Creation vs. Evolution

Major DNA Study Undermines Evolution “In A Big Way”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted Jul 3, 2018, updated my “old debate forum a post” at the end (Jump)

PJ MEDIA UPDATE:

Thanks to a new study, evolutionists and their disciples are having to reexamine some of their most revered dogma. Particularly, evolutionists are now having to make sense of conclusions stating that almost all animal species, as well as humans, showed up on the stage of human history at the same time.

One of the constants of science is that science is constantly revising as it is challenged by new data, new theories, and new ways of observing and measuring data, not to mention the changes in scientific ideology molded by larger worldview shifts. Thomas Kuhn’s landmark book THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS provides a compelling argument for how scientific paradigms evolve, shift, and even jump to completely different tracks. However, within the many disciplines of science, evolution and evolutionists have remained dogmatic about the necessity of remaining committed to certain a priori assumptions. Well, as it turns out, some of evolution’s most revered a priori assumptions are now crumbling in the face of new research.

A study published in the JOURNAL HUMAN EVOLUTION is causing quite the stir. In the WORDS OF PHYS.ORG, “The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.”

So startling, in fact, that according to David Thaler, one of the lead authors of the study, “This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could.”

The study’s very own author was so disturbed by how the conclusions challenged current scientific dogma that he “fought against it as hard as [he] could.” His “fight” gives credence to the study’s conclusions. His eventual acceptance, not to mention publication, of the conclusions speaks well of Thaler’s commitment to being a scientist first and an ideologue second.

[….]

This is no small matter for evolutionists because, as WORLD MAGAZINE helpfully summarizes:

According to traditional evolutionary thinking, all living things on Earth share common ancestry, with species evolving through a slow process of random mutation, natural selection, and adaptation over roughly 3.8 billion years. The idea that humans and most animals suddenly appeared at the same time a mere 200,000 years ago or less does not fit with that model.

[….]

Speaking of the study, World provides a concise explanation:

In the past, researchers studied DNA in the nucleus of cells, which differs markedly from one species to another. But the new study analyzed a gene sequence found in mitochondrial DNA. (Mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells, produce about 90 percent of a cell’s chemical energy.) Although mitochondrial DNA is similar across all humans and animals, it also contains tiny bits that are different enough to distinguish between species. This difference allows researchers to estimate the approximate age of a species.

The researchers analyzed these gene sequences in 100,000 species and concluded that the event—either the simultaneous appearance of humans and most animals, or a population crash—occurred about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. That proposal challenges the bedrock of evolutionary theory.

An aside, this is how my mind works. As I was trying to figure out the title for this post, I went with the above. But then this reminded me of a skit by the Jerky Boys which I uploaded an excerpt from a while back that I have to share:

FOSSILS NEVER SUPPORTED

This is really old news… but with new DNA evidence to support the issue. I will post a paper I wrote many years ago in a debate with a friend. But here are a few quotes to peak curiosity:

  • “…the fossil record doesn’t show gradual change, and every paleontologist has known that since Cuvier.”  (Dr Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Lecture at Hobart & William Smith Colleges; Feb 14, 1980.)

MORE:

Anthropologist EDMUND R. LEACH told the 1981 Annual Meeting of the British Association For The Advancement Of Science:

“Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin.  He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so.”

DAVID RAUP, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago:

“He [Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences….  Darwin’s general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil record is a very incomplete one…. Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded.  We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much.  The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.  By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information [archaeopteryx as well].”

Harvard paleontologist STEPHEN JAY GOULD, probably evolution’s leading spokesperson today, has acknowledged:

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.  The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON, perhaps the twentieth century’s foremost paleontologist, said:

“This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists.  It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate.”

DAVID B. KITTS of the school of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma wrote:

“Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record.  Evolution requires [key word, requires] intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”

DR. STEVEN STANLEY of the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, John Hopkins University, says:

“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic [structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”

BEFORE the main article excerpt… here is how the researchers explained away the issue (GULF NEWS):

…The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today including humans came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

“This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,” Thaler told AFP.

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 per cent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?

Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?…

Here is TECH TIMES dealing with the issue:

Born Around The Same Time

In analyzing the COI of 100,000 species, Stoeckle and Thaler arrived at the conclusion that most animals appeared simultaneously. They found that the neutral mutation across species were not as varied as expected. Neutral mutation refers to the slight DNA changes that occur across generations. They can be compared to tree rings because they can tell how old a certain specie or individual is.

As to how that could have happened, it’s unclear. A likely possibility is the occurrence of a sudden event that caused large-scale environmental trauma and wiped out majority of the Earth’s species.

“Viruses, ice ages, successful new competitors, loss of prey — all these may cause periods when the population of an animal drops sharply,” explains Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment.

Such times give rise to sweeping genetic changes across the planet, causing new species to appear. However, the last time such an occurrence took place was 65 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs and half of all other species on the planet.

The study is published in the journal Human Evolution.

So this article is an amazing confirmation in the growing body of new gene studies that have boomed in the last couple decades. It helps confirm a “creation event,” or what others would say is confirmation of a genetic bottleneck of the Great Flood, requiring new definitions and challenges to the status quo!

MY PREDICTION is you will here more about a flood caused by a meteor in an article from 2007:

Everything YEC’ers (young earth creationists) say happened in this mega flood has been derided for years… until recently. A Discover Magazine article entitled,

To explain this “early reporting,” see: Why Does Nearly Every Culture Have a Tradition of a Global Flood? (ICR)

This study of DNA just adds to the neo-Darwinian proposition being overturned and comes with thanks to BARBWIRE! All the emphasis is theirs:

An earth-shattering gene survey has confirmed that the best in science is perfectly consistent with the best in theology. This study, which should shake the theory of evolution to its roots, will probably get buried by the Talking Snake Media because it doesn’t fit their narrative. (Note, by the way, that evolution is a theory, not a fact. Don’t let them lie to you about this.)

In this seismic article on the WWW.PHYS.ORG website, sweeping gene survey reveals new facets of evolution, author Marlowe Hood reports on a study of five million gene snapshots – referred to as “DNA barcodes” – that are on deposit in the GenBank database, which is managed by the U.S. government.

These DNA barcodes have been taken from about 100,000 animal species by researchers all over the world. The findings were published last week by Mark Stoeckle of the Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler of the University of Basel in Switzerland.  These findings are “sure to jostle, if not overturn, more than one settled idea about how evolution unfolds.” That’s the understatement of the year.

These findings are more like an atomic bomb going off under the hoax of Darwinian evolution. This study, interestingly enough, was prompted by a handheld genetic test which is used to bust sushi bars trying to pass off tilapia for tuna.

The first nuclear bombshell is – get ready for this – that virtually all living things came into being at about the same time.

“The study’s most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

‘This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could,’ Thaler told AFP.

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age?” (Emphasis mine throughout.)

“Surprising” indeed. More like volcanically explosive. And the question is absolutely penetrating: how can evolution possibly be true when the scientific evidence, based on the best in genetic research, reveals that all living things came into existence at about the same time?

[….]

Here is the pull quote of seismic proportions: “In analysing the barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.”

How indeed do we explain the fact that all animal life is the same age? Well, creation scientists and students of the Bible have a perfectly coherent explanation. The reason that all living things, including human beings, are the same age is that the Creator created them all at the same time, just as Genesis 1 tells us.

The study reveals another jolting discovery, which likewise is fatal for the theory of evolution. While Darwinian evolution requires an untold number of transitional forms, forms that are somewhere between one life form and another, the fossil record has no transitional fossils for which a credible case can be made, not one.

Darwin himself recognized the problem of missing links in his own day, and optimistically believed that time would solve the problem – he figured as more and more fossils were discovered, missing links would finally be found. Alas for Darwin, we actually have fewermissing links today than in his day, as advances in science have revealed that forms once considered transitional aren’t transitional forms at all.

As Stephen Jay Gould, one of the preeminent paleontologists in the world, said, “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”

That sets the stage for the second utterly revolutionary pull quote from the article. “And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there’s nothing much in between.” In other words, the reason that no transitional forms have ever been found is quite simple: there aren’t any.

PREDICTIONS MADE ABOUT THE FOSSIL RECORD!
from a 2002 debate on INFOCEPTOR/SPACEBATTLES

“…and this perhaps is the most obvious
and gravest objection which can be
urged against my theory.”
~ Darwin ~ [speaking of the fossil record]

Let us jump into the two major models by which we can extrapolate our (humanity’s) origins.  Either we evolved, or we were created, period.  As Douglas Futuyma stated in his anti-creationist book, Science On Trial,

“Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things.  Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed, or they did not.  If they did not, they must have developed from preexisting species by some process of modification.  If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence.”

Now, for those who say that this is a religious topic, e.g., religious creationism versus non-religious science, this next part is for you.

The religions of the world that say we evolved over a very long period by a slow evolutionary process are the following:

Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Jainism, Animism, Spiritism, Occultism, Satanism, Theosophy, Bahaism, Mysticism, Liberal-Judaism, Liberal-Islam, Liberal-Christianity, Unitarianism, Religious Science, Unity, Humanism.

Of course there are differences in the subtleties of these religious belief systems, for example: in Hinduism the earth is balanced on the back of a turtle, who himself is on the back of another – larger – turtle.  What we end up with is an infinite progression to an even larger turtle.  Nevertheless, the point is, the Hindu believes that all life originally came from the simplest forms, and through millions of years of evolutionary change, we now have arrived at the current phoenix of evolution, man.  The only religions that accept the literal, Biblical interpretation of origins are the following: Orthodox Judaism, Orthodox Islam, and Orthodox Christianity.

Is Evolution a Religion? 

Huxley called evolution “religion without revelation.”  H. S. Lipson, FRS, Professor of Physics, Univ. of Manchester, UK, states that

“In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it.”

Professor D. M. S. Watson, one of the leading biologists and science writers of his day, demonstrated the bias behind much of the evolutionary thinking when he wrote,

“evolution [is] a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.”

So it’s not a question of biased religious creationists versus objective scientific evolutionists; rather, it is the biases of the Christian religion versus the biases of the religion of secular humanism resulting in different interpretations of the same scientific data.  As the anti-creationists science writer Boyce Rensberger admits:

“At this point, it is necessary to reveal a little inside information about scientists work, something the textbooks don’t usually tell you.  The fact is that scientists are not really as objective and dispassionate in their work as they would like you to think.  Most scientists first get their ideas about how the world works not through rigorously logical process but through hunches and wild guesses.  As individuals, they often come to believe something to be true long before they assemble the hard evidence that will convince somebody else that it is.  Motivated by faith in his own ideas and a desire for acceptance by his peers, a scientist will labor for years knowing in his heart that his is correct but devising experiment after experiment whose results he hopes will support his position.”

