The Dinosaur “Explosion”

As Though They Were Planted There

In the famed Cambrian Explosion most of today’s animal phyla appeared abruptly in the geological strata. How could a process driven by blind, random mutations produce such a plethora of new species? Evolutionist Steve Jones has speculated that the Cambrian Explosion was caused by some crucial change in DNA. “Might a great burst of genetic creativity have driven a Cambrian Genesis and given birth to the modern world?” [1] What explanations such as this do not address is the problem of how evolution overcame such astronomical entropic barriers. Rolling a dice, no matter how creatively, is not going to design a spaceship.

The Cambrian Explosion is not the only example of the abrupt appearance of new forms in the fossil record, and the other examples are no less easy for evolution to explain. Nor has the old saw, that it’s the fossil record’s fault, fared well. There was once a time when evolutionists could appeal to gaps in the fossil record to explain why the species appear to arise abruptly, but no more. There has just been too much paleontology work, such as a new international study on dinosaurs published this week, confirming exactly what the strata have been showing all along: new forms really did arise abruptly.

The new study narrows the dating of the rise of dinosaurs in the fossil record. It confirms that many dinosaur species appeared in an “explosion” or what “we term the ‘dinosaur diversification event (DDE)’.” It was an “explosive increase in dinosaurian abundance in terrestrial ecosystems.” As the press release explains,

First there were no dinosaur tracks, and then there were many. This marks the moment of their explosion, and the rock successions in the Dolomites are well dated. Comparison with rock successions in Argentina and Brazil, here the first extensive skeletons of dinosaurs occur, show the explosion happened at the same time there as well.

As lead author Dr Massimo Bernardi at the University of Bristol explains, “it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.”

There just isn’t enough time, and it is another example of a failed prediction of the theory of evolution.

1. Steve Jones, Darwin’s Ghost, p. 206, Random House, New York, 2000.

h/t: The genius.

World’s Oldest Tree is World’s Most Complex Tree

Makes Perfect Sense

We have often discussed the problem of “early complexity,” and how as we peer back in time—whether in the geographic strata or by phylogenetic reconstruct—things don’t get simpler. This makes no sense on evolution and this week’s news of a fossil specimen in northwest China, revealing and ancient, and highly complex, tree, just makes it worse. As one of the authors admitted:

This raises a provoking question: why are the very oldest trees the most complicated?

Fortunately evolution is a fact.

New Book: The Fossils Prove Evolution

Upside Down

We have seen here and here that a new book co-authored by evolutionist Dennis Venema is influenced by the mythical Warfare Thesis. The book, for example, informs readers that the basic issue of the seventeenth century Galileo Affair was “the veracity of the new science, and its perceived threat to biblical authority.” As we saw, this is the false, evolutionary rendition of history. The Warfare Thesis is a myth, and the Galileo Affair is perhaps the favorite example for evolutionists.

After framing the discussion with this bit of Whig history, Venema introduces scientific evidences which he believes make evolution to be compelling. He begins with the fossil record. This is a bit surprising given how badly the theory fares on the fossil evidence. Later in the book Venema will state that according to evolution truly new features should be rare:

One of the things evolution predicts is that seldom will any feature in an evolutionary lineage be truly “new.” [37]

This is an example of an evolutionary prediction that has gone terribly wrong, and the fossil record gives a plethora of examples. As we have explained many times, the general character of the fossil record is precisely the opposite of what evolutionists had expected. Rather than the traditional evolutionary tree pattern of new species gradually appearing over time, the fossil record reveals the exact opposite. The strata show several bursts of new species appearing on the scene, followed by a winnowing.

This is upside down.

Like a Christmas tree, you have a wide berth of branches and twigs at the bottom, or beginning, and over time there is a narrowing as the species are lost to extinctions. Rather than a tree becoming increasingly wider over time from narrow beginnings, the strata often reveal the opposite pattern. Of course it is far more complicated than this simple analogy, but what is important is that the fossil record reveals so many “explosions” of new species. The so-called “Cambrian Explosion,” (yes, it is called an “explosion”) is the most famous, but there are several others. In these events, new species appear abruptly in the fossil record. Not only do a great many “truly new” features appear, entirely new lineages appear as well.

Clearly, the fossil record repeatedly falsifies this prediction of evolution.

In a great example of confirmation bias, evolutionists often downplay the importance of these fossil data and the falsifications they present. In fact, sometimes these are ignored altogether.

And so it is with Venema’s treatment of the fossil record. He appeals to the general pattern of the fossil record, and to the specific example of the evolution of cetaceans.

His primary example of why the fossil record is such strong evidence for evolution are the cetaceans.

A collection of fossils can be arranged from land mammals to whales, which is precisely what evolution needs since whales are mammals. The idea is that mammals first evolved on land, and then certain species made their way back into the water, thus introducing mammals to marine environments.

Venema agrees that some of these fossil species may not be in the actual lineage leading to modern whales. That is good because the literature often illustrates these species as forming a clean, simple, lineage, from ancient mammals to modern whales.

While one may draw a line between the fossil species, the fact is there are many species suggesting more of a bush than a branch, and any such line is imposed onto the data rather than read out of the data.

And if these species did arise from evolution, and if the modern whale did arise from such a land-to-sea transition then, as usual, it would be quite a mystery. For a great transition, including the loss of hind limbs, grinding teeth and pelvises and developing a host of new features must have occurred relatively quickly.

The new features include the fluke tail with its unique vertical propelling motion, the huge filter-feeding jaw, and the ability to give live birth and raise its young in the marine environment. The latest entry to the community could swim, dive and feed better than most fish and sharks. All sorts of evolutionary scenarios can explain why the whale acquired such advanced skills, but they are speculative. The whale’s aquatic prowess does not refute evolution, but it raises the question of how we can be so sure about the purported evolutionary change that is supposed to have created the whale.

