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What’s Wrong With The Theory of Evolution?

Tim Harwood M.A. (2001)

Lost Civilizations (@lostcivilizations)

Published in

lostworlds

· 1 week ago

One hundred and fifty years ago Darwin made some observations on nature, on the basis of which he put forward the idea that the enormous diversity of life on planet earth can be explained purely in materialistic terms, and not as had been previously thought, by divine intervention. There is no question that Darwin’s observations on selection have been a tremendously powerful force in the nineteenth century and beyond, scientifically, socially, politically, and culturally. And yet despite all this, in his day the theory was greeted with a hostile barrage of skepticism, criticism, and oftentimes ridicule, and if opinion polls are to be believed, very few people to this day take the theory of evolution seriously as an explanation for life. Why is this?

Well, the reason is really very simple. Right from the start the criticisms made were real and valid, and while the questions posed have somewhat changed in form and structure in the last 150 years, to this very day a long list of seemingly intractable problems remain with the theory. This freeware electronic book is designed to be a brief, readable, and scientifically accurate, guide to the current state of the evolutionary debate. If you wish to pursue the subject further, a short reading list is provided at the end.

Absence of Intermediate Forms

Darwin in The Origin of Species wrote:-

The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on earth must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?..(this)…is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.

This is the oldest criticism of Darwin’s theory and rather interestingly it has never in fact been answered. It is the case that there are no intermediate fossils of any significance in the fossil record. Up to a ¼ of a million fossil species exist in the museums of the world, and you can pretty much count on the fingers of one hand the number of fossils evolutionists are today seriously putting forward as intermediate forms – and even then the evidence is disputed. It is a common misconception that the fossil record is evidence for Darwinian evolution – it is not. All that is revealed by the fossils is that new species appear out of nowhere, fully formed, stay the same for huge periods of time, and then disappear. The absence of intermediate forms has been called a 'trade secret,' by the world famous scientist Stephan J. Gould, and is the main reason he developed the theory of ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ Evolutionary change because of its non-appearance in the fossil record must happen very fast in small isolated areas, as per Gould. However, as I shall explore later, this idea itself has several major flaws. The old argument that further research expeditions would turn up intermediates might have been valid 50 years ago, but can no longer be used today. Similar claims that the fossil record is incomplete are equally as spurious. For example, Denton has cited studies based upon modern species that suggest up to 85% of animals are preserved in the fossil record. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume the fossil record is anything other than a highly accurate and detailed account of the development of life on earth - which, frankly, scares the hell out of evolutionists, who rather lamely continue to spin the lie that the fossil record is in some way significantly incomplete. Today many fossil species are commodity items because they are so widely and easily available. You can buy a trilobite fossil for about $20, there are thousands perhaps tens of thousands of trilobite fossils in the world today, but none to show what trilobites evolved from, or what trilobites themselves might have evolved into. Similarly there is what is called the Cambrian explosion, when invertebrate life appeared suddenly with no clear ancestors. The arrival of almost all modern phyla of invertebrate life all at once is a direct contradiction of the prediction made by Darwin's theory of gradual change and intermediate forms.

What Hypothetically Would Intermediates Have Looked Like?

Evolutionists are unable to cite intermediate forms, so it is interesting to consider for a moment what an intermediate form might look like. We cannot find any evidence of intermediate forms, but can we for a moment image a plausible creature? Well, no, not really is the basic answer. You can repeat the following basic discussion for a variety of important species transitions, but I will lean upon Denton and Evolution a Theory in Crisis, to give you a taster of the problems of a hypothetical intermediate avian ( bird ). The current best guess is a flightless creature hopping around trying to catch flies, and somehow, slowly developing wings to jump a little bit higher each time. A number of problems spring to mind with this thesis.

‘Firstly, light feathers are totally different from down feathers or feathers used for insulation; they involve an exquisite system of cross-latched barbules and shapes which are totally different from those of down feathers. Moreover, a flight feather would be totally useless for anything other than flight, and so the odds would be massively weighted against a creature that did not have them to begin with ever developing them. There would be no reason for it. Likewise with the development of arms into wings; that would actually be dysfunctional prior to the day the creature flew and, again, the odds against such a development for no particular reason are astronomical. We do have several kinds of birds such as ostriches with vestigial wings, but again these are descended from birds that flew and are not in some process of evolving into flying birds. They are developing out of being flying birds. Flying birds likewise require highly specialized bone structures, tails, hearts, lungs, and general balance parameters, all of which are totally different from those of other creatures, any of which would be antifunctional prior to flight. Developing any one of these things prior to being flight-capable would require overcoming gigantic odds. The odds of all of these adaptations developing from scratch thus, which is required by Darwinian notions of the evolution of modern birds, amount to several infinitesimals multiplied together. The entire age of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen. In fact, assuming one such feature had developed by chance, by the time the next one did, the first would, in all likelihood, still having been antifunctional during the time that the next was evolving, have de-evolved. The only other possibility from the point of view of evolution would be to have all necessary functionality for flying birds arise via mutation on the same day – which is just another way of saying God did it. The funny thing is that scientists believe in evolution because they wish to rule out what they see as the ‘supernatural’ alternative, while in fact they have created the supernatural alternative in their requirement for endless violations of probabilistic laws. Thus, we observe that any change to a substantially different kind of creature, requires new kinds of organs, with an entirely different set of system integration requirements for those organs. That this could happen through the selection of millions of tiny random mutations is seen to be a zero-probability event, both statistically and programmatically.’