It’s not really a question of who is biased, but which bias is the correct bias with which to be biased!  (Did you follow that?)  Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and professor of biology at Harvard University, recently wrote this very revealing comment (I will underline where Lewontin originally italicized).  It illustrates the implicit philosophical (dare I say religious) bias against creation – regardless of whether or not the facts support it:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories; because we have a priori commitment, a commitment to materialism.  It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.  Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

Now, a person does not have to be religious to see or comprehend the evidences for the creation model of our origins.  One only has to be scientifically-minded-enough not to reject the evidence due to an “a priori” assumption, as the next example by Kansan State University immunologist, Scott Todd, in a correspondence to Nature magazine (Sept. 1999) shows: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”

What this entails is the open-mindedness of an individual to view evidence, and, even if the evidence goes against his or her presupposed ideas or worldview, that said person, is willing to change their assumptions to fit the evidence, not changing the evidence to fit the assumptions.  That being said, how can we know, or see, the past via our models of origins (creation or evolution)?  Are there certain predictions or events the theories say we should see if that particular view of life is true?  There certainly is!  Lets see if we can sort a few of the major predictions made by the differing models and see where the evidence lies.

The Importance of the Fossil Record

Let us begin with the evolutionary view of life, and what the fossil record should show in accordance with the predicted event – which is, life changing over time from the simplest form (i.e., a single celled ameba) to the most complicated forms (i.e., volitional invertebrates, man).  In other words, creationists and evolutionist have radically different ideas as to the kinds of life they expect to find as fossils, created or evolved.

Evolutionists should expect to clearly see, and in fact predicted over 120 years earlier, one type of animal or plant changing into another type.  The prediction then is that the boundaries between kinds should blur as we look further and further back into time via their fossil history.  Better put is this defining explanation by Dr. Henry Morris on the importance of the fossil record:

“The fossil record must provide the critical evidence for or against evolution, since no other scientific evidence can possibly throw light on the actual history of living things.  All other evidence is circumstantial….  The time scale of human observation is far too short to permit documentation of real evolutionary change from lower to higher kinds of organisms at the present time.  The vital question, therefore, is: ‘Does the record of past ages, now preserved in the form of fossils, show that such changes have occurred?’” (Dr. Morris is a creationist)

Dr. Duane Gish also states the importance of the fossil record:

“Much evidence could be drawn from the fields of cosmology, chemistry, thermodynamics, mathematics, molecular biology, and genetics in an attempt to decide which model offers a more plausible explanation for the origin of living things.  In the final analysis, however, what actually did happen can only be decided, scientifically, by an examination of the historical record, that is, the fossil record.” (Dr. Gish is a creationist)

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t include some quotes by evolutionists on this same subject, since I just quoted two well-known creation scientists.  W. Le Gros Clark, the well-known British evolutionist, has said:

“That evolution actually did occur can only be scientifically established by the discovery of the fossilized remains of representative samples of those intermediate types which have been postulated on the basis of the indirect evidence.  In other words, the really crucial evidence for evolution must be provided by the paleontologist whose business it is to study the evidence of the fossil record.”

Pierre Grasse, the most distinguished of all French zoologists, whose knowledge of the living world was said to be encyclopedic, said this:

“Naturalist must remember that the process of evolution is revealed only through fossil forms.  A knowledge of paleontology is, therefore, a prerequisite; only paleontology can provide them with the evidence of evolution and reveal its course or mechanisms.  Neither the examination of present beings, nor imagination, nor theories can serve as a substitute for paleontological documents.  If they ignore them, biologists, the philosophers of nature, indulge in numerous commentaries and can only come up with hypothesis.  This is why we constantly have recourse to paleontology, the only true science of evolution….  The true course of evolution is and can only be revealed by paleontology.”  Elsewhere he comments: “Thus evolution actually did occur can only be scientifically established by the discovery of the fossilized remains of representative samples of those intermediate types which have been postulated on the basis of the indirect evidence.  In other words, the really crucial evidence for evolution must be provided by the paleontologist whose business it is to study the evidence of the fossil record.”

Sir Gavin de Beer, British biologist and of course, evolutionist, said:  “The last word on the credibility and course of evolution lies with the paleontologist…”  Glenister and Witzke, in their chapter in an anti-creationist book, state: “The fossil record affords an opportunity to choose between evolutionary and creationist models for the origin of the earth and its life forms.”

It would be sensible to assume then, that the fossil record is important, if not crucial, to this debate for the origins of humankind.  Thus, the history of life may be traced through an examination of the fossilized remains of past forms of life entombed in the rocks.  If life arose from an inanimate world through a mechanistic, naturalistic, evolutionary process and then diversified by a similar process via increasingly complex forms in to the millions of species that have existed and now exist; then the fossils actually found in the rocks should correspond to those predicted on the basis of such a process.  On the other hand, if living things came into being by a process of special creation, the broad outlines of which are given in the first two chapters of Genesis, then predictions very different from those based on evolutionary theory should be made concerning the fossil record.

Creation Model

On the basis of the creation model, we would predict an explosive appearance in the fossil record of highly complex forms of life without evidence of ancestral forms.  We would predict that all of the major types of life, that is, the basic plant and animal forms, would appear abruptly in the fossil record without evidence of transitional forms linking one basic kind to another.  We would thus expect to find fossilized remains, for example, of cats, dogs, bears, elephants, cows, horses, bats, dinosaurs, crocodiles, monkeys, apes, and men without evidence of common ancestors.  Each major kind at its earliest appearance in the fossil record would possess, fully developed, all the characteristics that are used to define that particular kind.

Evolution Model

On the basis of the evolution model, we would predict that the most ancient strata in which fossils are found would contain the most primitive forms of life capable of leaving a fossil record.  As successively younger strata were searched, we would expect to see gradual transition of these relatively simple forms of life into more and more complex forms of life.  As living forms diverged into the millions of species which have existed in the past and which exist today, we would expect to find a transition of one form into another.

We would predict that new types would not appear suddenly in the fossil record possessing all of the characteristics which are used to define that group but would retain characteristics used to define the ancestral group.  Dr. Gish says,

“There should not be any difficulty in finding transitional forms.  Hundreds of transitional forms should fill museum collections.  If we find fossils at all, we ought to find transitional forms.  As a matter of fact, difficulty in placing a fossil with a distinct category should be the rule rather than the exception.”

What Do the Evolutionists Say?

To better grasp what we are dealing with here, let us first see what some of the bigger names in the evolutionary field of geology and paleontology have to say about the fossil record and the evidence that it portrays. Charles Darwin, the man whose theory is the topic of this discussion, also realized the foundational importance of this matter to the life-blood of his theory, if you will:

“[Since] innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?  Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this perhaps is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”

Again, Darwin:

“The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists… as a fatal objection to the belief of the transmutation of species.  If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, that fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.  For the development by this means of a group of forms all of which are (according to the theory) descended from some one progenitor, must have been an extremely slow process; and the progenitors must have lived long before their modified descendants.”

Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s “bulldog,” also realized the importance of this issue when he wrote: “If it could be shown that this fact [gaps between widely distinct groups] had always existed, the fact would be fatal to the doctrine of evolution.”

Absence of transitional forms was a continuing problem for Darwin, as it is for paleontologists today.  David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, makes this abundantly clear with this statement:

“He [Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would, and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences….  Darwin’s general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil record is a very incomplete one….  We are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded.  We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much.  The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.  By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America [still on display in the Los Angeles Natural History Museum], have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information.”  [Archaeopteryx as well]

Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, probably evolution’s leading spokesperson today, has acknowledged: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.  The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

Anthropologist Edmund R. Leach told the 1981 Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: “Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin.  He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so.”  George Gaylord Simpson, perhaps the twentieth century’s foremost paleontologist, said: “This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists.  It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate.”

Dr. Steven Stanley of the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, John Hopkins University, says:

“The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic [structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”

Professor Heribert Nilsson, Director of the Botanical Institute at Lund University, Sweden, declared after forty years of study in this field:

“It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of evolution out of paleobiological facts.  The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material.  The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.”

Gareth J. Nelson, of the American Museum of Natural History: “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil ‘group’ can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another.  The ancestor-descendant relationship may only be assumed to have existed in the absence of evidence indicating otherwise.”  Well known British zoologist Mark Ridley declares: “…no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.”

Moreover, Newsweek reported:

“In the fossil record, missing links are the rule: the story of life is as disjointed as a silent newsreel, in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated.”

Lord Solly Zuckerman, M.A.,M.D.,D.Sc., famous British anatomist concurred:

“…if man evolved from an apelike creature he did so without leaving a trace of that evolution in the fossil record.”  Dr. Derek V. Ager from the Department of Geology, Imperial College, London, at the Proceedings of the Geological Association said: “It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as student…have been debunked.”

Personal letter from Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History in London, to L. Sunderland:

“…I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustrations of evolutionary transitions in my book.  If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly would have included them…Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils…I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.”

Again, Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the prestigious British Museum of Natural History, which houses the world’s largest fossil collection – sixty million specimens – said:

“For almost 20 years I thought I was working on evolution…. But there was not one thing I knew about it…. So for the last few weeks I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: ‘Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true?’  [Fossils being included in this question of “Where’s the beef?”] I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence.  I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all i got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, ‘Yes, I do know one thing -–it ought not to be taught in high school.’  …  During the past few years… you have experienced a shift from evolution as knowledge to evolution as faith….  Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge.”

So by using quotes and comments by evolutionists themselves on the subject of the fossil record and what evidences it provides, I have shown that as of yet, the evolutionary predictions made about the geological record have not been met.  What does the fossil record show?  Let us peer into just the first layer and see if this could shed light on the prediction made by the evolutionary model that we should find simpler life forms evolving into more complicated forms and fauna in the upper parts of the geological columns. 

The Cambrian “Explosion”

In the Cambrian rocks are found a multitude of highly complex creatures with no ancestors.  After vertebrates were found in the Cambrian, Science magazine placed every major animal phylum (group) in the Cambrian rocks.  This information comes as a shock to most people for it is not discussed in school or university textbooks.  Dr. Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History said, “There is still a tremendous problem with the sudden diversification of multicellular life.  There is no question about that.  That’s a real phenomenon.”  Noted evolutionist Dr. George Gaylord Simpson has called the sudden appearance of many types of complex life forms in the Cambrian rocks (around the entire globe) the “major mystery of the history of life.”  He went on to say that two-thirds of evolution was already over by the time we found the fist fossils.  Today, some scientists are saying 75 percent of the evolutionary process occurred before the first fossils were deposited.

Dr. David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and George Gaylord Simpson, the twentieth century’s foremost paleontologist, have both pointed to the fact that two-thirds of evolution was over by the time we found the first fossils.  Creationists were saying that to an open-minded person (setting you’re “a priori” presuppositions aside), this would indicate agreement between the creation model and what is found in the fossil record.  Eldredge goes on to say:

“Then there was something of an explosion.  Beginning about six hundred million years ago and continuing for about ten to fifteen million years [Dr. Gould rates it about five million], the earliest known representatives of the major kinds of animals still populating today’s seas made a rather abrupt appearance.  This rather protracted ‘event’ shows up graphically in the rock record….  Creationists have made much of this sudden development of a rich and varied fossil record where, just before, there was none….  Indeed, the sudden appearance of a varied, well-preserved array of fossils, which geologists have used to mark the beginnings of the Cambrian Period does pose a fascinating intellectual challenges.” 

