Activist or terrorist?

Back in the early 1990s I had no idea that Best would focus on animal rights, to the point where he is currently banned from entering the UK on grounds of being an "ecoterrorist". I originally came across him through the books on postmodernism he co-authored with Douglas Kellner. Even if Kellner hasn't-- and I as yet don't know-- joined the Critical Animal Studies movement, his past discussions of pedagogy have no doubt influenced the "ecopedagogy" of Richard V Kahn.

Who Owns You?

Who Owns You? - A Documentary - Trailer from Taylor Roesch on Vimeo.

Over the last 20 years, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has been issuing patents to universities and private companies on raw human genes. One company or university is given a legal monopoly over a molecule that is inside every human being and many other animals. This documentary explores the legal, ethical, and clinical ramifications of human gene patenting.

If you can, please donate to the film at our Kickstarter page:

kickstarter.com/projects/1305236092/your-genes-have-been-patented-a-feature-documentar


whoownsyoufilm.com



Taylor Roesch
taylorroesch.com

David Koepsell
davidkoepsell.com

Music by:
Carter Mahnke

I Stand Alone

Every once in a while you come across an incident in the media so bizarre it bores into your consciousness in such a way that you're forced to think about it more than you'd like to. The case I am referring to, for me at least, seems to reinforce the "new naturalism" in films such as Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone. While for some the interest probably amounts to little more than forensically second guessing the complexities of a mental illness, that is not what interests me. No, my regard for the film in question is bolstered by recollections of other rare, sensational incidents, in which armed, naked men act out their desperation in public, leading me to recall Aihwa Ong's insightful discussion in Neoliberalism As Exception:

"Following Weber, we have long assumed that the economic ethic--or a calculative and methodical attitude toward the acquisition of skills, competitive gain, and market activities--is a fundamental necessity for participation in the capitalist environment. But Weber did not live to observe the incredible dynamism of contemporary capitalism that can exclude some categories of calculative actors. Increasingly, their skills are unmarketable if they do not include neoliberal elements of manipulatability, and therefore they cannot be equally valued in fluid market conditions" (p174).

Taking this further, I find myself agreeing with Joel Whitebook in his Perversion and Utopia, which quotes Adorno to the effect that the dissolution of the principium individuationis seen in schizophrenia does not constitute a form of enlightenment or emancipation. To be sure, Adorno acknowledges that, "the identifying principle of the subject is itself the internalized principle of society", but he still maintains that any regression into madness merely marks a passage from domination by society to domination by nature. In other words, the relinquishment of the calculative rationality Ong describes cannot be automatically construed as an endorsement of Lacanian or Deleuzian cultural critique (p151), and I would equally resist the temptation to characterise I Stand Alone in such terms. I instead reserve an interpretation of film and the real life male amok runners alike in terms of the new naturalism. Without progressive, collective support, a body without manipulatability risks regression to the point where it can only mutilate inert flesh- as per the redundant butcher in Gaspar Noe's film, who is poised on the brink of implosion.

A number of years ago, the media reported how one of these naked guys entered a packed church, brandishing a samurai sword. Moreover, I'll never forget a friend telling me about someone he knew who was fishing at a quiet spot with some workmates, when they too were set upon by one of these amok runners. The details are very unpleasant, so I think I will stop now, and leave it to a viewing of I Stand Alone to do the talking for me. I don't see these individuals as exerting any more agency than the "mouthpiece" for the Construct Council in Perdido Street Station. Although much unforgettable, grotesque imagery, features in that book, it offers a more rounded portrait of human relations than I Stand Alone, which at least affords some relief.

Some problems with evolution and genetic perspectives (part 3)

Potassium-argon ‘dates’ of recent Mt. Ngauruhoe lava flows.

As you can see from the ‘dates’ in the above table the lava flows that were less than 55 years old were given dates from 267,000 years to 3.5 million plus or minus 20 thousand years.

What About Carbon Dating?

Carbon dating fares a little better but is still not very accurate. In 1984 Hansruedi Stutz found some sandstone with fossilized mussels in it and with fragments of coalified wood. The sandstone described as coming from Magenwil, Switzerland is said to be 20 million years old and thus the coalified wood found in the sandstone along side the mussels could be at the approximate same age. Mr. Stutz sent samples to the Physikalisches Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland. This is a very prestigious laboratory and could be counted on in processing the samples with utmost care to eliminate any contamination. Given the ‘assumed’ date of the sandstone the 14C reading in the wood, assuming it was the same age, should read as an infinite age as all perceptible 14C would have been converted to 12C in around 100,000 years.

Instead the laboratory gave the date of 36,440 years +/- 330 years. That all the 14C is not gone shows that the sandstone is probably not near the date ‘assumed’ either.

Are Decay Rates Constant?

The decay rate is limited by the light constant c and if c has changed over the years as Barry Setterfield (in physics section above) says then past decay rate could have been much substantially faster.

But some recent experiments in beta decay of ionized atoms have been accelerated up to a billion fold. During experimentation 163Dy, a stable nuclide under normal earth conditions would found to decay to 163Ho in 47 days when the conditions were bare nucleus of the completely ionized state. That is 1400 times the normal half life in the 163Dy - 163Ho decay rate. In the rhenium – osmium dating system, which is an isotopic clock used by evolutionists, the 187Re decays to 187Os with a half life of only 33 years. The experiment involved the fully ionized 187Re in a storage ring which were found to decay at a rate of almost a billion times faster than normal decay. The normal 187Re – 187Ho half life is 42 billion years.

Bosch, F. et al., Observation of bound-state b– decay of fully ionized 187Re, Physical Review Letters 77(26)5190–5193, 1996. For further discussion of this experiment, see: Kienle, P., Beta-decay experiments and astrophysical implications, in: Prantzos, N. and Harissopulus, S., Proceedings, Nuclei in the Cosmos, pp. 181–186, 1999.

We will now leave radiometric dating. I could put much more, but I believe I have shown the problems in the dating game played by the evolutionists and their circular way of thinking.

Reason Number 9

Evolutionists are not Evolution's Friend (Or with a theory this broken, why don't they get a new one?)

Neo-Darwinism

Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders

Much of the problem is that neo-Darwinism appears completely invincible to falsification by observations or by experiments, so much so that many doubt if it is a scientific theory at all. Partly, the stochastic nature of evolutionary changes must demand that there should be an unique explanation for each event, so that any difficulty raised by observations could be explained or explained away with ease, and partly, the practitioners of neo-Darwinism exhibit a great power of assimilation, incorporating any opposing viewpoint as yet another “mechanism” in the grand “synthesis”. But a real synthesis should begin by identifying conflicting elements in the theory, rather than in accommodating contradictions as quickly as they arise. “Beyond neo- Darwinism - An Epigenetic Approach to Evolution” Journal of Theoretical Biology Vol. 78, 1979 p.574

It is now approximately half a century since the neo-Darwinian synthesis was formulated. A great deal of research has been carried on within the paradigm it defines. Yet the successes of the theory are limited to the interpretation of the minutiae of evolution, such as the adaptive change in coloration of moths; while it has remarkably little to say on the questions which interest us most, such as how there came to be moths in the first place. Beyond Neo-Darwinism: An Introduction to the New Evolutionary Paradigm (1984) p.ix

George Gaylord Simpson (1902 – 84) Alexander Agassiz Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at Harvard

A telescope, a telephone, or a typewriter is a complex mechanism serving a particular function. Obviously, its manufacturer had a purpose in mind, and the machine was designed and built in order to serve that purpose. An eye, an ear, or a hand is also a complex mechanism serving a particular function. It, too, looks as if it had been made for a purpose. This appearance of purposefulness is pervading in nature, in the general structure of animals and plants, in the mechanisms of their various organs, and in the give and take of their relationships with each other. Accounting for this apparent purposefulness is a basic problem for any system of philosophy or of science. ''The problem of plan and purpose in Nature" Scientific Monthly June 1947 p. 481

The origin of life was necessarily the beginning of organic evolution and it is among the greatest of all evolutionary problems. The Meaning of Evolution (1949) p.14

Francis Crick (1916–2004) Co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Nobel laureate 1962, Professor at the Salk Institute

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. What Mad Pursuit (1988) pp.138-139

An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. Life Itself (1981) p.88

Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts. Life Itself (1981) p.153

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University

The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative; by definition, nobody was around to see what happened. The Selfish Gene (1989) p.14

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that). “Put Your Money on Evolution” The New York Times (April 9, 1989) section VII p.35

Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation. River out of Eden (1995) p.83

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. The Blind Watchmaker

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.316

As an academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution, certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. The Devil's Chaplain (2003) p.10

It is forever true that DNA is a double helix, true that if you are a chimpanzee (or an octopus or a kangaroo) trace your ancestors back far enough you will eventually hit a shared ancestor. To a pedant, these are still hypotheses which might be falsified tomorrow. But they never will be. The Devil's Chaplain (2003) pp.17-18

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.

Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant. So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. NewScientist September 17 2005 p.33

I should have been talking about the combined probability of life's originating on a planet and leading, eventually, to the evolution of intelligent beings capable of anthropic reflection. It could be that the chemical origin of a self-replicating molecule (the necessary trigger for the origin of natural selection) was a relatively probable event but later steps in the evolution of intelligent life were highly improbable. Intelligent Thought (2006) p. 95-6

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard University

I can understand such an attitude directed toward photographs of objects -- through opportunities for subtle manipulation are legion even here. But many of our pictures are incarnations of concepts masquerading as neutral descriptions of nature. These are the most potent sources of conformity, since ideas passing as descriptions lead us to equate the tentative with the unambiguously factual. Suggestions for the organization of thought are transformed to established patterns in nature. Guesses and hunches become things. Wonderful Life (1991) p.28

These shortest-term studies are elegant and important, but they cannot represent the general mode for building patterns in the history of life. The reason strikes most people as deeply paradoxical, even funny-but the argument truly cannot be gainsaid. Evolutionary rates of a moment, as measured for guppies and lizards, are vastly too rapid to represent the general modes of change that build life’s history through geological ages. ... These measured changes over years and decades are too fast by several orders of magnitude to build the history of life by simple cumulation. Reznick’s guppy rates range from 3,700 to 45,000 darwins (a standard metric for evolution, expressed as change in units of standard deviation-a measure of variation around the mean value of a trait in a population-per million years). By contrast, rates for major trends in the fossil record generally range from 0.1 to 1.0 darwins. Reznick himself states that “the estimated rates [for guppies] are...four to seven orders of magnitude greater than those observed in the fossil record” (that is, ten thousand to ten million times faster!). “The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant”

Pierre Grasse (1895 - 1985) Editor of the 28-volume "Traite de Zoologie" Chair of Evolution at Sorbonne University

Any living thing possesses an enormous amount of 'intelligence'... Today, this 'intelligence' is called 'information,' but it is still the same thing... This 'intelligence' is the sine qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers, and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.2

Zoologists and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents provided by paleontology, i.e., the history of the living world. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.3

Through use and abuse of hidden postulates, of bold, often ill-founded extrapolations, a pseudoscience has been created. It is taking root in the very heart of biology and is leading astray many biochemists and biologists, who sincerely believe that the accuracy of fundamental concepts has been demonstrated, which is not the case. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.6

Today, our duty is to destroy the myth of evolution, considered as a simple, understood, and explained phenomenon which keeps rapidly unfolding before us. Biologists must be encouraged to think about the weaknesses of the interpretations and extrapolations that theoreticians put forward or lay down as established truths. The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.8

It follows that any explanation of the mechanism in creative evolution of the fundamental structural plans is heavily burdened with hypotheses. This should appear as an epigraph to every book on evolution. The lack of direct evidence leads to the formation of pure conjectures as to the genesis of the phyla; we do not even have a basis to determine the extent to which these opinions are correct. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.31

What is the use of their unceasing mutations, if they do not change? In sum, the mutations of bacteria and viruses are merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.87

Bacteria, the study of which has formed a great part of the foundation of genetics and molecular biology, are the organisms which, because of their huge numbers, produce the most mutants. This is why they gave rise to an infinite variety of species, called strains, which can be revealed by breeding or tests. Like Erophila verna, bacteria, despite their great production of intraspecific varieties, exhibit a great fidelity to their species. The bacillus Escherichia coli, whose mutants have been studied very carefully, is the best example. The reader will agree that it is surprising, to say the least, to want to prove evolution and to discover its mechanisms and then to choose as a material for this study a being which practically stabilized a billion years ago! Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.87

Some contemporary biologists, as soon as they observe a mutation, talk about evolution. They are implicitly supporting the following syllogism: mutations are the only evolutionary variations, all living beings undergo mutations, therefore all living beings evolve. This logical scheme is, however, unacceptable: first, because its major premise is neither obvious nor general; second, because its conclusion does not agree with the facts. No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.88

Once one has noticed microvariations (on the one hand) and specific stability (on the other), it seems very difficult to conclude that the former (microvariation) comes into play in the evolutionary process. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.88

Although everything is not as it should be, the living world is not at all chaotic and life results from a very well-defined order. As soon as some disorder, even slight, appears in an organized being, sickness, then death follow. There is no possible compromise between the phenomenon of life and anarchy. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.98

The opportune appearance of mutations permitting animals and plants to meet their needs seems hard to believe. Yet the Darwinian theory is even more demanding: a single plant, a single animal would require thousands and thousands of lucky, appropriate events. Thus, miracles would become the rule: events with an infinitesimal probability could not fail to occur. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.103

There is no law against day dreaming, but science must not indulge in it. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.104

The genic differences noted between separate populations of the same species that are so often presented as evidence of ongoing evolution are, above all, a case of the adjustment of a population to its habitat and of the effects of genetic drift. The fruitfly (drosophila melanogaster), the favorite pet insect of the geneticists, whose geographical, biotropical, urban, and rural genotypes are now known inside out, seems not to have changed since the remotest times. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.130

Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University

If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just about where these levels are actually found to be... A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

To press the matter further, if there were a basic principle of matter which somehow drove organic systems toward life, its existence should easily be demonstrable in the laboratory. One could, for instance, take a swimming bath to represent the primordial soup. Fill it with any chemicals of a non- biological nature you please. Pump any gases over it, or through it, you please, and shine any kind of radiation on it that takes your fancy. Let the experiment proceed for a year and see how many of those 2,000 enzymes have appeared in the bath. I will give the answer, and so save the time and trouble and expense of actually doing the experiment. You would find nothing at all, except possibly for a tarry sludge composed of amino acids and other simple organic chemicals. How can I be so confident of this statement? Well, if it were otherwise, the experiment would long since have been done and would be well known and famous throughout the world. The cost of it would be trivial compared to the cost of landing a man on the Moon... In short there is not a shred of objective evidence to support the hypothesis that life began in an organic soup here on Earth. The Intelligent Universe (1983) pp.20-21, 23

At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube faces at random. Now imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. "The Big Bang in Astronomy" New Scientist November 19, 1981 pp.521-527

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that 'a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein'. "Hoyle on Evolution" Nature November 12, 1981 p.105

Robert Jastrow (b. 1925) PhD Theoretical Physics recipient of NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement (Agnostic)

At present, science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on the earth. Perhaps the appearance of life on the earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited; either life was created on the earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the planet. The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief. Until the Sun Dies (1977) pp. 62-63

The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy ... For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. God and the Astronomers (1992) pp.106-107

Roger Lewin PhD Biochemistry News Editor of Science Magazine

The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear No. Science November 21 1980 p. 883

The key issue is the ability correctly to infer a genetic relationship between two species on the basis of a similarity in appearance, at gross and detailed levels of anatomy. Sometimes this approach...can be deceptive, partly because similarity does not necessarily imply an identical genetic heritage: a shark (which is a fish) and a porpoise (which is a mammal) look similar. Bones of Contention (1987) p.123

Richard Lewontin (b. 1929) PhD Zoology Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection in particular is hopelessly metaphysical, according to the rules of etiquette laid down in the Logic of Scientific Inquiry and widely believed in by practicing scientists who bother to think about the problem. The first rule for any scientific hypothesis ought to be that it is at least possible to conceive of an observation that would contradict the theory. For what good is a theory that is guaranteed by its internal logical structure to agree with all conceivable observations, irrespective of the real structure of the world? If scientists are going to use logically unbeatable theories about the world, they might as well give up natural science and take up religion. Yet is that not exactly the situation with regard to Darwinism? The theory of evolution by natural selection states that changes in the inherited characters of species occur, giving rise to differentiation in space and time, because different genetical types leave different numbers of offspring in different environments... Such a theory can never be falsified, for it asserts that some environmental difference created the conditions for natural selection of a new character. It is existentially quantified so that the failure to find the environmental factor proves nothing, except that one has not looked hard enough. Can one really imagine observations about nature that would disprove natural selection as a cause of the difference in bill size? The theory of natural selection is then revealed as metaphysical rather than scientific. Natural selection explains nothing because it explains everything. “Testing the Theory of Natural Selection” Nature March 24, 1972 p.181

It is the great irony of modern evolutionary genetics that the spirit of explanation has moved more and more towards optimal adaptation, while the technical developments of population genetics of the past 30 years have been increasingly to show the efficacy of non adaptive forces in evolution. "A natural selection" Nature May 11,1989 p.107

As to assertions without adequate evidence, the literature of science is filled with them, especially the literature of popular science writing. Carl Sagan's list of the "best contemporary science-popularizers" includes E.O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas, and Richard Dawkins, each of whom has put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market. "Billions and Billions of Demons"

It is said that there is no place for an argument from authority from science. The community of science is constantly self-critical ... It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. ... But when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe that quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution. "Billions and Billions of Demons"

Ernst Mayr (1904 – 2005) Professor of Zoology at Harvard University

The basic framework of the theory is that evolution is a two-stage phenomenon the production of variation and the sorting of the variants by natural selection. Yet agreement on this basic thesis does not mean that the work of the evolutionist is completed. The basic theory is in many instances hardly more than a postulate and its application raises numerous questions in almost every concrete case. Populations, Species and Evolution (1970) p. 6

The occurrence of genetic monstrosities by mutation, for instance the homeotic mutant in Drosophila, is well substantiated, but they are such evident freaks that these monsters can be designated only as 'hopeless.' They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination through stabilizing selection. Giving a thrush the wings of a falcon does not make it a better flier. Indeed, having all the other equipment of a thrush, it would probably hardly be able to fly at all. It is a general rule, of which every geneticist and breeder can give numerous examples, that the more drastically a mutation affects the phenotype, the more likely it is to reduce fitness. To believe that such a drastic mutation would produce a viable new type, capable of occupying a new adaptive zone, is equivalent to believing in miracles.

