By Fazale Rana, Ph.D. 

New Research Raises Questions about Evolution, Supports Intelligent Design

While working for Procter & Gamble, I was involved in a project that required me to travel frequently to a chemical plant in Batesville, Arkansas. While there, our hosts often “treated” us to a meal that featured deep-fried catfish, a local “specialty.”

I don’t care much for fish and I didn’t enjoy the catfish meal the first time I had it.  Even though I didn’t wish to repeat the experience, our hosts took us out for catfish dinner every time we visited Batesville. So I just learned to expect it.

Catfish have recently caused problems for evolutionary biologists as well. Researchers have discovered an unanticipated example of convergence (repeated occurrence) involving catfish, one that causes them as much indigestion as the fried catfish caused me. It turns out the venom glands of poisonous catfish must have had at least two independent origin events, if viewed from an evolutionary perspective.

As I’ve previously pointed out, given the nature of its mechanism, evolution shouldn’t repeat itself, because it’s a historically contingent process. (See here and here for a more detailed discussion of this point.) And yet, over the last decade or so, evolutionary biologists have discovered a number of examples of convergence at the organismal and biochemical levels. In his book, Life’s Solution, paleontologist Simon Conway Morris describes numerous examples of morphological and behavioral convergence.

But convergence isn’t confined to macroscopic systems. As I describe in The Cell’s Design, when viewed from an evolutionary perspective, a number of life’s molecules and processes, though virtually identical, appear to have originated independently, multiple times.

New work by a scientist from the University of Michigan serves as one of the few detailed studies on the origin of venomous glands in fish. This investigator studied over 150 different species representing all the known species of catfish. Based on his examination, he concluded that between 1,250 to 1,600 species of catfish possess venom glands, far exceeding previous estimates.

Anatomical characterization reveals the venom glands are associated with sharp, bony spines along the leading edge of the catfish fins. When the spines puncture another fish, the membrane surrounding the venom-producing cells rips, thus releasing poison. The venoms generated by catfish cause a variety of effects including pain, muscle spasms, tissue damage, and respiratory distress.

When trying to account for the origin of venom glands in catfish from an evolutionary perspective, it appears as if these structures must have emerged at least two separate times. It also seems as if the evolutionary pathway leading to the emergence of toxin glands and associated structures was the same as well, with the gland toxins apparently derived from other skin compounds.

It is remarkable to think that a complex biological system like this would emerge independently on at least two separate occasions.

The widespread occurrences of convergence at the organismal and molecular level are unexpected given the nature of the evolutionary process. Biological convergence provides very real justification for skepticism about the idea that evolutionary mechanisms alone account for life’s history and diversity.  On the other hand, the repeated, independent origins of complex systems make sense from a creation viewpoint. It is reasonable, then, to expect that the Creator would reuse good designs.

When served catfish by our well-meaning hosts, I thanked them for their hospitality and politely did my best to choke it down. But I have a hard time swallowing the idea that biological convergence can be explained apart from the work of a Creator.

Click here for original post.

Book review by Fazale Rana, Ph.D.
Part 5

A Chapter-by-Chapter Response to Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth

It was not one of my finer moments. I was on my junior high school’s basketball team and we were headed out for an away game. As we boarded the bus, the cheerleaders handed everyone an apple as a pre-game snack. Being in seventh grade meant I was relegated to the back of the bus where the exhaust fumes were especially bad that day. So after eating my apple, I pulled my shirt up over my nose in the hopes of filtering out some of the noxious odors. That move was my undoing.

The combination of the recently consumed apple, the exhaust, and the winding road pushed me over the edge. Soon I was feeling nauseous. And then the unthinkable happened—I threw up inside my shirt. I don’t know what was worse: the vomit all over my chest or the teasing that predictably ensued.

Everyone is embarrassed by something. And many creationists think that evolutionary biologists should be mortified by the gaps in the fossil record. But as Richard Dawkins writes in The Greatest Show on Earth, the fossil record is of no concern to evolutionary biologists in the least. In fact, Dawkins considers the fossil record as evidence for biological evolution—in spite of ridicule from the creationist camp about all the “missing links.”

He discusses this point in chapter six of The Greatest Show on Earth. This week I continue my chapter-by-chapter critique of his latest book in which he offers what he considers the best evidence for the evolutionary paradigm. (Go here, here, here, and for comments on previous chapters.)

Chapter Six

Dawkins admits there are gaps in the fossil record. But, he argues (and I would agree with his point), these gaps are to be expected given the vagaries of the burial and fossilization process. In fact, in some respects it is surprising that we have any fossils at all. According to Dawkins, creationists make much out of nothing when they use this point to deride the evolution.

He further asserts that the presence or absence of fossils is immaterial. From his standpoint, the case for biological evolution is so strong that a fossil record is not needed to establish the validity of evolution. Having fossils is a bonus. He then argues that the fossils we do possess provide powerful support for an evolutionary history of life, citing a number of examples presumably meant to document the evolution of major groups. Dawkins chooses to focus on the evolutionary transitions that allegedly occurred when vertebrates moved from the water to land with the origin of tetrapods, and then back to the water in the case of whales, seals, and turtles.

