Fake Evolution Is Not Evidence

The media have a bad habit of calling things ‘evolution’ that fail to support the notion that people have bacteria ancestors.

Beach bums can still marry sherpas. Whether you live at sea level or in the Himalayas, you are still a member of Homo sapiens sapiens. People do differ, obviously, but we are all members of the same global human race. The headline on Medical Xpress, therefore, is guilty of fake evolution when it announces, “Himalayan powerhouses: How Sherpas have evolved superhuman energy efficiency.” They may as well say that gymnasts have evolved superhuman flexibility, or that obese Americans have evolved beer bellies. Any genetic difference could be dubbed ‘evolution’ in this view, but it’s not going to help Darwin get from bacteria to humans.

We are NOT bashing Darwin here. Evolutionists at Rutgers are careful to say that. They just want to include more data about symbiotic relationships than usually considered. They are proposing a new concept of “symbiome phylogenetics,” based on the idea that groups of organisms often evolve together. Perhaps they want to build more ‘diversity and inclusion’ into Darwin’s theory to make it more trendy. But biologists knew about symbiosis long before Darwin, so what’s evolution got to do with it? Nevertheless, one advocate felt a need to tip-toe past the Bearded Buddha. “What we wish to clearly stress is that we are not engaged in Darwin-bashing,” Debashish Bhattacharya  said. “We consider Darwin a hero of science.” Confession accepted. Go and sin no more.

Mutations are only half the story. Alan Bergland at the University of Virginia is studying mutations in insects, to see if any of them are helping individuals adapt to climate change, reports Phys.org. But the fleas are still fleas, the flies are still flies, and the roaches are still roaches. He believes “These rapidly reproducing critters offer evolutionary insights,” but the insights are shallower than the kind Darwin needs. They compare to the finch beaks on the Galapagos that oscillate with the weather. No new species are appearing; just some individuals that can take the heat a little longer than others. People do that, but they are not evolving. Wasn’t Darwin trying to explain the origin of species?

Floundering for Darwin. Six Darwinists from Scandinavia are all excited about the “fastest event of speciation ever reported for any marine vertebrate.” What happened? In just 3,000 generations, they report in PNAS, some European flounders adopted different “breeding behaviors.” The authors claim, but do not prove, that the fish cannot hybridize or interbreed, but even if they cannot, they are still European flounders—with the same basic floundering equipment and no new organs or genetic information. Is this any more significant than the degree of variation strict young-earth creationists accept? They allow for all the varieties of dogs, cats and horses from single breeding pairs coming off the Ark. Darwin needs bigger changes than this. If anything, these evolutionists have given ammo to the creationists; variations can occur fairly rapidly, within created kinds.

Darwin Flubber Makes Stuff Happen. Convergence rears its ugly head again, this time in Current Biology. Luke J. Harmon mixes in ample Stuff Happens powder into his Darwin Flubber recipe, finding evidence for divergence and convergence in mammalian evolution. “Using a global dataset of mammalian species, Mazel and colleagues find that both convergence and divergence occur more often than expected,” Harmon says. “Convergence was especially common at broad scales that involved Australia, speaking to the extraordinary replicate mammalian communities found there.” Odd; Darwin’s only illustration in Origin shows only divergence.

Illustration for CEH by J. Beverly Greene. All rights reserved.

Darwinism for the birds. Always read the fine print when you see Darwin lifted up in the news with claims like, “genetic differences between populations of animals and plants in a given species are important drivers of new species formation and are a key to understanding evolution.” Science Daily then claims, in the very next sentence: “But that assumption has never been rigorously tested, until now….” Wait a minute; isn’t Darwin the one who answered the question in the first paragraph? Namely, “How do new species originate?” And this has never been tested till now? A closer look shows that all Michael Harvey’s team at U Michigan proved is the Stuff Happens Law. Read carefully, watching for theory escape clauses and the high perhapsimaybecouldness index:

The study provides the first large-scale test of the link between population differentiation rates and speciation rates. The results confirm the evolutionary importance of population genetic differentiation.

However, genetic differences do not guarantee evolutionary success. Harvey and his colleagues found that the correlation between population genetic differentiation and species formation was imperfect, which suggests that other factors besides differentiation may be important in determining how many new species are produced.

They also found that the emergence of new populations within a species occurs at least three times faster than new species develop, suggesting that most differences between populations will not last long enough to impact species diversity.

