January 6, 2017 | David F. Coppedge

The Darwin Fail Comedy Show

Darwinian evolution is supposed to innovate new things, not remove them or conserve them. Here are the latest examples of “Darwin Fail” embarrassments.

You can’t get bacteria to evolve into humans by losing things and breaking things, any more than you can lose money on every sale but make it up in volume. Do evolutionists really believe that any of the following discoveries are helping their theory?

Losing teeth. A weird dinosaur lost its teeth during development, Fox News reports. It kept its teeth only in youth. Even worse, the evolutionists resort to the theory-rescue device of convergence, claiming that “toothlessness evolved several times in different species.” Even if that makes sense, it represents loss, not gain.

Hold ‘er steady, mate. “Stabilizing selection” is not what Darwin had in mind. It only maintains what exists, “stabilizing” things against change. But evolutionists at Hokkaido University try to make a case that “Stabilizing evolutionary forces keep ants strong.” The subtitle says, “Hokkaido University researchers are finding evidence of natural selection that maintains the status quo among ant populations.” Wonderful, but how are ants going to evolve into humans by keeping the status quo? It’s like your financial advisor boasting that he has kept your portfolio from growing.

Pipefish sexual roles: it’s complicated. This story from NIMBios (the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis) tries to find a Darwinian explanation for the reversed sexual roles of seahorses and pipefish, where the males carry the young before they hatch. Apparently in evolutionary theory, rules are reversible (see the Stuff Happens Law). The evolutionists don’t seem to mind that a reversible law of nature can explain anything.

“From a research standpoint, pipefish are interesting because of the unique opportunity they provide to study sexual selection in reverse, which can tell us a lot about how variation works in mating and reproductive success,” said lead author Sarah Flanagan, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis.

“This study shows that there are many factors at play in this system, more than perhaps we ever realized, but it’s that variation in traits and fitness which allows for sexual selection to work,” Flanagan said.

Farewell, latitudinal diversity gradient. Jon Tennant is a science writer with a comedy act. In his PLoS Blog entry, “Terrestrial Mesozoic ninja turtles,” he calls turtles and tortoises evolutionary successes:

Turtles are an incredible evolutionary success story, with about 350 extant species that inhabit all major oceans and landmasses and from tropical to temperate climates. The fossil record of turtles is incredibly rich, and documents the adaptation of various sub-lineages to a broad range of habitat preferences, including several marine radiations. They’re also ridiculously cute, although whether their evolutionary accomplishment is down to this remains to be studied.

Cute writing. But diversity and a good match-to-environment do not prove Darwin’s theory; turtles could have been designed that way. Unfortunately for Darwinians hankering for empirical support, Tennant spends the bulk of his time undercutting an evolutionary notion called the ‘latitudinal biodiversity gradient,’ that supposedly accounts for “the pattern of increasing biodiversity as you go from the poles towards the equator, and is generally considered [by evolutionists] to be one of the first-order controls on much of modern life.” Climate, in other words, should affect the evolution of diversity. Tennant points to a study that shows it’s not that simple. The gradients change over time, and are influenced by other factors such as “continental shifts, dispersal events and vicariance, or environmentally-mediated changes such as major climatic disruption (sound familiar?).” So which factor isolates Darwinian theory from the Stuff Happens Law? Now read his last sentences and ask if they help arouse confidence in evolutionary theory:

This discovery also challenges the commonly held assumption [by evolutionists] that latitudinal diversity gradients are both static and widespread among all living groups. This is probably due to at least a partial failure to appreciate the patterns that the fossil record reveal to us among researchers who focus exclusively on extant taxa. Naughty naughty.. (not that we’re biased at all as palaeontologists).

Complex shark appears abruptly. What this has to do with medicine is not clear, but evolutionists at University of Chicago Medicine examined a rare bone of a “chimaera,” a shark-like marine vertebrate said to be 280 million Darwin Years old. It may not be a shark, but it looks pretty sharky from the illustration, complete with a cartilaginous skeleton, complex anatomy and specializations. The discoverers of the fossil skull even thought it was a shark at first. The article shields its ignorance in passive voice: “A large extinction of vertebrates at the end of the Devonian period, about 360 million years ago, gave rise to an explosion of cartilaginous fishes.” Gave rise to? Destruction doesn’t explain innovation. Explosion? That’s not Darwin’s slow-and-gradual theory. The guy in the video clip provides no clue on how such a complex creature evolved. In fact, what he does say should humiliate Darwinians, “The earliest fossil chimaeras that we know about are about 340 million years old, and they look pretty much like modern chimaeras.” So they appear without ancestors, and stay virtually the same for hundreds of millions of years? Where is the evolution? Not only that, after it appeared explosively, it shows a “slowly evolving genome,” he says.

No ginkgo evolution here, mate. The ginkgo tree is a classic “living fossil” that was long thought extinct until found doing just fine in China (5/16/13). The ginkgo genome was recently decoded. What was found in the genome? Nothing to help Darwin. The BBC News reports that it has 10.6 billion DNA letters, over three times the size of the human genome! This hardy tree (one of the few organisms that survived the 1945 Hiroshima A-bomb) has some tricks up its sleeve:

Its anti-insect arsenal is particularly smart. The Ginkgo will synthesise one set of chemicals to directly fight a pest, but also release another set of compounds that specifically attract the insect’s enemies.

Readers will look in vain for any hint this tree evolved from something else, or continued to evolve after it appeared in the fossil record. “The tree is famed for being a ‘living fossil’ – a term used to describe those organisms that have experienced very little change over millions of years.” Yet the article boasts that “The Chinese-led research team says the new information should help to explain the tree’s evolutionary success.” Go figure!

Hoarding inherited stock. The phrases “negative selection” and “strong conservation” take prominence in a Nature Communications paper about “microsporidian iron–sulfur cluster biosynthesis.” Sorry, that’s not going to help Darwin. He needs positive selection of innovations arising by mutation. Those are never mentioned. All these scientists find is negative selection, which can only conserve what is already there. The trait in question was already present in bacteria, the paper says.

We found one paper that claims to provide evidence for “positive selection.” We’ll take a look at that tomorrow and let the evolutionists give us their best shot.

If Darwinism did not have the status of “accepted truth” that must be taken for granted, it would be laughed off the stage. David Berlinski shares his personal experience in this ID the Future podcast that some prominent evolutionists he knows (particularly mathematicians) have said under their breath that Darwinian evolution is kind of “nutty.”

 

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Comments

  • Jon Saboe says:

    Must be a new law of nature, the “reverse option”.

    Anything that happens can happen in reverse.

    Reminds me of the old sci-fi cliche of fixing something simply by reversing the polarity.

  • lux113 says:

    It really begs the question…

    What has to happen environmentally for an improvement that you spent millions of years developing become a detriment that you need to spend millions of years getting rid of?

    This, by itself, should falsify evolution.

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