Science magazine had evolutionary scientist, Dr. David Woodruff, do a review of the book Macroevolution, Pattern and Process.  Dr. Woodruff stated that the fossil record “fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.”  Ichthyologist Dr. Donn Rosen, the late curator of fish at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, noted that evolution has been “unable to provide scientific data about the origin, diversity, and similarity of the two-million species that inhabit the earth and the estimated eight million others that once thrived.”  Dr. Steven M. Stanley, professor of paleobiology at John Hopkins University, openly admits that “the known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic [gradual] evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualist model can be valid.” 

In the book Darwin’s Enigma, Luther Sunderland interviewed five top paleontologists at leading natural history museums around the world (some of which have been mentioned already), each having significant fossil collections.  Those interviewed were Dr. David Pilbeam, former curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, later professor of anthropology at Harvard; Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History; Dr. Niles Eldredge, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum in New York City; Dr. David M. Raup, curator of Geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; and Dr. Donald Fisher, state paleontologist at the New York State Natural History Museum.  This is what Sunderland said after all the above men were interviewed:

“None of the five museum officials could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of one basically different type to another.”

So, is the proof of evolution “wanting?”  Dr. Eldredge when he confessed about our textbooks in the colleges and universities (and presumably television channels such as the Discovery Channel or The Learning Channel) also confessed to the lack of evidence about the theory of evolution that so permeates our society:

“I admit that an awful lot of [mis]information has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true….  Many statements about prehistoric time, or a presumed fossil record, partake of imaginative narratives.”

Is it any wonder then when philosophers and scientists say such things like, “Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grownups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science.  It is useless” ~ Professor Louis Bounoure, Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Center of Scientific Research.  Or, that “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future.  Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has” — Malcolm Muggeridge, world famous journalist and philosopher.

These men are only commenting on the lack of any credible evidence that should be there if evolution were true.  They are only commenting on the predictions made that are yet to be substantiated.  To reject creation a priori and to defend a model that lacks any substance, whatsoever, is itself unscientific.  Or, as the senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History puts it, “Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, but seems somehow to convey anti-knowledge.”

Dr. Gish remarks that,

“Eldredge admits that ‘The Cambrian evolutionary explosion is still shrouded in mystery.’  But creation scientists say, ‘what greater evidence for creation could the rocks give than this abrupt appearance of a great variety of complex creatures without trace of ancestors?’  Thus we see, right from the beginning, on the basis of an evolutionary scenario, the evidence is directly contradictory to predictions based on evolution but is remarkably in accord with predictions based on creation.  This [Cambrian] evidence alone I sufficient to establish the fact that evolution has not occurred on the earth.”

To Conclude

When creationists look at evolution through the eyes of mathematical probabilities; the fossil record; information theory and the vast informational content in living things; the laws of thermodynamics, biogenesis and non-contradiction; comparative studies in physiology/anatomy/taxonomy/embryology/ morphology/genetics and biochemistry; and sciences such as anthropology, geology, and biology, they (we) find it hard to believe that anyone who fairly examines this issue could state that evolution is a fact – or even a credible theory.  This is why creationists argue that any open-minded individual, scientist or layman, who will objectively evaluate all the evidence, will discover that such evidence comes down heavily on the side of creation.

As I have shown with the crux of the Darwinian theory, the fossil record.  Where does the evidence lay?

“Perhaps the most obvious challenge is to demonstrate evolution empirically. There are, arguably, some two to ten million species on Earth. The fossil record shows that most species survive somewhere between three and five million years. In that case, we ought to be seeing small but significant numbers of originations and extinctions every decade.  But, of course, we do not see that.” (One of the nation’s most eminent biologists, Keith Stewart Thompson, from the article, “Natural Selection and Evolution’s Gun,” American Scientist, Vol. 85, Nov/Dec 1997, p. 516)

Ghost In The Machine – Richard Milton

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Posted here originally June 2020. Updated PDF link.)

This is chapter 15 (The Ghost In The Machine) from Richard Milton excellent book entitled [originally published Jan 1, 1992], “SHATTERING THE MYTHS OF DARWINISM” (PDF), as well as a bit from near the end of the book regarding a “spellchecking” program to shore up his ideas from chapter fifteen. It really has to do with responding to the idea that a computer program is shown to “evolve.” That in some way there is an increase in novel information in the program that is adding to the specificity of the program apart from the designers/software engineers.

I would be remiss to not link to an article that also goes through this example well:

Enjoy… mind you this book was read by me in 1998, but the ideas here have been sustained through today.

Ghost in the Machine
pp. 167-176

[167>] Russel and Seguin’s 1982 picture of a human-looking “evolved” version of a dinosaur was an impressive feat combining science and imagination in a constructive and entertaining way. Yet few in 1982 foresaw that in little more than a decade, over 100 million people around the world would pay to be scared by the even more impressive feat of the computer generated dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park”.

Nothing that has entered the evolution debate since Darwin’s time has promised to illuminate the subject so much as the modern computer and its apparently limitless ability to represent, on the monitor-screen, compelling visual solutions to the most abstruse mathematical questions.

The information handling capacity of electronic data processing, with its obvious analogy to DNA, has been enthusiastically enlisted by computer-literate Darwinists as offering powerful evidence for their theory; while genetic software systems, said to emulate the processes of genetic mutation and natural selection at speeds high enough to make the process visible, have become a feature of most up-to-date biology laboratories.

The computer has been put to many ingenious uses in the service of Darwinist theory. And it has changed the minds of not a few skeptics by its powerful visual imagery and uncanny ability to bring extinct creatures – or even creatures that never lived – to life in front [168>] of us. But, compelling though the visual images are, how much confidence should we put in the computer as a guide to the evolution of life?

In his book The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins describes a computer program he wrote which randomly generates symmetrical figures from dots and lines. These figures, to a human eye, have a resemblance to a variety of objects. Dawkins gives some of them insect and animal names, such as bat, spider, fox or caddis fly. Others he gives names like lunar lander, precision balance, spitfire, lamp and crossed sabers.

Dawkins calls these creations “biomorphs”, meaning life shapes or living shapes, a term he borrows from fellow zoologist Desmond Morris. He also feels very strongly that in using a computer program to create them, he is in some way simulating evolution itself. His approach can be understood from this extract:

Nothing in my biologist’s intuition, nothing in my 20 years experience of programming computers, and nothing in my wildest dreams, prepared me for what actually emerged on the screen. I can’t remember exactly when in the sequence it first began to dawn on me that an evolved resemblance to something like an insect was possible. With a wild surmise, I began to breed generation after generation, from whichever child looked most like an insect. My incredulity grew in parallel with the evolving resemblance…. Admittedly they have eight legs like a spider, instead of six like an insect, but even so! I still cannot conceal from you my feeling of exultation as I first watched these exquisite creatures emerging before my eyes.[1]

Dawkins not only calls his computer drawings “biomorphs”, he gives some of them the names of living creatures. He also refers to them as “quasi-biological” forms and in a moment of excitement calls them “exquisite creatures”. He plainly believes that in some way they correspond to the real world of living animals and insects. But they do not correspond in any way at all with living things, except in the purely trivial way that he sees some resemblance in their shapes. The only thing about the “biomorphs” that is [169>] biological is Richard Dawkins, their creator. As far as the “spitfire” and the “lunar lander” are concerned there is not even a fancied biological resemblance.

The program he wrote and the computer he used have no analog at all in the real biological world. Indeed, if he set out to create an experiment that simulates evolution, he has only succeeded in making one that simulates special creation, with himself in the omnipotent role.

His program is not a true representation of random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary it is dependent on artificial selection in which he controls he sees some resemblance in their shapes. The only thing about the “biomorphs” that is biological is Richard Dawkins, their creator. As far as the “spitfire” and the “lunar lander” are concerned there is not even a fancied biological resemblance.

The program he wrote and the computer he used have no analog at all in the real biological world. Indeed, if he set out to create an experiment that simulates evolution, he has only succeeded in making one that simulates special creation, with himself in the omnipotent role.

His program is not a true representation of random mutation coupled with natural selection. On the contrary it is dependent on artificial selection in which he controls the rate of occurrence of mutations. Despite Dawkins’s own imaginative interpretations, and even with the deck stacked in his favor, his biomorphs show no real novelty arising. There are no cases of bears turning into whales.

There is also no failure in his program: his biomorphs are not subject to fatal consequences of degenerate mutations like real living things. And, most important of all, he chooses which are the lucky individuals to receive the next mutation – it is not decided by fate – and of course he chooses the most promising ones (“I began to breed from whichever child looked most like an insect.”) That is why they have ended up looking like recognizable images from his memory. If his mutations really occurred randomly, as in the real world, Dawkins would still be sitting in front of his screen watching a small dot and waiting for it do something.

Above all, his computer experiment falsifies the most important central claim of mechanistic Darwinian thinking; that, through natural processes, living things could come into being without any precursor. What Dawkins has shown is that, if you want to start the evolutionary ball rolling, you need some form of design to take a hand in the proceedings, just as he himself had to sit down and program his computer.

In fact, his experiment shows very much the same sort of results that field work in biology and zoology has shown for the past hundred years: there is no evidence for beneficial spontaneous genetic mutation; there is no evidence for natural selection (except as an empty tautology); there is no evidence for either as significant evolutionary mechanisms. There is only evidence of an unquenchable optimism among Darwinists that given enough [170>] time, anything can happen – the argument from probability.

But although Dawkins’s program does not qualify as a simulation of random genetic mutation coupled with natural selection, it does highlight at least one very important way in which computer programs resemble genetic processes. Each instruction in a program must be carefully considered by the programmer as to both its immediate effect on the computer hardware and its effects on other parts of the program. The letters and numbers which the programmer uses to write the instructions have to be written down with absolute precision with regard to the vocabulary and syntax of the programming language he uses in order for the computer system to function at all. Even the most trivial error can lead to a complete malfunction. In 1977, for example, an attempt by NASA to launch a weather satellite from Cape Canaveral ended in disaster when the launch vehicle went off course shortly after takeoff and had to be destroyed. Subsequent investigation by NASA engineers found that the accident was caused by failure of the onboard computer guidance system – because a single comma had been misplaced in the guidance program.

Anyone who has programmed a computer to perform the simplest task in the simplest language – Basic for instance – will understand the problem. If you make the simplest error in syntax, misplacing a letter, a punctuation mark or even a space, the program will not run at all.

In just the same way, each nucleotide has to be “written” in precisely the correct order and in precisely the correct location in the DNA molecule for the offspring to remain viable, and, as described earlier, major functional disorders in humans, animals and plants are caused by the loss or displacement of a single DNA molecule, or even a single nucleotide within that molecule.

In order to simulate neo-Darwinist evolution on his computer, it is not necessary for Dawkins to devise complex programs that seek to simulate insect life. All he has to do is to write a program containing a large number of instructions (3000 million instructions if he wishes to simulate human DNA) that continually regenerates its own program code, but randomly interferes with the code in trivial ways, such as transposing, shifting or missing characters. (The system must be set to restart itself after each fatal “birth”.)

[171>] The result of this experiment would be positive if the system ever develops a novel function that was not present in the original programming. One way of defining “novelty” would be to design the program so that, initially, its sole function was to replicate itself (a computer virus). A novel function would then be anything other than mere reproduction. In practice, however, I do not expect the difficulty of defining what constitutes a novelty to pose any problem. It is extremely improbable that Dawkins’s program will ever work again after the first generation, just as in real life, mutations cause genetic defects, not improvements.