Response

I think Dawkins is wrong in his claim that the fossil record is not needed to establish the validity of biological evolution (macroevolution). Without an abundant fossil record, how is it possible to maintain that evolution is a fact? The preserved history of life provides the means to conduct a time-based assessment of Darwin’s idea. If evolution is understood as change in life’s history over time driven by the forces of selection, then time-based data is necessary to cement this idea’s legitimacy.

Darwin discovered a mechanism that accounts for microevolution, speciation, and the evolution of microbes. But does the same mechanism apply to large-scale biological changes? We know that selection operating on genetic variation explains small evolutionary changes because we can observe them in real time. As I have pointed out before, there are reasons to think this mechanism is limited to small-scale changes because work in artificial selection exposes nonnegotiable biological boundaries.

In order to prove that selection can yield large-scale biological innovation, we need some type of time-based observation. Of course, we can’t observe macroevolutionary changes directly, but in principle we can witness these changes from the fossil record, which serves as a proxy for life’s history—a history that should be characterized by certain features and patterns if macroevolution is indeed a fact.

In many respects, there are gaps in knowledge in every scientific discipline. The real questions are: Can we discern the actual trends in life’s history from the fossil record despite the gaps? And is the fossil record an adequate enough sampling to evaluate predictions made by Darwin’s theory? Many paleontologists think so.

Rather than revealing gradual evolutionary transformations as expected based on Darwin’s mechanism, life’s history is dominated by explosive appearances every time biological innovation occurs. Biologist Eugene Koonin has termed these dramatic innovations as “big bang” events. These big bangs include: the origin of cells, the origin of archaea, bacteriea, and eukarya, and the origin of animal body plans. (Go here to read an article I wrote about Koonin’s idea.) Gaps in the fossil record aren’t the problem for evolution, it’s the pattern of discontinuities and explosive innovations, a pattern I think better fits within a creation model.

But what about the examples Dawkins cites of evolutionary transformations at the water’s edge? These changes appear to be described by a series of transitional fossils. Given the incompleteness of the fossil record, aren’t these examples sufficient to establish evolution’s validity?

At first glance the origin of tetrapods, seals, and whales appear as remarkable examples of a transitional sequence in the fossil record. But careful consideration of the details identifies problems for the evolutionary framework. (Go here and here to read two articles I wrote about problems with the evolutionary account of tetrapod origins, and go here and here to listen to an episode of Science News Flash in which I discuss the evolutionary model for the origin of, whales and seals, respectively.)

One Final Point

In chapter six Dawkins also discusses a statement by famous biologist J. B. S. Haldane. As the story goes, Haldane was asked to identify an observation that would invalidate the theory of evolution. In reply, he quipped, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!”

In other words, if fossils appeared out of order in the geological column, then the theory of evolution can’t be true. But Dawkins goes on to elaborate that there is “not a single solitary fossil [that] has ever been found before it could evolve.”

Evolutionary biologists often use this argument to defend their point of view. Yet I don’t buy it. In my opinion, this is a form of circular reasoning. We know that there aren’t rabbits in the Precambrian because we’ve never found rabbits in these geological layers. If rabbits were found in the Precambrian, then we would know that they existed during that time of Earth’s history.

There is nothing in the theory of evolution that tells us when organism should emerge. We know complex animal life appeared on Earth about 540 million years ago (mya) because the fossil record tells us so. We know that bony fish appear in the Ordovician because that’s what the fossil record shows. We know that dinosaurs appeared on Earth about 225 mya and became extent 65 mya because the fossil record indicates it.

Apart from the record provided by the fossil record, we wouldn’t have any knowledge of what past life on Earth looked like. Nor would we know anything about the timing and order of the appearance and disappearance of life-forms. Evolutionary biologists interpret the history of life from an evolutionary perspective and try to use their paradigm to explain the fossil record. But the theory of evolution can’t make predictions as to when life-forms should appear in Earth’s history. If rabbits were found in the Precambrian, Haldane and other evolutionary biologists most certainly wouldn’t abandon the evolutionary framework. Instead they would modify the theory to accommodate the appearance of rabbits at that point in time.

The fact of the matter is that there are “rabbits-in-the-Precambrian” examples in the fossil record that justifiably falsify the evolutionary paradigm. One that I’ve pointed out is the co-occurrence of vertebrates, chordates, urochordates, hemichordates, and echinoderms at the base of the Cambrian explosion. (Go here and here for previous articles.)

According to the evolutionary model, echinoderms produced hemichordates and urochordates as two separate evolutionary branches. Urochordates gave rise to chordates which, in turn, generated the jawless fish as the first vertebrates. In reality, fossils representative of these phyla show up simultaneously at the base of the Cambrian explosion. In other words, the fossils of jawless fish, chordates, urochordates, and hemichordates are out of sequence. If evolutionary biologists are sincere about the criterion for falsification laid down by Haldane, then good reason to abandon the evolutionary framework does exist.

The features that define the fossil don’t match the expectations based on Darwin’s mechanism. But the fossilized history of life on Earth is a bonus—a bonus for creationism.

 

By Robert Crowther

1. Darwin was wrong.

2. Missing links still missing.

3. There is no such thing as junk DNA.

4. Birds did not descend from Dinosaurs.

5. Irreducible complexity is still irreducibly complex.

6. Tiktaalik has been invalidated by an earlier ancestor.

7. Haeckel’s embryo drawings are still fake (and still in textbooks).

Hat tip to EvolutionNews.org

 

By Fred Reed

I was about fifteen when I began to think about evolution. I was then just discovering the sciences systematically, and took them as what they offered themselves to be, a realm of reason and dispassionate regard for truth. There was a hard-edged clarity to them that I liked. You got real answers. Since evolution depended on such sciences as chemistry, I regarded it as also being a science.

