Have You Heard About Eternity? by Marius le Roux - HTML preview

IS THERE A CASE FOR THE SPRINGING UP AND EVOLUTION OF LIFE?

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

        Genesis 1:31a

The Origin of Life

Evolution postulates that life on earth arose from non-life, that is, from the inorganic, mineral compounds and substances of the earth.   

Is it possible that a living organism, an organism with a complex built-in information system and capable of reproducing itself, could have come about on its own?  Can we simply believe in a bolt of lightning striking a primordial pool of mud as some do? The biological DNA program of every living cell is so complex that it cannot yet be said to be fully understood. Could biological life have compiled its own genetic code?  

Is the spontaneous springing of life from non-life even suggested in any way that is remotely scientifically tenable?

Let us also bear in mind that the proposal that life emerged from non-life runs against a principle of biological science, biogenesis, which states that life can only come from life.  It postulates that there is no living organism on earth that did not derive from preceding life.   Moreover, the offspring of a parent organism is always of the same kind.{15}  

The requirement that life came from non-life, abiogenesis, is therefore a dead end, even before we come to a discussion of evolution itself. 

But let us continue.

The Development of Life Forms According to the Evolutionary Viewpoint

Once life had originated through unexplained forces, organisms of increasing complexity are said to have developed over time from less complex organisms to form the vast diversity of life on earth.  This means that all biological life, say, plant life, eagles, whales, dragonflies and humans, derive from the same ancestral life form.  

The mechanism of this development was called “natural selection” by the father of evolution, Charles Darwin.  Natural selection, or the concept of “survival of the fittest”, occurs in nature where variations occur in the offspring of organisms, which they pass on to their own offspring.  If competing offspring have traits that are advantageous, given the constraints of food, space and other limitations of their environment, they will survive, whilst those that do not have those traits, will perish.  As differences accumulate over generations, populations of organisms diverge from their ancestors and this divergence, so it is said, has led to the massive array of all living things that exists today.

With the discovery of DNA and its encyclopaedic genetic code, another string was supposedly added to the argument for evolution. Neo-Darwinism proposes that evolution is caused by random genetic mutations within an organism’s DNA that occur over successive generations. Beneficial mutations are preserved because they aid survival.  Natural selection therefore acts to preserve and accumulate small, advantageous genetic changes over successive generations.  If a creature developed a functional advantage, its offspring would inherit that advantage, leaving inferior disadvantaged members of the same species to gradually die out. 

This, then, is the evolutionary viewpoint.  Some call it a theory, but it is not really a theory, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Sir Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity.  Evolution cannot claim to be in that category, as it is not underpinned by the methods of science.

Is there a compelling case for this viewpoint?

Allow me, dear reader, to take you to a few of the questions that confront it.

Variation

There is abundant evidence that living things can change under the influence of natural selection.

Take, for example the different breeds of domestic animals and different varieties of plants that have been bred.  From the domestic evidence, one can conclude that changes can occur over generations that lead to different features, characteristics and traits in an organism.

There is further evidence today in genetically modified crops, which through various features such as drought tolerance and insect resistance, produce better yields than conventional crops.

It is well documented that Darwin himself observed variations in the sizes of the beaks in colonies of finches in the Galapagos Islands.  Those with the larger beaks dominated, as they were better able to break up seeds on which they fed. 

Variation, also referred to as speciation, shows that living things can undergo changes to existing features, such as the size of a bird’s beak, or the length of a cat’s hair, under the influence of natural selection. 

But variation is not evolution. 

Evolution requires that new genetic information be added to an organism’s genetic code to form entirely new creatures.

Although some finches had larger beaks, they were still finches.

The Bible teaches that all living creatures were made “according to their kind”. The term “kind” can be equated to “species”. This would explain why, for example, the original created wolf “kind” with an abundant genetic store could have diversified into dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes and so forth.

We will presently look at this topic more closely.

Irreducible complexity

It has been proposed that complex biological mechanisms and systems of the human body, and of a myriad of other creatures, function on the basis of irreducible complexity.  

In his book, Darwin’s Black Box,{16} scientist Michael J. Behe illustrated the concept of irreducible complexity with reference to a mousetrap.  As we know, a common mousetrap consists of five parts.

