Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution

Casey Luskin Permalink
Based upon Casey Luskin's chapter, "The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution," in the volume More than Myth, edited by Paul Brown and Robert Stackpole (Chartwell Press, 2014)

"There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution."¹ So said Eugenie Scott, the de facto head of the Darwin lobby, while speaking to the media in response to the Texas State Board of Education's 2009 vote to require students to learn about both the scientific evidence for and against neo-Darwinian evolution.

For those who follow the debate over origins, Dr. Scott's words are as unsurprising as they are familiar. It seems that almost on a daily basis, we find the news media quoting evolutionary scientists declaring that materialist accounts of biological and chemical evolution are "fact." Students who take college-preparatory or college-level courses on evolution are warned that doubting Darwinism is tantamount to committing intellectual suicide -- you might as well proclaim the Earth is flat.² Such bullying is enough to convince many that it's much easier on your academic standing, your career, and your reputation to just buy into Darwinism. The few holdouts who remain are intimidated into silence.

But is it true that there are "no weaknesses" in evolutionary theory? Are those who express doubts about Darwinism displaying courage, or are they fools that want to take us back to the dark ages and era of the flat Earth?³ Thankfully, it's very easy to test these questions: all one must do is examine the technical scientific literature and inquire whether there are legitimate scientific challenges to chemical and biological evolution.

This chapter will review some of this literature, and show that there are numerous legitimate scientific challenges to core tenets of Darwinian theory, as well as predominant theories of chemical evolution. Those who harbor doubts about Darwinism need not be terrified by academic bullies who pretend there is no scientific debate to be had.

Problem 1: No Viable Mechanism to Generate a Primordial Soup

>According to conventional thinking among origin of life theorists, life arose via unguided chemical reactions on the early Earth some 3 to 4 billion years ago. Most theorists believe that there were many steps involved in the origin of life, but the very first step would have involved the production of a primordial soup -- a water-based sea of simple organic molecules -- out of which life arose. While the existence of this "soup" has been accepted as unquestioned fact for decades, this first step in most origin-of-life theories faces numerous scientific difficulties. ( more )

Problem 2: Unguided Chemical Processes Cannot Explain the Origin of the Genetic Code

Let's assume that a primordial sea filled with life's building blocks did exist on the early Earth, and somehow it formed proteins and other complex organic molecules. Theorists believe that the next step in the origin of life is that -- entirely by chance -- more and more complex molecules formed until some began to self-replicate. From there, they believe Darwinian natural selection took over, favoring those molecules that were better able to make copies of themselves. Eventually, they assume, it was inevitable that these molecules would evolve complex machinery -- like that used in today's genetic code -- to survive and reproduce. ( more )

Problem 3: Step-by-Step Random Mutations Cannot Generate the Genetic Information Needed for Irreducible Complexity

According to evolutionary biologists, once life got started, Darwinian evolution took over and eventually produced the grand diversity we observe today. Under the standard view, a process of random mutation and natural selection built life's vast complexity one small mutational step at a time. All of life's complex features, of course, are thought to be encoded in the DNA of living organisms. Building new features thus requires generating new information in the genetic code of DNA. Can the necessary information be generated in the undirected, step-by-step manner required by Darwin's theory? ( more)

Problem 4: Natural Selection Struggles to Fix Advantageous Traits in Populations

In 2008, 16 biologists from around the world convened in Altenberg, Austria, to discuss problems with the modern neo-Darwinian model of evolution. The journal Nature covered this "Altenberg 16" conference, quoting leading scientists saying things like:

"[T]he origin of wings and the invasion of the land . . . are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about."

"You can't deny the force of selection in genetic evolution . . . but in my view this is stabilizing and fine-tuning forms that originate due to other processes."

"The modern synthesis is remarkably good at modeling the survival of the fittest, but not good at modeling the arrival of the fittest." ( more)

Problem 5: Abrupt Appearance of Species in the Fossil Record Does Not Support Darwinian Evolution

The fossil record has long been recognized as a problem for evolutionary theory. In the Origin of Species, Darwin explained that his theory led him to believe that "[t]he number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, [must] be truly enormous."However, he understood that the fossil record did not document these "intermediate" forms of life, asking, "Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?" Darwin's answer showed the tenuous nature of the evidence backing his ideas: "Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." ( more )

Problem 6: Molecular Biology Has Failed to Yield a Grand "Tree of Life"