The question of the origin of life interested me. The evolutionary explanations that I encountered in textbooks of biology ran to, “In primeval seas, evaporation concentrated dissolved compounds in a pore in a rock, a skim formed a membrane, and life began its immense journey.” I saw no reason to doubt this. If it hadn’t been true, scientists would not have said that it was.

Remember, I was fifteen.

In those days I read Scientific American and New Scientist, the latter then still being thoughtfully written in good English. I noticed that not infrequently they offered differing speculation as to the origin of life. The belief in the instrumentality of chemical accident was constant, but the nature of the primeval soup changed to fit varying attempts at explanation.

For a while, life was thought to have come about on clay in shallow water in seas of a particular composition, later in tidal pools with another chemical solution, then in the open ocean in another solution. This continues. Recently, geothermal vents have been offered as the home of the first life. Today (Feb 24, 2005) on the BBC website, I learn that life evolved below the oceanic floor. (”There is evidence that life evolved in the deep sediments,” co-author John Parkes, of Cardiff University, UK, told the BBC News website. Link at bottom.)

The frequent shifting of ground bothered me. If we knew how life began, why did we have so many prospective mechanisms, none of which really worked? Evolution began to look like a theory in search of a soup. Forty-five years later, it still does.

Questions Arise

I was probably in college when I found myself asking what seemed to me straightforward questions about the chemical origin of life. In particular:

1. Life was said to have begun by chemical inadvertence in the early seas. Did we, I wondered, really know of what those early seas consisted? Know, not suspect, hope, theorize, divine, speculate, or really, really wish.

The answer was, and is, “no.” We have no dried residue, no remaining pools, and the science of planetogenesis isn’t nearly good enough to provide a quantitative analysis.

2. Had the creation of a living cell been replicated in the laboratory?

No, it hadn’t, and hasn’t. (Note 1)

3. Did we know what conditions were necessary for a cell to come about?

No, we didn’t, and don’t.

4. Could it be shown to be mathematically probable that a cell would form, given any soup whatever?

No, it couldn’t, and can’t. (At least not without cooking the assumptions.) (Note 2)

Well, I thought, sophomore chemistry major that I then was: If we don’t know what conditions existed, or what conditions are necessary, and can’t reproduce the event in the laboratory, and can’t show it to be statistically probable – why are we so very sure that it happened? Would you hang a man on such evidence?

My point was not that evolutionists were necessarily wrong. I simply didn’t see the evidence. While they couldn’t demonstrate that life had begun by chemical accident, I couldn’t show that it hadn’t. An inability to prove that something is statistically possible is not the same as proving that it is not possible. Not being able to reproduce an event in the laboratory does not establish that it didn’t happen in nature. Etc.

I just didn’t know how life came about. I still don’t. Neither do evolutionists.

What Distinguishes Evolution from Other Science?

Early on, I noticed three things about evolution that differentiated it from other sciences (or, I could almost say, from science). First, plausibility was accepted as being equivalent to evidence. (And of course the less you know, the greater the number of things that are plausible, because there are fewer facts to get in the way.) Again and again evolutionists assumed that suggesting how something might have happened was equivalent to establishing how it had happened. Asking them for evidence usually aroused annoyance and sometimes, if persisted in, hostility.

As an example, it seems plausible to evolutionists that life arose by chemical misadventure. By this they mean (I think) that they cannot imagine how else it might have come about. (Neither can I. Does one accept a poor explanation because unable to think of a good one?) This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.

Consequently, discussion often turns to vague and murky assertion. Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists. Guacamayos are gaudy so they can find each other to mate. Always there is the pat explanation. But starlings seem to mate with great success, though invisible. If you have heard a guacamayo shriek, you can hardly doubt that another one could easily find it. Enthusiasts of evolution then told me that guacamayos were at the top of their food chain, and didn’t have predators. Or else that the predators were colorblind. On and on it goes. But…is any of this established?

Click here for the full article and footnotes.

 

By Ray Bohlin, Ph.D.

A River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins is the fourth in a series being published by Basic Books entitled “The Science Masters Series.” This series is said to be “a global publishing venture consisting of original science books written by leading scientists.” Purposing to “present cutting-edge ideas in a format that will enable a broad audience to attain scientific literacy,” this series is aimed at the non-specialist.

The first three releases were The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures about the Ultimate End of the Universe by Paul Davies, The Origin of Humankind by Richard Leakey, and The Origin of the Universe by John D. Barrow. These were followed by the contribution from Dawkins. A look at these books, and at future contributors like Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, Murray Gell-Mann, Lynn Margulis, and George C. Williams, makes the endeavor look less like a scientific literacy series and more like an indoctrination in philosophical naturalism.

The exposition of a Darwinian view of life by Dawkins in River Out of Eden certainly fits into the overt anti-theism category. His “River Out of Eden” is a river of DNA that is the true source of life and the one molecule that must be understood if life is to be understood.

