May 23, 2023 | David F. Coppedge

How Darwinism Is Made to Look Like Science

A century-long strategy has allowed Darwinians to
parasitize science, overcome its natural defenses,
and establish storytelling as legitimate research

 

 

It’s amusing to hear critics of this site from the Darwin lovers. They tout the Scientific Method. They exalt Peer Review. They talk about how evolution has tons of Evidence, but creation is just an outdated religious myth that is Unfalsifiable. Occasional scientists who deign to send a snide Tweet to us sneer that it is beneath their dignity to respond to our articles.

It seems rather odd to see this, when the bulk of our information contains detailed quotes from pro-Darwin sources, and links to their primary articles and papers. Anyone is free to look up those sources and evaluate the soundness of their arguments and evidence. Only rarely do we cite creationist or intelligent design research, although we occasionally give a link to one as a response to claims made by the 100% pro-Darwin sources, so that our readers can read two interpretations of the same evidence instead of just the Darwin Party line.

Peaceful Parasitism

To be sure, the vast majority of published science does not concern origins. We wade through thousands of article titles a week to find the ones that concern evolution, the origin of life, or deep time. Most scientists are not thinking about evolution all the time. They are studying a plant’s genes and proteins, a star’s spectrum, a potential target for a cancer drug, or some other detail that doesn’t bear on origins. We have only praise for those doing honest research seeking the truth about their specialization with honesty and integrity. But when the subject of origins comes up, watch out: no one dare dispute The Consensus!

Having gained camaraderie with normal scientists long ago, Darwinians pretend their storytelling is just as rigorous as rocket science or cancer research, and they have convinced other departments that they belong as academic brethren. Having inserted themselves like selfish genes into the Science Building, where philosophers don’t usually hang out, they have become adept at flashing detailed phylogenetic trees and genome comparisons and employing abstruse Jargonwocky. Big Media loves them because of their comfortable alternative to Religion, the despised bogeyman of science, which was excommunicated and censored from the Science Building a century ago after the Scopes Trial. A challenge to a Darwinian hypothesis? It must have been motivated by the Bogeyman, says Wormtongue, the science advisor to an aging and poisoned Francis Bacon. The status quo is just fine! The new regime established by King Charles has made science better than ever!

Why the Vitriol?

The academic ecology works out well for the Darwin Party. The Big Science Cartel, like an adaptive immune system, roams the halls with natural killer cells quietly seeking Darwin skeptics to devour. This creates a safe space for the Darwinist parasites that have invaded academia and lived with it in tolerable equilibrium for many years. Their hosts have become desensitized to their methods. We know by over two decades of experience that the only critique one Darwin storyteller is likely to get within Big Science and Big Media is a gentle disagreement by another Darwin storyteller with a slightly different plot twist (e.g., whether the last common ancestor was a sponge or a comb jelly). Journal editors don’t mind these kinds of “matters arising” because the friendly parasites keep King Charles safe from infection by foreign invaders.

And so, unaccustomed to real critique of foundational worldview assumptions and methods, Darwinian scientists become not only lazy, but subject to outbursts of anger whenever they step out of their comfort zone in the academic echo chamber and encounter a serious skeptic on the outside. It’s like a dangerous pathogen that must be eradicated! You don’t reason with a germ; you douse it with poison, and inoculate the citizens with antibodies. Here’s a comment we received today from someone calling himself “chuckdarwin”—

LOL this site is full of weapons-grade garbage. You miserable liars for Jesus and anti-science clowns. Humans are apes, and you’re academic vabdals [sic] who worship Iron Age incest mythology.

We don’t know the person who sent this; it was probably NOT an academic research scientist, but you get the idea that Darwinians and those influenced by their immune system can be very passionate about attacking their critics.

Normal Darwin Ecology Today

Academia doesn’t have to resort to this kind of radical chemotherapy often, so it carries on day by day, doing mostly legitimate research. Wormtongue assures the corpus of scientists that its Darwin Party transposons in the genome are doing good work, too. The legit researchers are too busy to read their stories anyway, so they get away with it. As a result, we get tales like this.

Credit: Illustra Media.

