What's Wrong With
The Theory of Evolution?
The Fossil Record!
The scientific concept of the origin of life on earth begins with the premise that life first appeared billions of years ago with the formation of microscopic organisms out of inanimate matter. In the billions of years that followed, small organisms evolved into higher and more complex forms of life through random mutations, and one species evolved into another.
Over the years, a process referred to as "natural selection," scientists believe, weeded out those mutations and organisms less fit to survive than others. Thus, it was mostly the more "fit" that passed on their genetic character traits to subsequent generations. And that's how we and all other life forms got here.
On the surface, this sounds great. However, a deeper analysis of the underlying mechanism and the fossil record, leaves little doubt that a random process, of mutation or any other kind, could not possibly have been the driving force behind the development of life on earth.
First, it should be pointed out that the purported mechanics of speciation are not exactly based on strong empirical evidence, to begin with, as explained on the website of The Department of Geology of The University of California, which has one of the top 25 Geology programs in the country, according to 'America's Best Graduate Schools' by U.S. News and World Report:
"The process of speciation has been difficult to observe, however, and there is still a great deal of controversy about the mechanisms of speciation. No one doubts that it occurs frequently, at least on a geological time-scale. No one has seen a new species form in ecological time, although some cases come very close. You would expect, then, that the geological record, which is so much longer and more incomplete, would hardly ever sample speciation events. We need to include that fact in any theory of speciation. In fact, then, both biologists and paleontologists must infer what happens, and it is very difficult to sort out where fact ends and where interpretation begins. Possibly the term 'speciation' may cover a broad spectrum of events: we already know that some species differ by as few as three genes from others, a difference that would be less than brother-sister differences in other organisms ... Notice that since biologists have not seen a speciation event that everyone would believe, biologists are driven to theory-heavy models of speciation, rather than a rich store of observational evidence. Even so, there are cases of near-speciation in the biological world, and many of them have been ignored because they suggested the 'wrong' answer!"
In addition to showing how the scientific concept of speciation is not exactly based on solid evidence, the above paragraph also shows how dishonest and misleading some scientific literature can get when it comes to evolution.
The University's literature above actually begins with a factual-sounding declaration which I deliberately left out: "The fossil record tells us that new species have evolved from pre-existing ones."
Really?
With all the difficulties presented within the same literature, does the fossil record really tell us that? How can it make a bold statement like, "No one doubts that [speciation] occurs frequently," when the entire paragraph expresses anything but certainty?
The problem with the purported mechanics of Darwinian evolution, though, goes far beyond the lack of evidence for frequent speciation. The lack of an essential by-product of frequent speciation, a long series of happenstance events, completely undermines the fundamentals of Darwinian evolution.
People often challenge the theory of evolution on the basis of whether a random process can produce organization. An analogy often given is: Can an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters, given enough time, produce the works of Shakespeare purely by random keystrokes? Let's assume for the purpose of this discussion that this is possible -- random mutations can, given enough time, eventually produce the most complex forms of life.
Let's get an idea of how that would work by rolling a die (one "dice"). To get a "3," for example, you'd have to roll the die an average of six times (there are six numbers, so to get any one of them would take an average of six rolls). Of course, you could get lucky and roll a 3 the first time. But as you keep rolling the die, you'll find that the 3 will come up on average once every six rolls.
The same holds true for any random process. You'll get a "Royal Flush" (the five highest cards, in the same suit) in a 5-card poker game on average roughly once every 650,000 hands. In other words, for every 650,000 of mostly lesser hands and meaningless arrangements of cards, you'll get only one Royal Flush.
Multi-million dollar lotteries are also based on this concept. If the odds against winning a big jackpot are millions to one, what will usually happen is that for every game where one person wins the big jackpot with the right combination of numbers, millions of people will not win the big jackpot because they picked millions of combinations of meaningless numbers. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a multi-million dollar lottery yet where millions of people won the top prize and only a few won little or nothing. It's always the other way around. And sometimes there isn't even one big winner.
Now, let's take this well-understood concept of randomness and apply it the story of monkeys on typewriters. As mentioned earlier, for the purpose of this discussion we'll assume that if you allow monkeys to randomly hit keys on a typewriter long enough they could eventually turn out the works of Shakespeare. Of course, it would take a very long time, and they'd produce mountains and mountains of pages of meaningless garbage in the process, but eventually (we'll assume) they could turn out the works of Shakespeare.
For simplicity sake, we'll use a limited number of moneys. (My point actually becomes stronger when you use an infinite number of monkeys.)
Let's say, after putting a monkey in front of a typewriter to type out Shakespeare, you decide you also want a copy of the Encyclopedia of Britannica. So you put another monkey in front of another typewriter. Then, you put a third monkey in front of third typewriter, because you also want a copy of "War And Peace." Now you shout, "Monkeys, type," and they all start banging away on their typewriters.
You leave the room and have yourself cryogenically frozen so you can come back in a few million years to see the results. (The monkeys don't have to be frozen. Let's say they're an advanced species; all they need to survive millions of years is fresh ink cartridges.)
You come back in a few million years and are shocked at what you find. What shocks you is not what you see, but what you don't see. First, you do see that the monkeys have produced the works of Shakespeare, the Encyclopedia of Britannica and "War and Peace." But all this you expected.
What shocks you is that you don't see the mountains of papers of meaningless arrangement of letters that each monkey should have produced for each literary work. You do find a few mistyped pages here and there, but they do not nearly account for the millions of pages of "mistakes" you should have found.
And even if the monkeys happened to get all the literary works right the first time, which is a pretty impossible stretch of the imagination, they still should've typed out millions of meaningless pages in those millions of years. (There's no reason for them to stop typing.) Either way, each random work of art should have produced millions upon millions of meaningless typed pages.
This is precisely what the problem is with the Darwinian theory of evolution.
A random process, as depicted by Darwinian evolution and accepted by many scientists, even if one claims it can produce the most complex forms of life, should have produced at least millions of dysfunctional organisms for every functional one. And with more complex organisms (like a "Royal Flush" when compared to a number 3 on a die), an even greater number of dysfunctional "mistakes" should have been produced (as there are so many more possibilities of "mistakes" in a 52-card deck than a 6-sided die).
The fossil record should have been bursting with millions upon millions of completely dysfunctional-looking organisms at various stages of development for the evolution of each life form. And for each higher life form -- human, monkey, chimpanzee, etc. -- there should have been billions of even more "mistakes."
Instead, what the fossil record shows is an overwhelming number of well-formed, functional-looking organisms, with an occasional aberration. Let alone we haven't found the plethora of "gradually improved" or intermediate species (sometimes referred to as "missing links") that we should have, we haven't even found the vast number of "mistakes" known beyond a shadow of a doubt to be produced by every random process.
That randomness will always produce chaos in far greater ratios than anything else, even in cases where it can occasionally produce order of any kind, is an established fact. A process that produces organization without the expected chaos is obviously following a predetermined course.
The notion that the fossil record supports the Darwinian theory of evolution is as ludicrous as saying that a decomposed carcass proves the animal is still alive. It proves the precise opposite. The relative scarcity of deformed-looking creatures in the fossil record proves beyond any doubt that if massive speciation occurred it could not possibly have happened through a random process.
