The Evolutionist Speaks: Savor the Irony

People sometimes ask me if evolutionists are at all changing their minds given the overwhelming scientific evidence against their religious mandate. The answer of course is “no.” But there are some evolutionists, well one anyway, that at least acknowledges some of the evidence. That would be the one and only Lynn Margulis who illustrates just how far an evolutionist can go, but no further. In her 2011 Discover magazine interview, after stating that “All scientists agree that evolution has occurred,” the University of Massachusetts professor goes on to explain that natural selection “eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create,” that she believed the textbook orthodoxy that random mutations lead to evolutionary change and new species “until I looked for evidence,” and that “There is no gradualism in the fossil record.” Kudos to Margulis for acknowledging the evidence. It seems strange to laud someone for stating the obvious, but that’s evolution for you. Margulis also recounts how evolutionists denigrated her for coming too close to the hypothesis of acquired characteristics—another example of how evolution has harmed science.

So why was Margulis an evolutionist? As usual it’s all about religion as Margulis unwittingly explains:

The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.

Man has spoken (or woman in this case). Savor the irony. With metaphysical logic the evolutionist criticizes the others for their perceived metaphysics.

But who is the metaphysician, the one who rejects a priori certain answers or the one who follows the evidence wherever it leads?

Evolution always has been, and remains today, a religious theory, even for open-minded evolutionists such as Lynn Margulis.

The Difference Between Science and Evolution

It is the worst sin of science. Scientists sometimes make mathematical errors. They also make measurement mistakes, logical fallacies and a host of other blunders. They even formulate hypotheses that don’t make sense. But all of these must happen, for to err is human. What scientists don’t do, or at least very rarely do, is knowingly misrepresent science. It’s a nice way of saying scientists don’t lie. It is unacceptable in science. In other fields lying may be routine. It may even be justified and expected. Salespeople lie to buyers and buyers lie back to the salesperson. And that is just one example of many. As financier Jean-Claude Juncker once said, “When it’s serious, you have to lie.” But not in science.

Evolution is often considered part of science but truth telling is one of their differences. As with politics, lying is fundamental to evolution. Evolutionists lie without even realizing it. They argue strenuously there is no lie—right after telling a lie.

For instance, when promoting evolution, evolutionists insist evolution is a fact. And when they say “evolution” they mean it in the colloquial sense. That is, bacteria are supposed to have evolved into multicellular organisms leading to fish. Fish evolved into amphibians. Amphibians evolved into reptiles. Reptiles evolved into mammals. And so forth, all in a gradual process of common descent. All of this occurred via random events and the interplay of natural laws. It is a big claim and you can see examples of such fact claims here.

Evolutionary theory is an overarching idea that is highly flexible and often difficult to define precisely. This is particularly a problem when it is found to be in conflict with scientific findings, which is quite often. In these moments, rather than admit the failure, the theory morphs in order to absorb the uncooperative findings. All of this is problematic, but at least there is a theory, even if amorphous, to work with.

But when evolutionists are trying to justify or defend their theory, they radically lower the bar by redefining evolution as mere change over time. For instance, the easily defended and uncontroversial claim that gene frequencies change over time becomes the definition of evolution. You can see examples of this here.

It is a classic bait-and-switch. Evolutionists insist that the species arose strictly naturalistically and indeed that all of biology originated spontaneously. But when justifying their claim they suddenly switch the claim to mere change over time. Their claim goes from the metaphysically-laden and undefendable to the empirical and trivial.

The problem with evolution is not the theory itself. Evolution may be true, it may be false, or it may be somewhere in between. The problem is the religious dogma that motivates evolution and insists that evolution is a scientific conclusion of the same certainty as gravity, heliocentrism and that the Earth isn’t flat. This big claim is absurd beyond measure and so when questioned evolutionists then have no choice but to play their shell game.

If this were science it wouldn’t be permitted for whereas lying is expected in some fields, it is the worst sin of science.

