Darwin Given Credit for Non-Darwinian Observations

Darwinian evolution is one of the most curious scientific theories ever. Even un-Darwinian data can be twisted to support it.

Darwinism is modern secular biology’s all-encompassing worldview to explain every observation in biology. But Darwin (using his name as a synecdoche for his modern disciples) is a kleptomanic. He steals observations that have nothing to do with his theory, or even oppose it. Then he twists them into support for his theory. He can’t lose.

Darwinian evolution is supposed to refer to the origin of new species by means of natural selection. That was in the title of Darwin’s book. There are two ways Darwinians can claim that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” One is to make evolution refer to every change of every kind – no matter what caused it (the Stuff Happens Law). The other way is to redefine “sense” to encompass nonsense. Here we will see examples of both.

Crashing waves may have spurred the evolution of backbones (New Scientist). Crashing waves have no power to create backbones. Besides, most evolutionists believe that the chordate ancestors of vertebrates originated deep in the sea during the Cambrian explosion. For support of his incongruous headline, reporter Lucas Joel leans on Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania, who examined 3,000 “early” fish fossils. Fish diversity and habitats, however, have nothing to do with Darwinian evolution, unless one is willing to perform divination on bones with the power of suggestion.

This is a bit of a surprise – big evolutionary steps are usually associated with biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs. But the data suggests that the evolutionary events that helped fill the seas with fishes occurred in shallow, salt-water environments like tidal areas and lagoons.

Those environments may have encouraged the evolution of vertebrates because their bones helped them withstand swirling or crashing waves in shallow water environments, suggests Sallan.

If crashing waves spurred the evolution of backbones, why are most tide pool animals invertebrates? Oh, because they evolved hard shells. But kelp have no hard shells. Oh, they evolved holdfasts. But sea squirts, sea stars and sea urchins have no holdfasts. Well, they must have evolved other ways to withstand crashing waves, because Darwin enlightened the scientific world with his great idea: stuff happens!

Bacteria’s password for sporulation hasn’t changed in 2.7 billion years (Astrobiology Magazine). If this story is about non-evolution, then it is not about evolution. Here is a phenomenon that has escaped the implacable force of Darwinian change for nearly 3 billion years. But it’s worse than that. It’s about change going in the wrong direction:

“It was surprising, because traditionally we think about evolution going from simple to complex,” said Durand. “But there are more and more examples of evolution going in the other direction, from complex to simple.”

Such ‘evolution’ looks more like de-evolution, admits Dannie Durand of Carnegie Mellon, but he gets to call it “evolution” anyway. The e-word evolution appears seven times in this short article. Evolution can go forward, backward, and sideways, or just sit there (19 Dec 2007). Such a “scientific explanation” could explain anything, even opposite outcomes. How handy is that kind of belief?

Neglected baby beetles evolve greater self-reliance (Cambridge University). This is a story about the behavior of some beetles observed after 35 generations of neglect. Did anyone think to inform the Darwinist geniuses at creationist James Clerk Maxwell‘s alma mater that all the descendants are all members of the same species? What evolved? Sure, animals have enough plasticity to alter their behaviors to fit circumstances. Even feral humans can learn to get along. But where have they demonstrated the “origin of species”? Please ask what actual data support Darwin’s theory in this quote, after you ask if they predicted the outcome using Darwin’s theory:

“Our ongoing research investigates the importance of the social environment in evolution. We are watching the way that evolution unfolds in these experimental populations and they constantly teach and surprise us,” said Professor Rebecca Kilner, senior author of the paper.

“The better our understanding of how evolution works, the better able we are to predict how animals will evolve in a changing world”.

A curious branch of plankton evolution (Science Daily). Darwinism can be flat wrong and nobody minds, as long as the Bearded Buddha still gets his daily sacrifices. The worship service in this press release quickly runs into trouble. Nobody moans, though. They get excited, knowing that the Darwin web of belief is strong enough to absorb any falsifying evidence.

Planktonic foraminifera (forams) — tiny, shelled organisms that float in the sea — left behind one of the most complete fossil records of evolutionary history in deep sea deposits. Consequently, evolutionists have a relatively sturdy grasp on when and how new lineages arose and developed their own unique features. However, a study publishing October 17 in the journal iScience reveals that one foram lineage evolved much more rapidly than everyone predicted, and researchers are looking beyond Darwin’s original theories of gradual evolution to understand why.

“It was an exciting moment. What our study and many others are starting to agree on is that evolution of forams is not necessarily gradual, as Darwin and more recent scientists thought,” says first author Russell Bicknell, a palaeontologist at the University of New England’s Palaeoscience Research Centre in Australia. “Life can exist for long periods of time exhibiting only minor changes followed by rapid, punctuated shifts.”

Readers of the opening bluff need to understand that the job of Darwin’s disciples is to distinguish their explanation from what creationists already believe, that forams are all part of the same created kind. The paper in iScience mentions no innovation, and no novel organ or system (just variations in shell shape). The evidence is not about Darwinian evolution; it’s about variation. The authors say nothing about beneficial mutations or positive selection, which must be minimal requirements to even begin to call this support for Darwinism. But then, it’s not anyway. It’s evidence for saltationism – rapid, punctuated change and stasis. That’s the notion that got Goldschmidt and Gould in trouble years ago, when they suggested that traditional Darwinian gradualism was not supported by the data.

