Darwinists Are Contortionists

To keep their pet theory from being falsified, Darwinians must stretch, twist and bend it to fit unexpected observations.

The lengths that Darwinians will go through to defend their show seems like watching a contortion act. No observation can falsify a theory that can accommodate opposite things. Evolution is explosively rapid sometimes, but runs at a standstill other times. Things burst onto the scene 100 million years earlier than thought, but no Darwinian blinks an eye. How much longer can this circus go on?

Microbe in Evolutionary Stasis for Millions of Years (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences). You won’t believe your lyin’ eyes as this guy lionizes Darwin’s flexibility. Critical readers will be too flabbergasted to say anything after this.

It’s like something out of science fiction. Research led by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences has revealed that a group of microbes, which feed off chemical reactions triggered by radioactivity, have been at an evolutionary standstill for millions of years. The discovery could have significant implications for biotechnology applications and scientific understanding of microbial evolution.

“This discovery shows that we must be careful when making assumptions about the speed of evolution and how we interpret the tree of life,” said Eric Becraft, the lead author on the paper. “It is possible that some organisms go into an evolutionary full-sprint, while others slow to a crawl, challenging the establishment of reliable molecular timelines.”

Wait: isn’t radioactivity one of the causes of mutations? Aren’t mutations the feedstock for evolution? Team members found the evidence “shocking” that these microbes have not evolved for 175 million Darwin Years. So why don’t they abandon the theory? Eric has to be one of the most gullible Darwinists reported in these pages.

“These findings are a powerful reminder that the various microbial branches we observe on the tree of life may differ vastly in the time since their last common ancestor,” Becraft said. “Understanding this is critical to understanding the history of life on Earth.“

Does he really call this sort of gullibility “understanding” – or is Becraft just showing his peers how to be crafty?

A discovery that ‘literally changes the textbook’ (Michigan State University). This episode in the “earlier than thought” category involves brain wiring in fish. A teaspoon of sugar helps the medicine go down, and an appeal to medical applications helps bad theories sound useful. “MSU’s expertise in fish biology, genetics helping researchers rewrite evolutionary history and shape future health studies.”

The network of nerves connecting our eyes to our brains is sophisticated and researchers have now shown that it evolved much earlier than previously thought, thanks to an unexpected source: the gar fish.

Gar fish don’t fit the evolutionary narrative. Some contortion will be necessary. A guy named Ingo uses Tontological lingo:

Michigan State University’s Ingo Braasch has helped an international research team show that this connection scheme was already present in ancient fish at least 450 million years ago. That makes it about 100 million years older than previously believed.

A million Darwin Years here, a hundred million there; pretty soon you’re talking real loony. Who believed that? Did you? Did Ingo ever think how illogical this is? He didn’t find missing links between the gar and the human. He only pushed back the origin of complex brain wiring back in time closer to when he needs it to “emerge.” This makes the Darwinians’ job harder. Now they have 100 million years less time for lucky mutations to show up and get selected.

Their write-up (Vigouroux et al., Science 9 April 2021, “Bilateral visual projections exist in non-teleost bony fish and predate the emergence of tetrapods) uses the e-word evolution 29 times, but never mentions mutation or selection. That’s understandable, because it would have taken multiple lucky accidents to get the wiring to work. What evolutionist would want to figure that out?

Team cracks eggs for science (University of Illinois). Here’s a move not even evolutionists can perform. A young undergrad and his advisor, smiling for the camera, couldn’t get natural selection to fix an easy problem: thicken a bird’s beak. Isn’t that what the Galapagos finches figured out?

Like welfare recipients, cowbirds provide a classic example of “brood parasitism” in animals. They lay their eggs in other species’ nests so they don’t have to do the hard work of incubating or feeding their young.

“Our experiments help us to understand the long-standing conundrum of why most hosts of the cowbird and its conspicuous egg have not evolved to eject the parasitic egg from the nest,” Hauber said.

Gumby, the flexible clay animation character from cartoons.

What the Darwinists determined by testing the eggshells with nails was that the host bird’s beak is not strong enough to crack the cowbird eggshell. This should have been an easy fix for natural selection. If the beak had evolved to be stronger, the warbler could lift the deadbeat’s egg out of the nest and let it fall to ground. Such an easy fix; where is Darwin when these poor overworked mother birds need him? They are learning that, like acrobatic contortionists, there are some moves that even Gumby Darwin just cannot do.

Fossoriality and evolutionary development in two Cretaceous mammaliamorphs (Nature). Darwin maintains entire teams that can contort together in dazzling displays of the Stuff Happens Law (SHL). The skinny on this paper is that two fossil mammals from the Cretaceous seem to have evolved the same trait independently – backbones and limbs specialized for digging (fossoriality).

Viewed within the mammaliamorph phylogeny (Fig. 3), the fossorial features shared by these two species can be interpreted as having evolved independently under similar selective pressures for specific morphological traits associated with similar ecological and biomechanical functions.

That’s only the first act. The authors say that this kind of independent evolution happens all the time, all over the place.

The interaction of these developmental mechanisms with natural selection may have underpinned the diverse phenotypes of body plan that evolved independently in various clades of mammaliamorph.

Once again, the authors fail to identify any mutations or selective pressures that forced these animals to “develop” fossoriality. They pass that ball to an old paper from 1903 written by an evolutionist who can no longer be called on to defend his story of how the SHL did it.

So rewrite the textbooks, Ingo. You said your find “literally changes the textbook,” so take responsibility and do it. We suggest the following revision from our post, “How the Stuff Happens Law Can Be Scientific” (13 Oct 2018):

The Story of Evolution

Evolution explains more complexity, and more simplicity. It explains why flight arose in some birds, but was lost in others. With evolution, organs and genomes can become more complicated, or more streamlined. Eyes emerge through evolution, but eyes are also lost by evolution. Evolution makes the cheetah fast but the sloth slow. By evolution, dinosaurs grow to skyscraper size, and hummingbirds grow tiny. With evolution, peacocks grow more flashy and crows more black, giraffes tall and snakes long. Evolution makes roundworms round, and flatworms flat. Evolution explains predator and prey, loner and herder, light and dark, high and low, fast and slow, profligacy and stinginess, terrorism and altruism, religion and atheism, virtue and selfishness, psychosis and reason, extinction and fecundity, war and peace. Evolution explains everything.

You can add that Darwinian evolution can work at a full sprint or a crawl. Not evolving is even a kind of evolution. As the world’s most accomplished contortionist, evolutionary theory can bend, stretch, twist, and even stick its head in its posterior.

Cartoon for CEH by Brett Miller. All rights reserved.