Why then are evolutionists so taken with the patterns of the fossil record, and examples such as the fossil sequence that is supposed to lead to the whale? Yes, it provides a good sequence, but there are many questions of just how random mutations could accomplish such heroics. And there are the many other aspects of the fossil data that are problematic, such as the many “explosions.”

These are serious evidential problems, and it would seem the fossils would be the last thing to which evolutionists would appeal. What’s going on?

The answer is, as usual, that the evolutionist’s certainty comes from metaphysics, not science. The idea is not that the whale-like fossils prove evolution directly, but that they disprove any notion that God created them independently. Therefore they must have evolved. Venema makes several such arguments. Here is one of his passages:

Of course, some might argue that it simply pleased God, as Creator, to create a series of unrelated species at this time in earth’s history that happen to suggest an evolutionary relationship. Many Christians find this plausible; but note how this type of argument cannot ever be ruled out by additional evidence. Any additional such species we find in the fossil record would then merely be more separate species that God elected to create at this time. This explanation also leaves scientists bereft of a hypothesis to test with further research. If the species we observe in the fossil record are the direct, special creations of God, then we will not necessarily find a pattern in the fossil record. Faced with such an explanation, a scientist would not have the ability to make predictions about what should be found in the fossil record at certain times. [13]

Here Venema makes two strong arguments. First, the text highlighted in blue above is the classic argument from the intellectual necessity of evolution. Science, as Venema argues, won’t work with creationism. Venema explains that such creationism (i) is not vulnerable to the evidence, (ii) makes it impossible to form testable hypotheses, and so (iii) leaves scientists unable to make predictions.

These are arguments from the philosophy of science that mandate evolution. We must have evolution in order to do science properly. Creationism must be ruled out, regardless of the scientific evidence.

These metaphysics render the scientific evidence irrelevant and, ironically, make evolution (rather than creationism) untestable and not vulnerable to the evidence. Fossil species appearing abruptly in the strata don’t matter when your philosophical argument makes creation untenable. As usual, the evolutionary argument is guilty of the very criticism is casts.

Second, the text highlighted in red above is theological. It is an age-old argument about how God would create the world. Rather than using patterns which appear arbitrary to us, God should fill the design space randomly.

Venema goes on to make the usual evolutionary arguments that the patterns we observe are unlikely. The evolutionary premise here is that the alternative to evolution is a random design of the species. For example, Venema writes:

The probability of mammalian characteristics (such as having hair and feeding their young with milk, as well as a number of defining skeletal characteristics) arising in a separate, unrelated lineage is a pretty big stretch. [14]

This argument hinges entirely on random design being the sole alternative to evolution. Either the species are designed randomly, or it’s evolution. This reasoning dates back centuries and, as Venema has explained, entails beliefs about how God would create the world. In other words, it is religious.

What if God would not necessarily create the species randomly? In that case, the evolutionist’s powerful argument absolutely fails. It would be fatal to the entire position.

In other words, the evolutionary argument entirely hinges on a silly, strawman claim about God.

In my studies of the arguments for evolution, I find they fall into two broad categories: philosophical arguments about man, knowledge, and science; and religious arguments about God. In typical fashion, Venema has appealed to both these long-standing categories of strong arguments for evolution.

If the evolutionist’s premises are correct, then evolution is a no-brainer. We must be evolutionists—regardless of the scientific evidence. The species arising from random causes, such as mutations, makes no sense scientifically, but would be a must. As usual the religion and philosophy steer the science.

This new book is yet another example, in a long line of works going back to Darwin and before, of how evolution is our modern day mythology. New species appearing out of nowhere. Fantastic designs arising from random mutations. And all of this mandated to be a fact. If you cannot see a problem with this, then you must be an Epicurean.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolutionists Have a Simple Proposal for the Evolution of the Mammalian Jaw

Simultaneous, Concurrent, Convergent Evolution

Somehow random mutations creating an incredibly complicated set of bones, muscles, teeth, and behaviors, with “extremely precise” functions, all of which “likely” arose independently rather through common descent, just doesn’t sound right. So as usual evolutionists view the problem teleologically. According to the latest study of the mammalian jaw, it seems that “mammal teeth, jaw bones and muscles evolved to produce side-to-side motions of the jaw, or yaw, that allowed our earliest ancestors to grind food with their molars and eat a more diversified diet.”

To produce?

As usual, the infinitive form tells all. Aristotelianism was not rejected, it was incorporated.

But how could such interdependent complexity evolve in the first place? The jaw, dental, and ear characters comprise so many highly complex, moving parts that need each other to work. And furthermore, they appear in different lineages. The answer is simple: simultaneous, concurrent, convergent evolution.

Based on results of the morphometrics and functional analyses, I develop a novel hypothesis for the simultaneous origin of unique jaw, dental, and ear characters in cladotherians. […] Here, I examine concurrent evolutionary changes to functional anatomies of jaws, molars, and ears in early cladotherian mammals […] The jaws, molars and ears of australosphenidans (which include monotremes) are morphologically similar to those of therians, suggesting convergent evolution of similar functional traits in this group.

All of this, the study concludes, “may have been an especially significant event in mammalian evolution.” Indeed. But for a paper entitled, “The evolutionary origin of jaw yaw in mammals,” there is remarkably little explanation of just how this design evolved.

The bottom line is the evidence does not fit the theory. If the answer is simultaneous, concurrent, convergent evolution, then let’s just admit the obvious.

“When Facts Fail”: Oh The Irony

Fossils and DNA

Because when an evolutionist, such as Michael Shermer in this case, warns readers that people don’t change their minds even when presented with the facts, the irony should be savored:

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

Yes, there certainly are conflicting data.

It gets worse:

Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith.

Evidence for evolution in DNA? What exactly would that be? Ultra conserved elements, orphans, replication, duplication, the universal DNA code, protein synthesis, protein coding genes, genetic regulation, recurrent evolution, convergence, cascades of convergence, and … well you get the idea. The evolutionist is demonstrating some of those “facts that fail” and the attendant doubling down, right before our eyes.