• It commonly has a base on which the parts are mounted.
• a striker adapted to strike the mouse.
• a spring that loads the striker.
• a trigger hosting the bait, and 
• a retaining member that retains the striker in its loaded position and is released when the bait is taken.  

If any one of these parts is not present, or fails, the mousetrap cannot function at all.

Whilst evolution holds that all of life in its vast array arose by numerous, successive, slight modifications, Behe famously stated that no biological system could be formed by such modifications, if it were irreducibly complex.  The irreducible parts could not develop little by little – the system cannot start if they are not all complete, present and functioning at the same time.

The human knee briefly described above is irreducibly complex.  The knee cannot function if all its parts are not present and working. If a condyle on the femur or a cruciate ligament is not present, the knee cannot function, and cannot start to function.

Loss of Information

We have seen that living organisms are founded on microscopic male and female parent cells meeting to form a new cell that grows according to the instructions contained in the DNA received from the parent cells.

As indicated at the start of this chapter, it is well known that changes in characteristics or traits of living things can occur. Such changes, which some call variation or speciation, can come about through the ordinary mechanism of heredity, under the influence of natural selection, over the span of successive generations. An example mentioned above is the emergence of finches with large beaks in a community of finches where large beaks convey a survival advantage. Another example is acquired immunity to DDT in mosquitoes in an area where DDT is used to control mosquitos.  Immune mosquitos would have an obvious survival advantage. 

This is sometimes held out, incorrectly, as evidence of evolution in action. 

Why incorrectly?

Well, what is perhaps not widely appreciated is that, contrary to the requirements of evolution, variation in an organism leads to a loss of information in the DNA of the organism. 

The evolutionary tree, starting with simple organisms, requires a gain in information to produce more complex organisms.  

How does the loss of information occur?  

We saw earlier that biological characteristics or traits are determined by the DNA of a new living cell. Each offspring inherits one half of its genetic information from its father and one half from its mother. For each characteristic, there is a pair of genes located on corresponding chromosomes received from the parent cells, and in corresponding positions.  The pair of genes controls the same characteristic, but the genes may not both be effective. For example, one gene received from the father may code for blue eyes, while the other received from the mother may code for brown eyes.  Sometimes two genes can have a combined effect, while at other times only one gene, the dominant one, has any effect on the organism, while the other one, the recessive one, has no effect.  Thus, if the offspring has blue eyes, the gene for blue eyes is said to be dominant over the gene for brown eyes. In nomenclature, the dominant gene is shown in a capital letter and the recessive gene in lower case. Pairs of genes that control given characteristics are called alleles. Simply put, an allele is one of two or more different versions of a gene, but for ease of reference alleles will simply be called genes.

Now, where a population of organisms comes under an environmental or other threat, it may be that only some members of the population with certain characteristics will survive.  If their offspring carry the same characteristics, they will carry the surviving line.

Take as a simplified example, a wild cat population with short hair. In the illustration below, a pair of short-haired cats is shown in the first row, one male and one female. Each carries two genes, a dominant gene S that will code for short hair, and a recessive gene l that will code for long hair. (Strictly speaking, the gene for long hair should here be shown as “s” but “l” will be used for ease of illustration).

Each cat in the first row would have received one gene S from one of its parents, and the other gene l from the other of its parents.

Now, when it comes to reproduction, a gene pair separates during the process of meiosis (described above) in the formation of reproductive cells, called gametes. Half the reproductive cells will carry one gene and the other half the other gene.

So, when reproductive sperm cells are produced in the male cat by the process of meiosis, its chromosome with the gene S and its chromosome with the gene l will end up in different sperm cells. Half the sperm cells will contain the dominant gene S and the other half the recessive gene l. The same applies to the reproductive egg cells produced during meiosis in the female cat. Half the egg cells will have the dominant gene S and half the recessive gene l.

In the example, all fertilization possibilities are shown in the second row. If an S sperm fertilizes an S egg, the offspring will be short haired (SS). If an S sperm fertilizes an l egg, the offspring will also have short hair (Sl). So too, if an l sperm fertilizes an S egg, it will be short hair for the offspring (lS).  But if an l sperm fertilizes an l egg, the offspring will be long haired.  