When fossils failed to demonstrate that animals evolved from a common ancestor, evolutionary scientists turned to another type of evidence -- DNA sequence data -- to demonstrate a tree of life. In the 1960s, around the time the genetic code was first understood, biochemists Émile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling hypothesized that if DNA sequences could be used to produce evolutionary trees -- trees that matched those based upon morphological or anatomical characteristics -- this would furnish "the best available single proof of the reality of macro-evolution." Thus began a decades-long effort to sequence the genes of many organisms and construct "molecular" based evolutionary ("phylogenetic") trees. The ultimate goal has been to construct a grand "tree of life," showing how all living organisms are related through universal common ancestry. ( more)

Problem 7: Convergent Evolution Challenges Darwinism and Destroys the Logic Behind Common Ancestry

In Problem 6 of this series, we saw that the main assumption underlying all phylogenetic trees is that biological similarity is the result of inheritance from a common ancestor. The problem for evolutionary biologists faced with conflicting evolutionary trees is that biological similarity often appears in places not predicted by common descent. In other words, everyone recognizes that biological similarities often appear among species in cases where they cannot be explained as the result of inheritance from a common ancestor. This means the main assumption fails.

We also saw at the end of Problem 6 that when biologists are unable to construct phylogenetic trees, they often make ad hoc appeals to other processes to explain away data that won't fit a treelike pattern. One of these explanations is convergent evolution, where evolutionary biologists postulate that organisms acquire the same traits independently, in separate lineages, and not through inheritance from a common ancestor. Whenever evolutionary biologists are forced to appeal to convergent evolution, it reflects a breakdown in the main assumption, and an inability to fit the data to a treelike pattern. Examples of this abound in the literature, but a few will suffice. (more)

Problem 8: Differences Between Vertebrate Embryos Contradict the Predictions of Common Ancestry

Another area where evolutionary biologists claim powerful evidence for common ancestry is the patterns of development of vertebrate embryos. Biology textbooks typically portray the embryos of different groups of vertebrates as starting off development in a highly similar fashion, reflecting their common ancestry. However, such claims overstate the degree of similarity between the early stages of vertebrate embryos.
Biologists who investigate these questions have found considerable variability among vertebrate embryos from their earliest stages onward, contradicting what we are told to expect from common ancestry. As a paper in Nature stated, "Counter to the expectations of early embryonic conservation, many studies have shown that there is often remarkable divergence between related species both early and late in development." Or, as another article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution stated, "despite repeated assertions of the uniformity of early embryos within members of a phylum, development before the phylotypic stage is very varied." ( more )

Problem 9: Neo-Darwinism Struggles to Explain the Biogeographical Distribution of Many Species

Biogeography is the study of the distribution of organisms in time and space both in the present and past on Earth. It is often contended that biogeography strongly supports neo-Darwinian theory. For example, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a pro-Darwin advocacy group, claims that "consistency between biogeographic and evolutionary patterns provides important evidence about the continuity of the processes driving the evolution and diversification of all life," and "[t]his continuity is what would be expected of a pattern of common descent." However, the NCSE dramatically overstates its case and ignores the many instances where biogeography does not show the sort of "continuity" that would be expected under a pattern of common descent. ( more)

Problem 10: Neo-Darwinism's Long History of Inaccurate Predictions about Junk Organs and Junk DNA

For decades, evolutionists have claimed that our bodies and genomes are full of useless parts and genetic material -- "vestigial" organs -- showing life is the result of eons of unguided evolution. During the Scopes trial in 1925, evolutionary biologist Horatio Hackett Newman contended that there are over 180 vestigial organs and structures in the human body, "sufficient to make of a man a veritable walking museum of antiquities."

Over time, however, these predictions of vestigial body parts and useless DNA have not held true. As scientists have learned more and more about the workings of biology, important functions and purpose have been discovered for these so-called vestigial structures. Indeed, in 2008 the journal New Scientist reported that, since the days of Professor Newman, the list of vestigial organs "grew, then shrank again" to the point that today "biologists are extremely wary of talking about vestigial organs at all." Structures that were previously -- and incorrectly -- considered to be vestigial include:

The tonsils: At one time, they were routinely removed. Now it's known they serve a purpose in the lymph system to help fight infection.
The coccyx (tailbone): Many evolutionists still claim this is a hold-over from the tails of our supposed primate ancestors, but it's actually a vital part of our skeleton, used for attaching muscles, tendons, and ligaments that support the bones in our pelvis.
The thyroid: This gland in the neck was once believed to have no purpose, and was ignored or even destroyed by medical doctors operating under false Darwinian assumptions. Now scientists know that it is vital for regulating metabolism.
The appendix: Darwinian scientists have claimed the appendix is a "vestige of our herbivorous ancestry," and over eons of evolution its function in humans has been diminished, or lost. But it's now known that the appendix performs important functions, such as providing a storehouse for beneficial bacteria, producing white blood cells, and playing important roles during fetal development. In light of this evidence, Duke University immunologist William Parker observed that "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ'" but "it's time to correct the textbooks." ( more )

