Two Evolutionary Evidences Debunked
Among examples of evolution cited by Darwinists in the past, these should be taken off the shelf and thrown in the trash.
The family that walks on all fours: Back in 2006, reports of a Turkish family that habitually walks on all fours gave some evolutionists opportunity to call them “missing links” or “evolutionary throwbacks” (see 3/07/2006). Their ape-like gait was even given a name, “Uner Tan Syndrome.” Darwin had pointed to “atavisms” (reversals to previous evolutionary states) as evidence for common ancestry.
Better late than never; a new analysis debunks this interpretation. Bless her heart, Stephanie Pappias at Live Science has made it clear that these people are not evolutionary throwbacks at all. Their gait has nothing to do with ape walks or other primate traits. Instead, lacking wheelchairs or physical therapy, the people were responding as best they could to a genetic disorder. Only 5 of the family of 19 have this disorder, which includes cognitive disabilities. Yet it was the subject of a BBC documentary, “The Family that Walks on All Fours.” The researcher who looked into this evolutionary claim, Liza Shapiro (U of Texas) describes her reaction to the documentary:
“It was all about whether or not it was evolutionary reversal, which kind of horrified me,” she said. Immediately, though, she could see that the family was not using the primate diagonal gait….
About 99 percent of the strides were lateral, not diagonal — a blow against the notion that the family members had “rediscovered” an ancestral primate way of walking. Instead, they were walking like any typical adult would if asked to move on hands and feet.
Pappias goes on to explain that an “evolutionary reversal” cannot involve just one trait like this:
“They’re doing what any human does in that situation where they can’t stand up,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro emphasized that even if the family had moved with a diagonal gait, the pattern would not prove anything about human evolution or the origins of bipedalism.
“Bipedalism requires a lot of changes, physical and anatomical changes in the body,” she said. “Neurological changes. Motor changes. It’s not just one thing.“
Bottom line: this family’s walking behavior provides no support for evolutionary theory. Instead, it shows what can happen when errors occur in the complex programs required for bipedal locomotion. In this case, a mutation on chromosome 17 affecting the cerebellum left the sufferers crippled, unable to enjoy a highly complex human ability.
About the human eye’s bad design: A stock response by Darwinists to intelligent design has been to allege bad design (dysteleology), particularly in the alleged “backward” wiring of the human eye. Some evolutionists have been adamant about this, claiming that a human engineer would never be so stupid as to put the photoreceptors behind a tangle of blood vessels. The flipside of this argument has been that the eyes of octopus and squid got it right, with the photoreceptors in front of the vessels. As quoted in the Baloney Detector, Jared Diamond once said we would have to conclude “God is indeed a squid” if he had lavished his best design on those creatures. (Diamond was later accused of research misconduct; see 5/17/2009.)
This evolutionary argument began to unravel in 2007 when researchers found that Müller cells, penetrating the thicket of blood vessels in the human retina, actually provide near-ideal vision by acting as wave guides to the individual photoreceptors—providing better performance than could be had if the rods and cones were in front of the blood vessels (see 5/02/2007 and subsequent research reported 5/07/2010 about additional vision enhancements provided by the Müller cells).
Now, Nature News adds to the design bonanza exhibited by Müller cells. Under Research Highlights, the journal mentioned findings by the Technion Israel Institute of Technology about the “prism of the eye” that concentrates individual colors for best vision:
The team found that Müller cells concentrate green and red light onto the daytime-light-sensing cones, increasing by up to ten times the amount of light they absorb than if Müller cells were absent. Blue light, however, leaks out of Müller cells towards rod cells, which enable night vision. Imaging experiments on isolated guinea-pig retinas largely confirmed the model’s results.
The findings could explain how light is able to travel efficiently through various cellular layers in the retina to reach the cone cells.
Design perfection speaks for itself. As for squid eyes, we wouldn’t want to use them unless we lived in their dark, murky environment. Squid and humans have the ideal eyes for their habitats.
Brought to you in the tradition of radio icon Paul Harvey’s famous pivotal phrase, “And now, the rest of the story.” The Darwinists set themselves up for a big fall, didn’t they? We hope they will learn a lesson not to hasten to disparage design, let alone mock God like Jared Diamond did so crudely. Unfortunately, evolutionary claims like this often do years of damage on impressionable minds before they are debunked. We must ask at this point, though, how many other classic “proofs” of evolution are waiting for their turn at the intellectual guillotine of “further research”? Don’t be so gullible as to think a claimed evolutionary “evidence” is conclusive.
Comments
I Origins is a current movie playing where a scientist attempts to debunk intelligent design, and thus God, by showing how an origin species, a worm with the pax gene could development an eye by simple mutations. They claimed they disproved ID, however this was a designed experiment, performed by intelligent scientists, in a lab.