And that’s just the macro part of avian evolution. Denton also discusses the micro-biological features of an intermediate such as the lungs. This is much harder hitting, and evolutionists are completely clueless on how this transition happened. Moreover, the avian lung is more or less identical the world over, so again, empirical evidence points towards abrupt appearance and subsequent relative stasis, rather than slow gradual change. Likewise, some people mistakenly think the first bird could have been a glider – actually the flight principals are totally different for powered and unpowered flight. In all honestly, I do not think there is a valid intermediate form for a bird - it is mathematically and physically impossible, both on a microbiological level and a macroscopic system level.

Finally, at this point I feel some readers will recall the famous ‘intermediate fossil,’ Archaeopteryx, and feel uneasy with my arguments. Well, I am sorry to say that in recent years it has become painfully obvious that Archaeopteryx is a fully functional bird capable of powered flight, with all the main avian adaptations already in place, including completely modern flight feathers. The fact this modern bird has claws, teeth, and a bony tail, hinting at reptilian ancestry, does not make it an intermediate. It just makes it odd. It is also true that claw analysis suggests modern birds do not descend from Archaeopteryx, as well as the fact that Archaeopteryx is isolated and alone in the fossil record, with no intermediate connection between itself and any other creature. Even worse, the dinosaurs that Archaeopteryx was once supposed to have evolved from, are now commonly dated well after its appearance. Basically, rather than being the father of all modern avians as many poorly written textbooks still claim, it was probably an evolutionary dead end that died out. In sum, despite the fact that flight arose several times separately, we have no clue as to how it happened. On the basis of the fossil record and the terrible problems of even trying to imagine what an intermediate avian might look like, to be perfectly honest the whole process looks like magic.

Molecular Intermediates

The other angle on intermediate forms is molecular analysis. In the early days of post war microbiological research many evolutionists naively felt that molecular level evidence would finally provide proof of their theory. One would be able to see the links between species in their molecular construction, and trace a clear evolutionary history. Where the fossils have so spectacularly failed them, the microbiological evidence would come to the rescue. The thinking went that ‘living fossils,’ such as the lungfish, would have ancient and primitive DNA, producing ancient and lesser evolved molecular structures. The problem is that molecular classification has revealed the very same world of huge gaping gaps that the fossil record faithfully records. The ‘living fossils,’ appear as modern as man in the molecular structures they possess, and the main classes of organisms appear separated, with no clear intermediate molecular connections between them. We see discontinuity, rather than continuity in molecular formation. Much to the dismay of evolutionists, the evidence points once again to abrupt appearance and subsequent relative stasis, rather than the slow gradual change advocated by Darwin ( Denton, Chapter 12 ).

Complexity

When Darwin first proposed his theory cells were literally assumed to be no more than gooey blobs of a few basic compounds. Since creatures were such simple constructions, it did not seem conceptually difficult to Darwin that selection could produce striking evolutionary change. For example, Darwin felt that if bears spent some time swimming around in the shallows, they would quickly become whales. He honestly believed it was that simple. However, today we know much better. Cells are entirely accurately likened to the world's best most advanced semi-conductor chip factories, with a level of complexity that almost defies description. It is true to say that the uncovering of the true complexity of living creatures has consistently taken aback even the most die hard evolutionists, and it is an issue they generally prefer not to talk about.

When discussing complex systems one is spoiled for choice, but I always find the dolphin’s sonar to be a most interesting example of complexity.In terms of size, power consumption, reliability, and an outstanding ability to track small objects in noisy environments, the dolphins’ sonar is superior to anything we humans have built at the dawn of the 21st century. Today we take it for granted that dolphins have this capability, but during the second world war radar was considered one of the most advanced military technologies on the face of the planet, and when it was first announced very few people found it credible that such white hot high technology could possibly exist in nature. Fifty years on everyone has now become used to the idea that technological systems in nature are still routinely vastly superior to anything we can design, but the mystery remains. Why can humans with multi billion dollar research budgets, consistently not design technological systems capable of matching the level of engineering perfection found in nature? Even more puzzling is trying to imagine how this stunning perfect sonar system could have evolved bit by bit, with every tiny mutation providing a small but clear survival to the dolphin. Rather unsurprisingly, no answers are offered by evolutionists.

