Evolution Defanged - Later Developments

Darwin supposed that different beak types had evolved to accommodate different diets: shorts beaks to pick small seeds off the ground, large beaks for crushing larger seeds, long, hooked beaks to penetrate cacti. But when famed naturalist William Beebe came to study the birds in the 1930’s, he dissected them and found the same kinds of food in every craw (mostly seeds and insects).

Also puzzling is why Darwin decided the Galapagos finches represented thirteen different species, since they are all capable of mating with each other, although they do so only when closer relatives are unavailable. This is especially interesting because the majority of these finch beaks look very similar; some of them even appear to have the same shape at a different size. When one considers finally that there are, oddly enough, thirteen major islands in the Galapagos, Darwin’s division of “his” finches into thirteen different species may seem something less than objective.

What would Darwin’s motivation be for this categorization? His working hypothesis was that the birds had become island-territorial after emigration, which is clearly not true, since at least four of them can be found on San Cristobal alone. How Darwin would have arrived scientifically at this conclusion also causes one to ponder, since he only visited four of the islands during his stay.[1] 

A tautology is a kind of circular logic that manipulates questions without ever really answering them. The following exchange is a good example:

“Do you like ice cream?”

“Not as much as I used to.”

“How much did you like it then?”

“More than I do now.”

The person responding uses this tautology to avoid giving a meaningful answer.

Today a similar situation has emerged among scientists studying natural selection, the area of Darwinian science that gave us the timeworn phrase, “survival of the fittest.” The problem scientists have is that no matter what kind of criteria they use to determine “fitness” with in an animal population, they have not had any success in predicting which animals will survive, and have been reduced to explaining events after the fact by declaring the ones that have survived to be the fittest. This, of course, leaves them holding a large, smelly tautology. The pattern is the same:

“What animals will survive?”

“The fittest, of course.”

“And which are the fittest?”

“The ones that survive.”

This evasive pattern, unfortunately, can pass a whole career’s worth of time, since the only alternative is to think the unthinkable and wonder if there might be one or two basic assumptions somewhere that need to be questioned.

Duane Schmidt calls primordial soup the University of Mud, because not only did it have to spontaneously pop a cell into existence, the cell had to be intelligent. The first cell to spring into existence possessed many complex mechanisms, including an internal clock that marked time in billionths of seconds and a data bank comprising 52 million volumes of information. It had the ability to absorb and digest food, repair itself, grow an “outboard motor” (or cilium) to facilitate movement, and most importantly, the ability to replicate itself. To strain credulity even more, the first cell had to know, before it replicated, how to work in concert with other cells.

If a cold, rationalistic evolutionist manages to muster enough faith to believe in this miracle, there are worse obstacles ahead. How do cells evolve? The simple, Darwinian answer is that cells mutate in many different directions, and the most “favorable” mutations are then preserved through natural selection. This idea is drastically wrong for a few related reasons.

First, the odds are incredibly, devastatingly bad that one wild animal who has developed a favorable mutation will be able to find another animal of the same species with the same favorable mutation, then ensure that their offspring are only allowed to mate with each other, so as not to lose their unique features. The mathematical odds of this happening in the wild are beyond hyperbole. The only way this happens is when some one sets up a highly artificial, carefully selected gene pool, as in dog breeding. To believe that this process came about naturally can only evoke one response: “Not in a hundred million years.”

The second problem with the natural selection of genes is that the scientists who came up with this theory had an outdated, oversimplified idea of the way genes work. They assumed that cells would contain genes to define each characteristic of the body, and that genes could be classified by the features they defined: hair color genes, foot size genes, etc. Since that time, however, microbiologists have discovered a characteristic of genes called pleiotropy. This word means simply that single genes have multiple effects. By way of example, not only might the gene that affects hair color also affect foot size and arm length, it actually takes several different genes working together just to determine hair color, which makes the relationships between different features even more intertwined and complex. Michael J. Denton gives insight into this confusing causality with some real-life examples of gene pleiotropy at work. “In the house mouse,” he relates, “nearly every coat-color gene has some effect on body size. Out of seventeen x-ray induced eye-color mutations in the fruit fly…fourteen affected the shape of the sex organs of the female, a characteristic one would have thought was quite unrelated to eye color. Almost every gene that has been studied in higher organisms has been found to affect more than one organ system…” This means that the already astronomical odds of favorable mutations finding each other is complicated further, because the same gene that helps a lion run faster may also cause his teeth to fall out sooner. And before we get too wrapped up in this “survival of the fittest” scenario, we might refer back to the section on tautology to remind ourselves that natural selection is really a useless concept.

Darwinists often tout antibiotic-resistant bacteria and adaptive viruses like AIDS as proof that evolution occurs daily, but Michael J. Behe disagrees. The truth is that cells which “become resistant” to different attackers are not adding information necessary for survival, but actually losing the ability to react to the attacks; in other words, every time it “adapts” it is actually losing information. While this is consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is not consistent with the Darwinian idea of evolutionary progress.

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