This river of DNA originally flowed as one river (one species) which eventually branched into two, three, four, and eventually millions of rivers. Each river is distinct from the others and no longer exchanges water with the others, just as species are isolated reproductively from other species. This metaphor allows Dawkins to explain both the common ancestry of all life along with the necessity of gradualism in the evolutionary process.

Dawkins refers to this river of DNA as a digital river. That is, the information contained in the DNA river is completely analogous to the digital information of languages and computers.

Surprisingly, Dawkins gives away the store in this first chapter. In pressing home the digital analogy, Dawkins first uses probability to indicate that the code arose only once and that we are all, therefore, descended from a common ancestor:

The odds of arriving at the same 64:21 (64 codons: 21 amino acids) mapping twice by chance are less than one in a million million million million million. Yet the genetic code is in fact identical in all animals, plants and bacteria that have ever been looked at. All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.(p. 12)

So it is reasonable to use probability to indicate that the code could not have arisen twice, but there is no discussion of the probability of the code arising by chance even once. A curious omission! If one tried to counter with such a question, Dawkins would predictably fall back on the assumption of naturalism that since we know only natural processes are available for the origin of anything, the genetic code must have somehow beaten the odds.

African Eve

Chapter 2 attempts to tell the story of the now famous “African Eve.” African Eve embodies the idea that we are all descended from a single female, probably from Africa, about 200,000 to 100,000 years ago. This conclusion originates from sequence data of the DNA contained in mitochondria.

Mitochondria are tiny little powerhouses that produce energy in each and every cell of your body. Just as your body contains many organs that perform different functions, the cell contains many organelles that also perform specific functions. The mitochondrion is an organelle whose task is to produce energy molecules the cell can use to accomplish its tasks.

However, mitochondria are also the only organelle to contain their own DNA. Certain proteins necessary to the function of mitochondria are coded for by the mitochondrial DNA and not by the nuclear DNA like every other protein in the cell. One other unique aspect of mitochondria is their maternal inheritance. That is, all the mitochondria in your body are descended from the ones you initially inherited from your mother. The sperm injects only its DNA into the egg cell, not its mitochondria. Therefore, an analysis of mitochondrial DNA reveals maternal history only, uncluttered by the mixture of paternal DNA like nuclear DNA. That’s why these studies only revealed an African Eve, though other recent studies claim to have followed DNA from the Y chromosome to indicate an ancient “Adam.”

Now these scientists don’t actually think they have uncovered proof of a real Adam and Eve. They only use the names as metaphors. But this action does reveal a shift in some evolutionists minds that there is a single universal ancestor rather than a population of ancestors. This at least is closer to a biblical view rather than farther away.

Finally, Dawkins makes his case for the reliability of these molecular phylogenies in general. Here he glosses over weaknesses in the theory and actually misrepresents the data. On page 43 he says, “On the whole, the number of cytochrome c letter changes separating pairs of creatures is pretty much what we’d expect from previous ideas of the branching pattern of the evolutionary tree.” In other words, Dawkins thinks that the trees obtained from molecular sequences nearly matches the evolutionary trees we already had. Later on page 44, when speaking of all molecular phylogenies performed on various sequences, he says, “They all yield pretty much the same family tree which by the way, is rather good evidence, if evidence were needed, that the theory of evolution is true.”

Well, besides implying that evidence is not really needed to prove evolution, Dawkins stumbles in trying to display confidence in the molecular data. What exactly does “pretty much” mean anyway? Inherent in that statement are the numerous contradictions that don’t fit the predictions or the ambiguous holes in the general theory. But then, evidence isn’t really needed anyway is it?

While this chapter contained the usual degree of arrogance from Dawkins, particularly in his disdain for the original account of Adam and Eve, it was somewhat less compelling or persuasive than is his usual style. He hedged his bet frequently and simply waived his hand at controversy. Unfortunately, this may not be picked up by the unwary reader.

Scoffing at Design

In Chapter 3 Dawkins launches a full-scale assault on the argument from design. After presumably debunking arguments from the apparent design of mimicry (not perfect design, you know, just good enough), Dawkins states, “Never say, and never take seriously anybody who says, ‘I cannot believe so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.’ I have dubbed this fallacy ‘the Argument from Personal Incredulity.’”

To some degree I’m afraid that many creationists have given Dawkins and others an easy target. Such a statement, “I cannot believe…,” has been used many times by well-meaning creationists but is really not very defensible. It is not helpful to simply state that you can’t believe something; we must elaborate the reasons why. First, Dawkins levels the charge that much of what exists in nature is far from perfectly designed and is only good enough. This he claims is to be expected of natural selection rather than a designer. This is because a designer would design it right while natural selection has to bumble and fumble its way to a solution. To begin with, the lack of perfection in no way argues for or against a designer.

I have always marveled at some evolutionists who imply that if it isn’t perfect, then Nature did it. Just what is perfection? And how are we to be sure that our idea of a perfect design wasn’t rejected by the Creator because of some flaw we cannot perceive? It is a classic case of creating God in our own image.

The evolutionists are the ones guilty of erecting the straw man argument in this instance. In addition, Dawkins fully admits that these features work perfectly well for the task at hand. The Creator only commanded His creatures to be fruitful and multiply, not necessarily to be perfectly designed (humanly speaking) wonders. Romans 1:18-20 indicates that the evidence is sufficient if you investigate thoroughly.