Irreducible Complexity

But simply taking about complex systems from the viewpoint if incredulity hardly does the subject justice, since it is not just a question of implausible complexity, but in many cases out right impossible complexity. What I mean is that microbiological systems consist of a variety of critical components. All serve a unique function, and without each and every one of them, the system is non functional. There really is no conceivable way such systems can evolve bit by bit, with every stage providing a clear survival advantage. It is impossible. Period. Rather than exploring this subject in detail, I will at this point simply refer you to Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, which provides an admittedly not flawless, but nonetheless quite devastating discussion of the whole issue, by a world expert on the subject of microbiological systems. In my opinion, the book clearly answers the challenge made by Darwin made in The Origin of Species:-

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

As Behe has pointed out with this admittedly fussy quotation, this issue is so devastating, evolutionists have decided they simply do not want to talk about it:-

...the Journal of Molecular Evolution. JME is a journal that was begun specifically to deal with the topic of how evolution occurs on the molecular level. It has high scientific standards, and is edited by prominent figures in the field. In a recent issue of JME there were published eleven articles; of these, all eleven were concerned simply with the analysis of protein or DNA sequences. None of the papers discussed detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures. In the past ten years JME has published 886 papers. Of these, 95 discussed the chemical synthesis of molecules thought to be necessary for the origin of life, 44 proposed mathematical models to improve sequence analysis, 20 concerned the evolutionary implications of current structures, and 719 were analyses of protein or polynucleotide sequences. There were zero papers discussing detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures. This is not a peculiarity of JME. No papers are to be found that discuss detailed models for intermediates in the development of complex biomolecular structures in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nature, Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology or, to my knowledge, any journal whatsoever.

Evolutionist Response to Complexity Issue

When evolutionists talk about complexity, they used to (and some still do) make generalized statements such as 'lungs could have evolved as float bladders,' and 'feathers first evolved for insulation not flight,' statements which have long since been shown to be absurd. Then refuse to debate any specifics and retreat behind these extremely general statements, and say that you are being irrational and stupid. Typical quotes dredged up to by evolutionists to disprove the irreducible complexity problem include the following:-

Orgel's second rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.

'Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience. Richard Dawkins - River Out of Eden.

Whether these two typical quotes answer the challenge made by advocates of irreducible complexity such as Denton and Behe, is a question only you the reader can answer for yourself, but personally I think not. The Orgel quote sounds exactly like the classic 'God moves in mysterious ways,' quote if you ask me, highlighting the religious rather than the scientific nature of the faith of the disciples of the Gospel according to Saint Darwin. Other rhetorical tricks used include false analogy, for example comparing irreducible complexity with chaos theory. If you had infinite computing power and infinitely accurate instruments you could model a chaotic process. Even with such tools, you cannot model an irreducibly complex system. The further claim that the astonishing complexity of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics (true) is apparently disproved because ' the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies only to closed systems. The Earth is not a closed system.' The suggestion seems to be that if you take a solution of simple chemicals, apply a clamp fixed blowtorch, you can get life and / or an increase in information? A fascinating idea, but no one has ever come up with an experiment to prove it. This hypothetical experiment is just another of the delusional fits evolutionists are prone to suffer. I do not believe any such experiment will ever be demonstrated.

Origins of Life (Abiogenesis)

No one really has a clue how life started. About the most sensible answer available is panspermia, which states life originated in space and fell to earth. Of course it just shifts the origins of life elsewhere, but it remains the most plausible materialistic explanation for life on Earth yet offered. It is true some people got very excited about the Miller experiment in 1954 when amino acids were created in enclosed apparatus, and indeed, this debunked Icon of Evolution is still widely (and in my opinion fraudulently) used to sell evolution to the general public. But criticism has been leveled at the mild spark discharges as a simulation of lightening, and that is before we even get onto the question of accurate atmospheric simulation, and a comparison between the complexity of amino acids and the level of complexity the first replicating cell would have required. All the experiment really demonstrated was that the material to build cells might have been present. The experiment does not talk to us about how these chemicals could have spontaneously combined and formed a living cell. In short, 50 years on a solution seems further away than ever. In fact, it has become apparent that abiogenesis is such a hard problem; evolutionists have in effect walked away from the whole issue. That is why if you turn to the index of an evolution textbook, it is unlikely you will find the word abiogenesis. The biochemists say it is a problem for evolutionists, and the evolutionists say it is a problem for biochemists. Quite frankly in all honesty, you might as well say God did it – it’s a much less irrational form of argument than claiming chemicals can somehow bump together and spontaneously form life. They do not. To back this up, allow me to reference Alexander Mebane, cited from Darwin's Creation Myth.

Although this "disproof by mathematical impossibility" might well be called the most fundamental argument against Darwin's imagined " accidental creation" of all new organisms, it has historically been the easiest one for believers to laugh off, because the matter is so complex that, in general, it is quite impossible to produce estimates of the improbabilities involved that are more than "impressionistic". Much quoted has been Fred Hoyle's striking simile for the probability of an accidental or spontaneous formation of the simplest known life-form: "comparable to the probability that a tornado sweeping through an airplane junkyard would happen to assemble a flyable Boeing 747" 39-but, of course, no coercive proof can be given that that comparison is a realistic one. The French physicist Lecomte du Nouy, in 1947, calculated an "astronomical" improbability for the accidental assemblage of even a small protein-but, since he made the wholly unrealistic assumption that its natural formation could occur only by a "fortuitous concourse" of all its atoms, his result was (rightly) ridiculed by chemists, and his point (wrongly) inferred to be unsound.

