Evolutionist: “Jesus had nothing to say about … abortion”

And So This Is Christmas

On this 2017 Christmas holiday an evolutionist has proclaimed that the man whose birthday is celebrated today did not come out against abortion. She wrote:

Jesus had nothing to say about … abortion … He did have quite a lot to say about the poor and the vulnerable, and maybe that’s a good place to start.

Readers shouldn’t need a lengthy explanation of the problem here. Theologians refer to this as imposing an idea onto Scripture rather than reading it out of Scripture. To say that Jesus said nothing about abortion but—in the very next breath—admit that He did instruct us to protect the vulnerable, does not make sense.

It would be like saying Jesus said nothing about stabbing people in the back, though he did admonish us not to murder, but that’s different.

Or again, it would be like saying Jesus said nothing about being nice to people, though he did tell us to do to others as we would have them do to us. But that’s different.

No, it isn’t different.

The problem here is that babies are, if anything, “vulnerable.” One need not stretch definitions to see the problem. One does not need an imagination here to get it.

Babies. Are. Vulnerable.

It is not that this writer made a minor slip here. This assertion is nothing short of absurd.

In fact, the claim is so silly and ridiculous, I would not normally bring it to the attention of readers. If you showed me this quote, I would assume it is from some phony troll or chatroom.

But it isn’t, and this is where the problem becomes more important. The quote is from a newspaper article. And it is not from just any old newspaper. It is from, err, the top newspaper in the world—The New York Times.

Nor is the article deeply buried somewhere. It is prominently displayed above the fold, top right on the website.

Nor is the author someone who accidently slipped a piece into The Gray Lady. In fact, the piece was written by, err, Contributing Op-Ed writer Margaret Renkl.

Renkl’s point is that followers of Jesus need to get with the program, and drop the whole pro life thing. After all, Jesus had nothing to say about abortion.

Right?

The argument isn’t even wrong, and yet there it is. Complete absurdity parading as words of wisdom, as if in some Hans Christian Andersen story.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

But, But, But, … The Origin Of Life Was All But Solved!

“The origin of life is among the greatest open problems in science”

With everyone from the National Academy of Sciences to science writers such as Carl Zimmer proclaiming that the origin of life problem has essentially been solved, we wonder why we continue to find researchers, this time Yehuda Zeiri at Ben-Gurion University, admitting that:

Despite decades of research, how life began on Earth remains one of the most challenging scientific conundrums facing modern science.

and Sara Walker resorting to hope and luck:

The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of complexity that are anywhere near that of even the simplest living systems. A key challenge is identifying the properties of living matter that might distinguish living and non-living physical systems such that we might build new life in the lab. This review is geared towards covering major viewpoints on the origin of life for those new to the origin of life field, with a forward look towards considering what it might take for a physical theory that universally explains the phenomenon of life to arise from the seemingly disconnected array of ideas proposed thus far. The hope is that a theory akin to our other theories in fundamental physics might one day emerge to explain the phenomenon of life, and in turn finally permit solving its origins. […] If we are so lucky as to stumble on new fundamental understanding of life that allows us to solve our origins, it could be such a radical departure from what we know now that it might be left to the next generation of physicists to reconcile the unification of life with other domains of physics, as we are now struggling to accomplish with unifying general relativity and quantum theory a century after those theories were first developed.

But “hope” is not a good science strategy.

One sign of this problem is the proliferation of hypotheses, indicating, as we have pointed out many times, the lack of any good solution. Or as Alex Berezow a bit more bluntly puts it:

The origin of life is a profound mystery. Once life arose, natural selection and evolution took over, but the question of how a mixture of various gases created life-giving molecules that arranged into structures capable of reproducing themselves remains unanswered. Many theories have been proposed, some of which are popular (e.g., RNA World), and some of which are a far-fetched (e.g., aliens). Unlike politics, more ideas are not necessarily better; in science, a diversity of theories tends to betray the reality that scientists have no idea what's going on.

No idea what’s going on? It must be time for Jeremy England to find another Ilya Prigogine idea.

The BBC on Evolution: It Just Gets Worse

“The Convictions of a Monkey’s Mind”

The previous post reviewed Chris Baraniuk’s article for the BBC about why evolution is such a great theory (“one of the greatest theories in all of science”), a fact, and so forth. The post showed how terrible the evidence is for evolution. In a sense, evolutionists themselves provide the most powerful critique of their theory. Just listen to their own explanations of why it is a fact. But there is more to the story. It gets worse because, well, that previous post didn’t cover Baraniuk’s complete article. That previous post only looked at part of Baraniuk’s article. It only looked at those parts of Baraniuk’s article that at least made some sense.

After discussing Richard Lenski’s long term experiment (LTEE), Baraniuk steps back to discuss the role of genes in evolution. Here is what he has to say:

Over the last century scientists have catalogued the genes from different species. It turns out that all living things store information in their DNA in the same way: they all use the same "genetic code".

What's more, organisms also share many genes. Thousands of genes found in human DNA may also be found in the DNA of other creatures, including plants and even bacteria.

These two facts imply that all modern life has descended from a single common ancestor, the "last universal ancestor", which lived billions of years ago.

So, to paraphrase, we have two premises and a conclusion. The premises are:

P1: All living things store information in their DNA in the same way.
P2: Organisms also share many genes.

And the conclusion is:

C1: All modern life has descended from a single common ancestor.

It would be wrong to say this is a false claim. When we say that someone has made a false claim, the implication is that, while wrong, there was at least some logical reasoning present, some logical thread to follow. A false claim is a claim that starts with some evidence and in the process of getting to the conclusion, fouls up in some sort of an observable way. There was a stumble in an otherwise, at least somewhat, logical train of thought. We can at least see what the fellow was getting at. We can sympathize a bit, and reconstruct his attempt, and fix if for him, at least as best as we can. It may still be a hopeless argument, but at least we can see where he was going.

For the evolutionist there is no train of thought—no logical reasoning present. It is closer to, ironically, what Darwin described as “the convictions of a monkey's mind.”

It is complete gibberish.

To say that the conclusion C1 above does not follow from the premises P1 and P2 would be like saying your pet dog failed to beat you at chess when all he did was barf all over the board. Your dog not only failed to beat you, he didn’t even play the game.

