The Icons of Evolution: Do They Hold Up?
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for A Creator, chapters 2 & 3. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
The problem is to get [people] to reject irrational and super-natural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, Science, as the only begetter of truth.
- Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, emphasis mine
Science… has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do with its own creating, and that the means of creation must not have included any role for God.
- Evolution critic Phillip E. Johnson
To a lot of folks science represents the empirical, the trust-worthy, the hard facts, and the experimentally proven. Every-thing else is dismissed as mere opinion, conjecture, and superstition - in other words, mindless faith.
J.P. Moreland said that for many people the term scientific means something is good, rational and modern, whereas something not scientific is old-fashioned and not worth the belief of thinking people.
The four most prominent images of evolution can rightly be called the icons of evolution. They, as well as a few more, are in our textbooks and are the examples always given when asked. For many scientists they are the evidence for evolution. And they are either false or misleading.
The Stanley Miller Experiment
In 1953, as a graduate student, Miller reproduced the atmosphere of the primitive earth and then shot electric sparks through it to simulate lightning. This produced a red goo con-taining amino acids, considered by many to be the “building blocks of life.”
So what's the problem? The consensus is that the atmosphere was not at all like the one he used. There's no evidence for it, but much against it. In fact, we’ve known since at least the 60s, just a decade after his experiment - so why is it still presented as credible? What happens if you replay the experiment using an accurate atmosphere? Some textbooks like to fudge by saying you get organic molecules. To the unknowing these may sound like precursors to life, but they’re formaldehyde and cyanide - in other words, embalming fluid!
Even if you could get amino acids you are still incredibly far from creating life. You’d have to get the right number of the right kinds of amino acids to link up to create a protein molecule - and that’s still a long way from a living cell. Then you’d need dozens of protein molecules, again in the right sequence, to create a living cell. But it's still included in some textbooks! If included in textbooks at all it should be an interesting footnote, but is often featured with pictures. It’s being generous to only call it misleading. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA and a spiritual skeptic: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
Darwin’s “Tree of Life”
In Darwin's "Tree of Life," the development of life is depicted as a tree, starting with an ancient ancestor at the bottom and then blossoming upward into limbs, branches and twigs as life evolved with increasing diversity and complexity. So Miller showed us how we supposedly got the building blocks, then Darwin’s Tree demonstrated how all life descended from those building blocks.
A key aspect of his theory was that natural selection would act slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations and that no great or sudden modifications were possible.
But Darwin knew the fossil record failed to support his tree. He acknowledged that major groups of animals (called phyla) appear suddenly in the fossil record. That’s not what his theory predicts. Even in his day, the fossil evidence shows the rapid appearance of phylum-level differences in what’s called the ‘Cambrian explosion.’
Like modern-day evolutionists, Darwin thought future dis-coveries would vindicate him, but it hasn’t happened. As a matter of fact, fossil discoveries over the past 150 years have shown that the Cambrian explosion was even more abrupt and extensive than scientists once thought.
The Cambrian - a geological period a little more than 540 million years ago - has been called the ‘Biological Big Bang’ - it gave rise to the sudden appearance of most of the major animal phyla that are still alive today, as well as some that are now extinct.
These animals, which are so fundamentally different in their body plans, appear fully developed, all of a sudden, in what paleontolo-gists have called the single most spectacular phenomenon of the fossil record.
What if the fossils just haven’t been discovered yet? Millions of fossils have already been dug up that only support the Cambrian explosion. There are enough good pre-Cambrian sedimentary rocks to have preserved evidence if there was any. Experts in the field have said that the Cambrian explosion is “too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record.”
Yet Darwin’s Tree of life is still included in textbooks and called fact.
Ernst Haekel’s Drawings of Embryos
Ernst Haekel was a German biologist. By juxtaposing drawings of an embryonic fish, salamander, tortoise, chick, hog, calf, rabbit and human, he graphically established that they were all amazingly similar (virtually indistinguishable) in their earliest stages of development. Only later did they become strikingly different.
The similarity between early embryos has been characterized as “by far the strongest single class of facts.” As it turns out, they aren’t similar.
For one thing, they were faked - Haekel was so confident in his theory he often just used the same woodcut to print drawings from different embryos. In other cases he doctored the drawings to make them look more similar than they really were. He was exposed as a fraud in the 1860s, yet they are still being used even in some upper-division textbooks on evolutionary biology.
Secondly, he cherry-picked his examples. He only shows a few of the 7 vertebrate classes and stacked the deck by picking representatives that came closest to fitting his idea - and then went further by faking similarities.
