Attempts to Counter Stephen Meyer’s Book

Evolution is extremely flexible in its explanations because there is more imagination than hard scientific evidence. For this reason, it has opened the door for evolutionary scientists to create some of the most far-reaching scenarios ever imagined, and claiming it’s all in the name of ‘science’ which cannot be confirmed and yet claim its superiority (bluffing) to be factual or near factual.

Ever since Stephen Meyer’s “Darwin’s Doubt”  was published and has been a best seller on Amazon.com in science, various articles have been trying to counter it.

“Darwin’s Doubt” by Stephen Meyer has to do with an explosion of complex life forms such as the Cambrian arthropod having a large complex brain that all of a sudden appears in the fossil record were expected ancestors of these animals have not been discovered. This is similar to what is being discovered in space where scientists are discovering abrupt appearances of diverse group of galaxies already in mature states near what they consider to be the beginning of the universe which is contrary to what evolutionary astronomers believed! They thought one type of galaxy evolved into another, this called the “Hubble Sequence.”

Popular Science writer and evolutionist, Carl Zimmer decided to write an article that attempts to counter Meyer’s book and others like it. His article appears in the New York Times which is not surprising because this publication is very pro-evolution.

Zimmer’s style in his rebuttal is quite classic for a militant defender of evolution, because he purposely avoids mentioning Meyer’s book for fear of giving it credit and that more people would buy the book as a result. He does refer to Meyer and the rest who don’t believe in neo-Darwinism as “opponents of evolution”.

When a theory gets increasingly more complicated as new data is discovered which falsifies it even more and old arguments are looked at with the new data, it means the theory is not valid. A totally new direction is required! The increasingly complicated theory, in this case “evolution” is only resting on man’s imagination to rescue it rather than facts. That is not to say inferences cannot be drawn in science nor advancing growing knowledge with new data, but when conjecture is considered growing knowledge and is so dominate among its explanations, this is not science but rather a cult following.

Zimmer endorses and uses conjecture over science quite often in his article, “Explaining Evolution’s Big Bang”…

“Long before the Cambrian explosion, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, one lineage of animals had already evolved the genetic capacity for spectacular diversity. Known as the bilaterians, they probably looked at first like little crawling worms. They shared the Precambrian oceans with other animals, like sponges and jellyfish. During the Cambrian explosion, relatively modest changes to their genes gave rise to a spectacular range of bodies.”

“But those genes evolved in bilaterians tens of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion put them to the test, notes Dr. Smith. “They had the capacity,” he said, “but it hadn’t been expressed yet.”

Zimmer suggests that evolution created genetic capacity for a purpose of producing enormous diversity among animals but kept it dormant for millions of years till something triggered its use in a short period of time by evolutionary standards. Correct me if I’m wrong, but nature doesn’t go by future assumptions in order to survive, does it? Does anyone believe evolution relies on predictions of the future which affects what it does in the present? When I was taught about evolution in school, the theory said that evolution relies on what goes on in at the present moment in order to survive! A mindless process doesn’t go by selecting future goals for survival especially many million of years into the future. We humans with a brain can decide on goals that may enhance our lives in some way, this takes a thinking process to do this!

Also, many diverse life forms require massive amounts of specified information much like many forms of advanced technology requires massive amounts of specified information. So not only does this conjecture lack observable data, and lack the ability to be replicated, and lack the ability to consider and execute future goals, its explanation of “genetic capacity” lacks a realistic requirement of creating massive amounts of specified information in a short period of time in order to create a diverse group of animals.

Meyer puts it this way in his book, functional genes and proteins are not just rare but exceedingly rare within sequence space as science points out. As a result, a random mutational search for specified information would fail, than to succeed, in generating even a single new gene or new protein during the entire history of life on earth!

On the other hand, Zimmer fails to show how DNA can originate, and show how mutations are able to obtain new information to build another life form! All what Zimmer does is, assume that evolution just happen to build a “genetic capacity” to be used many millions of years later without explaining why that was required for survival of the fittest in the present.

