Evolution's Proposed Mechanisms -
Mutation and Natural Selection
Without any answers to the origin of life question, Darwinian evolution theory ought to have died right there. However, because evolutionists have largely ignored this monumental hurdle and have chosen instead to focus on the mechanisms of change within already living systems, we must likewise follow the argument there as well.
Darwin's Important Statement:
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species", 1958, p. 171
It is the purpose of this article is to demonstrate that in light of the observable evidence, Darwin's theory does indeed "break down."
Biological Systems Unexplained by Mutations and Natural Selection
As noted in the previous section, Darwinian evolution cannot account for the emergence of even "simple" cellular life. Here we shall look at some specific features of more complex living systems and evolution's failure to account for them.
The Information Problem
Note here that in order to go from molecules, or amebas to man, a quantitative jump in information is required. This point is absolutely paramount. Unless evolution theory can come up with a reasonable scenario by which massive amounts of information may be accrued in living systems, by purely naturalistic forces, Darwin's theory will remain fatally and hopelessly flawed.
Sexual Reproduction
According to the evolution story, life began by replicating asexually. Just how, when and why sexual reproduction evolved is an utter mystery, unexplainable by mutation and natural selection.
"This book is written from a conviction that the prevalence of sexual reproduction in higher plants and animal is inconsistent with current evolutionary theory." George C. Williams, "Sex and Evolution", Princeton University Press, 1975, p. v.
"The evolution of sex is one of the major unsolved problems o biology. Even those with enough hubris to publish on the topic often freely admit that they have little idea of how sex originated or is maintained. It is enough to give heart to creationists." Michael Rose, "Slap and Tickly in the Primeval Soup", New Scientist, Vol., 112 October 30, 1986, p. 55
"Indeed, the persistence of sex is one of the fundamental mysteries in evolutionary biology today." Gina Maranto and Shannon Brownlee, "Why Sex?" Discover, February 1984, p. 24
"Sex is something of an embarrassment to evolutionary biologists. Textbooks understandably skirt the issue, keeping it a closely guarded secret." Kathleen McAuliffe, "Why We Have Sex", Omni, December 1983, p. 18
"So why is there sex? We do not have a compelling answer to the question. Despite some ingenious suggestions by orthodox Darwinians (notably G.C. Williams 1975; John Maynard Smith 1978), there is no convincing Darwinian history for the emergence of sexual reproduction. However, evolutionary theorists believe that the problem will be solved without abandoning the main Darwinian insights - just as early nineteenth century astronomers believed that the problem of the motion of Uranus could be overcome without major modifications to Newton's celestial mechanics." Philip Kitcher, "Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism", 1982, p. 54
"From an evolutionary viewpoint sex differentiation is impossible to understand, as well as the structural sexual differences between the systematic categories which are sometimes immense. We know that intersexes [a part male and part female organism] within a species must be sterile. How is it, then, possible to imagines bridges between two amazingly different structural types?" N. Heribert Nilsson, "Synthetische Artbildung", 1953 p. 1225
Immune Systems
"We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature as no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system." Michael Behe, "Darwin's Black Box", 1996, p. 138
"Unfortunately we cannot trace most of the evolutionary steps that the immune system took. Virtually all the crucial developments seem to have happened at an early stage of vertebrate evolution, which is poorly represented in the fossil record and from which few species survive. Even the most primitive extant vertebrates seem to rearrange their antigen receptor genes and posses separate T and B cells, as well as MHC molecules. Thus has the immune system sprung up fully armed." Avrion Mitchison, "Will We Survive?" Scientific American, Vol. 269, September 1993, p. 138
Mutations - Rates and Results
"The vast number of genetic experiments with plants and animals carried on since DeVries studies have shown that mutations do occur constantly and that the changes in phenotype produced by such mutations may rarely be of adaptive value and contribute to the survival of the organism. Instead, such mutations are more likely to to have a deleterious or even disastrous effect. A random change in a computer chip or even a computer program is hardly likely to improve it. Mutations are random changes in nucleic acids and usually represent not merely alteration but an actual loss in genetic information. When we consider the complexity of living things, the wonder is not that mutations are usually harmful, but that any mutation is ever advantageous." "Biology", 1985, p. 988
