Evolution Impossible (2 page)

This is a very legitimate question and one that raises the very relevant issues that this book attempts to address. Most scientists and educators believe that evolution is true — simply because that is what they have been taught when they went through school, college, and university. Most science textbooks, science academies, science museums, and popular biology authors echo the view that evolution is a proven fact of science. For example, a widely used 2007 university textbook on evolution has a bold-type topic heading “The Fact of Evolution Is Explained by Evolutionary Theory.”
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The authors go on to claim that scientists now understand how all the evolutionary processes work, and in many instances how these processes have generated species adaptation and divergence.

In a recent position paper on evolution, the United States National Academy of Sciences stated that “evolution” is considered a fact. The Academy maintained that because the theory of evolution is supported by so many experiments and observations, scientists are confident that the fundamental components of the theory will not be overturned by new scientific evidence.
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The Geological Society of London claims that it has been long established beyond doubt that our planet is about 4,560 million years old. It holds that life has evolved into its current form over a period of thousands of millions of years as a result of genetic variation combined with natural selection.
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The Australian Academy of Science published a similar view, saying that there is a vast body of “factual” knowledge supporting the theory that the natural processes of evolution have produced the biological complexity we have on earth today.
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In fact,
science academies around the world echo the same belief in evolution as the Interacademy Panel (IAP), a global network of science academies, publishing a statement on the teaching of evolution signed by 67 academies of sciences. This statement asserts that the member academies agree that evidence-based “facts” about the evolution of life on earth have been established by a large number of observations and results of independent experiments, including that

• life appeared on earth at least 2.5 billion years ago;
  
• since life first appeared it has continued to evolve, and this is confirmed by paleontology and modern biology and biochemistry;
  
• the structure of the genetic code of all living organisms indicates their common primordial origin.
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Not surprisingly, most natural history museums have displays presenting evolution as if it is a “fact” of science. For example, the Smithsonian Institute, in their 2009 exhibit “Since Darwin: The Evolution of Evolution,” has this statement:

“The evolution of living things has been occurring for billions of years and is responsible for the dazzling diversity of life on Earth.
That is a fact
” (emphasis mine).
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When the world’s preeminent institution devoted to researching natural history says that evolution is a fact, it is very reasonable for a casual visitor and the media to believe this. Of course, it also is not surprising that well-known evolutionists also assert that evolution is a “fact” of science, such as the eminent Harvard University paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, who writes that he does not deny the “fact” of evolution,
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and Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins, who writes that the purpose of his 2009 book on evolution is to show that evolution is an “inescapable fact.”
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However, when we examine these statements about evolution more closely, we find that they are simply assertions made without citing proven evidence, or where evidence is cited it does not actually prove the claim. For example, it is asserted that life arose so many million years ago. But I have found no reputable scientific paper explaining a proven mechanism for how a living cell could arise from nonliving molecules — a process called abiogenesis. On the other hand, I have found many published scientific findings that show that abiogenesis cannot happen, as I explain in chapter 3.

Another assertion is that all life “evolved” from primitive organisms over millions of years, which stems from Charles Darwin’s theory involving mutations and natural selection. When Darwin wrote his book over 150 years ago, scientists at that time knew very little about the extremely complex biochemistry machinery within living organisms. In fact, living cells had not yet been discovered. It took nearly a century of further scientific study before DNA — a chemical molecule that encodes the structure and mechanisms that constitute the myriad different types of cells that make up the millions of different organisms that inhabit our planet — was discovered. The development in recent years — and in particular during the last three decades — of sophisticated scientific equipment and methodologies has enabled scientists to explore the components of living organisms and their cells extensively. We now know a high level of detail about the enormous complexity of the genetic information encoding their structures and biochemistry.

However, to date I have found no reputable published scientific paper that explains a proven mechanism for how this huge amount of highly complex genetic information could arise by chance. Nor could I find any scientific papers reporting the observation of new meaningful genetic information arising by chance. In other words, I could find not a single published scientific paper reporting the evidence that supports the fundamental requirement of evolution that new meaningful genetic information arises by chance. Instead, I have found much published data showing that it is impossible for new purposeful genetic information of any significance for evolution to arise by chance, and I discuss this evidence in detail in chapter 4.

This was an astounding finding — the widely claimed “fact” of evolution was not only
not
proved, but there were published articles disproving it. This observation will be a surprise to many readers, and some may doubt that my observations are correct. After all, have I not just pointed out that evolution is considered to have occurred by most scientists around the world? How can I now say it has been disproved by scientific studies? Why don’t other scientists now reject Darwin’s theory? The answer is that some scientists, as they read about the latest scientific evidence regarding the biochemistry of living organisms, are now also rejecting evolution. However, it is not easy for scientists to publicly reject evolution because of peer pressure to have those scientists discredited or removed from positions of influence. A recent example of this was the case of Israeli Education Ministry chief scientist Dr. Gavriel Avital, who was sacked for questioning the validity of evolution.
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A few years ago the documentary film
Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed
was produced, which exposed examples of the persecution and marginalization of scientists who have dared to question the evidence for evolution.
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Science-based doubts about the theory of evolution are not new.

