What Does One Mean By Evolution?

Can you define evolution? Is it a mechanism, and if so, what is the mechanism? Is evolution a sequence? And if there is a disagreement on both to what extent do they represent the same idea? These are some of the questions brought up by Jonathan Bartlett in his thought-provoking article…

“One of the keys to holding a reasoned position is to understand the varieties of views on a given subject. Only then are you even able to really understand your own position. When you engage deeply with a variety of positions, even if you disagree with them, it often expands your understanding of the entire issue considerably.

 ”Another reason to become acquainted with a range of views is to prevent yourself from being bullied by a “consensus of opinion.”  Many times when a “consensus” is formed, it is done by heaping together a large swath of diverse opinions into a single position, or by creating a category so big it is meaningless. When those positions are then picked out and examined individually, it turns out that the “consensus” is nothing of the sort, but rather a ploy to make the argument seem more sound than it is.”

The explanations of evolution are very complex in such a way that it revolves around “stuff happens” which can be untestable or non-confirmed ideas or even just interpreting the idea into the data in one way or another. Most people know evolution by natural selection but does that also mean “materialism” or “biological self-organization” or “teleological selection” or what?

What do you mean by evolution? If evolution is a heritable variance in reproductive success which results in the adaptation of a population to its environment then why for example would bacteria which is the most adaptive species on the planet in the most simple to extreme environments would evolve into higher levels of species which do not have those amazing adaptive abilities?

Do you think of evolution of being just “Darwinism or atheism?” The term “Darwinism” has a variety of different meanings in the science literature which is it to you? Jonathan Bartlett makes an excellent point by encouraging creationists in particular and others to be familiar and hold an understanding of various viewpoints on the subject.

Does Purposeful Evolution Really Exist?

Scientists have been amazed at the awesome designs in nature such as DNA where it was once considered to be a simple blob is actually one of the most complex and specialized designs known to man. This amazing design contains an array of special parts required for function as a result, evolutionists invoke another mindless process which includes understanding on how it must be built.

For example, the DNA Damage Repair function which is essential for life was described by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as evolving this way…

“Homologous recombination is a complex mechanism with multiple steps, but also with many points of regulation to insure accurate recombination at every stage.  This could be why this method has been favored during evolution.  The machinery that relocalizes the damaged DNA before loading Rad51 might have evolved because the consequences of not having it would be terrible.”

Since there are problems with the belief in a slow gradual change where scientists discovered that natural selection does not work. An example of this would be in the study on the belief in protein evolution. In fact it is ridiculously unrealistic. Homologous recombination is a man-made story fused together in order to rescue the slow and gradual story and would not have existed when things like proteins first evolved.

The explanation about evolution given by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is a strange one considering a mindless process would have to know certain things in order for the design to be successful. How could a mindless process understand there are consequences of not having something would be detrimental to the point where it could mean death? How would that motivate a non-mind to produce machinery and complex mechanisms to avoid such terrible consequences?

Considering the following…

1) Mathematics emerged because the consequences of not having it would make science inaccurate.

2) Life emerged because the consequences of not having it would make the earth a very lonely place.

3) Earth emerged because the consequences of having no planets being able to sustain life in this particular solar system would be terrible and lonely.

4) Eyes emerged because the consequences of not having them would be blindness.

5) The constants of physics became fine-tuned because the consequences without it would be terrible.

6) The machinery that repairs DNA might have evolved because the consequences of not having it would be terrible.

What we have here is something intelligently designed being corrupted by a man-made story on how various mindless processes are able to do the same thing. It’s like trying to build a running car using homologous recombination, how far would that car get built and stay running while experimenting with trial and error with a mindless process for billions of years? And a car is nowhere near the complexity that exists like with DNA!  There is no such thing as “purposeful evolution” it’s called intelligent design, created by God!

Questions Rise About What Scientists Really Know

Several recent stories have appeared which casts doubt on the integrity of the scientific method and in some cases the ability for scientists to solve mysteries about the real world in which we live in.  A major scandal broke which exposed 90 peer-review papers from over a decade of being fraudulent, leaving some to ask, “how is this possible?”

The UK Telegraph reports…

“Joachim Boldt is at the centre of a criminal investigation amid allegations that he may have forged up to 90 crucial studies on the treatment. He has been stripped of his professorship and sacked from a German hospital following allegations about his research into drugs known as colloids.

Experts described Mr Boldt’s alleged forgeries as possibly the biggest medical research scandal since Andrew Wakefield was struck off last year for falsely claiming to have proved a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.”

What makes this very disturbing about this is the fact that the fake research put people’s lives at risk by treatments given under the authority of science!  Boldt forged names of co-authors in his papers, conducted drug trials without approval, and stolen money from people by getting paid for operations that he never performed. The fake operations may not have been solely for the income but rather a front for impressing manufacturers of the expensive colloid medicines.

