(Hat tip to Sean and Will for their conversation on Facebook that inspired this article.)
The evangelists for evolution make a lot of strange and contradictory statements. I am routinely ridiculed and characterized as some sort of anti-Darwinian nutcase who doesn’t understand the basic concepts of evolution theory because I tend to paraphrase what the “experts” have written and said with dripping sarcasm. One of my more vocal critics was asked his opinion about this six-minute video:
Sean replied,
That’s the kind of explanation I would have given. I only have a couple of provisos:
(1) I would disagree that there are lots of <<theories>> of evolution. I would say there was one overarching theory with lots of associated hypotheses.
(2) I’d disagree that birds are reptiles. I think reptiles are a paraphyletic group, which excludes aves.
Other than that, I think it was a good overall summary.
Hmmm. Was that video really a good summary? Professor Chakrabarty began his speech with a joke formed as a loaded question frequently attributed to creationists: “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” And the punchline? “Well, because we’re not monkeys. We’re fish.” The really funny thing was Chakrabarty wasn’t joking. According to the theory of evolution, humans are directly related to fish primarily by descent with modification via sexual reproduction, by isolation of a breeding population, over long periods of time. It seemed to me that Professor Chakrabarty was making a number of statements and claims about the theory of evolution that were remarkably similar to and consistent with comments I’ve made in the past.
For example, I have written on numerous occasions that if Darwin’s theory of evolution really is true, and life and the universe both came to exist as the result of spectacular good luck instead of divine intervention, then our earliest ancestors logically must have been some sort of single-celled organism directly related to the original form of life formed by abiogenesis.
And Chakrabarty’s claims are not unique. Dr. Neil Shubin, discoverer of the so-called transitional fossil Tiktaalik roseae, the alleged missing-link between fish and land animals, wrote a best-selling book titled Your Inner Fish, named the best book of the year for 2008 by the National Academy of Sciences. Yet science can’t explain why it happened or how it happened, but they do think they know when it happened, approximately 375 million years ago. That’s allowing for a lot of Time. Professor Chakrabarty basically said the same things I’ve been saying, only using slightly different words:
Evolution is a fact, as much as the theory of gravity, and you can prove it just as easily. You just need to look at your belly button that you share with other placental mammals. Or your backbone, that you share with other vertebrates. Or your DNA, that you share with all other life on earth. Those traits didn’t pop up in humans, they were passed down from different ancestors to all their descendants, not just us.
Now when someone starts talking about “evolutionary biology” and then talks about DNA, they have changed the subject to Mendelian genetics without calling it what it is. Evolution/natural selection and genetics are not the same thing. DNA analysis allows us to learn about the unique genetic composition of an individual living organism. As anyone who’s watched one of those “CSI” forensic-science programs know, only identical siblings have identical DNA. Everyone else can be uniquely identified. Evolutionary biologists have simply appropriated the science of genetics and proclaimed common ancestry explains how plants, fish, birds, and people all descended from a single-celled organism, but it’s a very poorly conceived explanation.
Chakrabarty suggests the audience can see evidence of evolution simply by observing his or her own belly button. With all due respect to the professor, if observation of the belly button can be called evidence of evolution via common descent, then the eyes used for observation of advanced features like eyes, ears, wings, and sophisticated functionality like echo-location navigation can be claimed to provide far better evidence of intelligent design.
Of course, “experts” like Richard Dawkins argue that intelligent design is only a beguiling illusion. His objections use terms like vestigial organs, laryngeal nerves in giraffes, the vas deferens, and even the allegedly poor design of the eye as evidence of unintelligent design. Even if we assume his argument is true and those features mentioned are truly minor design flaws, how does that become evidence of common descent, as opposed to evidence of imperfect design, according to human standards?
Dawkins says that we can trust the careful conjecture of experts over what we can observe with our own eyes. For two decades, I created intelligent designs for computer programs and applications and then I usually wrote the code. We developers had a unique term for careful conjecture, either used to estimate how long it would take to solve a problem or speculate about the true nature of the problem to solve: an acronym called SWAG. (Here’s a hint: I’m sure you can guess what the letters in SWAG represent. If not, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to tell you.)
When biologists lecture about evolution, they always gloss over the major engineering problems that would be involved in a dramatic transformation from a fish to a land-based animal, and then ultimately to a human being. It’s somewhat easier to believe the idea that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor because of the similarities in body plan and the percentage of DNA we allegedly share in common. However, the differences remain significant, and problems are not solved by assumptions. Fish have fins and scales, not appendages or fur. Fish absorb oxygen from water, which monkeys and humans cannot do; we drown. While the number of mutations or successful transformations necessary to “evolve” from primate ancestor to human are fewer that those required to metamorphose from fish to human, in many respects they are not less significant problems, as my attempts to explain the problems related to the formation of human chromosome 2 have documented.
