What Evolutionists Have Vigorously Denied For Decades Is Now “An Exploding Field”

Holding Back Science

A new study has added yet more evidence to the claim that organisms respond to environmental challenges with non DNA, epigenetic, changes that are heritable. That may sound like detailed scientific jargon that has little importance outside of the dry, technical journal papers, but nothing could be further from the truth. Evolutionary theory has traditionally viewed heritable changes as being strictly channeled through DNA. For it is the DNA that can be altered by those chance mutations. The idea is that these chance mutations sometimes just luckily happen to improve the organism, and so it is selected. Thus all change that ever occurs to a species is, ultimately, from a source that is random. Non random change that might be directed, that is that might address the environmental challenge at hand, is not allowed. No teleology, no final causes, no design. Those are the metaphysical ground rules and the new study, far from merely addressing detailed scientific issues, has significant philosophical implications regarding evolutionary dogma. As one science writer put it:

For some evolutionary biologists, just hearing the term epigenetics raises hackles. They balk at suggestions that something other than changes in DNA sequences—such as the chemical addition of methyl groups to DNA or other so-called epigenetic modifications— has a role in evolution.

Or as one researcher explained:

People are really stubborn about accepting that that’s possible.

Aside from violating evolution’s ground rules against heritable directed change, otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetics takes the unlikeliness of evolution to an entirely new level.

We would have to believe that evolution’s undirected, random change somehow created an astonishingly complex adaptation machine. Not only do the sheer intricacies and interdependencies of epigenetics, and the lack of an evolutionary fitness pathway rule out a random origin, but the violation of Occam’s Razor is colossal. We must believe that evolution created a profoundly complex machine which facilitates an entirely new form of evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.