Seven Mysteries of Evolution

When we read the statements above in the strongly anti-creationist Encyclopedia of Evolution, we knew we had to share the entire article with you.

Let's not wait for the next generation to explore them. Let's explore them now from the beginning.

Milner wrote, "Creationists ... scoff at evolutionary theory for what it hasn't solved, as if that disproves all of modern biological knowledge." That's partly correct. Creationists do scoff at evolutionary theory, but they do it because evolutionary theory is contrary to modern biological knowledge. Evolutionists are the ones who reject modern biological knowledge in order to keep their precious theory alive.

Life

The origin of life is the first "mystery". Modern biological knowledge tells us that inanimate matter cannot come to life by any natural process. Evolutionists reject this well-establish fact, and keep wasting time looking for some way to prove Louis Pasteur wrong. They ask foolish questions like, "How did living matter originate out of nonliving matter? Was it a process that happened once or many times? Can it still happen today under natural or artificial conditions? Did it evolve out of the kind of growth and replication processes we see in crystals or on an entirely different basis?"

Modern biological knowledge provides the answers. Specifically, the answers are: "It didn't." "It didn't even happen once." "It can't happen today under natural or artificial conditions." and, "It didn't evolve like crystals, or anything else, for that matter." But evolutionists don't like those answers. So, they reject modern biological knowledge and call the origin of life, "science's greatest mystery."

Sex

The second greatest mystery is sex. We've talked at length about the Birds and the Bees, and Sex and the Single Bacterium in past newsletters, examining the issues Milner brings up.

Sure, we would like to know why pricking or shocking frog eggs fertilizes them, but creationists aren't hamstrung by trying to explain it in terms consistent with evolution. Creationists are free to shock all the frog eggs they like, observing what happens inside the cell when they do. Perhaps they might figure out why those changes allow the egg to divide and produce all the cells required to make a tadpole. If they do, they can publish the answer without having to invent some fable about how it is the result of evolution.

Language

We've never written about the origin of language before. We probably should, but we won't this month. It is too big a topic to adequately cover in this overview of evolutionary mysteries. We can, however, briefly summarize the evolutionists' problem with language.

Language, as Milner points out, is not evolving from simple to complex, as evolutionary theory would predict. Evolutionists would expect that as man's brain evolves and becomes more capable, language should become richer and more complex.

Fortunately, I went to high school back in the days when four semesters of Latin were required to graduate from high school. Now one can graduate from college without taking a single semester of Latin. As a result, most younger Americans don't know how to decline a noun, or conjugate a verb--and it certainly shows in the email we get! Language skills are devolving, not evolving!

Suffice it to say that scientists who study languages realize that the origin of human languages is not consistent with the theory of evolution. Knowledgeable, honest evolutionists like Milner know it, and find it "mysterious."

Phyla

Evolutionists have trouble explaining the phyla (and all of the other biological categories except species, for that matter).

It is possible, through selective breeding, to produce dogs, horses, pigeons, roses, etc., with distinctive characteristics. No one would mistake a collie for a poodle, and it would be tempting to call them two separate species, except for the fact that they can still mate and produce fertile offspring. (Fertility is the arbitrary, man-made test for determining if two critters of the opposite sex are the same species.)

Biologists find it convenient to group all similar species into a single "genus". They group similar genera into a "family". They group similar families into an "order". They group similar orders into "classes". Similar classes make up a "phylum."

The theory of evolution is based on the idea that all existing life came from one original living thing. Therefore, in the beginning, there was only one species, which was the only member of a single genus, which was the only genus in a family, which was the only family in an order, which was the only order in a class, which was the only class in the one-and-only original phylum. Supposedly that one species became diverse, resulting in several species. Those species became so different from each other that they each became a distinct genus. As time went on (so the story goes), life diversified into families, orders, classes, and phyla.

So, one should see in the fossil record a gradual diversity of species, with enough different species to divide into phyla very late in the fossil record. That isn't what one sees at all. There are several different phyla in the fossil record right from the start.

Furthermore, there should be lots of transitional fossils representing the original member of each phylum, class, order, and family. There aren't.

Extinctions

Frankly, we would not have included extinction as a problem for evolution, but since Milner did, we can't avoid addressing it.

As far as we are concerned, extinction is a process by which species cease to be, which has nothing to do with how species come into existence. If the United States and the Soviet Union had become involved in a global nuclear war in the 1960's, wiping out all life on Earth (as some people feared at the time), it would have told us nothing about the origin of man or animals. But the theory of evolution involves "survival of the fittest", which involves "extinction of the weakest" as part of the process.