But, as it happens, a similar calculation has more recently been carried out which, unlike du Nouy's, "leans over backwards" to be as favorable as possible, though it leads to the same conclusion. Robert Shapiro is a chemist who actively participated in the post-1952 experimental investigations of "origin of life by natural chemical evolution", and in 1986 published a very significant book (Origins) summarizing that work and the conclusions to be drawn from it. Dismissing as unrealistic the idea that either DNA or RNA could ever have spontaneously "evolved", because of the complexity of those purine base + sugar + phosphoric acid structures. He asks what could have been the simplest possible "pre-living" chemical assemblage that might have been able to generate the essential quality of life, self-replication. Generously oversimplifying to the maximum degree credible (or beyond), he proposes (p. 296) that the first "proto-life" might conceivably have emerged from a set of as few as ten very small "primitive enzymes", each one a mini-protein of only 25 links, and all constructed from a set of only four amino acids, rather than the twenty that Nature now employs. Assuming for the purpose the real natural occurrence of a "primordial soup" that consisted exclusively of those four amino acids (which is of course, a simply ridiculous postulate), he proceeds to show that, under these absurdly favorable conditions, the probability of "spontaneously", or accidentally, forming the requisite set of molecules would be about 1 in 10^150. So, if something like 10^150 random trials were available, the thing might really have happened. But he had previously calculated (p. 126) that, if one assumes that the Earth was covered by a 10-km-deep layer of "soup", and that random trials went on at the rate of one billion per second in every cubic micrometer (billionth of a cubic millimeter) of that ocean for one billion years (the maximum time that really elapsed before life appeared), only 1.5 x 10^62 separate tries could be made. (I have checked this calculation, and found it correct.) This number is so invisibly tiny compared to 10^150 (far tinier than a bacterium compared to the whole Solar System!) that the spontaneous natural formation of the ten mini-enzymes is thus demonstrated to be strictly impossible. This amounts to a proof that, even when making the most favorable assumptions conceivable, one is simply forbidden to take seriously the proposition that "Life on Earth must have arisen spontaneously, in some natural and unintentional way...

In fact, the whole Oparin'Haldane picture of a naturally-formed " primordial organic soup", though it was taken very seriously for some thirty years after the first promising looking Urey-Miller experiment of 1952, must now be called an "exploded" belief. Not only do the early rocks show no trace of its presence (it would necessarily have generated enormous quantities of rather stable organic "tars"). but it is now admitted by all that the prerequisite " Jovian" atmosphere (methane, ammonia, hydrogen) would in reality have been blown away by the Sun very early in Earth's formation. Our real primordial atmosphere consisted, like those of Venus and Mars, almost entirely of carbon dioxide. There is no way to produce any sort of "organic soup" from such an atmosphere.

Haldane's Dilemma

If the absence of intermediate fossils is the ‘trade secret,’ of paleontology, Haldane’s Dilemma is the trade secret of genetic theory. Originally posed in 1957, by the early 1970s everyone quickly realized how intractable the Dilemma was, and serious attempts to tackle the issue directly ended. The details are complex, Haldane’s original notes themselves contain errors, but the bottom line is fairly simple and I will summaries it for you. Basically Haldane pointed out the fairly obvious fundamental idea ( yet in precise mathematical language ) there is a ‘cost,’ to selection. Since most mutations are bad, if a species has too high a rate of mutation, so many offspring will be infertile, that the population / species will die. So a very clear limit is set upon the rate of evolutionary change and novelty. Evolution can only happen slowly. Which in itself is fine of course, that is what Darwin always said. However the problem Haldane hit upon, was that was that you would need an Earth at least twice as old as is currently claimed for any remote chance of natural selection evolution being possible. This is a problem.

There are a number of amazingly bizarre 'solutions,' currently on offer, which are revealing in demonstrating just how much trouble evolutionists are in over this issue.Matt Ridly has written one of the world’s most widely read and respected student textbooks on evolution, and is one of the few authors with the intellectual honesty to even openly confront the issue. Renamed Haldane's Cost of Selection in order to make it sound less threatening, in a disappointingly small section he basically argues that because random genetic drift is the main driving force in evolution, Haldane's Dilemma is no problem. There is no cost of substitution with genetic drift you see. However, that position is absolutely absurd. If what I have written is not quite clear enough for you, Ridly is arguing that thousands of times over the millennia, the right mutations have happened exactly as required with no form of selection to filter them. In the case of avians for example ( birds ) – mutations for wings, beaks, claws, etc, just ‘happened,’ by magic exactly as required, in sequence, at just the right moment. Well, obviously, that's a form of creationism, which Ridly completely contradicting himself, argues is unscientific in the introduction.

What is the Theory of Evolution Anyway?

