Brand New Study on the Evolution of Photosynthesis

A “Very Advanced Capability”

How exactly is evolution a fact when, as the number two science journal in the world put it, “How and when Cyanobacteria evolved the ability to produce oxygen through photosynthesis is poorly understood”? Or as evolutionist Robert Blankenship admitted, “The whole question of the origin of cyanobacteria has long been a mystery because they kind of just appeared out of the tree of life with this very advanced capability to do oxygenic photosynthesis without any apparent forebears.”

If the cyanobacteria that do photosynthesis “just appeared” with this “very advanced capability” and “without any apparent forebears,” and if how and when they evolved photosynthesis “is poorly understood,” then just how is it that evolutionists are so certain that evolution is a fact?

What am I missing here?

It is not as though photosynthesis is a tangential capability or a minor event in the so-called “evolutionary history” of life. As the leading science writer Charles Q. Choi put it, “One of the most pivotal moments in Earth’s history was the evolution of the photosynthetic life that suffused air with the oxygen on which virtually all complex life on the planet now depends.”

Nor is it as though photosynthesis is a simple capability, in no need of explanation for how it possibly could have arisen by random mutations. Anyone who has studied photosynthesis even superficially knows it is incredibly complex. And for those who have studied in greater detail, it only gets worse. The molecular machines and their exquisite, finely-tuned, functions are truly amazing. It doesn’t “just happen.”

Even evolutionists, who are always trying to explain how easy it would be for biology’s wonders to arise by happenstance, admit to the complexity of photosynthesis. As Blankenship put it, photosynthesis is a “very advanced capability.” Similarly, Woodward Fischer agreed that the evolution of photosynthesis would be “very challenging”:

It took a substantial unfolding of evolutionary time before oxygenic photosynthesis developed, perhaps because, as we know, it was a very challenging biochemistry to develop.

Nor is it as though the evidence we do have suggests any kind of a straightforward evolutionary development of photosynthesis.

If evolution is true, then we must fire up fresh rounds of evolution’s fake news, including incredible convergences and massive horizontal, or lateral, gene transfer and fusion. Round up the usual suspects:

The phylogenetic relationships of these prokaryotes suggest that the evolution of aerobic respiration likely occurred multiple times. This, along with evidence that the modern photosynthetic system apparently arose through the lateral gene transfer and fusion of two photosynthetic systems

This is absurd. Convergence, horizontal gene transfer, and fusion are all made up mechanisms to fix the problem that the scientific evidence contradicts evolutionary theory. This isn’t making sense.

But it gets worse.

Not only are evolutionists forced to draw from their army of phony explanatory mechanisms, but they are left with the proverbial “missing link.” The problem is, from where did the photosynthesis come? It couldn’t have come from the purported common ancestor via descent, and it “just appeared” with this “very advanced capability.”  So evolutionists have to usher in their horizontal gene transfer story.

But from where?

From where did the incredible battery of genes—that would just happen to team up and create the all-time incredible capability of photosynthesis—come? Conveniently for evolutionists—and here’s one of the beauties of being an evolutionist—they can never know. Like Flew’s gardener, evolutionists are certain that some “missing link” organism somehow had photosynthesis up and running, or just happened to have the crucial genes just lying around, but we likely will never observe that organism because it has long since become extinct.

Oh how convenient. Some mysterious organism did it. We’ll never know just how photosynthesis evolved because the organism where it happened has long since gone extinct, billions of years ago. Since then, it just luckily passed the technology around for other organisms to have, such as the cyanobacteria. Choi and Fischer explain:

The fact that Oxyphotobacteria possess the complex apparatus for oxygenic photosynthesis while their closest relatives do not suggests that Oxyphotobacteria may have imported the genes for photosynthesis from another organism via a process known as lateral gene transfer. It remains a mystery what the source of these genes was, “and because it happened long ago, it's pretty likely that the group may actually have gone extinct,” Fischer said.

Can I be an evolutionist too?

Photosynthesis is crucial to life and incredibly complex, evolutionists haven’t a clue how it could have evolved, it doesn’t fit the evolutionary common descent model and “just appeared” without a hint of where it came from, evolutionists are forced to make up a long just-so story to try to explain it, their story can’t be falsified because the origin of photosynthesis has long since disappeared, and on top of all this, evolutionists insist their theory is a fact, beyond all reasonable doubt.

