Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Evolutionists Are Losing Ground Badly: Both Pattern and Process Contradict the Aging Theory

It just doesn’t make sense that the entire biological world spontaneously arose all by itself. But the challenges to evolution go far beyond the intuition. When Charles Darwin proposed his unlikely idea in 1859 it defied much of what was known about biology in that day. Today, the situation has only become worse. If there was ever a modern-day myth this is it and science is increasingly revealing this with its empirical findings dealing with both biological patterns and processes.

If the pattern does not comply, then you must falsify

Contradictory patterns in biology include the abrupt appearance of so many forms and the diversity explosions followed by a winnowing of diversity in the fossil record. It looks more like the inverse of an evolutionary tree with bursts of new species which then die off over time. Furthermore the types of adaptive change we do observe occurring in populations does not appear to be of the form that could accumulate to the large-scale change evolution requires.

At the molecular level, DNA and protein sequences are not what was expected and evolutionists had to construct all manner of ad hoc adjustments to make sense of the data. For instance, mutations must have just happened to occur at particular locations, and they must have occurred at wildly different rates, depending on the location within the genome, the gene, the species or the era.

Equally striking are the incredible similarities we find in otherwise unrelated species. If evolution is true these species would be in distant parts of the evolutionary tree. But when we look under the hood we find profound convergence—highly detailed, specific, designs repeated in distant species. This is not an occasional or rare finding in biology as one might assume given evolutionist’s typically light treatment and downright dismissal of the evidence. This pattern is ubiquitous.

But just as common, and just as contradictory, as the incredible similarities amongst remote species are the differences amongst allied species. Again, though evolutionists have downplayed such findings, they are as striking as they are ubiquitous.

If the process does not accept, then you must reject

Patterns that contradict evolutionary theory are only part of the story. Processes are increasingly being elucidated in biology that also defy the theory. Breeders have known since Darwin’s day that the changes they could induce could only go so far and even Goethe knew there were limits. Likewise for adaptive changes observed in the field.

In fact the sheer number of hypothetical mutations that evolution would require to occur to create the millions of incredible designs is astronomical. Evolution’s only hope is that, strangely, biological designs would somehow be constructable via a long series of single mutations, none of which could be very harmful. Not surprisingly, that is exactly the opposite of what the science reveals. Even the evolution of a single protein is astronomically against all odds.

And the adaptive changes that we do observe in biology are found to be the product of incredibly sophisticated cellular and molecular mechanisms—a built-in adaptation machine, if you will.

In other words, rather than the slow incorporation of random mutations via natural selection as envisioned by evolution, populations respond rapidly to challenges with intelligent, directed adaptations. These results make no sense on evolution, but that has not stopped evolutionists from trying to force-fit them into the theory. Here is how one recent paper summarized these findings:

1. Heredity involves more than DNA. There are heritable variations that are independent of variations in DNA sequence, and they have a degree of autonomy from DNA variations. These non-DNA variations can form an additional substrate for evolutionary change and guide genetic evolution.

2. Soft inheritance, the inheritance of developmentally induced and regulated variations, exists and it is important. Soft inheritance includes both non-DNA variations and developmentally induced variations in DNA sequence.

3. Since many organisms (including humans) contain symbionts and parasites that are transferred from one generation of the “host” to the next, it may be necessary to consider such communities as targets of selection.

4. Saltational changes leading to evolution beyond the species level are common, and the mechanisms underlying them are beginning to be understood. Macroevolution may be the result of specific, stress-induced mechanisms that lead to a re-patterning of the genome - to systemic mutations.

5. The Tree Of Life pattern of divergence, which was supposed to be universal, fails to explain all the sources of similarities and differences between taxa. Sharing whole genomes (through hybridization, symbiosis and parasitism) and partial exchange of genomes (through various types of horizontal gene transfer) lead to web-like patterns of relations. These web-like patterns are particularly evident in some taxa (e.g. plants, bacteria) and for some periods of evolution (e.g. the initial stages following genome sharing or exchange).

So now those random mutations must have created life not only with DNA-based heredity, but other heredity mechanisms within the cell. The astronomically unlikely requirements for evolution just increased exponentially.

And these incredible mechanisms just happen to allow populations to undergo rapid, large-scale change in the time span of a single generation, to meet environmental challenges. Add another exponential increase to those requirements evolution must have somehow fulfilled.

And if this isn’t enough, the Tree of Life doesn’t work anymore. In the paper above the evolutionists optimistically imagine that the observed web-like patterns could have been created through various sharing and exchange of genomes. That is yet another “and then a miracle happened” explanation which makes little scientific sense. Here is just one example of many that illustrates the problem.

The notion that the entire biological world spontaneously arose all by itself defies common sense. It also defies empirical science.

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