Evolutionist Has Another Honest Moment as “Thorny Questions Remain”

Stephen Jay Gould called them our “honest moments.” The truth is, as evolutionists admitted in one paper, “thorny questions remain” not merely regarding minor details of how evolution is supposed to have created all of biology, but of fundamentals such as how replication, metabolism and energy mechanisms arose. As one evolutionist explained:

It's a chicken and egg question. Scientists are in disagreement over what came first -- replication, or metabolism. But there is a third part to the equation -- and that is energy. … You need enzymes to make ATP and you need ATP to make enzymes. The question is: where did energy come from before either of these two things existed? We think that the answer may lie in simple molecules such as pyrophosphite which is chemically very similar to ATP, but has the potential to transfer energy without enzymes.

We think that the answer may lie in simple molecules? Such vacuous speculation is a slender thread of hope. In fact evolutionists haven’t got a clue. That’s not hyperbole—it’s putting it kindly.

How then, you might wonder, can evolution be a scientific fact with such fundamental scientific problems? Of course it cannot be. For that we must await the mother of all honest moments. But don’t hold your breath, for old scientists don’t change their minds, they just go away.

Evolution Professor: Evolution Reconciles “Gross Evil and Suffering in the World”

David Hume was not expressing a minority opinion when his character Philo triumphantly concluded against creationism because “a perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures,” and that nature is arranged so as “to embitter the life of every living being.” The belief that God never would have intended for this bad world reached back to antiquity and continues today. As evolution professor John Avise affirms:

Evolution by natural causes emancipates religion from the shackles of theodicy. No longer need we agonize about why a Creator God is the world’s leading abortionist and mass murderer. No longer need we query a Creator God’s motives for debilitating countless innocents with horrific genetic conditions. No longer must we anguish about the interventionist motives of a supreme intelligence that permits gross evil and suffering in the world. No longer need we be tempted to blaspheme an omnipotent Deity by charging Him directly responsible for human frailties and physical shortcomings (including those that we now understand to be commonplace at molecular and biochemical levels). No longer need we blame a Creator God’s direct hand for any of these disturbing empirical facts. Instead, we can put the blame squarely on the agency of insentient, natural evolutionary causation. In part for this reason, the evolutionary biologist and philosopher Francisco J. Ayala has hailed the discovery of natural selection as “Darwin’s gift to science and religion.” [Inside the Human Genome, 157-8]

This is the reason why evolution is a fact. No Creator God would have intended for this world. From a scientific perspective, the theory of evolution is a non starter.

Fossil species appear abruptly in diversity Big Bangs followed by extinctions.

Adaptations that we do observe in populations arise quickly as a result of complex mechanisms that respond to the environmental challenge. Not only does this falsify evolutionary expectations, it also fails to fulfill the hope that the large-scale evolution requires can be explained as repeated rounds of adaptive change.

Sister species reveal, upon close inspection, dramatic differences for which evolution cannot account. And distant species reveal repeated designs. Incredible convergence is ubiquitous in biology and the evolutionary tree has consistently failed to explain the pattern of similarities and difference between the species.

And of course evolution cannot explain how even a single protein arose, to say nothing of the never-ending series of fantastic biological designs. Evolution is so astronomically unlikely that it far exceeds what scientists ordinarily take as impossible.

That doesn’t mean we can know that evolution is impossible. But we do know that the claim that evolution is a fact is not scientific.

It would be difficult to find, in the history of science, an idea that is held with more confidence and is more unlikely. It literally is today’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” tale with the twist that Hans Christian Andersen’s royalty is replaced by religion.

Avise’s sentiment in the above passage is typical. Evolution is underwritten by religious mandates. Evolution is a fact, yes, but that fact is metaphysical. Evolutionists provide a great many proofs of their fact, but the proofs always entail theological premises.

The Elaborate Nanoscale Machine Called Photosynthesis: No Vestige of a Beginning

Plants use carbon dioxide and produce oxygen while animals use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. It’s one of nature’s many Huttonian cycles with “no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.” But what James Hutton could not have dreamt of is the literally astonishing magnificence of the invisible machinery working behind the scenes to sustain the carbon cycle. What would the often misunderstood Scottish polymath say today in response to photosynthesis and the electron transport chain? What would the father of the Scottish Enlightenment conclude from “Nature’s most elaborate nanoscale biological machine” which “converts light energy at unrivaled efficiency of more than 95 percent compared to 10 to 15 percent in the current human-made solar technologies”?