The finding of a suitable mate for the 'hopeless monster' and the establishment of reproductive isolation from the normal members of the parental population seem to me insurmountable difficulties. Populations, Species, and Evolution (1970) p.253

Colin Patterson (1933 – 1998) Senior Palaeontologist at British Museum of Natural History

Just as pre-Darwinian biology was carried out by people whose faith was in the Creator and His plan, post-Darwinian biology is being carried out by people whose faith is in, almost, the deity of Darwin. They've seen their task as to elaborate his theory and to fill the gaps in it, to fill the trunk and twigs of the tree. But it seems to me that the theoretical framework has very little impact on the actual progress of the work in biological research. In a way some aspects of Darwinism and of neo-Darwinism seem to me to have held back the progress of science. The Listener October 8, 1981 p.392

So what about the tree here and the numbers on the branches? As Steve said, it is produced by a program. Those numbers don't pop out of the data in any way, so I suppose those come from massaging the data with evolutionary theory. It is a program that assumes evolution to be true and tells the computer to find a tree. So my question will be: What is the tree telling us about? Is it telling us something about nature or something about evolutionary theory? "Evolutionism and Creationism" November 5, 1981 p.10

One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let's call it a non- evolutionary view, was last year I had a sudden realization for over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, 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, that is true? 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, "I do know one thing - it ought not to be taught in high school." "Evolutionism and Creationism" November 5, 1981 p.1 1 2 3

Michael Ruse (b. 1940) Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series in the Philosophy of Biology

But we did talk much more about the whole question of metaphysics, the whole question of philosophical bases. And what Johnson was arguing was that, at a certain level, the kind of position of a person like myself, an evolutionist, is metaphysically based at some level, just as much as the kind of position of let us say somebody, some creationist, someone like Gish or somebody like that. Speech at 'The New Antievolutionism' symposium February 13,1993

I think that we should recognize, both historically and perhaps philosophically, certainly that the science side has certain metaphysical assumptions built into doing science, which -- it may not be a good thing to admit in a court of law -- but I think that in honesty that we should recognize, and that we should be thinking about some of these sorts of things. Speech at 'The New Antievolutionism' symposium February 13,1993

It's certainly been the case that evolution has functioned, if not as a religion as such, certainly with elements akin to a secular religion. Those of us who teach philosophy of religion always say there's no way of defining religion by a neat, necessary and sufficient condition. The best that you can do is list a number of characteristics, some of which all religions have, and none of which any religion, whatever or however you sort of put it. And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion. Speech at 'The New Antievolutionism' symposium February 13,1993

Certainly, though, as I say, for Thomas Henry Huxley, I don't think there's any question but that evolution functioned, at a level, as a kind of secular religion...If you look both at his printed stuff, and if you go down to Rice University which has got all his private papers, again and again in the letters, it comes through very strongly that for Julian Huxley evolution was functioning as a kind of secular religion...I think that today also, for more than one eminent evolutionist, evolution in a way functions as a kind of secular religion...Certainly, if you look for instance in On Human Nature, Wilson is quite categorical about wanting to see evolution as the new myth, and all sorts of language like this. That for him, at some level, it's functioning as a kind of metaphysical system. Speech at 'The New Antievolutionism' symposium February 13,1993

W.R. Thompson (1887 - ?) Entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada

Darwin considered that the doctrine of origin of living forms by descent with modification, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory unless the causes at work were correctly identified, so his theory of modification by natural selection was, for him, of absolutely major importance. Since he had at the time the Origin was published no body of experimental evidence to support his theory, he fell back on speculative arguments. The argumentation used by evolutionists. Said de Quatrefages, makes the discussion of their ideas extremely difficult. Personal convictions, simple possibilities, are presented as if they were proofs, or at least valid arguments in favour of the theory. As an example de Quatrefages cited Darwin’s explanation of the manner in which the titmouse might become transformed into the nutcracker, by the accumulation of small changes in structure and instinct owing to the effect of natural selection; and then proceeded to show that it is just as easy to transform the nutcracker in to the titmouse. The demonstration can be modified without difficulty to fit any conceivable case. It is without scientific value, since it cannot be verified; but since the imagination has free rein, it is easy to convey the impression that a concrete example of real transmutation has been given. This is the more appealing because of the extreme fundamental simplicity of the Darwinian explanation. The reader may be completely ignorant of the biological processes yet he feels that he really understands and in a sense dominates the machinery by which the marvelous variety of living forms has been produced. Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition (1956) p. xi

As we know, there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists, not only about the causes of evolution but even about the actual process. This divergence exists because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusion. It is therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non-scientific public to the disagreements about evolution. But some recent remarks of evolutionists show that they think this unreasonable. This situation, where scientific men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigour, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and undesirable in science. Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition (1956) p.xxii

George Wald (1906 - 1997) Professor of Biology at Harvard University Nobel Laureate

The reasonable view was to believe in spontaneous generation; the only alternative, to believe in a single, primary act of supernatural creation. There is no third position. For this reason many scientists a century ago chose to regard the belief in spontaneous generation as a "philosophical necessity." It is a symptom of the philosophical poverty of our time that this necessity is no longer appreciated. Most modern biologists, having reviewed with satisfaction the downfall of the spontaneous generation hypothesis, yet unwilling to accept the alternative belief in special creation, are left with nothing. "The origin of life" Scientific American August 1954 p.46

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation. "The origin of life" Scientific American August 1954 p.46

Paleontology

George Gaylord Simpson (1902 – 84) Alexander Agassiz Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at Harvard

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. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants. Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) p. 107

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University

In the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years (evolutionists are now dating the beginning of the Cambrian at about 530 million years), are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. The Blind Watchmaker (1996) p.229

Niles Eldredge (b. 1943) Chief Curator at The American Museum Of Natural History

Darwin's prediction of rampant, albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in the fossil record. The Myths of Human Evolution (1982) p.45-46

There seems to have been almost no change in any part we can compare between the living organism and its fossilized progenitors of the remote geological past. Living fossils embody the theme of evolutionary stability to an extreme degree...We have not completely solved the riddle of living fossils. Fossils (1991) p.101, 108

As a paleontologist, I readily concede that my long dead fossils, lacking any traces of their soft anatomies or behaviors, are totally mute on the subject of reproduction and transmission of genetic information. And this is, I acknowledge, a major limitation to our data. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.2

Simple extrapolation does not work. I found that out back in the 1960s as I tried in vain to document examples of the kind of slow, steady directional change we all thought ought to be there, ever since Darwin told us that natural selection should leave precisely such a telltale signal as we collect our fossils up cliff faces. I found instead, that once species appear in the fossil record, they tend not to change much at all . Species remain imperturbably, implacably resistant to chance as a matter of course. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.3

Stasis is now abundantly well documented as the preeminent paleontological pattern in the evolutionary history of species. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.77

No wonder paleontologists shied away form evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting of cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change -- over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for all the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. When we do see the introduction of evolutionary novelty, it usually shows up with a bang and often with no firm evidence that the organisms did not evolve elsewhere! Evolution cannot forever be going on someplace else. Yet that's how the fossil record has struck many a forlorn paleontologist looking to learn something about evolution. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.95

But we saw -- as did several paleontological contemporaries of Darwin -- that if you do collect a series of fossils up through a sequence of sedimentary rock, and if you don't see much evidence of anatomical change through that series, that is indeed evidence that substantial gradual evolutionary change has not occurred within that species lineage, no matter how gappy the record may be. That's why the evidence for stasis now appears so overwhelming. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.96

The persistent pattern of nonchange within samples, coupled with the abrupt appearance of new species -- organisms marked with anatomical innovations -- had to be telling us something about the way the evolutionary process works. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.97

I needed to explain why evolution leaves and entirely different sort of pattern in the rock record than Darwin -- and his long string of successors, including many paleontologists -- had supposed. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.97

Scientists, being as a rule more or less human beings, passionately stick up for their ideas, their pet theories. It's up to someone else to show you are wrong. Reinventing Darwin (1995) p.221

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) Professor of Zoology and Geology at Harvard University

In fact, the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to record catastrophes: rocks are fractured and contorted; whole faunas are wiped out (see my column of October, 1974). To circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he argued, is extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can reasonably infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hardnosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological apologists. Natural History February 1975 pp.16-17

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed'. “Evolution’s Erratic Pace” Natural History May 1977 p.14

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. “Evolution’s erratic pace” Natural History May 1977 p.14

All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record--if only one step in a thousand survives as a fossil, geology will not record continuous change. Although I reject this argument (for reasons discussed in "The Episodic Nature of Evolutionary Change"), let us grant the traditional escape and ask a different question. Even though we have no direct evidence for smooth transitions, can we invent a reasonable sequence of intermediate forms--that is, viable, functioning organisms--between ancestors and descendants in major structural transitions? Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing? The concept of preadaptation provides the conventional answer by permitting us to argue that incipient stages performed different functions. The half jaw worked perfectly well as a series of gill-supporting bones; the half wing may have trapped prey or controlled body temperature. I regard preadaptation as an important, even an indispensable, concept. But a plausible story is not necessarily true. I do not doubt that preadaptation can save gradualism in some cases, but does it permit us to invent a tale of continuity in most or all cases? I submit, although it may only reflect my lack of imagination, that the answer is no. "The Return of Hopeful Monsters" Natural History June 1977 p.24

Gradualism, the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It was primarily a prejudice of nineteenth-century liberalism facing a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history. Natural History February 1978 p.24

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution. “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?” Paleobiology January 1980 p.127

Sediments between 4 and 10 million years in age are potential guardians of the Holy Grail of human evolution--the period when our lineage began its separate end run to later domination, and a time for which no fossil evidence exists at all. "Empire of the Apes" Natural History May 1987 p.24

Darwin invoked his standard argument to resolve this uncomfortable problem: the fossil record is so imperfect that we do not have evidence for most events of life's history. But even Darwin acknowledged that his favorite ploy was wearing a bit thin in this case. His argument could easily account for a missing stage in a single linage, but could the agencies of imperfection really obliterate absolutely all evidence for positively every creature during most of life's history? Darwin admitted: "The case as present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained." (1859, p.308) Knowledge Science and Relativism (1999) p.187

Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian record, all discovered in the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar character of this evidence has not matched Darwin's prediction of a continuous rise in complexity toward Cambrian life, and the problem of the Cambrian explosion has remained as stubborn as ever -- if not more so, since our confusion now rests on knowledge, rather than ignorance about the nature of Precambrian life. Wonderful Life (1991) p.57

The opposite truth has been affirmed by innumerable cases of measurable evolution at this minimal scale-but, to be visible at all over so short a span, evolution must be far too rapid (and transient) to serve as the basis for major transformations in geological time. Hence, the “paradox of the visibly irrelevant”-or, if you can see it at all, it’s too fast to matter in the long run. “The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant” Natural History December 1997 p.15

Moreover, and with complete generality-the “paradox of the visibly irrelevant” in my title we may say that any change measurable at all over the few years of an ordinary scientific study must be occurring far too rapidly to represent ordinary rates of evolution in the fossil record. The culprit of this paradox, as so often, is the vastness of time (a concept that we can appreciate “in our heads” but seem quite unable to get into the guts of our intuition). The key principle, however ironic, requires such a visceral understanding of earthly time: if evolution is fast enough to be discerned by our instruments in just a few years- that is, substantial enough to stand out as a genuine and directional effect above the random fluctuations of nature’s stable variation and our inevitable errors of measurement-then such evolution is far too fast to serve as an atom of steady incrementation in a paleontological trend. Thus, if we can measure it at all (in a few years), it is too powerful to be the stuff of life’s history. If large-scale evolution proceeded by stacking Trinidad guppy rates end to end, any evolutionary trend would be completed in a geological moment, not over the many million years actually observed. “Our face from fish to man,” to cite the title of a famous old account of evolution for popular audiences, would run its course within a single geological formation, not over more than 400 million years, as our fossil record demonstrates. “The Paradox of the Visibly Irrelevant” Natural History December 1997

Anatomy may fluctuate over time, but the last remnants of a species usually look pretty much like the first representatives. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002) p.749

Pierre Grasse (1895 - 1985) Editor of the 28-volume "Traite de Zoologie" Chair of Evolution at Sorbonne University

Zoologists and botanists are nearly unanimous in considering evolution as a fact and not a hypothesis. I agree with this position and base it primarily on documents provided by paleontology, i.e., the history of the living world. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.3

Naturalists 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 hypotheses. That is why we constantly have recourse to paleontology, the only true science of evolution. From it we learn how to interpret present occurrences cautiously; it reveals that certain hypotheses considered certainties by their authors are in fact questionable or even illegitimate. Evolution of Living Organisms (1977) p.4

Richard Leakey (b. 1944) High School Drop-Out

Isolated teeth, single bones, fragments of skulls: for the most part, these are the clues from which the story of human prehistory must be reconstructed. The Origin of Humankind (1994) p. ix

The task of inferring an evolutionary link based on extremely fragmentary evidence is more difficult than most people realize, and there are many traps for the unwary. Simons and Pilbeam had been ensnared in one of these traps: anatomical similarity does not unequivocally imply evolutionary relatedness. The Origin of Humankind (1994) p. 8

Ernst Mayr (1904 – 2005) Professor of Zoology at Harvard University

Anything truly novel always seemed to appear quite abruptly in the fossil record. Toward a New Philosophy of Biology (1988) pp.529-530

Colin Patterson (1933 – 1998) Senior Palaeontologist at British Museum of Natural History

These gaps might be due to failure in fossilization, or to mistakes in the genealogy, or to wrongly identified fossils; or they could be (and have been) taken to show that the theory of evolution is wrong. Evolution (1978) p.133

Darwin devoted two chapters of The Origin of Species to fossils, but spent the whole of the first in saying how imperfect the geological record of life is. It seemed obvious to him that, if his theory of evolution is correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it, because each stratum should contain links between the species of earlier and later strata, and if sufficient fossils were collected, it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor descendent sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not so in Darwin's time, and today, after more than another hundred years of assiduous fossil collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps. Evolution (1999) p.106

But there are still great gaps in the fossil record. Most of the major groups of animals (phyla) appear fully fledged in the early Cambrian rocks, and we know of no fossil forms linking them. Evolution (1999) p.109

Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else. Evolution (1999) p.109

W.R. Thompson (1887 - ?) Entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada

Evolution, if it has occurred, can in a rather loose sense be called a historical process; and therefore to show that it has occurred historical evidence is required. History in the strict sense is dependent on human testimony. Since this is not available with respect to the development of the world of life we must be satisfied with something less satisfactory. The only evidence available is that provided by the fossils. It has been pointed out by both supporters and opponents of the evolutionary doctrine, that even if we can demonstrate the chronological succession of certain organisms, this is not proof of descent. This may seem like a quibble. If we put a pair of house-flies in a cage and let them breed, we do not doubt that the live flies we find there in a month’s time are the descendants of the original pair. Similarly, if in an apparently undisturbed geological formation we find snail shells at an upper level very similar to those at a lower level, we may reasonably conclude that there is some genealogical connection between the two groups, though we cannot trace the descent from individual to individual as is required in a true family tree. Therefore we found in the geological strata a series of fossils showing gradual transition from simple to complex forms, and could be sure that they correspond to a true time-sequence, then we should be inclined to feel that Darwinian evolution has occurred, even though its mechanism remained unknown. This is certainly what Darwin would have like to report but of course he was unable to do so. What the available data indicated was a remarkable absence of the many intermediate types that should have existed in the strata regarded as the most ancient; the absence of the principle taxonomic groups. Against these difficulties he could only suggest that the geological record is imperfect, but that if it had been perfect it would have provided evidence for his views. It is clear therefore that the paleontological evidence at his disposal, since it had not led competent naturalists acquainted with it to a belief in evolution, could only justify a suspense of judgment. The condition of fossil material is, of course unsatisfactory since soft tissues usually disappear, leaving only skeletal structures, frequently much distorted . The fossil insects of the group which I am best acquainted cannot be accurately determined, even to genera. It is evident that any organisms now extinct existed in the past but we can never know them as we know living forms. The chronological succession of the fossils is also open to doubt, for it appears generally speaking, that the age of the rocks is not determined by their intrinsic characteristics but by the fossils they contain while the succession of the fossils is determined by the succession of the strata. It was thought also that the fossils should appear in a certain order, corresponding roughly to the stage in embryological development. In fact the strata, and therefore the fossils they contain, do not always occur in the accepted order. In some areas of the world, for example, the Cambrian strata, which are regarded as the oldest fossiliferous formations, rest on the Crestaceous which are regarded as relatively recent; in other, Crestaceous or Tertiary beds appear instead of the Cambrian, on the granite. Sometimes the character of the deposits would lead to the belief that they were chronologically continuous since they can be separated only by the fossils they contain. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain these departures from accepted theory, and thought they are often the subject of controversy among geologists I do not suggest that the problems to which they relate are insoluble.

On the other hand, it does appear to me, in the first place, that Darwin in the Origin was not able to produce paleontological evidence sufficient to prove his views but that the evidence he did produce was adverse to them; and I may note that the position is not notably different to-day. The modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses which, however plausible, are in the nature of things unverifiable. Introduction to The Origin of Species 6th Edition (1956) pp. xvii-xix

Ernst Haeckel Apostle of Deceit

Ernst Haeckel was known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog on the Continent’ and ‘the Huxley of Germany’ for his now notorious support of evolution. He is today known as a scientist who perpetrated fraud upon fraud to promote evolution.