It is not that evolutionists make a few mistakes here and there in an otherwise well thought out attempt. It is that they completely fail to provide anything remotely resembling a scientific argument for their Epicurean conviction that the entire biological world (and everything else for that matter), arose by itself.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

“Evolution” of Darwin’s Finches Tracked at Genetic Level

Fat, Drunk and Stupid

One thing we can all agree on is that the infamous finches on the Galápagos Islands are a classic icon of evolution. The difference is that evolutionists are playing the fool. Ever since Darwin wondered aloud that if the different types of finches he saw on the Galápagos Islands were not merely variants of a species, but in fact different species, then it “would undermine the stability of species,” and therefore the finches (and everything else) must have spontaneously arisen, evolutionists’ dullness has been embarrassing. Like the co-worker who reveals his ignorance as he rambles on about his pet peeve, evolutionists positivistic proclamations about the finches reveals an astonishing level of ignorance.

Darwin’s findings on the Galápagos Islands told him precisely nothing about how the finches, or anything else for that matter, could spontaneously arise as he would claim. Instead, it was all a silly, eighteenth century, non-scientific, religious argument. God would never create those finches, so they must have evolved.

To this day evolutionists continue to parrot this silly argument as though it has any relevance to modern science. And so not surprisingly, they import their centuries-old, religious views into today’s science, failing to comprehend what it actually means. Witness yesterday’s news item from the leading journal, Nature, which begins:

Researchers are pinpointing the genes that lie behind the varied beaks of Darwin’s finches – the iconic birds whose facial variations have become a classic example of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

A classic example? It is a classic example of how utterly non scientific evolutionary “theory” is. The article discusses particular genes that have been identified as influencing the size and shape of the finch’s beak. And it rehearses the myth that changes that occurred in the finch populations over the course of recent drought years reveal “evolution in action”:

Shifts in this gene underlay an evolutionary change that researchers watched in 2004-05, during a drought that ravaged the Galápagos Islands, where the finches live. The beak sizes of one population of finches shrank, so as to avoid competing for food sources with a different kind of finch – and their genetics changed accordingly.

Of course there was no “evolution in action.” This is evolutionary mythology.

The finch’s beaks altered in response to the drought. The finches were still finches. No new finches arose, and no new beak designs arose.

This is not a story of random mutations luckily finding a new, improved, design that was then fixed in the population via natural selection. Preexisting genes influenced preexisting beak designs in preexisting finch species. And when the drought ceased the populations cycled back to their pre drought designs. New designs were not created.

But that is the science, and evolution never was about the science. Evolutionist’s on-going claims about the Galápagos finches are non scientific and, frankly, ridiculous. The finches truly are a classic icon of evolution. They don’t reveal a case of evolution in action, but rather evolutionary thought in action.

The Evolutionist’s Latest Project: Artificial Intelligence in a Chat Robot

Epic Meltdown

If humanity arose by random chance, then it should be fairly straightforward to mimic and even create intelligence. Enter researchers at Microsoft who this week demonstrated their latest artificial intelligence “achievement,” an online chatbot that rapidly degenerated into a racist, bigoted, holocaust-denier complete with every pejorative and four-letter word you can, and cannot, imagine.

Lawrence Krauss’ Playlist Hacked

Now Evolution Makes Sense

Late this evening Darwin’s God broke into Lawrence Krauss’ much coveted private playlist. This was a major breakthrough, and kudos to our Hacker Unit in doing something that creationist teams have been unable to do despite many years of effort. Krauss’ musical habits are legendary, but he has always been strangely secretive about his tastes. Krauss constantly listens to music on campus, and students complain they can’t get their questions answered simply because he cannot hear them. Krauss lectures, and holds office hours, with headphones seemingly affixed to his head.

Krauss’ playlist has been estimated to be upwards of 5 GB with literally millions of songs. These estimates were based simply on the sheer number of endless hours Krauss spends listening to music. Our breakthrough was based on a hunch from an event at Tempe’s Something From Nothing comedy club, which we covered years ago. Perhaps the playlist is much shorter. “What if Krauss listens only to one song,” someone joked. If that were the case then the playlist would have evaded detection. Sure enough, when we explored the hunch, the data fell into place. It turns out Krauss, amazingly, listens only to one, single, song. Click above to hear the song.

All of this makes perfect sense now. In Saturday’s debate, Krauss explained that protein evolution is not a problem because, “Fortunately we have the Sun.” The audience was dumbfounded, and had no clue what the atheist was babbling about. But his song, “Let The Sunshine In,” by The Fifth Dimension, says it all.

Evolutionists complain that we “just don’t understand” their theory. We have always thought it was “just add water,” but now we get it—it is “just add sunshine.”

Now we see how proteins evolved. This origins debate is now beginning to resolve. We have failed to understand because evolution is so profound. We have failed to appreciate the evolutionist’s message, because of their sheer brilliance.

Out of respect to Krauss’ privacy Darwin’s God will not publish Krauss’ password (but it has to do with the Sun).

Let the sunshine in.

Lawrence Krauss’ Monumental Blunder(s)

Truly a Bogey Moment

In tonight’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe,” debate, the topic of protein evolution induced a long sequence of blunders. Lawrence Krauss attempted to compare a protein to a snowflake. If snowflakes spontaneously arise, then why not protein-coding genes? When Stephen Meyer called him on his absurdity, Krauss doubled down, making the ludicrous claim that there is “a lot of information” in a snowflake, and that Shannon’s information theorem “would tell you that.”

That is a monumental level of ignorance. This is a live debate, and speakers can misspeak and make mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all make mistakes, and people can take it back. But doubling down and reasserting a sheer absurdity is different. Krauss obviously really believes what he said.

If that was not enough, Krauss followed this with the equally absurd claim that the Sun’s energy fuels protein evolution. “Fortunately we have the Sun,” concluded the religiously-driven atheist.

Next Krauss made the age-old claim that “We’re coming very close to an origin of life solution.” This has been the standard line since Alexander Oparin predicted in 1924 that origin of life research would be solved “very, very soon.” Unfortunately, evolutionists do not reckon with the actual science. Their statements are driven by their dogma.

Finally Krauss made the oxymoronic statement that “neoDarwinism is an oxymoron—it doesn’t mean anything.” Krauss was literally flying from one absurdity to the next in his attempt to dodge the facts.

NeoDarwinism an oxymoron? By this time I was no longer surprised by anything the evolutionist said. If the origin of life is practically solved, if a snowflake’s information is comparable to that of a protein, if the Sun’s energy does it all, then hey, why not. NeoDarwinism must be an oxymoron.