Zimmer also makes a surprise case for evolution or should I say, shocking case for evolution by embracing a global flood! Evolutionists have always attacked the historical account from the Bible. Zimmer suggests that nature had to respond to the killing off of many species from a global flood by triggering the Cambrian explosion using the “genetic capacity” which was somehow prepared many millions of years in advance!

“It took a global flood to tap that capacity, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper propose.  They base their proposal on a study published last year by Shanan Peters of the University of Wisconsin and Robert Gaines of Pomona College. They offered evidence that the Cambrian Explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land, eroding the drowned rocks.”   

What is so very interesting about Zimmer and the authors whom he sights, they use the “Great Unconformity” as evidence for a global flood!  Creation scientists have for a long time now, been using the Great Unconformity as evidence for a global flood. Evolutionists however, have rejected using that method for evidence for a global flood, calling it a myth rather than science so why are these guys using the same evidence as creationists treated so differently? We certainly don’t see rebuttals coming from evolutionists on Zimmer’s endorsement of a global flood. So how did Zimmer get acceptance from his peers who previously opposed flood geology? Is it because Zimmer embraced a particular story for his conclusion, that life came from poison which has never been observed in nature nor even replicated in a lab rather than coming from God and that minerals were able somehow to miraculously produce advanced and complex animal body parts in a short period of time. Talk about mythology in trying to explain a major falsification of evolution!

Listen, if these evolutionists like Zimmer who now embraced a global flood with the same evidence creationists use through the years demonstrates that not only are creation scientists using the scientific method, but it also shows the lie evolutionists have created on what is and is not science for the purpose of keeping other views out of the science realm. The scientific method is not based on who the person is nor what they may believe in, rather it’s based on a procedure!

For example, two mechanics from two different backgrounds, one is a Christian who fixes your car by replacing the spark plugs and the wires, and then an atheist replaces those same parts years later. Some supposed expert writes a review in your local newspaper of the car shop saying the christian’s method wasn’t mechanical because he believes those spark plugs and wires came from God and then say, the atheist used the mechanical method in changing your spark plugs and wires because he rejects the existence of God. This folks is loony logic that most Americans do not believe in!

So the likes of Zimmer and other evolutionists have been lying to the public on what science is and is not, all in the name of defending evolution because they are merely basing their bias on who the person is and what he or she believes in when drawing conclusions from the data!

But the good news is, nature is astounding, we learn from it each day. God is highly intelligent, way beyond our understanding which is why continuing to study nature on how it works is so fun and important to learn about!

Can Science Prove or Disprove The Existence of God?

In the previous post within this series, can science prove or disprove the existence of God, we covered Anthropologist, Bruce Latimer’s assumption about what constitutes something intelligently designed like the foot from the argument that sore feet is proof for a poorly designed foot to one of the most marvelous and advanced designs ever to be produced in the universe, the human brain!

Now let’s turn to the fossil record, deemed to be the best evidence for evolution, is actually one of the best evidences for God!

“Animals and plants appear in the fossil record fully formed and remain unchanged through (supposed) millions of years. No knowledgeable individual denies this.”

-Terry Scambray

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”

-Stephen Jay Gould

For years, evolutionists have been trying to come up with a solution that solves this “uncomfortable paradox.” of hard evidence against evolution. Like poker players, they attempt to come up with explanations in order to bluff their way through a hand of cards that has been dealt to them unfavorably. Thus, they give an illusion that evolution is stronger than what it actually is, a theory with many falsifications!

“The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps. He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory.”  

-Charles Darwin

The Cambrian Explosion is not the only sudden appearance of fossils in the record but also the Ediacara Explosion which is believed to have preceded the Cambrian.

“Surprisingly, however, as shown by Shen and colleagues, these earliest Ediacara life forms already occupied a full morphological range of body plans that would ever be realized through the entire history of Ediacara organisms. “In other words, major types of Ediacara organisms appeared at the dawn of their history, during the Avalon Explosion,” Dong said. “Subsequently, Ediacara organisms diversified in White Sea time and then declined in Nama time. But, despite this notable waxing and waning in the number of species, the morphological range of the Avalon organisms were never exceeded through the subsequent history of Ediacara.” 

