Tag Archives: Darwin

Why Darwin’s Theory Doesn’t Work

Atheist Pseudo-Science, , ,

A new study found that 54% of Americans accept Darwin’s theory, and believe human beings descended from earlier species of animals. This is not surprising given our society’s hostility to God. But it is contrary to modern science. In this post I will try to explain, as simply as I can, why modern science shows Darwin’s theory doesn’t work.

“Survival of the fittest” is not a force; it’s the self-evident statement that the organisms most likely to survive (the “fittest”) usually do survive. Big deal. There is no “search” button; there is nothing in Darwin’s theory that builds complex structures when needed.

We know from modern science that all creatures have very complex systems. We know from modern science that these systems are built from, and operated according to, code. Human beings have 3.2 billion “letters” of DNA code. In 2012, scientists studying human DNA found it contains four million switches to turn the systems in our body on and off. Each “switch” is complex code.

Mutations can and do occur anywhere in DNA. Over 99.99% of mutations are harmful or have no immediate effect. Mutations pop up in DNA at random, like typos in the text of a book.

Now imagine random changes, mutations, occurring throughout the 4,000,000 sections of our DNA that are switches. These mutations will degrade the vast majority of those switches. The overall trend will be downward, not upward. All the computer simulations show this, as I noted in this prior blog: https://countingtogod.com/mendels-accountant/

Darwin’s theory imagines that gradual changes to just one switch will eventually result in a better switch. But, even if that occurs (and no one has ever seen that occur), the other switches are being degraded. You can’t just “freeze” one switch, and try to improve that over eons, and pretend that the other switches are not harmed. It’s a simple numbers game; overall mutations degrade systems. Think of typos in the text of a book, or random changes in the programming behind the apps on your smart phone. Not likely to make the system better, and by not likely I mean never if you do the math. I made this point in both of my books. Mutations are a downhill slope. Mutations are like rust spots on the surface of a car. A few won’t slow down the car, but eventually the car will fall apart.

And that’s it! It’s really simple, despite the mindboggling refusal of many “educated” persons to see the obvious. Random changes to complex code, that can and do occur anywhere in the code and have no purpose or pattern, will not get you a better system. They will not build a new kind of animal.

This simple and obvious conclusion is supported by:

  1. The second law of thermodynamics — All systems are running down.
  2. The fossil record – the myriad varieties of “intermediate” organisms predicted by Darwin don’t exist.
  3. Laboratory experiments on bacteria showing a decline in function over tens of thousands of generations.
  4. As noted above, complex computer simulations of the effects of mutations.
  5. The existence of structures like the human brain, so complex that we cannot begin to understand how it works, that could not possibly have arisen from random changes.

Human beings are special. Don’t let anyone claim we are descended from pond scum. God designed us.

Thanks for reading.

Doug Ell

The Glory of the Peacock

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Have you ever seen a peacock? The tail – “train” – opens like a fan, and explodes with colors and patterns. Here’s a short video:

The sight is glorious.

How did the peacock get its tail? The secular world insists all creatures “evolved” by a process of keeping the best mistakes, by mutations that just, “accidentally,” happened to create incredible technology. I’ve shown mathematically why that theory, Darwin’s “goo-to-you” theory of evolution, is nonsense, why mutations only destroy information; they can’t create it.

Darwin knew nothing about DNA and genes, but he did know his theory did not explain the peacock. The oversized, glorious tail of the peacock slows it down. The tail does not help the peacock get food, avoid predators, or otherwise survive. How did such a beautiful tail “evolve” without God? In 1860, a year after he published his theory, Darwin wrote:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

Eleven years later Darwin tried to solve the problem. He invented a “theory of sexual selection.” The basic idea was that the peacock’s tail had the value of attracting females (peahens), and therefore had “evolved” without God. In other words, Darwin claimed that peacocks with sexier tails had better luck with the peahens, and passed on their genes to the next generation. It’s a “just-so” story worthy of Kipling, and does nothing to explain how the whole process got started, where the information and technology came from to build the first peacock tail, but it was enough of a fig leaf to satisfy generations of Darwinists that the problem had been solved.

Until a research team tested it. After a seven year study, researchers announced in 2007 that “the peacock’s train is not the object of female sexual preference – contradicting Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.” In other words, females mated with “poor-quality” peacocks as often as with “flashy, high-quality” peacocks. Darwin’s ‘theory of sexual selection’ fails to explain the very thing Darwin concocted it for! More hard scientific evidence (like the rejection of “junk” DNA and the absence of intermediary forms in the fossil record) that Darwin was wrong.

And the colors! Those brilliant, iridescent colors of the peacock don’t come from dyes. They are produced by super small geometric structures of atoms, designed to intensify certain wavelengths of light. To design that structure, and to build the factories to produce and assemble it, is stunning, futuristic technology.

