Theory of Evolution: Questions and Doubt Remain – part 3
Part 3:
Scientists Doubt the Theory
Disagreements Indicate Lack of Evidence
Why Do Monkeys Still Exist?
The Origin of Life
It Could Not Happen By Chance
–continued from Part 2
Scientists Doubt the Theory
The most amusing part of the Scientific American article was their fourth point.
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4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution. No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. 7 |
Do you think they really believe that? If so, why did they publish an eight-page article defending evolution? They haven’t published proof of the round earth. That’s because scientists don’t take the flat earth theory seriously. But they did have to try to defend the theory of evolution because it is losing adherents, even among scientists.
Their words and actions don’t match. If evolution isn’t losing adherents, what is all the big fuss about? They know that the theory of evolution really is losing adherents at an unprecedented rate. The editors of Scientific American said as much in the first three sentences of the editorial they wrote to introduce the feature article.
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Preaching to the converted is unrewarding, so why should Scientific American publish an article about the errors of creationism [see page 78]? Surely this magazine’s readers don’t need to be convinced. Unfortunately, skepticism of evolution is more rampant than might be supposed. 8 |
Last month we told you that Eugenie C. Scott got this year’s Public Service Award from the National Science Board. In her acceptance speech she said the award “highlights the importance of scientists taking the anti-evolution movement seriously.â€
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Scientific American showed this graph on page 81. They didn’t refer to it specifically in their article because they |
apparently thought it spoke for itself.wonder what they think it said. Probably, they think it shows that highly educated people don’t believe in young-earth creationism.We think that it really shows that the longer evolutionists
are allowed to brainwash students, the more successful they will be.
But, even after at least 16 years of brainwashing,
40 percent of the people still won’t believe the lie they are being taught.
Almost 30 percent of the people with advanced degrees don’t believe in evolution.
If the theory of evolution were true, that number would be zero.
It isn’t zero because many well-educated people can see
the bankruptcy of the theory of evolution,
despite years of evolutionary indoctrination.
Don’t let them tell you that they aren’t scared!
They are either panicking, or in denial, or both.
Disagreements Indicate Lack of Evidence
Their next point was,
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5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution. Evolutionary biologists passionately debate diverse topics: how speciation happens, the rates of evolutionary change, the ancestral relationships of birds and dinosaurs, whether Neandertals were a species apart from modern humans, and much more. These disputes are like those found in all other branches of science. Acceptance of evolution as a factual occurrence and a guiding principle is nonetheless universal in biology. 9 |
These disputes are NOT like those found in all other branches of science. For example, there was briefly a dispute about cold fusion, but it was quickly resolved because the experiments could not be reproduced, and the “excess heat†that was allegedly measured could be accounted for by experimental error.
There aren’t even disputes like these in non-evolutionary biology. When was the last time you read a headline that said, “Biologists now say the liver, not the heart, actually pumps blood!†?
The reason why there are debates about evolutionary topics is because the things being discussed are matters of opinion, not scientific facts. Somebody finds a part of a jaw and thinks it came from a human ancestor. A second scientist (who usually has also discovered a part of a jaw, which he claims came from a human ancestor) says the first scientist is wrong. There is more ego involved than evidence. Objectivity is distorted by the desire (perhaps even the need) to have bragging rights.
If there really was some solid evidence that one kind of species has ever turned into another kind of species, biologists would agree on it, just as they agree on the function of internal organs.
Scientific American also says in this section,
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Yet creationists delight in dissecting out phrases from Gould’s voluminous prose to make him sound as though he had doubted evolution … 10 |
No, we don’t think Gould doubted evolution. We do, however, point out that facts he himself presented did not support the conclusions he drew. He knew that the fossil record contained no transitional forms, or other evidence for evolution. That’s why he came up with punctuated equilibrium. It was his rationalization of how evolution could be true, despite the fossil record as he knew it. Nobody would care if we said, “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.†But the fact that he said it 11 makes it worth quoting.
Scientific American goes on to say
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.. and they [creationists] present punctuated equilibrium as though it allows new species to materialize overnight or birds to be born from reptile eggs. 12 |
Actually, Scientific American is confusing Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monster theory†with Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium. The hopeful monster theory is like punctuated equilibrium on steroids. Although the two theories differ in the amount of evolution that can take place in a single generation, both eventually have to confront the problem that a reptilian parent had to have had a mammalian child at some point for either theory to be true. According to either theory, something without a backbone gave birth to something that did. These are facts that evolutionists don’t like to face.
Why Do Monkeys Still Exist?