And what about those fossils? More “evidence for evolution”? How about those fossils that appear “as though they were planted there” as Richard Dawkins once admitted. One of those “planted” classes, the humble trilobites, had eyes that were perhaps the most complex ever produced by nature. [1] One expert called them “an all-time feat of function optimization.”

And even Shermer’s go-to source, Wikipedia, admits ancestral forms, err, “do not seem to exist”:

Early trilobites show all the features of the trilobite group as a whole; transitional or ancestral forms showing or combining the features of trilobites with other groups (e.g. early arthropods) do not seem to exist.

Likewise, even the evolutionist Niles Eldredge admitted [2] they didn’t make sense on standard evolutionary theory:

If this theory were correct, then I should have found evidence of this smooth progression in the vast numbers of Bolivian fossil trilobites I studied. I should have found species gradually changing through time, with smoothly intermediate forms connecting descendant species to their ancestors.

Instead I found most of the various kinds, including some unique and advanced ones, present in the earliest known fossil beds. Species persisted for long periods of time without change. When they were replaced by similar, related (presumably descendant) species, I saw no gradual change in the older species that would have allowed me to predict the anatomical features of its younger relative.

And it just gets worse:

The story of anatomical change through time that I read in the Devonian trilobites of Gondwana is similar to the picture emerging elsewhere in the fossil record: long periods of little or no change, followed by the appearance of anatomically modified descendants, usually with no smoothly intergradational forms in evidence.

Any more facts Mike?

1. Lisa J. Shawver, “Trilobite Eyes: An Impressive Feat of Early Evolution,” Science News, p. 72, Vol. 105, February 2, 1974.

2. Niles Eldridge, “An Extravagance of Species,” Natural History, p. 50, Vol. 89, No. 7, The American Museum of Natural History, 1980.

More Fossil-Molecule Contradictions: Now Even the Errors Have Errors

Evolution as Contra Indicator

The problem with evolution is that, because it is always wrong, being wrong doesn’t count against it. In fact, evolution is so wrong that even its errors have errors. And whereas a normal theory with so many flubs would have long since been discarded, since evolution is true from the start it can’t be discarded. So instead evolutionists spend their time trying to determine just how wrong they are. One of evolution’s many problem areas is with the so-called evolutionary tree. Evolutionists compare the species to figure out which branch and twig they go on, but it never works out very well. One of the problems is that the fossil comparisons are inconsistent with the molecular comparisons. This has been a problem for more than half of a century—ever since we had molecular data—and it is just getting worse. Now a new massive study shows that not only is the problem worse than previously thought, but the errors increase with those species that are supposed to have evolved more recently. This means that the standard strategy of blaming it on the fossil data won’t work very well this time:

Our results suggest that, for Aves, discord between molecular divergence estimates and the fossil record is pervasive across clades and of consistently higher magnitude for younger clades. […] Unexpectedly, relative disparity is substantially higher for crown than for stem divergences. This observation is difficult to attribute to fossil preservation biases. The quality of the fossil record is expected to improve from the past towards the present, because more fossil bearing rocks are preserved from younger deposits. If disparity were primarily driven by gaps in the fossil record, one would expect the gap between the divergence of a lineage and its oldest known fossil to be smaller on average for the basal crown divergence in each clade, which by definition occurred more recently than the stem divergence. […] In sum, biases in the fossil record predict larger gaps between genetic divergences and fossil occurrences for stem divergences than for crown divergences, yet the opposite pattern is observed. […] Though often mischaracterized as scrappy, the fossil record of modern birds is now sampled from hundreds of thousands of specimens from throughout the Cenozoic. As increasing efforts have yielded vast numbers of new specimens but failed to reconcile the gap between molecular and fossil evidence, it becomes less plausible to attribute disparity solely to gaps in the fossil record.

In other words, the data make no sense on the theory of evolution. These are not minor errors that could plausibly be characterized as evolutionary “noise.” These are fundamental problems that have consistently contradicted the theory for decades.

Fortunately evolutionists know that their theory is true. Everything spontaneously arose, even though evolutionists have no idea how this could possibly have happened. That’s just the stuff of good solid scientific research.

Morphological Discontinuities Trouble Evolutionists

One of the Most Important Questions in Evolutionary Biology

NeoDarwinism expected a fine gradation of form from one species to the next but the distribution of morphologies is clumpy at virtually all scales. Appeals to gaps in the fossil record don’t solve the problem and now evolutionists are considering more complex explanations for how evolution could have produced such morphological discontinuities. They are also suggesting that the expectation of fine gradations between species may have been driven by Charles Lyell’s promotion of uniformitarianism in geology and by the desire to be physics-like. Darwin’s friend Thomas Huxley warned Darwin about his narrow focus on gradualism. As Douglas Erwin explains:

Lyell, however, deeply influenced Darwin, and just as Lyell invoked uniformitarianism as part of his efforts to make geology a science, I believe Darwin followed suit in his development of evolutionary thought. Huxley famously wrote to Darwin immediately before publication of The Origin, suggesting that Darwin had adopted a gradual view of evolution too unreservedly.

But what if Darwin had not cast his evolution as a gradual, law-like process? If he had allowed for saltations to explain the discontinuities, rather than gaps left by an imperfect fossil record, then his theory would have been less compelling. Now, 150 years later, we have yet another false prediction and evolutionists struggling to patch the theory. And if something as fundamental as this remains in question, then certainly evolution is not a scientific fact.

More Fossil Failures: New Mammalian Fossils “Change Everything”

Science Versus Dogma

Earlier this year two different mammalian fossils, discovered in China, have revealed yet more problems for evolution. The problem is that, as with the existing evidence, the new findings point to “radically different,” as one evolutionist admitted, models of the origin of mammals. One of the new fossil findings, as with most of the molecular data, points to a much earlier origin of mammals, going back more than 200 million years ago. The other new finding is closer to the traditional, fossil-based, dating, closer to 150 million years ago.