Thirdly, he claimed he was showing the early stage of development when in fact it was the midpoint of development. Now why is that important? If you go back to the earlier stages, the embryos look far more different from one another. But he deliberately omits the earlier stages altogether. Embryologists refer to the ‘Developmental Hourglass’ - early on, embryos are very different, then more similar during the midpoint of development, and then finally very different again.
The Missing Link
The archaeopteryx (“ancient wing”) was a creature dating back 150 million years. With the wings, feathers and wishbone of a bird, but with a lizard-like tail and claws on its wings, it was hailed as the missing link between reptiles and modern birds. One paleontologist called it “a holy relic of the past that has become a powerful symbol of the evolutionary process itself.” It was discovered in Germany immediately after the publication of The Origin of Species and “helped enormously to establish the credibility of Darwinism and to discredit skeptics.”
But does it illustrate Darwinian evolution? No, we would need more than an intermediate form to show that and we’d need to know how you get from one form to the other.
Besides, we see the duck-billed platypus around today which nobody considers transitional but which has characteristics of different classes.
And it turns out it wasn't even close to being part bird, part reptile. It’s a bird with modern feathers, and birds are different from reptiles in many important ways - their breeding systems, bone structure, lungs, their distribution of weight and muscles.
Paleontologists now agree archaeopteryx isn’t an ancestor of any modern birds but is a member of a totally extinct group of birds.
In 1999 National Geographic said of a new discovery, Archaeoraptor, that there’s now evidence that feathered dinosaurs were ancestors of the first bird. It was a fake - someone had glued a dinosaur tail to a primitive bird.
Ornithologist Alan Feduccia, and evolutionary biologist at UNC Chapel Hill said in Discover magazine:
Archaeoraptor is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it’s difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard there is a fake-fossil factory in northeast China… where many of the recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found.
Bambiraptor was a chicken-sized dinosaur with supposedly bird-like characteristics. A group of molecular biologists reported finding 65 million year old bird DNA, suggesting that birds are closely related to dinosaurs. It was 100% turkey DNA. But get this - these people said they found turkey DNA in a dinosaur bone - and it actually got published in Science magazine. This is how committed they are to a non-evidential theory.
Other Pieces of "Evidence"
Sloping forehead, heavy brow, jutting jaw and receding chin - exactly what a blend of man and ape should look like. This was Java Man.
Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois excavated a site on an Indo-nesian island in 1891 and 92 and dated some bones he dug from a riverbank to be half a million years old. According to Dubois, he was the missing link between apes and humans.
What is not well known is that Java man consists of nothing more than a skullcap, a femur (thigh bone), three teeth and a great deal of imagination. It was little more than speculation fueled by evolutionary expectations of what he should have looked like if Darwinism were true.
In a book on paleoanthropology: Java man is like an old friend. We learned about him in grade school… In fact, the vast majority of people who believe in human evolution were probably first sold on it by this convincing salesman. Not only is he the best-known human fossil, he is one of the only human fossils most people know.
What most don’t know:
1. Dubois’ shoddy excavation would have disqualified the fossil from consideration by today’s standards.
2. The femur didn’t really belong with the skullcap.
3. The skullcap was distinctly human and reflected a brain capacity well within the range of humans living today.
4. Or that a 342-page scientific report from a fact-finding expedition of nineteen evolutionists demolished Dubois’ claims and concluded that Java man played no part in human evolution.
But as recently as 1994, Time magazine treated Java man as a legitimate evolutionary ancestor.
We have a miniscule number of fossils believed to be ancestors of humans - most often just skull fragments or teeth - and lots of elasticity in reconstructing specimens to fit evolutionary theory. National Geographic once hired four artists to recon-struct a female figure from 7 fossil bones fond in Kenya and got four drastically different results
Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature magazine in 1999:
“The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.”
He called each fossil an “isolated point, with no knowable con-nection to any other given fossil, and all float around in an overwhelming sea of gaps.” In fact, he said that all the fossil evidence for human evolution “between 10 and 5 million years ago - several thousand generations of living creatures - can be fitted into a small box.”
He concluded that the conventional picture of human evolution is a ‘completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices’ and that they had the same validity as bedtime stories.
What about gills? “The fetuses of mammals at one stage have gill slits which resemble those of fish.” Life magazine in 1996 even said it was “some of the most compelling evidence of evolution.” Our ancestors must have lived in the ocean at one point.
They’re nothing of the sort! An embryo is doubled over and has ridges in its neck. They’re not gills, and they’re not even gill slits. Even fish don’t have gills at that stage. It’s just an anatomical feature that grows out of the fact that this is how vertebrate embryos develop. Any resemblance to gills is purely illusory/coincidental. This is a perfect example of reading evolutionary theory back into the evidence.