Based upon Casey Luskin's chapter, "The Top Ten Scientific Problems with Biological and Chemical Evolution," in the volume More than Myth

For me the Irreducible Complexity argument is the nail in Darwin’s coffin.
The genetic code is evidence of a high order of intelligence. It shows design and purpose. That kind of information encoding and embedding just doesn’t happen all by itself no matter how much time you allow. Scientists are people first and scientists second (or maybe 3rd or 4th, etc.). All humans have a tendency to find evidence of their own presuppositions in their search for truth. Even in religion, sincerity only counts for so much. Rightly dividing God’s word takes a life time and look how easy it is for error to creep in. Look how many different denominations of churches there are! It’s an indication that there are lots of interpretations of the same Book and the same God. Science suffers in the same way. Well intentioned, smart people can get led astray. Some are not well intentioned. Some have Mt. Everest hight pride because they “know” they are absolutely brilliant. Some are brilliant but pride has a way of destroying a lot of the good they might be able to do. Some are in it for the grant $$$ or other nefarious reasons. Today... science seems almost totally politicized. Can anyone say Global Warming? Or anyone remember Haecke’sl “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? It was called a “Biogenetic Law”. And check this out, “In seeking to understand why the Haeckelian view persisted so long, we have also to consider the alternatives. We often are highly conservative and will hold to a viewpoint longer than is justified when there is no alternative or, worse, when the logical alternative upsets the rest of our world view.” quote from Keith Stewart Thomson, “Marginalia Ontogeny and phylogeny recapitulated”, American Scientist Vol. 76, May-June 1988, p. 274 - (reference source #1). “...when the logical alternative upsets the rest of our world view,” perhaps they should have been studying cognitive dissonance theory instead. I only sight this to show how easily we forget the mistakes of science and to show how, once a theory is put forth that holds promise for showing what we really, really want, it is very hard for it to DIE and people to say, “Gee we were wrong.” It also shows that for some people the evidence can ONLY lead in one direction. This nonsense about following anywhere the evidence may take them is just a lie. Evolution is one of those beloved theories. It will never die in the minds of those that want there to be NO God that they have to be accountable to (I have very bad news for those people). Bill Whittle has a great video on this idea. It’s about liberals and their cock-a-mamy theories of how the world is suppose to work. It goes by two names but the only one I can remember is The Train Set. Some folks can generate endless ideas - and we need those types of people. The flip side is ideas, at the end of the day, need to be grounded in reality. Those ideas that are not - and the people that come up with them, need to be kept far, far away for positions of power. B.H. Obama, Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler come to mind. Flame away!

***You can’t test an orogeny (mountain building event) either, yet through the powers of observation and rational deduction about our tiny little time snapshot of the end result of an extremely slow process, the mechanisms of plate tectonics, pluton emplacement, ore body formation etc are well understood and accepted concepts.***

Ok SpaceBar.... here’s one for you:

The Bull Giraffe goes, on average, about 18’ tall. His neck, again on average, is about 6’ long. In order to pump blood against gravity up 6’ of neck to his brain requires a heart like a jackhammer.

So now this giraffe has got his heart pounding like a jackhammer and decides to bend down and get a drink. With the pump now going with gravity instead of against it, he has just blown his brains out.....but....in his arteries are little valves that shut down the flow of blood as he is bending over. The last squirt of blood, then shoots into a sponge-like organism that just happens to reside underneath the giraffe’s brain and absorbs the blood.

This, of course is extremely fortunate for the giraffe. As he’s drinking, he senses a predator and stands up quickly to run away. He then, from standing too quickly and having no blood flowing in his brain, passes out and gets eaten by the predator, only this doesn’t happen because the sponge has been circulating the blood to the brain the whole time.

So, as he stands up, the valves reopen to resume the blood flow and the giraffe can flee the predator.

Michael Behe has referred to this in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” as irreducible complexity. In order for this morphology to work, all of the pieces have to be present at the same time.

The neck without the heart....dead.
The heart without the neck....dead.
The neck without the valves....dead.
All of the above without the sponge....dead.