This is hilarious. It is like something out of a Monte Python skit. Evolution loses every battle, but manages to win the war because, after all, it’s right.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

How Did Birds Get Their Wings? Bacteria May Provide a Clue to the Genomic Basis of Evolutionary Innovation, Say Evolutionists

30 Days of Evolution

That evolution occurred is known to be a fact but how evolution occurred is not known. In particular we are ignorant of how evolutionary innovations arose. Of course biological novelties and innovations arose from a series of random chance events, but it is less than reassuring that we cannot provide more detail. How exactly did the most complex designs spontaneously arise? What mechanisms overcame, over and over, the astronomical entropy barriers, by sheer luck of the draw? As Craig MacLean’s and Andreas Wagner’s, and coworker’s, new PLOS Genetics paper begins, “Novel traits play a key role in evolution, but their origins remain poorly understood.” Could it be that evolution is not actually a fact? No, not according to evolutionists. And this new paper claims to provide the basis for how the seemingly impossible became the mundane.

The paper begins by summarizing the many proposed genetic mechanisms for the evolution of biological innovations:

An evolutionary innovation is a new trait that allows organisms to exploit new ecological opportunities. Some popular examples of innovations include flight, flowers or tetrapod limbs [1,2]. Innovation has been proposed to arise through a wide variety of genetic mechanisms, including: domain shuffling [3], changes in regulation of gene expression [4], gene duplication and subsequent neofunctionalization [5,6], horizontal gene transfer [7,8] or gene fusion [9]. Although innovation is usually phenotypically conspicuous, the underlying genetic basis of innovation is often difficult to discern, because the genetic signature of evolutionary innovation erodes as populations and species diverge through time.

1. Mayr E. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press; 1963.

2. Pigliucci M. What, if anything, is an evolutionary novelty? Philos Sci. 2008;75: 887–898. Available:http://philpapers.org/rec/PIGWIA

3. Patthy L. Genome evolution and the evolution of exon-shuffling—a review. Gene. 1999;238: 103–14. Available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10570989 pmid:10570989

4. True JR, Carroll SB. Gene co-option in physiological and morphological evolution. Annu Rev Cell Dev Biol. 2002;18: 53–80. doi: 10.1146/annurev.cellbio.18.020402.140619. pmid:12142278

5. Zhang J. Evolution by gene duplication: An update. Trends Ecol Evol. 2003;18: 292–298. doi: 10.1016/S0169-5347(03)00033-8.

6. Bergthorsson U, Andersson DI, Roth JR. Ohno’s dilemma: evolution of new genes under continuous selection. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007;104: 17004–9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0707158104. pmid:17942681

7. Boucher Y, Douady CJ, Papke RT, Walsh DA, Boudreau MER, Nesbø CL, et al. Lateral gene transfer and the origins of prokaryotic groups. Annu Rev Genet. 2003;37: 283–328. doi: 10.1146/annurev.genet.37.050503.084247. pmid:14616063

8. Wiedenbeck J, Cohan FM. Origins of bacterial diversity through horizontal genetic transfer and adaptation to new ecological niches. FEMS Microbiol Rev. 2011;35: 957–976. doi: 10.1111/j.1574-6976.2011.00292.x. pmid:21711367

9. Thomson TM, Lozano JJ, Loukili N, Carrió R, Serras F, Cormand B, et al. Fusion of the human gene for the polyubiquitination coeffector UEV1 with Kua, a newly identified gene. Genome Res. 2000;10: 1743–56. pmid:11076860 doi: 10.1101/gr.gr-1405r

The unspoken problem here is, as usual, serendipity. The various proposed genetic mechanisms for the evolution of biological innovations all suggest an amazing bit of fortuitous luck. For random chance events just happened to create these various complicated structures and mechanisms (such as horizontal gene transfer and protein domains their shuffling) which then produced new evolutionary breakthroughs.

Evolution didn’t know what was coming. Evolution did not plan this out, it did not realize that horizontal gene transfer would lead the way to new biological worlds. The evolution of horizontal gene transfer would require a long sequence of random mutations, many of which would not provide any fitness advantage. And when the construction project was completed, and the first horizontal gene transfer capability was possible, there would be no immediate advantage.

This is because there would have been no genes to transfer. The mechanism works only when it is present in more than one, neighboring, cells. One cell gives, and another cells receives. By definition the mechanism involves multiple cells.

But it doesn’t stop there. Even if the first horizontal gene transfer capability was able to spread across a population, and even if it did provide a fitness advantage to the fortunate citizens, there would not be even a hint of the enormous world of biological innovations that had just been opened.