Outside of the academic world there are a number of important commercial applications based on computer simulations that deserve to be seriously examined. A good example of this is in the field of aircraft wing design where computers have been used by aircraft engineers to develop the optimum airfoil profile. In the past wing design has been based largely on repetitive trial and error methods. A hypothetical wing shape is drawn up; a physical model is made and is aerodynamically tested in the wind tunnel. Often the results of such an empirical design approach are predictable: lengthening the upper wing curve, in relation to the lower, generally increases the upward thrust obtained. But sometimes results are very unpredictable, as when complex patterns of turbulence combine at the trailing edge to produce drag, which lowers wing efficiency, and causes destructive vibration.

Engineers at Boeing Aircraft tried a new approach. They created a computer model which was able to “mutate” a primitive wing shape at random – to stretch it here or shrink it there. They also fed into the model rules that would enable the computer to simulate testing the resulting design in a computerized version of the “wind tunnel”- the rules of aerodynamics.

The engineers say this process has resulted in obtaining wing designs offering maximum thrust and minimum drag and turbulence, more quickly than before and without any human intervention once the process has been set in motion.

Designers have made great savings in time compared with previous methods and the success of the computer in this field has given rise to a new breed of application dubbed “genetic software”. Indeed, on the face of it, the system is acting in a Darwinian manner. The [172>] computer (an inanimate object) has produced an original and intelligent design (comparable, say, with a natural structure such as a bird’s wing) by random mutation of shape combined with selection according to rules that come from the natural world – the laws of aerodynamics. If the computer can do this in the laboratory in a few hours or days, what could nature not achieve in millions of years?

The fallacies on which this case is constructed are not very profound but they do need to be nailed down. In a recently published popular primer on molecular biology, Andrew Scott’s Vital Principles, this very example is given under the heading “the creativity of evolution”. The process itself is called “computer generated evolution” as though it were analogous to an established natural process of mutation and selection.[2]

The most important fallacy in this argument is the idea that somehow a result has occurred which is independent of, or in some way beyond the engineers, who merely started the machine by pressing a button. Of course, the fact is that a human agency has designed and built the computer and programmed it to perform the task in question. As with the previous experiment, this begs the only important question in evolution theory: could complex structures have arisen spontaneously by random natural processes without any precursor? Like all other computer simulation experiments, this one actually makes a reasonable case for special creation – or some form of vitalist-directed design – because it specifically requires a creator to build the computer and devise and implement the program in the first place.

However, there are other important fallacies too. The only reason that the Boeing engineers are able to take the design produced on paper by their computer and translate that design into an aircraft that flies, is because they are employing an immense body of knowledge – not possessed by the com put er – regarding the properties of materials from which the aircraft will be made and the manufacturing processes that will be used to make it. The computer’s wing is merely an outline on paper, an idea: it is of no more significance to aviation than a wave outline on the beach or a wind outline in the desert. The real wing has to actually fly in the air with real passengers. The decisive events that make that idea into a reality are a long, complex sequence of human operations [173>] and judgments that involve not only the shaping and fastening of metal for wings but also the design and manufacture of airframes and jet engines. These additional complexities are beyond the capacity of the computer, not merely in practice but in principle, because computers cannot even make a cup of coffee, let alone an airliner, without being instructed every step of the way.

In order for a physical structure like an aircraft wing to evolve by spontaneous random means, it is necessary for natural selection to do far more than select an optimum shape. It must also select the correct materials, the correct manufacturing methods (to avoid failure in service) and the correct method of integrating the new structure into its host creature. These operations involve genetic engineering principles which are presently unknown. And because they are unknown by us, they cannot be programmed into a computer.

There is also an important practical reason why the computer simulation is not relevant to synthetic evolution: because an aircraft wing differs from a natural wing in a fundamental way. The aircraft wing is passive, since the forward movement of the aircraft is derived from an engine. A natural wing like a bird’s, however, has to provide upthrust and the forward motion necessary to generate that lift making it a complex, articulated active mechanism. The engineering design problem of evolving a passive wing is merely a repetitive mechanical task – that is why it is suitable for computerization. So far, no-one has suggested programming a computer to design a bird’s wing by random mutation because the suggestion would be seen as ludicrous. Even if all of the world’s computers were harnessed together, they would be unable to take even the most elementary steps needed to design a bird’s wing unless they were told in advance what they were aiming at and how to get there.

If computers are no use to evolutionists as models of the hypothetical selection process, they are proving invaluable in another area of biology; one that seems to hold out much promise to Darwinists – the field of genetics. Since Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, and since geneticists began unraveling the meaning of the genetic code, the center of gravity of evolution theory has gradually shifted away from the earth sciences – geology and pale-ontology – toward molecular biology.

[174>] This shift in emphasis has occurred not only because of the attraction of the new biology as holding the answers to many puzzling questions, but also because the traditional sciences have proved ultimately sterile as a source of decisive evidence. The gaps in the fossil record, the incomplete-ness of the geological strata, and the ambiguity of the evidence from comparative anatomy, ultimately caused Darwinists to give up and look somewhere else for decisive evidence. Thanks to molecular biology and computer science they now have somewhere else to try.

Darwinists seem to have drawn immense comfort from their recent discoveries at the cellular level and beyond, behaving and speaking as though the new discoveries of biology represent a triumphant vindication of their long-held beliefs over the irrational ideas of vitalists. Yet the gulf between what Darwinists claim for molecular biological discoveries and what those discoveries actually show is only too apparent to any objective evaluation.

Consider these remarks by Francis Crick, justly famous as one of the biologists who cracked the genetic code, and equally well known as an ardent supporter of Darwinist evolution. In his 1966 book Molecules and Men, in which he set out to criticize vitalism, Crick asked which of the various molecular biological processes are likely to be the seat of the “vital principle”.[3] “It can hardly be the action of the enzymes,” he says, “because we can easily make this happen in a test tube. Moreover most enzymes act on rather simple organic molecules which we can easily synthesize.”

There is one slight difficulty but Crick easily deals with it; “It is true that at the moment nobody has synthesized an actual enzyme chemically, but we can see no difficulty in doing this in principle, and in fact I would predict quite confidently that it will be done within the next five or ten years.”

A little later, Crick says of mitochondria (important objects in the cell that also contain DNA):

It may be some time before we could easily synthesise such an object, but eventually we feel that there should be no gross difficulty in putting a mitochondrion together from its component parts.

This reservation aside, it looks as if any system of [175>] enzymes could be made to act without invoking any special principles, or without involving material that we could not synthesize in the laboratory. [4]

There is no question that Crick and Watson’s decoding of the DNA molecule is a brilliant achievement and one of the high points of twentieth-century science. But this success seems to me to have led many scientists to expect too much as a result.

Crick’s early confidence that an enzyme would be produced synthetically within five or ten years has not been borne out and biologists are further than ever from achieving such a synthesis. Indeed, reading and rereading the words above with the benefit of hindsight I cannot help but interpret them as saying “we are unable to synthesize any significant part of a cell at present, but this reservation aside, we are able to synthesize any part of the cell.”

Certainly great strides have been made. William Shrive, writing in the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, says, “The complete amino acid sequence of several enzymes has been determined by chemical methods. By X-ray crystallographic methods it has even been possible to deduce the exact three-dimensional molecular structure of a few enzymes.”[5] But despite these advances no-one has so far synthesized anything remotely as complex as an enzyme or any other protein molecule.

Such a synthesis was impossible when Crick wrote in 1966 and remains impossible today. It is probably because there is a world of difference between having a neat table that shows the genetic code for all twenty amino acids (Alanine = GCA, Praline = CCA and so on) and knowing how to manufacture a protein. These complex molecules do not simply assemble themselves from a mixture of ingredients like a cup of tea. Something else is needed. What the something else is remains conjectural. If it is chemical it has not been discovered; if it is a process it is an unknown process; if it is a “vital principle” it has not yet been recognized. Whatever the something is, it is presently impossible to build a case either for Darwinism or against vitalism out of what we have learned of the cell and the molecules of which it is composed.

It is easy to see why evolutionists should be so excited about cellular discoveries because the mechanisms they have found appear to [176>] be very simple. But however simple they may seem, as of yet no-one has succeeded in synthesizing any significant original structure from raw materials. We know the code for the building blocks; we don’t know the instructions for building a house with them.

Indeed, the discoveries of biochemistry and molecular biology have raised some rather awkward questions for Darwinists, which they have yet to address satisfactorily. For example, the existence of genetically very simple biological entities, such as viruses, seems to support Darwinist ideas about the origin of life. One can imagine all sorts of primitive life forms and organisms coming into existence in the primeval ocean and it seems only natural that one should find entities that are part way between the living and the nonliving – stepping stones to life as it were. It is only to be expected, says Richard Dawkins, that the simplest form of self-replicating object would merely be that part of the DNA program which says only “copy me”, which is essentially what a virus is.

The problem here is that viruses lack the ability to replicate unless they inhabit a host cell – a fully functioning cell with its own genetic replication mechanisms. So the first virus must have come after the first cell, not before in a satisfyingly Darwinian processes.

But despite minor unresolved problems of this kind Darwinists still have one remaining card to play in support of their theory. It is the strongest card in their hand and the most powerful and decisive evidence in favor of Darwinian evolutionary processes.

[….]

pp. 223-227

[223>] Earlier on I referred to computers and their programs as a fruitful source of comparison with genetic processes since both are concerned with the storage and reliable transmission of large quantities of information. Arguing from analogy is a dangerous practice, but there is one phenome-non connected with computer systems that could be of some importance in understanding biological information processing strategies.

The phenomenon has to do with the computer’s ability to refer to a master list or template and to highlight any exceptions to this master list that it encounters during processing. This “exception reporting” is profoundly important in information processing. For instance, this book was prepared using a word-processing program that has a spelling checker. When invoked, the spell checker reads the typescript of the book and compares each word with its built-in dictionary, highlighting as potential mistakes those it does not recognize. Of course, it will encounter words that are spelled correctly but are not found in a normal dictionary – such as “deoxyribonucleic acid”. But the program is clever enough to allow me to add the novel word to the dictionary, so that the next time it is encountered it will be accepted as correct instead of reported as an exception – as long as I spell it correctly.

In other words, the spelling checker isn’t really a spelling checker. It has no conception of correct spelling. It is merely a mechanism [224>] for reporting exceptions. Using these methods, programmers can get computers to behave in an apparently intelligent or purposeful way when they are really only obeying simple mechanical rules. Not unnaturally, this gives Darwinists much encouragement to believe that life processes may at root be just as simple and mechanical.

In cell biology there are natural chemical properties of complex molecules that lend them-selves to automatic checking and excepting of this kind. For example many molecules are stereospecific – they will attach only to certain other specific molecules and only in special positions. There are also much more complex forms of exception reporting, for instance as part of the brain’s (of if you prefer, the mind’s) cognitive processes: as when we see and recognize a single face in the crowd or hear our name mentioned at a noisy cocktail party.