This was truly a Bogey moment.

The 12 Points of Evolution: Evolutionists Outdo The Office

And Air Travel

When The Office manager Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) gives a guest lecture at the local business school, he reveals not only the depths of his ignorance but his lack of self-awareness. At one point he hilariously makes an attempt at profundity, informing the students with all assuredness that “There are four kinds of business: Tourism, food service, railroads, and sales.” Realizing his categories have left something out he quickly adds “And hospitals-slash-manufacturing. And air travel.” Scott hasn’t had a deep thought in his life, yet is certain his knowledge and intellect tower over those around him.

I was reminded of Carell’s hilarious portrayal of Scott this week when evolutionist Dan Graur made an attempt to describe “All of evolutionary biology” in 12 points. One can picture Graur, like Carell, starting with the four main points of evolution, and quickly realizing there is another point or two that he left out. But Graur’s first point is beyond anything fiction writers could have dreamed up:

1. Evolutionary biology is ruled by handful of logical principles, each of which has repeatedly withstood rigorous empirical and observational testing.

Logical principles? Rigorous empirical testing? You’ve got to be kidding. The entire biological world arising by chance comes from logical principles? A theory that contradicts science at every turn has repeatedly withstood rigorous testing? The sheer pompous absurdity leaves Carell in the dust.

But it gets better.

5. All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point.

Here Graur has spoken the unspeakable. In his ramblings Graur has laid bare the uncomfortable truth: evolutionary thought holds that the world arose spontaneously. Those Epicurean chance events, whether swerving atoms or mutating molecules, conspired to create everything we see. The idea is prima facie ridiculous and evolutionists do everything to dress it up with more palatable notions of natural selection, fitness landscapes, and all manner of Aristotelian euphemisms (“Dinosaurs were experimenting with flight”).

Not surprisingly evolutionists rushed in to cover over the embarrassment. Outdoing Steve Carell, Matthew Cobb hilariously added predation:

I think the main thing that’s not quite right about this is 5, “All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point”. While this is essentially true, it misses out two of the most significant novelties in the history of life, which were not created by mutation, but instead by instances of predation that went wrong and instead produced symbiosis, with one kind of cell living inside another. The first such event took place around 2 billion years ago, somewhere in the ocean. Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small organisms called prokaryotes which had no cell nucleus or mitochondria (these are the tiny cellular structures that help provide you and me and giraffes and mushrooms with energy). Everything changed when one unicellular life-form, known as an achaebacterium, tried to eat another, called a eubacterium. On this one occasion the eubacterium survived inside its would-be predator and became trapped, losing many of its genes to its host and eventually turning into a molecular powerhouse – the mitochondrion – that produced energy from chemical reactions and was used by the new eukaryotic cell. These new eukaryotic life-forms were a weird hybrid, composed of two different organisms. They were our ancestors. A second, similar, event occurred around a billion years ago, when a eukaryotic cell, complete with mitochondria, engulfed a eubacterium that had long ago evolved the trick of acquiring energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. Predation went wrong again, and another form of symbiosis eventually appeared. This gave rise to algae and eventually plants, in which small organelles called chloroplasts, the descendants of the intended eubacterial victim, turn light into energy for the benefit of the eukaryotic host.

Of course one could also add any number of other evolutionary just-so stories, from Woese’s network of horizontal gene transfer creating a coordinated lateral evolution to retroviruses controlling embryonic development, evolutionary story-telling has no shortage of mechanisms that, as luck would have it, not only were created by evolution but, in turn, have produced more evolutionary change of their own.

The serendipity is staggering. Cobb’s fortuitous predators, as well as all the other imagined evolutionary mechanisms must have been, ultimately, created by those random mutations.

Graur put his finger on it.

All the evolutionary just-so stories, no matter how ridiculous, nonetheless owe their existence to those chance mutations. The rest is serendipity, just ask Michael Scott.

Jeffrey Taylor Sympathetically Reviews Jerry Coyne’s Book Against Religion

Ball Don't Lie

Jerry Coyne, having supplied the world with yet another tome proving that evolution is true—and by true Coyne and the evolutionists mean as true as the existence of gravity or the computer screen sitting in front of you, in other words there is not much nuance there—has now moved on to the next target: religion. In his new book Faith Versus Fact, Coyne rides the mythical Warfare Thesis (which holds that religion, except for in its anti realism form where it merely is the keeper of some vague set of values we might want to think about, opposes science and the two are incompatible) to take the battle to the believers. You can read a polite review in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Taylor. Taylor’s review is polite because, like Coyne, he also is an evolutionist and atheist. Unfortunately, that means that Taylor misses the key point that readers must understand if they are to make sense of Coyne’s new book, and evolutionary thought in general.

Coyne’s earlier book on why evolution is true did not add any new arguments or evidences to the evolution apologetic. The book was an excellent contribution to the genre, with its unique arrangement of the evidence and Coyne’s good writing style. And it gathered more evidence in one place than most treatments. But conceptually, it pounded the same themes that date back to Darwin, Hume, Wolfe, Malebranche, Lucretius, and many more.

And those themes are deeply metaphysical. The most obvious of them is the problem of evil and how evolutionists view it as requiring a distant god. The world must have arisen spontaneously, on its own, so to speak, because their god never would have intended for this gritty world. (You can read more about how Coyne handles the POE here, here, here and here, for example).

The key point to understand when reading the evolution genre is that it is motivated by, and relies on, this sort of religious belief. I call it a key point not only because the religious assumptions are fundamental and essential to evolutionary thought, but because they often are misunderstood. After all, isn’t the argument against an active Creator motivated by science, not religion?

No, science makes no such mandate, or provides no such evidence.

But what about evolution?

Evolution is founded on theological and philosophical claims about God and creation. From a scientific perspective it is not plausible. But from a religious perspective it is a fact.

So when Coyne rails on those of faith, and argues that religious beliefs are no longer tenable, he is making a hypocritical argument. He is a religious person, no less so than any high priest ever was, driven by deeply held metaphysical convictions.

Like evolution, atheism is also grounded in metaphysics. A typical example comes from atheist PZ Myers’ opinion piece in the LA Times where he made the case for atheism from the problem of evil:

We go right to the central issue of whether there is a god or not. We're pretty certain that if there were an all-powerful being pulling the strings and shaping history for the benefit of human beings, the universe would look rather different than it does.