Dawkins further closes off criticism by declaring that “there will be times when it is hard to think of what the gradual intermediates may have been. These will be challenges to our ingenuity, but if our ingenuity fails, so much the worse for our ingenuity.” So if explanations fail us, the fault is not with the evolutionary process, just our limited thinking. How convenient that the evolutionary process is so unfalsifiable in this crucial area. But after all, he implies, this is science and intelligent design is not!

Dawkins concludes the chapter with a discussion on the evolution of the honeybee waggle dance. It is filled with probabilistic statements like “The suggestion is that…. Perhaps the dance is a kind of…. It is not difficult to imagine…. Nobody knows why this happens, but it does…. It probably provided the necessary….” Yet at the end, Dawkins proclaims,

We have found a plausible series of graded intermediates by which the modern bee dance could have been evolved from simpler beginnings. The story as I have told it…may not be the right one. But something a bit like it surely did happen.

Again, “it happened” only because any other explanation has been disallowed by definition and not by the evidence.

Click here for the full article.

 

By Fazale Rana, Ph.D.
Part One of Two

“Seeing is believing.” Many evolutionary biologists lean on this old adage to argue for the validity of the evolutionary paradigm. They claim that evolution must be a fact, because we can observe it happening. We can see evolution in action. In fact, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins makes this very case in his recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which presents what Dawkins believes to be the best evidence for biological evolution.

One example of evolution happening in real time is the Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE) conducted by Richard Lenski’s group at Michigan State University.

Long Term Evolution Experiment

This study, inaugurated in 1988, has been designed to monitor evolutionary changes in Escherichia coli.The LTEE began with a single cell of E. coli that was used to generate twelve genetically identical lines of cells.

The twelve clones of the parent E. coli cell were separately inoculated into a minimal growth medium that contained low levels of glucose as the only carbon source. After growing overnight, an aliquot of each of the twelve cultures was transferred into fresh growth media. This process has been repeated everyday for about twenty years. Throughout the experiment, aliquots of cells have been frozen every 500 generations. These frozen cells represent a “fossil record” of sorts that can be thawed out and compared to current and other past generations of cells.

The forces of natural selection have been carefully controlled in this experiment. The temperature, pH, nutrients, and oxygen exposure have been constant for the last twenty years. Starvation is the primary challenge facing these cells.

Lenski and coworkers have noted evolutionary changes in the cells, some which have occurred in parallel. For example, all of the populations evolved to increase cell size, grow more efficiently on glucose, and grow more rapidly when transferred to fresh media. These changes make sense given the near starvation conditions of the cells.

Are Evolving Bacteria Evidence for Evolution?

But does the evolution of E. coli in the LTEE validate the evolutionary paradigm? Not necessarily. Just because evolution is routinely observed doesn’t mean that evolutionary processes can adequately account for life’s origin and history, and the full range of biodiversity.

I like to think of evolutionary changes as falling into one of five categories.

1. Microevolution refers to changes happening within a species. A textbook example would be the change in wing color of the peppered moth in response to changes in pollution levels in the UK.
2. Speciation occurs when one species gives rise to a closely related sister species. Take for example the evolution of the finches on the Galapagos Islands from an ancestral finch species that came to this archipelago from South America. Upon arrival this ancestral finch evolved into a variety of species that vary primarily in body size and in beak size and shape. Both microevolution and speciation have been repeatedly observed in nature and, in my opinion, are noncontroversial.
3. Macroevolution refers to putative changes that require that evolutionary processes have genuine creative potential. Examples include humans evolving from a primate ancestor, whales evolving from a terrestrial wolf-like mammal, and birds evolving from theropods. Whether or not macroevolution has occurred defines the creation/intelligent design/evolution controversy. I am skeptical that macroevolution is a real process that shaped life’s history. (Go here, here, and here to read a couple of representative articles that help explain my skepticism.)
4. Chemical evolution is another type of evolutionary process I’m skeptical about. This term refers to the processes that presumably generated the initial life-forms. According to this model, chemical selection transformed a complex chemical mixture of simple compounds into protocellular entities that further evolved to yield the first true cells. (I would refer readers to the book I coauthored with Hugh Ross, Origins of Life, for a detailed rationale for my skepticism about chemical evolution.)
5. Microbial evolution helps make sense of the evolutionary changes associated with the LTEE, which don’t really fit in any of the previous four categories. These types of transformations involve changes in viruses, bacteria, archaea, and single-celled eukaryotes—changes like the acquisition of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the ability of viruses to hop from one host to another (such as SARS and HIV), and the emergence of drug-resistant strains of the malaria parasites. Microbial evolution would also include horizontal gene transfer between microbes, which accounts for the evolution of pathogenic bacteria from non-pathogenic strains (like E. coli O157:H7). Again, I don’t find microbial evolution particularly controversial. A preponderance of evidence exists for it, including the LTEE.

In a sense, it is not surprising that single-celled microbes and viruses can evolve given their extremely large population sizes and capacity to take up large pieces of DNA from their surroundings and incorporate it into their genomes.