A fellow medical researcher was shocked and dismayed, “For me, it shakes the world I work in and makes me feel less confident in it, and if I were a member of the public I would feel the same,” he said. On another front, remember how health professionals told us that free radicals in food are to be avoided which is why antioxidants became so popular.

Well, this article in Science Daily may raise a few eyeballs…

“Free radicals are molecules that react readily with other substances in the body, and this can have negative effects on health in certain circumstances, through the damage caused to cells. Free radicals can be counteracted by substances known as ‘antioxidants’, which are common ingredients in many dietary supplements. The idea that free radicals are generally dangerous and must be counteracted is, however, a myth, according to scientists who have conducted a new study of the role that free radicals play in heart physiology.“

The researchers are not denying that free radicals can cause damage; they just support the old saying of  “everything in moderation.” What about evolution? There also been stories about this subject as well…

In New Scientist

“The standing dogma of eye evolution is challenged with the discovery of an invertebrate that sees light like vertebrates do, rather than like their more closely related cousins, according to a study published today (March 1) in EvoDevo.”

The story of evolution clings to its favorite behavior when expectations are falsified, it grows in complexity. While confined to the evolutionary framework, rescue tactics are invoked as this explanation implies…“Now it’s unclear which photoreceptor originally gave animals sight, and which kind evolved to sense light later.  Or, perhaps an ancestor used both receptors to see, and over the millennia, one variety or the other lost its visual function.”

This explanation only enhances more problems for the story of evolution but one of the rescue tactics which gets invoked quite often is the attempt to call it a victory for evolution. Yes, you got that right, a victory…In another stunning development which challenges evolution, a team of scientists led by George Cody of the Carnegie Institution of Washington discovered organic material in a fossil that is assumed to be 417 million years old.

The organic material is not known to be able to survive that long because in the real world, hungry microbes and other processes are known to break down the material.  A rescue tactic was once again required in the evolutionary framework, so scientists changed their tune on what is common sense with observational data to imagination in order to save the theory, now they claim organic material could not only last that long but could also last up to 500 million years!  Until of course they discover an older fossil with organic material. Evolution certainly does better with the unknown than it does with the known because there are no falsifications with imagination.

Scandals point out the vulnerability of science to human moral failings as well as putting together a falsified evolutionary story. The Climategate scandal caused the likes of Nature, calling for transparency in published research on research.

“If genomics were as politicized as climate science, the authors of studies in which the information trail is missing would probably face catcalls, conspiracy charges and demands for greater transparency and openness.  Instead, many in the field merely shrug their shoulders and insist that is how things are done.”

This story puts those who have much faith in scientists into a bad dream. They follow them through vast mountains of ignorance along with the science reporters who defend Darwinian evolution with religious fervor, who don’t ask the tough questions but go out of their way to go along with whatever is written by evolutionary scientists. The reality of it is, they are sinners in need of God!

Human Genome Overturns The Philosophy of Biology

Good news coming from the 10th year anniversary of  the Genome project. In celebration of the remarkable work that was conducted, science has dedicated a number of interesting articles on the subject. Most of the articles go into great detail on the different findings that conflicted with their predictions based on evolution. The articles do not identify human evolution but what they do say, we have an incredible array of specified complexity behind our smiley faces!

John Mattick from the University of Queensland concludes…

“These observations suggest that we need to reassess the underlying genetic orthodoxy, which is deeply ingrained and has been given superficial reprieve by uncritically accepted assumptions about the nature and power of combinatorial control.”

“As Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock wrote in 1950: “Are we letting a philosophy of the [protein-coding] gene control [our] reasoning? What, then, is the philosophy of the gene?  Is it a valid philosophy?” … There is an alternative: Human complexity has been built on a massive expansion of genomic regulatory sequences, most of which are transacted by RNAs that use generic protein infrastructure and control the epigenetic mechanisms underpinning embryogenesis and brain function. I see the human genome not simply as providing detail, but more importantly, as the beginning of a conceptual enlightenment in biology.”

The dogma of genetics in evolution tells of a story on how DNA is the master controller of heredity, translating its information into proteins that create our bones, feet, legs, hands and brains.  But what they discovered was the number of genes is far smaller than expected (only 1.5% of human DNA contains genes), and the rest is non-coding DNA which was assumed to be leftover junk that generates RNA, which regulates the expression of genes, especially during development.

Maynard Olson from the University of Washington, Seattle asked, “What Does a ‘Normal’ Human Genome Look Like?” He is alluding to what minor players are there in variation. Holders of the dogma of genetics in evolution might be a bit thrown back with this comment, “balancing selection, the evolutionary process that favors genetic diversification rather than the fixation of a single ‘best’ variant”; instead, he continued, this “appears to play a minor role outside the immune system.”

These are quite remarkable days in the history of science, the philosophy of biology (based on Darwinism) that ruled the 19th and 20th centuries is now considered invalid. When it comes to evolution, nothing in biology obtains clarity! It’s an endless search for answers that lead to nowhere. This is because evolution is the wrong framework. The human genome project confirms what the Bible says, and that is God created all things!