"Even if we didn't have a great deal of data on this point, we could still be quite sure on theoretical grounds that mutants would usually be detrimental. For a mutation is a random change of a highly organized, reasonably smoothly functioning living body. A random change in the highly integrated system of chemical processes which constitute life is almost certain to impair it - just as a random interchange of connection in a television set is not likely to improve the picture." James Crow, (Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconson), "Genetic Effects of Radiation", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 14, January, 1958, pp. 19-20
"The one systematic effect of mutation seems to be a tendency toward degeneration." Sewall Wright, "the Statistical Consequences of Mendelian Heredity in Relation to Speciation", The Systematics, editor Julian Huxley, 1949, p. 174
"There is no single instance where it can be maintained that any of the mutants studied has a higher vitality than the mother species…It is therefore impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombination's." N. Heribert Nilsson, Synthetische Artbildung, 1953, pp. 1157, 1186
"It is a striking, but not much mentioned fact that, though geneticists have been breeding fruit flies for sixty years or more in labs all around the world - flies which produce a new generation every eleven days - they have never yet seen the emergence of a new species or even a new enzyme." Gordon Rattray Taylor (Former Chief Science Advisor, BBC Television), The Great Evolution Mystery (New York; Harper & Row, 1983) p. 48
Norman Macbeth, "Darwin Retired"1971, comments on the study done by geneticist Richard Goldschmidt on fruit flies: p.33:
"After observing mutations in fruit flies for many years, Goldschmidt fell into despair. The changes he lamented were so hopelessly micro that if a thousand mutations were combined into one specimen there would still be no new species."
Roy Abraham Varghese, "The Intellectuals Speak Out About God", 1984, quotes Chandra Wickramisinghe, internationally recognized authority on interstellar matter, head of the Dept. of Applied Mathematics and astronomy, University College, Cardiff, Wales:
"We found that there's just no way it could happen. If you start with a simple micro organism, no matter how it arose on earth, primordial soup or otherwise, then if you just have that single organizational, informational unit and you said that you copied this sequentially time and time again, this question is does that accumulate enough copying errors, enough mistakes in copying, and do these accumulations of copying errors lead to the diversity of living forms that one sees on the earth. That's the general, usual formulation of the theory of evolution…We looked at this quite systematically, quite carefully, in numerical terms. Checking all the numbers, rates of mutation and so on, we decided that there is no way in which that could even marginally approach the truth:"
C. H. Waddington, Geneticist Science Today, "Evolution", by C.H. Waddington, 1961, p. 79:
"This is really the theory that if you start with any fourteen lines of coherent English and change it one letter at a time, keeping only those things that still make sense, you will eventually finish up with one of the sonnets of Shakespeare… it strikes me as a lunatic sort of logic, and I think we should be able to do better."
On Chromosomes, Mutations, and Phylogeny, by John N. Moore, Dec 27, 1971, p. 5:
"Upon rigorous examination and analysis, any dogmatic assertion…that gene mutations are the raw material for any evolutionary process involving natural selection is an utterance of a myth."
Natural selection destroys information
Natural selection - survival of the fittest - is indeed an observable, testable, repeatable fact. Animals and plants better suited to their environments will survive; while the less suited will become extinct. The key point to remember here is that selection, by definition, implies a reduction in quantity. Natural selection denotes a reduction in the varieties of plants and animals that can survive in a particular environment. Once these varieties have been selected out, there is no known naturalistic mechanism that can replace this lost information. In other words, each time nature selects out those varieties less suited to a particular environment, we are left with less overall information for further adaptive change. This is evolution in reverse!