In other words, the data do not fit the theory. In order to reconcile the conflict, and fit the data to the theory, evolutionists have a wide range of explanatory mechanisms they can draw on. They can say that a trait descended from a common ancestor or that it evolved at some later date, in a particular lineage arising from the common ancestor. They also can say that a trait evolved more than once in multiple lineages arising from the common ancestor—the so-called homoplasies. These explanatory mechanisms alone make the theory highly flexible and allow evolutionists to explain just about any pattern.

The gratuitous use of such explanatory mechanisms makes for a circuitous theory. That is, the theory is augmented with various degrees-of-freedom allowing it to adapt to a wide range of data. As one evolutionist explained, mammalian phylogeny is “complex”—a euphemism that evolutionists use to explain empirical contradictions requiring additional epicycles.

But even this sacrifice of parsimony can’t fix all the contradictions. And so evolutionists must defer the problem to the future. As one evolutionist explained, “With sufficient data, ranging from molecular to morphological, we will eventually reach to a working hypothesis that will have the power to explain how mammals originated.”

But as we have seen many times, this repeated claim that more data will solve evolution’s problems has not fared well in the past. Perhaps this time will be different, but at the very least, what we do know for certain is that today, evolution lacks even a working hypothesis to explain how mammals originated. Nonetheless evolutionists are certain evolution is a fact.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Hominin Fossils Yield Uncooperative DNA Data

“Now we have to rethink the whole story.”

Scientists continue to improve their amazing ability to recover microscopic DNA molecules from ancient fossils and this new source of old data is causing problems for evolution. The latest finding, published earlier this month, comes from hominin fossils found in caves in northern Spain. In recent decades fossils from a few dozen individuals have been found in these caves. According to evolution these fossils should have been ancestors of the Neanderthals but the recovered DNA have falsified this expectation. Instead the DNA is more closely related to the Denisovans, so named after the Siberian cave where their bones were discovered. This is not a minor problem and, once again, evolutionists struggle to reconcile their theory with the evidence as these quotes reveal:

“Right now, we’ve basically generated a big question mark.”

“Everybody had a hard time believing it at first.”

“Now we have to rethink the whole story.”

“It’s extremely hard to make sense of. We still are a bit lost here.”

As science writer Carl Zimmer put it, “The new finding is hard to reconcile with the picture of human evolution that has been emerging based on fossils and ancient DNA.” In other words, the data do not fit the theory.

Once again evolution must be patched up, and once again it takes on increasing levels of complexity to accommodate the uncooperative data.  As one evolutionist admitted, “The more we learn from the DNA extracted from these fossils, the more complicated the story becomes.”

In fact evolutionists are now considering several new stories. Perhaps the fossil species from the Spanish caves are not true Neanderthals, but belonged to the ancestors of both Denisovans and Neanderthals.

Or perhaps the newly discovered DNA was passed to both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but eventually disappeared from Neanderthals. On the other hand, perhaps the Spanish fossils belong to yet another branch of humans altogether—Homo erectus.

Scientific theories are supposed to be parsimonious. Geocentrism required dozens and dozens of epicycles, but with heliocentrism the data fell neatly into place according to the simple idea that the planets revolve about the Sun.

Evolution is far beyond geocentrism in its level of complexity. As new findings stream in evolutionary theory must be modified with so many of its own epicycles. Rather than explain the natural world, evolution is more often surprised by nature. Its predictions are routinely false and evolution appears to be more of an after-the-fact tautology than an insightful description of reality.

Here’s That New Fossil Study That Found a Crack in Evolution

It Will Only Get Bigger

Animal groups do not evolve greater and greater new designs as time goes by, but rather are at their maximum level of diversity early in their history. And species must be constrained in how much they can change. The ignorant babblings of creationists? Ridiculous criticisms of IDs? True they have been making such claims for years, but this time it comes from evolutionists at the University of Bath who performed a massive fossil study. As one of the evolutionists explained:

This pattern, known as “early high disparity,” turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years.

Early high disparity? And another one of the evolutionists explained that species must be constrained in how much they can change:

Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. The only exceptions to the rule are groups that were wiped out at times of mass extinction.

In their paper they explained that there are few putative macroevolutionary trends or rules that withstand scrutiny. Funny, we’ve been saying that for years. The difference is we don’t carry a theological mandate for evolution.

Now we find such talk in evolution papers. These findings join the thousands of other scientific problems with evolution, slowly eating away at the foundation.

Religion drives science and it matters.

Presenting Anomalocaris: Look What Those Primitive Bacteria Turned Into

Life Blossomed

Here is an excellent animation well worth watching even if only for the animation itself. It also highlights how evolutionists take for granted, and think nothing of, their heroic narrative.

The Science Guy: Evolution is True, Creationism is False

Bill Nye, host of the 1990s “Bill Nye the Science Guy” children’s show, makes a plea for evolution in this new video clip. Nye explains that evolution deniers are not scientifically literate and have no future:

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. It's like, it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer. Your whole world is just going to be a mystery instead of an exciting place.

… Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don't believe in evolution. I mean, here are these ancient dinosaur bones or fossils, here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can—we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems. 

It is not so much that the evidence proves evolution but that it disproves creationism. As Nye explains, evidence such as the fossils, radioactivity and distant stars leaves evolution deniers with massive inconsistencies. Such rejection of science leaves one unable to pursue any kind of technical career.

Nye is moving quickly and there is much that he leaves unspoken. But listen carefully and you will understand the message.

An Evolutionist Just Made An Incredible Blunder In a Sodium Channel Evolution Paper As Evolutionists Continue To Drink Their Own Bathwater

You won’t believe Harold Zakon’s fallacy in the very first sentence of his new PNAS paper on sodium channel evolution. The University of Texas evolutionist writes:

Multicellular animals evolved >650 million years ago (1).

And what is Zakon’s reference for this rather remarkable claim? It is a 2009 Nature paper on fossilized steroids indicating ancient multicellular life. Amazingly, Zakon conflates existence with evolution. In other words, whatever appears in the fossil record must have evolved.