“Overall, however, the study confirms the long-held assumption that the genetic differences between populations of a given species might predict its probability of contributing to the diversity of life,” Harvey said.

None of the parrots, woodpeckers, toucans, hummingbirds, blackbirds, tanagers, warblers, thrushes, wrens, chickadees, jays and flycatchers mentioned in the article appeared to be evolving into something other than parrots, woodpeckers, toucans, hummingbirds, blackbirds, tanagers, warblers, thrushes, wrens, chickadees, jays and flycatchers.

Evolution by genetic disease. Darwin was intrigued by the flightless cormorants on the Galapagos, but nobody checked the genetic basis for their pitiful, stubby wings—till now. Science Daily tells what a team of geneticists found about these birds: they all have a genetic disease that affects their cells’ ability to make primary cilia, which are important organelles for cellular health. “Interestingly, when these same genes go awry in humans, they cause bone-development disorders called skeletal ciliopathies.” The birds, in other words, are sick. Their isolation on these desolate islands prevents any of them evolving back to health. How would Darwin be pleased by this? We think the birds would rather be up there flying with their cousins. For a different take on what it means for Darwinian evolution, see Evolution News & Science Today.

Darwin Flubber: a magical elastic substance made of a secret blend of Emergence, Convergence and Submergence. Darwin Flubber allows the Evolutionary Web of Belief to absorb any falsifying blow. —Darwin Dictionary

What’s good for the goose: duck and cover. Phys.org printed another bird story with links to the old finch-beak icon of evolution. “Fowl-mouthed study finds that diet shaped duck, goose beaks,” the headline trumpets. But the geese are still geese, and the ducks are still ducks. Goose beaks are different because geese eat different food. “Geese, which evolved to prefer the leaves and roots of plants over filter feeding (though some still do), have shorter, narrower beaks that give geese a more forceful bite for pruning tough plant parts.” Correction: they didn’t “evolve to prefer” those things; they “are observed to prefer” those things. Aaron Olsen’s story is so weak, he is not even sure of it himself. “All that said, Olsen acknowledges his assessment of waterfowl lineage remains an open hypothesis. He said he invites further research, even if it ultimately ruffles his feathers.” Don’t teach this “fowl-mouthed” study to children.

Turtle soup. Does evolution account for the loss of hard shells? If you’re a sea turtle, perhaps that’s helpful. Evolutionists in the UK think it came about because of changes in their respiration. But if this were a law of nature, leatherback sea turtles wouldn’t be an exception. Phys.org uses the power of suggestion to tell a just-so story: “This suggests that the evolution of a soft-shell in leatherbacks may have been linked to thermoregulation, not respiration, enabling the species to regulate heat gain and loss.” More Darwin Flubber here.

Mini-microevolution. Look at the stickleback fish in this Nature News article about evolution. One is bigger and fatter than the other, but that’s true of humans. Are the evolutionists even sure they are different species? Some of these fish live in lakes, and some in streams. That’s true of trout and salmon; so what? Surely Darwin portrayed much more massive shifts in the drama of life, from wolf to whale, from fish to reptile, from ape to man. He’s going to need much more than this to support his story that humans came from bacteria. The evolutionists quibble about trivia: which populations resist parasites better, which ones live longer, or whether lake sticklebacks are more fit. The last paragraph takes it all back, anyway, saying that selection works to split populations, except when it glues them together:

Many studies have provided examples of populations in a species adapting to different environments, and the populations becoming different from each other through the process of divergent selection. But what determines whether adaptive divergence will subsequently lead to ecological speciation? Before this report, one might have proposed a balance between the strength of divergent selection pulling populations apart and the exchange of genes between the two populations holding them together. Now, frequency-dependent selection, previously known for its role in maintaining variation in populations, has emerged as a mechanism that can hold populations together, perhaps serving like a ‘glue’ that limits how far different populations of a species can diverge. This insight gained by Bolnick and Stutz reveals an additional factor to consider when addressing whether divergent selection will lead to ecological speciation.

Stop playing games, evolutionists. PNAS is goofing off again, publishing about “Spatial evolutionary games with weak selection.” It’s all theoretical fol-de-rol about how populations engage in various behavioral modifications (at least in their computers). Get off the game consoles, evolutionists; Darwin needs more real field biologists to find evidence for his theory that bacteria are evolving into humans.

Sigh. What a racket. This is what you get when science is ruled by totalitarians (see Jerry Bergman’s article, 6/14/17).

Cartoon by Brett Miller. Used by permission.