Evolution Impossible (3 page)

The current scientific debate over the mechanisms of evolution demonstrates that evolution is not a proven “fact” of science — it is a “wish” of science, a fanciful hope in the light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that somehow a mechanical process to describe how life arose will be discovered. As several social commentators and a biographer have pointed out, Darwin established a mechanical conception of organic life in the “machine age,” that time following the first world fair in London in 1851, when the machine had become the single most absorbing preoccupation of the time.
²²
This obsession with the “machine worldview” continues to dominate science to this day and is played out in the evolution controversy.

But before considering more of the evidence against evolution, let us first revisit Darwin’s theory in the next chapter.

1
. N.H. Barton, D.E.G. Briggs, J.A. Eisen, and N.H. Patel,
Evolution
(Cold Spring Harbour, NY: Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory Press, 2007), p. 81.

2
. National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine,
Science, Evolution, and Creationism
(Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2008), p. 11. Available at:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11876
.

3
. Geological Society of London, “Young Earth Creationism, Creation Science, and Intelligent Design,” 2008, available online at:
http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/views/policy_statements/page3635.html
, accessed 8/6/2010.

4
. Australian Academy of Science,
Intelligent Design Is Not Science,
letter published in major Australian newspapers, October 21, 2005. See:
http://www.science.org.au/reports/intelligent-design.htm
.

5
. The Interacademy Panel on International Issues, IAP Statement on the Teaching of Evolution, 2006, see:
http://www.interacademies.net/File.aspx?id=6150
.

6
. See
http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/darwin/evolution.html
, accessed 10/23/2009.

7
. National Academy of Sciences,
Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences
(Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 28.

8
. Richard Dawkins,
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
(London: Bantam Press, 2009), p. 18.

9
. O. Kashti, “Sa’ar Dismisses Chief Scientist for Questioning Evolution,”
Haaretz,
October 5, 2010; see
http://www.haaretz.com
.

10
. See
www.expelledthemovie.com
.

11
. P.S. Moorhead and M.M. Kaplan, editors, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” The Wistar Institute Symposium Monograph No. 5 (Philadelphia, PA: Wistar Institute Press, 1967).

12
. Barbara J. Stahl,
Vertebrate History, Problems in Evolution
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).

13
. Michael Denton,
Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
(Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986).

14
. Werner Gitt,
In the Beginning Was Information
(Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2006).

15
. Lee M. Spetner,
Not By Chance: Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution
(New York: Judaica Press, 1997).

16
. Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart,
The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

17
. Jerry Fodor, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,”
London Review of Books
, vol. 29, no. 20 (2007): p. 19–22, available at
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/jerry-fodor/why-pigs-dont-have-wings
.

18
. Jerry Fodor and Masimo Piattelli-Palmarini,
What Darwin Got Wrong
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

19
. Suzan Mazur,
The Altenberg 16: An Exposé of the Evolution Industry
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), available online at
http://books.google.com/books
.

20
. Ibid. p. 34.

21
. Stephen C. Meyer,
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
(New York: HarperOne, 2009).

22
. Geoffrey West,
Charles Darwin: A Portrait
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 334. See also A. Sandow, “Social Factors in the Origin of Darwinism,”
The Quarterly Review of Biology
, vol. 13 (1938): p. 315–326; John C. Greene,
Science, Ideology and World View
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981).

Chapter 2

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

The year 2009 saw the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s book
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
In his book, Darwin recorded his observations of the struggle for existence of many species. He proposed that there was a principle operating in nature that the “more diversified the descendants from any one species become in structure, constitution, and habits,” the better enabled they will be to take opportunistic advantage of differences in the environment to increase in numbers in the struggle for existence.
¹
In other words, the more varieties of grass there were, the more likely some grass varieties would survive variations in environmental conditions such as rainfall, temperature, and soil type, and be able to increase in numbers, thus perpetuating the species.