And who allowed this colossal, non scientific, blunder into print? None other than John Avise who just happens to believe that it would be blasphemous to ascribe harmful and inefficient genomic designs to God.

In a massive exercise of drinking their own bathwater, evolutionists peer-review and edit papers written by other evolutionists and the result is, quite literally, garbage out.

You Won’t Believe How Evolutionists Say These Two Major Contradictions Cancel Each Other Out

Even before Darwin scientists knew that completely new kinds of species appeared rather abruptly in the fossil record. And a century later—when scientists uncovered the genomes of different species—they discovered that if evolution were true, then genes that build highly complex designs must have been around long before those complex designs appeared on the scene. Over and over, evolutionists have come to realize, very early life not only must have been extremely complex, but it even must have anticipated the later complexity by having the right genes all ready to go. Evolutionists even have a word for this. They call it “preadapted” genomes. Of course evolutionists insist all this must have spontaneously arisen, for no reason. It was just lucky.

Now these two problems with evolution—the abrupt appearance of new species and preadapted genomes—might seem to be unrelated. Of all the many falsifications and problems with evolution, and there are many, what do these two have to do with each other?

Well it turns out evolutionists have found a way to play the one against the other, so they cancel themselves out simultaneously, in their minds. In a clever argument, they say that the preadapted genomes paved the way for the abrupt appearance of fantastic designs that came later. Of course none of this actually solves the problems, but it sounds very scientific and impressive:

The genomes of taxa whose stem lineages branched early in metazoan history, and of allied protistan groups, provide a tantalizing outline of the morphological and genomic changes that accompanied the origin and early diversifications of animals. Genome comparisons show that the early clades increasingly contain genes that mediate development of complex features only seen in later metazoan branches. Peak additions of protein-coding regulatory genes occurred deep in the metazoan tree, evidently within stem groups of metazoans and eumetazoans. However, the bodyplans of these early-branching clades are relatively simple. The existence of major elements of the bilaterian developmental toolkit in these simpler organisms implies that these components evolved for functions other than the production of complex morphology, preadapting the genome for the morphological differentiation that occurred higher in metazoan phylogeny. Stem lineages of the bilaterian phyla apparently required few additional genes beyond their diploblastic ancestors. As disparate bodyplans appeared and diversified during the Cambrian explosion, increasing complexity was accommodated largely through changes in cis-regulatory networks, accompanied by some additional gene novelties. Subsequently, protein-coding genic richness appears to have essentially plateaued. Some genomic evidence suggests that similar stages of genomic evolution may have accompanied the rise of land plants

So for some reason all kinds of genes arose spontaneously for no known reason, and later all kinds of species with fantastic new designs appeared abruptly, but not to worry because the former made possible the latter.

Evolutionists say without evolution nothing makes sense in biology, but it seems that with evolution nothing makes sense in biology. Religion drives science and it matters.

Darwin Blamed the Evidence For the Lack of Fossils

Since the days of Charles Darwin the fossil record has provided incredible details of past life on earth, but in Chapter 9 of the first edition of his book, entitled “On the Imperfection of the Geological Record,” Darwin made this excuse for his theory:

Nature may almost be said to have guarded against the frequent discovery of her transitional or linking forms. From the foregoing considerations it cannot be doubted that the geological record, viewed as a whole, is extremely imperfect …

So new forms appeared abruptly in the fossil record and Darwin could not explain how such innovation evolved, but it was nature’s fault. Intelligent design advocates say the world conspicuously allows for discovery, but evolutionists say the opposite.

Mouse-to-Elephant: Evolution in Action

An international team of evolutionists reported this week that mice evolved into 33,000 pound elephants in 24 million generations. They also looked at other evolutionary transitions such as from a slightly larger, rabbit-sized, mammal to an elephant (10 million generations), and going in the other direction from a large elephant to smaller dwarf versions (100,000 generations). This relatively fast rate of reduction was a surprise for the evolutionists, as the lead research explained:

The huge difference in rates for getting smaller and getting bigger is really astounding—we certainly never expected it could happen so fast!

What is also surprising is that evolutionists could even make such measurements. One report explained that the evolutionists “measured large-scale evolution in mammals” and another explained that they “have for the first time measured how fast large-scale evolution can occur in mammals.”

It looks like yet another impressive proof text for evolution. To first order the timeframe, and number of generations, to morph mice into elephants has actually been measured? One might wonder how evolutionists could achieve such an accomplishment. The complexities of such an undertaking seem overwhelming. The very idea seems to be unscientific, and yet here we have not only an understanding of the process, but we even have sufficient detail to measure such large-scale evolution. Surely this is ground-breaking research.

Well, as usual, there’s a catch. In spite of the claims, the evolutionists did not actually make any such measurement. Not in any scientific, objective way, at least. What the evolutionists did was to compare various fossils and, assuming they evolved into each other, computed the time required.

Assuming the evolved into each other? Yes, behind all the headlines and hoopla, there is that minor caveat. Evolution was assumed from the beginning. Evolutionary rates were “measured” by first taking evolution as a given. That’s just the stuff of good solid scientific research.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Is Evolution a Truism?

One argument for why evolution is true is that it necessarily follows from the mere existence of biological variation that is inherited, limited resources and natural selection. Here is how one peer-reviewed journal paper described it:

The conventional picture of Darwinian evolution was summarized by Gould as based on two undeniable facts and an inescapable conclusion (Gould, 1977: 11):

(1) Organisms vary, and these [random] variations are inherited (at least in part) by their offspring.

(2) Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive.

(3) On average, offspring that vary most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable variation will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection.

It is yet another evolutionary proof that has failed badly for, as is intuitively obvious to anyone not committed to evolution, random biological variations do not necessarily add up to the astonishingly complex designs we find in the biological world. Indeed, that would be quite a remarkable finding. As Gould would later explain, the large-scale change evolution requires did not arise from the sorts of small-scale biological variation that can help species to adapt:

Whatever genetic and developmental setting permitted this cardinal event [the Cambrian explosion], it was not business as usual, to be simply extrapolated from Darwinian changes in modern populations. We cannot begin to answer “what is (multicellular) life”? without understanding such events.