Just because scientists have observed microevolution, speciation, and microbial evolution doesn’t mean that macroevolution is necessarily valid. The scale of the biological changes that take place in microevolution and speciation are radically different than those that presumably take place in macroevolution. As is true in other areas of science, processes happening at one level can’t automatically be extrapolated to other levels without proper validation. In my opinion, this validation doesn’t exist for macroevolutionary changes. As for microbial changes, it is hard to maintain that what is true for viruses and single-celled prokaryotic organisms is valid for complex, multicellular eukaryotes. In fact, many biologists don’t even think that the concept of a species applies to bacteria and archaea in the same way it applies to complex, multicellular organisms, if it applies at all.

The LTEE is a remarkable scientific study that has and will continue to reveal important understanding about microbial evolution. But I don’t think that it can be counted as overarching evidence for the evolutionary paradigm. It is evidence that microbes can evolve and nothing more. Next week I will discuss recent work associated with the LTEE that actually raises broader questions about molecular evolution and, consequently, the evolutionary framework.

 

By Jonathan Wells
Discovery Institute

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. In Why Evolution is True, he summarizes Darwinism—the modern theory of evolution—as follows: “Life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species—perhaps a self-replicating molecule—that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.”1Coyne further explains that evolution “simply means that a species undergoes genetic change over time. That is, over many generations a species can evolve into something quite different, and those differences are based on changes in the DNA, which originate as mutations. The species of animals and plants living today weren’t around in the past, but are descended from those that lived earlier.”2

According to Coyne, however, “if evolution meant only gradual genetic change within a species, we’d have only one species today—a single highly evolved descendant of the first species. Yet we have many… How does this diversity arise from one ancestral form?” It arises because of “splitting, or, more accurately, speciation,” which “simply means the evolution of different groups that can’t interbreed.”3 If Darwinian theory were true, “we should be able to find some cases of speciation in the fossil record, with one line of descent dividing into two or more. And we should be able to find new species forming in the wild.” Furthermore, “we should be able to find examples of species that link together major groups suspected to have common ancestry, like birds with reptiles and fish with amphibians.” Finally, there are facts that “make sense only in light of the theory of evolution” but do not make sense in the light of creation or design. These include “patterns of species distribution on the earth’s surface, peculiarities of how organisms develop from embryos, and the existence of vestigial features that are of no apparent use.” Coyne concludes his introduction with the bold statement that “all the evidence—both old and new—leads ineluctably to the conclusion that evolution is true.”4 Of course, “evolution” is undeniably true if it means simply that existing species can change in minor ways over time, or that many species living today did not exist in the past. But Darwin’s claim that all species are modified descendants of a common ancestor, and Coyne’s claim that DNA mutations and natural selection have produced those modifications, are not so undeniably true. Coyne devotes the remainder of his book to providing evidence for them.

Fossils

Coyne turns first to the fossil record. “We should be able,” he writes, “to find some evidence for evolutionary change in the fossil record. The deepest (and oldest) layers of rock would contain the fossils of more primitive species, and some fossils should become more complex as the layers of rock become younger, with organisms resembling present-day species found in the most recent layers. And we should be able to see some species changing over time, forming lineages showing ‘descent with modification’ (adaptation).” In particular, “later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.”5

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin acknowledged that the fossil record presented difficulties for his theory. “By the theory of natural selection,” he wrote, “all living species have been connected with the parent-species of each genus, by differences not greater than we see between the natural and domestic varieties of the same species at the present day.” Thus in the past “the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.” But Darwin knew that the major animal groups—which modern biologists call “phyla”—appeared fully formed in what were at the time the earliest known fossil-bearing rocks, deposited during a geological period known as the Cambrian. He considered this a “serious” difficulty for his theory, since “if the theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited long periods elapsed… and that during these vast periods the world swarmed with living creatures.” And “to the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” So “the case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”6

Darwin defended his theory by citing the imperfection of the geological record. In particular, he argued that Precambrian fossils had been destroyed by heat, pressure, and erosion. Some of Darwin’s modern followers have likewise argued that Precambrian fossils existed but were later destroyed, or that Precambrian organisms were too small or too soft to have fossilized in the first place. Since 1859, however, paleontologists have discovered many Precambrian fossils, many of them microscopic or soft-bodied. As American paleobiologist William Schopf wrote in 1994, “The long-held notion that Precambrian organisms must have been too small or too delicate to have been preserved in geological materials… [is] now recognized as incorrect.” If anything, the abrupt appearance of the major animal phyla about 540 million years ago—which modern biologists call “the Cambrian explosion” or “biology’s Big Bang”—is better documented now than in Darwin’s time. According to Berkeley paleontologist James Valentine and his colleagues, the “explosion is real, it is too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record.” Indeed, as more fossils are discovered it becomes clear that the Cambrian explosion was “even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned.”7

What does Coyne’s book have to say about this?

“Around 600 million years ago,” Coyne writes, “a whole gamut of relatively simple but multicelled organisms arise, including worms, jellyfish, and sponges. These groups diversify over the next several million years, with terrestrial plants and tetrapods (four-legged animals, the earliest of which were lobe-finned fish) appearing about 400 million years ago.”8

In other words, Coyne’s account of evolutionary history jumps from 600 to 400 million years ago without mentioning the 540 million year-old Cambrian explosion. In this respect, Coyne’s book reads like a modern biology textbook that has been written to indoctrinate students in Darwinian evolution rather than provide them with the facts.