In response as to why we don't see the massive "mistakes" in the fossil record, some scientists point out that the genetic code has a repair mechanism which is able to recognize diseased and dysfunctional genetic code and eliminate it before it has a chance to perpetuate abnormal organisms.
Aside from this response not solving the problem, as I will point out soon, it isn't even entirely true. Although genetic code has the ability to repair or eliminate malfunctioning genes, many diseased genes fall through the cracks anyway. There are a host of genetic diseases -- hemophilia, various cancers, congenital cataract, spontaneous abortions, cystic fibrosis, color-blindness, and muscular dystrophy, just to name a few -- that ravage organisms and get passed on to later generations, unhampered by the genetic repair mechanism. During earth's history of robust speciation through, allegedly, random mutations, far more genes should have fallen through the cracks. Where are they?
And, as an aside, how did the genetic repair mechanism evolve before there was a genetic repair mechanism? And where are all those millions of deformed and diseased organisms that should've been produced before the genetic repair mechanism was fully functional?
But all this is besides the point. A more serious problem is the presumption that natural selection weeded out the vast majority of the "misfits."
A genetic mutation that would have resulted in, let's say, the first cow to be born with two legs instead of four, would not necessarily be recognized as dysfunctional by the genetic repair mechanism. (I'll be using "cow" as an example throughout; but it applies to just about any organism.) From the genetic standpoint, as long as a gene is sound in its own right, there's really no difference between a cow with four legs, two legs, or six legs and an ingrown milk container. It's only after the cow is born that natural selection, on the macro level, eliminates it if it's design is not fit to survive.
It's these types of mutations, organisms unfit to survive on the macro level, yet genetically sound, that should have littered the planet by the billions.
Sure these deformed cows would have gotten wiped out quickly by natural selection, since they had no chance of surviving. But that's precisely the point: Where are all those billions of life forms that were genetically sound but couldn't make it after birth?
How many millions of dysfunctional cows alone, before you even get to the billions of other species in earth's history, should have littered the planet and fossil record before the first stable, functioning cow made its debut? If you extrapolate the random combinations from a simple deck of cards to the far greater complexity of a cow, we're probably talking about billions of "mistakes" that should have cluttered planet earth for just the first functioning cow.
Of the fossils well-preserved enough to study, most appear to be well-designed and functional-looking. Did nature miraculously get billions of species right the first time? With the ratio of aberrant looking fossils being no more significant than common birth deformities, there seems to have been nothing of a random or accidental nature in the development of life.
And to admit that life was not a random process, as I've heard some evolutionists do, and then just leave the question open as to how life got to its current state of diversity, is absolutely absurd and grossly dishonest. There are no other options: it was either an accident or deliberate. And if it obviously wasn't an accident, it had to be by intelligent design.
One absurd response I got from a molecular biologist as to why a plethora of deformed species never existed was: There is no such thing as speciation driven by deleterious mutation.
This is like, upon asking, "How come no one ever leaves the lecture hall through exit 4?" getting a response like, "Because people don't leave the lecture hall through exit 4." Wasn't that the question?
What evolutionists have apparently done is looked into the fossil record and found that new species tend to make their first appearance as well-formed, healthy-looking organisms. So they made a rule out of it: "Speciation is not driven by deleterious mutations." So now that's it's a rule of evolution, you can no longer ask why? If I told you a "rule" that shoes grow on apple trees, can you no longer ask how that works, because it's a rule?
Instead of asking themselves how can a random series of events, which is known to always produce chaos, seldom produce chaos in nature, they've simply formulated a rule in evolutionary biology: There is no such thing as speciation driven by deleterious mutation. This hardly addresses the issue.
It's one thing for the genetic code to spawn relatively flawless cows today. Perhaps, after years of stability, one might argue, nature finally got it right by passing down mostly the beneficial genes. But before cows took root, a cow with three legs, for example, would have been no more genetically deleterious than a cow with four legs. The genetic repair mechanism may recognize "healthy" or "diseased" genetic code, but it can't know how many legs, horns or ears a relatively new species should have, if we're talking about a trial-and-error crapshoot. If the genetic repair mechanism could predict, years before natural selection on the macro level had a chance to weed out the unfit, what a functioning species should eventually look like, we'd be talking about some pretty weird, prophetic science.
In a paper published in the February 21, 2002, issue of Nature, Biologists Matthew Ronshaugen, Nadine McGinnis, and William McGinnis described how they were able to suppress some limb development in fruit flies simply by activating certain genes and, with additional mutations, suppress all limb development during embryonic development.
In another widely publicized experiment, mutations induced by radiation caused fruit flies to grow legs on their heads.
What these experiments showed is how easy it is to make drastic changes to an organism through genetic mutations. Ironically, although the former experiment was touted as supporting evolution, they both actually do the opposite.
The random process that supposedly resulted in such a massive proliferation of life forms on earth could've have created chaos by simply flipping of few genetic "switches." But it didn't even do that! Obviously, the proliferation of life is not the result of random events, neither on the genetic level nor the macro level.
Evolutionists tend to point out that the fossil record represents only a small fraction of biological history, and this is why we don't find all the biological aberrations we should. The issue here, though, is not one of numbers but of proportions.
For every fossil of a well-formed, viable-looking organism, we should have found an abundance of "strange" or deformed ones, regardless of the total number. What we're finding is the proportional opposite.
The theory of evolution may have made sense in the scientifically ignorant days of Darwin. But in the 21st century, evolution appears to be little more than a figment of imagination. Although this imaginative concept has in the years since Darwin amassed a fanatical cult-like following, there is much evidence that contradicts it.
An article entitled, "The Chaos Theory of Evolution," by Keith Bennett, on NewScientist.com, October 18, 2010, describes research that shows the cornerstones of evolution -- adaptation and natural selection -- have little to do with speciation.
Keith Bennett's bio: Professor of late-Quaternary environmental change at Queen's University Belfast, guest professor in palaeobiology at Uppsala University in Sweden, and author of "Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life" (Cambridge University Press). He holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
Excerpts from his article:
"In 1856, geologist Charles Lyell wrote to Charles Darwin with a question about fossils. Puzzled by types of mollusc that abruptly disappeared from the British fossil record, apparently in response to a glaciation, only to reappear 2 million years later completely unchanged, he asked of Darwin: 'Be so good as to explain all this in your next letter.' Darwin never did.
"To this day Lyell's question has never received an adequate answer. I believe that is because there isn't one.
"...the neat concept of adaptation to the environment driven by natural selection, as envisaged by Darwin in 'On the Origin of Species' and now a central feature of the theory of evolution, is too simplistic. Instead, evolution is chaotic.
"Our understanding of global environmental change is vastly more detailed [today] than it was in Lyell and Darwin's time. James Zachos at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues, have shown that the Earth has been on a long-term cooling trend for the past 65 million years. Superimposed upon this are oscillations in climate every 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years caused by wobbles in the Earth's orbit. "
Their research, mostly on birds, "shows that new species appear more or less continuously, regardless of the dramatic climatic oscillations of the Quaternary or the longer term cooling that preceded it.
"The overall picture is that the main response to major environmental changes is individualistic movement and changes in abundance, rather than extinction or speciation. In other words, the connection between environmental change and evolutionary
change is weak, which is not what might have been expected from Darwin's hypothesis.
" ... macroevolution may, over the longer-term, be driven largely by internally generated genetic change, not adaptation to a changing environment."