-Science daily

If evolution was true in nature, scientists would have discovered a wide range of transitional animals, more so than the species themselves rather they discovered animals fully formed, and very complex! For example, Cambrian animals are not what one would call, “simple” by no means, but rather they are highly complex creatures! Trilobite eyes themselves are astoundingly complex!

Why do you think Gould invented his own pet theory that proposed great acceleration in evolution?  Because gradualism, a structure in nature that is achieved by progressive steps from a mindless process as Darwin proposed was being falsified by hard evidence in the fossil record! On the other hand, the Bible refers to animals after their own kind, and the only way abrupt appearances of animals in the fossil record could only happen when available specified information was present and that information came from God!

One experiment which tested to see how natural selection would choose mutations to change a species or in other words add new information which is evolution. The experiment would have broken the back of the creationist model if proven to be true rather than just using assumptions or invented explanations to argue against it. I’m referring to of course is the fruit fly experiment!

After 600 generations, the fruit flies became what? resistant to change. And after millions of generations, they became handicap, less fit…The original generation had a much more advantage in fitness over the mutated ones! If evolution was true, the mutated ones should have been more fit than the originals! The experiment utterly destroys the whole notion of evolution and unwittingly confirms creationism!

What about reproduction? Does this verify or deny either creationism or evolution? If evolution was true, not only would new information have to be created but also would have to be passed on to future generations! Organisms have an array of very complex functions from the smallest one-cell animals to humans. However, science has revealed that only some of the functions are connected with reproduction! The other functions have nothing to do with reproduction so therefore evolution could not have created them! Because evolution requires selection from something!

So we see, evolution doesn’t create. Animals are discovered fully formed, no transitions and remain the same animal. Evolution is not an engineer, so that is why it doesn’t create biological complex function. Nature is not evolving upwards but rather in a downward trend. Even resistance to pesticides and antibiotics by bacteria is not evolution in action! Existing information is used or a loss of information nothing new created.

Can science disprove the existence of God? The answer is clearly, no! Evolution doesn’t not replace a creator, in fact science has shown confirmation for intelligent design by God, confirmation in the fossil record, confirmation with engineering principles that have purpose, fine tuning, mutation experiments, and so on. What it boils down to is belief rather than hard evidence for evolution! The hard evidence favors creationism!

Odd Marine Animal In Cambrian Turns Evolution Upside Down

A new study has found hundreds of  small animals which looks like a flower in the strata located in China as reported in live science. This unusual but amazing small creature has a  U-shaped digestive tract, along with mouth and anus side by side. They attached themselves to the seafloor where they use their tentacles to create a water current which guides food particles to their mouth so they can eat.

The body plan of this fossil is almost identical to modern living animals!  One of the most notable differences is, the fossil is bigger than modern living ones, about 56mm.  Also, “unlike what is found in living entoprocts, the stem and flowerlike feeding cup of the ancient creature were covered by tiny hardened protuberances called sclerites, which may have formed a sort of hard exoskeleton for the creatures.”

This fossil evidence recently discovered turns evolution upside down! Here is another example of an animal phylum appearing suddenly in the oldest layers containing multicellular animals. It appears out of nowhere, fully formed, and doesn’t change its basic body plan for 520 million years in the evolutionary time frame.

And this is not the only animal discovered like this,  it’s true about all the animal phyla! How does this fit into the story of evolution? Reporter Stephanie Pappas tried to answer that question by claiming the animal was “likely an ancestor of a group known as the entoprocta.”  Do you realize what she just did in order to try to rescue evolution from this discovery?

Think about it, How can this animal be an ancestor to the modern ones? How can you argue that this creature which is larger and more complex than the modern animals of its kind, be an ancestor?  It turns Darwin’s tree upside down!