Life on Earth quickly became independent from lightning as a nitrogen source, says new study (University of St. Andrews, 22 May 2023). Nitrogenases, molecular machines that can break apart those tough triple bonds in molecular nitrogen, are still not understood after decades of research. Scientists would love to mimic their ability to perform room-temperature nitrogen fixation. It would revolutionize agriculture, save the climate and help feed the world! How did evolution accomplish this feat?

Well, it just emerged.

Some microorganisms are capable of converting N2 gas into bioavailable forms like ammonium, but before the emergence of this metabolism, energetic processes such as lightning must have been responsible for breaking apart these N2 molecules.

The researchers at St. Andrews ran some “spark discharge experiments,” conjuring up subliminal signals harking back to images of Frankenstein and Stanley Miller. The fact that lightning can fix nitrogen is well known, but how did microorganisms gain this ability? It emerged. No intelligence needed.

To their surprise, though, they learned that the signature of lightning on nitrogen fixation in old rocks didn’t match expectations. To an evolutionist, this can only mean one thing: microbial nitrogenase machines evolved earlier than thought!

However, the isotopic composition the researchers found in their spark experiments does not match that of nitrogen archived in the rock record of early Earth. This discrepancy suggests that lightning was not a major source of nitrogen as microbial life evolved.

Instead, these results provide another piece of evidence that microorganisms have been able to convert N2 gas into bioavailable forms for more than three billion years.

There are, however, a few rock samples from the Isua Greenstone Belt on Greenland which are nearly 3.8 billion years old, and whose isotopic composition could potentially be explained by nitrogen contributions from lightning.

How rigorous was this thinking? One of the most baffling and important molecular machines in nature “emerged,” and it did so ‘earlier than thought.’ It magically appeared more than 3 billion Darwin Years ago, and that “could potentially” explain it. Isn’t science wonderful!

We can agree with a statement by astrobiologist Christiane Helling, who concludes the press release, “To communicate our science, it is important to reflect the extraordinary uniqueness of the Earth’s atmosphere in the astronomical context.”

Marsupials might be the more evolved mammals (Natural History Museum, 19 May 2023). As we showed in the comb jelly vs sponge story, Darwinians love gaming. They like upsets, too, which keep the crowd from getting bored.  Here, Darwin sportscaster Emma Caton entertains the revolutionary evolutionary idea that opossums and kangaroos are more evolved than elephants, apes and humans.

Mammal evolution has been flipped on its head, according to new research that suggests marsupials are the more evolved mammals.

By estimating how the common ancestor of mammals reproduced and developed, scientists have turned over the longstanding belief that marsupials are more primitive than placentals.

If you’re worried that King Charles is in trouble, don’t be alarmed. It’s all part of the strategy to show that Darwinists, like real scientists, can debate and have differences of opinion.

One can go check out the rationale behind this surprise play by the Marsupial Team and see if anything rises above speculation. Some Darwinist at London’s fabled Natural History Museum, where Richard Owen once criticized Darwin, decided that having a more “flexible reproductive system” gave a fitness advantage to the kangaroos pictured at the top of the press release. And if it was a fitness advantage, nature surely selected it. Is it a rigorous scientific fact, though?

‘So by stretching out development and making it more external to the mother, marsupials may be able to cope better with less stable environmental situations. But this is very much a guess and a hypothesis that needs to be tested.’

As usual, futureware keeps the Darwin just-so storytelling game going. Real scientists test their hypotheses, don’t they? So do we! the Darwinians boast with their white lab coats on. Do they say how they will test this one? Do they promise to test it? The hypothesis sounds so full of holes that multiple theory rescue devices could be concocted to patch it up with new storytelling plots. Even if they find out some day that marsupials do cope better under lab conditions, would that be relevant to whatever happened 160 million Darwin Years ago? And who will be around to check whether this hypothesis passes the test—any test? Doesn’t matter; King Charles was honored, so keep the funds coming.

A Journey to the Origins of Multicellular Life: Long-Term Experimental Evolution in the Lab (Georgia Institute of Technology, 10 May 2023). Darwinians can’t act as lazy as they are; they need to look busy. These ones played with algae in test tubes to presumably figure out how the first multicellular organisms—that presumably led to us—might have evolved in the oceans hundreds of millions of Darwin Years ago.