In other words, what this evolutionary narrative entails is monumental serendipity. Biological structures and mechanisms (horizontal gene transfer in this case, but it is the same story with the other hypotheses listed above) are supposed to have evolved as a consequence of a local, proximate, fitness advantage: a bacteria could now have a gene it didn’t have before.

But it just so happened that the new structures and mechanisms would also, as a free bonus, be just what was needed to produce all manner of biological innovations, far beyond assisting a lowly bacteria increase its fecundity.

This is monumental serendipity.

The science contradicts the theory

Undaunted, the new paper finds that one of the other mechanisms, gene duplication and subsequent neofunctionalization, is a key enabler and pathway to biological innovations.

That conclusion resulted from what otherwise was a fine piece of research work. The experimenters exposed different populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a dangerous infectious bacteria, to 95 new sources of its favorite food: carbon.

The bacteria had to adjust to the new flavors of carbon and they did so with various genetic modifications, including various genetic mutations. In the most challenging cases (where the new carbon sources were most difficult for the bacteria to adjust to), the bacteria often produced mutations in genes involved in transcription and metabolism. And these mutations often occurred in genes where there were multiple copies, so the mutations occurred in one copy while the other copy could continue in its normal duties.

The problem is, these genetic duplicates were preexisting in the P. aeruginosa genome. This is yet another instance of serendipity.

Why? Because preexisting duplicates are not common. Only about 10% of the genes have duplicates lying around, and fortunately, the genes needed for adaptation (involving transcription and metabolism) just happened to have such duplicates.

Now there were a few instances of de novo gene duplication. That is, once the experiment began, and after the P. aeruginosa populations were exposed to the challenging diets, a total of six genes underwent duplication events. But in each and every case, the duplication events occurred repeatedly and independently, in different populations (for each of the 95 different carbon sources, the experimenters ran four parallel trials with independent populations).

This result indicates directed gene duplication. This is because it is highly unlikely that random, chance, gene duplication events just happened hit on the same gene in different populations. Here is an example calculation.

Let’s assume that in the course of the experiment, which ran for 30 days and about 140 generations of P. aeruginosa, some genes may undergo duplication events by chance. Next assume there is a particular gene that needs to be duplicated and modified in order to for P. aeruginosa to adapt to the new food source. (Note that there may be several such genes, but as we shall see that will not affect the conclusion). Given that there are four separate, independent trials, what is the probability that the gene will be duplicated in two or more of those trials?

Let P_dup be the probability that any gene is duplicated in the course of the experiment. For our gene of interest, it may be duplicated in 0, 1, 2, 3, or all 4 of the trials. The binomial distribution describes the probability, P, of each of these outcomes. To answer our question (i.e., What is the probability that the gene will be duplicated in two or more of those trials?) we sum the binomial distribution’s value for N = 2, 3 and 4. In other words, we calculate P(2) + P(3) + P(4).

This will give us the probability of observing what was observed in the experiment (i.e., the duplication events occurred repeatedly and independently, in different populations, in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed).

Well for a reasonable value of P_dup, the probability that any gene is duplicated in the course of the experiment, such as 0.0001, the probability of observing multiple duplications events for any given food source (i.e., P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is about 60 in one billion, or 6  times 10^-8. Even worse, the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about 5 times 10^-44.

It isn’t going to happen.

Exceptionally high rates of gene duplication, in particular genomic regions of Salmonella typhimurium, in a high growth rate medium, were observed to be about 0.001 and even slightly above 0.01 in rare cases.

If we go all out and set P_dup to an unrealistically high 0.1, our results are still unlikely. The P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is .05, and the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about 2 times 10^-8.

In order to raise these probabilities to reasonable levels, such that what was observed in the experiment is actually likely to have occurred, we need to raise P_dup to much higher values. For example, for a P_dup of .67 (two-thirds probability), P(2) + P(3) + P(4)) is .89, and the probability of observing this in all 6 cases where duplication events were observed is about .5.

But even this doesn’t work. For if we were to imagine unrealistically high P_dup values of 0.1 or higher, then massive numbers of duplication events would have been observed in the experiments.

But they weren’t.

Once again, the science contradicts the theory. Our a priori assumption that evolution is a fact, and that the P. aeruginosa adaptations to the new food sources were driven by random mutations, did not work. The theory led to astronomically low probabilities of the observed results.

What the observed gene duplications are consistent with is directed gene duplications. Just as mutations have been found to be directed in cases of environmental challenges, it appears that gene duplications may also be directed.