“He became Darwin’s chief European apostle proclaiming the gospel of evolution with evangelist fervor, not only to the university intelligentsia but to the common man by popular books and to the working classes by lecture in rented halls.” Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, TFE Publishing, Toronto, 1984, p. 184, who cites Peter Klemm, Der Ketzer von Jena, Urania Press, Leipzig, 1968

Haeckel’s enthusiasm for the theory of evolution caused him to fraudulently manufacture ‘evidence to bolster his views. He was the first person to draw an evolutionary ‘family tree’ for mankind. To fill in the gap in the tree between inorganic non-living matter and the first living bacteria, he invented a series of minute protoplasmic organisms which he called Monera. Of these he said:

‘not composed of any organs at all, but consist entirely of shapeless simple homogeneous matter . . . nothing more than a shapeless, mobile, little lump of mucus or slime, consisting of albuminous combination of carbon.” Ernst Haeckel, The History of Creation, translated by E. Ray Lankester, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1883, 3rd ed., Vol. 1, p. 184.

No Monera existed or ever existed and Haeckel knew that yet persisted in using and even creating species and subspecies of this genus. In 1868, a prestigious German scientific journal published 73 pages of his speculations with more than 30 drawings of these imaginary Monera, as well as scientific names as Protamoeba primitivia, and the process of fission by which they allegedly reproduced. Ernst Haeckel, ‘Monographie der Moneren’ Jenaische Zeitschrift fur Medizin und Naturwissinschaft, Leipzig 4:64, 1868

Haeckel didn’t just stop there, he also created a non-existent speechless Ape-man called Pithecanthropus alalus and even had an artist, Gabriel Max, draw up the imagined creature even though there was not one iota such a creature ever existed. Yet the Dutch scientist, Professor G.H.R. von Koenigswald, described the drawing: ‘Under a woman with long lank hair sits cross-legged suckling a child. Her nose is flat, her lips thick, her feet large, with the big toe set considerable lower that the rest. Beside her stands her husband, fat bellied and low browed, his back thickly covered with hair. He looks at the spectator good-naturedly and unintelligently, with the suspicious expression of the inveterate toper (habitual drinker). It must have been a happy marriage; his wife could not contradict him, for neither of them could speak.” Herbert Wendt, From Ape to Adam, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, 1971, p.82

But Haeckel’s biggest fraud by far was his totally erroneous theory that the human embryo is initially identical with that of other mammals and then goes through a series of stages where it has gills like a fish or a tail like a monkey, etc. This theory is sometimes called ‘The Law of Recapitulation’ or has Haeckel called it ‘The biogenetic law’. Later this idea as it moved into mainstream evolutionary thought was called: ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ which means the development of the individual embryo repeats it alleged evolutionary history. This fraudulent idea is still in evolutionary thought today in many guises. For instance E. G. Raymond Hawkey’s three dimensional book, Evolution, Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 1986, which states on the front cover that is was ‘produced in collaboration with British Museum (Natural History)’ and on the back cover, ‘Like many other animals, human beings retrace much of their evolutionary past in the womb . . .By the time it (the human embryo) is 28 days old it resembles our earliest vertebrate ancestor, the fish. Like a fish it has . . . what appear to four gill slits.’ Those supposed ‘gill slits’ have nothing to do with breathing but are where the ear and the jaw area are formed.

Haeckel then proceeded to draw pictures of embryos of human and other animals showing the similarities which were not ever there. He completely forged pictures from his imagination to fill in the data he wanted.

Professor Wilhelm His, Sr. (1831 – 1904) a famous comparative embryologist of the day and professor of anatomy at the University of Leipzig, finally uncovered the fraud. He showed that in 1874 Haeckel had added 3.5 mm to the head of Bischoff’s dog embryo, taken 2 mm off the head of Ecker’s human embryo, doubled the length of the human posterior, and substantially altered the details of the human eye. He sarcastically pointed out that Haeckel taught Jena, home of the then finest optical equipment available, and so had no excuse for inaccuracy. He concluded that anyone who engaged in such blatant fraud had forfeited all respect and that Haeckel had eliminated himself from the ranks of scientific research workers of any stature. Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, TFE Publishing, Toronto, 1984, pp. 276, 475.

Haeckel even had to publicly rescind his fraudulent ideas, but interestingly enough he remained wildly popular in Germany and his ideas were still incorporated into evolutionary thought for around 100 years. His evolutionary ideas are incorporated in abortion where the doctor will tell a young lady that the baby in her womb is just a ‘fish’ and of no matter or consequence.

Haeckel’s evolutionary ideas were also used to create a unique from of social Darwinism and racism that became the German national ethos under Hitler’s National Socialism. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, American Elsevier, New Yord, 1971, pp. xvi, xvii. ‘Biological Sciences and the Roots of Nazism, American Scientist 76:56, January – February 1988.

Here is what others say:

Jane Oppenheimer Professor of Biology and History of Science

It was a failing of Haeckel as a would-be scientist that his hand as an artist altered what he saw with what should have been the eye of a more accurate beholder. He was more than once, often justifiably, accused of scientific falsification, by Wilhelm His and by many others. For only two examples, in "Anthropogenie" he drew the developing brain of a fish as curved, because that of reptiles, birds, and mammals is bent. But the vesicles of a fish brain always form in a straight line. He drew the embryonic membranes of man as including a small sac-like allantois, an embryonic organ characteristic of and larger in reptiles, birds, and some nonhuman mammals. The human embryo has no sac-like allantois at all. Only its narrow solid stock remains to conduct the umbilical blood vessels between embryo and placenta. Examples could be multiplied significantly. "Haeckel's Variations on Darwin"

The blind adoption of Haeckel's doctrines by such workers in bordering fields, and their infection with his faith that "Development is now the magic word by means of which we shall solve the riddles by which we are surrounded", is less reprehensible than their uncritical acceptance by the professional embryologists who swallowed them with as much gullibility, and who remained utterly unperturbed by the fact that Haeckel himself was never in any sense a professional embryologist. The seduction of embryology by a fanatic who expresses himself even metaphorically in terms of magic represents a darker chapter in its history. Essays in the history of Embryology and Biology (1967) pp. 153-154

Michael Richardson Embryologist at St. George’s Medical School

This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It's shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately misleading. It makes me angry. What Haeckel did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don't. These are fakes. "An Embryonic Liar" The London Times August 11, 1997 p.14

Our survey seriously undermines the credibility of Haeckel's drawings.

It looks like it's (Haeckel’s embryos) turning out to be one of he famous fakes in biology.

Some problems with evolution and genetic perspectives (part 2)

The results are in the following table.

Flow Date	Sample	Lab Code	K-Ar “Age” Millions of years
11 February 1949	A	R-11714
	B	R-11511	1.0 +/- 0.2
4 June 1954	A	R-11715
	B	R-11512	1,5 +/- 0.1
30 June 1954	A #1	R-11718
	A #2	R-12106	1.3 +/- 0.3
	B #1	R-12003	3.5 +/- 0.2
	B #2	R-12107	0.8 +/- 0.2
	C	R-11513	1.2 +/- 0.2
14 July 1954	A	R-11509	1.0 +/- 0.2
	B	R-11716	<>
19 February	A	R-11510	1.0 +/- 0.2
	B	R-11717	<>

Some problems with evolution and genetic perspectives (part 1)

I've been enjoying reading Mae-Wan Ho lately, not only because of her specific opposition to the biotech industry in many respects, but, more generally, her demonstration of how the scientific establishment deploys the so-called "fear, doubt and uncertainty" strategy to discredit its opponents. It seems worthwhile then to compile a few points about the inherent fallacies of the theory of evolution, with a tip of the hat to Evan Wiggs.

Please note though, my interests here are closer to Mae-Wan Ho, rather than any prima facie case Wiggs extrapolates to support his preferred brand of religious tub thumping.

Mae-Wan Ho advocates holding science accountable, while the likes of Richard Dawkins rose to prominence thanks to an appointment as Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, at the bequest of millionaire Charles Simonyi (one of the developers of Microsoft Word, and now budding space tourist; see charlesinspace.com). The operating principle of PUS could be likened to a hypodermic needle administered by a cadre of "experts" into a passive public body.

Introduction

Before we take on the ten reasons evolution is wrong we must first define what we are talking about. Evolutionists will say the word evolution to you and you may think you know what they are saying, but you probably don’t. There are at least five concepts of evolution that the evolutionist speaks of as one. They are:
Cosmic Evolution – Their Cosmology or how the Universe came into being.
Stellar Evolution – How the stars, galaxies etc. formed
Earth’s Evolution – How the Sun and the planets formed in our solar system.
Macroevolution – The postulate that says all life formed from earlier organized non-life and through some form of mutation, natural selection, and enormous amounts of time.
Microevolution – The limited variation that takes place in a species or families complex gene pool or genome

In this article I agree that microevolution occurs, but the other four are imminently debatable.

Now another issue needs to be face before we go on. Evolutionists are fond of talking down and attacking creationists as being less “scientific” than they. They use ad-hominen attacks and accuse creationists as being stupid and unable to understand their “science”. We need to understand what science is and how our arguments fit in its’ framework.

Science. According to the Oxford Dictionary science is "A branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truth within its own domain."

The process is for a postulate is first formulated and then announced. Then there are three things about this postulate that must be true before it can be considered a theory.
The postulate must be observable.
The postulate must be capable of repeatable experimental verification
The postulate must withstand a fasifiability test, or an experiment conceived which the failure of the experiment would disprove the postulate.

When you talk with evolutionists make sure you have these points covered. They will talk circles around you and call you stupid if you don’t know what they are talking about. As Evolutionists have never observed any of the first four supposed evolutions they assume are true, they only talk about the last microevolution and try to define it as all five! The constantly point out microevolution as being the proof of all the other four. The sooner we creationists figure this out the sooner we can win this debate.

From the points given above is shows us that both evolution and creation are postulates. Neither have much of a chance of becoming a theory because of the difficulty of observing events that happened in the distant past and trying to have those events become repeatable. When evolutionists become dogmatic in their speech as if evolution had been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, they are talking about microevolution and they are bluffing because the lack real proof.

What we are left to do then is look forensically into such things as fossils, microbiology, biochemistry, information theory, etc. to try and see if we can catch the process in its’ act. We will talk about all these things in this article.

.Microevolution Defined

We now need to define carefully the concept of microevolution as we and the evolutionists both understand it differently. Microevolution to the creationist is the limited variation that can be expressed by the genome of a “species’ or family of plants or animals. It is the variation in the alleles of a genome as they are expressed in sexual reproduction and the mixing of alleles that occurs. These alleles are mostly not the product of mutations, but rather reside in the total genome of a population. See the genetics section for a further treatment of alleles in a genome.

The Evolutionist sees microevolution as the cornerstone of evolutionary theory. They believe that it is billions of microevolution mutations in the genome, creating new alleles, and natural selection preserving those changes that is the process of evolution.

Creationists do not see microevolution as being able to drive the massive information gain that needs to occur for evolution to be possible, that is the ameoba to man evolution concept. Microevolution changes mainly occur through the practice of selective breeding. There are no “mutations” in selective breeding or in genome adaptation to the environment. The complex changes that occur are already in the genome and are merely being brought out from human or environmental pressure.

For instance sugar beets in the early 1800’s had a 6% sugar content, by selective breeding that sugar content had risen to 17% by 1878. That was as far as the breeders were able to stretch the genome and they certainly didn’t create a potato from the sugar beet.
Another instance of microevolution is the English peppered moth (Biston betularia). In pre-industrial England the peppered moth lived on the white bark of the birch tree. The moth came in two basic varieties, peppered white and dark. These two varieties hatch out at about a 50% ratio. But when the dark variety landed on the white birch bark, the birds saw them and ate them at a higher rate than the peppered white moth. But as industrialization occurred and coal dust darkened the birch trees, the peppered white moth became rarer because the birds ate them and the dark variety blended into the tree. But they still hatched out at a 50% ratio. (This has since been proven to have 'staged' photographs of the moths 'glued' to tree trunks - so much for evolutionists objectivity)
Other microevolution issues we look at are selective breeding in dogs, cats or cows for example. If we let these all breed together they would all fall back to some common denominator animal. But you can see how far the genome will stretch when you look at a teacup poodle and a rottweiler. But they never created another species.
In fact evolutionists are experimenting with microevolution experiments to see if mutations, a cornerstone in their postulate, will really cause enough positive changes to move one species to another. Since 1910 there have been accelerated mutation experiments with the fruit fly. To date no success. Since about 1950 there have been accelerated mutation experiments with bacteria and again not much success. Come to think of it these would be really good falsifiability experiments too wouldn’t they?

So with all that said we are now ready to begin our reasons why evolution is wrong.

Reason Number 1
Genetics is Not Evolution’s Friend

Genome – the total genetic structure of a species or kind or its gene pool.
Mutation – a mistake in the copying of the DNA; can be caused by radiation, or chemicals.
Recombination – the genetic mixing in sexual or asexual reproduction
Gene – the stuff of life, the sequence of amino acids in the double helix of DNA
Allele – variants of genes in the Genome that are for the same structure but that express a characteristic differently, such as brown eyes vs. blue eyes.
Taxon – Category in classification such as species, phylum.
Phylogeny – The (supposed) evolutionary history or family tree of a species or other group.

As we stated before evolution depends on beneficial mutation, natural selection and enormous amount of time for it to occur. Therefore we will now look at genetics and see if this is true.

But first let us look at the comments of an amateur evolutionist.

“EVOLUTION IS NOT RANDOM, FOR (probably not) THE LAST TIME. Variety is there because evolution causes random mutation, hence the variety.” From a debate on talkorigins.org

Ummm a little double talk. Well it also appears this is perilously close to evolution being an intelligent designer. But it is also a tautology or circular reasoning to say that “evolution causes random mutation” because evolutionists say random mutation causes evolution.

But to be correct, evolution is a religious philosophy that operates with a lot of faith. So evolution isn’t necessarily any more random than the person’s thoughts and it certainly cannot be some kind of force driving the random mutation. Nor can it cause mutations random or otherwise.

Mutation and natural selection are the engine of evolution. Creationists believe in natural selection but we doubt the role mutations play in evolution and know if we can show that mutations cannot be part of the engine, then evolution will have lost its power.

Genetics and evolution have been enemies from the beginning. Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin were contemporaries. Mendel is the father of modern genetics and Darwin is the father of evolution. In Darwin’s day genetics was just starting and Darwin knew really very little about how genetics worked. His idea of change in species was based on erroneous and untested ideas of inheritance. Mendel’s ideas were based on careful experimentation and showed that individual characteristics were surprisingly resilient and constant.

Darwin believed in the idea that variations caused by environment could be inherited. Thus the giraffe’s long neck was a result of the “inherited effects of the increased use of parts”. The Origin of Species, 6th ed, London 1902, p 278. Darwin believed that if parent giraffes strained their necks to reach the top leaves then the progeny would inherit longer necks. While even evolutionists today would see this a patently false, they still accept with apparent ease the change in the genetic structure it represents and throw that change to the magic of mutation. It wasn’t until much later that mutations were used as the change agent in evolution because it became apparent this idea of Darwin didn’t work.

In reality there are multiple mutation processes that can impact a genome but evolutionists only choose one. I will explain why in a bit. First the types of mutations:

1. Duplication or Amplification of a segment of DNA
2. Inversion of a segment of DNA
3. Deletion of a segment of DNA
4. Insertion of a segment of DNA
5. Transposition of a segment of DNA from one place to another.
6. Point Mutation of a single nucleotide.

The first five are interesting genetic processes. Each is a complex and precise process that has much biochemical signaling and purpose. We don’t really know much about why the genes do this as we are still very weak in our knowledge of how our genome works. But none of these processes can add any data to the genome, they just move data around. I must add another point here: some evolutionists place recombination in this list, but recombination is sexual mixing and once again cannot add any data to the genome. Recombination just takes the genome and mixes what is there. There are tens of maybe hundreds or trillions of combinations in our genome to recombine. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

The type of mutations called point mutations are the only genetic processes that can actually add information to the genome and that is why evolutionists have chosen point mutations as the mutational driver of evolution. We will hereafter call point mutations simply mutations to simplify the writing.



Were Darwin's Galapagos Finches Evolution?

What does happen in a population as the genome reacts to the environment? Darwin looks at the finches on the Galapagos Islands and notices variations in beak size. He thought that the harder seed in the dry time was causing the beaks of the finches to grow stouter from the use of the part. But what was happening was that natural selection or a long term drought in the islands was causing the seed cases to harden. The heavier beaked finch allele in the genome was favored and the lighter beaked finch allele was not. The heavier beaked finch became more dominant because it passed on the heavy beak alleles. The heavy beak was not the result of a mutation! It was already an allele in the genome and was just brought out as a result of the environment. When the rains came back the lighter beak became the more efficient beak and the number of heavy beaks reduced. This is microevolution at its best. But there was no change in the genome of the finch and certainly no new species has arisen from this. The genome expresses its variety by recombination of the alleles and causing the phenotype to show its wonderful God given types.

What About Mutations?

But what about mutations then? What are they and how can they be beneficial? Mutations are mistakes in the genetic copying process. They effect one nucleotide base at a time and are called point mutations. Once in every 10,000 to 100,000 copies there is a mistake made. Our bodies have a compare – correct process that is very efficient. In fact it is 1016 times better than the best computer code, but once in every 1,000,000,000 or 10,000,000,000 copies a mutation “gets out” so to speak. That is equal to a professional typist making a mistake in 50,000,000 pages of typescript. You see mutations are predominately bad and the cell tries to make sure they don’t happen.

The Neo-Darwinists made random mutations the engine of evolution. They claim that many very small mutations are the basis of the “goo to you” hypothesis of evolution. For mutations to be the driver of the massive amount of information there must be two things true of those mutations.

1. The mutations must be positive and allow the organism to procreate and pass them on.
2. The mutations must add information to the genome of the organism.

To date no evolutionist has pointed out such a mutation and if they exist they must be exceedingly rare.

The smallness of the point mutation is also in question. Dawkins seems to think that the mutation can be as small as needed to make the hypothesis work, but it appears that one nucleotide base is as small as you can get. So a positive mutation cannot add but a single bit of information to the genome or one nucleotide’s worth. But is that enough? And if that truly does occur will natural selection grab and go with it?
Population Genetics Factors

Population Genetics show that a positive mutation in a population has a poor chance of surviving the “noise” of random events in the population. In a stable population of organisms each organism must reproduce one of itself to keep the stability of the population. But we see in nature that animals must produce many more than one for themselves because of the randomness of death. Even elephants produce 5 to 10 offspring to overcome this random noise factor. Some organisms produce thousands or even millions to assure replacing themselves. Evolutionists want many mutations to occur so positive mutations can be captured by natural selection but a high mutation rate for a population is not good as the overwhelming number of mutations are not good and can destroy a population.