That is a religious argument. Myers, who comes from a Lutheran background, draws a conclusion that depends on what he believes about God. God wouldn’t create this world, so there must be no God.

Aside from the hypocrisy, atheism is founded on a fallacy. For its conclusion, that matter and motion are all that exist, does not support religious beliefs about God. If materialism is all there is, then Myers cannot know anything about God. Myers could not know what God would or wouldn’t do. Atheism is vacuous and collapses on itself. Nor is this problem anything new for atheism. Historian Alan Charles Kors, for example, found that eighteenth century French atheism had come from the church and its culture. Kors wrote:

[My] inquiry led not to a prior history of free thought ... but to the orthodox culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in France. It was, above all, within the deeply Christian learned culture of those years that there occurred inquiries and debates that generated the components of atheistic thought. It was, to say the least, not what I had expected; it indeed was what I found. … Before one can understand the heterodoxy of early-modern atheism, one first must understand the orthodox sources of disbelief.

Atheism is a referendum on religious belief and specifically, in most cases, a referendum on Christian religious belief. That referendum is based not on some logical fallacy or historical failure of Scripture, but rather on our rejection of the Creator. God wouldn’t do it that way.

Elsewhere Taylor makes this point repeatedly. He is concerned there is a lack of understanding about atheism. Taylor argues that people need to understand and appreciate the reasoning behind atheism rather than cast atheists simply as failed theists. We must understand the underlying rationale:

Nowhere does Taunton posit the most obvious conclusion one may reach about the growing prevalence of atheism today: namely, that the tenets in which the Christian tradition demands faith may have ultimately appeared to young people to be untenable. Christianity requires that we, in the twenty-first century, after having mapped the human genome, sent probes to Mars, and discovered the Higgs Boson, believe in human parthenogenesis and tales of a man turning water into wine, calming raging seas, curing lepers, and raising the dead. It requires that we believe that God chose to redeem humankind by means of a human sacrifice.

This monumental failure called atheism is all the more striking when it appeals to scientific findings, as though somehow those findings mandate the atheist’s religious convictions. As per the quote above, Taylor somehow sees molecular biology and other advances of science as mitigating against the virgin birth, crucifixion, and atonement of Christ? We’ve discovered genetics and space travel, so therefore miracles aren’t possible? You’re kidding, right?

Unfortunately, no. The atheists are quite serious in their sophism.

As they say in science, this isn’t even wrong. Such a critique would be too generous. These atheist arguments are the stuff of late-night dorm room sessions where freshman argue strenuously about that which they do not understand. The heat of the argument is exceeded only by the ignorance.

Most people eventually grow up. Not so with the atheists and evolutionists.

It’s not that Coyne, Myers, Dawkins, Taylor and the rest are not smart people. They certainly are. But their religious convictions have them stuck in a fool’s game. After two thousand years, they continue to repeat the absurdities of their Epicurean forefathers.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

There Comes a Time

Live By the Sword, Die By the Sword

It happened this morning at 9:13 AM, a moment I shall never forget. The historians had always told us this day would come, but it just seemed impossible. Yes spontaneous origins seems absurd, they agreed, but the inexorable march of science will find it out. It always does. Don’t get in the way of science they warned, and now they have turned out right. And we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to resist any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses. And if evolutionists can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate Epicureanism to be true, we shall dismiss our objections, and admit, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our failed intuition that something does not come from nothing. All this ran through my mind as I read through Cynthia Moss’s new paper on bat evolution. It all seemed so contrived, but nonetheless, there it was:

Our observations demonstrate that the evolutionary progression that gave rise to the bat wing membrane has resulted in atypical somatosensory inputs, which have been co-opted to enhance flight control.

Evolutionists finally had hard facts to back up their claims. They now had scientific observations demonstrating the evolution of components of the bat wing. In fact, these are fantastically efficient and complex sensors detecting airflow over the wing and transmitting that information along the central nervous system as part of an incredible biological flight control system. As Moss explains in the above video, “Biology has done an exquisite job in creating these animals that can maneuver so agilely.” The paper further explained that “Bats achieve remarkable agility with modified forelimbs that serve as airfoils while retaining capacity for object manipulation.” Or as the press release put it, “Bats fly with breathtaking precision because their wings are equipped with highly sensitive touch sensors, cells that respond to even slight changes in airflow.” Such biological designs could even help engineers design air vehicles that better negotiate obstacles by sensing and adjusting to air turbulence.

It seems so amazing, yet now we know it all is nothing more than the product of blind mutations. In fact Moss’s paper had many more cogent observations. For example, the paper explains that the bat’s specialized airflow sensors evolved in order “to guide motor behaviors.” Also, the paper does not simply limit itself to bat evolution, but brilliantly concludes that vertebrate nervous systems, in general, “have flexibly adapted to accommodate anatomical specializations for flight.”

Needless to say all of this left me stunned. But I quickly began to see the truth of evolution. I simply had never conceived of the idea that things like sensors evolved in order to guide motor behaviors, or that entire nervous systems evolved in order to accommodate capabilities such as flight.

But once you shed your anti science bias, evolution provides these sorts of amazing explanations. Of course nervous systems evolved. They evolved to produce flight. How could I have ever doubted such obvious truths? It just goes to show how dangerous those science deniers are.

Richard Lenski: “It is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed, or evolved”

The Mother of All False Dichotomies

Practically since Darwin the various species of finches on the Galápagos Islands have been declared to be decisive, powerful examples of evolutionary theory. An undeniable confirmation of the age-old Epicurean idea that the world arose spontaneously. But exactly how do some bird species on an island group in the middle of the ocean demonstrate such a bold claim?

The answer involves much more than science. For these cute little birds do not tell us that single-celled bacteria somehow arose from a lifeless collection of chemicals. They don’t tell us that those bacteria gave rise to the complicated eukaryotes, and then to multicellular organisms, and then to fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. The Galápagos finches don’t even tell us how they themselves could have evolved.

What they do tell us is that nature’s organisms can change. Darwin inferred this, and more recent studies have uncovered some of the specifics. With changing weather patterns and food supplies, the birds respond accordingly. They adapt—a feature that is ubiquitous in biology.

The various species have some fantastic adaptation capabilities, and it’s nothing like evolution’s story of blind mutations hitting on better designs on rare occasion. Instead, it is a rapid shifting between preexisting designs, enabled by preexisting and very complicated mechanisms.