The paper’s premise, that biological innovations such as flowers and wings are analogous to bacteria adapting to new nutrient sources, is fallacious. But setting that aside, the experimental results do not make sense on evolution’s mechanism of random mutations and natural selection. Instead, the results indicate directed adaptation.

Guess the Evidence for Early Evolution

A Complicated Narrative

As Aaron David Goldman summarized this month, the evolution of early life was a complicated affair. First of all there was the origin of life (OOL) events that produced the first living organism. Then there was a tremendous amount of evolutionary progress leading to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of today’s extant species. LUCA probably had DNA, an impermeable phospholipid membrane with much the same small army of proteins that attend to today’s cell membranes, the famed ATPase turbine-driven enzyme for ATP construction, protein synthesis machinery like today’s cells, the universal DNA code and DNA repair mechanisms. In short, LUCA was, as Goldman explains, a “sophisticated cellular organism that, if alive today, would probably be difficult to distinguish from other extant bacteria or archaea.”

Strangely enough DNA replication that we see in today’s cells was not present in LUCA. Instead RNA polymerases performed that job. Later in evolutionary history, today’s complex and circuitous DNA replication incredibly evolved independently several times. Also the aminoacyl tRNA synthetases underwent considerable horizontal gene transfer (HGT).

This is but a small sampling of the complicated evolutionary narrative of early life. And what exactly is the evidence for this Darwinian choreography leading from OOL to LUCA and finally to the three cell domains? Well actually there is, err, none.

In fact, not only is there no evidence for this narrative, evolutionists have repeatedly been stymied in their attempts to demonstrate how it would work in the laboratory. In fact, they can’t even demonstrate how it would work outside of the laboratory. Even when evolutionists are free to speculate and hypothesize with computer models or cartoon renditions, the problem still resists solution because it is too unlikely.

And so why do evolutionists believe all these things about early evolution? Because this circuitous narrative is required if evolution is true. In other words, the evidence for all these things is the fact of evolution. If the species spontaneously arose, as evolutionists insist is a fact, then this early life narrative, in one form or another must have occurred.

They are forced to believe that the OOL somehow occurred, in spite of the science. They are forced to believe that incredible complexity evolved early in evolutionary history because today’s extant species have too much in common. From an evolutionary perspective, those similarities must have been present in LUCA. Likewise DNA replication must not have been present in LUCA because the DNA replication machinery in today’s species reveals too many differences.

Furthermore the aminoacyl tRNA synthetases fail to form an evolutionary tree. So evolutionists must believe HGT caused the confusion. There is no independent evidence that HGT changed around the aminoacyl tRNA synthetases. The evidence simply is the failure to find an adequate evolutionary tree to explain these enzymes.

Similarly there is no evidence that today’s complex and circuitous DNA replication evolved independently several times. Again it is a result of believing in evolution. If the species spontaneously arose then, yes, DNA replication must have evolved independently several times.

Early evolution is an example of how evolution violates Occam’s Razor. Science seeks parsimonious solutions, but evolution leads to circuitous narratives. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Here’s How Evolutionists Hypocritically Criticize Others

The planets do not revolve about the Earth. Nor do the Sun or the stars. But if that is your model, you can force-fit the observations to it. In the case of geocentrism, dozens of bizarre adjustments were required to fit the observations. As the figure illustrates, these adjustments added a great deal more complication to the basic geocentric model. With the adjustments, the planets were not exactly rotating about Earth, but about some nearby point (which could be adjusted as needed). Furthermore, as the planets circle around the Earth or a nearby point, they also travel in smaller circles, or epicycles. And of course these epicycles can be adjusted as needed. The result is a complicated model of celestial motion with a large number of knobs which are adjusted to try to match what we observe from Earth. And it works. If your model has sufficient number of knobs, you can fit any data.

This is what evolutionists do as well. The species do not fit into an evolutionary tree of life. The fossil record does not reveal this, the anatomy of the species does not reveal this, their embryonic development patterns do not reveal this, nor does the DNA reveal this.

So evolutionists add a great number of evolutionary “epicycles” to their model. Genes are transferred between species as needed, identical designs independently evolve—like lightning striking twice—over and over, unique designs rapidly evolve over and over, and so forth. These are the evolutionist’s just-so stories of the many bizarre, unobservable ways that they imagine evolution to have occurred in order to fit the data. And evolutionists insist all of this is true. It is not merely a theory, it is a fact beyond any reasonable doubt, they resolutely maintain.