It’s about time evolutionists come to grip with reality, to start viewing things in a logical manner and that the fossil record is not their strongest evidence for evolution! From a creationist prospective, this scientific discovery is another confirmation which doesn’t increase complexity in its explanation that it turns things upside down and all around.

The Story Of “Vernanimalcula”

Back in 2005,  paleontologist David Bottjer from the University of Southern California proclaim a discovery known as…“Vernanimalcula” as an animal which has a bilateral body plan. “Vernanimalcula” was dated within the evolutionary framework of tens of millions of years prior to the Cambrian explosion.  He then used this discovery to claim there was no Cambrian explosion after all.

David Bottjer is a miltant evolutionary biologist who gained additional notoriety by pressuring the museum in California to cancel a contract from a small non-profit group that had tried to rent part of the museum for a private screening of the pro-ID film. He called it a “creationist” film because it was questioning the power of natural causes concerning fossils in the Cambrian. The modern ID movement is more like theistic evolution than creationism but it does have legit criticisms of Darwinism.

In Bottjer’s 2005 paper in Scientific American, he writes…

“We had come to Guizhou [China] in 2002 to hunt for microscopic fossils of some of the earliest animals on earth. Specifically, we were hoping to find a bilaterian.“

He already had a preconception of what he wanted to discover, and being a militant evolutionist, it just wasn’t a typical discovery rather it was something to be used against creationism and the pro-ID movement. We will discuss more about Bottjer’s method of scientific discovery in a moment, but now let’s turn to some other research that tears Bottjer’s claims to pieces!

The summary goes like this…

“Fossils described as Vernanimalcula guizhouena, from the nearly 600 million-year-old Doushantuo Formation in South China, have been interpreted as the remains of bilaterian animals. As such they would represent the oldest putative record of bilaterian animals in Earth history, and they have been invoked in debate over this formative episode of early animal evolution. However, this interpretation is fallacious.”

“We review the evidential basis of the biological interpretation of Vernanimalcula, concluding that the structures key to animal identity are effects of mineralization that do not represent biological tissues, and, furthermore, that it is not possible to derive its anatomical reconstruction on the basis of the available evidence.”

“There is no evidential basis for interpreting Vernanimalcula as an animal, let alone a bilaterian. The conclusions of evolutionary studies that have relied upon the bilaterian interpretation of Vernanimalcula must be called into question.”

Wow, not only did the co-authors of the paper…Stefan Bengtson, John A. Cunningham2, Chongyu Yin, and Philip C.J. Donoghue say it wasn’t bilerian body plans but it wasn’t even an animal at all! That is just the tip of the ice-berg, the authors also suggested that Bottjer has major bias which clouds his judgement while resorting to what this blog always refers to as drawing a conclusion using evolution for the purpose of shaping and molding a story a certain way rather than allowing the evidence to lead to the conclusions.

“It is likely that the fossils referred to as Vernanimalcula were interpreted as bilaterians because this was, as our epigram betrays, the explicit quarry of its authors. If you know from the beginning not only what you are looking for, but what you are going to find, you will find it, whether or not it exists. As Richard Feynman (1974) famously remarked: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. . . . After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists.”

“Conversely, once you have fooled yourself you will fool other scientists. And soVernanimalcula has been marshaled in evidential support for the timing of bilaterian evolution and of multifarious bilaterian innovations. The “little spring animal” has taken on a life of its own, a life it never had in the Neoproterozoic. It is our hope that Vernanimalcula will now be laid to a merciful rest, freed from the heavy burden of undue evolutionary significance that has hitherto been heaped upon it.”

Evolution is nowhere near the level as the law of gravity is, and even that is questioned because of the “big bang” where “dark matter” is invoked to explain what gravity does not in order to keep the theory alive. The law of gravity requires no such rescue mechanisms.   Paleontologist David Bottjer reduces the scientific method to a mere story, because of his hatred towards creationism and the modern intelligent design movement. The critical paper of Bottjer’s work should be applauded for their honesty and they are right, the story of “Vernanimalcula” (which is not a vampire) should be put to rest!