But it is change. And that, for Darwin and later evolutionists, is all they need. You see Darwin and evolutionists in general hold to a doctrine of creationism where the Creator constructs the species to be unchanging. In the eighteenth century it was referred to as the “fixity” or “immutability” or “stability” of species.

So if the finches could, in fact, change, then for evolutionists the fixity of species—and all of creationism along with it—must be false. And if creationism is false, then evolution must be true. As Darwin wrote in his notebook, if there was the slightest foundation for this idea, it “would undermine the stability of species.” Thus the template was cast for evolutionists to come.

What is striking is the heavy reliance on metaphysics. Nothing about the science here tells us, or even hints, that the biological world arose spontaneously as evolutionists insist is true. The underlying foundation of evolutionary thought is religious. As NT Wright recently quipped, “Oh my goodness, he [Darwin] has discovered some very interesting finches, this means we can’t believe in Genesis anymore.”

One recent study highlights this gap between the metaphysics and the science. The study further demonstrates the adaptive capabilities of species such as the finches. It also further demonstrates that adaptation is not evolution. The birds are quick to adapt but they are simply tracking the environment and food supply. The hallmark is their flexibility and adaptiveness.

As one scientist put it, “there has been no long-term specialised evolution.” For many years now even evolutionists have recognized that adaptation does not add up to the large-scale change evolution requires. Some other mechanism is needed.

Nonetheless the Galápagos finches continue to be celebrated as a proof text of evolution. They are an example of change, and evolution is equated with change—any kind of change. Even a mere altering of gene frequencies in a population is, for evolutionists, nothing less than full blown evolution. Such a trivial change becomes proof that the biological world arose spontaneously. It is the mother of all false dichotomies.

As evolutionist Richard Lenski put it, “It is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed, or evolved, during the history of life on Earth.” Yes, it is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed. But it is not an incontrovertible fact that they have evolved. The equating of change with evolution rests on deeply-held religious beliefs.

As NT Wright might say, “Oh my goodness, Lenski has discovered some very interesting bacteria, this means we can’t believe in Genesis anymore.” The idea that changing gene frequencies, or an occasional genetic mutation, proves that the species spontaneously arose is truly one of the greatest leaps of logic you will ever see. You can see more such examples here and here.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

This Piece by Lawrence Krauss is a Damning Indictment

Follow the Evidence

When Eric Metaxas wrote a Christmas Day piece in the Wall Street Journal about how science is lending support to modern-day arguments for design in the universe, he drew fire from all quarters. Apparently Metaxas arguments were full of fallacies. Of particular interest was a criticism by leading physicist, Lawrence Krauss. Surely a top scientist would leave no doubt about Metaxas’ flubs.

Krauss’ first point was that Metaxas is a “religious writer with an agenda,” and so his arguments cannot be trusted. But religious people in general, and Christians in particular, are all over the map when it comes to design. Indeed, many of Metaxas’ critics are Christian theologians.

Clearly Metaxas, qua “religious writer” or Christian, is not bound to an agenda regarding design. Why then does Krauss sense an agenda at work? Perhaps because, in fact, it is Krauss who is the one with the agenda. You see Krauss is an atheist, and when it comes to design, atheists are most definitely not all over the map. If you are an atheist, then you can’t accommodate arguments that the science strongly points to a designer. In fact, elsewhere, when not claiming others have an agenda, Krauss has advocated the abolishment of religion:

Religion will go away in a generation, or at least largely go away - and that's what I think we have an obligation to do.

And Krauss says Metaxas is the one with the agenda?

Unfortunately Krauss’ criticism goes downhill from there. Krauss explains that “The piece was rife with inappropriate scientific misrepresentations.”

Misrepresentations?

Metaxas makes two basic arguments. First, evolution’s just-add-water view of life had led astronomers to expect that the universe is teeming with life. ETs should be common and if we point our radios to the stars we should eventually pick up some interesting signals. But no such signals have been found. It is a clear example of yet another falsified evolutionary expectation. In fact Metaxas cites some astronomers who have argued the probabilities for ET life is far lower than previously expected.

Second, Metaxas points out that the universe is fine-tuned for life. And while this is a more subtle point, no one questions that this is an interesting and powerful set of evidences that must be reckoned with. That is, except Krauss.

Metaxas is pointing to fundamental findings. While there is much more to say about them, there is no misrepresentation as Krauss charges.

In fact, again, it is Krauss who is the one who is guilty of his charges. Krauss makes the common evolutionary appeal to future findings. “We currently DO NOT know,” the publicly-funded professor begins, “the factors that allow the evolution of life in the Universe.” [emphasis in original]

I’ve seen this response many times. Evolutionists argue the science proves their theory, and when they are presented with the actual evidence they then make the argument from ignorance. So what if the evidence is against them, future science might switch things around.

Absolutely. That certainly is true. Who knows what science may discover in the future.

But that is irrelevant.

No one is talking about unknown findings at some unknown time in the future made by some unknown scientist. Metaxas is talking about the here and now. He made no sweeping metaphysical claims, as evolutionists do. He was merely discussing today’s science.

It gets worse.

Krauss next resorts to a silly straw man version of Metaxas’ simple point:

The mistake made by the author is akin to saying that if one looks at all the factors in my life that led directly to my sitting at my computer to write this, one would obtain a probability so small as to conclude that it is impossible that anyone else could ever sit down to compose a letter to the WSJ.

At this point Krauss wasn’t even wrong. Did he write this while standing in line to board his next flight?

Krauss continues with more misrepresentations of both science and Metaxas’ points. It is true that science isn’t going to prove anything for Krauss and the evolutionists. One can always interpret the evidence to support the chance-creationism hypothesis. Just look at how Krauss ends his rebuttal:

The appearance of design of life on Earth is also overwhelming, but we now understand, thanks to Charles Darwin that the appearance of design is not the same as design, it is in fact a remnant of the remarkable efficiency of natural selection.

The remarkable efficiency of natural selection?

Krauss is apparently unaware of the most basic biological research in the past half century. Yes, Charles Darwin hoped for such remarkable efficiency. And yes he presented many thought experiments for why he believed it to be true. But that was nineteenth century naturalism. There was no scientific evidence for it then, and we now understand much more about the many problems with that view.

Krauss’ criticism of Metaxas reveals the pathetic state of evolutionary thinking. Religion drives science, and it matters.