The gist of Bennett's article is that we cannot predict the course of the evolution of life because adaptation and natural selection -- the bedrock of Darwinian evolution -- have little to do with speciation.
But, you may ask, if Bennet's research shows that speciation is driven by some innate genetic characteristics rather than chaotic climate conditions, aren't we back to square one?
No, we're not. Evolution driven by an innate ability of genes to mutate and evolution driven by unpredictable climactic conditions are totally different animals (no pun intended), as will become clear soon.
Genetically driven speciation is analogous to, say, randomly hitting a ball on a billiard table. When the ball drops into a pocket it may have dropped into a random pocket but this was not necessarily a truly random event. The ball can only drop into one of the six pockets available; it cannot drill a new pocket at a random spot.
The point is, the ball can only drop into a pocket that was previously prepared for it, limiting its randomness by a predetermined set number of possibilities. So, no matter how randomly the ball is hit, its "randomness" is limited and guided by the predesign of the billiard table.
This is what I believe is behind speciation. Organisms only change into "allowable," or perhaps genetically guided, life forms. The appearance of a new organism may be a random choice among several "allowable" life forms, but, aside from the occasional aberration, which never results in a lineage of aberrations, an organism will never turn out to be a truly randomly constructed creature.
Fossil records and lab experiments seem to support this type of "organized evolution", which we will name Focused Biological Evolution (FBE), to differentiate it from Darwinian evolution.
Some years ago I read an article about how scientists found a cactus in the desert that had mutated under extreme conditions into another type of cactus. They decided to experiment to see how many different mutations of cacti they could get out of the original one. So they subjected the original cactus to the same conditions that had resulted in it mutating. To their amazement, no matter how many times they performed the experiment, the cactus only changed into that one mutated form.
The scientists in this experiment did not get a myriad of dysfunctional mutations before getting a functioning cactus. They didn't even get several different functioning cacti. The only result was this one mutation, and there seemed to be nothing random about it.
In 2006, a team of researchers from Panama, Colombia and the UK recreated the Heliconius heurippa butterfly in the laboratory by crossing two other species of butterfly, Heliconius cydno and Heliconius melpomene. The process of creating one new species out of two is known as hybrid speciation. Experimenter Chris Jiggins of the University of Edinburgh told BBC News: "The fact [that] we've recreated this species in the lab provides a pretty convincing route by which the natural species came about."
Although this was a "reverse" type of evolution, that the genetic code was able to create a new functional species is an indication of how the genetic code holds some sort of "guidance system" that not only maintains the viability of its host's current form but also that of other forms, and true randomness has little to do with speciation.
In another experiment, in 2002, biologists at the University of California uncovered genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans in animals can be accomplished through what was described as "simple mutations" in a class of regulatory genes, known as Hox, that act as master switches by turning on and off other genes during embryonic development.
Using laboratory fruit flies and a crustacean known as Artemia, or brine shrimp, the scientists showed how modifications in the Hox gene Ubx suppresses 100 percent of the limb development in the thoracic region of fruit flies, and 15 percent in Artemia.
"This kind of gene is one that turns on and off lots of other genes in order to make complex structures," said one graduate student working in William McGinnis' laboratory. "What we've done is to show that this change alters the way it turns on and off other genes. That's due to the change in the way the protein produced by this gene functions."
What this experiment demonstrated is that even in cases where it would have been very easy for nature to create an immense number of bizarre creatures by the simple random setting of genetic switches, nature apparently got these switch settings right the first time in a vast majority of cases, as is evidenced by the mostly functional looking creatures in the fossil record.
As an aside, what's interesting is the simplistic interpretation given by the graduate student about how switches "make complex structures." Switches do not "make complex structures" or cause things to evolve, just as turning on light switches do not cause electricity, light fixtures or wiring to evolve. Switches merely signal a pre-programmed or pre-determined event to occur between existing components. The components themselves may have taken much design and planning.
For an organism's features to simply pop up or disappear with the flick of a switch, there would have to have been a sophisticated underlying mechanism already in place that assigned specific tasks to specific genetic switches. Rather than showing how "simple" it is for new limbs to "evolve," the above experiment shows how sophisticated biological systems really are, and yet how simple it is to change their course of development. Similarly, turning a computer's switch on and surfing the web, for example, is simple enough for a 10-year-old to do, but those simple acts make use of highly sophisticated research, design and development efforts.
Another experiment, this one by evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University, showed very clearly that speciation is the result of an underlying genetic design and not chaos and randomness.
For twenty years Lenski cultivated 12 populations of bacteria that originated from one single Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacterium. After more than 44,000 generations, Lenski noticed a similar pattern in all 12 populations; they evolved larger cells, faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.
Sometimes around the 31,500th generation, one (and only this one) population suddenly acquired the ability to metabolize citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot metabolize. The citrate-using mutants then increased in population size and diversity.
Lenski wondered what would happen if he replayed this experiment; would the same population evolve in the same way, and would any of the other 11 also evolve. So he turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations, and replayed the experiment.
The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, it was always the same population that re-evolved, and it always evolved only into that same mutation.
This experiment speaks volumes of speciation's non-randomness. Not only was the end result the same every time this experiment was re-played, but the similarity between the intermediate "chaos" of each culture showed that even what gave the appearance of being chaos was actually part of an organized process.
What's mind-boggling is how some evolutionists saw Lenski's experiments as supporting Darwinian evolution, when in fact it did just the opposite. Here's a comment by an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago about Lenski's experiment: "The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
Contrary to what this evolutionary biologist claims, nothing in Lanski's experiment evolved in the Darwinian sense. The entire process, after several runs, became as predictable as the "chaos" of an undeveloped fetus turning into a fully formed human being. That's not evolution. Such events are generally referred to as development, formation, maturation, etc., not evolution.
What Lenski's experiments confirmed is that new mutated life forms are not the result of small, random, beneficial, changes, as described by Darwinian evolution, but a genetic predisposition that allows for very specific, predefined forms of life, very much like my earlier billiard analogy. Furthermore, that the genetic code can hold the blueprint for more than one life form is nothing new. We see this quality in some creatures even today:
* Caterpillars are crawling creatures that go through a stage called pupa, in which they undergo a complete metamorphosis and emerge as flying creatures, butterflies.
* Tadpoles are aquatic, gill-breathing, legless creatures that develop lungs, legs, and other organs to roam on dry land.
* Some salamanders undergo a metamorphosis which also takes them from an aquatic environment to an air-breathing one.
We call these transformations "metamorphoses," as opposed to evolution, because they happen in front of our eyes and it's obvious that their transformations are guided by an innate genetic mechanism, not by an evolutionary process. Had we seen these creatures transform only in the fossil record, and not in front of our eyes, evolutionist would undoubtedly have hailed these transformations as proof of Darwinian evolution.
Darwinian Evolution (DE)
vs.
Focused Biological Evolution (FBE)
You can probably sum up the differences between Darwinian Evolution and Focused Biological Evolution in a nutshell: After a century and a half, we've found more evidence that contradict DE than support it. FBE, on the other hand, is continually being proven in labs, by the fossil record and by archeological discoveries.
After much digging and analysis, we've found that the progression of life as suggested by Darwin is completely absent from fossil and archeological records. Most conspicuous is the absence of the massive number of deformed and diseased life forms that should have littered earth as a result of a long series of random changes.
