Evolution Impossible (4 page)

Thus, recent tree of life depictions show the first life forms — the nature of which is unknown, developing into the “last universal common ancestor” (LUCA) — the nature of which is also unknown — which then splits into three types of single-celled organisms: bacteria and archaea (similar to bacteria) followed by the more complex eurokytes, whose genetic material is packaged in a nucleus within the cell. It is claimed that around 3 billion years after the first living organisms formed, the eurokytes began evolving into multi-cellular organisms. Over the next 600 million to 1.1 billion years or so they became the protozoa, then plants, followed by amoebae and fungi, then invertebrate animals like worms, shellfish, and insects, followed by vertebrate animals such as sharks, fish, and amphibians, and, lastly, two main branches lead into reptiles and birds on one branch and mammals and then humans on the other.
⁹

Further to this explanation, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History’s website depicted a modern tree of life diagram with four colored lines showing how humans are supposed to be related, as per the evolutionary tree of life, to dogs, leeches, mushrooms, and the bacterium
E. coli
.
¹⁰

The idea that humans had descended from apes was explicitly argued by Thomas H. Huxley in his book
Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature
, which was published in 1863. Eight years later, Darwin expanded these arguments in his book
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,
in which he proposed on the basis of anatomical similarities that man had descended from apes and gorillas. Darwin predicted that fossils of the earliest ancestors of humans would be found in Africa where apes still live. This idea that humans evolved from apes remains a dominant theme of scientific study, and there is continuing research to try to put together the last branches of an ape-to-human evolutionary tree.
¹¹

For example, popular science articles and documentaries on evolution commonly show “artists’ impressions” of apes evolving into humans, and museum displays of very human-like supposed missing links between apes and humans such as “Lucy” make the claim seem realistic. In the case of “Lucy,” the popular name given to a specimen of the fossilized remains of
Australopithecus afarensis
, subsequent studies of the remains showed it was actually very similar to the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo and not human-like at all.
¹²

For many biologists, the theory of evolution claim that humans evolved from apes has been reinforced by DNA similarities between chimps and humans. In 2005, the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome was published and compared with the human genome.
¹³

About 96 percent of chimpanzee and human DNA is similar. However, this is not surprising, since humans and chimpanzees are obviously different but have many similarities. These include arms, legs, fingers, eyes, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, gastrointestinal tract, and blood, as well as hormones, blood-clotting mechanism, immune system mechanisms, and the list continues. It is on this basis that chimpanzees have been used in the past for medical and drug research studies before applying the learning to humans. All these structures and functions, down to the finest detail of molecular structure, have to be encoded in the DNA. So it is not surprising that if you have similar anatomy and biochemistry you would have similar genetic code.

However, if in fact humans had evolved from chimpanzees as the last small step in 3.5 billion years of evolution, one would intuitively expect to have found something like 99.99 percent similar DNA. This relatively large 4 percent difference is more indicative of having the same intelligent designer just like the early model Volkswagen Beetle and Porsche cars. Both vehicles had air-cooled, horizontally opposed, four-cylinder engines in the rear, two doors, a storage trunk in the front, and many other similarities because they had the same design team — Ferdinand and son Ferdinand “Ferry” Porsche. An identical explanation would apply to the homologies argument for evolution, that is, the various animals described by Darwin as having the same basic forearm bone pattern do so because they have the same intelligent designer.

Other “so-called” evidence that humans have evolved has been presented by the notion that during an animal’s early development, that is, embryonic development, it retraces its evolutionary history. Darwin believed this. He wrote:

As the embryonic state of each species and group of species partially shows us the structure of their less modified ancient progenitors, we can clearly see why ancient and extinct forms of life should resemble the embryos of their descendants — our existing species.
¹⁴

He went on to say, “Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the com
mon parent-form of each great class of animals.”
¹⁵

This idea was popularized by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel not long after the publication of Darwin’s book. Haeckel made drawings of what were supposedly the embryos of species such as the fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, rabbit, and a human. All the embryos were drawn as having supposed gill slits like a fish. So these drawings suggested that, for example, a human embryo also ostensibly passed through a fish stage with gill-like structures, and so on, before it became fully human. This was then assumed as being evidence that humans were descended from fish, meaning that humans had evolved from fish. For more than a century these drawings were used as evidence for evolution, and biology textbooks up to the early 1990s contained illustrations of a human embryo with gill pouches and a tail.
¹⁶

In the mid-1990s, embryologist Michael Richardson, with the cooperation of other biologists, collected and photographed the types of embryos Haeckel had drawn. The results were published in 1997 in
Anatomy and Embryology
and in
Science,
and showed that the actual embryos were very different from the drawings of Haeckel and that human embryos did not have gill structures at any stage of development!
¹⁷

Thus we now know that the development of human embryos shows no evidence of evolutionary origins. However, in 2005 a very widely used university biology text still claimed that patterns of embryological development are evidence that vertebrates share a common evolutionary ancestor and that “all vertebrate embryos” have gills, pouches, and other fishlike features.
¹⁸

This is a clear example of an important piece of evidence for human evolution proposed by Darwin that now has been shown to be false. We have also seen that Darwin’s evidence from the homologies can be equally well explained by intelligent design. Additionally, the actual evidence claimed to support human evolution from individual fossil remains has been either of a species of ape or a human, so that the supposed ape-man evidence appears to be considerably exaggerated in favor of an evolutionary explanation.