Another peer-reviewed paper put it this way:

It is relatively well known how organisms adapt to their environment and, arguably, even how new species originate. However, whether this knowledge suffices to explain macroevolution, narrowly defined here to describe evolutionary processes that bring about fundamental novelties or changes in body plans, has remained highly controversial.

Such sentiment is common and it represents the failure not of a minor tenet of evolutionary theory, but of a fundamental prediction. Indeed, this highlights one of the common reasons people have always been skeptical of evolution.

It’s not exactly shocking (except for evolutionists, see for example here, here and here) that species might be able to adapt to changing environments. We hardly need to invoke the heroic idea that all of biology arose from random events to make sense of adaptation.

But the idea that, beginning in a warm little pond somewhere, random events would inexorably build one upon the next in a biological construction job of ever increasing sophistication is, yes, quite heroic. Yet amazingly evolutionists have insisted this very thing is true. They know not how, but they are sure that somehow the incredibly high-dimension biological design hyperspace is filled with gradual, ever-increasing fitness pathways that lead to the millions upon millions of species and all their intricate and creative designs. And so therefore, they have believed that the mere existence of biological variation that is inherited, limited resources and natural selection, together make evolution a truism.

But now even evolutionists are coming around to what was obvious from the beginning. Biology is not a “just add water” kind of project. It is yet another miserable failure of evolutionary theory. But evolutionists will, of course, remain undeterred. For evolution must be a fact. Religion drives science, and it matters.

New Cambrian Arthropod Vision System: No More Shudders

Years ago physicist Riccardo Levi-Setti became fascinated with trilobites. He wrote a book about them and at one point called their 500 million year old eyes “an all-time feat of function optimization.” They were, as evolutionists admitted, “an impressive feat of early evolution.” But now a new finding shows evolution to be even more impressive.

Charles Darwin considered the eye to be an “organ of extreme perfection.” Even after writing Origins he confessed it gave him a cold shudder. He needed to focus on his theory’s fine gradations to give himself comfort. But one hundred and thirty four years later, in 1994, evolutionists laid the problem to rest. The evolution of the eye was finally understood. It turned out such evolution was no big deal after all. In fact the eye could rather easily evolve.

The only catch to the conclusion was that it was made by evolutionists. Remember that evolutionists insist evolution must be a fact for religious reasons. As such their objectivity is sometimes wanting, as in this case. With evolution taken as a fact, whether or not vision systems evolved was no longer in question—they did. The only question was how they have evolved. The 1994 paper explained that although Darwin “anticipated that the eye would become a favorite target for criticism,” the problem “has now almost become a historical curiosity” and “the question is now one of process rate rather than one of principle.” The evolutionists estimated this rate by first assuming that the eye indeed evolved. They wrote:

The evolution of complex structures, however, involves modifications of a large number of separate quantitative characters, and in addition there may be discrete innovations and an unknown number of hidden but necessary phenotypic changes. These complications seem effectively to prevent evolution rate estimates for entire organs and other complex structures. An eye is unique in this respect because the structures necessary for image formation, although there may be several, are all typically quantitative in their nature, and can be treated as local modifications of pre-existing tissues. Taking a patch of pigmented light-sensitive epithelium as the starting point, we avoid the more inaccessible problem of photoreceptor cell evolution. Thus, if the objective is limited to finding the number of generations required for the evolution of an eye’s optical geometry, then the problem becomes solvable.

The problem becomes solvable? The evolutionists skipped the entire evolution of cellular signal transduction and the vision cascade. That would be like saying you have showed how motorcycles evolved although you took the engine, drive train and wheels as your starting point.

The evolutionists then skipped all of the major problems that arise after you have a signal transduction system in place, such as the incredible post processing system and the creation of the machinery to construct the vision system. The problem they ended up solving is sometimes affectionately referred to as a “cartoon” version of the real world problem.

The research, if you can call it that, did not serve as evidence for evolution. Yet the paper became a favorite reference for evolutionists wanting to suppress scientific skepticism of evolution. Eye evolution, they insisted, was now known to be straightforward. Here, for instance, is how our tax dollars are used by PBS to promote this abuse of science:

Zoologist Dan-Erik Nilsson demonstrates how the complex human eye could have evolved through natural selection acting on small variations. Starting with a simple patch of light sensitive cells, Nilsson’s model “evolves” until a clear image is produced.

With such mythology now internalized in evolutionary lore, evolutionists will believe practically anything, including a new finding of even greater evolutionary wonders. The new paper reports on complex vision in early arthropods long predating most of the trilobites. But in order to properly “educate” the reader and prepare them for the findings, the paper begins with, yes, a reference to that 1994 Nilsson paper:

Despite the status of the eye as an “organ of extreme perfection,” theory suggests that complex eyes can evolve very rapidly. … Here we report exceptionally preserved fossil eyes from the Early Cambrian (~515 million years ago) Emu Bay Shale of South Australia, revealing that some of the earliest arthropods possessed highly advanced compound eyes, each with over 3,000 large ommatidial lenses and a specialized “bright zone.” … The eyes are more complex than those known from contemporaneous trilobites and are as advanced as those of many living forms. They provide further evidence that the Cambrian explosion involved rapid innovation in fine-scale anatomy as well as gross morphology, and are consistent with the concept that the development of advanced vision helped to drive this great evolutionary event.

With the mythological framework properly in place, the findings could then safely be presented as confirmations of evolution. As the journal’s editor added:

Charles Darwin thought that the eye, which he called an “organ of extreme perfection,” was a serious challenge to evolutionary theory — but he was mistaken. Theory predicts that eyes can evolve with great speed, and now there is support for this prediction from the fossil record.

