Evolution Media: Dogma First, Then Puzzles

Evolution is a fact! Got that? If so,
now you are ready for the difficulties

It’s curious reading many pro-evolution articles in the science media. They seem to follow a script. They begin with strong affirmations of evolution. Then they backpedal somewhat, admitting to difficulties with the theory, sometimes serious enough to admit a crisis. But they never give up hope. Here’s the three-step process:

• Evolution is a fact! Billions of years ago, life evolved! Salute!
• Unfortunately, scientists don’t understand how it happened.
• Further research (and funding) may figure it out some day.

This can be dubbed the APF pattern: Affirmation, Puzzle, Futureware. Watch this pattern illustrated in these recent news articles that can be considered typical fare from the Darwin propaganda mill.

Bees evolved from ancient supercontinent, diversified faster than suspected (Washington State University in St. Louis, 31 July 2023). Here’s the pattern with quotes from the press release:

• A: “The first bees evolved on an ancient supercontinent more than 120 million years ago….”
• P: “There’s been a longstanding puzzle about the spatial origin of bees….”
• F: “This work opens the way for more studies ….”

Life on Earth didn’t arise as described in textbooks (University of Copenhagen, 12 July 2023). With bombast, these evolutionists in Denmark are going to give the real scoop on how life arose. But keep reading.

• A: “Between 685 and 800 million years ago, multicellular organisms began to appear in all of Earth’s oceans during what’s known as the Avalon explosion, a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion. During this era, sea sponges and other bizarre multicellular organisms replaced small single-celled amoeba, algae and bacteria, which until then, had had [sic] run of the planet for more than 2 billion years.”
• P: “Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth’s oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest.”
• F: “There remains much that the researchers don’t know, as well as and [sic] a plethora of controversy. Therefore, Bjerrum hopes that the new result can spur other researchers around the world to reconsider their previous results and data in a new light.”

Large-scale investigation of orphan genes in the human gut microbiome elucidates their evolutionary origins (bioRxiv, 12 July 2023). The problem of “orphan genes” (genes with no known ancestors) should be a huge problem for Darwinists to explain, and it is. Watch these authors follow the APF pattern by first sweeping the problem away in generalities, then wringing their hands.

• A: “Orphan genes, i.e., genes that lack homologs outside a given species, are ubiquitous in all domains of life. In prokaryotes, orphans can originate (i) in the native genome via de novo evolution from non-genic regions or alternative frames of existing genes, or by rapid divergence and remodeling, or (ii) in a foreign genome, including viruses, followed by horizontal transfer.”
• P: “However, strong quantitative evidence supporting either scenario is lacking…. Our results support that orphans emerge due to multiple routes, challenging the notion that external elements such as phages and plasmids are the primary source of prokaryotic genetic novelty.”
• F: They resort to the power of suggestion, but does might make right? “Importantly, origination in the native genome might provide a constant influx of mostly transient genes into the cloud genome of prokaryotic pangenomes, where some orphans may prove adaptive, facilitating evolutionary innovation.”

Earth’s most ancient impact craters are disappearing (Phys.org, 1 Aug 2023). This article shows a conundrum about the age of the earth. If the earth is billions of years old, where are all the old impact craters? “They can’t find them, and they might never be able to,” concludes this research team. Science is supposed to be about what you can observe, not what should be there but isn’t found.

• A: “Geologists have found evidence of impacts, such as ejecta (material flung far away from the impact), melted rocks, and high-pressure minerals from more than 3.5 billion years ago.“
• P: “But the actual craters from so long ago have remained elusive. The planet’s oldest known impact structures, which is what scientists call these massive craters, are only about 2 billion years old. We’re missing two and a half billion years of mega-craters.” Is erosion a good explanation for the lack of evidence? They looked at rock cores.

What they found was not encouraging for the search for Earth’s oldest craters. While some impact melt and minerals remained, the rocks in the outer ridges of the Vredefort structure were essentially indistinguishable from the non-impact rocks around them when viewed through a geophysical lens.

“That was not exactly the result we were expecting,” Huber said. ‘The difference, where there was any, was incredibly muted. It took us a while to really make sense of the data. Ten kilometers of erosion and all the geophysical evidence of the impact just disappears, even with the largest craters,” confirming what geophysicists had estimated previously.

• F: “In order to have an Archean impact crater preserved until today, it would have to have experienced really unusual conditions of preservation,” Huber said. “But then, Earth is full of unusual conditions. So maybe there’s something unexpected somewhere, and so we keep looking.”

This pattern is followed by many popular articles about evolution. They start with Affirming the truth of evolution, as if there is no doubt at all, and nobody questions it. Then comes a Puzzle, where what evolution expected is the opposite of what was observed, or at least far different from expectations. A research team tackles the puzzle and cannot solve it, or only takes some meager steps that they boast as progress. This is followed by the appeal to Futureware: more research may solve the puzzle.

Now that you know how evolutionary propaganda works, be on the lookout for it, and don’t be deceived.