Coevolution of public goods game and networks based on survival of the fittest (PLoS One). This paper illustrates how smart academics who know some math can be absolutely clueless about the real world. In this paper, “survival of the fittest” (with no mention of all its eugenics baggage) comes back from the dead to haunt science once again. But the “research” is just handwaving, done with models that have nothing to do with biology. Is there any mention of novelty, of innovation, of creativity? No. The winners in this “public goods game” played by imaginary entities are the ones that don’t go extinct, that’s all. The authors invented an imaginary game in a model, set the rules, and decided who lives or dies. That’s intelligent design in the form of computer programming, not evolution. And they recommit the old tautology of equating fitness with survival (“Fitness for Dummies,” 19 June 2014). We hope they had fun getting this nonsense published (to the shame of PLoS One for letting it through), but now let them try to invent a wing or an eye in the real world using nothing but Darwin’s Stuff Happens Law.

Machine learning spots natural selection at work in human genome (Nature). This article, too, keeps Darwin’s zombie phrase “natural selection” alive with promises you will find it in “deep learning” methods of artificial intelligence. OK, so they find variation in certain genes. Even young-earth creationists accept that. Notice, however, that all the variations are fully within the human gene pool, and all humans are interfertile. You will find nothing about the following ideas that must be present to provide support Darwinian evolution: positive selection, novelty, innovation, beneficial, species, speciation, or improvement. In fact, the authors even admit that they don’t know what to look for! This is fake science masquerading as research on Darwinian evolution:

Because geneticists don’t yet know which parts of the genome are being shaped by natural selection, they must train their deep-learning algorithms on simulated data.

Generating that simulated data requires researchers to posit what the signature of natural selection looks like, says Sohini Ramachandran, a population geneticist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “We don’t have ground truth data, so the worry is that we may not be simulating properly.”

And because deep-learning algorithms operate as black boxes, it’s hard to know what criteria they use to identify patterns in data, says Philipp Messer, a population geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “If the simulation is wrong, it’s not clear what the response means,” he adds.

Further, they don’t know the effects of the mutations they identified as due to “natural selection.” The closest they could come to is lactose tolerance. Again, though, that is not an innovation or benefit (except in certain circumstances of life); it’s only a matter of gene regulation. If this is the best they can point to, it doesn’t even come close to speciation – changing one group of people into a different species. Where is the evidence? It’s in futureware again, as writer Amy Maxmen hopes the algorithms for detecting this mystical blind watchmaker’s creative genius will get better some day over the rainbow.

A new take on kangaroo evolution (Phys.org). This headline is like the joke about old soap being packaged as “New! Improved!” It’s the same old Darwin Flubber, illustrating perfectly the cartoon above: no matter what happens, “it evolved.”

• The kangaroo is among the most recognizable animals in the world. It is also unique to Australia and New Guinea, having evolved its unique characteristics in relative isolation.
• Some of those ancestors grew to become giants weighing over 250 kilograms. Others hung around and eventually evolved to become the creatures we see today.
• But they evolved to have teeth with higher crowns, suggesting they had switched to eating tough grasses.
• This suggests that higher crowns evolved approximately 3 to 4 million years ago, not 5 to 12 million years ago as has been believed.

So how exactly did these “most recognizable animals” begin the dramatic physiological changes from quadrupedalism to explosive bipedal locomotion? “It is still not known why they started hopping.” ‘Oh!’ the precocious student raises his hand. ‘I know! It evolved!’

Chimps like to copy human visitors to the zoo – Ig Nobel Prize (The Conversation). Let’s end (and we’re not out of material) with a funny research project that won the annual award for studies that “first make you laugh, and then make you think.” Readers can decide if anyone was really thinking when they hear this: researchers “found that the chimpanzees at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden were just as likely to imitate human visitors as the other way round.” No kidding. This even got published in the journal Primates, with the highfalutin title, “Spontaneous cross-species imitation in interactions between chimpanzees and zoo visitors.” (You, dear Homo sapiens, are the other species.) OK, so what does this have to do with Darwinian evolution?

Our study shows that chimpanzees and humans were equally likely to use imitation as a way to interact with each other. Given that we know chimps aren’t as good as humans at learning through imitation, this challenges traditional theories and suggests imitation may have evolved primarily for social reasons rather than as a means of learning. The images evoked by our study of chimps and humans imitating each other at the zoo might make people smile. But the scientific implications reach all the way back to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and the role imitation may have played for that mysterious species.

And this, dear reader, is why Darwinism maintains its stranglehold on the scientific world. It can’t lose. No matter what happens, “it evolved.” Darwin be praised! Strange; we don’t see chimpanzees putting humans in zoos and writing research papers about them.

Bergman’s book about Darwin is an eye-opener.

We do see evolutionists putting other members of their own species in Human Zoos, though, to demonstrate their adoration of Charles Darwin. Watch the film Human Zoos, and get serious about the damage his vacuous theory has done to the world.