I think this example from what is one of the world’s leading student textbooks on evolution, gives you an interesting insight into the confused nature of modern evolutionary theory. It also exposes the fact that despite what many people think, there is no such thing as the 'theory of evolution.' In fact evolutionists play the fairground shell game. You have 3 shells in front of you, a blue bead is under one, and to win the prize you have to guess correctly. However, if you do guess correctly, the stand owner refuses to lift the shell, moves them around, and just makes you guess again. That's exactly what evolutionists do. They argue in public that evolution is about slow natural selection over billions of years, when you point out the gaps in the fossil record you get the punctuated-equilibrium fast evolution in small groups message, if you mention Haldane's Dilemma, you often get insults / silence / claims its 'not relevant,' or like Ridly they just start talking complete non-sense, and hope you do not notice. Those who state the Dilemma is not relevant (there is no logical justification for this view, by the way) should keep in mind that Haldane made another obscure genetic cost calculation, and said no animal could have more than about 30,000 genes. Until recently evolutionists ridiculed this number and confidently told you humans had at least 100,000 genes - that was until the human genome was sequenced of course. These cost calculations are hard hitting, highly accurate, and need answers.

Two Distinct Types of Evolution; Microevolution and Macroevolution

There are a number of subtleties to the evolutionary debate that evolutionists try to exploit to their own advantage. For example, Neo-Darwinists maintain that there is only one fundamental mechanism behind evolution. Since we can put microevolution in the laboratory, test it, and observe it, they say evolution is a confirmed scientific fact. However, while no-one today seriously challenges the reality of microevolution / population genetics and the capacity for the phenotype (outward appearance) of organisms to change sometimes quite substantially through natural selection, skeptics such as myself, do not see that confirmation of microevolution proves a second type of evolution, named macroevolution, happens according to the same principals and fundamental mechanism. Extant systems can mutate and change, granted, but the question this pamphlet addresses is where these systems come from in the first place – to which evolutionists have no real answer. The panspermia.com faq, summarizes the current problem with the microevolution mechanisms that have been uncovered as the following:-

The theory that more organized forms of life on Earth evolved from less organized forms over about four billion years is well established. But new genes are necessary for this process. The theory that new genes arise by random mutation of old genes and natural selection is not established. The result of every known mutation is either neutral or deleterious, except when the disabling of a gene is advantageous. It is possible that ‘gene duplication’ followed by other mutations could have occasionally produced a closely related new gene with a function very similar to the original one. But a convincing account of even one wholly new gene with an unrelated specific new function, arising from mutations of an existing gene, or assembled from random strands of nucleotides, has not been given.

That is to say, no one has uncovered any evidence whatsoever that mutations can generate significant amounts of new information. New information, indeed new genes are essential for a simple cell to turn into a man, and no clear evidence is provided to show existing microevolution mechanisms are capable of doing this. Indeed, microevolution is in fact an information culling system, and over time the reduction of information within the collective gene pool can seriously undermine the long-term survival prospects of a species. If you want an analogy, every step down the path of microevolution can be seen as progressively painting yourself ever tighter into a corner.

This point, while devastating in itself aside, perhaps the clearest disproof of the microevolution equals macroevolution argument, is the truly enormous mass of real world empirical evidence that organisms can only be bred a limited distance from their original forms. When you push a species too far you start to get a variety of problems, breathing difficulties for the bulldog, poor temperament, increased fragility and genetic errors. In all cases further experimentation is finally ended with the onset of sterility. I feel it important to emphasize this is not idle speculation, but very well observed and replicated scientific fact. The most heavily experimented upon organism on the face of the planet is probably the fruit fly, and no one has ever got anything other than deformed fruit flies crawling out of their tubes. The point is, if microevolution really were the secret of life, you would not repeatedly run into such terrible breeding problems.

Moths / Finch Beaks / Bacteria etc

Various examples of microevolution, both observed and fossil are routinely palmed off as ‘proof,’ of evolution. The fact that there used to be more white moths than black moths is a comically weak ‘proof,’ of evolution. According to Darwinian creation legend, finches also grow longer beaks in time of famine - of course after the drought ended the beaks went straight back to the same original size. That is the part not many books tell you. Other examples of microevolution are not very convincing. Bacteria gaining immunity to drugs, for example. Okay, so some bacteria have a gene that enables them to resist antibiotics, the ones without it die, and the ones with it live. That is quite clearly (again) population genetics, not evolution.

Evolutions seem in general to have absolutely terrible problems differentiating between a system that shuffles an existing gene pool, and a system that creates new genes. They seem fixated on the idea the rearranging existing genes, properly called population genetics, amounts to ‘evolution.’ It should be called devolution. The idea that a simple cell can turn into a human being simply by rearranging or copying existing genes is comical, yet this is what they expect us to believe, and is widely considered to be a serious scientific proposal. Rather perversely, microevolution is actually a force for stasis and devolution, not change and macroevolution. It tends to actively select against change, rather than promote it. About the limit of what you will ever achieve with microevolution is a transition from, for example, dog to fox, or mouse to rat, that is about it. Microevolution gives us no insight whatsoever into how the major species transitions happen, which is the real crux of the evolutionary debate.