In the second generation, this is shown by three offspring having short hair (SS, Sl and lS) and one with long hair (ll).

In this generation, one short haired cat (lS) is naturally paired with the sole long-haired cat (ll). In their offspring, all four fertilization possibilities are again shown, resulting in two short haired cats (Sl), and two long haired cats (ll).  

In the third generation, the two long-haired cats are naturally paired. The offspring of these two cats will all be long haired as shown in the fourth row.{17}

With a cataclysmic climate change to cold weather, the long-haired cats will have the better chance of survival, and their offspring in turn will all have long hair (ll).

This is a simplistic representation, but we can conclude the following:

• the most recent generation has adapted to its environment
• they are more specialized than their ancestors
• this has occurred through natural selection
• they have not gained any new genes
• the cat population as it now exists has lost genetic information compared to its ancestors
• the gene pool of this population has been diminished
• the population is now less rich in the original genetic store of its kind
• they are now less able to adapt to an opposite climatic swing.

Evolution, however, is constructed on an opposite premise.  

Simply put, there has to be a gain in genetic information for the evolutionary tree to grow from simpler to more complex life forms.

Actually, one does not have to go far to confirm the principle that is involved here.  In the world of animal breeding, it is common cause that purebred pedigree animals suffer from genetic impoverishment. One example, amongst hundreds of genetic diseases in dogs, is hip dysplasia in larger dog breeds.

In breeding, it is the breeder who selects what is considered to be desirable traits such as size or shape or colour and so forth. The breeder will therefore pair animals with the same desired characteristics, and may even cull new-born offspring that do not have the sought-after characteristics. In nature, the same principle will apply where natural selection, as opposed to the breeder’s selection, will determine the surviving line, and, as in breeding, with resultant, depleted genetic information.{18}

For evolution, the difficulty of loss of information in natural selection is insurmountable. With the obvious limitations of the traditional tenets of the theory of evolution, a new proposal, neo-Darwinism, was put forward.  

The Argument for Neo-Darwinism

Now, dear reader, you may ask whether evolution’s difficulties have not been answered by neo-Darwinism. DNA copying as explained in the previous chapter is not always completely accurate in that random errors can occur.  Is it not when natural selection acts on these random errors that evolution occurs?

Actually, neo-Darwinism does not begin to answer the requirements of evolution, and only serves to extinguish the evolutionary argument.  There is a mass of scientific sources on this issue, but the following points can be made for purposes of this study.

• As already indicated, when living organism reproduce, they make a copy of their DNA which is passed on to their offspring.
• Every living cell has intricate molecular machinery designed to copy DNA accurately, but copying errors do occur.
• Copying errors that occur in reproduction are known as mutations.
• A mutation is a change in the sequence of DNA.  All mutations involve some change in the sequence of letters (bases) in the genome.  A single mutation can be as simple as a single letter swap or the insertion or deletion of a letter. Most mutations are of this simple kind. Mutations can also be complex, like the deletion of an entire gene. 
• Nearly all mutations have a deleterious effect, even if most do not have a strong effect.
• Natural selection can only eliminate the severely deleterious mutations from the gene pool by eliminating individuals that carry them.
• Unless mutations cause a significant reduction in reproductive rates, the organism that carries them will be just as successful in leaving progeny as the others that don’t. Thus, if mutations are not deleterious enough, natural selection cannot “see” them and therefore cannot eliminate them, and the mutations will accumulate.
• Since the vast majority of mutations have too small an effect to be selected out, each new generation carries over all the not-so-harmful mutations of previous generations, plus their own.
• Over time, all these mutations will build up to a stage where, in combination, they may have a serious effect on the fitness of an organism to reproduce successfully. This means that there is an unstoppable accumulation of deleterious mutations in the DNA of living organisms.
• The net effect of the burden of random mutations is degradation or in some cases complete destruction of function.
• Major findings in human genome studies show, firstly, an accumulating mutation load, and, secondly, multiple associations between mutations and diseases.
• In the 2012 Human Gene Mutation Database of more than 141 000 mutations, the classification is just in two categories - mutations are either classified as “disease associated” or “functional”.  There is no category labelled “beneficial”.  New mutations are being discovered at over 11 000 per year.
• A handful of beneficial mutations have been discovered. One example is the discovery that a single gene change in ethnic Tibetans has allowed them to cope with the low oxygen levels that occur on the high Tibetan plateau.
• Only a tiny fraction of mutations is from copying errors, around 0.1% of the total mutation burden. The rest are from other causes such as, possibly, radiation, virus infections, reactive metabolic products, and others.
• Cells have in-built mechanisms for maintaining genome quality during reproduction, known as “DNA copying fidelity”. These mechanisms include proofreading, error correcting systems and error accumulation checkpoints.
• Some examples of “new” information through mutations have been cited: sickle cell anaemia, which confers a resistance to the malaria parasite by producing deformed haemoglobin molecules; and nylon digestion by bacteria which involves a loss of functionality of an enzyme. These involve a decay or corruption of existing genetic information.
• The Neo-Darwinian position relies entirely on random DNA copying errors for producing novelty, but this can now essentially be discounted. Sources{19}