Two centuries later Hutton’s deism is as strong as ever. But the limits of scientific knowledge Hutton warned have been dramatically pushed back. It is no longer “in vain to look” for now we do see. No longer is there no observable vestige of a beginning, rather we now observe there is no vestige of a beginning. To speak of the spontaneous evolution of the world is now at best a sign of scientific illiteracy. More often it is a religious mandate imposed on science for which there is no excuse.

And so now we have a choice. We can continue to with centuries-old religious dogma or we can follow the science.

Evolutionists Surprised Again: The Evolutionary Principle “Does Not Appear to Apply” to RNase P

According to Sidney Altman it makes sense that there are enzymes, such as RNase P, which include RNA components in addition to proteins. After all, the mother of all such ribonucleoproteins, the ribosome, is too complex to have evolved by itself. Surely less complex ribonucleoproteins must have evolved in the process:

Ribosomes are also ribonucleoproteins (RNPs), but they are much more complicated than RNase P. It seems unreasonable that ribosomes, with three RNAs and about 50 proteins, would exist without less complex RNPs having come into existence first and having persisted throughout evolution.

Such reasoning is more dangerous than evolutionists such as Altman realize. For if the lack of evolutionary stepping stones to biology’s astronomical complexity is “unreasonable” then evolution must be the most unreasonable hypothesis in the history of science.

But that’s not the only problem with Altman’s reasoning. New research is showing that RNase P makes no sense in evolution’s preconceived role. The problem is that not all flavors of RNase P are ribonucleoproteins. In Trypanosoma brucei, the pathogen that causes headaches in evolutionists, RNase P consists merely of a single protein. But when that simple version of RNase P was transplanted into yeast—replacing the more complex ribonucleoprotein version—everything worked fine.

In other words, there is no apparent evolutionary fitness advantage of implementing the far more complex version of the enzyme, which evolutionists cannot explain anyway even if there were such an advantage.

So evolution requires the construction of a complex structure which (a) they cannot explain and (b) shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.

Of course none of this harms evolution, because evolution never was about science in the first place. It is what happens when religious fundamentalism controls the science.

Evolutionists Are Now Saying That Evolution Created an Optimized Evolutionary Process

Evolutionists have always liked our immune system for its apparent Darwinian process of generating randomized antibodies and, through a feedback-selection process, amplifying those antibodies that successfully bind to the pathogens. Is it not an example of natural selection acting on random mutations—a proof-of-concept of Darwinian evolution before our very eyes? Such conclusions are another sign of the religious dogma that drives science. In fact our immune system not only operates in an infinitesimally smaller design space than would evolution, it performs its experiments astronomically faster than evolution ever could. Furthermore our immune system comes with a built-in, complex, feedback system that performs the selection. In other words, the selection is not natural as it is supposed to be in evolution. Also, there is that bugaboo that if evolution is true then it must have created our immune system. It would be yet another example of a hyper complex process that is somehow created by evolution, and is then enlisted as evidence for, or an example of, evolution itself. Not only that, but evolution would have created, as research continues to reveal, not only a hyper complex process but one that optimizes the production of those important antibodies.

Every calculus student knows that a mathematical description of a process can be optimized by finding the derivative and equating it with zero. But finding the derivative can be difficult, such as when the mathematical description includes integrals. This type of problem, known as the calculus of variations, is important in many engineering problems.

It also applies to our immune system. About ten years ago researchers used Pontryagin’s maximum principle—an important concept in engineering control theory involving the calculus of variations—to predict how our immune system works.

Our B cells produce antibodies but their division is more complicated than normal cell division. Rather than dividing to produce two identical daughter cells, B cell division is usually asymmetric as it produces two slightly different types of daughter cells. One of the daughter cells proceeds to produce antibodies but the other continues to adjust the antibody design. This approach optimizes the production of successful antibodies to fight off infections. Here is how one writer summarized this design:

Compared with symmetric division, in asymmetric division there is a tenfold increase in the number of antibodies produced. In addition, the cell that stays behind in the germinal center stores information regarding a successful antibody it has produced, and the optimization process thus concludes more quickly. "This kind of time-saving in antibody production can be a real life-saver in the case of a dangerous infection," explains Michael Meyer-Hermann.

This is another example of a hyper complex design that evolution’s random mutations must have luckily produced so that evolution’s natural selection could choose it and then evolution could proceed. It is difficult to overstate the absurdity of this howler. This is what happens when religious dogma drives science.