The vast majority of life forms in fossil or archeological discoveries give the appearance of being well formed and functional organisms. The evidence that DE never happened is spitting in our faces. In fact, the mere proposal by some scientists of a theory like "punctuated equilibrium" (which says that most species experience
little change for most of their history, and then, suddenly, new species appear) accentuates the extent to which scientists are at a loss to find empirical support for DE.
In fact, theories like punctuated equilibrium are typical of evolutionists when confronted with contradictions. They simply make a "rule" out of inexplicable findings and, presto, there's no more need to explain. How does life just pop out of nowhere? "Most species experience little change for most of their history, and then, suddenly, new species appear." That really answers that, doesn't it?
One far-fetched, almost comical, explanation given for punctuated equilibrium is that these creatures evolved elsewhere and only their final forms, somehow, mysteriously, appeared in the location where we found sudden appearances of new species.
But the question remains, how come we always find only the fossils where organisms suddenly appeared in their final form and never where they went through the long evolutionary process? Could it be because that long evolutionary process is a myth?
Scientists then start tinkering in the lab with speciation to prove DE. Instead of finding that speciation produces all sorts of random creatures, which is what you'd expect of a random processes, they find that speciation is more of an "action-reaction" process that generally produces some very well-defined, specific, functional organisms. Apparently, speciation seems no more evolutionary than metamorphosis or gestation, albeit requiring different time scales and circumstances.
A theory like punctuated equilibrium actually makes for more comedy than science. Perhaps we should update punctuated equilibrium to the following:
There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that if you incubate three dozen worms in a solution of amino acids and carbon compounds for approximately one and a half million years they will eventually evolve into the Long Island Railroad. The only problem with this theory is that if this were true some species of fish would have a natural tendency to ride the Long Island Railroad. But fish have never actually been observed commuting between Long Island and Manhattan.
A group of enterprising archaeologists, however, found the missing link to this apparent puzzle. Digging through the ruins of an old Long Island Railroad yard, they came across a fossil of a fish believed to be extinct for billions of years. In fact, after taking a radiocarbon reading of the fossil and the brown paper bag it was found in, they confirmed that their find dated back to the "big bang," give or take six months. This proves conclusively that prehistoric fish did commute via the Long Island Railroad.
Now, the question arises, did prehistoric fish commute on dry land or did prehistoric trains run underwater? No one really knows for sure. But, the famous Dr. Imust Beagenius (pronounced I-must Be-a-genius) is grappling with a theory. Dr. Beagenius suggests that prehistoric fish must have travelled on dry land. He points out that extensive laboratory tests show that railroad tickets are not waterproof.
There you have it -- a theory which links fish, worms, and the Long Island Railroad. It couldn't be more logical.
Unfortunately, not everyone is that easy to please. There are those who, believe it or not, would demand a more detailed explanation of such a theory, no matter how logical it sounds. "How do a bunch of worms," they would naively ask, "turn into the Long Island Railroad?"
In spite of the absurdity of such skepticism, I offer the following evidence which should render this theory proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Our archeologist friends went back to the same railroad yard and made some more astonishing discoveries. They lined up some of the old cars side by side and noticed how each car was slightly bigger and better developed than the one before it. The car at one end had a highly sophisticated and powerful air conditioning system, while the car at the other end had not even a fan. The only trace of air conditioning found in one underdeveloped car was the fossil of a conductor slapping an old woman with his cap to create some air disturbance. (His cap, incidentally, has been known to be extinct for at least seven and a half billion years. It had no union label.)
Then, scientists took a worm crawling in the same railroad yard and put it under a powerful electron microscope. And behold, they made an astounding discovery: A worm's cell magnified three billion times has an uncanny resemblance to a train window (without the shades).
It's quite obvious that the evidence presented for the worm-train theory overshadows the somewhat popular but fanatical notion that trains may have been manufactured by intelligent beings. The "intelligent beings" theory would imply a labor union. So far, none of the trains studied showed any traces of major medical benefits, pension funds, or sick leave. How such a ridiculous theory even got started is hard to imagine. So much for this nonsensical "intelligent beings" theory.
By now you must be saying to yourself, "Well, the evidence for the worm-train theory is certainly overwhelming. Any idiot can see its scientific validity. But where did the first worm come from?"
I'm glad you asked. The theory widely accepted by the scientific community and also strongly supported by our famous Dr. Imust Beagenius is the "big bait" theory. In the beginning there was a big ball of fishing hooks. Nature found it rather absurd to have so many fishing hooks without worms. In a few short billions of years, worms began to materialize around the hooks. When the first trout started biting, nature found it necessary to produce more worms to keep up with the fishing season. And so, worms began materializing on virtually every hook around the globe. Then, in the off-season, there were more worms than hooks. So, the problem at that point was storing these excess worms. This brought about the invention of the can. So, you see, the worm-train evolution began with the Big Bait. And the Big Bait began with a can of worms.
How's that for a new theory?
I heard one evolutionist even admit that life could not have been an accident. But he wouldn't acknowledge it must have been intelligently designed. This is quite an absurd position. It's got to be one or the other. Something is either an accident or deliberate; there is no in-between and no other options. And if you prove one, you've disproven the other. Conversely, if you disprove one, you've proven the other.
If all evidence shows clearly that the development of life on earth was not the result of accidental occurrences, that demonstrates conclusively that it had to be intentionally designed. To understand the former but not acknowledging the latter is intellectual dishonesty, at best, delusional, at worst.
How is FBE different?
While Darwinian evolution began as a theory in search of evidence, FBE is a direct result of that evidence. Unlike DE, FBE is not a theory waiting to be proven; it's the evidence that created it. What's more, FBE not only explains the fossil record and speciation in the field and the lab, but, interestingly, it is also fully compatible with Creation.
Here's a capsulized review of how FBE would explain the development of life on earth from its inception to today.
Please note that FBE does not explain how life began. And neither does any other science. There is not a scintilla of empirical evidence in the lab or in the field that shows abiogenesis (living organisms arising from inanimate matter) ever occurred or is even possible. Yet, we are here; something or someone had to have started life. So with the complete absence of any science to explain the beginning of life, using Creation as a model is as good as any.
In the beginning, all of today's ancestral life forms were Created. (Whether "Created" means ex nihilo or that the land and sea gave forth their respective creatures is irrelevant to this discussion.)
As these ancestral life forms spread or appeared throughout various climates around the globe, they went through changes to adapt to their environments and, in some cases, speciation may have occurred.
Being that every known (and perhaps as yet unknown) variation of life has its roots in genetic code rather than accidental occurrences, adaptation and speciation did not require massive trial-and-errors or long development periods. Instead, they were as smooth and as precise transformations as the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs and caterpillars into butterflies.
(Speciation involving intermediate chaotic-looking organisms, by the way, has thus far been found only in micro organisms. And even then, the "chaos" always have similarities, with the end result always appearing as a specific genetically-dictated mutation, not as a randomly generated organism.)
The sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record, therefore, is precisely how it must've happened. New species could easily have popped up within a generation or two. For without the need of Darwin's lengthy development period, millions of years of myriads of "misfits" and missing links were not necessary (even if they could possibly evolve life).
As far as scientific explanations go, DE has been a 150-year failure. It's time we discarded DE, as we've done with many other outdated "earth is flat" type of theories. The sophistication of the 21st century calls for a new theory that fits the facts, not an old patched-up theory that has its roots in ignorance and needs a new patch for every discovery. Focused Biological Evolution could be that new theory.