Just like Darwin in 1860, evolutionary biologists today should feel sick looking at the glory of the peacock. A glory that reflects, in a very small way, the glory of God.

Thanks for reading. Please share the good news of true science. Together we can change the world.

Doug

The Finch’s Beak

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I’m working on a new, easier-to-read book about science and God. As one example of how natural selection has never created new kinds of creatures, I discuss the finch’s beak. One of my “test” readers was surprised: “Isn’t that one of the key examples given to support evolution?” She’s right, it is, which shows how distorted the evolutionary literature has become. Let’s look at the real facts about changes in the beaks of finches, and you can decide for yourself.
Finches are smallish birds found in most parts of the world. According to evolutionary myth, Charles Darwin noticed differences in the size of the beaks of species of finches when he visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835. He supposedly concluded that the birds had adapted, by natural selection, to different diets. Then, a mere 24 years later, in 1859, he was inspired by the beaks of finches to conceive and publish his theory of evolution.

Horse manure. As historian of science Frank Sulloway states, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Darwin never mentioned finches in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (yes, Darwin was a blatant racist). Sulloway writes:

Thus the point of real historical interest is why Darwin, who surely wanted to bolster the text of the Origin with his most convincing scientific evidence, chose to omit any specific reference to a group of birds that he supposedly thought were so important for his evolutionary argument.

The finch myth, the myth that Darwin had an “eureka” moment while studying the beaks of finches, is nonsense. Darwin largely stole the theory of evolution from an 1858 letter written to him by Alfred Russell Wallace. For the story of how Darwin did that, and managed to take credit for the theory ahead of Wallace, I refer you to Tom Wolfe’s recent book The Kingdom of Speech.

Of course, facts don’t stop evolutionists. The National Academy of Science, a Darwin propaganda machine that tries to silence all discussion of design, claims finches are “a particularly compelling example” of the origin of species. The Washington Post (not my favorite newspaper) recently wrote an article on the “iconic Galapagos finches.”

Historical embellishments aside, what are the facts? In the 1970s biologists studied finches on one of the Galapagos Islands during a severe drought. The drought restricted the diet of finches to mostly large, hard-to-crack seeds. 85 percent of the finches perished. The average beak size of the survivors was 5% greater than the average beak size before the drought.

Don’t get too excited. When the rains returned, the average beak size returned to normal. To be clear, there were always finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks. There were finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks before the drought, there were finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks during the drought, and there were finches with larger beaks and finches with smaller beaks after the drought. There was never a new kind of finch. There was no new technology created. There was only a temporary change in the relative sizes of those two populations.

What do you think? A “compelling example” of how new species are created? If you want to learn more about the myth of the finch’s beak, I would refer you to this article by Jonathan Wells. Wells concludes “never in the history of science was so much based by so many on so little.”

No one has ever found any new technology that was created by natural selection. Since 1988, scientists have watched a common type of bacteria “evolve” in the lab, grown in flasks with nutrients the bacteria eat. The bacteria reproduce more than six times a day and there have been over 60,000 generations of bacteria. The main change was that the bacteria turned into couch potatoes, fat bacteria that can’t swim. Because of mutations, errors in coding, some of the technology they used to have no longer works. Because the flasks are shaken, and the bacteria don’t need to swim to get food, the bacteria got fat and more couldn’t swim.

There is also the itsy bitsy scientific fact that, mathematically, the theory of evolution is a disaster. It is nowhere near powerful enough to build new technology. The odds of getting by mutation a new piece of technology, a new functional protein not related to another functional protein, are so hard to overcome that it may never have happened in the history of life on Earth. I give an overview of the science/math on this in pages 105 to 112 and 136 to 138 of Counting To God. Getting dozens of new pieces that work together just right to build new technology, like legs, eyes, ears, bones, or the human brain? Ridiculous almost beyond comprehension.

So the next time someone makes the absurd claim that “evolution is a fact,” you might ask that person to look at the real facts, and you might start with the finch’s beak.

Thanks for reading. Please spread the good news of true science.

Darwin and the Octopus

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You knew the octopus is strange. Now science says it’s even stranger, and the evidence is not good for Darwin’s theory.

Octopuses have eight arms with suction cups, and taste through their suckers. They have three hearts. They are extremely intelligent; they can solve complex mazes, open jars filled with tasty crabs, and build structures. They camouflage themselves by altering the way light reflects from their skin, and they can change the texture, pattern, and brightness of their skin. Parts of their brains are in their arms, and the arms “can execute cognitive tasks even when dismembered.”