Coyne goes on to discuss several “transitional” forms. “One of our best examples of an evolutionary transition,” he writes, is the fossil record of whales, “since we have a chronologically ordered series of fossils, perhaps a lineage of ancestors and descendants, showing their movement from land to water.”9

“The sequence begins,” Coyne writes, “with the recently discovered fossil of a close relative of whales, a raccoon-sized animal called Indohyus. Living 48 million years ago, Indohyus was… probably very close to what the whale ancestor looked like.” In the next paragraph, Coyne writes, “Indohyus was not the ancestor of whales, but was almost certainly its cousin. But if we go back 4 million more years, to 52 million years ago, we see what might well be that ancestor. It is a fossil skull from a wolf-sized creature called Pakicetus, which is bit more whalelike than Indohyus.” On the page separating these two paragraphs is a figure captioned “Transitional forms in the evolution of modern whales,” which shows Indohyus as the first in the series and Pakicetus as the second.10

But Pakicetus—as Coyne just told us—is 4 million years older than Indohyus. To a Darwinist, this doesn’t matter: Pakicetus is “more whalelike” than Indohyus, so it must fall between Indohyus and modern whales, regardless of the fossil evidence.

(Coyne performs the same trick with fossils that are supposedly ancestral to modern birds. The textbook icon Archaeopteryx, with feathered wings like a modern bird but teeth and a tail like a reptile, is dated at 145 million years. But what Coyne calls the “nonflying feathered dinosaur fossils”—which should have come before Archaeopteryx—are tens of millions of years younger. Like Darwinists Kevin Padian and Luis Chiappe eleven years earlier, Coyne simply rearranges the evidence to fit Darwinian theory.)11

So much for Coyne’s prediction that “later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones.” And so much for his argument that “if evolution were not true, fossils would not occur in an order that makes evolutionary sense.” Ignoring the facts he himself has just presented, Coyne brazenly concludes: “When we find transitional forms, they occur in the fossil record precisely where they should.” If Coyne’s book were turned into a movie, this scene might feature Chico Marx saying, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”12

There is another problem with the whale series (and every other series of fossils) that Coyne fails to address: No species in the series could possibly be the ancestor of any other, because all of them possess characteristics they would first have to lose before evolving into a subsequent form. This is why the scientific literature typically shows each species branching off a supposed lineage.

Click here for the full article and active footnotes.

 

By Casey Luskin, Ph.D.

If you believe what you read in the newsmedia, another new alleged missing link has been found. That is, if you consider something discovered in the early 1990’s new. This fossil seems to have spent almost as much time under the microscope at Berkeley as it did in the ground in Ethiopia, when it was first buried about 4.4 million years ago.

Why did it take over 15 years for the reports on this fossil to finally be published, besides the fact that it allowed more time for planning the now-customary PR campaign? A 2002 article in Science explains exactly why: the bones were so brittle, “squished,” “chalky” and “erod[ed]” when cleaned such that many of the bone fragments had to be “reconstruct[ed]”—and that took a long time. Here’s the story from more than seven years ago:

[I]n 1992, the Middle Awash Research Team, co-led by [Tim] White, made a discovery that ended Lucy’s reign. About 75 kilometers south of Lucy’s resting place, at Aramis in the Afar depression of Ethiopia, the team found fossils of a chimp-sized ape dated to about 4.4 million years ago. … The team named this species Ardipithecus ramidus, drawing on two words from the Afar language suggesting that it was humanity’s root species. But skeptics argue that the published fossils are so chimplike that they may represent the long-lost ancestor of the chimp, not human, lineage.The next field season, team member Yohannes Haile-Selassie found the first of more than 100 fragments that make up about half of a single skeleton of this species, including a pelvis, leg, ankle and foot bones, wrist and hand bones, a lower jaw with teeth—and a skull. But in the past 8 years no details have been published on this skeleton. Why the delay? In part because the bones are so soft and crushed that preparing them requires a Herculean effort, says White. The skull is “squished,” he says, “and the bone is so chalky that when I clean an edge it erodes, so I have to mold every one of the broken pieces to reconstruct it.” The team hopes to publish in a year or so, and White claims that the skeleton is worth the wait, calling it a “phenomenal individual” that will be the “Rosetta stone for understanding bipedalism.”(Ann Gibbons, “In Search of the First Hominids,” Science, 295:1214-1219 (February 15, 2002).)Of course a key feature in demonstrating that an organism was bipedal is the precise shape of its pelvis. But look at what one of the current media stories on A. ramidus is reporting about the original condition of the pelvis that was discovered: One problem is that some portions of Ardi’s skeleton were found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction. “Tim [White] showed me pictures of the pelvis in the ground, and it looked like an Irish stew,” says Walker. Indeed, looking at the evidence, different paleoanthropologists may have different interpretations of how Ardi moved or what she reveals about the last common ancestor of humans and chimps.(Michael D. Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman, “Excavating Ardi: A New Piece for the Puzzle of Human Evolution,” Time Magazine (October 1, 2009).)The recent news report in Science recounts the same problems with the fossil: But the team’s excitement was tempered by the skeleton’s terrible condition. The bones literally crumbled when touched. White called it road kill. And parts of the skeleton had been trampled and scattered into more than 100 fragments; the skull was crushed to 4 centimeters in height.(Ann Gibbons, “A New Kind of Ancestor: Ardipithecus Unveiled,” Science, Vol. 326:36-40 (Oct. 2, 2009).)National Geographic put it thus: After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface. They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. “Chalky”? “Squished”? “Badly crushed and distorted”? “Needed extensive digital reconstruction”? After all the media hype and overblown claims about importance of Ida, forgive me for having an initial reaction of skepticism. How far would you trust a “Rosetta stone” that was initially “crushed to smithereens” and “would turn to dust at a touch”?Claims of bipedalism often depend upon precise measurements of the angles of key bones such as the pelvis, femur, and knee-bones. But if these bones were discovered in such a crushed, squished, etc. form, determining the precise contours of these bones might become a highly subjective exercise. I’m sure they spent a lot of time on their reconstructions (and it certainly sounds like they did) but at the end of the day, it’s difficult to make solid claims about extremely unsolid bones.Click here for the full article. 