Evidence Commonly Miscited By Evolutionists

Since there are so many widely held misconceptions about evolution, I want to spend the last part of this pamphlet discussing some of claims made by evolutionists, and setting out why they are misleading, confused, sometimes dishonest, and oftentimes just plain wrong. The book Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells contains a detailed discussion of many such false claims, and details how to this day the vast majority of evolution textbooks are riddled with major errors, as evidence that was debunked up to a century ago is presented to students as ‘scientific fact.’ The sad reality is that none of the evidence cited to prove macroevolution in the last 150 years has stood the test of time. Every time evolutionists think they are on the verge of proving their theory, the prize slips through their fingers. The pattern starts to look rather predictable after a while.

Computer Simulations

Various computer simulations have been touted as proof of evolution. But when one creates a computer program, and runs it on created computer hardware, running off generated electricity, how does that disprove the need for creation? Those objections aside for one moment, none of these computer programs have ever generated new features within their own core code - all they do is basically run preprogrammed fractal equations. Besides, other aspects of evolutionary theory such as Haldane's Dilemma can also be modeled on computers. Why does no one want to talk about that? Again, panaspermia.com offers interesting insights:-

Chandra Wickramasinghe has compared the neo-Darwinian account of evolution to saying that all of world literature came from the book of Genesis by occasional typos and paragraph swapping. The mechanism is analogous to stipulating that every text along the way was viable as literature. Such gradualistic series have not been shown to be possible in written text or computer programs. Nor have they been shown to exist in biology. If this is how new genes are supposed to evolve, the mechanism remains to be demonstrated.

Horse Evolution

In 1879, an American fossil expert, O. C. Marsh, and famous evolutionist Thomas Huxley, collaborated for a public lecture that Huxley gave in New York. Marsh produced a schematic diagram that attempted to show the development of the front and back feet, legs, and teeth of the horse. He published his evolutionary diagram in the American Journal of Science in 1879, and it subsequently found its way into many other publications and textbooks. The scheme has not changed much. It shows a beautiful gradational sequence in ‘the evolution’ of the horse, unbroken by any abrupt changes. This is what generations of kids have seen in school textbooks and encyclopedias. However, as usual, we find a detailed examination of how this proof of evolution was derived proves rather interesting. For starters, fossil remains of modern horses have been found next to the earlier species they were alleged to have evolved from. And secondly there is no one site in the world where the evolutionary succession of the horse can be seen. Rather, the fossil fragments have been gathered from several continents on the assumption of evolutionary progress, and then used to support the assumption. That sort of approach to 'proof,' will get you fail marks every time on any reasonably advanced mathematical course, and is yet another example of the intellectually sloppy methods and flawed reasoning routinely used by evolutionists. And the fossil sequence is not quite as complete as the diagram suggests. One can also suggest that the genetic distance between the earliest horse and modern horses is not so great, since modern horses sometimes give birth to offspring with some of the alleged primitive feature such as 3 toes. i.e. its just microevolution / population genetics. And finally, let us assume for a moment the diagram is genuine. If it takes several generations for horses to show not much development apart from size, surely this sequence proves there is something very wrong indeed with the fossil record with all the huge gaping holes in it? Surely it proves we should have dozens or even hundreds of intermediates in the fossil record to mark the transition between species. Either way you chose to see it, genuine or fraud, horse evolution is not good news for evolutionists, and the idea it amounts to a proof of Darwin is quite simply absurd.

Vanishing 'Vestigial,' Organs

These strange organs used to prove evolution. In 1895 the seminal book The Structure of Man was published by Ernst Weidersheim listing 86 human organs with allegedly no function ( a recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica says there are 'more than 100,' vestigial organs.) However, S.R. Scadding has examined these claims. His conclusion was 'Weidersheim was largely in error in compiling his long list of vestigial organs. Most of them have at least a minor function at some point in life.' (Do vestigial organs provide evidence for evolution? In Evolutionary Theory, Vol 5, pp.173-6) As is pointed out even the supposedly useless appendix may have its uses, and what few vestigial organs remained may well only be 'vestigial,' because we have not figured out what they do yet. Basically, there are next to no redundant systems in any living creatures, and while evolutionists do try rather hard on this point, the fact of the matter is that the evidence for ‘bad design,’ is next to non-existent. What examples of bad design do exist, can in most cases be attributed to devolution / microevolution. That is to say the species is a micoevolutionarily devolved form of an earlier species, simply confirming the fact that the mechanism of microevolution is incapable of generating either new genes or new information.

Convergent Evolution / Homology

A bat's wing, a porpoise's flipper, a horse's leg, and a human hand all contain bones that are structurally similar. Before Darwin, biologists called this ‘homology,’ and considered it evidence for a common design, but Darwin attributed it to a common ancestor. Modern Darwinists have re-defined homology as similarity due to common ancestry, but now homology cannot serve as evidence for common ancestry without arguing in a circle. Many biology textbooks use circular reasoning anyway: We know that two features are homologous because they come from a common ancestor, and we know they come from a common ancestor because they are homologous. Again, this kind of flawed circular approach to ‘proof,’ will get you fail marks every time on a maths course. Most philosophy departments also run courses in logic that teach you how to construct a coherent argument. Perhaps evolutionists should take them.

