Your Brother Daniel
For more great blogs as
this one go to Daniel’s blog site at: www.Mannsword.blogspot.com
Evolution
and the Scientific Consensus
Is there really a
scientific consensus in favor of macro-evolution? According to Casey Luskin, research
coordinator for the Discovery Institute,
such a consensus, if it still exists, is quickly coming apart:
· In 2007, Harvard chemist George Whitesides
admitted he has “no idea” how “life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of
molecules in the prebiotic Earth.” More recently, a paper in Complexity acknowledged, “Many different
ideas are competing and none is available to provide a sufficiently plausible
root to the first living organisms.” (CRJ,
Vol 37/#03, 37)
This issue of
“consensus” is not a minor one. Evolutionists continually appeal to this
alleged consensus to argue that they represent science, while IDers and
creationists do not. Therefore, in order to be in step with science, schools
must use the textbooks that advance evolution. It also means that there should
be no place for ID or even any criticism of evolution in the classroom.
However, this
“consensus” is becoming increasingly elusive, even on Darwin’s home-turf:
· In 2008, sixteen leading biologists convened in
Altenberg, Austria, to discuss problems with the neo-Darwinian synthesis. When
covering this conference, Nature
quoted leading scientists saying things like, “evolutionary theory has told us
little about” important events like “the origin of wings and the invasion of
the land.” That same year, Cornell evolutionary biologist William Provine
explained that “every assertion of the “evolutionary synthesis below is false,”
including: “natural selection was the primary mechanism at every level of the
evolutionary process,” “macroevolution was a simple extension of
microevolution,” and “evolution produces a tree of life.” (38)
The “tree-of-life” is a
concept inseparable from Darwinism. If higher life-forms had evolved from lower
ones, we should expect the fossil record to bear witness to this fact. We
should therefore be able to observe how one form gradually morphs into another,
creating a virtual tree-of-life, connecting the dots. However, such a tree has
eluded its proponents:
· The following year, leading biologist Eugene
Koonin wrote that breakdowns in core neo-Darwinian tenets such as the
“traditional concept of the tree of life” or that “natural selection is the
main driving force of evolution” indicate “the modern synthesis has crumbled,
apparently, beyond repair.” (38)
· Koonin mentioned growing skepticism over the
“tree of life,” and the technical literature contains numerous examples of
conflicting evolutionary trees, challenging universal common ancestry. An
article in Nature reported that “disparities
between molecular and morphological trees” lead to “evolution wars” because
“evolutionary trees constructed by studying biological molecules often don’t
resemble those drawn up from morphology.” Another Nature paper reported that newly discovered genes “are tearing
apart traditional ideas about the animal family tree,” since they “give a
totally different tree from what everyone else wants.” A 2009 article in New Scientist observes that “many
biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be
discarded.” (38)
It is noteworthy that
the tree should be “discarded” rather than revised. This is because many have
despaired of finding a tree – a biological/morphological roadmap - to
demonstrate how one species evolved into another. However, it would seem that
to despair that such a tree exists is also to despair of neo-Darwinism. The
tree is as indispensible to neo-Darwinism as a blueprint is to an engineer.
Consistent with the idea
of unguided natural selection, evolutionists had predicted that they would find
leftover, now useless, genes leftover from our evolutionary ancestors. They
called these genes “junk DNA.” Francis Collins had even claimed that “45 percent
of the human genome” consists of “genetic flotsam and jetsam” – leftover junk!
The presence of such an extensive collection of junk, would, of course, rule in
favor of evolution. However, more recently, the findings have ruled against
evolution:
· A major 2012 Nature paper by the ENCORE
consortium reported “biochemical functions for 80% of the genome.” Lead ENCORE
scientists predicted that with further research, “80 percent will go to 100”
since “almost every nucleotide is associated with a function.” (39)
This prediction does not
accord with the messiness of evolution and its leftover loose ends that
evolutionists would expect to find, but rather with the design of Intelligence!
Is there a consensus
regarding evolution among the scientific community? Hardly! Nevertheless, the
vast majority still expect to find a natural
explanation for the origins of life and speciation. However, in light of the
above, such an expectation is the product of faith and not science. Interestingly, it is this faith that now
predominates throughout our scientific institutions.
No comments:
Post a Comment