Needing job security, they made this a “long term experimental evolution” task trying to get “snowflake yeast” to form colonies under artificial conditions (as if that has anything to do with real natural history).

The world would look very different without multicellular organisms – take away the plants, animals, fungi, and seaweed, and Earth starts to look like a wetter, greener version of Mars. But precisely how multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled ancestors remains poorly understood. The transition happened hundreds of millions of years ago, and early multicellular species are largely lost to extinction.

To investigate how multicellular life evolves from scratch, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology decided to take evolution into their own hands. Led by William Ratcliff, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences, a team of researchers has initiated the first long-term evolution experiment aimed at evolving new kinds of multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors in the lab.

But it’s not evolution if it is done under lab conditions by intelligent design. Isn’t that cheating? Doesn’t matter. “Laboratory evolution” sounds trendy.

Over 3,000 generations of laboratory evolution, the researchers watched as their model organism, “snowflake yeast,” began to adapt as multicellular individuals. In research published in Nature, the team shows how snowflake yeast evolved to be physically stronger and more than 20,000 times larger than their ancestor. This type of biophysical evolution is a pre-requisite for the kind of large multicellular life that can be seen with the naked eye.

Ah, these yeast got strong! Colonies of half a million cells “evolved to be as strong and tough as wood.” That sounds like fitness! ‘Me big! Me cell grow big like ox. Muscle machines strong like wood!’ Little Johnny is impressed at first, but asks, “weren’t they still snowflake yeast?” Susie asked, “If they were as tough as wood, how did they live?”

The team selected on organism size because all multicellular lineages started out small and simple, and many evolved to be larger and more robust over time. The ability to grow large, tough bodies is thought to play a role in increasing complexity, as it requires new biophysical innovations. However, this hypothesis had never been directly tested in the lab.

Sounds like a slap at intelligent design: increasing complexity, innovations; wow. But…

Laboratory evolution experiment shows how dogs evolved to be happy! Would that make any sense if the experimenters forced the animal in unnatural ways?

If they selected the “fittest” according to their own criteria, it was not evolution. They were forcing these cells against their nature. No actual innovations were mentioned, at least none that helped the yeast. No selected genetic mutations were mentioned. No heritable changes to the genome were mentioned. No functional diversification was mentioned. All they got were dense clumps of bigger cells that had been given unnatural nutrients and conditions in which to grow.

Why didn’t anyone call this out as fake science guilty of investigator interference? We can hear it now: ‘Why you science denier, shut up! Where’s your white lab coat? What do you know?’

Serving a Bigger Purpose

The profs and students had plenty of busy work to do during this experiment. It must have been fun. But was it evolution? The human beings did all the selecting. They controlled the nutrients and atmosphere and temperature. They decided what looked to them like fitness. Is bigger and stronger always better? What if a group of hares stuffed with steroids all dogpile on each other, grab each others’ arms and legs and ears? They become a confused bundle and can’t get untangled. Meanwhile, the tortoise leisurely strolls on by, winning the fitness race. Moral: bigger and stronger is not always better.

Did they check the genes to see if new species had evolved? Did they release the fittest colonies into the wild and see if they survived? Don’t ask. This was only intended to demonstrate a “pre-requisite” for the evolution of multicellular life. As a propaganda tool, it accomplished its purpose: to make Darwinian evolution look like real science.

Haters of creation thump their chests with all this evidence of evolution. Where is your peer-reviewed science?, they taunt us. Where is your falsification? Where is your Scientific Method? If you want people to believe your fairy story, go do it in the lab, like these reputable scientists did. Evolution: it’s the Greatest Story on Earth!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Visited 468 times, 1 visits today)

Comments

  • That Chuck Darwin jasper may be the same one who used that name to troll The Question Evolution Project. Vitriol, assertions, and so on, but Darwin’s acolytes and other misotheists show little original thought. (I’ll allow that “weapons-grade garbage” is kind of clever, though.) Their arguments are boilerplate. Interesting that these people do not prove that science is on their side and refute everything that creationists and ID proponents present. Also, I lack belief that those are scientists who think it is beneath their dignity to respond to your articles — but they did anyway.

Leave a Reply