But let’s say that one point mutation occurs and gives an individual a positive value of 0.1 percent for survival and passing on that positive gene. Let us also say that this population needs 5 offspring to keep the population stable or 20 percent growth. The survival rate increase would be 20.02 for the mutation. Sir Ronald Fisher was a mathematician and one of the world’s experts on the mathematics of evolution and one of the founders of the field of population genetics. He was also one of the architects of the Neo Darwinian Theory. He calculated that most mutations with positive survival values would not survive, and he believed that the answer was many positive mutations. He said: “A mutation, even if favorable, will have only a very small chance of establishing itself in the species if it occurs once only.” Fisher R.A. (1958). The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Oxford, Second revised edition, New York: Dover.

Let us continue our example above with Fisher’s calculations. Our organism with a 0.1% survival factor would have one chance in 500 of surviving. If there were 500 organisms with the mutation their odds would be about 5 out of 8. With 1000 with the same mutation their odds would be about 6 out of 7 and with 2500 organisms with the same mutation the odds are about even. What are the odds of 2500 organisms having the same point mutation (it has to be the same for that particular information to get into the genome) in a population? The chances that 500 organisms would have the very same point mutation in the very same nucleotide is 1 in 3.6 x 102,738. Lee M. Spentner, Not By Chance – Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, The Judica Press, New York, p. 103.

A mutation almost always involves a loss of information or just a copy of information. They have never added new information to the genome, so it appears that they can never bring that genome added complexity. Are there beneficial mutations? Yes there are for certain environments. Blind cave catfishes are the result of the mutation that lost the information of an eye. This mutation caused the eye, which was useless and prone to disease and injury in the cave to be lost and it actually helped the catfish survive in the cave. But the catfish genome did not have any new information added for it to become a perch genome or any other genome. In fact the eye genes were lost to the genome. If that blind fish were to be swept out of the cave by a flood, and that does happen, it won’t survive to pass on those no eye alleles. So natural selection, working in the cave worked to keep the eyeless going, outside the cave will kill it quick. The important thing to keep in mind is that we all along were only working with the genome of the catfish and at no point was there any new information to change that genome to another. Genomes are like rubber bands that you can stretch out very far, but they will always snap back to the original when released.

If we look at the accelerated fruit fly experiments that used radiation to accelerate the copying errors of DNA to try to produce another species, we have only seen fruit flies with parts missing or dead flies or flies too crippled to pass on its genes. They never got a house fly out of the deal. Why? Because the mutation lost information in the fruit fly genome and did not add the information to become a house fly.


Beneficial verses Positive Mutations

How do we define “beneficial” mutations? It is interesting that a mutation such as an orange without seeds is considered useful, that is to orange eaters like me, but to oranges it is not such a good idea, for the seedless orange cannot pass on its genes. It is a useful mutation, but not a positive mutation. A positive mutation would enable the species to pass on its genes more efficiently and would add information to the genome. Evolutionists get this definition confused too.

Another problem is that evolutionists confuse mutations with recombination and alleles. They are not the same. Some variant alleles in a genome are the result of mutation, but most are from recombination and were there at the beginning of that species. All alleles that arise from mutation are either neutral or excessively deleterious. There are not really any positive mutations in literature today, even evolution literature. In one instance the single nucleotide substation in a genome was responsible for the resistance to a weed herbicide. This herbicide was made to attach and deactivate a protein needed by the weed. A single change in the genetic code for this protein, in the sector used for defining the herbicide attachment, deprived the herbicide of its attachment point and nullified its effectiveness.

Was this a positive mutation? We have no way of knowing if this was the result of a mutated allele or the expression of an allele in the genome that was already there. It may have been a very rare, neutral mutation of an allele that had been in the genome too. But it was specific to the man-made herbicide and had no selective value outside of that. It did not create another function and did not help the weed to adapt any other way. It added no information to the genome and thus no new complexity. There was no evolution here.

So you see, mutations can produce an allele of a gene that is neutral (rarely) or produce alleles that are dangerous, but cannot be the driver of massive amount of change that needs to occur to change one species into another. Most people don’t appreciate the massive amount of point change that must occur. For that to occur we should be seeing many positive mutations in the population. Instead we are seeing massive information loss mutations in the population. The X-Men just couldn’t happen outside of the movies.

Molecular Biology and Irreducible Complexity

Even molecular biology has not helped as the evolutionists have hoped. Molecular genetics have found that genomes have supported Taxonomy and not Phylogeny. It has also been found in molecular genetics that genomes have multiple copies of genes or of noncoding sequences that are very homogeneous within species, but heterogeneous between species. Such ‘repeats’ could not have been formed by random mutations acting on a common genome of a postulated ancestor. Evolutionists suggest an unexplained ‘molecular drive’ to account for these copies. It is simpler to assume there is no common ancestral genome.

Michael Behe in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” speaks of the irreducible complexity of several biological systems that cannot be created in a manner where there are non-functional intermediates because they wouldn’t exist long enough to pass on their structure. He uses the common mousetrap as his analogy, none of the parts can catch a mouse, and they all have to be present and functionally joined together to work. The cell is an example that had to be created in situ and not from an intermediate that couldn’t function much like the parts of the mousetrap.

There have been arguments from evolutionists that the parts of the mousetrap could be used for other uses, like fish hooks or paperweights, but that is missing the point entirely. That cellular systems are useful in other places does not say they would be useful in the cell by them selves, just as a paperweight won't catch a mouse! It is a MOUSETRAP we are interested in, not a paperweight! One even said that a simple spring could catch a mouse. Ummmm yeah, right!

Do Hox (Homeotic) Genes Save Evolution?

Another microbiological issue is the Hox gene that seemed to fit in the “punctuated equilibrium” of Gould, because a small mutation in a Hox gene could have a profound effect on the organism. But further research on the Hox gene proved this not to be Evolution’s Saviour. Dr. Christian Schwabe, a non-creationist critic of Darwinian evolution said this:

“Control genes like homeotic genes may be the target of mutations that would conceivably change phenotypes, but one must remember that the more central one makes changes in a complex system, the more severe the peripheral consequences become. … Homeotic changes induced in Drosophila genes have led only to monstrosities, and most experimenters do not expect to see a bee arise from their Drosophila constructs.” (Mini Review: Schwabe, C., 1994. Theoretical limitations of molecular phyolgenetics and the evolution of relaxins. Comp. Biochem. Physiol. 107B: 167-177

In the eleven years since this quote research has born out this quote. Changes to homeotic genes cause monstrosities; they do not change an amphibian into a reptile. And the mutations do not add any information; they just cause the existing information to be misdirected to create fruit fly legs where fruit fly antenna needs to be for instance.

Do not be misled by the Evolutionists. They constantly try to find the mutation that is positive (I don’t blame them either) and try to find the new thing that supports their theory. I have concerned Christians coming to me all the time with a newspaper article saying what about this?! I just tell them not to panic and wait because it too will fall and be found as nothing. Truly God is in control and all striving will cease. Pray for your evolutionist friends, don’t get into a mad argument with them, and love them as Christ called us to. Don’t call them names and don’t talk about them in bad ways, that is not Jesus in you.

Remember Evolution is a philosophy masquerading as a science. You are talking with someone who thinks “science” is totally on their side, but don’t really know it isn’t. They don’t believe in Creation because that would make them have to answer to God.

Evolution Fails to Predict the Genetic Complexity

Any scientific theory, which evolution is purported to be, has to be able to predict to be a good theory. But evolution in its’ need to connect mutation in the genome to the massive change needed for evolution incorrectly predicted the direct gene to morphology connection. Only with this connection can small mutations actually have the ability to make massive morphological changes necessary for evolution to be plausible.

The Darwin concept:

One gene – One Protein – One Function

But we are learning more about the genetic package and are finding that contrary to the evolutionist’s wish’s the genetic structure has always been surprisingly resilient. I must mention again the accelerated fruit fly experiments and the extraordinary resilience of the fruit fly genome. I believe that this would be a great falsifiability test for evolution.

What evolutionist say is that evolution is a theory that can absorb all new data and take it in and make it part of the theory. When they say that they are not describing a scientific theory, but a philosophy.

We have recently discovered the incredible complexity of the genome and how it reacts and moves its’ instructions to create the morphology or the phenotype of the organism. It is not a one to one correlation, but the complexity is much beyond that.

Bent Proteins

Bent proteins have had much interest in science for a couple of decades. Many first heard of them in some rather strange diseases such as the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or the Mad Cow disease that was caused by a prion or a badly bent protein. We all wondered how could a bent protein cause morphological change in a brain?
As researchers dove deeper into this issue and looked a past research going back into the 1970s they started seeing that there appeared in cells an incredibly complex dance between the genes and protein and RNA folds to transmit data to assemble extremely complex protein machines in the cell as well as transmit data to assemble cell structures as well as create the macro morphology of an organism. This answered some questions that arose in genetic research where it appeared the genes didn’t always have a one to one correspondence with morphological structure. In fact some genes seemed to be connected to multiple structures and some genes seemed to be unconnected. As it turns out the bent proteins provide another layer of highly organized information in the cell. The appear to be bent in non-random ways based on the molecular structure and the bends are actually a function of physics and not biology. We have discovered around 200 of these protein bends and have seen how they actually provide more information to the cell than the genes themselves.
The folding process has been found to be absolutely necessary for the protein to function in the cell and occurs right out of the ribosome. The folded shape is determined by several factors.
1. Internal covalent bonds such as disulfide bridges between cysteine units in the chains.
2. Hydrogen bonds.
3. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic interaction with the surrounding solvent.
4. The interaction with other with other molecules large and small that help carry on cellular function.
In fact two different proteins can fold into similar shapes and perform the same cellular function. But this is all made possible by a process that is guided. Random folds wouldn’t work. The prions of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease prove that. There are protein complexes that provide a chaperone that help the proteins to bend in the proper way, and there are chaperones that help the protein to stay in its proper bend. These chaperones are also responsible for metal ions movement in the cell.
This is something evolutionists may claim as “part of the great universal acid” of their theory, but evolutionary theory actually prevented researchers from discovering these protein machines because of the assumptions built into evolution. Another failure and another nail in the coffin.


Reason Number 2
Statistics are not Evolution’s Friend

Statistics and probability are great enemies of Evolution. Because Evolution utilizes random mutations as the main engine of their postulate, we can then use the laws of probability to exam their claims. Many evolutionists cry foul here, but they have no reason to do so as they also use probability to lay out their claims.

Here is another quote from an amateur evolutionist.

“All this complexity can easily come about through evolution, as is explained in ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ (a book by neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins). This is because it is often cumulative, and so more likely and more efficient. . . . Nothing betrays a lack of understanding of natural selection quite like saying that the chance (of Evolution being correct) is too small. Natural selection is an algorithmic process, it the complete OPPOSITE of chance. The author states that there hasn’t been enough time. This is all too human thought of our own significance. The Earth was formed; it is estimated, around 4,600,000,000 years ago. In comparison, Homo Sapiens are thought to have emerged around 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Four and a half billion years ago seems more than enough.”

I am really intrigued by evolutionist’s ideas of natural selection. As we discussed above natural selection cannot operate on something that is not there. It has no intelligence to drive anything. It is a predator, it is a storm, it is a drought, it is a thousand other things that will either destroy an animal that has the wrong alleles in its phenotype. In fact natural selection is not algorithmic but it is digital. Either alive or dead. Natural selection is not the opposite of chance, it just makes sure the good alleles last and the bad ones disappear, that is all. But natural selection is also blind and may also just snuff out a really good allele that had its head down at the water hole too long. As we spoke above in the genetics section the mutations are decidedly bad and lose information and lead to bad alleles, so natural selection usually limits their existence in a population. But natural selection is also "noise" in a population that doesn't allow a single point mutation a very good set of odds for surviving and passing on those genes. Evolutionist speak of natural selection like it is intelligent or something and can spot a mutation that it needs to save.

Short Primer on Probability

Now we will look at the “cumulative” idea and see if that is a go or not. For Evolution to be true there has to be a large amount of cumulative organization of positive mutations. In fact Evolution says that all life came out of prior non-life. Darwin’s warm pond or the lightning charged primordial soup of other evolutionists. Could that really happen? What do statistics say?

The amateur evolutionist above thinks that four and a half billion years seems to be enough, but is it?

We will give him not the 4.6 billion years for life but the whole supposed age of the universe of 20 billion. We will even assume that ALL of the 20 billion years are good and that all the precursors to life are in some warm primordial soup (we will discuss this in the Biochemistry section below) somewhere just waiting to do their thing.

Let’s talk briefly about probability which is a subset of Statistics. What is the chance if you toss a coin you get heads? Assuming the coin is equally weighted, and not a trick coin, it is 1/2. On a die the probability of rolling a six is 1/6. The probability of tossing a coin and getting heads and rolling a die and getting a six is 1/2 x 1/6 = 1/12. Now this doesn’t mean that in twelve tosses and throws you will get simultaneously a head and a six, it means that if you throw long enough 1/12 of all throws will have both a head and a six.

Now let us get a little more complicated. Let’s figure the odds or probability of randomly spelling the phrase “the theory of evolution”. There are 26 letters and one space possible adding to 27 possible selections. There are 20 letters in the phrase and 3 spaces. Therefore the odds, on the average, spell out the phrase correctly only once in 2723 outcomes! That is only one success in 8.3 quadrillion, quadrillion attempts or 8.3 x 1032. Now suppose ‘chance’ uses a machine which removes, records and replaces all the letters randomly at the fantastic speed of one billion per microsecond (one quadrillion per second). On the average the phrase would happen once in 25 billion years by this method.

Whoops! We ran out of time just trying to randomly recombine correctly a 23 letter and space phrase. You see the probability multiplication rule is not so kind to the randomness of evolution thought.

But let’s look at biological beginnings. You see in that warm pond or primal soup we just assume that there were amino acids there and we will assume that there were all the L type necessary for life. We will look later at Biochemistry and see it those assumptions are safe, but for now we will just assume them. One thing we will have to turn off is natural selection, because natural selection won’t work here. We are just trying to polymerize a self replicating organic structure like a DNA or RNA molecule, and natural selection assumes that a good allele will be safe and a bad allele won’t, and we don’t have any good or bad alleles yet. We are just trying to get the genes now in the right sequence. If they are not in the right sequence they won’t work and if they are they will. And there is no way for evolution or natural selection or whatever other magic driver the evolutionists can come up with to know if the sequence is right until it replicates. There is no cumulative process here as a partially correct complex molecule won’t work and would be discarded until one does.

The odds of forming a chain of 124 specifically sequenced proteins of 400 amino acid bases is 1 x 1064,489! Now that is just one complex molecule and life requires much, much more. Mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest known genome of the free living organisms, containing 482 genes comprising 580,000 bases. A human DNA molecule can contain three billion amino acid bases. That is not counting all the other enzymes, proteins, hormones and other life chemistry needed. These odds are utterly impossible and shows that evolution being the source of life’s beginning is not even remotely possible.

Fred Hoyle stated this: “Two thousand different and very complex enzymes are required for a living organism to exist. And random shuffling processes could not form a single one of these even in 20 billion years. I don’t know how long it is going to be before astronomers generally recognize that the arrangement of not even one of the many thousand of biopolymers (Life molecules) on which life depends could have been arrived at by natural processes here on earth.

“Astronomers will have little difficulty in understanding this because they will be assured by biologists that it is not so; the biologists having been assured in their turn by others that it is not so. The ‘others’ are groups of persons who believe, quite openly, in mathematical miracles.

“They advocate the belief that, tucked away in nature outside of normal physics, there is a law which performs miracles (provided the miracles are in the aid of biology). The curious situation sits oddly on a profession that for long has been dedicated to coming up with logical explanations. . . The modern miracle workers are always found to be living in the twilight fringes of thermodynamics.”
Fred Holye, “The Big Bang in Astronomy,” in New Scientist, November 19, 1981, pp 521-527

Weasely Dawkins


We will now look briefly at a case of weaseling by a master weasel Richard Dawkins of “The Blind Watchmaker” and “The Selfish Gene” etc. (Yes I have read them both!). Richard Dawkins is a neo–Darwinist who has championed the Evolution of random mutations and natural selection which was falling awry in evolutionary thought in recent years. Mr. Dawkins in “The Blind Watchmaker” developed a program on computer to generate the phrase “methinks it is like a weasel” in about 164 supposedly random iterations. This computer program was quite a novelty in the early 80’s when it was written, but today it is quite primitive.

But the program has some problems.

1. The outcome is known and targeted, whereas in life chemistry there is no target, there is only something that may work when the sequence is right and there is no way of knowing it might work until you get it complete. No near guesses allowed.

2. Correct guesses are saved. In life chemistry there is no way of knowing if any iteration has protein sequences that will be useful later as the only way of knowing they are right is when the whole complex molecule works.

3. It is a computer program with the parameters carefully chosen by Dawkins to make sure the outcome is what he wanted. If the parameters are tweaked another way the real probability comes back normally. Dawkins sped up the random mutation rate to accelerate the evolution rate and tried to use these figures to prove evolution could happen with a mutation rate that would destroy a population. Weak thinking in a weasly mind.

Remember to love those evolutionists out there whom you know, and do not use this to just to whack them. Lovingly query them and even if they revile you as a cretin in science, pray for them.

Reason Number 3
Biochemistry is not Evolution’s Friend

Words you may need to know.
Biogenesis – A term in biology that states the life only descends from life.
Spontaneous Generation – The belief that life can come spontaneously from non-life. Many in Darwin’s day believed that bacteria would just appear from non-life in a water cask. Today we know this is not true.
Law of Mass Action – Chemical reactions always proceed in a direction from the highest to lowest concentration.
Polymerization – Linking together of organic molecules to make bigger molecules.
Chirality – The ‘handedness of life molecules. Nearly all amino acids are ‘left-handed’ and nucleic acids, starch, glycogen, etc. contain sugars that are all ‘right-handed.

