Darwinism Evolves to Elude Falsification

The flexibility of Darwinian stories can be seen in two recent escape mechanisms.

The king is dead; long live the king (Science Daily). Darwinians admire other storytellers like themselves. One popular storyteller was Lewis Carroll. In his fanciful novel Through the Looking Glass, he envisioned a Red Queen who had to keep running just to stay in place. Her counterpart was a Red King that had to move slowly to not overtake his partner. Evolutionists adopted both these fictional plots into Darwinian theory: the Red Queen arms race, and the Red King parasitism-mutualism contest. The article has bad news: The Red King is dead. Headline: “Ant genomics declare ‘checkmate’ to red king theory: Long-standing scientific theory challenged.” Who will be the successor? A number of questions remain, but Scientific Materialism is sure to find answers within a Darwinian framework.

Yet, there are still many questions about the evolution of DNA and genomes. What are all the factors that contribute to this increased rate of evolution among mutualists? What does genetic adaptation look like in other symbiotic relationships? Although we don’t have all the answers yet, this study provides an important framework to begin a new line of questioning.

What is clear, however, is that this research has moved its piece on the chessboard of science, stared down the Red King Theory, and confidently declared, “Checkmate.”

Bucket of warm spit (Science Daily): Saliva contains many complex molecules, some of them bearing tandem repeats that give it its stickiness. Some evolutionists decided to compare a saliva gene from monkeys, apes and humans.

The study found that within the MUC7 gene, instructions for building important components of the bottlebrush were repeated multiple times in each of the five primate species studied. Gorillas had the fewest copies of this information (4-5), while African green monkeys had the most (11-12). Humans fell somewhere in between, with 5-6.

Taken at face value, this shows African green monkeys are farther along than humans and gorillas in their evolution. But the evolutionists found a way to save Darwin from the data. “The new study shows that as primates evolved, the DNA in their MUC7 tandem repeats sometimes changed in places (a normal part of evolution).”

It’s a plot, we keep telling you. Darwinism is a storytelling plot.