When I Explained Darwin I Got Pushback about Biogeography

Full Queeg

I recently explained that Darwin, as well as evolution co-discoverer Alfred Wallace, came to believe in transmutation and so they then sought a suitable mechanism. That comes straight from leading Darwin historian Janet Browne. And why did Darwin and Wallace “believe in transmutation” in the absence of a known mechanism? Both Darwin and Wallace made it clear in their writings that their reasoning was metaphysical. The biological world did not meet with their creationist expectations. God would never have created this world and so evolution was the answer, even though they didn’t know how it could occur. Again, this is well recognized by historians. Darwin’s books, papers and notebook entries were chocked full of religious arguments.

This is the motivation and template for evolution and it has continued ever since Darwin. Evolution is not about science, it is about God. But evolutionists are in denial about this. They insist there is no religion here, right after making religious arguments. It is a fascinating study in denialism. You can see examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

So it is not surprising that an evolutionist gave me pushback when I wrote that Darwin and Wallace were driven by metaphysics:

This is, basically, crap. If anything, it was biogeographical observation that led Darwin to evolution:

In fact, not only did Darwin’s arguments for evolution hinge on religious premises, that includes his biogeographical arguments. Evolutionists are ahistorical. They imagine their mandate for a spontaneous origins is a scientific finding. Let’s look at some examples.

The Swedish botanist Carl Von Linne, or Linnaeus (1707-1778), was one of the greatest naturalists of the eighteenth century. He is most famous for the universally-accepted hierarchical method of classification that today bears his name. But Linnaeus’ popularity and influence spread beyond just classification. One of his most famous and influential beliefs was that of the fixity, or stability, of species. His proclamation Nullae Species Novae—no new species—idealized species as perfect forms created by the wise Creator.

Linnaeus was later troubled when he discovered hybrids—species that are produced by the crossing of two related species—and he later softened his doctrine of the stability of species. But this was inconsequential—his system with its conception of species became deeply rooted and the nineteenth century began with the notion of species as immutable still strongly in place.

But in his travels around the world in the 1830s, Darwin saw species on various islands that did not quite match the species on the nearby mainland. It was practically an epiphany for Darwin when he began to consider that the different types of finches he saw on the Galápagos Islands might not simply be variants of a species, but instead might actually be different species. If there was the slightest foundation for this idea, Darwin wrote in his famous notebook entry, it “would undermine the stability of species.”

The finches did not suddenly reveal to Darwin how fish could change to amphibia, or how amphibia could change to reptiles, or how reptiles could change to mammals. Rather, the revelation was that the idea of creation was suddenly becoming untenable. The crucible for Darwin was not full of positive evidence for evolution but rather negative evidence against creation. Evolutionist Ernst Mayr has pointed out that Darwin’s conversion from creationist to materialist was not due to a loss of religious faith but rather initially due to three key scientific findings and then later reinforced by several additional findings. And what were these scientific findings? They were all findings against creation. In other words, the key evidence that swayed Darwin was not direct evidence for evolution but rather evidence against creation that indirectly argued for evolution. And as Mayr further points out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome in order for evolution to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

The preDarwinian metaphysic was that species were fixed and essentialistic. Evidence for small-scale change argued against the old view and in so doing became important evidence for evolution.

This is one example of how Darwin interpreted the biogeographical evidence according to religious premises. These arguments became even stronger when the evidence did not merely fail to align with religious expectations, but rather made no sense on the theory of creation. These are much more powerful arguments for evolution and are evident in Darwin’s earliest notes and writings on evolution. For instance, in 1842 and 1844, almost two decades before publication of Origins, Darwin wrote two lengthy essays on his emerging theory. These eventually were published by his son Francis in 1909 in a book entitled The Foundations of The Origin of Species.

In the 1844 essay Darwin discussed the biogeography evidence. Darwin argued that certain species existed over narrow geographical ranges, and that there was “no reason” for this “On the ordinary theory of the separate creation of each species.” Also, Pacific islands closer to the Americas had plants with more of an “Asiatic character.” That too was “not obvious on the ordinary theory of creation.” Or again, the same species of plants had been found on immensely remote mountain summits, but:

we ought to be very slow in admitting the probability of double creations. In the case of plants on mountain summits, I think I have shown how almost necessarily they would, under the past conditions of the northern hemisphere, be as similar as are the plants on the present Arctic shores; and this ought to teach us a lesson of caution. But the strongest argument against double creations may be drawn from considering the case of mammifers in which, from their nature and from the size of their offspring, the means of distribution are more in view. … On the idea of double creations it would be strange if the same species of several plants should have been created in Australia and Europe; and no one instance of the same species of mammifer having been created, or aboriginally existing, in two as nearly remote and equally isolated points.

Then there was the problem of plant diversity, or lack thereof, on islands:

Why on the theory of absolute creations should this large and diversified island only have from 400 to 500 (? Dieffenbach) phanerogamic plants? and why should the Cape of Good Hope, characterised by the uniformity of its scenery, swarm with more species of plants than probably any other quarter of the world? Why on the ordinary theory should the Galapagos Islands abound with terrestrial reptiles? and why should many equal-sized islands in the Pacific be without a single one or with only one or two species? Why should the great island of New Zealand be without one mammiferous quadruped except the mouse, and that was probably introduced with the aborigines? Why should not one island (it can be shown, I think, that the mammifers of Mauritius and St Iago have all been introduced) in the open ocean possess a mammiferous quadruped? Let it not be said that quadrupeds cannot live in islands, for we know that cattle, horses and pigs during a long period have run wild in the West Indian and Falkland Islands; pigs at St Helena; goats at Tahiti; asses in the Canary Islands; dogs in Cuba; cats at Ascension; rabbits at Madeira and the Falklands; monkeys at St Iago and the Mauritius; even elephants during a long time in one of the very small Sooloo Islands; and European mice on very many of the smallest islands far from the habitations of man2. Nor let it be assumed that quadrupeds are more slowly created and hence that the oceanic islands, which generally are of volcanic formation, are of too recent origin to possess them; for we know (Lyell) that new forms of quadrupeds succeed each other quicker than Mollusca or Reptilia. Nor let it be assumed (though such an assumption would be no explanation) that quadrupeds cannot be created on small islands; for islands not lying in mid-ocean do possess their peculiar quadrupeds

Finally, Darwin went “full-Queeg” with this extended rant:

Shall we then allow that the three distinct species of rhinoceros which separately inhabit Java and Sumatra and the neighbouring mainland of Malacca were created, male and female, out of the inorganic materials of these countries? Without any adequate cause, as far as our reason serves, shall we say that they were merely, from living near each other, created very like each other, so as to form a section of the genus dissimilar from the African section, some of the species of which section inhabit very similar and some very dissimilar stations? Shall we say that without any apparent cause they were created on the same generic type with the ancient woolly rhinoceros of Siberia and of the other species which formerly inhabited the same main division of the world: that they were created, less and less closely related, but still with interbranching affinities, with all the other living and extinct mammalia? That without any apparant adequate cause their short necks should contain the same number of vertebræ with the giraffe; that their thick legs should be built on the same plan with those of the antelope, of the mouse, of the hand of the monkey, of the wing of the bat, and of the fin of the porpoise. That in each of these species the second bone of their leg should show clear traces of two bones having been soldered and united into one; that the complicated bones of their head should become intelligible on the supposition of their having been formed of three expanded vertebræ; that in the jaws of each when dissected young there should exist small teeth which never come to the surface. That in possessing these useless abortive teeth, and in other characters, these three rhinoceroses in their embryonic state should much more closely resemble other mammalia than they do when mature. And lastly, that in a still earlier period of life, their arteries should run and branch as in a fish, to carry the blood to gills which do not exist. Now these three species of rhinoceros closely resemble each other; more closely than many generally acknowledged races of our domestic animals; these three species if domesticated would almost certainly vary, and races adapted to different ends might be selected out of such variations. In this state they would probably breed together, and their offspring would possibly be quite, and probably in some degree, fertile; and in either case, by continued crossing, one of these specific forms might be absorbed and lost in another. I repeat, shall we then say that a pair, or a gravid female, of each of these three species of rhinoceros, were separately created with deceptive appearances of true relationship, with the stamp of inutility on some parts, and of conversion in other parts, out of the inorganic elements of Java, Sumatra and Malacca? or have they descended, like our domestic races, from the same parent-stock? For my own part I could no more admit the former proposition than I could admit that the planets move in their courses, and that a stone falls to the ground, not through the intervention of the secondary and appointed law of gravity, but from the direct volition of the Creator.

Evolution is motivated by the perceived failures of creation. Darwin had no idea how the species could evolve, and neither do evolutionists today. But this is man’s assessment of creation. Evolution must be true. There is nothing wrong with religious arguments and beliefs. But let’s not confuse it with science.

When I Pointed Out the De Novo Gene Evidence an Evolutionist Came Unglued

Primitive Thinking

It is interesting that evolutionists, who believe they came from primitive apes, display a certain primitive thought in their communications. The latest example is an evolutionist who criticized a book skeptical of evolution. The book made the point that fundamentally new genes are unlikely to have evolved by the usual random change and natural selection mechanisms. The book elaborated on this problem at length. But the evolutionist retorted that this was all wrong:

[The book] claims that the origin of new genes is a mystery, when in fact it is basically a solved problem (as long as you aren’t talking about the origin of the very first genes at the origin of life—and allegedly this book is supposed to be about the Cambrian Explosion, not the origin of life).

In other words, aside from the origin of life, the origin of fundamentally new genes is not a mystery and is basically has been solved by evolutionists.

That is, of course, false. When I pointed out the evidence the evolutionist harshly criticized me.

Look up jingwei and sdic and the literature on their origin. Look up Long et al. 2003. Why can’t you even get these totally obvious basic points right?

The problem is jingwei and Sdic are not fundamentally new genes, but rather have significant similarities to parts of other genes. And the paper he cited did little to resolve this question of how fundamentally new genes arose. In fact, about the only thing the paper did say about the evolution of such genes is that it is rare. That view has since been discarded as too many of these fundamentally new genes have been discovered.

So the evolutionist cited two irrelevant genes and a paper that gave an outdated view, and accused me of missing “totally obvious basic points.”

When I pointed all this out, the evolutionist tried to walk back his points. He claimed that I was the one who brought up fundamentally new genes, and that he merely was referring to genes that are mostly rearrangements of other genes. “Shame!” he vindictively concluded.

And there we have it. At this point the evolutionist is in checkmate. For he has just forfeited his claim that the book is all wrong, that the evolution of new genes is a solved problem, and by extension that evolution is a fact. He cannot now say, “Oh, but I was also referring to fundamentally new genes also.”

He has made it clear that the book’s criticism is on solid ground. For as I pointed out (here and here), the evolutionary reasoning that such genes evolved by the usual random mutations and selection is circular. And the explanations for how this could have happened is little more than hand waving. Even evolutionists agreed it was impossible until, that is, the existence of such genes could not be denied. At that point evolutionists had to come up with some sort of explanation. The result is a speculative idea that relies on serendipity and ignores known, enormous problems.

A theory cannot fail to explain a plethora of fundamental observations and be a fact. Not a scientific fact, at least.

So will the evolutionist admit to any of these things? Will he agree that evolution is not a fact? Of course not. I’ll take the shame and the blame, and all the harsh criticism, if we can just agree on the overwhelming scientific evidence which checkmates evolution. Evolution is not a fact, and it never was.

Evolutionists are Doubling Down on De Novo Gene Evolution

They Win Again

How can a new protein-coding gene emerge from a random stretch of DNA? According to evolutionists this occurs via the usual random mutations and natural selection. In fact, as I explained last time, evolutionists are saying this is “basically a solved problem.” But such de novo gene evolution is not anywhere close to a solution. Even evolutionists, only a few years ago, agreed this was a heroic idea and that such genes could not have evolved, at least in the usual way. In typical fashion they pushed the problem into the recesses of deep time where anything can happen by mysterious mechanisms that no longer are present and so cannot be critiqued. That narrative serviced evolutionary thought for many years until the evidence for unique, so-called “orphan,” genes became undeniable.

And why were orphan genes a problem? If any design, such as orphan genes, exists in a species but not its allied species then according to evolutionary thinking, said design must not have been present in the common ancestor of those species. It must have evolved after the split from the common ancestor. And that means such a heroic evolutionary event cannot be pushed into deep time. And that’s a problem.

At first evolutionists rejected such an idea. They said such orphan genes would no longer be orphans once we decode the genomes of more species. But with more genomes came more orphans. Orphan genes did not diminish, they escalated, much to the chagrin of evolutionists.

So next evolutionists admitted that there were some novel, orphan genes, but they were exceedingly rare. An evolutionary novelty. And of course novelties are not fundamental to a theory, and so don’t need to be explained.