Over the years, a process referred to as "natural selection," scientists believe, weeded out those mutations and organisms less fit to survive than others. Thus, it was mostly the more "fit" that passed on their genetic character traits to subsequent generations. And that's how we and all other life forms got here.
On the surface, this sounds great. However, a deeper analysis of the underlying mechanism and the fossil record, leaves little doubt that a random process, of mutation or any other kind, could not possibly have been the driving force behind the development of life on earth.
First, it should be pointed out that the purported mechanics of speciation are not exactly based on strong empirical evidence, to begin with, as explained on the website of The Department of Geology of The University of California, which has one of the top 25 Geology programs in the country, according to 'America's Best Graduate Schools' by U.S. News and World Report:
"The process of speciation has been difficult to observe, however, and there is still a great deal of controversy about the mechanisms of speciation. No one doubts that it occurs frequently, at least on a geological time-scale. No one has seen a new species form in ecological time, although some cases come very close. You would expect, then, that the geological record, which is so much longer and more incomplete, would hardly ever sample speciation events. We need to include that fact in any theory of speciation. In fact, then, both biologists and paleontologists must infer what happens, and it is very difficult to sort out where fact ends and where interpretation begins. Possibly the term 'speciation' may cover a broad spectrum of events: we already know that some species differ by as few as three genes from others, a difference that would be less than brother-sister differences in other organisms ... Notice that since biologists have not seen a speciation event that everyone would believe, biologists are driven to theory-heavy models of speciation, rather than a rich store of observational evidence. Even so, there are cases of near-speciation in the biological world, and many of them have been ignored because they suggested the 'wrong' answer!"
In addition to showing how the scientific concept of speciation is not exactly based on solid evidence, the above paragraph also shows how dishonest and misleading some scientific literature can get when it comes to evolution.
The University's literature above actually begins with a factual-sounding declaration which I deliberately left out: "The fossil record tells us that new species have evolved from pre-existing ones."
Really?
With all the difficulties presented within the same literature, does the fossil record really tell us that? How can it make a bold statement like, "No one doubts that [speciation] occurs frequently," when the entire paragraph expresses anything but certainty?
The problem with the purported mechanics of Darwinian evolution, though, goes far beyond the lack of evidence for frequent speciation. The lack of an essential by-product of frequent speciation, a long series of happenstance events, completely undermines the fundamentals of Darwinian evolution.
People often challenge the theory of evolution on the basis of whether a random process can produce organization. An analogy often given is: Can an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters, given enough time, produce the works of Shakespeare purely by random keystrokes? Let's assume for the purpose of this discussion that this is possible -- random mutations can, given enough time, eventually produce the most complex forms of life.
Let's get an idea of how that would work by rolling a die (one "dice"). To get a "3," for example, you'd have to roll the die an average of six times (there are six numbers, so to get any one of them would take an average of six rolls). Of course, you could get lucky and roll a 3 the first time. But as you keep rolling the die, you'll find that the 3 will come up on average once every six rolls.
The same holds true for any random process. You'll get a "Royal Flush" (the five highest cards, in the same suit) in a 5-card poker game on average roughly once every 650,000 hands. In other words, for every 650,000 of mostly lesser hands and meaningless arrangements of cards, you'll get only one Royal Flush.
Multi-million dollar lotteries are also based on this concept. If the odds against winning a big jackpot are millions to one, what will usually happen is that for every game where one person wins the big jackpot with the right combination of numbers, millions of people will not win the big jackpot because they picked millions of combinations of meaningless numbers. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a multi-million dollar lottery yet where millions of people won the top prize and only a few won little or nothing. It's always the other way around. And sometimes there isn't even one big winner.
Now, let's take this well-understood concept of randomness and apply it the story of monkeys on typewriters. As mentioned earlier, for the purpose of this discussion we'll assume that if you allow monkeys to randomly hit keys on a typewriter long enough they could eventually turn out the works of Shakespeare. Of course, it would take a very long time, and they'd produce mountains and mountains of pages of meaningless garbage in the process, but eventually (we'll assume) they could turn out the works of Shakespeare.
For simplicity sake, we'll use a limited number of moneys. (My point actually becomes stronger when you use an infinite number of monkeys.)
Let's say, after putting a monkey in front of a typewriter to type out Shakespeare, you decide you also want a copy of the Encyclopedia of Britannica. So you put another monkey in front of another typewriter. Then, you put a third monkey in front of third typewriter, because you also want a copy of "War And Peace." Now you shout, "Monkeys, type," and they all start banging away on their typewriters.
You leave the room and have yourself cryogenically frozen so you can come back in a few million years to see the results. (The monkeys don't have to be frozen. Let's say they're an advanced species; all they need to survive millions of years is fresh ink cartridges.)
You come back in a few million years and are shocked at what you find. What shocks you is not what you see, but what you don't see. First, you do see that the monkeys have produced the works of Shakespeare, the Encyclopedia of Britannica and "War and Peace." But all this you expected.
What shocks you is that you don't see the mountains of papers of meaningless arrangement of letters that each monkey should have produced for each literary work. You do find a few mistyped pages here and there, but they do not nearly account for the millions of pages of "mistakes" you should have found.
And even if the monkeys happened to get all the literary works right the first time, which is a pretty impossible stretch of the imagination, they still should've typed out millions of meaningless pages in those millions of years. (There's no reason for them to stop typing.) Either way, each random work of art should have produced millions upon millions of meaningless typed pages.
This is precisely what the problem is with the Darwinian theory of evolution.
A random process, as depicted by Darwinian evolution and accepted by many scientists, even if one claims it can produce the most complex forms of life, should have produced at least millions of dysfunctional organisms for every functional one. And with more complex organisms (like a "Royal Flush" when compared to a number 3 on a die), an even greater number of dysfunctional "mistakes" should have been produced (as there are so many more possibilities of "mistakes" in a 52-card deck than a 6-sided die).
The fossil record should have been bursting with millions upon millions of completely dysfunctional-looking organisms at various stages of development for the evolution of each life form. And for each higher life form -- human, monkey, chimpanzee, etc. -- there should have been billions of even more "mistakes."
Instead, what the fossil record shows is an overwhelming number of well-formed, functional-looking organisms, with an occasional aberration. Let alone we haven't found the plethora of "gradually improved" or intermediate species (sometimes referred to as "missing links") that we should have, we haven't even found the vast number of "mistakes" known beyond a shadow of a doubt to be produced by every random process.
That randomness will always produce chaos in far greater ratios than anything else, even in cases where it can occasionally produce order of any kind, is an established fact. A process that produces organization without the expected chaos is obviously following a predetermined course.
The notion that the fossil record supports the Darwinian theory of evolution is as ludicrous as saying that a decomposed carcass proves the animal is still alive. It proves the precise opposite. The relative scarcity of deformed-looking creatures in the fossil record proves beyond any doubt that if massive speciation occurred it could not possibly have happened through a random process.
In response as to why we don't see the massive "mistakes" in the fossil record, some scientists point out that the genetic code has a repair mechanism which is able to recognize diseased and dysfunctional genetic code and eliminate it before it has a chance to perpetuate abnormal organisms.