Neanderthal Man

Human origins is a murky subject where personal opinions are routinely and aggressively presented as scientific ‘facts.’ Neanderthal man (discovered 1856) is widely considered to be our closest ancestor, at least by the general public, but despite the prevalence of Neanderthal skeletons, the transition from Neanderthal man to modern man is sudden and abrupt without any intermediate forms. Today not even the ‘experts,’ seriously entertain the idea that modern man descended from Neanderthal man. Homo Heidelbergensis ( also called Archaic Homo Sapiens and Homo antecessor )seems to be the best current guess for human origins. The thinking is both modern man and Neanderthal man evolved from this common ancestor, although what Heidelbergensis itself evolved from seems to be uncertain. It should be noted that these expert opinions seem to change from one decade to the next, as the ‘facts,’ keep changing (i.e. everyone used to know for a fact we evolved from Neanderthal man / Piltdown man / etc.) If you want my personal opinion on human evolution, the fossil fragments point to a biological field with an intelligent hominoid form in mind, trying to execute on its design properly and repeatedly not quite getting it right (it was an extremely tough engineering design brief, after all). I do not think there is a direct relationship as such between any of the hominoids, except that they are the product of the same field. The url for my alternative theory of evolution is provided at the bottom of this document in the ‘Further Reading,’ section.

Punctuated Equilibrium ( punk-eek )

This is Gould and Edlridges' attempt to get around the no intermediate fossils problem, since there is no doubt anymore that this is one huge problem that has to be addressed and explained by evolutionary theory. However I can not accept 'punk-eek,' is salvation for Neo-Darwinism, as even a few moments of casual thought reveals a number of very serious, deep, and fairly obvious problems with the theory, both in terms of abstract principals of logic, and a violent clash with real world empirical fact. For example:

Firstly, what Gould does is assume Darwinian selection, state the obvious that there is no fossil support for this idea, and on the basis of these assumptions, deduce punk-eek Darwinian selection. This approach to proof where the conclusion is part of the initial assumptions of the model is laughable.

Secondly, what proof does Gould cite to demonstrate evolution happens fast in small isolated groups? Answer: None. What he is actually doing is citing lack of evidence ( no fossils ), as evidence. Is citing absence of data, as data, a valid way to do real science? What scientific theory was ever proved on the basis of no evidence?

Thirdly, this theory claims (it’s implicit but not explicit in the theory) inbreeding is the major source of genetic variation. I do not think I even have to comment on this point.

Fourthly, the theory requires tiny groups of heavily inbred specialist species to triumph over vastly larger groups of animals again and again for hundreds of millions of years. In the real world, we find it is adaptable animals that win out in the battle for survival, not specialist ones. One needs look no further than Australia and the havoc generalized rabbits have caused to specialist indigenous marsupial species for proof of this point. Empirical facts are seen to contradict Gould.

Fifthly for several reasons you need a minimum population for a species to be viable. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewered sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it was all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these ‘peripheral,’ areas that Gould and Eldridge see as the salvation for Neo-Darwinism, it was all over. Again, empirical facts are seen to contradict Gould.

Sixthly, the cheetah provides an excellent real world example of what happens when species get penned into the isolated ‘peripheral’ areas Gould thinks are so wonderful and start inbreeding. An excellent article on this process can be found on this web site, http://www.cheetah.org/genetic.htm.

When geneticists looked at the amount of variation within the genes of the cheetah, they found that cheetahs exhibit much lower levels of variation than other mammals. In most species, related individuals share about 80 percent of the same genes. With cheetah, this figure rises to approximately 99 percent. The genetic inbreeding in cheetahs has led to low survivorship (a large number of animals dying), poor sperm quality, and greater susceptibility to disease. Inbred animals suffer from a lack of genetic diversity. This means cheetahs lack the ability to adjust to sudden changes in the environment, such as disease epidemics, and have unusually high susceptibility to certain viruses. For example, if a virus gets into a healthy population of leopards, not every animal dies; just some do, because leopards are genetically diverse. But if every animal is genetically the same, like the cheetah, and one gets infected, all of them may infected and die off. Because of their lack of genetic diversity, a deadly virus could wipe out all of the worlds' wild cheetahs instead of just the susceptible animals.

In other words, the cheetah provides present day proof that isolated populations engaged in inbreeding in ‘peripheral,’ areas which then re-conquer wide expanses of savannah, as is exactly what happened with the cheetah, are on a one way trip to oblivion. The evidence is so clear, that Gould really must be a complete and utter idiot not to see it. Basically, microevolution slowly devolves species over the millennia through mutation and natural selection, then kills off species in the blinking of a geological eye the moment they get penned into ‘peripheral,’ areas. Any break out from a 'peripheral,' area is doomed to failure because the resultant lack of genetic diversity caused by heavy inbreeding, makes each species sick, ill, and ultimately non-viable. Punk-eek speciation mangles DNA in a way that is ultimately fatal to a species. This is the real science behind punk-eek.