To his credit, Dr. Ken Miller did do his best to answer my questions, but he didn’t seem to understand the overall problem I was trying to solve: if we begin with the assumption that “evolution is true”, how do we ever get from point A to B, given what we know about dominant and recessive genes from studying genetics? In his recorded lecture found on YouTube, Dr. Miller described the formation of HC2 as “fusion”, which I explained in engineering and chemistry is a description for a process that occurs instantaneously. If evolution allegedly takes hundreds of thousands, even millions of years for one species to evolve into another, why use words that typically describe an immediate process? Again, the assumption is that because HC2 looks like it might have been formed by, as Dr. Miller so colorfully described, by “something” attaching two ancestral primate chromosomes together with Scotch tape, that’s what must have happened?
What I tried, and failed to do, was to get Dr. Miller (or any evangelist for evolution) to contemplate was the “how?” question. How could two “ancient primate” chromosomes get attached together to form HC2 without any loss of genetic information at any point in the process? How do these things happen? Professor Chakrabarty claimed that humans evolved from fish primarily because of two reasons: weak logic (fish appear much earlier in the fossil record) and some common DNA sequences.
Simply ask the internet: how did tetrapods (meaning all amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds) evolve from lobe-finned fish (prehistoric fish with lungs), and you’ll find out when the experts think it happened and what they think happened, but they skip over the “how?” questions such as: how did it happen? That’s where the rubber meets the road, as the expression goes. How did fish simply “move” onto land? Was some prehistoric ancestor of the snakehead fish out for a stroll on land one day, recognized a so-called environmental niche for what it was, and seized on the opportunity? </sarcasm>
The problem is that if you ask an evolutionary biologist too many questions, their answers will inevitably begin to contradict each other. Ask the internet how lungs allegedly evolved, and you’ll be informed that the swim bladders of fish allegedly evolved from lungs, and humans have lungs because our fish ancestors had lungs. How did our fish ancestors get lungs?
When one reads the abstract of a peer-reviewed scientific paper with the title “Evolution of lung breathing from a lungless primitive vertebrate” that would seem to address the problem, we see that scientists have claimed they “found that a distinct periodic centrally generated rhythm, described as “cough” and occurring in lamprey in vivo and in vitro, is modulated by central sensitivity to CO2. This suggests that elements critical for the evolution of breathing in tetrapods, were present in the most basal vertebrate ancestors prior to the evolution of the lung. We propose that the evolution of breathing in all vertebrates occurred through exaptations (meaning the change in the function of a trait) derived from these critical basal elements.”
The authors continue:
Air breathing in tetrapods, however, requires more than just a lung. Also required are a “breath”, output from a brainstem central rhythm generator (CRG) activating respiratory muscles to ventilate the lung, and populations of brainstem chemoreceptors sensitive to CO2/pH that modulate CRG activity. Together with the lung this system produces breathing matched to metabolic demand. The CO2/pH-modulated air-breathing CRG (CRGAB) is anatomically and functionally distinct from the CRG producing gill ventilation, which is not modulated by CO2/pH (Milsom, 2010; Wilson et al., 2002). The origin of the requisite CO2/pH-modulated CRGAB is unknown, but may have preceded the evolution of the lung (Perry et al., 2001). [emphasis added]
“Evolution of lung breathing from a lungless primitive vertebrate” by M. Hoffman, B. E. Taylor, and M. B. Harris.
Critical elements just happened to be present when they were needed. How convenient! This is why I’ve referred to Time and Luck the gods of atheism (and science.) Much better logic would say that fish were designed first. The same intelligent designer of fish simply used the universal building block of life called DNA to produce the complexity we can easily observe and comprehend, thanks to our limited yet egotistical human intelligence.
That would explain why fish are perfectly adapted for their environment but humans perfectly conceived for living on land. Perhaps things appear to be designed because they are designed. Humans aren’t terrible at creating our own designs, although we steal almost all of our best ideas and inventions from “natural” models argued by some to only exist because of their gods Time and Luck.
The microscope. The telescope. Flight. Sonar and radar. The computer. All impressive tools and technology, but not original designs. They are inventions and devices that somewhat competently mimic, but never surpass, the natural designs on which they are based. Does the design of an airplane allow it to fly “better” than an eagle, or just faster while carrying a lot more weight and burning huge amounts of fossil fuels?
Birds can fly because of feathers and wings, but those aren’t the only reasons. Birds also wouldn’t be able to fly without hollow bones as well. Well…almost all birds have hollow bones. Some flightless birds such as penguins and ostrich have solid bones. Loons also have solid bones, because they need them for diving. According to evolutionary theory, the narrative would be that all the other birds were in the process of developing hollow bones which later enabled flight, but loons recognized the environmental niche offered by diving underwater to catch and eat fish, so somehow their DNA figured out how to reconfigure for wings and feathers with solid bones and webbed feet instead of hollow bones and claws due to Luck, made possible by the magic of Time. </sarcasm>
As the old cliche goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Perhaps the modern expression ought to be you can lead an evolutionist to logic, but you can’t make him think.
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