Aside from this response not solving the problem, as I will point out soon, it isn't even entirely true. Although genetic code has the ability to repair or eliminate malfunctioning genes, many diseased genes fall through the cracks anyway. There are a host of genetic diseases -- hemophilia, various cancers, congenital cataract, spontaneous abortions, cystic fibrosis, color-blindness, and muscular dystrophy, just to name a few -- that ravage organisms and get passed on to later generations, unhampered by the genetic repair mechanism. During earth's history of robust speciation through, allegedly, random mutations, far more genes should have fallen through the cracks. Where are they?
And, as an aside, how did the genetic repair mechanism evolve before there was a genetic repair mechanism? And where are all those millions of deformed and diseased organisms that should've been produced before the genetic repair mechanism was fully functional?
But all this is besides the point. A more serious problem is the presumption that natural selection weeded out the vast majority of the "misfits."
A genetic mutation that would have resulted in, let's say, the first cow to be born with two legs instead of four, would not necessarily be recognized as dysfunctional by the genetic repair mechanism. (I'll be using "cow" as an example throughout; but it applies to just about any organism.) From the genetic standpoint, as long as a gene is sound in its own right, there's really no difference between a cow with four legs, two legs, or six legs and an ingrown milk container. It's only after the cow is born that natural selection, on the macro level, eliminates it if it's design is not fit to survive.
It's these types of mutations, organisms unfit to survive on the macro level, yet genetically sound, that should have littered the planet by the billions.
Sure these deformed cows would have gotten wiped out quickly by natural selection, since they had no chance of surviving. But that's precisely the point: Where are all those billions of life forms that were genetically sound but couldn't make it after birth?
How many millions of dysfunctional cows alone, before you even get to the billions of other species in earth's history, should have littered the planet and fossil record before the first stable, functioning cow made its debut? If you extrapolate the random combinations from a simple deck of cards to the far greater complexity of a cow, we're probably talking about billions of "mistakes" that should have cluttered planet earth for just the first functioning cow.
Of the fossils well-preserved enough to study, most appear to be well-designed and functional-looking. Did nature miraculously get billions of species right the first time? With the ratio of aberrant looking fossils being no more significant than common birth deformities, there seems to have been nothing of a random or accidental nature in the development of life.
And to admit that life was not a random process, as I've heard some evolutionists do, and then just leave the question open as to how life got to its current state of diversity, is absolutely absurd and grossly dishonest. There are no other options: it was either an accident or deliberate. And if it obviously wasn't an accident, it had to be by intelligent design.
One absurd response I got from a molecular biologist as to why a plethora of deformed species never existed was: There is no such thing as speciation driven by deleterious mutation.
This is like, upon asking, "How come no one ever leaves the lecture hall through exit 4?" getting a response like, "Because people don't leave the lecture hall through exit 4." Wasn't that the question?
What evolutionists have apparently done is looked into the fossil record and found that new species tend to make their first appearance as well-formed, healthy-looking organisms. So they made a rule out of it: "Speciation is not driven by deleterious mutations." So now that's it's a rule of evolution, you can no longer ask why? If I told you a "rule" that shoes grow on apple trees, can you no longer ask how that works, because it's a rule?
Instead of asking themselves how can a random series of events, which is known to always produce chaos, seldom produce chaos in nature, they've simply formulated a rule in evolutionary biology: There is no such thing as speciation driven by deleterious mutation. This hardly addresses the issue.
It's one thing for the genetic code to spawn relatively flawless cows today. Perhaps, after years of stability, one might argue, nature finally got it right by passing down mostly the beneficial genes. But before cows took root, a cow with three legs, for example, would have been no more genetically deleterious than a cow with four legs. The genetic repair mechanism may recognize "healthy" or "diseased" genetic code, but it can't know how many legs, horns or ears a relatively new species should have, if we're talking about a trial-and-error crapshoot. If the genetic repair mechanism could predict, years before natural selection on the macro level had a chance to weed out the unfit, what a functioning species should eventually look like, we'd be talking about some pretty weird, prophetic science.
In a paper published in the February 21, 2002, issue of Nature, Biologists Matthew Ronshaugen, Nadine McGinnis, and William McGinnis described how they were able to suppress some limb development in fruit flies simply by activating certain genes and, with additional mutations, suppress all limb development during embryonic development.
In another widely publicized experiment, mutations induced by radiation caused fruit flies to grow legs on their heads.
What these experiments showed is how easy it is to make drastic changes to an organism through genetic mutations. Ironically, although the former experiment was touted as supporting evolution, they both actually do the opposite.
The random process that supposedly resulted in such a massive proliferation of life forms on earth could've have created chaos by simply flipping of few genetic "switches." But it didn't even do that! Obviously, the proliferation of life is not the result of random events, neither on the genetic level nor the macro level.
Evolutionists tend to point out that the fossil record represents only a small fraction of biological history, and this is why we don't find all the biological aberrations we should. The issue here, though, is not one of numbers but of proportions.
For every fossil of a well-formed, viable-looking organism, we should have found an abundance of "strange" or deformed ones, regardless of the total number. What we're finding is the proportional opposite.
The theory of evolution may have made sense in the scientifically ignorant days of Darwin. But in the 21st century, evolution appears to be little more than a figment of imagination. Although this imaginative concept has in the years since Darwin amassed a fanatical cult-like following, there is much evidence that contradicts it.
An article entitled, "The Chaos Theory of Evolution," by Keith Bennett, on NewScientist.com, October 18, 2010, describes research that shows the cornerstones of evolution -- adaptation and natural selection -- have little to do with speciation.
Keith Bennett's bio: Professor of late-Quaternary environmental change at Queen's University Belfast, guest professor in palaeobiology at Uppsala University in Sweden, and author of "Evolution and Ecology: The Pace of Life" (Cambridge University Press). He holds a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
Excerpts from his article:
"In 1856, geologist Charles Lyell wrote to Charles Darwin with a question about fossils. Puzzled by types of mollusc that abruptly disappeared from the British fossil record, apparently in response to a glaciation, only to reappear 2 million years later completely unchanged, he asked of Darwin: 'Be so good as to explain all this in your next letter.' Darwin never did.
"To this day Lyell's question has never received an adequate answer. I believe that is because there isn't one.
"...the neat concept of adaptation to the environment driven by natural selection, as envisaged by Darwin in 'On the Origin of Species' and now a central feature of the theory of evolution, is too simplistic. Instead, evolution is chaotic.
"Our understanding of global environmental change is vastly more detailed [today] than it was in Lyell and Darwin's time. James Zachos at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues, have shown that the Earth has been on a long-term cooling trend for the past 65 million years. Superimposed upon this are oscillations in climate every 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years caused by wobbles in the Earth's orbit. "
Their research, mostly on birds, "shows that new species appear more or less continuously, regardless of the dramatic climatic oscillations of the Quaternary or the longer term cooling that preceded it.
"The overall picture is that the main response to major environmental changes is individualistic movement and changes in abundance, rather than extinction or speciation. In other words, the connection between environmental change and evolutionary
change is weak, which is not what might have been expected from Darwin's hypothesis.
" ... macroevolution may, over the longer-term, be driven largely by internally generated genetic change, not adaptation to a changing environment."
The gist of Bennett's article is that we cannot predict the course of the evolution of life because adaptation and natural selection -- the bedrock of Darwinian evolution -- have little to do with speciation.