First, we would like to make a distinction between the death of an individual and the extinction of a species.

Consider the passenger pigeon, which was abundant in New England in the 19^th century, but was hunted to extinction by 1914. Prior to that time, there were certainly hurricanes which, by the time they traveled up the eastern seaboard, weakened to the point that they were just tropical storms. Never-the-less, these storms were certainly strong enough that some of these storms must have blown some poor, unfortunate passenger pigeon into a building, tree, or other object, killing it. Once on the ground, water could have washed it someplace where it became covered in mud. If conditions were right, it could have become fossilized.

Suppose that someone found our hypothetical fossilized pigeon. One could correctly deduce that it died in (or shortly before) a storm that caused enough flooding to bury it. (If it had died long before the storm, it most likely would have been eaten by animals or insects.) But it would be incorrect to conclude that passenger pigeons became extinct because they all died in storms.

The fossil record contains the remains of creatures that were buried by wet mud, dry sand, or hot volcanic ash. It can tell us how those individuals died, but it tells us nothing about how the races those individuals belonged to went extinct.

Evolutionists think they have a problem with extinction because they make the erroneous assumption that every rock containing certain "index fossils" was formed at the same time. Since they find certain fossils in certain rocks, and not others, they think they see evidence of several "mass extinctions." They don't know how to explain why many diverse kinds of plants and animals went extinct "suddenly", while other plants and animals survived.

The mass extinction problem is a weakness in the theory of evolution that some might think we should try to exploit, but we haven't. It doesn't matter to us if dinosaurs died out because of an asteroid or the stomach flu. Evolution needs to explain how extinction caused new creatures to evolve to fill their niche in the environment. The theory of evolution can't do that, with or without mass extinctions.

DNA

We agree, of course, that DNA is a serious problem for evolutionists on several levels. First, there is the problem of how a molecule as complicated as DNA could have evolved by chance. What was the source of the genetic information that got into the DNA molecule? Where did the molecular machinery that decodes the DNA molecule come from? DNA, all by itself, is a real mystery for evolutionists.

But beyond that, there is a second problem with DNA. DNA should provide an evolutionary road map--if the theory of evolution is really true. Studies comparing DNA (and studies comparing various proteins) give conflicting and confusing family trees. These studies show that creatures that evolutionists don't think have a close common ancestor are more similar at the molecular level than creatures that supposedly do share a close common ancestor.

Milner ignores these two problems, and focuses on still more DNA problems. He wonders how random small changes can turn a DNA molecule that produces one kind of life into a DNA molecule that produces another kind of life. It would be like taking one of Shakespeare's plays and turning it into the Declaration of Independence by randomly changing letters.

The second problem Milner sees with DNA has to do with the driving force behind evolution. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, some scientists believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. That is, if you went to the gym and built up your muscles, your offspring would be born stronger. If a giraffe stretched its neck to get the highest leaves, then its offspring would be born with longer necks. Modern scientists reject this idea.

But if exercise, diet, weather, and desire, can't modify the DNA that is passed on to one's offspring, then what is the force that does change DNA? Evolutionists generally fall back on "chance", but that isn't a satisfactory explanation, and Milner knows it. That's why he is looking to find "any circumstances under which environment or behavior can work 'backwards,' influencing changes in DNA."

Natural Selection

Ever since Darwin, evolutionists have maintained that random variations are filtered by natural selection, which keeps the advantageous changes and discards the disadvantageous ones. Publicly, they profess that natural selection has the power to do this. But privately, many doubt this. You see hints of this in the scientific literature, where some scientists wonder if "survival of the fittest" is stronger than "survival of the luckiest". As Milner points out, even Darwin wasn't convinced that natural selection was powerful enough to do the job, and was looking for additional forces. He didn't find one, and neither has anyone else.

Evolutionist Milner has honestly identified seven serious problems with the theory of evolution. We agree with his conclusion that it is counterproductive to try to sweep these problems under the rug.

We only differ on one point. He thinks the solution is to look harder to find a way that one can reconcile the theory of evolution with all the contradictory scientific evidence. We think it is time to admit that science is against evolution because the theory of evolution is wrong, and the theory (not the evidence) should be discarded.

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Footnotes:

¹ Milner, The Encyclopedia of Evolution, 1990, Henry Holt and Company, Inc. pages 159-160 (Ev)
² ibid.
³ ibid.