Where did this technology come from? We now know that all life runs off code, like computers, only much more advanced. Scientists recently examined the code that octopuses run, their DNA, and found it – well, alien. “It’s the first sequenced genome from something like an alien,” joked one of the lead scientists. An organism’s genome is its complete set of code, all of its DNA. We don’t fully understand the wondrous complexity of DNA and how it works, but we can usually identify parts of the code that are used to build proteins – the machine parts of life. Those parts of DNA code are called genes. Octopuses have “hundreds of octopus-specific genes found in no other animal, many of them highly active in structures such as the brain, skin, and suckers.”

Got that? The octopus has “hundreds” of sections of brand new, never seen before in any other animal, genetic coding to build unique proteins. Where did that new coding come from?

As you know, there are only two theories. One is Darwin’s theory that natural selection kept the better of the random mutations, until a new species — here the octopus — appears. When Darwin proposed his theory we didn’t know that life runs on code. Now that we do, his followers claim that random, gradual changes in the code (mutations) somehow produce new technology. Under this theory, you would never find completely new coding. The octopus is classified as a mollusk – a clam. So Darwin’s theory is that somehow clams “evolved” into complex creatures with new, amazing technology – three hearts, eight arms with suckers that can taste, and new brain structure – by natural selection keeping the better of the random mutations, the random changes in the coding.

I think that’s patently ridiculous. Octopus DNA is a nightmare for Darwin’s theory. The odds of scrambling DNA code and getting functional code that will build a brand new machine part – producing the code that will build a sequence of amino acids that fold into a working protein – are about 1 in a number with 70 zeros — 1070. Now “only” about 1040 organisms have ever lived, so the odds against getting a new protein of any kind by accident are about 30 orders of magnitude greater than the number of creatures that have ever lived. And again the octopus has “hundreds” of sections of unique, never seen before, DNA code that build working parts. Plus those parts are highly designed to work together to build the technology that makes an octopus an octopus. The technology to coordinate eight arms must be amazing.

Darwin’s theory has never stood up to mathematical analysis. The octopus has grabbed it with eight arms and won’t let go. For Darwinists, it’s a nightmare.

This leaves us with the second explanation for the octopus. It was designed.

Thanks for reading.

A Confused Legal System

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Why is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) anti-faith? I supported them when they fought for the underdog and against discrimination. Now they attack any teacher who dares to suggest that life was designed. See this recent news item from Maine.

Our legal system is confused. It treats Atheism as the preferred and protected religion of the United States. If you suggest design, and discuss the new scientific evidence of design, you are considered to be imposing your religious beliefs on Atheists. But if an Atheist distorts the evidence to champion Darwin and his theory of unguided evolution, his religious views (Atheism) are protected. To me, your religion is your belief system when it comes to God. As I read the Constitution, ALL religions, ALL belief systems about God, are protected. We are free to choose any one. So we should be free to discuss scientific evidence of design in classrooms, to offer alternatives to Darwin. We should be intellectually free. Surely our founding fathers, who all believed in God, did not mean to prohibit discussion of evidence for God.

If I could find the right case/client for this, this is something I would love to take on in court.

Thanks for reading.

Perfection and Whale Hips

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One so-called “scientific” argument against the existence of God is that there are organs or features that appear unnecessary or imperfect. The argument is that this somehow shows that species evolved through a purely unguided process. Darwin wrote:

“On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility … should so frequently occur.”

This is nonsense. To borrow a phrase from a friend who teaches physics at MIT, this argument “is so bad it’s not even wrong.” It makes no sense on several levels. First, we are not able to judge God. What we think of as useless or imperfect may make sense in God’s plan. Second, who says everything has to be perfect or even useful? You don’t have to show that everything is perfect to have a scientific basis for belief; all you have to show is clear evidence of design in the universe and in life. (My book shows overwhelming evidence for that in seven areas of science.)

That’s all old news. What’s new, and amazing, is that organ-by-organ, feature-by-feature, scientists are discovering that items once thought useless are absolutely necessary. Take the appendix, cited by Darwin himself as useless. We now know the appendix is a “safe house” for helpful bacteria that may be otherwise destroyed in our stomachs, and serves other critical functions. About fifty species of mammals have an appendix, and those species are so diverse that, to quote one scientist, the appendix “must have evolved separately at least 32 times, and perhaps as many as 38 times.” Wow! So some blind, unguided, and ultimately chance-based process produced the same organ dozens of times in different species – or a common designer placed it there for a reason. Draw your own conclusion.

Take the myth of junk DNA – the argument that human beings were not designed because the majority of our DNA code was thought to be useless “junk.” This myth was destroyed in 2012 by 450 scientists worldwide as part of the ENCODE project.

And now whale hips. Whale hips were said to be the “marquee example” of a useless feature. Guess what? A recent scientific article explains why they are still necessary. Details aside, without whale hips you’re not likely to get baby whales.

I think baby whales are cute. Perhaps they’re perfect.

Thanks for reading.