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6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? This surprisingly common argument reflects several levels of ignorance about evolution. The first mistake is that evolution does not teach that humans descended from monkeys; it states that both have a common ancestor. 13 |
We have never heard a serious creationist make this argument. We invite you to search the back issues of our newsletter to verify for yourself that we have never used the argument. We don’t think you will find it on the Answers In Genesis, or Institute For Creation Research Site, either.
Ironically, children are often taught in public schools that people descended from monkeys. Students are likely to be confused by that and ask their teachers, “If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? â€. Again, the criticism should be leveled against the public school science curriculum, not creationists.
As Scientific American said, it is more accurate to say that the theory of evolution says that both humans and apes descended from a common UNKNOWN ancestor, the existence of which one must accept by faith.
The Origin of Life
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7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on earth. The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. [emphasis supplied] 14 |
Evolution certainly cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth. The origin of life does remain very much a mystery. There is no nonsense there! But biochemists have NOT learned how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry. In fact, they now know many more reasons why chemicals can’t spontaneously form something living than they did in the 1950’s. The more they study the origin of life, the more apparent it is that life could not have formed spontaneously.
The hate mail we get often includes statements to the effect that we don’t understand evolution because the theory of evolution says nothing about the origin of life. It is true that Darwinian evolution just attempts to explain how existing species change into other species, and says nothing about the origin of life. But, when we talk about evolution, we are talking about the theory of evolution as it is taught in the American public schools. American school children are taught that primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry.
Many evolutionists want desperately to separate the origin of life from the origin of species because they know that spontaneous generation of life is impossible. But they really can’t do that because the theory of evolution is supposed to explain how we got here without any supernatural activity creating life. They have to include the origin of life for it to explain how we got here.
The theory of evolution is quite literally, “dead on arrival.†It begins with lifeless chemicals on a lifeless planet. Somehow the theory of evolution needs to get those lifeless chemicals to combine to form something living, which can be transformed by mutation and natural selection. It can’t do it.
Ironically, in answer number 3 and answer number 7, Scientific American admitted that there isn’t a single documented case of inanimate chemicals coming to life, and that the origin of life is a mystery. We are quoting them not to make it appear that they doubt evolution, but to show that they believe in evolution in spite of evidence they are fully aware of.
It Could Not Happen By Chance
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8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance. Chance plays a part in evolution (for example, in the random mutations that can give rise to new traits), but evolution does not depend on chance to create organisms, proteins or other entities. Quite the opposite: natural selection, the principal known mechanism of evolution, harnesses nonrandom change by preserving “desirable” (adaptive) features and eliminating “undesirable” (nonadaptive) ones. As long as the forces of selection stay constant, natural selection can push evolution in one direction and produce sophisticated structures in surprisingly short times. 1 |
It would be a much more convincing argument if they could give any example whatsoever where natural selection has ever produced “sophisticated structures in surprising short times.†We would even settle for “sophisticated structures in rather long times.†But they didn’t give any examples because there aren’t any. Existing structures can, to a limited degree, change shapes. But new, sophisticated, structures (eyes, for example) cannot be produced by mutation and natural selection.
The best Scientific American can do is to offer a computer simulation.
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As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days. 2 |
First of all, the 13-letter sequence wasn’t produced randomly. Richard Hardison DESIGNED the program to produce that 13-letter sequence, and no other. He just intentionally wrote the program to be very inefficient by using a random letter generator. If Richard Hardison had randomly set bits in memory, and it produced an executable program that printed out “To be, or not to be?â€, it would have shown that, at least on one occasion, random processes can produce a functional program. Of course, it still isn’t analogous because someone had to design the computer, and the printer, and the cable that connects them.
An E in the fourth position of the string has no intrinsic “survival benefit†unless the rest of the string is pretty close to the target. In the same way, an optic nerve has no intrinsic survival benefit unless it is connected to a functioning eyeball and a brain that is programmed to do image processing. So, natural selection isn’t going to favor any part of an incomplete eye in the absence of the rest of the rest of the eye.
The reason why the computer simulation saved an E in the fourth position is because the program designer had the phrase, “To be, or not to be?†in mind when he wrote the program. The premise behind the theory of evolution prohibits a designer who has a goal in mind, causing natural selection to favor an optic nerve that isn’t connected on either end.
It seems like nearly every movie made in the twenty-first century includes some very convincing scenes that have been created by computer simulations–but the things depicted in those scenes didn’t really happen, no matter how convincing the simulation.
Hardison’s computer simulation does not represent anything that happened in the real world. It doesn’t even represent naturalistic evolution because it was designed, and is goal-oriented.
Continue Reading “No Nonsense”:
Conclusion
Topics covered in the Conclusion:
* Thermodynamics
* There are no Creative Mutations
* Limits to Natural Selection
* Speciation Rates
* Lack of Transitional Fossils
* Irreducible Complexity
* Recap
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
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