Darwin was impressed by the enormous variety of species in nature. He noted the range of plants of Europe and North America through to the birds from the separate islands of the Galapagos Archipelago. For example, he described his observations of a small three-feet-by-four-feet area of turf, where he was able to identify 20 species of plants from 18 different genera belonging to eight orders of plants. All these different plants were striving to live in this identical environment.
²

Darwin went on to propose the hypothesis that the different species and genera arose from a single common ancestor as part of the diversification survival mechanism, illustrating his idea with a branching “tree-like sketch.”
³

At the bottom of the tree was a species belonging to a large genus. As the species bred over generations, there would be extremely slight variations, represented as lines branching out from a common point. After 1,000 generations (and Darwin comments that 10,000 generations might be a better estimate) he showed two main lines had diverged as a fork in the tree. These represented the accumulated differences between the two breeding lines, which had now changed enough to be identified as two different species. Over the next 1,000 generations, these two species continued to diverge and became even more distinct from each other. As thousands of generations passed, more forking and divergence into different species occurred. Some branches ended without diverging, representing the extinction of that particular variety. After ten levels of branching on this hypothetical tree of life (that is, after 10,000 generations), three new species were shown as having evolved that would then be significantly different from the original parent. After 14,000 generations, Darwin suggests that the differences between the evolving species would be so large as to constitute several new genera.

This concept of a tree of life that diagrammatically mapped out the origin of different species made it relatively easy for people to understand Darwin’s idea. He was able to argue successfully that evidence for this tree was obvious in nature, plain for all to see. For example, he pointed out that different species of flowers have sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils, and although fitted for different purposes, they are constructed on the same pattern. Similarly, the fore-limbs of humans, moles, horses, porpoises, and bats are constructed on the same pattern, while giraffes and elephants have the same number of vertebrae in their necks, and so on.
⁴

Darwin offered an explanation of this “fact of nature” by proposing the mechanism of natural selection via the “survival of the fittest” group of organisms. That is, the new species in the tree of life came about as a result of small mutations in a population of organisms that gave particular organisms an advantage in surviving in their environment. As those organisms with the inherited advantage bred over a period of time, another mutation within the population would give those new offspring a new advantage in surviving compared with the other organisms.

The discovery of large numbers of different species of wingless beetles on the islands of Madeira off the west coast of North Africa intrigued Darwin. Out of the 550 different species of beetles on the islands, 200 were wingless. He noticed that the proportion of wingless beetles was largest on the exposed windy side of the island, whereas in the non-windy areas, there were large numbers of fully winged beetles. Darwin proposed that this was a clear example of natural selection at work. Over thousands of generations, the beetles with less perfectly developed wings were less likely to be blown out to sea and therefore survived to breed and pass on the weaker or smaller wing traits.
⁵

Over time, the successive and cumulative successful inherited mutations would give rise to what would become a new species, that is, a new branch on the “tree of life.” Darwin saw the wingless beetles on the island as an example of one of the new branches on his tree of life.

While travelling on the
HMS Beagle
, Darwin had read Charles Lyell’s book
Principles of Geology,
in which Lyell had proposed that the earth’s landforms had been formed by millions of years of slow change. This geological hypothesis provided the time frame needed for evolution. Darwin went on to apply his tree of life concept to the fossil record, arguing that it showed the divergence of the different ancient species from their common ancestors. He proposed that the example of the tree diagram could explain how the genera representing points on the lowest part of the tree, as seen in the fossil layers of the Silurian epoch, evolved into some of the organisms found still living today, as represented by the genera on the uppermost part of the tree.
⁶

Darwin eventually came to the conclusion that over eons of time all life had evolved by the process of natural selection from a single original organism. He wrote:

Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.
⁷

Thus Darwin proposed a scientific theory for the origin of life that was based on random mutations producing a vast diversity of new organisms. The new organisms would have similar forms and functions to their ancestors and thereby the evolutionary pathway could be worked out from the fossil record. This hypothesis has come to be known as the theory of evolution.

For much of the last 100 or so years biologists have devoted a significant part of their research activities to identifying proposed evolutionary pathways and filling in the details of this tree of life — from the supposed first life form through to present-day life forms. Where species have become extinct, the branch simply ends with that species. Examples of these trees or particular branches of the tree, such as the proposed evolutionary pathway for vertebrates (that is, animals with a backbone structure), can be found in most biology textbooks.

Up to the 1990s, developments in the tree of life were based largely on finds from the fossil record. Fossils found in the higher rock strata were believed to have been of organisms evolved from the species found in the lower and “older” rock strata. Evolutionary links were proposed on the basis of physiological and skeletal similarities (referred to as homologies) along the lines Darwin originally proposed.
⁸

Since the 1990s, the structure of this tree has been changing as biologists re-map its branches on the basis of identifying the genetic sequences in the genomes of modern organisms. Heritable traits that formed the basis of Darwinian evolution are encoded in the genes within the organism’s DNA. By identifying common pieces of DNA in different animals, biologists attempt to link those animals to a common ancestor and represent theoretical connection using a tree type diagram. These diagrams are referred to as “phylogenetic trees.”