Abusing Darwinism to Explain Everything

Do documents evolve? Are birds that can interbreed still evolving? Darwinism becomes meaningless if everything that changes in some way is used as support for the theory.

Darwinism means this and only this: universal common ancestry via unguided mutation and natural selection. That was Darwin’s aim: to link up every living thing in a grand tree. Every living thing came from ancestors, and their “innovations” arrived by chance mutations “selected” somehow without intelligence or guidance. Some reporters and scientists cannot stick to the definition. They say cars evolve, documents evolve, and civilizations evolve. Or, they take the tiniest changes and offer them as sacrifices to Charles Darwin. The equivocation needs to stop. Repeat after me: “Darwinism means universal common ancestry via unguided mutation and natural selection.” Children might remember the quip, “from goo to you by way of the zoo.”

Mathematical evidence shows that founding documents evolve through words (Science Daily). Believe it or not, Dartmouth eggheads are using Darwinian theory to explain the US Constitution, even though it proclaims that men are endowed by their Creator with rights. Their inspiration is poles apart from biomimetics; it might be dubbed evomimetics.

Inspired by the challenge to see how ideas are shared between nation’s through their founding documents, researchers at Dartmouth College have constructed a big data, evolutionary taxonomy of the world’s constitutions.

The analysis traces the textual ties that bind and has resulted in a mathematically-derived constitutional family tree. Visuals included with the study reveal the evolution of constitutions and constitutional ideas, and provide a window into how nations share political concepts.

Perhaps we can be charitable and assume they are only using “evolution” as a figure of speech. Nope:

For decades, researchers have theorized that the evolution of national constitutions follow pathways similar to biological evolution. The Dartmouth analysis demonstrates that the historical development of constitutions follows the Yule Process — a model in evolutionary dynamics that describes birth process.

New species can develop in as little as two generations, Galapagos study finds (Science Daily). Finch beaks again. This “zombie icon” of evolution just won’t die. What happened now? You can bet

They just keep coming back.

that Peter and Rosemarie Grant are at the center of it. And they are. The bottom line of the story is that three lineages of birds that they insist on calling different “species” can all interbreed; they just have split into groups that keep to themselves. One lone male they call “big bird” arrived one day from another island in the chain and found a cute chick to mate with. Big bird sang a slightly different love song, so his groupies stick to him and the family. But they are all not only finches, but Galapagos finches, with only the slightest of anatomical differences. Calling this an example of “the evolution of biodiversity due to natural selection” is a major fallacy of extrapolation, as if it explains (what, class?) universal common ancestry via unguided mutation and natural selection. Jonathan Wells dealt thoroughly with the Big Bird story in his updated book about icons of evolution, Zombie Science.

How dinosaur scales became bird feathers (BBC News). Rory Galloway tells another Darwinian just-so story. He knows full well that “Feathers are highly complex natural structures and they’re key to the success of birds.” But he insists that “they initially evolved in dinosaurs, birds’ extinct ancestors.” How would he know that? What does the evidence say? For one thing, “Birds have had feathers for as long as they have existed as a group and Professor Chuong couldn’t study primitive examples of feathers in any living animals.” That didn’t stop the professor from professing faith in Darwin. To present an appearance of empiricism, he tweaked some alligator genes. Lo and behold, he did not get feathers. What he did get allowed him to weave a fanciful story that slight elongations were the promising beginnings of incredibly beautiful, lightweight, structurally strong materials enabling powered flight.

“You can see we can indeed induce them to form appendages, although it is not beautiful feathers, they really try to elongate” he explained of the outcome. They are likely similar to the structures on those feather-pioneering dinosaurs 150 million years ago.

The reason the gene doesn’t cause the development of a fully feathered alligator is that unlike birds, alligators don’t have the underlying genetic architecture evolved to support these central feather-making genes, or hold the structures in place on the skin.

To him, “flight was just one highly successful experiment with feathers.” He really needs to watch the Illustra masterpiece, Flight: The Genius of Birds.

The slight difference: Why language is a uniquely human trait (Medical Xpress). This could have been a nice article about human exceptionalism. After all, no other animal has syntactical, grammatical, semantical language. The last paragraph, however, shows that the ideas presented at MIT are being forced into a Darwinian mold:

The long searched for “missing link” could lay in this fibre tract, which explains the leap forward of the simple sound association of animals to the matured language of humans A reason for this could be because this fibre tract only exists in adult humans but not in other primates and infants, and consequentially language capabilities are more advanced. Even linguist Chomsky is convinced by this idea. In the prologue to “Language in Our Brain” he also supposes that this brain structure “appears to have evolved to subserve the human capacity to process syntax, which is at the core of the human language faculty.”

Nothing in Darwinian theory evolves “to” do anything. They have turned a blind process into a directed search “to subserve” and “to process” the human capacity for language.

Credit: Illustra Media

Small but distinct differences among species mark evolution of human brain (Medical Xpress). Here’s a trick: use falsifying evidence to support your theory. Look what this article confesses about actual empirical evidence:

The massive analysis of human, chimpanzee, and monkey tissue published Nov. 23 in the journal Science shows that the human brain is not only a larger version of the ancestral primate brain but also one filled with distinct and surprising differences.

“Our brains are three times larger, have many more cells and therefore more processing power than chimpanzee or monkey,” said Andre M.M. Sousa, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and co-lead author of the study. “Yet there are also distinct small differences between the species in how individual cells function and form connections.”

Given this evidence, what should the scientists at Yale be focused on, the “distinct and surprising differences” or the small differences? It shouldn’t be surprising that two species that can eat bananas and blink eyes should have similarities, but there is a vast canyon separating human and chimpanzee brains, both qualitatively and quantitatively, to say nothing of unique capacities like language, the arts, and logical reasoning. We find the Yale Darwinians forcing everything into a Darwinian mold again: (1) they call parts of the brain “evolutionarily ancient” (see Circular Reasoning). (2) They apply “selection” to explain differences (see our analysis of Natural Selection). (3) They engage in speculative, fact-free evidence to keep Darwinism from being falsified: e.g., “The neocortical expression of this gene was most likely lost in a common ancestor and reappeared in the human lineage.”

Huge dose of brain chemical dopamine may have made us smart (New Scientist). Andy Coghlan may take the prize for abusing Darwinism with his suggestion that an influx of the neurotransmitter dopamine gave evolving humans their intelligence.

We may owe some of our unique intelligence to a generous supply of a signalling chemical called dopamine in brain regions that help us think and plan. Our brains produce far more dopamine in these regions than the brains of other primates like apes.

Not only does this rely on a high perhapsimaybecouldness index, it is a self-refuting argument. If Coghlan is smart because of dopamine, he’s a dope, I mean, by his own admission— because he has transferred his intelligence to a chemical that gives him pleasurable sensations with no necessary connection to truth. Notice, too, that the empirical evidence shows a major difference between apes and man. That should be the story.

The pain of reading nonsense like this week after week never stops. We do it for you, so that you can understand that the ruling philosophy of the modern world relies on absolute refusal to even consider the possibility of a Creator. Don’t be fooled by the facade of fake science whitewashing Darwin’s House of Cards. It isn’t a house of science. It is a shrine to the Bearded Buddha, protected by a priesthood and kingdom intolerant of any challenge to their power.