 

At the January meeting of the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), University of Texas Austin professor David Hills asserted that there are no legitimate scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinian evolution. He stated that scientific weaknesses in evolution have “no scientific basis” and compared teaching these weaknesses to teaching “alchemy” or “astrology.” 

Dr. Hillis’s assertions were false, and his comparisons were specious. Hundreds of Ph.D. scientists have expressed scientific skepticism of neo-Darwinian evolution.1 Additionally, the TSBOE was presented with hundreds of scientific articles that discuss scientific weaknesses in key aspects of neo-Darwinian evolution. Additionally, much like his co-participant Ronald Wetherington, Hillis has bluffed about the facts of this debate, and his own arguments are controverted by the scientific record. Hillis’s testimony included multiple inaccurate statements. Hillis’s mistakes and misrepresentations included:

1. Overselling the practical importance of evolution to agriculture and medicine.
2. Failing to acknowledge scientific challenges to Darwin’s “tree of life” hypothesis and completely misrepresenting disagreements between molecule-based phylogenetic trees.
3. Falsely claiming that there are high levels of congruence between anatomical and molecular phylogenies (leading experts acknowledge widespread disagreement between these two approaches).
4. Overstating the length and understating the extent of the Cambrian explosion (again, leading experts disagree with Hillis’s claims).
5. Invoking artificial selection as an explanation for biological information, even though it doesn’t accurately reflect the processes of unguided natural selection in the wild.
6. Wrongly claiming that newly-discovered function for so-called “junk DNA” does not demonstrate a weakness of evolution, despite the fact that evolutionists themselves previously cited “junk DNA” as key evidence for evolution.
7. Inaccurately portraying irreducible complexity as if it has been refuted by the scientific community (in reality, a variety of scientific papers show there is a vibrant scientific debate over irreducible complexity).
8. Downplaying natural selection acting on mutations as the primary adaptive mechanism in orthodox evolutionary theory.

Dr. Hillis said he “wants the truth to be told.” That is commendable. Unfortunately, many of Dr. Hillis’s statements before the TSBOE were clearly false or misrepresentations of the truth. In that vein, what follows is a rebuttal to selected segments of Hillis’s testimony before the TSBOE.

A. Hillis Overstated the Practical Importance of Evolution

Dr. Hillis’s testimony was brimming with praise for the alleged utility and power of modern evolutionary biology. He claimed that there are “a large number of modern agricultural practices that are now based upon evolutionary methods.” But even some leading evolutionary biologists have conceded otherwise. University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne admitted in the leading scientific journal Nature:

[I]f truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.2

To further show the alleged utility of evolution, Hillis discussed how mutations in one particular protein of the influenza virus allow it to escape detection by our immune system, stating “phylogenetic analysis … is a critical tool for developing flu vaccines every year,” and asserting that “knowledge of evolution helps millions of human lives be saved every year.” While there is no doubt that influenza “evolution” is a real phenomenon, we must ask the crucial questions: What degree of evolution is this? And can this sort of “evolution” be legitimately extrapolated to explain large-scale evolutionary changes? In other words, if we were teaching students about this type of “evolution,” should we teach them that it implies large scale macroevolutionary change that could explain the origin of complex biological features, such as new body plans?

Click here for the full article with active footnotes.

 

By Fazale Rana, Ph.D.

I remember watching Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In as a kid. One of my favorite characters was the German soldier, Wolfgang, played by Arte Johnson. Shell-shocked, the confused Wolfgang was still trying to fight World War II. His mission: spy on the Laugh-In show. From time to time, Wolfgang would stick his head out from behind the bushes and comment pensively, “Very interesting.”

Recently a team of paleoanthropologists and geologists reported on the remarkably complete remains of Ardipithecus ramidus, one of the earliest known hominids. The researchers nicknamed this creature Ardi, and find it to be “very interesting.” It holds interest from an apologetics standpoint, too. The discovery of Ardi overturns ideas associated with the theory of human evolution, and that uncertainty raises doubts about the validity of the theory as a whole.

(Go here to listen to the episode of Science News Flash in which I offer my assessment on what Ardi means to the human evolutionary model.)

One of the ideas called into question by this discovery is the scenario for the origin of bipedalism. Before these researchers reported on Ardi, I suspected that this evolutionary explanation was in trouble. At the risk of living in the past I invite you to go here and here to read earlier articles I wrote on the scientific problems with the evolutionary model for the origin of bipedalism in humans.

From my vantage point, discoveries like Ardi make it difficult to regard human evolution as a fact.