Certainly the homology in vertebrate limbs - wing, flipper, leg, hand - provides evidence of Darwinian evolution. These were described and named by Darwin’s predecessors who were not evolutionists. Richard Owen, the most famous anatomist of Darwin’s time, said they pointed to a common archetype or design, not to descent with modification.
Similarity alone doesn’t tell us anything about Darwinism’s factuality. Based on this alone, it could go either way - design or descent with modification. Look at Berra’s Blunder. Berra mistakenly used the different yet similar style of various year models of the Chevrolet Corvette to illustrate slight, progressive modification within species. The most glaring problem is that the Corvette is a spectacular example of a process guided by intelligent designers!
But Berra also unintentionally illustrated the fact that merely having a succession of similar forms doesn’t provide its own explanation. The fact they are similar does nothing to tell you about why they are similar, how it is they got that way. You can only say that they are similar and nothing more. And under a Darwinian process, once you somehow got an automobile, the natural forces of wind, rust, water and gravity would have to turn one model into its successor.
Well, surely we can't overlook the fact that humans and apes share 98% of the same genes. That must be meaningful. For one thing, the 2% that are different are rather trivial genes that have nothing to do with anatomy. In other words, the Darwinist is actually forced to explain just why we are so different given that the so-called body building genes are in the 98 percent. And they never mention we share 50% with bananas. So something more must be at play here. Homology honestly remains a mystery.
Secondly, it’s not surprising that two organisms that are similar anatomically are also similar genetically. But does this prove common ancestry? No; once again, it’s just as compatible with design as it is with common ancestry. A designer might very well decide to use similar materials to construct similar, but functionally different, structures/organisms.
Darwinism, in a nutshell, is merely materialistic philosophy masquerading as science. In fact, in my four-part series Are Science and Faith Incompatible, I demonstrate how science actually points strongly in the direction of Design.
Now there are many who deny that belief in Darwinism neces-sitates atheism. As a matter of fact, biologist Jean Pond proudly describes herself as “a scientist, an evolutionist, a great admirer of Charles Darwin, and a Christian.”
Furthermore: “Believing that evolution occurred - that humans and all other living things are related as part of creation’s giant family tree, that it is possible that the first cell arose by the natural processes of chemical evolution - neither requires nor even promotes an atheistic worldview.”
But can this be so? Obviously not; an inherently unguided natural process and the Christian concept of creation from nothing are clearly contradictory. As Phillip Johnson said, “The whole point of Darwinism is to show that there is no need for a supernatural creator, because nature can do the creating by itself.”
What are some of the implications ignored by atheists? We all love the idea of no responsibility and if it feels good it is good, but atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell reminds us rather pointedly:
That man is the result of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his love and beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labor of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction… that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely
built.
Are all scientists in agreement about Darwinism? Larry Hatfield in Science Digest said, "Scientists who utterly reject evolution may be one of our fastest-growing controversial minorities… Many of the scientists supporting this position hold impressive credentials in science."
After PBS’ 2001 series on evolution claiming that all known scientific evidence supports it as well as virtually every reputable scientist in the world, 100 scientists from the most prestigious schools published a two-page advertisement in a national magazine called “A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism.”
So it does not enjoy universal support even from the scientific community. These weren’t narrow-minded fundamentalists, but well-respected world-class scientists that included the likes of at least one Nobel nominee; however, most folks will never hear that there are credible scientists who are highly skeptical of Darwinian claims.
Backlash was substantial: A detailed, 151-page critique claimed it “failed to present accurately and fairly the scientific problems with the evidence for Darwinian evolution” and even system-atically ignored “disagreements among evolutionary biologists themselves.”
In short, the four icons of evolution do not hold up. Neither do various additional pieces of "evidence." And as we have seen, naturalistic ideology has driven many to declare the issue solved before properly vetting new discoveries. Very simply, they want Darwinism to be be true so badly that they prematurely jump at the earliest sign of corroborating evidence. Interestingly enough, that is much more closely akin to religious zeal than to objective science.
You know, just yesterday yet another book that I ordered arrived, and it joins a rather large stack of so-far-unread books. So long as Christ tarries nor calls me home, I will eventually get around to them. Among those books is Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. As I understand it, Nagel is a religious skeptic, yet he argues Darwinism fails to explain life as we know it. From the back cover: "There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense." I agree, but I'm sure that comes as no surprise. In coming posts, I'll look at some of the ways science corroborates the Christian worldview.