Smallest Fly Discovered: Practically Invisible Yet it Has Wings, Eyes and Complete Organ Systems. And One More Thing …

Scientists and engineers building miniaturized airborne vehicles might want to look to nature for their next breakthrough. At 0.40 mm Euryplatea nanaknihali is a technological wonder that dwarfs even the closest man-made competition.

But if this marvel has you doubting the validity of that old story of random mutations, and other lucky events, creating the birds and the bees (and everything else for that matter), then think again.

The newly discovered micro fly is yet another proof of evolution for it is a vicious parasite. It lays its eggs in the heads of ants which the larvae will consume from the inside. Eventually the ant dies and its head falls off. It is indeed, as Tennyson put it, a world “red in tooth and claw.” Surely it must have evolved. As Darwin explained to a friend in 1860:

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or the cat should play with mice.

This is the power of evolutionary thought. We have no idea how the world could have arisen spontaneously, but it must have.

Evolutionist: Plants Are “Driving Me Nuts!”

The abrupt appearance of many plant species was, for Charles Darwin, extraordinary. But the fossil record is not the only problem with plants. Plants also don’t fit into the evolutionary tree very well. Their DNA comparisons are inconsistent with their visible features, as discussed in the Nova documentary, First Flower:

NARRATOR: Now with the assurance of DNA insight, the family tree of living flowering plants has largely been written. The old family tree was now in for a major pruning. Roses were found to be closely related to squash, strawberries to marijuana, this meat-eating pitcher plant to China's famous rhododendrons. For centuries water lilies were thought to be nearly twins with the lotus—no longer.

MARK CHASE: This, believe it or not, is the closest living relative of the lotus. This is the London plane tree or sycamore. As you can see, this is not a little water plant, this is a big tree.

ANDREW DARRAGH (Horticulturist, Kew Gardens): …driving me nuts!

NARRATOR: Andy Darragh is in charge of tending to a garden at Kew that is organized by the old family tree of plants, it's called the Order Beds. He's got the somewhat overwhelming job of trying to bring order to the new order.

ANDY DARRAGH: We're in this weird limbo period. I'm trying to not only do a job of gardening, mowing, edging, and weeding constantly, but I've also got to keep myself up to date. And I've also got to try and understand plant science and botany. I wish it was simpler, but it's not.

NARRATOR: Perhaps the biggest surprise from the DNA evidence is that when all the number crunching was done, one plant showed up at the very bottom of the family tree of living flowering plants, Amborella, the oldest branch of the family tree—a plant so rare that it is only found in the remote Pacific island nation of New Caledonia. So is Amborella the world's oldest flowering plant? Not the fossil Archaefructus that Sun Ge discovered? Not necessarily.

PETER CRANE: The molecular evidence allows us to really understand living plants in enormous detail. What it doesn't allow us to do is to account for all the diversity that's extinct.

It’s another example of viewing the data according to the theory rather than viewing the theory according to the data.

Evolution Professor: Special-Creation “Effectively Eliminated”

In his book Inside the Human Genome evolution professor and National Academy of Science member John Avise continues with the usual evolutionary religious claims that the evil and inefficiency of biological designs—at the molecular level in this case—necessitate evolution, for such designs would never have been designed or created by a loving higher intelligence. As usual, it’s all about religion.

In his chapter on non intelligent design, Avise points out that the world is deeply flawed right down to the fundamental, molecular level, and he repeats his religious belief that ascribing such a world to a Creator God is tantamount to blasphemy:

If, on the other hand, natural causation is denied, and a caring Intelligent Designer is to be held directly responsible for life’s imperfect features, then the theodicy challenge remains poignant. How could a Creator God have engineered such a deeply flawed biological world, right down to its most elemental molecular features? Unless we pretend that biological defects do not exist, we seem forced to conclude that any Intelligent Designer is either technically fallible, morally challenged, or both. Furthermore, if the intelligent designer is deemed to be the Abrahamic God (rather than a Martian, for example), then are we not guilty of blasphemy in ascribing to Him a direct hand in sponsoring the molecular genomic flaws that plague human health? [156]

But this is only the beginning of evolution’s metaphysics and Avise next points out that these so-called “shared errors” are common to many species:

Furthermore, molecular imperfections in the human genome provide significant evidence for evolution not only because they are imperfect but also because they are phylogenetically interpretable. Most genomic flaws (apart from de novo mutations that are currently confined to particular individuals) are distributed across biological taxa in ways that make evolutionary (i.e., phylogenetic) sense. This is true at all levels in the phylogenetic hierarchy. At the microevolutionary scale, many genetic disorders in humans “run in families” according to specifiable rules of Mendelian inheritance. [157]

Avise’s argument that genetic disorders “run in families” is weak. Nor is his argument from shared errors any better because convergence in biology is rampant. Evolutionists never had a problem before with astonishingly complex designs that are found in distant branches of the evolutionary tree.

If evolution is true those designs must have evolved independently, in spite of the ridiculously low chances of such an evolutionary path occurring twice (or even once for that matter).

So if evolution has no problem with biology’s astonishing levels of convergence, which repeatedly falsified evolutionary expectations, then it hardly can claim some other similarities, flawed or otherwise, as compelling evidence.

But of course this isn’t where the power of the argument comes. The point of the argument, as Avise immediately explains, is a religious one:

And at the mesoevolutionary and macroevolutionary scales, humans share many molecular features, including particular molecular flaws, with various other taxa in the nested hierarchies of phylogeny. When fine details of molecular errors recur in phylogenetically related species, special-creation explanations for such errors are thus effectively eliminated (unless we are to suppose that a bumbling Creator made the same molecular mistakes time and again when directly forging different species). [157]

Evolutionary thought has always been a referendum on creationism. That’s why they insist on labeling ID theorists as “creationists.”

Let’s be clear about the nature of this debate. There is nothing wrong with evolutionary theorizing, per se. For there is nothing wrong with religious premises driving one’s thinking. Men have done this for eons and it certainly is not showing any signs of slowing.

Evolutionary thought can be traced to antiquity. In the era of modern science it shows up in the seventeenth century in Christian thinkers such as Malebranche, Burnet, Ray, Cudworth, and Leibniz, to name a few.

By the nineteenth century this movement had gained substantial momentum. Darwin served to collect, formalize and apply this thought specifically to the origin of species and his work was drenched in metaphysics. He is rightly exalted as the father of modern evolutionary thought as he set the template for the historical sciences in the twentieth century.

Most importantly, Darwin refined and exemplified a method that is now taken for granted in origins research. Namely, Darwin’s thought was motivated by, entailed and hinged on metaphysics no less than earlier thinkers. But in Darwin the metaphysics was subtly dressed in empirical language. Here is a typical example:

Thus, we can hardly believe that the webbed feet of the upland goose or of the frigate-bird are of special use to these birds; we cannot believe that the similar bones in the arm of the monkey, in the fore-leg of the horse, in the wing of the bat, and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance.

One can read through such passages and almost conclude that Darwin is merely presenting empirical scientific reasoning and conclusions. And so it is with today’s evolutionary reasoning, such as this typical textbook example:

If the 11 species had independent origins, there is no reason why their [traits] should be correlated.

It all sounds so scientific. But of course it is not. This is the great deception of evolutionary thought. It is made to sound scientific, and indeed evolutionists argue strenuously that it is. They claim the high ground of “just science” and use creationists as their foil.

And so there are three problems with evolutionary thought. First, it claims that its finding that evolution is a fact derives from empirical science. Second, it criticizes the use of religious assumptions. Third, its everything-came-from-nothing hypothesis, while religiously compelling, is scientifically absurd.

The first of these problems is a lie. The second is a hypocrisy. And the third is an abuse of science.

Evolutionists, of course, recognize none of this. But neither do their detractors. Common criticisms are that evolution is “only a theory” and so could be wrong. Even more typical is the complaint that evolution is really nothing more than atheism in disguise. Both criticisms are glaring misconceptions of evolutionary thought which simply give evolutionists more confidence. If criticisms of their ideas are clearly false, then they must be doing well.

This is why it is important to understand evolution. For both evolutionists and skeptics, progress will be difficult until evolution is properly understood.