However, the main claim of Darwin’s theory is that in the struggle for living organisms to survive, a large number of small mutations over time, with the help of “natural selection,” can produce completely new types of life. Darwin wrote in the conclusion of his work, “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.”
¹⁹
But does it really happen? Has this “war of nature” really produced new higher organisms? We will examine this claim more closely in chapter 4.

But before we do that we need to look at Darwin’s other claim — that all life arose from a primordial single organism into which “life was breathed.” If the theory of evolution does not rely on a supernatural creation, is it possible that life itself could have arisen by the random chance combinations of natural chemical compounds to form the first living organism? We will examine the science behind this impossibility in the next chapter.

1
. Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
(London: John Murray, 1859), p. 156.

2
. Ibid., p 157.

3
. Ibid., p. 160–161. See also G. Lawton “Uprooting Darwin’s Tree,”
New Scientist
(January 24, 2009): p. 34.

4
. Ibid., p. 418, 415, 451.

5
. Ibid., p. 176–177.

6
. Ibid., p. 404–405.

7
. Ibid., p. 455.

8
. E.P. Solomon, L.R. Berg, and D.W. Martin,
Biology,
seventh edition (Belmont, CA: Thomson, Brooks/Cole, 2005), p. 341, 343–344.

9
. Lawton, “Uprooting Darwin’s Tree,” p. 34–39.

10
. See
http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/darwin/treeoflife.html
.

11
. K. Wong, “The Human Pedigree,”
Scientific American
(January 2009): p. 46–48.

12
. A. Zihlman, “The Promiscuous Primate,”
Nature
, vol. 359 (1992): p. 786.

13
. The Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, “Initial Sequence of the Chimpanzee Genome and Comparison with the Human Genome,”
Nature,
vol. 437 (2005): p. 69–87.

14
. Darwin,
The Origin of Species,
p. 427.

15
. Ibid., p. 428.

16
. See, for example, E.P. Solomon, L.R. Berg, D.W. Martin, and C. Villee,
Biology,
third edition (New York: Saunders College Publishing, 1993), p. 402.

17
. M.K. Richardson et al, “There Is No Highly Conserved Embryonic Stage in the Vertebrates: Implications for Current Theories of Evolution and Development,”
Anatomy and Embryology,
vol. 196 (1997): p. 91–106; E. Pennisi, “Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered,”
Science,
vol. 277 (September 5, 1997): p 1435; M.K. Richardson, “Haeckel’s Embryos, Continued,” letter to
Science,
vol. 281 (August 28, 1998): p. 1285.

18
. Solomon, Berg, and Martin,
Biology,
seventh edition, p. 347.

19
. Darwin,
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,
p. 457.

Chapter 3

Why a Living Cell Cannot Arise by Chance

How life began remains one of the fundamental questions of modern science. To understand how the first living cell developed by natural physical and chemical processes a very, very long time ago is
fundamental to the theory of evolution. While no one has yet come up with a satisfactory explanation of how the first living cell could form by itself, it is nonetheless commonly assumed that it did. In fact, on the basis of this assumption, evolution is even being incorporated into the definition of life by some scientists. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has adopted the definition that life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” This definition directly implies that evolution is as much a fact of science as is life.
¹
However, if it can be shown that it is absolutely impossible for a living organism to arise by natural processes from nonliving matter, then the theory of evolution would be without foundation and unable to provide the complete mechanical-naturalistic explanation of how we came to be here. In this chapter we will look more closely at the scientific findings that show that a living cell cannot actually arise by chance.

Most scientific journal articles on origins begin with the confident assertion that living cells just formed by themselves billions of years ago. For example, Harvard University genetics professor Jack Szostak and co-researcher Alonso Ricardo write, “. . . as first life arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago.”
²
Similarly, University of New South Wales Emeritus Professor of Inorganic Chemistry Stanley Livingstone writes, “It appears that about 3,850 million years ago . . . the first life forms appeared in the oceans.”
³
Simple assertions similar to these are echoed in most science textbooks. The popular university biochemistry text by McKee and McKee states, “The Earth was formed from a cloud of condensing cosmic dust and gas about 4.5 billion years ago. Life arose soon thereafter.”
⁴

But on what basis do these eminent teachers make these statements — what is the evidence? Let us look at these statements more closely.

Where do the time periods of “about 3,700 million years ago” or “about 3,850 million years ago” for the beginning of life come from? What is the basis for scientists making these statements?