Support for this prediction? You’ve got to be kidding. A cartoon version of reality, taking the myth of evolution as true, is considered a “prediction” and amazing early complexity in the fossils then becomes a “support for this prediction”?

What the new fossils revealed is an early Cambrian, highly advanced vision system more elaborate than any so far discovered. Its compound eyes have more then 3,000 lenses optimally arranged in the densest and most efficient packing pattern. As the paper explains:

The extremely regular arrangement of lenses seen here exceeds even that in certain modern taxa, such as the horseshoe crab Limulus, in which up to one-third of lenses deviate from hexagonal packing.

All of this is presented to the reader as merely another demonstration of how fantastic designs just happen spontaneously to arise:

The new fossils reveal that some of the earliest arthropods had already acquired visual systems similar to those of living forms, underscoring the speed and magnitude of the evolutionary innovation that occurred during the Cambrian explosion.

Ho-hum, yet more evolutionary innovation. For evolutionists it is just another day in the office. As PZ Myers explains, we already knew that complex animals appear rapidly. After all, that is why they call it the “Cambrian explosion.” Evolutionists have written “whole books on the subject.”

Myers follows this circular reasoning with yet more question begging:

The sudden appearance of complexity is no surprise, either. We know that the fundamental mechanisms of eye function evolved long before the Cambrian, from the molecular evidence;

Of course there is no “molecular evidence” that gives us such knowledge. But if you assume evolution is true to begin with, as do evolutionists who analyze the molecular patterns, then Myers’ fictional, question begging, world makes sense.

Myers follows these circular arguments with a more subtle type of fallacy. He explains that these particular findings are no big deal because both this finding and the trilobite vision systems require cellular signal transduction, development machines and so forth:

It is also the case that the measure of complexity here is determined by a simple meristic trait, the number of ommatidia. This is not radical. The hard part in the evolution of the compound eye was the development of the signal transduction mechanism, followed by the developmental rules that governed the formation of a regular, repeating structure of the eye. The number of ommatidia is a reflection of the degree of commitment of tissues in the head to eye formation, and is a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one.

Setting aside the usual evolutionary speculation about how easily designs evolve, the problem here is that the cellular signal transduction, development machines and so forth are themselves problems for evolution. Indeed, even the simplest of light detection systems sport such incredible designs for which evolution has no explanation beyond vague speculation.

Next Myers is back to question-begging. In typical fashion he attempts to shore up the evolution position with the usual reference to the mythical 1994 Nilsson paper:

And finally, there’s nothing in the data from this paper that implies sudden origins; there can’t be. If it takes a few hundred thousand years for a complex eye to evolve from a simple light sensing organ, there is no way to determine that one sample of a set of fossils was the product of millions of years of evolution, or one day of magical creation.

Next is the fallacy of credulity. If you present an evolutionist with the scientific failures of his theory, he will accuse you of basing your skepticism on your own failure to imagine a solution. As Myers puts it:

It’s a logical error and a failure of the imagination to assume that these descriptions are of a population that spontaneously emerged nearly-instantaneously.

Failure of the imagination? Indeed, we just need to do more imagining, that’s the problem.

Finally Myers reiterates the flawed Darwinian argument that whatever abruptness you see in the fossil record is, after all, merely a consequence of all those gaps in the fossils:

Darwin himself explained in great detail how one should not expect fine-grained fossil series, due to the imperfection of the geological record.

When in doubt, doubt the data. Paleontologists agree that the fossil record reveals abrupt appearances, but when convenient evolutionists can always protect their theory with those gaps in the fossil record.

Evolutionary thinking is remarkable. I am reminded of John Earman’s remarks about Hume’s arguments. For it is astonishing how well evolution is treated, given how completely the confection collapses under a little probing. And yet evolutionists are supremely confident they are right.

Evolutionists such as Myers are very book smart, but the wisdom and common sense is lacking. The evolutionist’s confidence is exceeded only by the absurdity of his theory. Religion drives science and it matters.

Fossil Find: Fungus Controlled Ant Just Like Today

The fossil record cannot usually tell us about the soft body parts or the behavior of its specimens. For these, we look to the extant species. But now a clever finding reveals an odd behavior in carpenter ants from the distant past.

Nature is full of designs and behaviors not easily preserved in the fossils. Consider the bat, certain types of which map out objects around it as small as a mosquito by sensing the echoes of its own squeaks—a system known as echolocation. The bat emits a high-pitch squeak, well beyond the range of human hearing, up to 2,000 times per second. Next it determines both range and direction to the tiny mosquito by sensing the echo while filtering out echoes from the squeaks of nearby bats. Or consider fish that use underwater electric fields either passively or actively to sense objects around them, including other fish.

It is difficult to determine such details from the fossil record, but they reveal how unlikely is the theory of evolution. Anyone familiar with today’s sonar or radar systems knows the immense complexity involved with such systems: the problems of sensing the echo in the presence of the transmitted signal which can be billions of times stronger, of filtering out spurious signals such as echoes of older transmissions, of combining the echo information with knowledge of your own motion, and so forth. Yet the bat’s detection abilities are superior to those of the best electronic sonar equipment.

It is also difficult to determine complex behaviors from the fossil record. Consider certain Hydra species, a small underwater creature, that develop nematocysts—stinging cells which eject a tiny poisoned hair. A planarian worm known as the Microstomum, consumes Hydra but passes the nematocysts through its digestive system and positions them on its surface. The Hydra meal serves to arm the Microstomum, and when fully equipped the Microstomum omits the Hydra from its diet, resuming again after discharging its ill-gotten arsenal.

For evolution to have formed this system, certain Microstomum must have happened to have selectively digested the Hydra, leaving the nematocysts untouched. Then they also happened to have vectored the nematocysts to the surface and positioned it there. Then certain Microstomum happened to have a feedback loop installed to regulate its diet.