In the case of the spelling checker, the behavior of the system can be made to look more and more intelligent through a process of learning if, every time it highlights a new word, I add that word to its internal dictionary. If I continue for a long enough time, then eventually, in principle, the system will have recorded every word in the English language and will highlight only words that are indeed misspelled. It will have achieved the near-miraculous levels of efficiency and repeatability that we are used to seeing in molecular biological processes. But something strange has also been happening at the same time – or, rather, two strange things.

The first is that as its vocabulary grows, the spelling checker becomes less efficient at drawing to my attention possible mistakes. This unexpected result comes about in the fallowing way. Remember, the computer knows nothing of spelling, it merely reports exceptions to me. To begin with, it has only, say, 50,000 standard words in its dictionary. This size of dictionary really only covers the common everyday words plus a modest number of proper nouns (for capital cities, common surnames and the like) and doesn’t leave much room for unusual words. It would, for instance include a word like ‘great’ but not the less-frequently used word “grate”.

The result is that if I accidentally type “grate” when I really mean “great”, the spell checker will draw it to my attention. If however, I enlarge the dictionary and add the word “grate”, the spell [225>]checker will ignore it in future, even though the chances are that it will occur only as a typing mis take – except in the rare case where I am writing about coal fires or cookery.

One can generalize this case by saying that when the dictionary has an optimum size of vo-cabulary, I get the best of both worlds: it points out misspellings of the most common words and reports anything unusual which in most cases probably will be an error. (Obviously to work at optimum efficiency the size of dictionary should be matched to the vocabulary of the writer). As the dictionary grows in volume it becomes more efficient in one way, highlighting only real spelling errors, but less efficient in another: it becomes more probable that my typing errors will spell a real word – one that will not be reported – but not the word I mean to use. Paradoxically, although the spelling checker is more efficient, the resulting book is full of contextual errors: ‘pubic’ instead of ‘public’, ‘grate’ instead of ‘great’ and so on.

It requires a human intelligence -a real spelling checker, not a mechanical exception reporter to make sure that the intended result is produced.

I said two strange things have been happening while I have been adding words to the spelling checker. The second is the odd occasion when the system has highlighted a real spelling mistake to me- say, “problem” instead of “problem” – and I have mistakenly told the computer to add the word to its dictionary. This, of course, has the very unfortunate result that in future it will cease to highlight a real spelling mistake and will pass it as correct. The error is no longer an exception it is now a dictionary word.

Under what circumstances am I most likely to issue such a wrong instruction? It is most likely to happen with words that I type most frequently and that I habitually mistype. Anyone who uses a keyboard every day knows that there are many such ‘favorite’ misspelled words that get typed over and over. Once again, only a real spelling checker, a human brain, can spot the error and correct it.

The reason that the computer’s spellchecker breaks down under these circumstances is that the simple mechanisms put in place do not work from first principles. They do not work in what electronics engineers call ‘real time’ (they are not in touch with the real world) and do not employ any real intelligent understanding [226>] of the tasks they are being called on to perform. So although the computer continues to work perfectly as it was designed to, it becomes more and more corrupted from the standpoint of its original function.

I believe that this analogy may well have some relevance to Darwinists’ belief that biological processes can at root be as simple as the spelling checker. It is easy to think of any number of simple cell replication mechanisms that rely on exception reporting of this kind. I believe that if biological processes were so simple, they too would become functionally corrupt unless there is some underlying or overall design process to which the simple mechanisms answer globally, and which is capable of taking action to correct mistakes. This is the mechanism that we see in action in the case of the “eyeless fly”, Drosophila; in Driesch’s experiment with the sea urchin and Balinsky’s with the eyes of amphibians; the ‘field’ that governs the metamorphosis of the butterfly or the reconstitution of the cells of sponges and vertebrates.

Darwinists believe that the only overall control process is natural selection, but the natural selection mechanism could not account for the cases referred to above. Natural selection works on populations, not individuals. It is capable only of tending to make creatures with massively fatal genetic defects die in infancy, or to make populations that are geographically dispersed eventually produce sterile hybrid offspring. It is such a poor feedback mechanism in the sense of exercising an overall regulating effect that it has failed even to eliminate major congenital diseases. Natural selection offers only death or glory: there is no genetic engineering nor holistic supervision of the organism’s integrity. Yet we are asked to believe that a mechanism of such crudity can creatively supervise a program of gene mutation that will restore sight to the eyeless fly.

This is plainly wishful thinking. The key question remains: what is the location of the supervisory agency that oversees somatic development? How does it work? What is it’s connection with the cell structure of the body?

FOOTNOTES

  • Richard Milton, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1997), 167-176; 223-226.

(Editor’s Note. The author did not footnote what page he was quoting from, he only cited the work itself)

[1] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London, England: Pearson Longman, 1986).

[2] Andrew Scott, Vital Principles: The Molecular Mechanisms of Life (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1988).

[3] Francis Crick, Of Molecules and Men (Seattle, WA: Univ of Washington Press, 1966).

[4] Ibid.

[5] William Shrive, Enymes, in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982).

Fractals: The Mandelbrot Set | Jason Lisle

Published by Papa Giorgio

2019 IHCC Men’s Seminar | Saturday Morning Session 2 | Dr. Jason Lisle

(BTW, when he says “sets,” sometimes it sounds like “sex” – Lol)

Have you ever wondered why 2+2 is always 4, no matter where you go? Dr. Jason Lisle explains how the unchanging laws of mathematics reveal the unchanging mind of God. Your daily reliance on math points to something bigger than random chance—something deeply personal.

  • The Mandelbrot set is a very complex and detailed shape; in fact it is infinitely detailed. If we zoom in on a graphed piece of the Mandelbrot set, we see that it appears even more complicated than the original. In Figure 2, we have zoomed in on the “tail” of the Mandelbrot set. And what should we find but another (smaller) version of the original; a “baby” Mandelbrot set is built into the tail of the “parent.” This new, smaller Mandelbrot set also has a tail containing a miniature version of itself, which has a miniature version of itself, etc.—all the way to infinity. The Mandelbrot set is called a “fractal”3 since it has an infinite number of its own shape built into itself. (Answers In Genesis)

This does have a connection to geology, BTW. An older video from Calvary Chapel can be found here:

In this workshop, creation scientist Dr. Jason Lisle explores numbers, using fractals to help show the incredible beauty in even abstract mathematics. Around 36 minutes into the workshop, Dr. Lisle explores the nature of math itself, showing how math simply doesn’t make sense apart from a biblical worldview.

While this isn’t a light video (expect to have to think a little…although you can still get the general idea even if you don’t get the mathematical details), it is an encouraging reminder that there’s amazing beauty in math…and that God is the Creator of that beauty.

RPT Remembers a Giant in Intelligent Design

Published by Papa Giorgio

Because of the political season, I had missed the passing of a giant in the Intelligent Design community passing away a couple months ago. I have used his arguments well in debating I.D. online since the late 1990’s in forums like Space Battles and Volconvo (back in the day). I also have a couple excerpts from his book Zombie Science, that I do not remember what I used them for. Surely it was a debate online somewhere. Those will be at the end.

I have a post that includes Jonathan Wells on a panel that decimated some leading evolutionists here: Michael Behe & Stephen Meyer Destroy Challenge to Flagellum Motor. Cross Examined has a good interview with him HERE.

Here is the late Dr. Wells Bio:

Jonathan Wells (1942-2024) received two PhDs, one in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and one in Religious Studies from Yale University. A Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, he previously worked as a postdoctoral research biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the supervisor of a medical laboratory in Fairfield, California. He also taught biology at California State University in Hayward.

Dr. Wells published articles in Development, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, BioSystems, The Scientist and The American Biology Teacher. He is the author of Charles Hodge’s Critique of Darwinism (Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), Icons of Evolution: Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong (Regnery, 2000), The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Regnery, 2006), and The Myth of Junk DNA. He was also co-author with William Dembski of The Design of Life (FTE, 2008). His last solo book, Zombie Science (DI Press, 2017), showed how evolutionary theory — “though empirically dead” — continues to stalk our scientific and educational institutions. Dr. Wells also did research and writing on developmental information in embryos that is outside of, and inherited independently of, their DNA.

(Many archived articles linked here: DISCOVERY INSTITUTE)

A favorite article of his I love, and used an excerpt from for a paper in a philosophy class, is this one:

Darwin of the Gaps

The video is the full Icons of Evolution movie, here is the description:

Some of these icons of evolution present assumptions or hypotheses as though they were observed facts; in Stephen Jay Gould’s words, they are “incarnations of concepts masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature.” Others conceal raging controversies among biologists that have far-reaching implications for evolutionary theory. Worst of all, some are directly contrary to well-established scientific evidence. Most biologists are unaware of these problems. Indeed, most biologists work in fields far removed from evolutionary biology. Most of what they know about evolution, they learned from biology textbooks and the same magazine articles and television documentaries that are seen by the general public. But the textbooks and popular presentations rely primarily on the icons of evolution, so as far as many biologists are concerned the icons are the evidence for evolution.

Some biologists are aware of difficulties with a particular icon because it distorts the evidence in their own field. When they read the scientific literature in their specialty, they can see that the icon is misleading or downright false. But they may feel that this is just an isolated problem, especially when they are assured that Darwin’s theory is supported by overwhelming evidence from other fields. If they believe in the fundamental correctness of Darwinian evolution, they may set aside their misgivings about the particular icon they know something about. On the other hand, if they voice their misgivings they may find it difficult to gain a hearing among their colleagues, because (as we shall see) criticizing Darwinian evolution is extremely unpopular among English-speaking biologists. This may be why the problems with the icons of evolution are not more widely known. And this is why many biologists will be just as surprised as the general public to learn how serious and widespread those problems are.

There is a part two to the above, but it is more of a lecture form well-worth the watch as well:

In his latest book Zombie Science, biologist Jonathan Wells asks a simple question: If the icons of evolution were just innocent textbook errors, why do so many of them still persist? Wells gave a presentation about Zombie Science at the book’s national launch party recently in Seattle. (see more about the presentation here https://evolutionnews.org/2017/06/jon…) Watch as Wells explores a new wave of icons walking the halls of science while putting some familiar corpses back in the grave. New topics include DNA, the human eye, vestigial organs, antibiotic resistance, and cancer. Looking past the current zombie outbreak, Wells offers a hopeful vision of science free from the clutches of materialist dogma. Wells himself is something of an iconoclast, railing against the tyranny of science’s Darwin-only advocates. His first book, Icons of Evolution, became an international hit by dismantling the outdated and underwhelming “proofs” of evolution that have littered textbooks for decades. For doing so, he was attacked by Darwin’s defenders and became one of the most hated figures of the intelligent design movement.

Icons of Evolution’s website is here. I pray it is kept up:

Icons of Evolution
Home of Biologist and Iconoclast Jonathan Wells

I have read the bulk of his writings, but if you are not familiar with him or Intelligent Design, I suggest this book for your shelf:

A couple remembrances by his colleagues:

Here are those promised quotes, I created them in my Microsoft Word, September 2017:

Eighteen Winged Dragonflies.