It has authoritatively been stated that “all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis have been disproven”.{20}  The Modern Synthesis is also known as neo-Darwinism.

We shall return to this subject shortly.

Fossils

There is a branch of science involved in the search and study of fossils. The science is known as palaeontology.  Fossils are the remains of living things that have been replaced by rock material, or impressions of organisms preserved in rock. The ever-growing collection of recorded fossils worldwide is known as the fossil record.

Creatures shown in the fossil record, unearthed over centuries of excavation and investigation, provide a valuable insight into natural life on earth in the past.

Now, here is a superb opportunity to bring real evidence of the transitory claims of evolution, that is, that all of nature is a generational transition from simpler to complex life forms over the expanse of time. Bear in mind that a fossil is usually very old and does not essentially age. It can and does remain intact almost indefinitely.

In broad terms, evolution proposes that the so-called tetrapods, that is, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds evolved over time from fish, along various but unknown paths. That is to say, once fish themselves had evolved into fish from simple life forms themselves. 

The evolutionary “tree of life”, shown simplistically and stylistically below, and in a very small part, would look something like this:

Here we see the trunk of the tree branching from the first cells upwardly and outwardly into many branches which themselves branch out upwardly and outwardly into sub-branches, and so forth. The upward direction of the branches and sub-branches indicate increasing complexity of creatures (not shown) in the tree.

This is the evolutionary theory, in which simple organisms “evolved”, through inestimable generations in the natural order, into increasingly complex creatures under the influence of natural selection and accidental, random mutation in the genetic code.

More technically, before proceeding further, it is important to bear in mind that evolutionists assume that similarity (which may be anatomical or at molecular level) implies relationship by descent, that is, by common ancestry. Thus, all evolution trees are inverred, and not based on scientific fact.

A small paradigmatic evolution tree is pictorially shown below in the following simplistic image, for ease of illustration:

This image conveys the evolutionary proposal, shown pictorially in paradigm form and in an exceptionally simplistic form, that amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals “evolved” from fish, along the upwardly ascending evolutionary tree.

Now, if animals of increasing complexity evolved progressively, then it follows that there must be fossils, among the millions recorded, which serve to show this transition. In other words, there must have been millions, or billions, of transitional animals or “in-between” animals, which produced the upward march from fish to amphibian, or amphibian to reptile, or reptile to bird, and so forth, and they should feature in the fossil record.

These “in-between” animals must have been actual, fiable, living animals to have been able to pass on their “advancing” traits of increasing complexity to their offspring. There must have been “in-between” animals between a fish and amphibian, with a common ancestry, before an “in-between” animal itself evolved into a fully-fledged amphibian. The theory postulates that this process of gradual transition would have taken millions or billions of years. 

Indeed, Darwin said more than 150 years ago that the fossil record would in due course deliver the fossil evidence for inter-species transition, that is, that species evolved increasingly from lower life forms into higher life forms, as shown in the “evolutionary tree”.

Has the fossil record passed the litmus test of evolution? Have we seen fossils of the millions or billions of “in-between” animals in the fossil record?