But, you may ask, if Bennet's research shows that speciation is driven by some innate genetic characteristics rather than chaotic climate conditions, aren't we back to square one?
No, we're not. Evolution driven by an innate ability of genes to mutate and evolution driven by unpredictable climactic conditions are totally different animals (no pun intended), as will become clear soon.
Genetically driven speciation is analogous to, say, randomly hitting a ball on a billiard table. When the ball drops into a pocket it may have dropped into a random pocket but this was not necessarily a truly random event. The ball can only drop into one of the six pockets available; it cannot drill a new pocket at a random spot.
The point is, the ball can only drop into a pocket that was previously prepared for it, limiting its randomness by a predetermined set number of possibilities. So, no matter how randomly the ball is hit, its "randomness" is limited and guided by the predesign of the billiard table.
This is what I believe is behind speciation. Organisms only change into "allowable," or perhaps genetically guided, life forms. The appearance of a new organism may be a random choice among several "allowable" life forms, but, aside from the occasional aberration, which never results in a lineage of aberrations, an organism will never turn out to be a truly randomly constructed creature.
Fossil records and lab experiments seem to support this type of "organized evolution", which we will name Focused Biological Evolution (FBE), to differentiate it from Darwinian evolution.
Some years ago I read an article about how scientists found a cactus in the desert that had mutated under extreme conditions into another type of cactus. They decided to experiment to see how many different mutations of cacti they could get out of the original one. So they subjected the original cactus to the same conditions that had resulted in it mutating. To their amazement, no matter how many times they performed the experiment, the cactus only changed into that one mutated form.
The scientists in this experiment did not get a myriad of dysfunctional mutations before getting a functioning cactus. They didn't even get several different functioning cacti. The only result was this one mutation, and there seemed to be nothing random about it.
In 2006, a team of researchers from Panama, Colombia and the UK recreated the Heliconius heurippa butterfly in the laboratory by crossing two other species of butterfly, Heliconius cydno and Heliconius melpomene. The process of creating one new species out of two is known as hybrid speciation. Experimenter Chris Jiggins of the University of Edinburgh told BBC News: "The fact [that] we've recreated this species in the lab provides a pretty convincing route by which the natural species came about."
Although this was a "reverse" type of evolution, that the genetic code was able to create a new functional species is an indication of how the genetic code holds some sort of "guidance system" that not only maintains the viability of its host's current form but also that of other forms, and true randomness has little to do with speciation.
In another experiment, in 2002, biologists at the University of California uncovered genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans in animals can be accomplished through what was described as "simple mutations" in a class of regulatory genes, known as Hox, that act as master switches by turning on and off other genes during embryonic development.
Using laboratory fruit flies and a crustacean known as Artemia, or brine shrimp, the scientists showed how modifications in the Hox gene Ubx suppresses 100 percent of the limb development in the thoracic region of fruit flies, and 15 percent in Artemia.
"This kind of gene is one that turns on and off lots of other genes in order to make complex structures," said one graduate student working in William McGinnis' laboratory. "What we've done is to show that this change alters the way it turns on and off other genes. That's due to the change in the way the protein produced by this gene functions."
What this experiment demonstrated is that even in cases where it would have been very easy for nature to create an immense number of bizarre creatures by the simple random setting of genetic switches, nature apparently got these switch settings right the first time in a vast majority of cases, as is evidenced by the mostly functional looking creatures in the fossil record.
As an aside, what's interesting is the simplistic interpretation given by the graduate student about how switches "make complex structures." Switches do not "make complex structures" or cause things to evolve, just as turning on light switches do not cause electricity, light fixtures or wiring to evolve. Switches merely signal a pre-programmed or pre-determined event to occur between existing components. The components themselves may have taken much design and planning.
For an organism's features to simply pop up or disappear with the flick of a switch, there would have to have been a sophisticated underlying mechanism already in place that assigned specific tasks to specific genetic switches. Rather than showing how "simple" it is for new limbs to "evolve," the above experiment shows how sophisticated biological systems really are, and yet how simple it is to change their course of development. Similarly, turning a computer's switch on and surfing the web, for example, is simple enough for a 10-year-old to do, but those simple acts make use of highly sophisticated research, design and development efforts.
Another experiment, this one by evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University, showed very clearly that speciation is the result of an underlying genetic design and not chaos and randomness.
For twenty years Lenski cultivated 12 populations of bacteria that originated from one single Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacterium. After more than 44,000 generations, Lenski noticed a similar pattern in all 12 populations; they evolved larger cells, faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.
Sometimes around the 31,500th generation, one (and only this one) population suddenly acquired the ability to metabolize citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot metabolize. The citrate-using mutants then increased in population size and diversity.
Lenski wondered what would happen if he replayed this experiment; would the same population evolve in the same way, and would any of the other 11 also evolve. So he turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations, and replayed the experiment.
The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, it was always the same population that re-evolved, and it always evolved only into that same mutation.
This experiment speaks volumes of speciation's non-randomness. Not only was the end result the same every time this experiment was re-played, but the similarity between the intermediate "chaos" of each culture showed that even what gave the appearance of being chaos was actually part of an organized process.
What's mind-boggling is how some evolutionists saw Lenski's experiments as supporting Darwinian evolution, when in fact it did just the opposite. Here's a comment by an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago about Lenski's experiment: "The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
Contrary to what this evolutionary biologist claims, nothing in Lanski's experiment evolved in the Darwinian sense. The entire process, after several runs, became as predictable as the "chaos" of an undeveloped fetus turning into a fully formed human being. That's not evolution. Such events are generally referred to as development, formation, maturation, etc., not evolution.
What Lenski's experiments confirmed is that new mutated life forms are not the result of small, random, beneficial, changes, as described by Darwinian evolution, but a genetic predisposition that allows for very specific, predefined forms of life, very much like my earlier billiard analogy. Furthermore, that the genetic code can hold the blueprint for more than one life form is nothing new. We see this quality in some creatures even today:
* Caterpillars are crawling creatures that go through a stage called pupa, in which they undergo a complete metamorphosis and emerge as flying creatures, butterflies.
* Tadpoles are aquatic, gill-breathing, legless creatures that develop lungs, legs, and other organs to roam on dry land.
* Some salamanders undergo a metamorphosis which also takes them from an aquatic environment to an air-breathing one.
We call these transformations "metamorphoses," as opposed to evolution, because they happen in front of our eyes and it's obvious that their transformations are guided by an innate genetic mechanism, not by an evolutionary process. Had we seen these creatures transform only in the fossil record, and not in front of our eyes, evolutionist would undoubtedly have hailed these transformations as proof of Darwinian evolution.
Darwinian Evolution (DE)
vs.
Focused Biological Evolution (FBE)
You can probably sum up the differences between Darwinian Evolution and Focused Biological Evolution in a nutshell: After a century and a half, we've found more evidence that contradict DE than support it. FBE, on the other hand, is continually being proven in labs, by the fossil record and by archeological discoveries.
After much digging and analysis, we've found that the progression of life as suggested by Darwin is completely absent from fossil and archeological records. Most conspicuous is the absence of the massive number of deformed and diseased life forms that should have littered earth as a result of a long series of random changes.