Chirality

6. Homochirality – All having the same handedness
7. Heterochirality – Having a mixture of handedness, also called “racemic”.
8. Enantiomers – Having a 50/50 mixture of handedness, or having mirror image oppositeness.

You remember the warm little pond of Darwin? Well it didn’t exist and neither did the primal soup we are supposed to come from. You see these ideas have terrible problems in coming up with the proper compounds to produce life. You remember my parameters in the statistics section above, I allowed there to be plenty of substrate compounds available to see if we could actually randomly organize them into a self-replicating molecule and found we couldn’t. Well in looking at evolutionists ideas of the primitive atmosphere we will put some more nails in the Evolution coffin.

Primitive Atmospheres

What do the evolutionists need in a primitive atmosphere to have life generate from non-life. Remember if we cannot do this step the rest of Evolution is kind of moot. Mutations and natural selection don’t work on non-life chemicals.

Evolutionists tell us our planet was spun of from some kind of collision, or was some kind of rocky collapse or something spun out of the sun. Pick your favorite. And they say the earth was molten for millions and millions of years. This should have sterilized the early earth of just about anything organic. So where did the organic substances come from. Evolutionists believe they came from spontaneous generation maybe, or maybe outer space! We’ll just see if any of these make any sense.

Some evolutionists say that amino acids just formed out of seawater. If they did then mass action would have wiped them out. Richard E. Dickerson said:

“It is therefore hard to see how polymerization could have proceeded in the aqueous environment of the primitive ocean, since the presence of water favors depolymerization rather than polymerization.” Richard E. Dickerson, “Chemical Evolution and the Origen of Life.” Scientific American, September 1978, p. 75

Another problem with the primitive atmosphere is the presence of oxygen. Oxygen would destroy much of the organic compounds so the evolutionists came up with a reducing atmosphere or one without O2 and with CH4 as the main carbon carrier.

The trouble with this primitive atmosphere concept is that once life did occur, the reducing atmosphere would kill it as life needs oxygen. Evolutionists try to say that plants produced the oxygen, but plants need oxygen for respiration. There would have to been a very rapid change from reducing to oxidizing atmosphere once life appeared for life to have occurred in this manner. There is no mechanism or process that could do that quickly. The current plant oxygenizing of the atmosphere today couldn’t do that in less than 5000 years. Primitive life would not have even the capability as there wouldn’t be nearly as many of the plants in the brand new world.

Harold Urey admitted “that the non-oxygen atmosphere is just an assumption – a flight of imagination – in a effort to accommodate the theory.”
Harold Urey, “On the Early Chemical History of the Earth and the Origin of Life,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 38, 1952, p. 352

Stanley Miller, who was a pioneer in the laboratory synthesis of non-living amino acids in bottles created in a reducing atmosphere, said that the theory that the earth once had no oxygen is just “speculation”.
Stanley Miller, “Production of Some Organic Compounds under Possible Primitive Conditions,” in Journal of the American Chemical society, 7, 1955, p. 2351.

A recent Scientific American summary article on the origin of life admits that:

The classic ‘chicken and egg’ problem of ‘which came first, protein or DNA’ (since both need each other to reproduce) has not been solved by the 1980s idea of ‘self-reproducing’ RNA, as many textbooks imply. This is because the laboratory simulations are highly artificial with a ‘great deal of help from the scientists’.
Stanley Miller’s classic 1953 synthesis of life’s ‘building blocks’ in the test tube, as well as Sydney Fox’s ‘proteinoids’ (which produced circular blobs claimed to be ‘protocells’) are now largely regarded as dead ends.
Cleverly designed artificial self-reproducing molecules have no relevance to the origin of life.
Highly speculative ideas about life’s beginning on clay, floating in from outer space, forming on the surface of fool’s gold, in mid-ocean vents, and so forth, are just that. Stanley Miller, who is now a chemistry professor still leading in this area, himself says, ‘I come up with a dozen ideas a day, and I usually discard the whole dozen.’
The chairman of a recent National Academy of Sciences committee reviewing all origin-of-life research (which concluded that ‘much more research is needed’), stated that ‘the simplest bacterium is so [expletive] complicated from the point of view of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it happened.’
Do they then consider that the supernatural or miraculous (that is, creation) could have been involved? Not at all, says Stanley Miller. ‘I think we just haven’t learnt the right tricks yet.’

John Horgan, ‘Trends in Evolution: In the Beginning…’, Scientific American, February 1991, p. 100-109.

The Problem of Chirality

Now let us look at the problem of Chirality or handedness of organic compounds. Many important molecules of life exist in two forms. These two forms are non-supreimposable mirror images of each other. Nearly all biological life requires the biological polymers to be homochiral or the same handedness. That would be no problem of they could be produced chemically that way, but chemically there are produced in a racemic mixture, or with a mixture of both handedness.

“Synthesis of chiral compounds from achiral reagents always yields the ‘racemic modification’ and ‘Optically inactive reagents yield optically inactive products’”
Morrison, R.T. and Boyd R.N., 1987. Organic Chemistry, 5th ed. Allyn & Bacon Inc. p. 150.

So if the organic compounds were formed somehow in a primitive atmosphere they would be racemic. And that would present some major problems in polymerization of complex organic compounds such as large proteins, RNA, DNA etc. A wrong handed amino acid would cause the stopping of the polymerization of the more complex compound and effectively kill the process. Random organization of complex organic compounds would be drastically effected for the worse. All amino acids in proteins are ‘left-handed’, while all sugars in DNA, RNA and in the metabolic pathways are ‘right-handed’.

Another problem with Chirality is that homochiral biological substances racemize in time. This is the basis of amino acid racemization dating method. This method is not very reliable because of the variables such as temperature and pH and the particular amino acid. Racemization is a big problem during peptide synthesis and hydrolysis for it shows that the tendency of undirected chemistry is towards death, not life. This presents enormous problems for chemical evolution ideas as well.

Chirality can have tragic consequences. Thalidomide was prescribed in the early 60’s for women suffering from morning sickness. The left-handed form is a powerful tranquillizer, but the right-handed form can disrupt fetal development, resulting in the severe birth defects. The synthesis of the drug produced a racemate, as would be expected, but the wrong homochiral was not removed before the drug was marketed.

Evolutionists had no idea how Chirality came about in the biochemistry of the origin of life and to date have no real answer to the severe problems it represents in their postulate.

They have come up with some ideas that all are weak and I will list them here but not go into depth. If you want to know more, just e-mail me and I will explain whey these cannot explain Chirality.

Circularly polarized ultraviolet light
Will destroy the correct form as well, but not at the rate of the other form.
Requires a very narrow band of CP light.
Beta Decay and the weak force
Weak force is not strong enough to have the effect needed to create Homochirality.
Could not produce the L-enantiomer in a necessary significant excess.
Optically active quartz powders.
While quartz crystals are hexagonal and dissymmetric they are also racemic in nature and would not eliminate the homochiral organics
All experiments failed to prove this could be the reason for life’s needs for homochiral compounds.
Clay minerals.
The chiral selection of clay minerals that was reported now appears to have been an artifact of the technique used. This has been rejected.
Fluke seeding
Postulated that a fluke seeding of a supersaturated solution with a homochiral crystal would crystallize out the same enantiomer.
If the primal soup existed it would be extremely diluted and grossly contaminated.
The growing homochiral crystal would be immersed in the solution of the wrong remaining enantiomer and would not do anything.
Homochiral template
Proposed that a homochiral polymer arose by chance (wonder what the odds?) and acted as a template.
“But the opposite enantiomer acts as a chain terminator in the polymerization of chains and posses a severe problem in origin of life postulates.” Joyce, G.F., Visser, G.M., VanBoeckel, C.A.A., VanBoom, J.H., Orgel, L.E. and van Westrenen, J., 1984. Chiral selection in poly(C)-directed synthesis of oligo(G). Nature, 310:602-4.
Transfer RNA’s selected the right enantiomer.
Russell Doolittle, professor of Biochemistry at USC San Diego, and an atheist said: “From the start of their (Transfer RNA syntheases) existence, they probably bound only L-Amino Acids. Doolittle, R., 1983. Probability and the origin of life. In: Godfrey, L.R., ed., 1983. Scientists Confront Creationism, W.W. Norton, NY.
This is mere hand waving by this professor who lost a debate to Duane Gish. He never explains how such complicated enzymes could have functioned unless they themselves were homochiral, or how they would operate before RNA was composed of homochiral ribose.
Magnetic Fields
German scientists led by Eberhard Breitmaier of the Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Gerhard – Domagk – Strasse in Bonn, reported that a very strong magnetic field produced 98% homochiral products from achiral reagents. Bradley, D., 1994. A new twist in the tale of nature’s asymmetry. Science, 264:908.
No one could reproduce the experiment and it was found that one of the team, Guido Zadel, the post-doctoral fellow on whose the thesis the original work was based, had adulterated the reagents with a homochiral additive. Clery, D., and Bradley, D., 1994. Underhanded ‘breakthrough’ revealed. Science, 265:21.

Outer Space?

So with all the problems on earth of creating even the substances out of which life could occur scientists looked to space. There has been much hoopla where scientists zapped impure ice, supposedly matching interstellar compositions with ultraviolet light and forming amino acids. The ice contained a high amount of ammonia, methanol and hydrogen cyanide. This study was published in Nature on 28th of March 2002.

The paper said in part:

“How life originated is one of the earliest and most intriguing for humanity. Early experiments on the processing of a gas mixture simulating the primitive earth conditions assumed a reducing atmosphere with methane as the carbon containing molecule. Several amino acids were formed under these conditions as the products of spark discharge, photoprocessing or heat. It is now believed, however, that the Earth’s early atmosphere was rather non-reducing, with CO2 as the main carbon carrier. Processing of these alternative gas mixtures under experimental conditions leads to the formation of, at most, traces of amino acids.”

People, let me translate for you. What they are saying is this: “All our best guesses about how life started on earth are busted. But, we by faith believe in evolution so we must look to space as the place where life chemistry started.”

If is couldn’t start here, what makes them think it started out there?

God Bless each of you who are believers and may God use you in spreading the truth. Remember to treat with love and kindness those who differ from you.


Reason Number 4
Information Theory is not Evolution’s Friend

Information is the stuff of life. We see it every day in multiple ways. This paper is complex information. There are 26 letters, spaces, periods, commas, etc. all arranged (hopefully more correct than not!) to give out information. This did not come from random chance and no one would even begin to think so. That is unless one was an evolutionist.

Here is a quote from another amateur evolutionist. The quote is really about entropy which we will look at in the next section, but has some interesting stuff on information we can look at here.

“. . . However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in non-living systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightening are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?”

We won’t discuss the 2nd law of thermodynamics in this section but in the next. Right now we want to look at the nature in information that is given in the example above and compare it to biological information and see if the analogy given is valid.

Complex Life Information verses Simple Information

What we have here is a misunderstanding of what is true complex information and what is just information. What the amateur evolutionists above is looking at is simple information inherent in the laws of physics. We will look at snowflakes and stalactites first because they are both crystallization scenarios that evolutionists like to use. They also like to use salt crystallization from a warm salt laden fluid too. The crystal is not complex and it repeated over and over. If you break a crystal into two pieces you have two crystals. Crystal’s information would look something like this:

Abcabcabcabcabcabc

Where the life polymer would look like this”

The purpose of life is to love the Lord

If you break this apart you will lose the meaning and if you break apart the life polymer you will not have a smaller protein, you will destroy the protein.

Another issue is the crystallization is a process inherent in the substances them selves when the right environment occurs. There is no information given them to do this and they are very poor in information themselves. To try and say that this information as complex as DNA is absurd. They are waving their hands and bluffing in this.

Now if you saw a doily on the ground that was crocheted into a snowflake design you would instantly know some intelligence made it because you inherently know that the cotton fibers do not have a physical propensity to form that way no matter what the physical characteristics of their environment.

Graded river beds and sand dunes are just the remnants of the action of wind and water, the grading and dunes are because a certain velocity of wind or water will only carry particles of a certain size and down. As the wind or water velocity varies so to the particle sizes and thus you have a grading of particles. Extremely low complexity in these two examples. Just physics in action I’m afraid.

But if you saw 500,000 sand particles all lined up in a row you would suspect intelligent design, because wind can carve and grade a dune but it won’t line up the particles.

Now we can look at tornadoes and lightening. Wow, some people who experienced a tornado might not consider them so orderly. But all that aside they are much like the other examples as just particles obeying the laws of physics. Differential high and low pressure systems, caused by heat, moisture etc. These systems are more complex than the last two but still no cigar as to overall complexity and nowhere remotely near the complexity of a single small chain of amino acids.

This order from disorder is a chimera for there is only physical nature obeying the physical laws. In fact the non-theist physicist Paul Davies admits: “There is no law of physics able to create information from nothing.”

Specified Complexity

What is important here is the difference from “order” and information. Information is “specific complexity”. Specific complexity is needed to drive life, order is just interesting phenomena.

Information in the printed page is not in the paper nor the ink, but in the pattern of the characters and in the mind that understands and made them. Information in sound is not in the sound waves themselves nor in the storage devices, but in the modulation and words understood by the mind understands and made them.

Information in all living things is encoded in a kind of book called DNA. This information describes the complexity of a sequence and it doesn’t depend on the matter in the sequence. As in the above concepts the DNA molecule also appears to be understood by our cells and have been made by a higher intelligence that can ‘read’ the message as well as ‘create’ the message.

The DNA in one cell can carry the information of 3-4 30 copy volumes of encyclopedia Britannia. DNA is the most information dense medium known to man. The number of paperback books that could be stored in the DNA that would fit on the head of a pin is equivalent to a stack of books 500 times taller than the distance to the moon and each with unique and specific content. This information so overshadows the poor information in crystals, sand piles and weather systems that I cannot understand how anyone could think that this order sprang out of non-living disorder.

For an in-depth look at information theory and creation go here.

Rich specific information to create all the life we see today is what evolutionists try to say came from non-life. We will see in the next section that the laws of physics also dictate that this won’t work.

God Bless you all in all you do, in all your going in and going out.


Reason Number 5
Physics is not Evolution’s Friend

Much has been said of the laws of Thermodynamics in creationist literature and evolutionist literature, and it has been misunderstood by both sides.

Let’s look again at the quote from the amateur evolutionist and see what he is saying on this topic
“Simply incorrect science (creationist view that entropy is valid in an open system as well) Life is not a closed system. I quote from talkorigins.org
“However they (creationists) neglect the fact that life in not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more useable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect the next generation of tomato plants have more useable energy still? Creationists try to get around this by claiming that the information carried on my living things lets them create order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in non-living systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightening are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?”

The Laws of Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics
1st law – Matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Also called the law of conservation.
2nd law – Matter and energy tend to disorder and less useable energy. Also called the law of entropy.

There are other ways to understand the 2nd law with is the one the most argument is about.

Classical Thermodynamics
The energy available for useful work in a functioning system tends to decrease, even though the total energy remains constant.

Statistical Thermodynamics
The organized complexity (order) of a structured system tends to become disorganized and random (disorder).

Informational Thermodynamics
The information conveyed by a communicating system tends to become distorted and incomplete.

Now let us look at the different types of systems as the person in the quote discussed an open verses a closed system.

Types of systems

Isolated System – Exchanges neither energy not matter with its surroundings. The total entropy of an isolated system never decreases. The universe could be considered an isolated system and is running down.
Closed System – Exchanges energy but not matter with its surroundings. In this case the 2nd law is stated: the total entropy of the system and its surroundings never decrease.
Open System – Exchanges energy and matter with its surroundings. For an open system the law is stated: the total entropy of the system and its surroundings will never decrease.

Many evolutionists say that the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn’t apply to open systems but that is simply not true.
Dr. John Ross of Harvard University states:
. . . there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems. . . There is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics the notion that that the second law fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.” John Ross, Chemical and Engineering News, July 27, 1980, p. 40;

Now what we have in our open system is a tendency for energy to be lost as heat and for organized matter to be come disorganized. That is not to say that entropy reversals are not possible and do happen. The total entropy for the system must increase so for every decrease in entropy there must be a concomitant increase somewhere else.

In the examples in the above quote we can see this very well. When water freezes, heat as entropy gain is released. The same happens in the calcium carbonate in the stalactite. Graded river beds reduce velocity is streams and dunes reduce velocity of the wind. Storms release heat energy and create disorder and increase entropy.

The tomato plant is another order of specified complexity because it is life and has life chemistry driving it. The DNA in the seed has all the information to create the plant and that process is a temporary entropy reversal as suggested above. It is not getting ‘around’ the topic that creationists say this, it is true.

But can we expect continuing energy increases in the tomato plants in succeeding generations. That is questionable at best. I assume the useable energy is the fruit of the plant, tomato. Tomatoes are highly hybridized plants and the seeds may not be fertile (that old loss of information when information is changed) but we can experiment with this idea. Take some seeds from the tomato plant and propagate them. Follow this down several generations and what you will end up with is a very sorry plant with very little fruit. Entropy rules over all. You will need to get hybridized seedlings or seeds to get those yummy tomatos back and no you cannot get more energy every generation. That is a little exuberant misunderstanding of thermodynamics.

Entropy and Evolution

Now what does thermodynamics really say about Evolution? It says that while temporary entropy decreased are possible there must be compensating entropy increases in all systems to make the total system tend to entropy increase.

So what we have is the need for massive disorder to order, massive positive mutations, needed to have life as we see that. Entropy does not preclude those things absolutely happening it just pushes real hard at it not happening. It is like a 1000 lb weight on the back of a man climbing the mountain. I really decreases his odds at making the top.

Another concept brought up by the laws is the concept of useful energy. Evolutionists are fond of saying that the sun provides more than enough energy to drive their postulate. But does it? Is the energy useful to their postulate?

Raw energy from the sun, if not for the ability of living things to convert it to useful energy such as sugars, proteins etc. would be a destroyer of life. In many of the scenarios of primitive life the UV radiation is looked as the driver of the mutations need for evolution, but it conversely would destroy the organism as well if not protected. In fact the mutation rate being very slow and the energy being very fast the destruction would be very many times faster than the creation.