But the orphan genes just kept on coming. And coming. Finally evolutionists had to admit that there were a whole bunch of orphan genes, and so a whole bunch of genes, in various creatures, must have evolved relatively recently.

And as only evolutionsts can do, after losing every battle, they once again won the war. They turned defeat into victory by explaining that they now have evidence that genes are routinely evolving. The de novo mechanism went from rags to riches. It now was the predominant mode of gene evolution—it happens all the time, and there is no mystery.

And what exactly was that evidence that resolved the mystery? How can evolutionists now be so confident of what, only a few short years ago, they insisted was not possible? Well, err, the orphans are the evidence. Orphans exist in only a single species, so therefore the orphans must have evolved recently.

There, I said it.

And immediately this new truth was broadcast to the people. The New York Times assured its readers that evolutionists have discovered a “step-by-step process” for fast, efficient, modern gene evolution.

So it wasn’t too surprising when an evolutionist claimed recently that the origin of new genes, save for the very first genes way back in deep time, is “basically a solved problem.” That is, after all, the party line.

But when I pointed out the circular reasoning, the failed expectations, and the lack of any real solution beyond hand-waving, the evolutionist doubled down. He cited an 11 year old irrelevant paper (which repeats the now discounted refrain that “the true de novo origination of new genes from previously non-coding sequences is rare”). He also cited two proteins, neither of which are even examples of de novo gene evolution.

And so there we have it. Another evolutionary victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.

Greg Dawes: Religious Arguments Are Susceptible to Divine Mystery

Except When We Use Them

As a general rule, evolutionists never allow their own ideas to be exposed to the criteria they are using to criticize the other guy. To wit, while Greg Dawes finds there to be all kinds of problems with appeals to divine agents, including the fact that we really can’t predict what an omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect agent would do, he also finds evolution to an inference to the best explanation, in spite of the fact that that inference relies on the evolutionist’s appeals to how God would create the species.

About That Law Banning Creationism

Just One Problem

As regular readers of this blog know, evolutionists use the label “creationist” not just for those with a particular interpretation of Genesis. That is their term for anyone who doesn’t accept the fact of evolution. It doesn’t matter what your particular position is, you’re a creationist, period. So it was no surprise that Britain’s new ban on “creationism” is actually a ban on “any doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth.”

This is all a bit awkward though because it means that the ideas of one Alfred Russell Wallace, the, err, co-founder of evolution—whose memory is preserved with a statue at the Natural History Museum in London—are now officially banned because Wallace was, according to the evolutionist’s own terminology, a creationist.

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.

Still Trending: Now Biotechnology is an Evolutionary Mechanism

Darwinian Anachronisms

Like contemporary hairstyles in a western movie, evolution also has its anachronisms. As we have discussed before, when the leading edge in biology was breeding, evolution was cast as a natural breeder. Now the state of the art is genetic engineering and, so, evolution is cast as a natural genetic engineer. Evolution also uses “networks” and “molecular intelligence.” And so it is not surprising that teaching standards out of Canada now define “Biotechnology” as an evolutionary mechanism that students must understand and explain.

h/t: A friend

Richard Dawkins: How Could Anyone “Possibly Doubt the Fact of Evolution”

The Single Most Convincing Fact

Evolutionists like to say that there are mountains of evidence for evolution, but what is the best evidence? What would make a creationist think twice? Twenty five seconds into this video evolutionist Richard Dawkins answers this question. His killer evidence is the congruence between the genes of different plants and animals. Compare the genes across a range of species and you’ll see a “perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree.” In fact, you’ll see the same result for evolutionary trees using just single genes—the so-called gene trees. It works “with every gene you do separately.”

[0.25] I think perhaps the single most convincing fact—observation—you could point to would be the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the genes, using modern DNA techniques, such as looking at the letter-to-letter correspondences between the genes—compare the genes of any pair of animals you like—a pair of animals or a pair of plants—and then plot out the resemblances and they fall in a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. … [1.05] Moreover the same thing works with every gene you do separately and even pseudogenes that don’t do anything but are vestigial relics of genes that once did something. I find it extremely hard to imagine how any creationist that actually bothered to listen to that, could possibly doubt the fact of evolution.

Dawkins went on to have some rather harsh words for creationists. The message was clear. The evidence for evolution falls perfectly into place. It makes evolution a fact that is beyond any reasonable doubt. And anyone who doubts this is a bad person.

This sentiment is by no means particular to Dawkins. I have heard this same claim, and others like it, dozens of times. Sometimes informally in lectures, discussions, debates and so forth. Other times in textbooks or other literature.

What is amazing is the evolutionist’s high confidence and self-assuredness in such a blatant misrepresentation of science. It would be difficult to imagine a bigger falsehood. Phylogenetic incongruence is rampant in evolutionary studies. Conflicts exist at all levels of the evolutionary tree and throughout both morphological and molecular traits. This paper reports on incongruent gene trees in bats. That is one example of many. These incongruences are caused by just about every kind of contradiction possible. Molecular sequences in one or a few species may be out of place amongst similar species. Or sequences in distant species may be strangely similar. As one paper admitted, there is “no known mechanism or function that would account for this level of conservation at the observed evolutionary distances.” Or as another evolutionist admitted, the many examples of nearly identical molecular sequences of totally unrelated animals are “astonishing.”

An even more severe problem is that in many cases no comparison is even possible. The molecular sequence is found in one species but not its neighbors. When this problem first became apparent evolutionists thought it would be resolved as the genomes of more species were decoded. No such luck—the problem just became worse. Not surprisingly evolutionists carefully prefilter their data. As one paper explained, “data are routinely filtered in order to satisfy stringent criteria so as to eliminate the possibility of incongruence.”

Short genes that produce what are known as microRNA also contradict Dawkins’ high claim. In fact one evolutionist, who has studied thousands of microRNA genes, explained that he has not found “a single example that would support the traditional tree.” It is, another evolutionist admitted, “a very serious incongruence.”

Another paper admits that “the more molecular data is analysed, the more difficult it is to interpret straightforwardly the evolutionary histories of those molecules.”

And yet in public presentations of their theory, evolutionists present a very different story. As Dawkins explained, gene comparisons “fall in a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree.” This statement is so false it isn’t even wrong—it is absurd. And then Dawkins chastises anyone who “could possibly doubt the fact of evolution.” Unfortunately this sentiment is typical. Evolutionists have no credibility.