WHY EVOLUTION MUST REMAIN BEYOND DOUBTING

 


In “Zombie Evolution,” Jonathan Wells argues that:

• Similarity may be assumed to imply genealogy [common ancestry], but this is only an assumption. Any inference to genealogy based on sequence similarity is hypothetical.

It is so hypothetical that some evolutionists are abandoning the idea of a common ancestor, which would have explained the features like DNA, which are common to all life. However, according to Wells, they cannot abandon the idea of common ancestry:

• Yet evolutionary biologists...continue to defend the idea of universal common ancestry. For example, W. Ford Doolittle wrote in 2009 that he doubts “there ever was a single universal common ancestor,” but “this does not mean that life lacks ‘universal common ancestry’” because “‘ common ancestry’ does not entail a ‘common ancestor.’” Why such mental gymnastics? Doolittle freely admits that it is because “much is at stake socio-politically,” namely the need to defeat “anti-evolutionists” in “the culture wars.”

Consequently, evolutionists must hold fast to the only proof they have, that commonalities (homologies) mean common ancestry. However, such an “obvious” assertion is often contradicted by the facts. If the homologous structures serve as evidence of common ancestry or common descent, they must have been produced by the same genes, right?

• Structures are homologous because they arise from similar cells in the embryo. But again, the evidence does not support the hypothesis. As far back as 1958, de Beer noted, “Correspondence between homologous structures cannot be pressed back to similarity of position of the cells in the embryo, or of the parts of the egg out of which the structures are ultimately composed, or of developmental mechanisms by which they are formed.

Lacking the common genes or developmental pathways, the common structures do not serve as evidence of common descent or ancestry. However, to explain this embarrassment within the framework of evolution, evolutionists have invented a new term, “convergent evolution,” which, in effect, acknowledges that commonalities do not prove common descent. And these similar, non-ancestral structures common.

Let’s take the case of bioluminescence, independently “reinvented” perhaps over 60 times in bugs, bacteria, fungi, and fish. The findings of Oakley and Pankey point out that convergent evolution is statistically impossible:

• This convergent evolution is so astonishingly unlikely that we would never expect it to occur via the evolutionary mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. But because we know that evolution by this process is a fact, we must now admit that statistically impossible things regularly occur in evolution because…well we don’t really know why but it’s clear that evolution has received a special dispensation from the laws of probability. Not once does it occur to him to doubt the evolutionary mechanism.

But could evolution reinvent the same brain structures over and over again? In this regard, neuroscientist and evolutionist Paul Patton made an interesting revelation:

• “One of the most common misconceptions about brain evolution is that it represents a linear process culminating in amazing cognitive powers of humans, with brains of other modern species representing previous stages…However research in comparative neuron-anatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages.” (Scientific America Mind, “One World, Many Minds,” Dec 2008/Jan 2009, 72-73)

Patton acknowledged that what had been promoted as the evolutionary pathway of the brain (from simplicity to complexity), is not so. Previously, it had been taught that our brains derived from four sequential evolutionary steps in which the fish brain was overlaid by a reptilian complex and later repackaged in over-lying paleo- and then neo-mammalian brain additions. However, useful lies retain their place.

What remains the only alternative to God must remain beyond doubting. The truth be damned if it points to a Creator!