Alas, no such fossils have been found.

There will be some, or even many, who will claim that fossils of “in-between” animals have been found. There might be a handful of such claims but they are debatable. What would be good is if a fossil is shown that lies between a fish and a reptile, or between a reptile and a bird, and so forth, for all to see. Such a fossil would be worthy of study. Such fossils, if they existed, would have been paraded as a triumph of evolution. But they don’t exist.

The author John Blanchard puts it this way:

“A critical weakness in palaeontology’s claim to prove evolution is the fact that, even when they are arranged in the most ingenious way, the fossils stubbornly fail to introduce what evolutionists so desperately need, the smooth transition from one species to another, with a stream of intermediate organisms to ‘cement’ the index species together.

In his book Macroevolution: Patterns and Process, palaeontologist Steven Stanley is quite dogmatic about it: ‘The fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualist model can be valid.”{21}

Bear in mind that the fossil record ought to be a visual history of evolution, as that theory claims. There should be an encyclopaedia of fossils that demonstrate that everything evolved from simple organisms to complex creatures in the march of evolution, as fixed in stone for mankind to observe.

There is a further difficulty.  We noted that the “in-between” animals must have been viable, living, animals for the very evolutionary process to have taken place. They must have passed on their genetic information from generation to generation over millions or even billions of years to “produce” new, more complex, kinds of animals.

Are the offspring of any of them alive today?

Alas, none of them are walking around today. Remember, they were viable, and not inevitably destined for extinction.

The question is, were there ever such “in between” animals at all? 

Before moving on from transitional life forms, it should be noted that the evolution community faces another headwind, the Cambrian explosion.

This is how it has been explained:

“The Cambrian rocks provide some of the most devastating fossil evidence against evolutionary theory. Evolutionists believe these to be 541–485 million years old; in their thinking, they contain the remains of some of the earlier life forms that existed on Earth. Very significantly, a huge variety of animals appear suddenly, ‘out of the blue’. Dozens of widely different organisms are said to have arisen over a very short period of time. The differences are so great that they are often referred to as having fundamentally different ‘body plans’. This is why they are classed as different phyla (classification categories).

There is no evidence that these are somehow less sophisticated than their representatives alive today, so it is very difficult for evolutionists to argue that Cambrian creatures represent ‘primitive’ and ‘less evolved’ forms of life. The extinct trilobites had compound eyes that are among the most sophisticated and complex vision systems of any creature that has ever lived.  Anomalocarid also had sophisticated compound eyes, which have left evolutionists puzzled as to how they could have evolved so quickly.”{22}

John Blanchard explains it like this:

“As Richard Dawkins admits, ‘Il is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history’. Not surprisingly, the Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson describes the ‘Cambrian explosion’ as ‘the single greatest problem which the fossil record poses for Darwinism.”’{23}

A Different Tree

Instead of a tree, an orchard or vineyard is shown below, again simplistically and stylistically.

This orchard or vineyard represents creation.

Note that Biblical creationists do not hold to the view that God created the species just as we see them today. He created all of nature in different kinds of plants and animals, and designed these with the capacity to change and adapt to different environments. But this change, however, is limited: daffodils may turn into other types of daffodil, or birds into other types of bird; but daffodils will never turn into wheat (a different kind of plant) or birds into deer (a different kind of animal).

Creationists believe that the variety upon which natural selection can act was already present in the genetic information in the original kind, that is, within their DNA. Accordingly, the extent of change is limited.

This can be summed up as follows:

“In the creationist orchard, the trunk of each tree represents an original created kind or baramin, and the branches correspond to the diversity within a kind due to (limited) speciation, as for example, seen in the dog/wolf/jackal/coyote kind.

Evolutionary reasoning, on the other hand, cannot unravel the tangled phylogenetic brier and is unable to understand the true origin and diversity of created life, because its premises of naturalism and materialism axiomatically exclude the original work of a divine Creator.”{24}

When the author refers to speciation, he is referring to the mechanism of natural selection.

An ancient text also speaks of this.

“For since the beginning of the world God’s invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” 

Romans 1:20 NIV

More Fossils

The fossil shown below is a coelacanth.