UBX is one of a family of genes called “Hox genes,” which affect head-to-tail development. In 2007, Donald Prothero published a book defending evolution. The book included a photo of a four-winged fruit fly to illustrate how “big developmental changes can result from small genetic mutations.”99 The book also claimed that modern four-winged dragonflies evolved from ancient dragonflies that had more wings, and it featured a drawing of an eighteen-winged dragonfly together with a four-winged dragonfly. According to its caption, the drawing illustrated “the evolutionary mechanism by which Hox genes allow arthropods to make drastic changes in their number and arrangements of segments and appendages, producing macroevolutionary changes with a few simple mu­tations.”100

In November 2009, Prothero (together with Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer) debated Discovery Institute senior fellows Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg. During the debate, Sternberg pointed out that eighteen-winged dragonflies never existed.101 A few days later, Prothero responded in a blog post that Meyer and Sternberg had “completely missed the point” of the illustration. According to Prothero (apparently having forgotten the number of wings in his drawing), “the text clearly points out that the twelve-winged dragonfly is a thought experiment, an illustration to show that a simple change in Hox genes allows the arthropods… to make huge evolutionary changes by simple modifications of regulatory genes.”102

But the text in Prothero’s book did not identify the eighteen-winged dragonfly as a “thought experiment.” Instead, it stated, “Experiments have shown that a few Hox genes cause arthropods to add or subtract segments, and other Hox genes can produce whatever appendage is needed.” Thus the “macroevolutionary transition from one body form to another with a completely different number of segments and appendages is a very easy process.”103

In 2013 Prothero published another book, Bringing Fossils to Life, which claimed that “a tiny change in Hox genes can make a big evolutionary difference.” Indeed, “the fossil record confirms this idea that simply switching on or off Hox genes allows abrupt changes not only in appendages and wings, but even in the number of body segments.”104

Two pages later the book reproduced the 2007 drawing of an eighteen-winged dragonfly, with a caption that stated, “Fossils demonstrate that many early arthropods were capable of adding or losing wings or other appendages…. This cartoon of real fossils shows how this multiplication or reduction process can rapidly produce entirely new body forms from a single [Hex] mutant.”105

So in 2009 the eighteen-winged dragonfly was an imaginary thought experiment, but in four years it evolved into a real fossil! Isn’t zombie science amazing?

Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2017), 72-74.

Four-Winged Fruit Flies

NORMAL FRUIT flies have two wings. Behind each wing is a tiny “balancer ” that vibrates rapidly during flight to stabilize the fly’s movements. In the 1970s, geneticist Edward Lewis discovered that by artificially combining three separate DNA mutations in a fruit fly embryo he could transform the balancers into a second pair of normal-looking wings92 93 To some people, Lewis’s discovery seemed to corroborate the neo-Darwinian theory that DNA mutations provide the raw materials for evolution, and biology textbooks started using photos of a four-winged fruit fly to show students what mutations can accomplish.

But the mutant four-winged fruit fly lost its balancers in the bargain. Worse, the mutant wings do not have any flight muscles. So the four-winged fly has great difficulty flying and mating, and it cannot survive for long outside the laboratory94 95 It is a sideshow freak, an evolutionary dead end.

Yet some textbooks in 2000 featured photos of four-winged fruit flies, and some continue to do so. For example, Freeman’s 2014 Biological Science includes a photo of the four-winged fly, accompanied by text stating that mutations “can turn a segment in the middle part of the body into a segment just like the one that lies in front of it.” So instead of having balancers “the transformed segment now bears a pair of wings.” No mention of the fact that the mutant wings are effectively dead, or that the fly is severely handicapped.96

Jonathan Wells, Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2017), 71.

DNA Repair Destroys Evolutionary Theory

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is with a Hat-Tip to Wintery Knight!

… And this is the key point:

Here, we encounter a great paradox, first identified in 1971 by Manfred Eigen7: DNA repair is essential to maintain DNA but the genes that code for DNA repair could not have evolved unless the repair mechanisms were already present to protect the DNA.

And at the very end of the article, the most common response from Darwinian naturalists is rebutted:

Those who promote unguided abiogenesis simply brush off all of these required mechanisms, claiming that life started as simplified “proto-cells” that didn’t need repair. But there is no evidence that any form of life could persist or replicate without these repair mechanisms. And the presence of the repair mechanisms invokes several examples of circular causality — quite a conundrum for unintelligent, natural processes alone. Belief that simpler “proto-cells” didn’t require repair mechanisms requires blind faith, set against the prevailing scientific evidence. …

Video: Life Can’t Exist Without Repair Mechanisms, and That’s a Problem for Origin-of-Life Theories

<<<<<<<<Another Wintery Knight Hat-Tip! >>>>>>>>

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Dr. Fazale “Fuz” Rana about the appearance of first life on Earth. What are the minimum functions of a simple living system? When did life appear on the Earth? What are the best naturalistic hypotheses for the origin of life? Are any of these scenarios plausible? What is the best explanation for the information and algorithms in the cell? Is design a better explanation? (Just under an hour)

How does this cause a problem?

In this video David Gelernter, David Berlinksi, and Stephen Meyer break down the mathematical problems with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.

Piers Morgan Interviews Stephen C. Meyer (Serious Saturday)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Hat-tip to Wintery Knight’s FACEBOOK) In a lively yet in-depth discussion, Piers Morgan drills down to the core of human existence with Stephen C. Meyer, the prominent ‘intelligent design’ advocate. In this Piers Morgan Uncensored special, Meyers firmly rejects the idea that a scientific worldview leads to atheism, arguing instead that ‘the universe requires a creator or cause’. When Richard Dawkin’s name is mentioned, Meyer claims that he actually really loves the atheist firebrand and admires his intensity. Lastly, Morgan and Meyers agree that the question of God’s existence is tied to more than just cold hard facts, but also human nature itself.

Love Is Illusory (Wolpert | Sizer/Ammi | Provine | + Lennox)

Published by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED w/Dawkins & Greg Bahnsen at the end.

“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York, NY: Schribner, 1995), 3.

In this short montage I start out with Lewis Wolpert on the “Unthinkable” program with Justin Brierley. According to evolution, love is reducible entirely to natural causes. I add a response I love from a cyber friend (Ken Ammi) via his debate in March 2010 with Michael Sizer (see my upload of just this part). And of course I add Provine for good measure.

  • …love better coheres within the Christian, mind-first, conception of reality—where love has role, meaning and place in a universe created by a God who is love. (THE GOSPEL COALITION)

Here is a short snippet from John Lennox’s book, “Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility“

Free will and love

Another capacity that would be impossible without free will is the capacity to love. The existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre captured this idea well:

The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we need try to only persuade him that the beloved’s passion is the result of a psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love and his being are cheapened… If the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.7

The endowment of men and women with free will inevitably implies the possibility that they might use that free will to choose evil, and to reject love, even the love of God. Hence we must consider some necessary implications of human free will for the structure of nature. If the free will and free choice that God gave to human beings were intended to be genuine, that very fact necessitated that nature should possess a certain degree of autonomy.

C.S. Lewis puts it this way:

People often talk as if nothing were easier than for two naked minds to “meet” or to become aware of each other. But I see no possibility of their doing so except in a common medium which forms their “external world” or environment… What we need for human society is exactly what we have – a neutral something, neither you nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up sound waves in the common air between us.8

Lewis then points out that this and other neutral fields – matter, in other words – must have a certain fixed nature, a certain autonomy as Lewis calls it. Suppose the contrary were the case. Imagine, for example, that the world was structured in such a way that a beam of wood remained hard and strong when used in the construction of a house, but it became as soft as grass when I hit my neighbour with it. Or if the air refused to carry lies and insults. Indeed, says Lewis:

If the principle were carried to its logical conclusion evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in our thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations.9

The result would be, of course, that real freedom of human will and choice would be negated.

Nature, then, must have a certain autonomy, in order that there can be a society of beings with free will, able to make real moral decisions for good or evil, and to carry them out in practice. The potential of evil thought and act to produce evil effects cannot be annulled without simultaneously removing the necessary condition for free will to function. This is a moral universe.

So far, so good, but what lies behind all of this? How does this universe come to be a moral universe; and if we are to be free within it, what are the basic conditions for achieving that freedom?

7 J-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, New York, Pocket Books, 1984, p. 478.

8 C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, London, HarperCollins, 2002, p. 18.

9 Ibib., p. 21.

Naturalism is self-defeating Richard Dawkins vs. Greg Bahnsen

Evolutionists w/Egg On Their Faces – Failed Predictions

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • the theory has been attacked on the grounds that many aspects of nature fail to show any evidence of intelligent design, such as “junk” DNA — R. T. Pennock (2002)

First, this is with a hat-tip to WINTERY KNIGHT! BTW, I posted on this many years back (jump below to my imports). Here is the video WK posted and then I will add more from him and my old posts.

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Is the idea of junk DNA this one of the biggest mistakes in science in our lifetime? Only about 1% of our DNA codes for proteins, so what is the other 99% doing? Many evolutionary scientists over the years insisted that the non-protein coding DNA is largely junk, but intelligent design theorists predicted function will be prevalent throughout our genome. Guess which prediction turned out to be right?

Learn how scientists have discovered that the vast majority of our genome has function in this installment of the “Codes of Life” mini-series produced as part of the “Long Story Short” show on YouTube.

Find out more about scientific challenges to evolution. Download a free copy of the mini-book “Top 10 Scientific Problems With Evolution” here: TOP TEN PROBLEMS w/EVOLUTION. This free digital mini-book reviews the scientific literature and shows there are powerful scientific challenges to core tenets of Darwinian theory.

The key ideas here are this, Evolutionists predicted one thing. Intelligent Design proponents, another (EVOLUTION NEWS):

  1. …evolutionists predicted that, in line with their premise of a randomly generated genome, DNA would turn out to be full of Darwinian debris, playing no functional role but merely parasitic (atheist Richard Dawkins’s term) on the small portion of functional DNA.
  2. Proponents of intelligent design said the opposite. William Dembski (1998) and Richard Sternberg (2002) predicted widespread function for the so-called “junk.” After all, as a product of care and intention, the genome ought to be comparable in a way with products of human genius, with every detail there for a reason.

For instance, here is an article that John Woodmorappe wrote in 2002:

More and more noncoding DNA, long considered ‘junk DNA’, has eventually been found to be functional. Hardly more than a few months pass by and there is not another scientific paper demonstrating function for some form of junk DNA. As summarized in this article, there is also growing evidence that at least some pseudogenes are functional. It should be stressed that pseudogenes, unlike other so-called junk DNA, have long been burdened not only with the ingrained belief that they lack function, but also the additional onus of having supposedly lost a function. In addition, consider the following preconception relative to protein-coding genes in general:

‘Considerably less analysis of this type has been performed on coding regions, possibly be­cause the bias present from the protein-encoding function represented as nucleotide triplets (codons) promotes the general assumption that secondary functionality is present infrequently in protein cod­ing sequences.’

[….]

Against the backdrop of the customary negative opinion of pseudogenes, there have always been a few individuals who anticipated their functional potential. McCarrey (1986) et al. were probably the first to suggest that pseudogenes can be functional in terms of the regulation of the expression of its paralogous genes. They noted that the sense RNA tran­scribed by a gene could be effectively removed by hybrid­izing (forming a duplex) with the antisense RNA produced by the paralagous pseudogene. In addition, an otherwise nonfunctional peptide unit translated by the pseudogene could inhibit the peptide translated by the gene. They lik­ened these processes to a buffered acid-base titration. As described below, their ideas proved prophetic.