Evolution Professor: “The Tree is All Wrong”

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in 1859 there were many scientific problems with the idea. Today, a century and a half later, we know of a great many more empirical challenges to the idea that the species arose spontaneously. The latest falsified expectation is that microRNAs, discovered only a few decades ago, when compared between different species do not align with the evolutionary tree. Evolutionist Kevin Peterson and colleagues are pursuing this research. “I've looked at thousands of microRNA genes,” explains Peterson, “and I can't find a single example that would support the traditional tree.”

While there remain questions about these new phylogenetic data, “What we know at this stage,” explains another evolutionist, “is that we do have a very serious incongruence.” In other words, different types of data report very different evolutionary trees. The conflict is much greater than normal statistical variations.

“There have to be,” adds another evolutionist, “other explanations.” One explanation is that microRNAs evolve in some unexpected way. Another is that the traditional evolutionary tree is all wrong. Or evolutionists may consider other explanations. But in any case, microRNAs are yet another example of evidence that does not fit evolutionary expectations. Once again, the theory will need to be modified in complex ways to fit the new findings.

It isn’t that any one particular finding falsifies evolution, but the consistent pattern of contradictory findings—from nature’s complexities to uncooperative patterns—show that evolution is not explanatory, but rather tautological.

h/t: bornagain77

This Paper Will Be Cited As Showing How Those Complex Ion Channels Evolved

If you thought that Harold Zakon’s blunder in the very first sentence of his new PNAS paper, on the evolution of voltage-gated sodium channels, was merely the obligatory secret handshake and that thereafter Zakon would get down to business with some real science, well, think again. After his rather shaky start you’ll find that the second sentence is even worse than the first:

The nervous system and muscles evolved shortly thereafter.

Zakon gives no citation on this claim. Apparently it is one of evolution’s brute facts which evolutionists need merely to remind themselves of occasionally.

Later Zakon does admit to some problems with the evolutionary tree:

The phylogeny of basal metazoans is poorly resolved, likely because of the rapid radiation of these then-new life forms

So not only did metazoans just happen to arise spontaneously, but they did so in a “rapid radiation.” For every failure of evolutionary theory you can bet there are always the usual explanatory devices competing to fill the gap.

But there’s no getting around nature’s complexities:

in all animals with nervous systems, neurons generate action potentials (APs), release excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, form circuits, receive sensory input, innervate muscle, and direct behavior.

Not bad for something from nothing. As you can see, that just has random mutations written all over it. After all, such molecular engineering marvels just “appear” at some long lost unobservable time and place:

Potassium leak and voltage-dependent K+ (Kv) channels appeared three billion years ago in bacteria and occur in all organisms

Potassium channels “appeared” three billion years ago? For this claim Zakon cites a paper written by evolutionists who presuppose that potassium channels (and everything else for that matter) evolved. In other words, to support his unscientific assertion that potassium channels “appeared” three billion years ago, Zakon cites the work of evolutionists who assume that potassium channels “appeared” at some point.

Just when you thought this evolutionary tale could not become any more bizarre, Zakon explains how he believes these potassium channels “appeared”:

Kv channels are the “founding members” of the family of ion-permeating channels whose basic structure is a protein of six transmembrane helices (6TM) that associate as tetramers to form a channel. At some point early in eukaryote evolution, the gene for a 6TM channel likely duplicated, giving rise to a protein with two domains. These proteins then dimerized to form a complete channel. Such a channel still exists in the two-pore channel family of Ca2+-permeable channels localized in endosomes and lysozomes. The gene for a two domain channel likely duplicated to make a protein with four domains capable of forming a channel on its own (4x6TM). Eventually such a four-domain channel evolved (or retained) permeability to Ca2+, and these handily became involved in intracellular signaling. Other Ca2+-binding proteins and enzymes first appeared in single-celled eukaryotes. Additionally, there are single 6TM Na+-permeable channels in bacteria. Their relationship to eukaryotic [sodium] channels is unclear, and they will not be discussed in this review.

In the world of an evolutionists, astronomically complex structures just happen to form spontaneously. Things appear, duplicate, modify, retain, evolve, serendipitously perform new functions, and so forth.

Zakon goes on to explain that calcium channels also “appear early in animals.” Furthermore, it has been confirmed that sodium channels evolved from calcium channels. And how could evolutionists make such an astonishing discovery? Easy, by comparing the structures and amino acid sequences of these marvels, such as in choanoflagellates:

Analysis of putative Cav and Nav channel genes from fungi, choanoflagellates, and metazoans confirm this speculation and show that choanoflagellates have a channel that groups with recognized [sodium] channels with strong support.