Raw energy from the sun, cannot create the specified complexity needed for life. It can only cause complexity to be lost in mutations. In the labs scientists use sophisticated equipment to polymerize proteins in the right way. If sunlight were to enter this process it would destroy the proteins.

OK all you Evolutionists that claim I am so stupid and don't know my Thermodynamics here is the more technical page for you.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and love your neighbor (that evolutionist) as yourself.


Reason Number 6
Astronomy is not Evolution’s Friend
As I explained in the very first part of this paper, the evolutionists like to lump all their theories together. The talk about their cosmology, stellar evolution and planetary evolution as if they are one and the same with biological evolution and they are not. In fact they don’t line up with evolution very well either. We will look at all their postulates in this section going from the cosmos to the planets.



The Big Bang a Big Bust?



The Big Bang has lots of problems. In fact there was a recent article in New Scientist where hundreds of scientists, astrophysicists, engineers and researchers signed an open letter to the scientific community. It is so cogent I am quoting it here:



“An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
cosmologystatement.org

(Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004)

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that "science is the culture of doubt", in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.

Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method -- the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible. To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.

Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang's validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe.”

While the plasma or the steady state cosmologies also have their problems, especially with the transverse across the infinite problem, I will not address them here and concentrate on just the Big Bang.

What this open letter shows is the bias that is in science today and the dogma that is held about evolution. If you are outside the mainstream evolutionary postulate in science you won’t get funding, you not may gain the doctorate you are working on, you won’t get published in peer reviewed scientific magazines and you will be mocked and reviled. Usually name calling or an ad-hominen attack is proof the attacker has lost the argument anyway.

Some of the big bang problems are:

The Horizon Problem
The Cosmic Wave Background or CMB is the same everywhere to the precision of 1 part in 100,000.
However in the early Big Bang universe the temperatures would have been very different in different areas due to the random nature of the initial conditions.
The energy would be evened by energy transfer via radiation or light.
However the areas across the universe from each other are too far apart for light to have evened out the temperatures because light hasn’t had time to even get there.
Hypothetical Fudge Factors
Inflation fudge factor – without this fudge factor the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed.
Inflation however requires a density 20 times greater than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, or the theory of the origin of light elements above Iron.
Inflation also requires the universe to expand at extra luminal speeds early in its history.
Dark Energy and Dark Matter – both are because what we see in galaxy formation tells us that either the universe is much younger or there is enormous missing matter and or energy.
The big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have been subsequently been validated by observation.
There is a conundrum about the distance of stars and galaxies. Evolutionists speculate a universe of about 20 billion light years. They point out to the redshift of nearly all stars and galaxies as proof the universe is expanding and the stars and galaxies are moving away from us. Which also points out another conundrum on this expansion as if space itself is expanding then atoms would also be expanding as well as everything else. That is obviously not happening so we are left with questions. The stars and galaxies are not all within 7000 light years either as we would fry with the energy density if that was so.

So what is the answer?

Paul Davies the non-theist physicist recently published an article called “Black holes constrain varying constants, Nature418(6898):602-603, 8 August 2002. The gist of the article is this:

1. Already known: the fine structure constant a = 2ne 2 / hc, where e is the electronic charge and h is Planck’s Constant. Last year, there was a claim that a is increasing over time.

2. So if a is increasing is it due to and increasing e or a decreasing c?

3. The second law of thermodynamics is in force. The entropy of a black hole increases with the area of its event horizon (that’s if the standard formula applies with either varying c or e). Therefore the area cannot decrease unless the black hole’s environment has a corresponding entropy increase.

4. The key point: an increase in e would mean a reduction in the black hole’s area which would seem to violate the second law under the current formula. Increasing e would also lead to an increase of a black hole’s electric charge above the threshold value where the event horizon disappears and we are left with a naked singularity, and this would violate what is known as the cosmic censorship hypothesis.

5. But a decrease of c over time would lead to an increase in a black hole’s area, which is in line with the second law. So by process of elimination based on this theory about black hole thermodynamics, a tiny decrease in c is the right explanation for the tiny increase that was previously claimed for a over time.

Well that caused some consternation in physics circles, because the invariant c has become an icon and that icon is beginning to crack.

Barry Setterfield has a theory that time is slowing down since creation and has enormous implications for creation thought. Instead of me relating his theories to you, I’ll let you go to his site and see for yourself. Here it is, enjoy.
How old is the Universe?

Evolutionists need lots and lots of time for their scenario to at least have a remote chance. As we saw in the probability section even 20 billion years isn’t really enough. But is the Universe even 20 billion years old? There are lots if anomalies out there that question that very thing.

The missing Supernova Remnants.

I have taken this section out as I have found out the data was incorrect.



Strange Quasar – Galaxy Connections

According to the Big Bang theory quasars are super-luminous black holes at the very edge of the universe. They are a million or a hundred million times more massive than our sun and supposedly have a disk of surrounding material constantly falling into them releasing enormous energy in the process.

There is a ULX or ultra luminous X-ray quasar embedded in galaxy NGC 7319. The galaxy is 360 million light years away according to Hubble’s law of redshift. However the quasar is 100 times farther according to the same law. But according to the team of Geoffery Burbridge and Halton Arp the two are connected unmistakably together. Burbridge and Arp say that the galaxy is ejecting the quasar and there is a luminous cloud between them.

The Galaxy NGC 4319 and the quasar Markarian 205 are also connected in the same way. NGC 4319 is 107 million light yeas away and Markarian 205 is 12 times further. But they are also connected with a gas bridge.

Seyfert NGC 7319 and it ULX and NGC 4319 and Markarian 205 are two anomalies that we cannot ignore. The ejection from galaxies is rejected by the big bang community. This is because it hammers their key assumptions of the genesis of all matter at the big bang. It also calls into question many redshift distances determined by quasar redshifts.

Arp, H. Seeing red, redshifts, cosmology, and academic science, Aperion, Montreal, 1998; Arp, H. Quasars, redshifts and controversies, Interstellar Media, p. 34, Cambridge University Press, Berkeley, California, 1987; Arp, H. Companion galaxies: a test of the assumption that velocities can be inferred from redshift, Ap j 430: 74-82, 1994; Arp, H. The distribution of high-redshift (z>2) quasars near galaxies, ap j 525: 594 – 602, 1999; Arp, H. Catalogue of discordant Redshift Associations, Aperion, Montreal, 2003

What to Extrasolar Planets Tell us About Our Solar System?

About 100 planets orbiting other stars have been documented. Much hope has been pinned in finding another earth like planet orbiting another sun like star because then the evolutionists imaginations could run amuck with life appearing everywhere. But do these planets hold out any hope for the imaginations of the evolutionists? Hardly.

Sky & Telescope reported; “The new discoveries, like most of the previously know exoplanets, generally follow eccentric (enlongated) orbits and are closer to their stars than the gas giants in our solar system are to the sun.”

NewsNotes, The first exo-Jupiters, Sky & Telescope 104(3):20, 2002.

A statistical analysis of the Extrasolar planets verses our solar system will open our eyes. Some of the averages for the Extrasolar planets are:

Mean semimajor axis, a = 1.24 AU
Mean eccentricity, e = 0.274 (larger than Pluto’s e = 0.244, the most eccentric of our solar system.
Mean mass = 3.295 M_Jupiter. This is a minimum estimate not maximum.
The average values for our solar system are:

Mean semimajor axis, a = 11.902 AU
Mean eccentricity, e = 0.081
Mean Mass = 0.156 M_Jupiter.
The Extrasolar planets have much larger masses than our gas giants, they orbit much closer to the sun and greater orbital eccentricity that our planets. In fact they orbit much like a binary star system.

This raises the question of our solar system and its forming. According to the current theory the rocky inner planets were formed because the inner solar nebula was hot, while the outer regions of the solar system were cold, forming the gas giants.

It appears that the solar system is unique, though I know evolutionists will say, ‘we just haven’t found it yet”

Rapid Star Change Baffles Scientists

Evolutionary astronomers claim that normal stars like the sun evolve over millions or billions of years.

But Bengt Gustafsson at McDonald Observatory in Texas and Martin Saplund of the Uppsala Observatory in Sweden have observed a star called Sakurai’s Object in the constellation of Sagittarius.

In only a few years Sakurai’s Object has changed from a white dwarf about the size of the earth to a bright yellow supergiant 80 times wider than the sun. The diameter has expanded by a factor of 8000 and the volume by a factor of 500,000 million. The astronomers expressed great surprise at the speed at which this change occurred.

New Scientist 154 (2085):17, 7 June 1997: referring to Astronomy & Astrophysics 321: l17, 1997.

What About the Sun?

Atheists and evolutionists are fond of dismissing the sun as just a run-of-the-mill star, in a not-too-special place in the arm of a hum-drum galaxy. But nothing further from the truth could be imagined.

Our Special Star the Sun

The sun is in the top 10% (by mass) of stars in its neighborhood and is actually an ideal size to support life on earth. A red giant like Betelgeuse would have all the inner planets in it diameter. A blue white supergiant like Rigel would cook us with radiation 25,000 times as much as the sun. A much smaller star would not have enough energy to support life on earth and if the earth had to be closer to gain the needed energy, dangerous gravitational tides would exist.

The sun is a single star, whereas most stars are in multiple star formations. A planet in such a system would suffer from gravitational tides as well as wildly fluctuating temperatures. The sun’s position in our spiral galaxy is quite ideal. Its orbit is nearly circular, which keeps it from getting too near the galactic center where supernovas are more common. It also orbits almost parallel to plane, which keeps it from crossing the galactic plane which would be disruptive. Also the sun is ideal distance from the galactic center called the co-rotation radius. Only here does the star’s orbital speed match that of the spiral arms and thus keep it from crossing the arms and exposing it to supernovas. Chown, M., What a Star! New Scientist162(2192): 17, 1999.

Our sun is very powerful and throws out flares every few years, usually around sunspot maximum. Other violent ejections called coronal mass ejections cause huge electric currents in the earth’s upper atmosphere and can disrupt power grids and satellites. In fact in 1989, one disrupted a power grid in northern Quebec. But the sun is an exceptionally stable star. Three astronomers recently studied single stars of the same size, brightness and composition as the sun. Almost all of them erupt about once a century in superflares 100 to 100 million times more powerful than the one that blacked out Quebec. If the sun were to erupt in such a superflare it would destroy the ozone layer with catastrophic results for life. Siefe, C., Thank our lucky star, New Scientist161(2168): 15, 1999

Also life in globular or disk galaxies would not be possible for the energy densities in those galaxies would be too strong. Spiral galaxies are the only galactic shape where the sun could be in the arm as mentioned above and be able to sustain life. About 5% of the galaxies are spiral. Some speculate that there are quadrillions of planets out there where life could have started. They do this to try to increase the odds of life occurring somehow. If it is so remote on earth, they reason, then maybe with many more planets we can increase the chance.

First the though that there are quadrillions of planets out there is pure speculation. We have only seen about 200 extra solar planets and they are all gas giants, orbiting much too close to their suns. Knowing the narrow band of where life could exist in the universe would certainly limit the amount of planets out there that could support life.

Second the speculation that there are other planets where life could occur and thus increase the odds of life in the universe is a fundamental misunderstanding of probability. In statistics each probability has to stand on its own. If you flip a coin the chances are 50% to land a head and it is the same each time you flip. It doesn’t change. If the probability for life to occur is remote here it will be just as remote on some other planet. You cannot save evolution with such weak arguments as this.

The Faint Young Sun Paradox

Nuclear reactions power the sun. As the nuclear fuel is spent the sun’s core will shrink which would allow the reactions to occur more readily and thus cause the sun to shine more brightly over time.



But if the sun has been around the 3.8 to 4.6 billion years the evolutionists tell us then the sun should have been much fainter and cooler back then. In fact according to what we know now the sun should be about 25% brighter today than then. If that were true the earth would have been frozen at – 3 o C. But paleontologists say the earth was much warmer back then. The only way around this problem is to speculate on some massive greenhouse effect back then with about 1000 times more CO 2 in the atmosphere than today.



What Do the Planets in Our Solar System Tell Us?

Mercury the small planet with big problems, at least for evolution. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and one of the smallest. Pluto is smaller and Ganeymede of Jupiter and Titan of Saturn are both larger.

The side of the Mercury that faces the sun reaches a scorching temperature of 430 o C (hot enough to melt lead) and the dark side is a frigid -170 o. Mercury revolves around the sun every 88 days and rotates on its axis exactly three times for every to complete orbits.

So what is the “thing” about Mercury? One thing is that Mercury is that it has the highest density of all planets with the exception of Earth. It is so dense that it is thought that it has an iron core that occupies about 75% of its diameter. Evolutionary models say Mercury cannot be near as dense as it is. They assume a catastrophic event where another body his Mercury so hard that it blew off most of the lighter density material, leaving the heavy density iron core. They admit that if this or some other assumption did not occur Mercury disproves the long slow hypothesis of solar system formation. Taylor, S.R., Solar System Evolution: A New Perspective, Cambridge University Press, New York, p 194, 1992

Mercury has something else that the evolutionists wish it didn’t have. It has a magnetic field. But the iron core is frozen solid and according to the dynamo theory of planetary magnetic fields Mercury shouldn’t have one. So evolutionists have speculated that the core is iron sulfide that presumably would not be solid by now. Taylor, S.R., Destiny or Chance: our solar system and its place in the cosmos, Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 163, 1998.

But a core with high concentrations of sulfur so close to the sun undermines the nebular hypothesis of the evolutionists.

Venus also gives evolutionists headaches. Venus is the next planet to Mercury and Earth. It most like earth is size and composition but more closely resembles the middle ages description of hell.

Venus also pushes against the nebular hypothesis in that its nearly circular orbit is retrograde with all the other planets. Evolutionists tried to explain this away by saying Venus rotated prograde at first but had a “bulge” on which the gravitational tidal forces of Earth could act and turn the rotation around. Aside that the tidal forces decrease with the cube of the distance it is now known the Venus is even rounder than Earth and has no bulge.

The vastly different chemistry of the inner planets also speak difficulties into the nebular hypothesis in that the chemistry of the nebula would be very different if very small areas relatively speaking.

Venus has a magnetic field that is 25,000 times weaker than Earth, which is explained by evolutionists and their dynamo theory by saying that it much slower rotation of 243 days for one rotation. But Mercury rotates slowly (58.82 days) and has a magnetic field if nearly 5 times stronger than Venus. Mars rotates almost as fast as Earth and has a magnetic field that is less than 1/10,000 th of Earth’s.

Dr. Russell Humphreys, a creationist physicist, explains the magnetic fields this way. When all the planets were formed, they started off with a magnetic field produced by a decaying electrical current. The smaller the core and the poorer electrical conductor its material was, the faster the field would decay. Humphreys, D.R.., The earth’s magnetic field: Evidence that the Earth is young, Creation 21(3):140-149, 1984

Venus also has some surface features that point out a young surface. Mt. Maxwell is 36,000 feet above mean surface level. There are shield volcanoes, rift valleys including one 5,600 miles long, steep slopes, smooth plains. There are only 935 circular structures thought to be craters, far fewer that predicted by evolutionary time. Evolutionists propose that the whole surface has been worked over by plate tectonics and volcanic activity and ended some 300 -800 million years ago, yet 84% of the craters show no modifications. The evidence supports a much shorter time for the existence of Venus.

What about those gas giants out there?

Saturn’s rings have been seen as beautifully intricate, with rings within rings within rings. Their sharp edges and intricacies indicate they haven’t been around long.

Jupiter has enormous winds generated by energy from within. It is a mystery how Jupiter has retained this heat all these billions of years. Neptune even farter out has high winds generated by internal heat.

There are two moons of Saturn that do a very strange dance. Janus and Epimetheus orbit exceedingly close to each other. One moon gradually catches up to the other about every four years and when it does, they go through a brief period where the orbit each other and then trade orbits! This requires a very unlikely delicate relationship between mass, speed and distance. This relationship could not have gone on billions of years as the energy loss on each pass would eventually allow the moons to fall into Saturn.

There are many other things out there that make us scratch our heads. In fact Planetary Physicist David Stevenson, from Caltech said: “The most striking outcome of planetary exploration is the diversity of the planets” Another scientist said: “I’m surprised at the versatility of nature . . . you put together the same basic materials and get startling different results. No two are alike; it is like a zoo.” One planetary geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey said: “I wish it were not so, but I’m some what skeptical that we’re going to learn an awful lot about Earth by looking at other planetary bodies. The more we look at the different planets, the more each one seems unique.” Richard A. Kerr, ‘The Solar System’s New Diversity’, Science 265:1360, September 2, 1994.


The Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt

What to comets tell us about the age of the solar system? Two kinds of comet come into our solar system, short period (less than 200 years) and long period (greater than 200 years). If there is no way to keep feeding into both of these types of comets the solar system would have run out many years ago if the solar system is 4.6 billion years old.

To answer this conundrum for the old solar system the evolutionist astronomers have proposed two scenarios. The first is the Oort cloud which is a speculative cloud that lies outside of Pluto’s orbit to the distance of from 50,000 AU to 100,000 AU (1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun). The Oort cloud supplies all the long term comets that come into our solar system. It has been proposed that this cloud contains many billions of comet nuclei that are pushed out of the Oort cloud by the gravity of a passing star or some gravity tide and move into the inner solar system to eventually melt away.

But does the Oort cloud even exist? We don’t know and right now we have no way of knowing it is real. It is pure speculation. Many papers have been written about the Oort cloud and how it came into being, how it evolved etc. This is problematical that people would write such on a “speculative” subject. But let’s assume the Oort cloud does exist and assume that it started with the billions of comet nuclei. A recent study has revealed a new problem with this situation. During the formation of the solar system the comet nuclei were sent out to the Oort cloud region by the gravity of the newly formed planets. The new study took into account the collisions between the nuclei and found that most of the comets would have been destroyed by the collisions and only left a mass of nuclei of about one Earth rather than the 40 Earths originally speculated. The researchers desperately postulated some escape holes, but could only come up with enough nuclei for 3.5 Earths.

Sagan, C. and Druyan, A., Comets, Random House, New York, p. 201, 1985. Stern, S.A. and Weismann, P.R., Rapid collisional evolution of comets during the formation of the Oort cloud, Nature409(6820):589-591, 2001.