Or consider a sheep parasite known as the brainworm:

The brain worm that reproduces in sheep uses ants to get back into a sheep. The worms get into ants by infecting snails that eat sheep feces. The snails expel tiny worm larvae in a mucus that ants enjoy, and some dozens of worms take up residence in an ant. But this would do them no good if the ant behaved normally; too few ants would be eaten by sheep. Consequently, while most of the worms make themselves at home in an ant’s abdomen, one finds its way to the ants brain and causes the ant to climb up a grass stem and wait to be eaten by a sheep. Ironically, the worm that programs the ant is cheated of happiness in the sheep’s intestine; it becomes encysted and dies.

The whole procedure seems unnecessary. Why do the worm eggs defecated by the sheep not simply hatch and climb up the grass stem to await being eaten by a sheep instead of making the hazardous trip through snail and ant? How could they become adapted to being carried by the ant unless the ant were already programmed to make itself available to be eaten by a sheep?

The list, of course, goes on and on. There is the decoy-fish with its detachable dorsal fin that mimics a smaller fish complete with a dark spot resembling an eye and notch resembling a mouth. The decoy-fish becomes motionless except for the decoy which moves from side to side, causing the “mouth” to open and close. And there is the owl with ears tuned to different frequencies, to better track its prey, and the rattlesnake with heat-sensitive (infrared) sensors to image its prey at night.

Now, a new fossil finding shows just how persistent nature's odd behaviors can be. A carpenter ant (Camponotus leonardi) can be infected by the fungus Ophiocordyceps. Sensitive to the forest temperature and humidity, the fungus must be up off the ground but lower than the forest canopy. It arrives at the desired height by taking over the ant it infects:

The fungus cannot grow high up in the canopy or on the forest floor, but infected ants often die on leaves midway between the two, where the humidity and temperature suit the fungus. Once an ant has died, the fungus sprouts from its head and produces a pod of spores, which are fired at night on to the forest floor, where they can infect other ants.

Scientists led by Hughes noticed that ants infected with the fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, bit into leaves with so much force they left a lasting mark. The holes created by their mandibles either side of the leaf vein are bordered by scar tissue, producing an unmistakable dumb-bell shape.

It is another fascinating parasitic action that, it would seem, could never be found in the fossil record. But a team of intrepid researchers found a way:

Writing in the journal, Biology Letters, the team describes how they trawled a database of images that document leaf damage by insects, fungi and other organisms. They found one image of a 48m-year-old leaf from the Messel pit that showed the distinctive "death grip" markings of an infected ant. At the time, the Messel area was thick with subtropical forests.

"We now present it as the first example of behavioural manipulation and probably the only one which can be found. In most cases, this kind of control is spectacular but ephemeral and doesn't leave any permanent trace," Hughes said.

And how did evolution design such a Rube Goldberg device? Who knows:

"The question now is, what are the triggers that push a parasite not just to kill its host, but to take over its brain and muscles and then kill it."

He added: "Of all the parasitic organisms, only a few have evolved this trick of manipulating their host's behaviour.

Evolution is truly amazing. It creates in ways we cannot even figure out.

Religion drives science and it matters.

Did MicroRNAs Shape the Cambrian Explosion?

The fossil record reveals a history of life characterized by the abrupt appearance of new species followed by no change and eventual extinction in most cases. Needless to say, abrupt appearances and no change is not exactly what evolution expected. Much of this was known in Darwin's time and he figured that the fossil record was incomplete. Today such speculation doesn't work anymore. The evidence reveals even more clearly this pattern of abrupt appearances followed by stasis. As one recent paper explained:

Beginning some 555 million years ago the Earth’s biota changed in profound and fundamental ways, going from an essentially static system billions of years in existence to the one we find today, a dynamic and awesomely complex system whose origin seems to defy explanation. Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous animal phyla with very distinct body plans arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time.

As in Darwin's day, the fossil record does not match evolutionary expectations and evolutionists have been trying to solve the riddle. How can the empirical scientific data be explained by evolution? One new idea is to have the recently discovered microRNAs do the heavy lifting.

MicroRNAs are short snippets of DNA, about 20 nucleotides long, that help regulate protein production. The idea is that:

miRNAs might be instrumental in canalizing development such that phenotypic variation decreases through geologic time at the cost of increasing developmental precision, allowing for subsequent increases in morphological complexity.

The big words hide the fact that there is no substance to the proposal. Here is the proposal in English (my translation):

New forms abruptly appeared because evolution somehow created them. In fact, there was an abundance of these new forms, representing dozens of different designs, and many variations on each design. As luck would have it, evolution began creating microRNAs which suppressed much of that variation because, after all, microRNAs regulate protein production. So microRNAs explain the reductions in variation that follow the explosions. And, oh by the way, microRNAs also helped evolution create new wonders, not that it couldn't already, but you know, they helped.

This is the usual just-add-water view of science that prevails courtesy of evolution. Incredibly complex organisms which defy our understanding just appear now and then. They might give rise to more incredible creations, or maybe not. Meanwhile, the details of what actually happened remain a complete mystery.

For instance, the notion that microRNAs just began to proliferate on their own is absurd. They are one part of a mind-boggling regulation network. Indeed, the microRNAs themselves (which regulate protein production remember) are regulated by proteins. As new research is gradually elucidating, "MicroRNAs control the translation of mRNAs into proteins, and proteins in turn regulate the microRNAs at various levels.”

Not only is the production of microRNAs tightly controlled, but they are carefully removed from action as well, as a consequence of "a dense network of regulatory mechanisms."

But for a moment let's set all the problems aside. Let's give evolution every break and consider that this fanciful story may really be not the creation myth it appears to be, but the real thing. Taking this narrative at face value, it would mean that evolution produced the elaborate mechanisms and machinery (and sequences) of microRNAs, so that evolution then could really take off. It would be the ultimate Rube Goldberg device. Evolutionists, who are not the least abashed at presenting such tripe, are seriously telling each other that evolution created evolution. This is truly astonishing.

With each new failed expectation and each new unfounded absurd speculation, evolutionists are digging themselves deeper and deeper in their hole. Religion drives science, and it matters.