"[Natural Selection] may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. It is not a creative force as many people have suggested." Daniel Brooks as quoted by Rodger Lewin, "A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity", Science, Vol. 217, September 24, 1982, p. 1240
"No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution." Pierre-Paul Grasse, "Evolution of Living Organisms", 1977, p. 88
"I have seen no evidence whatsoever that these [evolutionary] changes can occur through the accumulation of gradual mutations." Lynn Margulis, as quoted by Charles Mann, "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother", Science, Vol. 252, April 19, 1991, p. 379
"Do we, therefore, see mutations going about the business of producing new strictures for selection to work on? No nascent organ has ever been observed emerging, though their origin in pre-functional form is basic to evolutionary theory. Some should be visible today, occurring in organisms at various stages up to integration of a functional new system, but we don't see them: there is no sign at all of this kind of radical novelty. Neither observation nor controlled experiment has shown natural selection manipulating mutations so as to produce a new gene, hormone, enzyme system or organ." Michael Pitman, "Adam and Evolution, 1984, pp. 67-68
Gradualism and Selective Advantage
"Darwin complained his critics didn't understand him, but he did not seem to realize that almost everybody, friends, supporters and critics, agreed on one point, his natural selection cannot account for the origin of the variations, only for their possible survival. And the reasons for rejecting Darwin's proposal were many, but first of all that many innovations cannot possibly come into existence through accumulation of many small steps, and even if they can, natural selection cannot accomplish it, because incipient and intermediate stages are not advantageous." Soren Lovtrup, "Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth", 1987, pp. 274-275
"It was a shock to the people of the 19th century when they discovered, from observations science had made, that many features of the biological world could be ascribed to the elegant principle of natural selection. It is a shock to us in the 20th century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock the best we can and go on. The theory of undirected evolution is already dead, but the work of science continues." Michael J. Behe, "Molecular Machines", Cosmic Pursuit, Spring 1998, p. 35
Common Claims and Rebuttals
Antibiotic Resistance
Antibiotic resistant bacteria are often claimed as empirical evidence that evolution is occurring today. This interpretation is quite false, since antibiotic resistance was already in the population.
"Some members of a bacterial strain are resistant to certain drugs naturally. In the course of time they can eventually become selected through evolutionary forces to become the dominant drug-resistant forms of a pathogentic strain."
Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, 1997, "How Bacteria Become Drug Resistant"
Again, natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest (in this case, those bacteria which are antibiotic resistant), but not the arrival of the fittest. It cannot explain where the information for antibiotic resistance came from in the first place.
Today we know that this information, already present in the bacteria population is sometimes passed on to other members through a process called conjugation.
"A small amount of genetic information may be present as smaller DNA molecules, called plasmids, which may replicate independently of the chromosome. Bacterial plasmids often bear genes involved in resistance to antibiotics." "Biology", Kingdom Monera, 1985, p. 487
"…some bacteria can pass on their drug resistance to bacteria of another strain by "infection" since the passing of resistance factors does not depend upon the lengthy process of mutation, it poses a much greater problem of drug immunity." Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, 1997, "How Bacteria Become Drug Resistant"
While most antibiotic resistant bacteria are the result of genetic information already present in the bacteria population, some become resistant through mutation. Much is made of this fact since it appears to demonstrate, in true Darwinian fashion, the process of mutation and natural selection in action.
"Once in several hundred million cell divisions a mutation makes a bacterium immune to an antibiotic drug. The mutation alters the bacterium's genetic code and thus its ability to use certain chemicals for its life activities." Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia, 1997, "How Bacteria Become Drug Resistant"
Notice that the same mutation that brought about antibiotic resistance also affected the bacteria's ability to utilize certain chemicals for its life activities. In short, bacteria which have acquired antibiotic resistance through mutation, have no selective advantage in an environment where the antibiotic has not been introduced. These bacteria are not stronger, but are inferior to the more "generic" bacteria, and will selected out in unrestricted environments.
To conclude then:
"…there is an enormous probability problem at the core of Darwinist and neo-Darwinist theory, which has been cited by hundred s of scientists and professionals. Engineers, physicists, astronomers, and biologists who have looked without prejudice at the notion of such variations producing ever more complex organisms have come to the same conclusion: The evolutionists are assuming the impossible." William R Fix, "The Bone Peddlers", 1984 (Fix has a M A degree in Behavioral Science, Simon Frazier University)