The Kuiper belt is the place from where all the short period comets are thought to be replaced. It lies about 30 AU to 100 AU out just beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is thought that the planetary gravitational interactions from the planets cause them to leave the belt and wander into the inner solar system to die.

Astronomers have discovered a number of small objects beyond Neptune and have claimed to have discovered the Kuiper Belt. They are called Kuiper Belt Objects appropriately or KBO. The first of these were discovered in 1992 and many more have been discovered since then. We creationists are not surprised that more objects have been found from Neptune to beyond the orbit of Pluto. But to date only several hundred of the KBO have been discovered, but there should be several billion of these objects if the solar system is very old.

It should be noted that the KBO discovered are many times larger than a comet nuclei, on the order of 100 to 500 times larger. This calls into question if these are actually KBO. Indeed many astronomers call them TNO or Trans Neptune Objects. Many of these TNO are binary orbiting objects and even Pluto and its moon Charon may be just TNO.

The question of the comets is still out for debate

Beatty, J.K., Asteroid Chasers are Seeing Double, Sky and Telescope.

Psalms 19:1

1 The heavens are telling of the glory of God;

And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.



Well we now come to an end of the Astronomy section. I simple could not write all I researched but I think I brought enough questions. Creation scientists are working to do predictive science based on their work and that is very good.



Remember to always speak through truth, grace and love.



Reason Number 7
Paleontology is not Evolution’s Friend

One of the most important areas to look forensically for evidence of evolution or creation is the fossil record. We have had over 150 years since Darwin proposed his theory. What has the record shown?

How important do the evolutionists think the fossil record is?

“The most direct evidence that evolution has occurred is presented in the study of the fossils.” W. Stephenson, Zoology, p. 249
“The gradual development of life revealed by the fossil record has been called evolution.” Biological Science – The Web of Life, Student book, p.885, 3rd Edition, 1981.
Fossils help to build up a connected story of the past and show the parade of life through the ages.” F.T. Barrell, Modern Science for Second Year, p.43, 2nd Edition, 1971.
“Our knowledge of the history of life stems largely from the study of the fossils.” Biological Science – The Web of Life, Student Manuel, p.289, 9th Edition, 1981.
“One of the main lines of investigation that reveals the time course of past evolution is paleontology, the study of fossils.” Paul B. Weisz, The Science of Biology, p. 551, 4th Edition, 1911.


So it appears that the evolutionists think that the fossil record is pretty important and that it actually shows the footsteps of evolution so to speak. Well, let us look at the fossil record and see it this be true.

The nature of the fossil record that has been found

95% of the fossils found consist of shallow marine organisms (e.g. corals and shellfish)
Of the remaining 5%, 95% are all the algae and plant / tree fossils (including the ones in coal) and all the other invertebrate fossils. (e.g. Insects)
5% of the 5% or 0.25% of the entire fossil record are vertebrate fossils (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals)
Only 1% of this 0.25% (or 0.0025%) of the entire fossil record are vertebrate fossils that consist of more than a single bone. (e.g. there are only 2100 dinosaur skeletons in all the worlds museums.
Now don’t get me wrong, we have found millions of fossils, but of those we would consider more that just a curiosity we have very few. Especially troublesome to the evolutionists are the gaps and holes in the fossil record that they cannot explain.

The Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian Explosion is “Evolutionary biology’s deepest paradox” is what professor Levinton said in Scientific American in his article “The Big Bang of Animal Evolution. Scientific American, November, 1992, pp.52-59.

Cambrian rocks are a system of fossil bearing rocks thought to be nearly 600 million years to about 500 million years. This is considered by the evolutionist to be the first system of multicelled organisms that proliferated. The only multicelled organism in the Precambrian is the Ediacaran group which are considered an evolutionary dead end. The only other organisms in the Precambrian are single celled organisms.

But in the Cambrian there was an “explosion” of life. In fact every phyla represented today are in the Cambrian. There were 26 phyla in the Cambrian and all those phyla have not changed at all to this date. The Echinoderma, the Mollusca, the Arthropoda and the Chordata are no different today than there were in the Cambrian rocks.

Creationists have long pointed out that a major issue for evolution is that all the major groups or phyla of life which we know today appear in the Cambrian with no evolutionary ancestors. They all seem to have appeared suddenly and simultaneously.

However the deepest conundrum that professor Levinton mentions in the above article is that in the rock layers above the Cambrian there are no new or different body plans appearing. What we have in the Cambrian appears to be fixed through all the succeeding layers of rock. This fact supports the creation model far better than the evolution model. According to the evolutionary theory there should be innumerable new body plans appearing in the fossil records as enormous and radical changes are needed for the amoeba to man postulate to be true.

Professor Leviton, a professor of Ecology and Evolution at the State University, is amazed that the fossil record does not show evolution in the light of his experiments of supposed rapid evolutionary change in aquatic worms resistance to toxic cadmium in “only” three generations.
But once you take off the evolutionary presuppositions the supposed paradox vanishes. This is one of the fundamental misunderstandings between creationists and evolutionists. I spoke about it in the introduction as well. Microevolution is not evolution! Many who do not understand simple genetics think that billions of microevolution changes eventually add up to a macro evolutionary change and that is not true.

What the experiment was: Worms from a cadmium free site were exposed to a site with cadmium laden sediments. Some worms survived and they were bred with other survivors and in three generation they had a worm population that was cadmium resistant.

But the only worms that survived the site with the cadmium laden sediments were worms that already had a resistant allele. They bred those together and reinforced the resistant allele and created a population of worms all with the resistant allele. That is not evolution! The allele already existed in the genome and was merely selected out. We do the same with dogs and cats etc. in selected breeding. This type of breeding does not add any new information to the genome that is not already there. This is not a new species of worm!

Problems with the Fossil Record

If the fossils are a true record of the evolutionary process then they ought to reflect that process. There should be a clear increase of complexity and plenty of fossils that show transition between species. But does the fossil record show that?

The fossil record does not show an increasing complexity. Evolutionist Dan McShea of the University of Michigan had approached this question in a detailed study of the backbones of creatures that evolutionists believe represent ancestor – descendant pairs. He wanted to see if the ‘descendant’ was more complex than the ‘ancestor’ on the average for each case. What he found was no trend at all. Other scientists studied the shells of ammonoids, a spiral shelled creature, to see if apparently related types got more complex higher in the rock strata and found there was absolutely no trend. Creationists would expect this result of these studies. McShea said: “Everybody knows that organisms get more complex as they evolve. The only trouble with what everyone knows is that there is no evidence it’s true.” L. Oliwenstein, ‘Onward and Upward?’, Discover magazine, June 1993, p 22 ff.

Those Pesky Transitional Fossils

Charles Darwin worried that the fossil record did not show what his postulate predicted when he stated: “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 is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” C. Darwin, Origin of Species, 6th ed. 1872 (London: John Murray, 1902), p 413

The late Stephen J. Gould, an ardent evolutionist and Marxist, said this about the fossil record: “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.” S.J. Gould, Evolution’s Erratic Pace, Natural History 86(5): 14, 1977.
Gould later stated: “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary states between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediated in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” S.J. Gould, in Evolution Now: A Century after Darwin, ed. John Maynard Smith, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1982)
Again Gould said: “I regard the failure to find a clear ‘vector of progress’ in life’s history as the most puzzling fact of the fossil record.” S.J. Gould, The Ediacaran Experiment, Natural History 93(2): 14-23, Feb. 1984

The late Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. A reader sent him a letter questioning him why he had not presented any transitional forms and in reply he wrote: “I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them …. I will lay it on the line – there is not one fossil which one could make a watertight argument.” C. Paterson, letter to Luther D. Sutherland, 10 April 1979, as published in Darwin’s Enigma (Green Forest AR: Master Books, 4th ed. 1988), p. 89

But evolutionists bravely persist in saying that there a many examples of transitional fossils. “Actually, paleontologists know of many detailed examples of fossils intermediate in form between various taxonomic groups” (Scientific American 1983)

What transitional fossils are they talking about? Well they consistently point our all the same old tired examples.

Bird Evolution

Probably the most famous fossil in bird evolution is Archaeopteryx which according to evolutionists combined feathers and skeletal features of dinosaurs. But was Archaeopteryx an intermediate or just a bird?
Archaeopteryx had fully formed flying feathers (including asymmetric vanes and ventral reinforcing furrows as in modern flying birds. It had a large wishbone for attachment of muscles responsible for the down stroke of wings.
Its brain was essentially that of a flying bird with a large cerebellum and visual cortex.
The fact that it had teeth is irrelevant to its alleged transitional status as a number of extinct birds had teeth, while many reptiles do not.
Furthermore, like other birds, both it maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible (lower jaw) moved. In most vertebrates including reptiles, only the mandible moves.
Finally Archaeopteryx skeleton has pneumatized vertebrae and pelvis. This indicates the presence of both a cervical and abdominal air sac, or at least two of the five sacs present in modern birds. The air sacs in turn indicate that the unique avian lung design was already present in what most evolutionists claim is the earliest bird. A. Fedduccia, Evidence from Claw Geometry Indicating Arboreal Habits of Archaeopteryx, Science 259(5096): 790 – 703, 5th February 1993. P. Christiansen and N. Bonde, Axial and Appendicular Pheumaticity in Archaeopteryx, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B. 267:2501 – 2505, 2000.

“Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth – bound, feathered dinosaur. But it’s not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of ‘paleobabble’ is going to change that.” Cited in V. Morell, Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms, Science 259(5069): 764 – 65, 5 February 1993.

More trouble for dinosaur – bird evolution.

Scientific American published a 10 page cover story in the March 2003 edition, pages 83 – 93. In it the authors Richard Prum and Alan Brush propose a new paradigm for bird evolution and propose abandoning the problem racked dinosaur – bird evolution. They state in the opening two paragraphs: “How did these incredibly strong, wonderfully lightweight, amazingly intricate appendages evolve? . . . Although evolutionary theory provides a robust explanation for the appearance of minor variations in the size and shape of creatures and their component parts, it does not yet give as much guidance for understanding the emergence of entirely new structures, including digits, limbs, eyes and feathers.”

Well some honesty at last, this is what creationists have been saying for years. Evolutionists have made such dogmatic claims of the absolute proof of evolution and now they say, well it may be a little more complex than we thought.

They say that the feathers from scales paradigm is false. They said that they believe evolutionists had made a false ‘assumption that the primitive feather evolved by elongation and division of the reptilian scale.’ But the say they have ‘a new appreciation’ of what the modern feather is and how it develops.

The feather is a skin appendage, like hair, that grows as a unique hollow tube from a follicle by the controlled proliferation of cells in a ring. Pennaceous (rigid, non-downy) feathers have an even more complex development, where barb ridges grow helically (spirally) inside the follicle, and meet to form the rachis (shaft) ridge. Then the feather emerges from the sheath and unfurls to its planar shape. And to make the barbs lock together, each barb has a branching pattern very similar to the rachis and barbs. That is, the main shaft of the barb, the ramus, has a branching pattern of barbules (‘little barbs’). In turn, the tips of the barbules have a tiny hooklets that fit into grooves on adjacent barbules. This enables the feather to form a stiff vane, and if it is ruffled, the bird merely has to preen it and it will lock back into shape.
Obviously this has no similarity to scales, and so early evolutionary theorists were hampered by the ‘lack of primitive fossil feathers,’ at least until some of the more recent finds since Archaeopteryx. Bush refutes the scales to feathers transition in his article “On the origin of feathers, Journal of Evolutionary Biology 9: 131 – 142, 1996.

This debunking of evolutionists views should be an embarrassment but the authors blithely move on to their thesis called evolutionary developmental biology or ‘evo-devo’. According to ‘evo-devo’ ‘the complex mechanisms by which an individual organism grows to its full size and form can provide a window into the evolution of a species anatomy.’ In other words they say, that by looking at the stages of feather development in a bird today, we can look for ‘ancient’ dinosaurs that had feathers similar to that stage of development. They say that ‘Feathers originated and diversified in carnivorous, bipedal theropod dinosaurs before the origin of birds or the origin of flight.’ That is their ‘revolutionary’ answer to the feather question. Humm! Looks like we made a circle back to the beginning.

Anyway their theory has many ungrounded assumptions and unsupported conclusions.

Archaeopteryx, which has been shown as a fully formed bird has been dated as evolving before many of the dinosaurs with allegedly primitive feathers.
The Archaeoraptor hoax from China in 1999 caused a cloud of “faked fossil’ that hangs over everything coming out of China.
Similarity of design is not an indicator of similar history. Similarity of design could have just as well been explained as good engineering design deserves reuse.
They are still not away from the scale to feather problem
They say that their new idea ‘proposes that feathers evolved through a series of transitional stages, each marked by a developmental novelty, a new mechanism of growth. But show no real proof of this concept.
But they also point out that the development sequence is precisely controlled by a sequence of expression of two other genes, one which encourages cell proliferation and another which regulates this proliferation and promotes cell differentiation. This is yet another layer of genetic information required to form feathers, which is lacking in reptiles.
This claim that the sequence of feather development parallels the evolutionary sequence smacks of Ernst Haeckel’s embryonic recapitulation fraud. (I’ll have more on him later.)
Our knowledge about the real nature of these feathers is too sketchy to draw such confident conclusions about a continuous scale of dinosaurs from so – called ‘primitive’ symmetrical downy feathers to asymmetrical ‘flying feathers.’ Even the co – author Bush previously said about Sinosauropteryx, ‘The stiff, bristle like fibers that outline the fossils lack the detailed organization seen in modern feathers. (cited in: Gibbons, A., ‘Plucking the Feathered Dinosaur’, Science 278(5341: 1230, 14 November 1997)
The attempts to differentiate types of feathers is highly artificial and incomplete. They admit they have not found any clues – even with ‘evo-devo’ to help them explain the transition from a loose downy feather to asymmetrical feathers with vanes. Their own illustration of the five states of feather development has a question mark beside stage 3, the critical point between to major classes of feathers.

The author admit that their approach raises basic questions about the definition of birds and feathers to begin with. They really don’t answer any of those questions either.

Tetrapod Evolution Fact or Fancy?

The Tetrapod according to evolution thought is the first fish to walking and land dwelling organisms. The Tetrapod is thought to have been forced out of its ecological niche in the Devonian area in the classic “warm pond” idea. It is thought that the red rocks, rich in iron oxides, portrayed a time of drought and desertification. Thus the Tetrapods were forced out of the pond and out onto the surface of the land. They “developed” legs and hands with fingers and became land dwellers.
In the increasing dryness the air-bladder of the fish became the new lungs of the Tetrapod and the gills atrophied and disappeared. The lobed fins of certain fished became legs with feet and digits to better travel between the warm ponds.

That makes for interesting reading and most people of a lay or semi scientific background would say “sounds good to me!” Notwithstanding the incredible about of new information that needed to come through random mutations and the massive amount of time for that to occur. Well it is not exactly true and the fossil record simply does not support such a story.

The lobed finned fish from which the Tetrapods supposedly came included the Coelacanths (who are still hanging around today) Sauripteris, Osteolepis and Eusthenopteron. Eventually the Eusthenopteron won out but the substantial discontinuity between it an Ichthyostega Tetrapod was huge. Evolutionists began looking for other Tetrapods and the missing links. But the evolutionist R.L. Carroll wrote: “We have not found any fossils that are intermediate between such terrestrial animals and the strictly aquatic rhipidistians described in the previous chapter.” R.L. Carroll, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, p.158, 1988
The Taxons Pederpes, Sinostega, Tulerpeton, Vantastega, Acantostega, Hynerpeton, Densighathus, Metaxygnathus, Elginerpeton, and Obruchevichtys were added to the lists, but the drying ponds concept was meeting with though times. The final blow to the drying pond hypothesis was when it was realized that the Devonian Tetrapods were predominately aquatic in nature.

This was found out when new Ichthyostegid material, including a well preserved articulated hind limb. The hind foot was found to have seven digits that were very flattened and with an inflexible ankle bone. The hind foot resembled the paddle of an elephant seal that a terrestrial walker. Acanthostega fossils were found also throwing this former terrestrial Tetrapod back into the pond.

The drying pond also collapsed from the understanding that the red beds were not necessarily due to arid climates but could also be of a monsoonal climate like the lower Amazon River basin.

Not to one to give up the evolutionists dropped the Eusthenopteron and focused on two more obscure lobed finned fish, Panderichtys and Elpistostege. Both of these fish exhibited characteristics of Tetrapods. In fact they looked more like a “mosaic” animal than a link. Stephen Gould’s term is “mosaic forms’ or ‘chimeras’ while Kurt Wise calls them ‘chimeromorphs’. But they are animals like the duck-billed platypus that has characteristics of both mammals and reptiles.

In fact the lobed finned fish and the Tetrapods are both ‘mosaic forms’ and don’t really posses the right combination of characters to be considered part of an evolutionary lineage. The fish both have some unique characteristics (such as design of the vertebrae) that rule them out as a Tetrapod ancestor.

Other Tetrapod Evolution Problems

1. The fossil record imposes a tight constraint on the timing of the supposed transition.

“Panderichthys and Elpistostege flourished in the early Frasnian and are to of the nearest neighbors of Tetrapods. But Tetrapods appear only about 5 – 10 million years later in the late Frasnian, by which time they were widely distributed and had evolved into several groups, including the lineage leading to the Tetrapods of the Famennian. This suggests that the transition from fish to Tetrapod occurred rapidly within this restricted time span.” Clack, J.A., Gaining Ground: The Origin and Evolution of Tetrapods, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, p. 96, 2002

2. The key morphological transitions, such as the purported change from paired fins to limbs with digits, remain undocumented in the fossil record. This is just one of the morphological transitions that must be documented.

3. There are severe functional challenges to the Darwinian interpretations as well. For an example in fish the head, shoulder girdle, and circulatory systems for a single mechanical unit. But in the amphibians the head is not attached to the shoulder girdle in order to allow terrestrial feeding and locomotion. Evolutionists must suppose how the head became detached in increments from the shoulder girdle with functional intermediated all along the way, and not with just minimally functional but highly functional, otherwise no gene transfer. Evolutionists have of course not been able to answer this question.