And so all of these epicycles do not bother the evolutionist. One evolution professor, after admitting that the evolutionary tree requires a vast number of gene transfer events for many species, nonetheless insisted that it would be perverse to suggest that the evolutionary tree does not work for animals:

To be sure, much of evolution has been tree-like and is captured in hierarchical classifications. Although plant speciation is often effected by reticulation and radical primary and secondary symbioses lie at the base of the eukaryotes and several groups within them, it would be perverse to claim that Darwin’s TOL [tree of life] hypothesis has been falsified for animals (the taxon to which he primarily addressed himself) or that it is not an appropriate model for many taxa at many levels of analysis. 

Perverse? Readers unfamiliar with the evolution genre may find that to be a curious choice of words. But in fact such sentiment, and this specific word, is not at all unusual in evolutionary thought. This is striking because “perverse” is a rather strong word that suggests more than merely a scientific mistake or misjudgment. It suggests mal intent perhaps driven by ulterior motive.

Evolutionists are so certain that the world arose spontaneously, all by itself, that anyone who even has the slightest doubt is viewed as harboring some irrational, deliberate opposition to the truth.

Are you getting the picture? Evolutionists hold to a religiously-driven creation story that is continually refuted by science. They dogmatically insist it is not merely a theory, but is a fact. And with self-righteous indignation they smear anyone who even so much as expresses doubt about theory dogma. It isn’t a pretty picture.

In this case, there are all kinds of scientific problems with the professor’s insistence that animals fit evolution’s tree of life model. Over and over the same designs are found in distant animals, in very different environments. At the other end of the spectrum, completely unique designs are found in animals that otherwise are highly similar. Likewise the embryonic development patterns reveal such unique differences in otherwise similar species. And the fossil record looks more like an inverted evolutionary tree, with bursts of diversity appearing followed by a reduction of diversity via extinction.

Now there are no easy answers to the question of origins. I’m not going to tell you I have the truth of why the fossil record, the embryonic patterns, the anatomical comparisons, and so forth, look the way they do. And when someone says they do, then run. For those who say it is all obvious, and smear those who disagree, have cards they’re not showing.

Evolution’s hole card is religion. It always comes out when the going gets rough. There are all kinds of proofs for why evolution is a known fact, and every single one of them is religious. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it is subtle. But it always is religious. That shouldn’t be too surprising since you certainly can’t use science to prove such an incredible claim.

Historically and today, evolution is underwritten by deep metaphysical truth claims. Then evolutionists turn around and claim it is all about science. And anyone who disagrees is perverse. It isn’t a pretty picture.

Evolutionists Celebrated This Prediction But When it Later Failed They Didn’t Care

Fifty years ago the revolution in molecular biology began to produce vast amounts of new data which evolutionists expected to be consistent with their already established evolutionary tree of life. And when they found such consistencies they claimed them as powerful evidence for their claim that the world just happened to arise somehow on its own is. As Niles Eldredge explained:

The basic notion that life has evolved passes its severest test with flying colors: the underlying chemical uniformity of life, and the myriad patterns of special similarities shared by smaller groups of more closely related organisms, all point to a grand pattern of descent with modification.

Likewise, Christian de Duve triumphantly declared:

All [organisms] are descendants of a single ancestral form of life. This fact is now established thanks to the comparative sequencing of proteins and nucleic acids.

And even the keen-minded philosopher Michael Ruse was certain of this interpretation:

The essential macromolecules of life speak no less eloquently about the [evolutionary] past than does any other level of the biological world.

But as more details emerged the picture became more complicated. In fact those macromolecules did not reveal such a grand pattern of descent with modification after all. They did not speak so eloquently about an evolutionary past. In some cases, for example, similar genes showed up in not so similar species, or not so similar genes showed up in similar species.

But evolutionists continued with their triumphant claims that the evidence confirmed their expectations. They explained the discrepancies with a range of special-purpose explanations. Sometimes these explanations called for mechanisms which had never been observed.

One of their popular explanations is that genes transferred between species, not via common descent but via extremely complex molecular mechanisms that export and import genes. Sometimes their use of this lateral or horizontal gene transfer mechanism is a real stretch. And in any case, their story calls for evolution to have created this incredible mechanism which then was so important for adaptation and the supposed subsequent evolution. In other words, evolution created evolution.

But none of this has stopped the evolutionists. Today they commonly use horizontal gene transfer to explain contradictory patterns, as evidenced by this sampling of paper titles:

Ancient gene transfer as a tool in phylogenetic reconstruction.