In other words, the morphology of the giraffe requires that:

1. A jackhammer heart
2. A 6 foot long neck
3. Valves in the arteries
4. A sponge under his brain

all be present at the same time or he’s dead meat. Or to put it another way, extinct.

I said all that to say this: Science can observe all of this and realize that there is no way that evolution could randomly put all of these pieces together at the same time in the same animal. But they don’t. Because they don’t want to.

Because the theory of evolution is a philosophy that they are comfortable with an they don’t want to consider a creator to whom they would be accountable. So they refuse to consider anything but natural/material reasons.

If your keys are in the kitchen and you refuse to look there you are never going to find them.

Blessings to you, SpaceBar

We know DNA has the following:

1. Functional Information
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder

How could such a system form randomly without any intelligence, and totally unguided?

What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate?

Furthermore, DNA contains multi-layered information that reads both forward and backwards - DNA stores data more efficiently than anything we've created - and a majority of DNA contains metainformation (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data). The design inference is obvious.

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings with find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus of itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.
We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine – that is one single functional protein molecule – would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.
What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle.
To gain a more objective grasp of the level of complexity the cell represents, consider the problem of constructing an atomic model. Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid.
Copying nature, we could speed up the construction of the model by using small molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides rather than individual atoms. Since individual amino acids and nucleotides are made up of between ten and twenty atoms each, this would enable us to finish the project in less than five million years. We could also speed up the project by mass producing those components in the cell which are present in many copies. Perhaps three-quarters of the cell’s mass can be accounted for by such components. But even if we could produce these very quickly we would still be faced with manufacturing a quarter of the cell’s mass which consists largely of components which only occur once or twice and which would have to be constructed, therefore, on an individual basis. The complexity of the cell, like that of any complex machine, cannot be reduced to any sort of simple pattern, nor can its manufacture be reduced to a simple set of algorithms or programmes. Working continually day and night it would still be difficult to finish the model in the space of one million years.
- Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985)

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And let me add my two cents to this astounding picture. The model that you would complete a million years later would be just that, a lifeless static model. For the cell to do its work this entire twenty kilometer structure and each of its trillions of components must be charged in specific ways, and at the level of the protein molecule, it must have an entire series of positive and negative charges and hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts all precisely shaped (at a level of precision far, far beyond our highest technical abilities) and charged in a whole series of ways: charged in a way to find other molecular components and combine with them; charged in a way to fold into a shape and maintain that most important shape, and charged in a way to be guided by other systems of charges to the precise spot in the cell where that particle must go. The pattern of charges and the movement of energy through the cell is easily as complex as the pattern of the physical particles themselves.
Also, Denton, in his discussion, uses a tennis ball to stand in for an atom. But an atom is not a ball. It is not even a ‘tiny solar system’ of neutrons, protons and electrons’ as we once thought. Rather, it has now been revealed to be an enormously complex lattice of forces connected by a bewildering array of utterly miniscule subatomic particles including hadrons, leptons, bosons, fermions, mesons, baryons, quarks and anti-quarks, up and down quarks, top and bottom quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks, virtual quarks, valence quarks, gluons and sea quarks…
And let me remind you again, that what we are talking about, a living cell, is a microscopic dot and thousands of these entire factories including all the complexity that we discussed above could fit on the head of a pin. Or, going another way, let’s add to this model of twenty square kilometers of breath taking complexity another one hundred trillion equally complex factories all working in perfect synchronous coordination with each other; which would be a model of the one hundred trillion celled human body, your body, that thing that we lug around every day and complain about; that would, spread laterally at the height of one cell at this magnification, blanket the entire surface of the earth four thousand times over, every part of which would contain pumps and coils and conduits and memory banks and processing centers; all working in perfect harmony with each other, all engineered to an unimaginable level of precision and all there to deliver to us our ability to be conscious, to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to experience the world as we are so used to experiencing it, that we have taken it and the fantastic mechanisms that make it possible for granted.
My question is, “Why don’t we know this?” What Michael Denton has written and I have added to is a perfectly accurate, easily intelligible, non-hyperbolic view of the cell. Why is this not taught in every introductory biology class in our schools?
- Matt Chait

stupid

/ˈstu·pɪd/ adj

› lacking thought or intelligence:

Consider this, to remove any ‘creator’ from our very existence including the beginning of our universe is to remove any ‘thought or intelligence’ from the equation. By definition, you are ultimately left with an existence from stupidity.

“Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” – Charles Darwin

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