Darwinism as a Post-Observation What-If Game

The silly evolutionary spin put on observations of the natural world do not contribute to science; they cheapen it.

Jellyfish Did Not Evolve Sleep

All the secular news media entered dogmatic slumbers when Nature announced, “Jellyfish caught snoozing give clues to origin of sleep.” The comment came from a paper in Current Biology, “The Jellyfish Cassiopea Exhibits a Sleep-like State.” Cozy in their beds, dreaming snugly of Darwin playing sandman to jellyfish, they used the observation that jellyfish take breaks to explain why people evolved sleep.

Jellyfish and humans may seem wildly different, but both still need to sleep (Science Daily): “This finding that jellyfish sleep implies that sleep is an ancient behavior, largely untouched by millennia [sic; hundreds of millions of years] of evolution.”

Even jellyfish get sluggish if they don’t have enough sleep (New Scientist): “The findings push the origins of slumber further back in our evolutionary past,” Sam Wong writes. He can’t bring himself to even consider a designed reason for animals to sleep.

Despite the vast evolutionary distance between jellyfish and backboned vertebrates like ourselves, the team found evidence for common mechanisms. The hormone melatonin, which promotes sleep in humans and our relatives, also induces quiescence in Cassiopea. So does pyrilamine, an antihistamine drug that causes drowsiness. It is also unclear why sleep evolved. The problem is that sleep has so many benefits, it’s hard to pick out the crucial one.

If evolution is so powerful to design a mechanism for sleep, why couldn’t it, in 500 million years, design a human being to get by without sleep? Wouldn’t that be a fitness advantage? Wouldn’t it provide us with even more time to pass on our genes?

Tomatoes Are Not Crystal Balls

Members of the tomato family use acylsugars for defense. Phys.org admits that “These specialized metabolites have a wide variety of structures and are made by different enzymes working together to carry out a series of biochemical reactions.” Rather than explain how random mutations arrived at the recipes for complex enzymes, let alone getting them to work together in organic synthesis, the authors, Layne Cameron and Robert Last, chose witchcraft. “Tomatoes’ crystal ball reveals evolutionary secrets,” they say, conjuring up images of the Bearded Buddha inside the skin of a tomato. “[S]tudying these specialized metabolites open an evolutionary window,” they believe. Last is least among philosophers of science. Look what he says:

“We sought to understand how this novel pathway originated and diversified across 100 million years of plant evolution,” said Last, MSU Barnett Rosenberg Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Plant Biology and the study’s senior author. “This is our crystal ball, our view into evolution.”

Evolution Did Not Make Sparrows an Ideal Size

Why aren’t house sparrows as big as geese? It’s a weird question” that sent Norwegian evolutionists on a quest to venerate Darwin. “But the overall message is this: The researchers tested the theory of evolution, predicted the results and things went as expected,” an article on Phys.org boasts. “The sparrows tell us that the theory of evolution actually works outside the laboratory as well.” But here’s the catch: the sparrows in the experiment, forced to evolve larger and smaller sizes, reverted to their original sizes when returned to the wild! If anything, this empirical evidence refutes Darwin’s theory. The evolutionists missed the real story: intelligent design!

But at the same time, it’s no benefit to be too big, either. Maybe you then become a more vulnerable catch for birds of prey? So far these are mostly speculations. We don’t actually know for sure.

What we do know is that the bird populations changed very quickly. This can tell us something about how adaptable the sparrows are.

