Free Republic

Life is not a naturalistic phenomenon with unlimited evolutionary potential as Darwin proposed. It is intelligently designed, ruled by immutable laws, and survives only because it has a built-in facilitated variation mechanism for continually adapting to internal and external challenges and changes. The essential components are: functional molecular architecture and machinery, modular switching cascades that control the machinery and a signal network that coordinates everything. All three are required for survival, so they must have been present from the beginning—a conclusion that demands intelligent design. Life’s built-in ability to adapt and diversify looks like Darwinian evolution, but it is not....

Darwin’s theory that species originate via the natural selection of natural variation is correct in principle but wrong in numerous aspects of application. Speciation is not the result of an unlimited naturalistic process but of an intelligently designed system of built-in variation that is limited in scope to switching ON and OFF permutations and combinations of the built-in components. Kirschner and Gerhart’s facilitated variation theory provides enormous potential for rearrangement of the built-in regulatory components but it cannot switch ON components that do not exist. When applied to the grass family, facilitated variation theory can account for the diversification of...