The vast majority of life forms in fossil or archeological discoveries give the appearance of being well formed and functional organisms. The evidence that DE never happened is spitting in our faces. In fact, the mere proposal by some scientists of a theory like "punctuated equilibrium" (which says that most species experience
little change for most of their history, and then, suddenly, new species appear) accentuates the extent to which scientists are at a loss to find empirical support for DE.
In fact, theories like punctuated equilibrium are typical of evolutionists when confronted with contradictions. They simply make a "rule" out of inexplicable findings and, presto, there's no more need to explain. How does life just pop out of nowhere? "Most species experience little change for most of their history, and then, suddenly, new species appear." That really answers that, doesn't it?
One far-fetched, almost comical, explanation given for punctuated equilibrium is that these creatures evolved elsewhere and only their final forms, somehow, mysteriously, appeared in the location where we found sudden appearances of new species.
But the question remains, how come we always find only the fossils where organisms suddenly appeared in their final form and never where they went through the long evolutionary process? Could it be because that long evolutionary process is a myth?
Scientists then start tinkering in the lab with speciation to prove DE. Instead of finding that speciation produces all sorts of random creatures, which is what you'd expect of a random processes, they find that speciation is more of an "action-reaction" process that generally produces some very well-defined, specific, functional organisms. Apparently, speciation seems no more evolutionary than metamorphosis or gestation, albeit requiring different time scales and circumstances.
A theory like punctuated equilibrium actually makes for more comedy than science. Perhaps we should update punctuated equilibrium to the following:
There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that if you incubate three dozen worms in a solution of amino acids and carbon compounds for approximately one and a half million years they will eventually evolve into the Long Island Railroad. The only problem with this theory is that if this were true some species of fish would have a natural tendency to ride the Long Island Railroad. But fish have never actually been observed commuting between Long Island and Manhattan.
A group of enterprising archaeologists, however, found the missing link to this apparent puzzle. Digging through the ruins of an old Long Island Railroad yard, they came across a fossil of a fish believed to be extinct for billions of years. In fact, after taking a radiocarbon reading of the fossil and the brown paper bag it was found in, they confirmed that their find dated back to the "big bang," give or take six months. This proves conclusively that prehistoric fish did commute via the Long Island Railroad.
Now, the question arises, did prehistoric fish commute on dry land or did prehistoric trains run underwater? No one really knows for sure. But, the famous Dr. Imust Beagenius (pronounced I-must Be-a-genius) is grappling with a theory. Dr. Beagenius suggests that prehistoric fish must have travelled on dry land. He points out that extensive laboratory tests show that railroad tickets are not waterproof.
There you have it -- a theory which links fish, worms, and the Long Island Railroad. It couldn't be more logical.
Unfortunately, not everyone is that easy to please. There are those who, believe it or not, would demand a more detailed explanation of such a theory, no matter how logical it sounds. "How do a bunch of worms," they would naively ask, "turn into the Long Island Railroad?"
In spite of the absurdity of such skepticism, I offer the following evidence which should render this theory proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Our archeologist friends went back to the same railroad yard and made some more astonishing discoveries. They lined up some of the old cars side by side and noticed how each car was slightly bigger and better developed than the one before it. The car at one end had a highly sophisticated and powerful air conditioning system, while the car at the other end had not even a fan. The only trace of air conditioning found in one underdeveloped car was the fossil of a conductor slapping an old woman with his cap to create some air disturbance. (His cap, incidentally, has been known to be extinct for at least seven and a half billion years. It had no union label.)
Then, scientists took a worm crawling in the same railroad yard and put it under a powerful electron microscope. And behold, they made an astounding discovery: A worm's cell magnified three billion times has an uncanny resemblance to a train window (without the shades).
It's quite obvious that the evidence presented for the worm-train theory overshadows the somewhat popular but fanatical notion that trains may have been manufactured by intelligent beings. The "intelligent beings" theory would imply a labor union. So far, none of the trains studied showed any traces of major medical benefits, pension funds, or sick leave. How such a ridiculous theory even got started is hard to imagine. So much for this nonsensical "intelligent beings" theory.
By now you must be saying to yourself, "Well, the evidence for the worm-train theory is certainly overwhelming. Any idiot can see its scientific validity. But where did the first worm come from?"
I'm glad you asked. The theory widely accepted by the scientific community and also strongly supported by our famous Dr. Imust Beagenius is the "big bait" theory. In the beginning there was a big ball of fishing hooks. Nature found it rather absurd to have so many fishing hooks without worms. In a few short billions of years, worms began to materialize around the hooks. When the first trout started biting, nature found it necessary to produce more worms to keep up with the fishing season. And so, worms began materializing on virtually every hook around the globe. Then, in the off-season, there were more worms than hooks. So, the problem at that point was storing these excess worms. This brought about the invention of the can. So, you see, the worm-train evolution began with the Big Bait. And the Big Bait began with a can of worms.
How's that for a new theory?
I heard one evolutionist even admit that life could not have been an accident. But he wouldn't acknowledge it must have been intelligently designed. This is quite an absurd position. It's got to be one or the other. Something is either an accident or deliberate; there is no in-between and no other options. And if you prove one, you've disproven the other. Conversely, if you disprove one, you've proven the other.
If all evidence shows clearly that the development of life on earth was not the result of accidental occurrences, that demonstrates conclusively that it had to be intentionally designed. To understand the former but not acknowledging the latter is intellectual dishonesty, at best, delusional, at worst.
How is FBE different?
While Darwinian evolution began as a theory in search of evidence, FBE is a direct result of that evidence. Unlike DE, FBE is not a theory waiting to be proven; it's the evidence that created it. What's more, FBE not only explains the fossil record and speciation in the field and the lab, but, interestingly, it is also fully compatible with Creation.
Here's a capsulized review of how FBE would explain the development of life on earth from its inception to today.
Please note that FBE does not explain how life began. And neither does any other science. There is not a scintilla of empirical evidence in the lab or in the field that shows abiogenesis (living organisms arising from inanimate matter) ever occurred or is even possible. Yet, we are here; something or someone had to have started life. So with the complete absence of any science to explain the beginning of life, using Creation as a model is as good as any.
In the beginning, all of today's ancestral life forms were Created. (Whether "Created" means ex nihilo or that the land and sea gave forth their respective creatures is irrelevant to this discussion.)
As these ancestral life forms spread or appeared throughout various climates around the globe, they went through changes to adapt to their environments and, in some cases, speciation may have occurred.
Being that every known (and perhaps as yet unknown) variation of life has its roots in genetic code rather than accidental occurrences, adaptation and speciation did not require massive trial-and-errors or long development periods. Instead, they were as smooth and as precise transformations as the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs and caterpillars into butterflies.
(Speciation involving intermediate chaotic-looking organisms, by the way, has thus far been found only in micro organisms. And even then, the "chaos" always have similarities, with the end result always appearing as a specific genetically-dictated mutation, not as a randomly generated organism.)
The sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record, therefore, is precisely how it must've happened. New species could easily have popped up within a generation or two. For without the need of Darwin's lengthy development period, millions of years of myriads of "misfits" and missing links were not necessary (even if they could possibly evolve life).
As far as scientific explanations go, DE has been a 150-year failure. It's time we discarded DE, as we've done with many other outdated "earth is flat" type of theories. The sophistication of the 21st century calls for a new theory that fits the facts, not an old patched-up theory that has its roots in ignorance and needs a new patch for every discovery. Focused Biological Evolution could be that new theory.