Convergent evolution: gene sharing by eukaryotic plant pathogens.

Evolution of patchily distributed proteins shared between eukaryotes and prokaryotes: Dictyostelium as a case study.

Evolution of four gene families with patchy phylogenetic distributions: influx of genes into protist genomes.

Evolutionary origins of the eukaryotic shikimate pathway: gene fusions, horizontal gene transfer, and endosymbiotic replacements.

Evolution of glutamate dehydrogenase genes: evidence for lateral gene transfer within and between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

Evolutionary analyses of the small subunit of glutamate synthase: gene order conservation, gene fusions, and prokaryote-to-eukaryote lateral gene transfers.

Evolution of filamentous plant pathogens: gene exchange across eukaryotic kingdoms.

Evolution of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases--analysis of unique domain architectures and phylogenetic trees reveals a complex history of horizontal gene transfer events.

Gene transfers from nanoarchaeota to an ancestor of diplomonads and parabasalids.

Horizontal gene transfer facilitated the evolution of plant parasitic mechanisms in the oomycetes.

Horizontal gene transfer between microbial eukaryotes.

Horizontal gene transfer in nematodes: a catalyst for plant parasitism?

Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic evolution.

Insertion of horizontally transferred genes within conserved syntenic regions of yeast genomes.

Interkingdom gene transfer of a hybrid NPS/PKS from bacteria to filamentous Ascomycota.

Lateral gene transfer in eukaryotes.

Lateral gene transfers and the evolution of eukaryotes: theories and data.

Lateral transfer of tetrahymanol-synthesizing genes has allowed multiple diverse eukaryote lineages to independently adapt to environments without oxygen.

Multiple lateral gene transfers and duplications have promoted plant parasitism ability in nematodes.

Phylogenomic analysis demonstrates a pattern of rare and ancient horizontal gene transfer between plants and fungi.

Phylogenetic analyses of diplomonad genes reveal frequent lateral gene transfers affecting eukaryotes.

In some cases evolutionists have no idea, beyond pure speculation, about how it could have happened. As they admit in one paper:

An alternative and more plausible possibility is that the STC gene has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism.

The fact of the matter is, once again evolutionists claimed a prediction, and it turned out to be wrong.

Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.

Evolutionists Are Now Going Wild With “Lateral” Evolution And One Evolutionist Said “There is Nothing to Criticize”

Do you remember when evolution was supposed to follow a common descent pattern, with genes passed down (“vertically” in evolution lingo) from progenitor to progeny? Then the evidence got in the way as similar genes were found in more distant species, violating the expect evolutionary pattern. So evolutionists took their first drink of lateral evolution. And of course the drinking continued. And continued. Soon the origin of life riddle, for instance, was transformed into one massive lateral evolution event, with genetic material readily being exchanged between cells in the same population via an incredibly complex, never observed, process that cannot be repeated or tested. Similarly lateral, or horizontal, evolution is being called upon to explain all kinds of findings that violate common descent’s expected pattern, as in the following example of evolutionists gone wild.

Many bacteria and single-cell eukaryotes live in zero or low oxygen environments and this means they can’t perform certain operations. For instance the eukaryotes cannot create sterols, small chemicals that are an important ingredient, for example, in the cell’s membrane, influencing its fluidity. Eukaryotes solve this problem, according to new research, by switching to the sterol-like molecule, tetrahymanol, for which oxygen is not required to synthesize. The research shows that the key gene in constructing tetrahymanol, squalene-tetrahymanol cyclase or STC, is distributed in many of these eukaryotes living in zero or low oxygen environments. But this means the STC gene is widely distributed, not following the expected common descent pattern. Not surprisingly, the evolutionists took another drink. They casually explain that the gene was “laterally transferred” among the eukaryotes:

The monophyly of eukaryote STC homologues could be explained by vertical inheritance from a common tetrahymanol-synthesizing eukaryotic ancestor. However, if this were the case, dozens of parallel losses of the STC genes in many eukaryotic lineages that currently lack this gene would be required, so this evolutionary scenario seems unlikely. An alternative and more plausible possibility is that the STC gene has been laterally transferred among phylogenetically diverged eukaryotes through an unknown mechanism.

An unknown mechanism? That’s right, evolutionists must appeal to unknown mechanisms to explain their “fact.” We don’t know how evolution happened, but we’re certain that it’s true. Take another drink. As one evolutionist who reviewed the paper wrote, “There is nothing to criticize.”

Nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.