Inouye apparently independently realized the same pos­sibility for pseudogenes (1988)….

Of course, me being no scientist could also read the writing on the wall, similar to vestigial organs. Here are those old posts of mine:

Both posts are from Friday, June 15, 2007

“Junk” Science

Evolution Predicts “Junk”… Intelligent Design Predicts “Treasure”

A long trail of refuse is what has been left behind by the theory of evolution. From the many deaths because evolutionary theory taught that tonsils were vestigial, to stalled insight into the appendix. Now we have years lost in the study of what was known as “Junk DNA.” Many years ago I debated that this will be found not to be junk, but will be shown to be useful, and after the first Scientific American article about “Junk DNA” not being Junk DNA, I was using it as an example to bolster the Intelligent Design argument:

For instance you can find a response here that I wrote in March of 2005:

This is originally from VOLCONVO, a debate forum I graced many years ago, now defunct, under:

philosophy-religion/4153-global-myths-evolution-spin-off-3

It is nice to see more and more INFORMATION (pun intended) come out on this, and the prediction made by Intelligent Design leaders in 1994! (Taken from EVOLUTION NEWS article):

As far back as 1994, pro-ID scientist and Discovery Institute fellow Forrest Mims had warned in a letter to Science against assuming that ‘junk’ DNA was ‘useless.'” Science wouldn’t print Mims’ letter, but soon thereafter, in 1998, leading ID theorist William Dembski repeated this sentiment in First Things:

[Intelligent] design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term “junk DNA.” Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as “junk” merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how “non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development.” Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.

(William Dembski, “Intelligent Science and Design,” First Things, Vol. 86:21-27 (October 1998)

If these scientists were coming from the perspective that everything was “designed” to begin with, they wouldn’t merely write off unknowns as “junk.”

10:13 PM 

Killing in the Name of Darwin

The Dangers of Darwinism

People use to have their tonsils pulled whenever they were slightly inflamed. In the 1930’s over half of all children had their tonsils and adenoids removed. In 1969, 19.5 out of every 1,000 children under the age of nine had undergone a tonsillectomy. By 1971 the frequency had dropped to only 14.8 per 1,000, with the percentage continuing to decrease in subsequent years. Most medical authorities now actively discourage tonsillectomies. Many agree with Wooley, chairman of the department of pediatrics at Wayne State University, who was quoted in one study as saying: “If there are one million tonsillectomies done in the United States, there are 999,000 that don’t need doing.”

In the Medical World News (N. J. Vianna, Peter Greenwald, and U. N. Davies, September 10, 1973, p.10), a story stated that although removal of tonsils at a young age obviously eliminates tonsillitis (the inflammation of the tonsils) it may significantly increase the incidence of strep-throat and even Hodgkin’s disease. In fact, according to the New York Department of Cancer Control: “…people who have had tonsillectomies are nearly three times as likely to develop Hodgkin’s Disease, a form of cancer that attacks the lymphoid tissue” (Lawrence Galton, “All Those Tonsil Operations: Useless? Dangerous?”Parade, May 2 (1976), pp. 26ff).

Ken Miller, 13 years ago, said, 

  • “the designer made serious errors, wasting millions of bases of DNA on a blueprint full of junk and scribbles. Evolution, in contrast, can easily explain them as nothing more than failed experiments in a random process.” (ARN and UNCOMMON DECENT)

The SCIENCE DAILY article that the above ARN article links to has this to say:

“This impressive effort has uncovered many exciting surprises and blazed the way for future efforts to explore the functional landscape of the entire human genome,” said NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “Because of the hard work and keen insights of the ENCODE consortium, the scientific community will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do, as well as how the genome’s functional elements have evolved. This could have significant implications for efforts to identify the DNA sequences involved in many human diseases.”….

….The ENCODE consortium’s major findings include the discovery that the majority of DNA in the human genome is transcribed into functional molecules, called RNA, and that these transcripts extensively overlap one another. This broad pattern of transcription challenges the long-standing view that the human genome consists of a relatively small set of discrete genes, along with a vast amount of so-called junk DNA that is not biologically active.

Thanks to the design theorists who predicted this outcome for the Intelligent Design theory, and for showing how this revelation refutes the prediction (yet again) that we should see if evolution is true. That is, useless genes and DNA.

10:34 PM 

SEE OTHER POSTS HERE ON MY .COM:

 

Greg Gutfeld’s “Agnosticism”

Published by Papa Giorgio

RE-POST/Fixed Media & Links

(Originally Posted In April of 2016, then in 2020)

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT

You describe yourself as agnostic atheist. What does that mean?

That means I don’t know. That’s all it means. I don’t […] I’m not arrogant enough to say that I am an atheist and I’m not arrogant enough to know that there is something out there, so I am happy to say that I don’t know.

And I think about it, I often say that I am an atheist in the daytime and terrified at night. And you wake up and you’re like […] ah, is this all there is? And then you wake up in the morning and it kind of goes away. […] I am in in the I don’t know party, which technically that might be agnostic or atheist. But I don’t know. I leave that to whatever happens, it’s the big practical joke. We’ll never know. Nobody comes back to tell what.

In his book, How To Be Right: The Art of Being Persuasively Correct (p.96), and in an article in NATIONAL REVIEW, as well as intimating the same in the above video, Greg Gutfeld said this:

This is important because it removes the sweaty veneer of ideological excess. While I love it when I’m certain about something, I realize those are rare moments in life. You cannot be certain about all things. As an agnostic, I do not call myself an atheist, because, to put it simply, “I don’t know.” For all I know there is a god, and it’s some dude in Jersey named Ned. True, I’ve pretty much discounted this theory — Ned has bad skin and a Beatle-do, qualities rarely associated with the divine. But the point is: I can’t be 100 percent sure. So I punt.

I will comment on his “agnosticism” in a bit, but first…

While I have enjoyed his contributions to Conservatarian thinking and much needed humor, I have to say this is one of the worse positions I have seen him take. Logically that is. And let me be clear… I am NOT saying this because he merely rejects “God” [read here Ned], but that he anthropomorphizes the big “G” — the classic theistic understanding of God.

Making wise decisions always depends on various factors even though it does not provide us with 100% guarantee. In this case, what is missing is a correct definition of God. So since we are primarily dealing with evidences garnered from history, science, philosophy, fulfilled prophecy, and the like… there is no silver bullet. Nothing is assured 100%

BUT…

There is a way to approach this as almost all person’s do (in their personal life or professional life). Just like a case in court so-to is the cumulative gathering through reason and logic evidences in a way that a strong case for God is made.

Even in a court situation, a case is made that sways a jury one way in order to not make a life-or-death ruling (in the case of a 1st degree murder trial), but to make a choice “beyond reasonable doubt.” Here is a great comment in an article on STAND TO REASON’S site:

The jury is asked if the evidence shows that the defendant is probably guilty.

It is to the evidence introduced in this trial, and to it alone, that you are to look for that proof.

The standard of probability is not “100% certainly guilty”; it is “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

A reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant may arise from the evidence, conflict in the evidence, or the lack of evidence.

If you have a reasonable doubt, you should find the defendant not guilty. If you have no reasonable doubt, you should find the defendant guilty.

Evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s it. That’s all. Nothing about faith.

In life, not just in the jury box, we are forced to make decisions with incomplete information, but we are never forced to go beyond evidence.

Andy Banister explains this concept with a walk through the woods:

It is easy to see that Mr. Gutfeld is creating an impossible plateau for one to reach that no field of study, whether the sciences or law (except maybe mathematics), can ever dream to attain. Perfection ~ something Greg should be familiar with rejecting and warning others about. That is, Utopian ideals and goals. In making this impossible 100% claim he defines God in such a way that evidence for His existence — not Ned, but the real Creator of the space-time-continuum — is defined out of existence. Greg essentially presupposes that God out of existence.

To wit, I will turn my attention to Greg Gutfeld’s “agnosticism.” He has repeatedly said “I don’t know.” In the video at the top of this post he says right after the “practical joke” comment “that we will never know.” That is not an agnostic position. Professor Budziszewski explains:

“To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him. Unfortunately, the position that we can know exactly one thing about God – his unknowability in all respects except this – is equally unsupportable, for why should this one thing be an exception? How could we know that any possible God would be of such a nature that nothing else could be known about him? On what basis could we rule out his knowability in all other respects but this one? The very attempt to justify the claim confutes it, for the agnostic would have to know a great many things about God in order to know he that couldn’t know anything else about him.”

J. Budziszewski, found in Norman Geisler & Paul Hoffman, eds., Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe, revised ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2001), 58

In other words… Gutfeld is showing arrogance by demanding 100% proof (that no jury demands), and by excluding God by defining Him in a way as to rig the outcome. As much as I respect him and his wonderful work… his position here is very childish. Not a position I would expect him to take… but ideology [his atheism] does tend to blind. And arrogantly so.

Sometimes the smartest skeptics give up what they wrongly view as faith for the most “childlike” reasons. For instance, Lewis Wolpert, who has too many letters after his name and is a very accomplished and respected developmental biologist, explained why he rejects God:

I stopped believing in God when I was 15 or 16 because he didn’t give me what I asked for. (Lewis Wolpert, “The Hard Cell,” Third Way, March 2007, p. 16)

During an interview, he also stated: “I used to pray but I gave it up because when I asked God to help me find my cricket bat, he didn’t help.”

When asked by Justin Brieley (Unbelievable show episode, “What Does Science Tell Us About God?”): “Right, and that was enough for you to prove that God did not exist.”

He replied: “Well, yes. I just gave it up completely.”

(See page 15 of MIDWEST CHRISTIAN OUTREACH JOURNAL)

While one would expect a meaty explanation that reasonable people would think about and come to a conclusion on… his reasoning is commensurate of a child’s reasons. Another well known skeptic, Bart Ehrman, doesn’t reject God because he found textual evidence against the Christian faith. He rejects God because there is suffering in the world:

“If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering?” He [Ehrman] says this “led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith”

(DR. CLAY JONES)

Bart’s way of dealing with this is basically the classical argument against God:

Premise 1: God is all-good (omnibenevolent)

Premise 2: God is all-powerful (omnipotent)

Premise 3: Suffering and evil exist

Conclusion: An all-good, all-powerful God could not exist since there is so much suffering and evil in the world. If he did, he would eradicate this evil.

Charles Darwin as well rejected God not based on evidence, but for theological reasoning:

  • That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes… A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient. It revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one; and the abundant presence of suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection. — Charles Darwin, The Works of Charles Darwin, Volume 29  (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2010), 121-122.)