In the mid-1960s, several mathematicians challenged the plausibility of evolution from a probability standpoint. The resulting mathematical studies culminated in a symposium on the analysis of the probabilities that evolution could occur, which was held at the Wistar Institute, a highly regarded biomedical science research center in Philadelphia. A full record of the presentations at the symposium was published that showed that the biologists were not happy about this new challenge to evolution.
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They insisted that the mathematicians did not understand evolution, but they did not provide any quantitative answers to the challenges.

In the 1970s, Harvard–educated paleontologist Dr. Barbara J. Stahl drew attention to some of the serious shortcomings in the fossil evidence for evolution.
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In the mid-1980s, King’s College London-educated molecular biologist Dr. Michael Denton drew attention to the huge complexity of biological systems at the molecular level and the inability of the theory of evolution to explain the origin of these systems.
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In the 1990s, the science of
information theory
came into prominence, but it still has not uncovered a natural source for the huge mass of specific information found within the genome, the DNA blueprint of living things. The cell proteins and nucleotides in our chromosomes are intricately complex and specific in their structure. Minute alterations in the arrangements of the amino acid components of these protein molecules affects their shape, the way they are folded, and their function. Their unique and precise arrangement gives them their specific biological information or code. Like digits in a computer code, their arrangement must be perfect or it fails. But where did this information come from? “From an ancestor” is not a helpful answer — it explains nothing. This failure of evolution theory to be able to explain the source of biological information has been pointed out by several information theorists such as Professor Werner Gitt at the German Federal Institute of Physics
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and Massachusetts Institute of Technology–educated physicist Dr. Lee Spetner.
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In an attempt to fill this glaring gap in the evolutionary explanation of how animals and plants developed their astounding variety and complexity, Harvard Medical School biology professor Dr. Marc W. Kirschner and University of California, Berkeley, professor of cell and developmental biology John C. Gerhart developed a new theory. It is related to the new field of epignomics and called “facilitated variation,” details of which they described in their book
The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma,
which was published by Yale University Press in 2005.
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They suggest that the “core processes” encoded in the DNA of an organism that produce its structure are in a sense so stable they are impervious to change produced by small-scale mutations, and they only allow for the possibility of a number of small mutational changes to accumulate over time. They then argue that changes in the organism’s environment produce stressors that trigger the activation of the accumulated mutations, which in turn produce some totally new “core processes” resulting in a new configuration of part of the organism. However, even if the theory were proved to explain some changes in biological systems, it still does not explain where the genetic information in the original “core processes” came from. In fact, in their conclusion the authors admit that their theory actually opens up more questions about the origins of the conserved “core processes.”

Further shortcomings of the theory of evolution were pointed out by the Rutgers University philosopher Dr. Jerry Fodor, who in an extraordinary article titled “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings” presented very strong arguments as to why Darwinian-type “natural selection” cannot be an effective basis for species evolution.
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Dr. Fodor’s piece attracted a lot of comment from other scientists, and he went on to develop his arguments further in a recent book co-authored by Dr. Masimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, titled
What Darwin Got Wrong
.
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Since “natural selection” comprises the essential core of Darwin’s theory, Fodor’s paper presented a serious challenge to the scientific integrity of evolution. As a result, in July 2008, 16 of the world’s leading evolutionary scientists met in a castle in Altenberg, Austria, to discuss these serious threats to evolutionary science. Details of the conference were written up by science journalist Suzan Mazur.
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She reports interviews and comments from attendees and other thought leaders in the area of evolution. They highlight the growing realization by these scientists that if natural selection is now rejected or marginalized as the underpinning evolutionary process, then Darwin’s theory is dead. Dr. Jerry Fodor is quoted
as saying, “Basically I don’t think anybody knows how evolution works.”
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This statement is a far cry from the confident assertions found in biology textbooks and museum displays. Furthermore, nobody knows how evolution works because nobody has ever observed evolution — it has never been observed in the past and it has not been observed in the laboratory. No one has been able to set up an experiment and make one type of organism evolve into a new type of organism (unless we deliberately remove genetic information or insert genetic information from another organism, neither of which is true evolution). To have no mechanism for how evolution can occur, as well as no experimental evidence, leaves evolution far from being a fact of science.

This quandary over evolution among top scientists is very real. What theory can replace neo-Darwinism? No one knows. Evolutionists are groping for credible mechanisms that can give rise to the multitude of life forms in our biosphere. The interviews reported by Susan Mazur present a vivid picture of the uncertainties and vehement disagreements of these scientists who continue to cling to their faith that evolution is an unquestioned fact of history. But evolution’s inner workings and mechanisms are made excruciatingly doubtful by the recent discoveries in molecular biology such as those highlighted by University of Cambridge–educated philosopher Dr. Stephen C. Meyer in his recent book
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
.
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