Finally, Haldane's Dilemma quite clearly shows evolution can in no way happen fast in small isolated groups if mutations occur only by undirected mechanistic processes. Gould says species spend 90% of their time in stasis, even assuming species spend 0% of their time in stasis and are in a constant state of rapid genetic change, no-one has come up with an answer. In other words, Haldane's Dilemma is an order of magnitudes worse for punk-eek than it is for gradualist Darwinian theory.

Basically, punk-eek is a detailed, well observed, eloquent, and insightful narrative of how microevolution and speciation can happen (or devolution as any sane knowledgeable person calls it). My summary would be right, but only in a limited sense, that offers no insights into the main evolutionary mechanism, whatever that might be. A subtle distinction. That conceded, anyone who takes punk-eek seriously as a macroevolution mechanism, can only be described a materialistic religious freak, prone to delusions, hallucination, and long and elaborate flights of emotionally induced fantasy. You know who you are.

The Selfish Gene

I do not think many people ever really believed this provocative idea, although Dawkins clearly fooled a vocal minority with his ramblings. Without going into the details, Dawkins is by trade an animal behaviorist, and simply using the accepted rules of game theory common to his specialty, the whole notion of the Selfish Gene has recently been comprehensively disproved. The wonder is that the disproof took so long to be pointed out. Basically Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam has pointed out for the Selfish Gene theory to be true, all alleles in the gene pool must be regularly randomly mixed with each other. In the real world for several reasons, this just does not happen. The Selfish Gene idea is a philosophical abstraction that can now be safely marked down as yet another materialist creation myth.

The Mentality of Evolution

There seems to be a cart before the horse attitude i.e. evolution has occurred, that's a fact ( it is never stated who proved this fact ), therefore we just need to twist the evidence until it fits our pre-conceptions. Of course, science is supposed to look at the evidence, and then derive the theory, but as Karl Popper admitted, the theory of evolution has never been a scientific theory due to its lack of testability; so normal scientific standards do not and have never applied to the theory of evolution. The following extract from Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial puts it quite nicely:-

It is likely that Darwinist gradualism is statistically just as unlikely as Goldschmidt's saltationism, once we give adequate attention to all the necessary elements. The advantageous micro mutations postulated by Neo-Darwinist genetics are tiny, usually too small to be noticed. This premise is important because, in the words of Richard Dawkins, ‘virtually all the mutations studied in genetics laboratories which are pretty macro because otherwise geneticists wouldn't notice them are deleterious to the animals possessing them.’ But if the necessary mutations are too small to be seen, there will have to be a great many of them (millions?) of the right type coming along when they are needed to carry on the long-term project of producing a complex organ. The probability of Darwinist evolution depends upon the quantity of favorable micro mutations required to create complex organs and organisms, the frequency with which such favorable micro mutations occur just where and when they are needed, the efficacy of natural selection in preserving the slight improvements with sufficient consistency to permit the benefits to accumulate, and the time allowed by the fossil record for all this to have happened. Unless we can make calculations taking all these factors into account, we have no way of knowing whether evolution by micromutation is more or less improbable than evolution by macromutation.
Some mathematicians did try to make the calculations, and the result was a rather acrimonious confrontation between themselves and some of the leading Darwinists at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia in 1967. The report of the exchange is fascinating, not just because of the substance of the mathematical challenge, but even more because of the logic of the Darwinist response. For example, the mathematician D. S. Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutations, because the number of mutations would have to be so large and the time available was not nearly long enough for them to appear. Sir Peter Medawar and C. H. Waddington responded that Ulam was doing his science backwards; the fact was that the eye had evolved and therefore the mathematical difficulties must be only apparent. Ernst Mayr observed that Ulam's calculations were based on assumptions that might be unfounded, and concluded that ‘Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by the fact that evolution has occurred.

Summary

There is no evidence to support Darwin’s notions of evolution. What Darwin discovered was population genetics, for which he deserves full credit. However, he provided no insights whatsoever into how the major species transitions happen, and many of the predictions he made such as the wide prevalence of intermediate fossil forms, have long since been comprehensively falsified. Furthermore, molecular classification reveals a similar picture of gaps, and confirms the narrative presented by the fossils. This is before we even mention such issues as irreducible complexity, Haldane’s Dilemma, and the terrible breeding problems associated with microevolution, which continually act to devolve genomes finally culminating in extinction once a species is penned into a ‘peripheral,’ area. The reality is, and this comes as a surprise to most laymen and scientists alike, all the main branches of evidence in the evolutionary debate consistently point towards abrupt appearance, and subsequent degeneration of species via the documented microevolution mechanism. Given the relative clarity of the empirical data in this respect, it is time notions of Darwinian selection were ejected from the last chance saloon they have languished in for so long now, and the materialists accepted that recourse to Newtonian scientific principals will never in itself be sufficient to account for the full wonder of life. This point should be obvious. No system bound by simple seventeenth century mechanistic Newtonian principals of physics and the laws of thermodynamics, is ever going to produce huge increases in information. Most likely in 100 years time people will wonder at the bizarre dogmatic quasi religious stupidity of present day Darwinian believers, and put them in the same category as the epicycle, phlogiston, and astrology fools of previous centuries.