Darwin was using theological presuppositions to drive his research, here are the precepts:

I have argued that, in the first edition of the Origin, Darwin drew upon at least the following positiva theological claims in his case for descent with modification (and against special creation):

  1. Human begins are not justfied in believing that God creates in ways analogous to the intellectual powers of the human mind.
  2. A God who is free to create as He wishes would create new biological limbs de novo rather than from a common pattern.
  3. A respectable deity would create biological structures in accord with a human conception of the ‘simplest mode’ to accomplish the functions of these structures.
  4. God would only create the minimum structure required for a given part’s function.
  5. God does not provide false empirical information about the origins of organisms.
  6. God impressed the laws of nature on matter.
  7. God directly created the first ‘primordial’ life.
  8. God did not perform miracles within organic history subsequent to the creation of the first life.
  9. A ‘distant’ God is not morally culpable for natural pain and suffering.
  10. The God of special creation, who allegedly performed miracles in organic history, is not plausible given the presence of natural pain and suffering.

(EVOLUTION NEWS & VIEWS)

This seems like a problem, but in fact, many atheists have abandoned this tactic. Why… through the work primarily of Alvin Plantinga. Here, Dr. Ronald Nash formulates WHY this syllogism is no longer a serious threat in philosophy:

Demonstrating the Consistency of the Theistic Set

After our brief detour into the differences between a theodicy and a defense, a short summary may help us get back on track. We have seen that the atheologian’s claim that the theistic set is self-contradictory remains nothing more than wishful thinking because of the atheologian’s failure to produce the missing premise required to show that the set is explicitly contradictory. Rather than rest on our laurels and live with the possibility that some atheologian might discover the missing proposition some time in the future, we have decided to see if we cannot beat the atheologian to the punch and actually demonstrate that the theistic set is consistent. Once done, this will eliminate any possibility of theism’s being shown to be logically inconsistent because of the existence of evil in the world. The method of demonstrating consistency requires that we add a premise (or premises) to the original set that logically entails the other proposition, which, in our case, is “The world contains evil.” In order to do the job, it is not necessary that our new premise be true or even that it be believed to be true. All that is necessary is that it be logically possible.

Consider, then, the following argument:

An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God created the world.

God creates a world containing evil and has a good reason for doing so.

Therefore, the world contains evil.

Numbers 1 and 2 taken together do, of course, entail 3. Therefore, the propositions from our original theistic set that now make up 1 are logically consistent with the existence of evil. The only relevant question regarding 2 is whether it is possibly true. Obviously it is since it is not logically false. Therefore, the theistic set is logically consistent from which follows the impossibility of anyone’s ever demonstrating that it is not.

Ronald Nash, Faith & Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1988), 189.

C.S. Lewis as well argues against this “evil universe” argument:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1952), 38-39.

So again, Bart’s rejection is dealt with handily, and shows his rejection is merely emotive in nature… devoid of any real substance. Similar to Greg Gutfeld’s position, his rejection is merely emotive in his reasoning. He is not worries about “evidence” per-se, but rather worried about some cosmic killjoy that may have a word with in regards to past or future hedonistic ventures. So his hiding arrogantly behind “I don’t know” is his crutch.

I have some really good books I can recommend to the person seeking good, well-thought-out, reasonable arguments detailing various forms of evidence for “faith”~

Post-Script,

May I also note quickly how a believer views faith as opposed to the faith Greg surely thinks is blind (and granted, some Christians are heppy with their “blindedness”):

Certain words can mean very different things to different people. For instance, if I say to an atheist, “I have faith in God,” the atheist assumes I mean that my belief in God has nothing to do with evidence. But this isn’t what I mean by faith at all. When I say that I have faith in God, I mean that I place my trust in God based on what I know about him.

William A. Dembski and Michael R. Licona, Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 38.

AND, unless we forget the bottom line in this discussion through hubris, we should know that which we reject through feigned ignorance:

NANOTECHNOLOGY | Gears, Motors, and “Cogs”

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Originally posted September of 2013)

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Gears, Motors, and “Cogs”

How does [chance] selection arrive at such coordination? What good is one gear without the corresponding gear? The challenge of IC [irreducible complexity] for Darwinism remains. ~ Uncommon Descent

Mechanical gears – like those found in clocks – have been around since the Greeks are thought to have invented them around 300 B.C. But scientists have now discovered a small hopping insect equipped with a set of living gears! University of Cambridge biologists discovered that Issus coleoptratus have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together. This allows both legs to spring at the exact same instant, propelling the tiny creatures straight forward. If one of the bug’s legs jumped a fraction of a second earlier than the other, this would push the insect off course to the left or right. The gears are located at the top of the insects’ hind legs and include 10 to 12 tapered teeth. The teeth of the gear lock together neatly, and they even have curves at the base, a design incorporated into man-made mechanical gears to reduce wear over time. Researcher Gregory Sutton said, “We usually think of gears as something that we see in human-designed machinery…. These gears are not designed; they are evolved – representing high speed and precision machinery evolved for synchronisation in the animal world.” What we’d like to ask him is how did this insect survive for thousands of years while it couldn’t jump straight? No, there is a much simpler explanation that scientists might see if they weren’t so biased against a Creator. The gears were designed by God, who gave all of His creatures – including you and me – all of the intricate parts we need!

Mind you, we have tiny motors (complete) found in nature that likewise fit Darwin’s own challenge of irreducible complexity — disproving neo-Darwinian positions… however, these gears provide yet another of many irreducible complexities that philosophical naturalism is hard-pressed to answer.

Atheist evangelist ~ Richard Dawkins ~ famous quip almost seems painfully funny:

  • “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” (See more here)

Here is another evidence of “irreducibilities” found in nanotechnology, the Kinesin Motor:

Via, EVOLUTION NEWS AND VIEWS:kinesin-transporting-a-vesicle-along-a-microtubule-intelligent-design-id

One of the most amazing examples of cellular nanotechnology is a molecular motor protein known as kinesin. Kinesin is responsible for transporting molecular cargo — including chromosomes (e.g. during cell division), neurotransmitters and other important material — along microtubule tracks from one region of the cell to another. It is driven by ATP hydrolysis, thereby converting chemical energy into mechanical energy which it can use for movement. A kinesin molecule typically possesses two tails on one end, which attach to the cargo, in addition to two globular heads (often called “motor domains”) on the other end. Some readers may recognize this elegant protein from the now-famous Harvard animation, Inner Life of the Cell (time 1:59).

The sheer number of processes needed to be undertaken by such a motor protein makes the appearance of intelligent design seem almost beyond rational denial. Of course, many people resist this conclusion despite the evidence. As one Science Daily article in October 2010 put it,

“Our results show that a molecular motor must take on a large number of functions over and above simple transport, if it wants to operate successfully in a cell,” says Professor Matthias Rief from the Physics Department of the TU Muenchen. It must be possible to switch the motor on and off, and it must be able to accept a load needed at a specific location and hand it over at the destination. “It is impressive how nature manages to combine all of these functions in one molecule,” Rief says. “In this respect it is still far superior to all the efforts of modern nanotechnology and serves as a great example to us all.” [emphasis added]….

The General Theory of Evolution contends that every lifeform on Earth came about by non-purposeful, unintelligent accidents. Yet many evolutionists repeatedly refer to seeing amazing design in nature. But can design exist without a designer? Join Eric Lyons as he looks at the remarkable design we see, even down to the smallest creatures on Earth, all of which point to a Grand Designer.

Information drives the development of life. But what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian evolutionary process? Or did it require intelligent design? The Information Enigma is a fascinating 21-minute documentary that probes the mystery of biological information, the challenge it poses to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the reason it points to intelligent design. The video features Dr. Stephen Meyer, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe, founder of the Biologic Institute. For more about intelligent design theory be sure to visit “Intelligent Design: The Definitive Source on Intelligent Design“

If you watch the short videos below, keep in mind that all this complexity at the cellular/protein level needs to be up and running optimally for life to have happened… at all.

And what one should keep in mind is the time-factor in all this “evolution” involved in event the simplest working protein… even long time (billions of years) is not enough time to get “the show on the road” ~ see Not Enough Evolutionary Time.

The idea that Behe’s flagellum motor has been answered is wishful thinking at best, and corrupt science at it’s worst (scientism: which is an insertion of a metaphysical principle stating things like “the only quantifiable reality known is the one made up of atoms, and, science [thus defined] is the best means to understanding said reality”). Really, then, it is an “evolution-of-the-gaps” type thinking.

✿ Ken Miller’s challenge can be read here;
✿ Responses to it and derivatives to it can be found here.

But as one can see… these giants of I.D. did truly wipe the floor with their critics [full exchange].

By-the-way, all this just got WAY MORE complex. For instance, here is the fast-swimming magnetotactic bacterium MO-1… it has 7-flagellum motors… with counter gears:

Here is a basic animation:

bacterium-mo-1

One should see Malcolm Bowden’s presentation on YouTube of the bacterium MO-1 as well.

And NOW even more complex is the fact that quantum mechanics may play a role (unrelated to the DNA or RNA) that folds these proteins into the shape for pieces to the whole of the working part.

The Electrical Blueprints That Orchestrate Life | Michael Levin

Published by Papa Giorgio

This comes by way of UNCOMMON DESCENT, hat-tip to Denyse O’Leary:

  • I’ve written about the “electric cell” here and here, describing how electric currents in cell membranes transmit information through an “electric code.” I’ve also written about “water wires” and cable bacteria. Biologists have long known about the membrane potential of an individual cell, which measures about -70 millivolts, due to ionic separations. They have known that neurons transmit ionic voltages down their membranes. Now, recent discoveries are showing that we must expand our exploration of bioelectricity to the whole body. – David Coppedge (March 15, 2023)

TED: DNA isn’t the only builder in the biological world — there’s also a mysterious bioelectric layer directing cells to work together to grow organs, systems and bodies, says biologist Michael Levin. Sharing unforgettable and groundbreaking footage of two-headed worms, he introduces us to xenobots — the world’s first living robots, created in his lab by cracking the electrical code of cells — and discusses what this discovery may mean for the future of medicine, the environment and even life itself. (This conversation, hosted by TED’s Chris Anderson, was recorded June 2020.)

A Series of Clips About Radiometric Dating Methods

Published by Papa Giorgio

Essentially, these assumptions negate any real radiometric dating endeavor.

(1) the radioactive element decays at a constant rate
(2) the rock crystal being analyzed is not contaminated by infusion of excess end product
(3) the rock crystal contained no end product when it was formed
(4) leaching of the parent element out of the rock sample did not occur.

Remember, these are clips… if you want MORE context, get and see the entire movies linked below. These are 9-short clips from three documentaries tackling false assumptions dealing with radioactive dating methods used to push a narrative of “long ages”

Potassium-Argon Dating and the Laetoli Footprints

Just a quick excerpt from Dismantled dealing with a dating method. This is a clip from the movie: “Dismantled: A Scientific Deconstruction of the Theory Of Evolution” (PRIME)

Dating Lava Flows – 3 Parts

Clipped from the movie: “Radioactive Dating and A Young Earth” (AMAZON DVD). Is radiometric dating really proof that the earth is billions of years old as evolutionists claim?

Radioactive Assumptions – 5 Parts

What kind of assumptions are made on the way to an “authoritative” date of the earth/fossil? The AGE OF THE EARTH I recommend getting for your library is here.

Dr. Snelling Bonus

Taken from “Beyond Is Genesis History? Vol 1 : Rocks & Fossils.”

Enjoy Dr. Andrew Snelling’s “Science Confirms a Young Earth – The Radioactive Dating Methods are Flawed” presentation from the ReEngage conference in Brisbane, Australia.