Though they cannot explain how even a single protein could evolve, evolutionists conclude that voltage-gated sodium channels evolved from calcium channels because they share certain similarities.

Later we learn that a variety of key molecular components were luckily finally in place “for construction of the nodes of Ranvier.”

And that electric organs evolved independently in African and American fish as the sodium channel gene “underwent a burst of evolutionary change at the origin of both groups of electric fishes, with numerous substitutions in key regions of the channel.”

Then there are the various neurotoxins, such as tetrodotoxin, that interfere with the sodium channel. Vertebrates that maintain high concentrations of tetrodotoxin must somehow protect their several types of sodium channels from the dangerous poison.

For example, hundreds of fish species, such as the Pufferfish, safely maintain high concentrations of tetrodotoxin with sodium channel genes that have slight differences which help to make the fish immune to tetrodotoxin. But how could these similar differences have evolved in all these different fish species? The slow process of random mutations would require too much time to save a species from its internal poison. Furthermore these modifications would be required in not just one, but all the different sodium channel genes. Once again evolution has an explanatory device:

We still do not know how pufferfish were able to survive with only one or a few tetrodotoxin-resistant [sodium] channels. The most likely scenario is that tetrodotoxin-resistant mutations accumulated gradually in the [sodium] channel genes as fish were initially exposed to a light load of tetrodotoxin. Gradually, as more channels gained resistance, they were able to carry a greater toxic load.

There is always a just-so story.

Then there are the garter snakes and their prey, the newts. Newts maintain high concentrations of tetrodotoxin and garter snakes that eat them have sodium channel genes with the right, immunizing, modifications.

But garter snakes that live in different areas do not have these modifications, and may die if they ingest a newt. In fact it appears that the different garter snakes populations that prey on newts would have had to independently evolve their sodium channel modifications:

Even more striking, tetrodotoxin resistance has evolved multiple times in populations of other species of garter snakes that are also sympatric with newts in the Pacific Northwest and California, as well as other snake species sympatric with other newts or frogs that use tetrodotoxin in South America and Asia.

But that’s not all. The newt larvae do not produce the tetrodotoxin poison but since the adult newts can be cannibalistic the larvae will flee when they smell tetrodotoxin nearby. So in this case tetrodotoxin is a chemical signal. This is also true in pufferfish when males detect nanomolar levels of tetrodotoxin resulting from female egg laying.

This is all fascinating biology and ion channels, such as these voltage-gated sodium channels, are incredible molecular machines. And while it is true that all of this can be explained in a speculative evolutionary narrative, the story here is that, as usual, the biology does not easily fit evolutionary theory. Papers such as this one are cited as yet more confirmations of evolutionary theory, but in fact they are little more than evolutionary story-telling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s What Alex “Philo” Filippenko Really Said Last Weekend at SETICon 2

Last weekend evolutionists fired off another round of metaphysics and as usual there was no counter attack. From their hilltop position evolutionists are free to throw down their religious mandates with impunity while the low-landers do nothing but run for cover. This time it was astrophysicist Alex “Philo” Filippenko lighting off the Infinite Regress howitzer from that bastion of Enlightenment, the SETICon 2 conference in Silicon Valley. Filippenko first fired a shot across the bow with his statement that “The Big Bang could’ve occurred as a result of just the laws of physics being there.” That had the Philistines cheering and the low-landers complaining as the evolutionist had left them with nothing but the laws of physics. That’s when Filippenko brought out the big gun and demolished even that last foothold:

"The question, then, is, 'Why are there laws of physics?'" he said. "And you could say, 'Well, that required a divine creator, who created these laws of physics and the spark that led from the laws of physics to these universes, maybe more than one.'"

But that answer just continues to kick the can down the road, because you still need to explain where the divine creator came from. The process leads to a never-ending chain that always leaves you short of the ultimate answer, Filippenko said.

The origin of the laws of physics remains a mystery for now, he added, one that we may never be able to solve.

"The 'divine spark' was whatever produced the laws of physics," Filippenko said. "And I don't know what produced that divine spark. So let's just leave it at the laws of physics."

