Over Real Time Epigenetics

Epigenetics has gone real-time and evolutionists are insisting it has no impact on the fact of evolution. Recall that epigenetics provided one of the many falsifications of evolution’s claim that biological variation knows nothing of need. According to evolution, if the environment shifts, presenting a new challenge to a population, then the population responds via the selection of random changes, such as mutations, which are not in response to the new challenge. In short, biological variation must not be directed. Any such intelligent response to the environment smacks too much of teleology, which evolutionary thought fundamentally rejects. So under evolution, populations adapt by chance. Mutations that just happen to address the challenge are selected.

But epigenetics falsified all of that. Science tells us that populations rapidly and intelligently adapt to environmental challenges. Such responses, for example, may be accomplished via modifications to the DNA sequence or via modifications to how genes are expressed. For instance small chemicals, such as methyl groups or hydroxyl groups (or one on top of the other!), may be attached to the DNA or to the histone proteins about which the DNA is wrapped. And such modifications can be passed on to subsequent generations.

This makes no sense on evolution. We would have to imagine that evolution’s random mutations and the like created this fantastic directed adaptation machine, ready to respond to a range of future environmental challenges.

And now epigenetics has been found to occur in real-time, providing profound falsifications of evolutionary expectations. These “real-time” epigenetic mechanisms are applied not to DNA, but to its temporary transcript, mRNA, which supplies the information used to synthesize a protein.

So now evolution must not only have created another fantastic directed adaptation machine, ready to respond to a range of future environmental challenges, but this machine must have been capable and ready to operate, immediately at sometime in the future, on the transitory mRNA molecule.

The absurdity of evolution has just become that much more absurd.

Not surprisingly evolutionists are struggling to provide any sort of coherent explanation for all this. Their mandate that evolution must be a fact has been long since known to be little more than dogma, and the continuing onslaught of scientific findings is not helping.

Evolutionists had no scientific explanation for the fantastic mechanisms behind epigenetics. I once debated an evolution professor who simply denied that cells had any such capability. Needless to say, meaningful debate is not possible when evolutionists deny known facts of science.

Such denial is continuing with the new findings of real-time epigenetics. Evolutionists are not seriously reckoning with the science. One evolutionist, for instance, attempted to defend the evolution of real-time epigenetics by conflating it with the general operation of gene regulation:

I'm absolutely astonished by this series of yours on methylation, Cornelius. You seem to think it's new. How on earth do you think that biologists think that cells even differentiate in multicellular organisms, let alone function, without control of gene expression? Do you think that biologists until recently thought that all genes were switched on all the time? Have you never heard of cell signalling? And what do you imagine that "regulatory genes" actually do if not, um, regulate genes? i.e. switch them on and off?

This argument that the evolution of complex mechanisms is obvious because, after all, we’ve known about it all along, may seem bizarre to newcomers. But for evolutionists this sort of argument is typical. Point out that diversity appears abruptly in the fossil record and evolutionists will tell you that they’ve explained all that with “punctuated equilibrium.” Point out that the origin of life is unlikely, and they’ll tell you that they’ve long since synthesized amino acids in a test tube.

Such problems are not really problems, evolutionists will tell you, because they’ve been known for a long time, and about them evolutionists have produced plenty of speculation.

Evolution has no scientific explanation, beyond speculation, for gene regulation in general. And they don’t have one for real-time epigenetics in particular.

Nonetheless, this evolutionist continued with the same sort of argument, this time recruiting the study of development and how it relates to evolution:

And far from being problematic for evolutionary theory, "evo-devo" answers a huge number of problems for evolutionary theory as it stood, namely how very small incremental DNA variation can make considerable, but viable, changes to the phenotype.

Aside from the fact that the so-called “evo-devo” research fell short of expectations and that development has contradicted evolutionary expections, it has nothing to do with the evolution of real-time epigenetics.

Again, newcomers will be surprised by the level of argumentation produced by evolutionists. But such nonsensical logic does provide a teachable moment. It is another sign of the closing of the evolutionary mind.