Ageing Is Not a Quirk of Evolution

People grow old and die. So do roundworms. Why? Evolutionists at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) in Mainz, Germany, put a Darwin spin on the question, according to Science Daily. In “Unveiling the mystery of why we age,” they decide it was just a “quirk of evolution” that happened way back when:

As Charles Darwin explained, natural selection results in the fittest individuals for a given environment surviving to breed and pass on their genes to the next generation. The more fruitful a trait is at promoting reproductive success, the stronger the selection for that trait will be. In theory, this should give rise to individuals with traits which prevent ageing as their genes could be passed on nearly continuously. Thus, despite the obvious facts to the contrary, from the point of evolution ageing should never have happened. This evolutionary contradiction has been debated and theorised on since the 1800s. It was only in 1953 with his hypothesis of antagonistic pleiotropy (AP) that George C. Williams gave us a rational [sic] explanation for how ageing can arise in a population through evolution. Williams proposed that natural selection enriches genes promoting reproductive success but consequently ignores their negative effects on longevity. Importantly, this is only true when those negative effects occur after the onset of reproduction. Essentially, if a gene mutation results in more offspring but shortens life that’s fine.

Thus, they have perpetuated the tautological formulation of natural selection by equating fitness with survival (6/19/14). The researchers are also apparently unaware that George Williams was a vehement critic of the reckless just-so storytelling by evolutionists (5/31/04). In a pretense of striving for empirical evidence, these scientists observe that autophagy (programmed cell death) slows down in older roundworms. But they did not show that such slowdown causes ageing in humans. Nor did they explain how autophagy (a complex, multi-step process that is tightly regulated; see “Dumpster Diving” at Evolution News) arose in the first place. In fact, they couldn’t even be sure that autophagy causes ageing in roundworms. But they invoked Darwin’s “Stuff Happens Law” as their all-purpose just-so story:

This evidence has now arrived according to the co-lead author of the paper Jonathan Byrne, “The evolutionary theory of ageing just explains everything so nicely but it lacked real evidence that it was happening in nature. Evolution becomes blind to the effects of mutations that promote ageing as long as those effects only kick in after reproduction has started. Really, ageing is an evolutionary oversight.” Jonathan continues “These AP genes haven’t been found before because it’s incredibly difficult to work with already old animals, we were the first to figure out how to do this on a large scale.” He explains further “From a relatively small screen, we found a surprisingly large number of genes [30] that seem to operate in an antagonistic fashion.” Previous studies had found genes that encourage ageing while still being essential for development, but these 30 genes represent some of the first found promoting ageing specifically only in old worms. “Considering we tested only 0.05% of all the genes in a worm this suggests there could be many more of these genes out there to find,” says Jonathan.

There’s no way to connect the observation to the result, in other words. But since it makes a nice story, they blessed the hearts of all seniors with the comforting words that ageing is just a quirk of evolution, an evolutionary oversight.

When the Darwin Party can operate isolated in its own echo chamber, this is the kind of silliness you get. What the Darwin Party really needs is a strong opposition party. The opposition party needs to be strong, forthright, and invulnerable to bluffing and intimidation. It needs to have both powerful scientific evidence and grounding in philosophy of science. It needs to be good at laughing and shaming stupid ideas. Science suffers without it. If they really believed in survival of the fittest, wouldn’t this be seen as the best way forward? Instead, Big Science refuses to even consider publishing letters to the editor, let alone scientific papers, that don’t bow the knee to King Charlie.

One evolutionist even agrees with this, surprisingly. Paul Braterman, writing for The Conversation, surprised colleagues by stating, “Listening to creationists can strengthen our understanding of evolution.” We don’t think so. In fact, CEH Editor challenged Braterman in his earlier mockery of creationism (“How to slam dunk creationists when it comes to the theory of evolution,” The Conversation, 9/14/17, a series of straw man arguments) to a written debate with Dr Walt Brown, who has had a standing invitation for decades now. Braterman refused, as has every other evolutionist. What are they afraid of? Here’s what: they are hooked on their just-so storytelling banquets with all those tantalizing speculations (6/25/14). How could they ever give those up?

The stock answer by Darwinians why they cannot allow criticisms of evolution is that every opposing view is “religious” somehow. And yet here we see them practicing witchcraft, divination and magic, acting like shamans to pass on the origins myth of our culture, fighting vociferously anyone who challenges their authority.