A Whale of a Tale

Much discussion about a whale with legs out of Pakistan has hit the airwaves and magazines. But the evolutionary whale hypothesis is probably one of the more fanciful stories and an interesting read. Supposedly a four legged that looked like a long snouted leopard called the Mesonychid decided to take to the water for food. In that process his back legs atrophied and his front legs shrank a bit and gained webbed feet and became an Ambulocetus. Further streamlining and atrophying the Rodhocetus came into being and sometime further down the road a very whale like Basilosaurus started swimming around.

Here is a picture of the sequence that is used to teach this story of schools. But the picture and story fails to show the serious problems with this series. One problem is Basilosaurus is about 10 times longer than the Amblulocetus. Another problem is that the Basilosaurus cannot be the ancestor to modern whales because of body shape, skull structure and tooth shape.

Thewissen, Hassain, and Arif in the article “Fossil evidence for the origin of aquatic locomotion if Archeocete whales” claims to have found evidence that the Ambulocetus was a walking whale. And what was that evidence? A very partial skeleton with a partial skull and lover mandible, six cervical and upper thoracic vertebrae four ribs, a fore arm with digits, and a foot with digits were all found in one level. In another level five meters above a mid thoracic vertebra, one caudal vertebra and one femur. From the Thewissen and the others concluded that the Ambulocetus was a “walking” whale. Notice there was no scapula and no pelvic girdle and not enough caudal vertebrae to determine proper muscle attachment. More fanciful thinking from the world of wonder of the Paleontologist. Science 263:210 – 212, 1994.

There are five suggested features to unite whales:

1. All incisors parallel with the tooth row – not preserved in Ambulocetes
2. Medial lambdoidal crest semicircular - not preserved in Ambulocetes
3. Nasals retracted – rostrum (snout) not preserved in Ambulocetes
4. Protocones small (features of teeth)
5. Accessory cusps large (features of teeth)
Prothero, D., Manning, E.M. and Fischer, M., 1988, In: The Phylogeny and Classification of Tetrapods, M.J. Benton (ed), Clarendon, Oxford, Vol. 2, pp. 201 – 234.

As can be seen we firstly don’t know if Ambulocetes was truly ambulatory and second we don’t even know if Ambulocetes was even a whale or even an ancestor to a whale.

Now through another Paleontologist we can see that another creature called the Pakicetus is a walking whale. Gingerich discovered the cranial bones of a wolf like creature in Pakistan that he claimed had an inner ear like a whale. That conclusion is at best questionable, but there were not any more post cranial bones found and we don’t know how this creature got around. But that didn’t stop Gingerich from publishing an article showing his creature splashing into the sea and swimming to catch fish.
P. Gingerich, The Whales of Tethys, Natural History (April 1994)” p. 86.

But now molecular scientists have entered the fray and said that following the molecules that there is a very different ancestor to the whale. “Until now paleontologists thought whales had evolved from Mesonychians, and extinct group of land-dwelling carnivores, while molecular scientists studying DNA were convinced they descended from artiodactyls (even towed ungulates). Gingerich said ‘The Paleontologists, and I am one of them, were wrong.’” Fossil Finds Show Whales Related to Early Pigs, Reuters, 19 September 2001,

It is amazing where presupposition will lead you when you don’t even know it.

Horse Evolution

In books and museums there is almost always portrayed one of the supposed “key” proofs of evolution the horse series. In a beautifully laid out picture showing the tiny Eohippus or the ‘dawn horse’ with a larger creature like the three toed Mesohippus and then to a larger still Merychippus, which has two toes and then finally to the modern Equus with one toe. There are also diagrams showing trends in tooth changes, showing an increasing hypsondonty (high-crowned teeth) to supposedly show a change in browse from bushes to grasslands. But is it all true and as clear as the pictures and diagrams show?
Hardly!

The ‘Dawn Horse’ or Eohippus was discovered in 1841 by Richard Owen, one of the leading paleontologists of the day. Owen saw no relation to the horse but thought the creature was more like the modern day hyrax or rock badger or coney, so he named it Hyracotherium. In 1879 the American paleontologist O.C. Marsh and T.H. Huxley (known as Darwin’s bulldog) put the Hyracotherium in the horse series as the Eohippus and established the whole horse series as a ‘proof’ of evolution.

The biologist Heribert-Nilsson said, “The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks”. Heribert-Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung, Gleerup, Sweden, Lund University 1954; cited in Luther Sunderland, Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, 4th Ed., Master Books, Santee, CA, p. 81, 1988.

As stated above the horse fossils are not so linear in the fossil record. For instance the three toed Neohipparion and the one toed Pliohippus were found in the same strata in north-eastern Oregon indicating they were living at the same time. S. Nevins, Creation Research Society Quarterly 10:196, 1974
In North America the three toed and the one toed horses lived together at the same time. In Nebraska there is a remarkable deposit of fossils where over 200 nearly complete fossils were found. Voorhies, the paleontologist who made the find believed they all died at the same time in the ash cloud from a volcano. Among other fossils there were five species of horse: Pseudhipparion gratum, Cormohipparion occidentale, Protohippus supremus, Astrohipus, Neohipparion, and Dinohippus. The Dinohippus varieties included a mix of tridactyl and monodactyl horses. McFadden said: “The discovery of an exquisitely preserved population of primitive Dinohippus (Pliohippus of Voorhies 1981) from Ashfall Fossil Beds in northeastern Nebraska . . . suggests that some individuals were tridactyl, whereas others were monodactyl (Voorhies 1981). Although that also may have been the case for other primitive equine species previously though to have been exclusively monodactyl.”
“Thus there were at least three different adaptive groups of fossil horses with diverse postcranial morphologies that coexisted during the middle and the late Miocene. The architeres retained the primitive tridactyl foot structure, including the digital pad. The advanced three toed horses evolved the unguligrade foot that in many ways was adaptively similar to the monodactyl forms. Finally, the monodactyl horses arose during that time, with locomotory complex that also occurred later in Equus.” M. Voorhies and J.R. Themasson, Science 206:331-333 (1979): Bruce J. McFadden, Fossil Horses (Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 73, 255, 257.

So we have a ‘primitive’ three toed horse, an ‘advanced’ three toed horse and a one toed horse all in the same bed having died together. Yet the horse series purports to inform us that the primitive three toed horse evolved into the advanced three toed horse who then evolved into the one toed horse. Seems a little out of sync doesn’t it. The fossil record as we find more and more does not support the horse evolution series.

Hominid Evolution or Paleoanthropology

Hominid evolution has been the most fanciful and most rife with hoaxes and scams of all the hypothesis presented before. Paleontology in hominid evolution pulls out all the stops and tries to stuff the proverbial fifteen pounds of manure into the ten pound bag.

One of the main issues facing paleoanthropologists today is the paucity of hominid fossils. Many researchers have never seen an actual fossil, but have only seen copies or even copies of copies or even worse had to rely on descriptions in literature. Casts of the fossils are available for researchers to examine, but the cast process leaves much to be desired as when in the 1984 American Museum exhibition of original fossils, the casts were used to prepare the mounts for the fossils to be exhibited. But when they attempted to mount the original fossils to the mounts most didn’t fit and the mounts had to be reworked. Thus paleoanthropologists are a group of scientists who are removed from their subject matter by several iterations.

Paleoanthropologists are masters at the “begging the question” modus operendi of evolutionists. They assume evolution, and thus make the evidence fit it. For instance they are prone to line up skulls in an “evolutionary” sequence. But that doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t prove that one skull was the ancestor of any other skull. Those are facts we simply have no way of knowing.

The Hall of Hoaxes

Neanderthal Man
Marcellin Boule in 1908 discovered a nearly complete skeleton of Neanderthal type that was buried ritualistically in the floor of a small cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. Boule examined the skeleton and made the following observations.
The features were simian and apish and not human.
The spine lacked the curve that would allow Neanderthal to walk upright
Boule placed the head in an unbalanced position on the neck so Neanderthal could not look at the sky.
Boule decided that Neanderthal could not extend his legs fully and thus walked in a bent-knee gait.
Boule placed a wide gap between the great toe and the other toes to make the foot more resemble a simian foot.
Boule believed that Neanderthal was closer to apes than man in brainpower and could not talk beyond grunts.
Boule believed that Neanderthal was a dead end of evolution.

Boule ignored the pathological features in the bones that showed a severe case of deformed bones due to arthritis and rickets. In fact if the man were to try to walk in the way Boule arranged the bones he would have fallen on his face because his center of gravity was place so far forward. Boule also ignored the cranial capacity of Neanderthal was 200 cc greater that modern Homo Sapiens.

Today Boule’s assertions seem out of place with the tall, erect Neanderthals that are in Museums today. But Boule was world renown for his abilities and his assertions were fully in line with evolutionary thought of his day and today. During Boule’s time the ‘brutish” caveman was widely being used to prove evolution. The supposed “self correcting” feature of evolutionary though took a bit long to correct here.


Piltdown Man
Charles Dawson was an amateur geologist and solicitor for the Crown in England. Digging in a gravel pit in 1911 a worker discovered a human skull (parietal) and gave it to Dawson. Dawson showed the skull to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the pantheistic evolutionary theology initiator and they both went fossil hunting in the pit. A elephant molar was found then the lower jaw of Piltdown man was found. The skull was modern and well formed and the jaw was primitive. This caused quite a stir in evolutionary circles and quite a debate raged and even many evolutionists were skeptical. But in 1915 in another pit (location still unknown I believe) exact pieces came to light that confirmed the authenticity of Piltdown man.

It wasn’t until 1953 that the hoax was discovered. The skull was a modern skull and the jaw was an orangutan jaw bone that had been placed in the pit and darkened to make it look old. In fact the jaw had been extensively modified to make it look more human with file marks readily visible. Some stone tools, purported to belong to Piltdown man were also late arrivals and darkened to look old. Self-correcting science finally found the hoax, but only after Piltdown man lead the evolutionary charge for 38 years.

We won’t go into Nebraska man, nor Java man nor Peking man as all are shameful hoaxes that were not corrected at the time of the hoax, but used to rally the faithful and pronounce the supposed “truth” of evolution for many years.

Recent Finds or is Lucy Really a Lady?

You remember all the hype, Australopithecus afarensis, dear old Lucy was said to be the “missing link” of human evolution. Bones scattered miles apart became the latest scheme to boost the concept of evolution. Lucy was thought to have walked upright, despite the evidence from CAT scans of the organ of balance that indicated it did not. Now there is molecular evidence that show Australopithecines are not human ancestors but chimp ancestors! That means that man came from upright walking and ground living and into the trees with chimp walking.
New Scientist 153(2075:18, 29 March 1997.

It now turns out that a new “missing link” has removed Lucy from her perch, or maybe moved her into her perch rather. It is Kenyanthropus platyops. His name is KNM-WT 40000, not to romantic, but who cares as he can now be the new savior of hominid evolution that has really taken in on the chin recently. What about this “upright walking” specimen of virility? Oops, well maybe he doesn’t exactly walk upright and has the cranial capacity of a chimpanzee, but because of the driving evolutionary pressure Kenyanthropus would just be another skeleton of a dead chimpanzee.

Well the Australopithecines are all now in discredit and are now just monkeys and Kenyanthropicines, just more of the same, are ruling. You see Paleoanthropologists make assumption on top of assumptions. They have no diagnostic tools, no methodological formula and not genetic technique to make the assumption that all these monkey bones are human ancestor, they just wish it so and viola it is.

Dr. David Pilbeam in an article he wrote for Nature Magazine, June 1978, entitled ‘Rearranging Our Family Tree’, stated that discoveries since 1976 had shaken his view of human origins and force a change in ideas of man’s early ancestors. He stated that he no longer believed he would be able to hit upon the true or correct story of the origin of man. He repeated several times that our theories have clearly reflected our current ideologies instead of the actual data. Too often they have reflected only what we expected of them.

What Are They Thinking?

Paleontology and especially Anthropaleontology are rife with fuzzy thinking and this story wins the prize for evolutionary fiction. Paleontologist Dan Gebo of Northern Illinois University reported the finding of a “missing link” between lower and higher primates. They reported their research in the Journal of Human Evolution (London) April, 2000.

They found the fossil in tons of muddy rubbish from a limestone quarry 100 miles west of Shanghai. The limestone was dated as Triassic rock some 220 million years old. This was much too old for primates as it was supposed to be right at the age of the beginning of the dinosaurs, so they assigned the fossil to a more acceptable 45 million years because the limestone had some “fissures” that dated to that age.

The article “Researchers Discover Fossils of Tiny, Thumb – Length Primates?” goes on to quote: “The researchers say the tiny primates were tree dwellers that relied on a steady diet of insects, fruit and nectar to fuel their high metabolisms. Unlike contemporary higher primates, the tiny primates were nocturnal and solitary creatures.”

“The implications are staggering’ Gebo said. ‘You would think that early higher primates would have a lot of characteristics of later higher primates, which were social creatures that occupied a daytime niche. It probably means we’re getting close to the transition between higher and lower primates.’”

The bones the researchers were excited about were a few heel bones of the primates that were about the size of a grain of rice. What is truly staggering here is the fantasy made up by Gebo based on such flimsy evidence. This is wishful thinking on a flight of fancy. How did he “know” all this evidence? He wanted it to be so to support his evolutionary ideas and he looked at it all through his evolutionary glasses.

This is not an isolated incident. Paleontology is rife with such leaps of logic, false deductions and wishful thinking.


Reason Number 8
Radiometric Dating is not Evolution’s Friend

Radiometric dating is a very plausible and understandable premise. In fact many good dates can come from it if the data is interpreted correctly. But with some technical issues and the evolution world view pressure radiometric dating is part of the propaganda of the evolutionists that is not friendly to evolution.

What is Radiometric Dating?
Radiometric dating is based on the premise that there are radioactive isotopes in nature that decay at a regular rate from the parent element to the daughter element. If we know three things we can use them to date items that contain those isotopes.
The original concentration of the parent isotope.
The concentration of the daughter element or isotope
The beta decay rate

For instance all living things contain carbon-14, or 14C, or radio carbon that decays to normal carbon 12C. 14C decays to 12C at a particular rate defined as half-life. One half-life of 14C is 5,730 years or half of the 14C is 12C in that amount of time. In 11,460 years another half will be gone leaving only a quarter of the 14C and so on. Because of the speed of 14C decay rate the range of dates that can be derived before any detectable 14C is left, is about 50,000 years. Anything over that has a bit of speculation built in.

There are other radiometric dating methods too. For example potassium-40 decays to argon-40; uranium-238 decays to lead-206 via other elements like radium; uranium-235 decays to lead-207; rubidium-87 decays to strontium-87; etc. All these methods are used in igneous rocks and are normally given as the time since solidification.

But these methods are not as infallible as the evolutionists would have us think. Let us look again at the three things we need to know to set a date.

The original concentration of the parent isotope. We must know how much of the parent was originally there and that there was no parent injected in during the time we are measuring.
The daughter concentration must not be compromised by an injection of daughter element or isotope during the time line.
The decay rate must be constant.

But evidence proves that all these assumption are fraught with error. It is well know that argon gas does intrude into igneous rock and skew dates in the most popular K-Ar dating method. In fact all the parent and daughter elements are water soluble and are known to leach into and out of igneous rocks thus potentially skewing the dates derived from their ratios.

Some Dating Games

Evolutionists do play with the figures at times too. When a radiometric “date” is out of line with their premise it is rejected and another found. For instance, researchers applied posterior reasoning to the dating of Australopithecus ramidus fossils. Most samples of basalt closest to the fossil bearing strata give dates of 23 Ma or 23 million years by the argon-argon method. The authors decided that was ‘too old’, according to their beliefs about the place of fossils in their evolutionary scheme. So they looked at some basalt further removed from the fossils and selected 17 of 26 samples to get a more acceptable maximum age of 4.4 Ma. The other samples gave much older dates but the authors decided they must have been contaminated and discarded them.
G. WoldeGabriel et al., ‘Ecological and Temporal Placement of Early Pliocene Hominids at Aramis, Ethiopia,’ Nature, 371:330-333, 1994

One could question their assumptions and ask if the 17 samples they used for the dates they wanted were the compromised samples and the ones the discarded because they had the ‘wrong’ dates were actually the ‘good’ dates. It is form of tautology to get a fossil you assume to be at 4.4 Ma and then select a radiometric date that corresponds to the date you want and then claim the date your assumed is true from the radiometric data!

There is a similar story around the primate skull known as KNM-ER 1470. The radiometric dates from surrounding basalt started with an initial 212 to 230 Ma, which according to the fossils was far off the mark as “humans weren’t around then’. After various attempts to find rock that would yield lower dates a date of 2.9 Ma was accepted due to an agreement between several different published studies although those studies also had ‘good’ and ‘bad’ dates just like the original study of KNM-ER 1470.

Later from some work with some pig fossils in Africa, evolutionists became convinced that the 2.9 Ma for KNM-ER 1470 was too ‘old’. Further studies of the rocks brought the age down to 1.9 Ma and those studies now ‘confirmed’ the new dates. Circular reasoning at its best my friends!
M. Lubenow, The Pigs Took It All, Creation 17(3):36-38, 1995

But you have to say that the evolutionists are not really conscience that they are involved in a tight tautology here, they are letting their presumptions lead them rather than the data. This is very common in radiometric dating methods and paleontology.

Mt. Ngauruhoe in New Zealand’s northern Island is the most active volcano in New Zealand. It is thought to have been active for at least 2,500 years, with more than 70 eruptive periods since 1839. In 1948 and 49 Mt. Ngauruhoe went through a strong eruptive phase with lava flows and then again in 1954 and 55 another strong eruptive phase with lave flows of about 280 million cubic feet.

Eleven samples were taken from the slopes of the mountain, two each from the 11 February 1949, 4 June 1954, and 14 July 1954 flows and from the 19 February 1975 avalanche deposits, and three from the 30 June 1954 flow. All the samples were sent to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Boston for whole rock K-Ar dating – first a piece of one sample from each flow, then a piece of the second from each flow after the first set of results was received, and finally a piece of the third sample from the 30 June 1954 flow. To also test the consistency of results within the samples, second pieces of the two 30 June 1954 lave samples were also sent. The samples were also describes as young with little aron so as to require extra care in sampling. Geochron is a respected commercial laboratory.

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