In other words, we must avoid the dreaded infinite regress. This of course is straight from the pen of David Hume whose character Philo fired off this weapon centuries ago:

How, therefore, shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being whom you suppose the Author of Nature, … if we stop, and go no further; why go so far? why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression?

Or as evolutionist Mark Ridley put it:

Positing a God merely invites the question of how such a highly adaptive and well-designed thing could in its turn have come into existence. Theological sophistry about the perfect simplicity of God and the inexplicability of the First Cause can be ignored here: the problem is to explain adaptive complexity. The first alternative to natural selection, therefore, is a viciously circular argument, and unscientific.

For Hume and the evolutionists there are two possibilities: Design and complexity arise on their own via natural law, or there is an infinite regress of “designers.”

Given these two absurdities the evolutionists, of course, choose law. But this is not the key move, for at this point the metaphysical fire fight is long over. The key move—and metaphysical heavy lifting—came at the earlier stage where the alternatives were defined. Remember, he who defines the debate wins the debate.

Science doesn’t tell us that there are two possibilities. It doesn’t tell us that design and complexity either arose on their own or else there is an infinite regress of designers. That is a metaphysical assertion—one of many that underwrite the evolution research program.

Amazingly evolutionists claim they are just “doing science” as they fire off these metaphysical salvos. Religion drives science, and it matters.

You Won’t Believe This One: Gene Splicing Stuns and Bewilders Evolutionists

Proteins perform a wide variety of tasks in the cell and when a particular job needs to be done the right protein is quickly synthesized by unwinding the right DNA gene, making a copy, editing the transcript, and translating the transcript, according to the DNA code, into a sequence of amino acids. Evolutionists had no explanation for this incredible and profound molecular manufacturing system (which still out performs anything scientists can come up with), but they remained steadfast. Indeed they argued all of this provided yet more proofs for evolution. Why? Because the DNA code was essentially universal. As one evolutionist explained, while the genetic code is preserved across species, it would not be if the species had been created independently. [1] If that’s true then the genetic code must have somehow evolved. Is that true? It’s difficult to say because that is, as usual, a non scientific claim. But aside from the metaphysics and the unexplained molecular manufacturing system, there is another problem with this story. It has now turned out to demolish evolutionary theory and has left evolutionists staring into the headlights.

Years after the universal DNA code was discovered, several other codes were also discovered which were not only astonishingly complex, but they were not universal. One such code is the so-called splicing code.

In higher organisms many of the genes are broken up into expressed regions, or exons, which are separated by intervening regions, or introns. After the gene is copied the transcript is edited, splicing out the introns and glueing together the exons. Not only is it a fantastically complex process, it also adds tremendous versatility to how genes are used. A given gene may be spliced into alternate sets of exons, resulting in different protein machines. There are three genes, for example, that generate over 3,000 different spliced products to help control the neuron designs of the brain.

And how does the splicing machinery know where to cut and paste? There is an elaborate code that the splicing machinery uses to decide how to do its splicing. This splicing code is extremely complicated, using not only sequence patterns in the DNA transcript, but also the shape of transcript, as well as other factors.

What is also complex about the new code is that it is context-dependent. In fact it even varies in different tissue types within a species. And studies of RNA binding proteins show even more complexity. These proteins are part of the molecular splicing machinery and they often regulate each other leading to an “unprecedented degree of complexity and compensatory relationships.” As one researcher explained:

We identified thousands of binding sites and altered splicing events for these hnRNP proteins and discovered that, surprisingly these proteins bind and regulate each other and a whole network of other RNA binding proteins.

Regulate each other and a whole network of other RNA binding proteins? Needless to say there is no scientific explanation for how this marvel could have evolved. And since this code is not universal but, quite the opposite, highly varying even between tissues, we can safely conclude the “universal code” prediction of evolution is falsified.

If evolution is true then we expect codes to be universal. Here we have an obvious example of a code that most definitely is not universal, so the prediction is false. And if a prediction is false, then either the theory is false, or it must be modified. But with so many falsifications, and so many modifications that make no sense on evolution, it is obvious that something is very wrong with the theory. In this case we would have to say that random mutations just happened to create many different splicing codes, over and over, of unimaginable complexity.

1. Mark Ridley, Evolution. (Boston: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1993) 49.