Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. – Carl Sagan.
Good science dictates changing or dropping a theory if it is contradicted by the evidence. This basic premise of science has been ignored when it comes to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
Consider the following examples.
Darwinian theory would predict that the fossil record would show the gradual introduction of new species. The fossil record is characterized by the sudden appearance of species.
Darwinian theory would also predict that the fossil record would show species changing over time but the fossil record demonstrates ”stasis” among species, that is, they remain the same over time.
During the Cambrian Explosion all 70 of history’s phyla (major divisions of biology) emerged “suddenly” in a historically brief span of time where only simple single and multi-cellular life had previously existed. The surviving phyla of today look remarkably like those first forms. The theory of Punctuated Equilibrium, from Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, was an intellectually honest attempt to reflect these two realities. There is no room in Darwinian theory for any “explosion.”
Darwinian theory would predict that every biological form would be built by tiny, functional steps. A biological “machine” that requires every one of its components to be present for the machine to be functional, cannot be the result of tiny, functional steps. The bacterial flagellum is the poster child for these machines but there are many other examples.
Darwinian theory would predict an absence of highly complex, specified information in biological systems as that kind of information is always and only the product of intelligence. You would NEVER see “Eat at Joe’s” in the sky and think it is some odd cloud formation. DNA is extremely complex, specified information and more, it is an entire language unto itself.
Darwinian theory would predict relatively brief time periods to get meaningful biological changes. For example, the common ancestor of humans and apes is estimated to have lived about 6 million years ago but it would take an estimated 70 million Darwinian-sized changes to get from this common ancestor to humans. But given the common ancestor population and generation time, math shows that getting two Darwinian size mutations to stick would take more than 100 million years.
Darwinian theory would predict that the tiny changes happening in genes would result in every gene being extremely closely linked to other genes from which it came. Think of a chapter in a book where a few letters are different from a chapter in another book. “Orfans” is the term for those genes for which no relationship can be discovered among all other known genes. Orfans have become ubiquitous, numbering in the tens of millions, and continue to grow with each gene sequencing published.
Darwinian theory would predict logical transition paths from a biological form to its descendants. Tiny changes should provide a clear way to get from point A to point B. Yet there are more than 50 known examples of “discontinuity” that fail this test. An example of this is birds being descended from dinosaurs, but all dinosaurs have a human-type “bellows” lung where the air goes in and out the same path and all birds have “flow through” lungs where the air exits a different path than it comes in. No one can explain how you can get from one to the other.
And the worst issue of all for the Darwinian worldview, which claims that all living things are the result of Darwinian processes, is the origin of life itself. The Naturalistic origin of life discussion is in an almost hopeless state, the same place it was 50 years ago.
These are not all the problems with Darwinian theory, but any one of them should send a scientist back to the drawing board. So when they stomp their feet and insist “there are NO problems with Darwin’s theory,” you know we are no longer talking good science but bad ideology. They are choosing to live with a reassuring fable rather than embracing a hard truth.
Pepper Adams
Peachtree City, Ga.
