DO COMMON STRUCTURES PROVE COMMON DESCENT?

The theory of evolution (TTOE) rests upon only one line of “evidence” - commonalities prove common descent, whether the commonalities are found in the fossil record, anatomy, chemistry, genetics, or even in common patterns of development.

Commonality, as an indication of common descent, should be able to be assessed by whether the anatomical commonalities, like the five digits on our hands, are paralleled by their supposed underlying genetic commonalities, which produce them. If the genes that give rise to similar structures are not identical, then common descent should be ruled out.

Evolutionary biologists have constructed evolutionary trees to illustrate hypothetical ancestral lines of descent based on these common traits, like the five digits on our hands and feet. If these do not arise in similar ways from similar genes, these similarities are unable to provide any evidence for common descent. In “Heretic,” Matti Leisola explained:

·       If the comparison of anatomical and DNA sequences led to the same family tree of organisms, this would be strong evidence for macroevolution.

However, instead of these two trees matching, they are wildly dissimilar. The two trees tell different stories about who descends from whom, according to Leisola:

·       The authors compared 1,070 genes in twenty different yeasts and got 1,070 different trees. An article in Quanta magazine, reporting on the paper in Nature, highlighted the challenge these findings pose for the Darwinian tree of life: According to a new study partly focused on yeast, the conflicting picture from individual genes is even broader than scientists suspected. “They report that every single one of the 1,070 genes conflicts somewhat,” said, Michael Donoghue, an evolutionary biologist at Yale who was not involved in the study. “We are trying to figure out the phylogenetic relationships of 1.8 million species and can’t even sort out 20 [types of] yeast,” he said. (Emily Singer, “A New Approach to Building the Tree of Life,” Quanta, June 4, 2013, accessed September 29, 2017, https:// www.quantamagazine.org/ a-new-approach-to-building-the-tree-of-life-20130604/)

Leisola reasons:

·       These results aren’t what we should expect from a process of blind, gradual macroevolution. The contradictions vanish, however, on the design hypothesis. That is, the experimental results are not out of place if the living world is the result of a designing intelligence selecting and adapting design concepts for use in a variety of design blueprints.

While the evidence is consistent with the design hypothesis, it contradicts the common-descent hypothesis. The evidence clearly demonstrates that common traits do not prove common descent.

Why the resistance to the many lines of evidence against TTOE? Years of intense and vitriolic opposition has taught Leisola that behind TTOE lies a pattern of resistance to anything that opposes naturalism, namely Intelligent Design:

·       Methodological materialism [naturalism] poses as “the scientific method”—empirical, neutral, disinterested. But this isn’t the case. It is not a neutral way to observe the world. It dogmatically limits possible answers. The possibility that life has been designed is deemed out of the question. In 1999, S. C. Todd put it plainly in the journal Nature: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.”