Weird Evolution Stories

Who needs facts when you
can just imagine anything
and Big Science will publish it?

For shame. The following evolutionary stories at “science news” site are so fact-free and speculative, they would flunk Philosophy of Science 101. But since Darwin is the patron saint of modern materialist culture, they get automatically promoted for public consumption. Their readers cannot hear the howls coming from Darwin skeptics behind the sound-proof barrier. That’s why you come here for common sense.

Next Time You Beat a Virus, Thank Your Microbial Ancestors (21 Aug, 2024, Univ of Texas at Austin). This silly story was echoed uncritically at Science Daily and other websites all the way to India. The Darwinos at UTA tell us not to thank God for our highly-complex and effective immune systems; no, we must bow down to bacteria, giving them thanks and homage for the sheer dumb luck that won them the lottery.

“Viral infections are one of the evolutionary pressures that we have had since life began, and it is critical to always have some sort of defense,” said Pedro Leão, now an assistant professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands and a recent postdoctoral researcher in Baker’s lab. “When bacteria and archaea discovered tools that worked, they were passed down and are still part of our first line of defense.”

We’re calling you out, Pedro. We demand Freedom of Information access to documents describing your instrument that measures evolutionary pressure. We want to see its units and error bars. How was it calibrated? We also want to know why your paper at Nature Communications assumes evolution (the Stuff Happens Law) instead of considering all the hypotheses that could explain similarities, such as common design. Why did you exclude non-Darwinian explanations? Are you a materialist? Fess up!

UChicago-led study casts new light on the origins of life on Earth (21 Aug 2024, Univ of Chicago). This weird sci-fi story also was reproduced without criticism by the myth-pushers Science Daily, Phys.org, and EurekAlert as well as Newsweek (aka Newspeak), with reverberations around the internet, all reproducing the same cartoony artwork. Raindrops created life! Let your imagination go wild! No facts needed! Don’t worry about probability calculations. If it could happen (in your imagination), it must have happened!

Cartoons by Brett Miller. Used by permission.

The paper was published in AAAS journal Science with the suggestive title, “Did the exposure of coacervate droplets to rain make them the first stable protocells?” Wait a minute! Coacervate droplets? Didn’t that go out of style after Oparin? They’re baa.aaa.ack. Like zombies, coacervates have resurrected to announce they are human ancestors. It must be true, because big name storytellers like Jack Szostak and Aman Agrawal are listed as co-authors.

Dr James Tour, a structural chemist at Rice University, would probably like a word with them. He could ask, ‘Jack, if you think life happened this way, why couldn’t you answer any of five easy challenges I gave you and 9 other origin-of-lifers last year? Why didn’t you admit this failure in your paper? Why didn’t you list me or any other Darwin skeptics in the references?’

What the unique shape of the human heart tells us about our evolution (20 Aug 2024, The Conversation). Aimee Drane, a “senior lecturer and clinical academic” at Swansea University, sees major differences between ape hearts and human hearts. Conclusion: the human heart must have evolved from theirs!

We believe the human heart evolved away from the trabeculated structure seen in the other great apes to enhance its ability to twist and contract more efficiently. This increased twisting motion, along with the smooth ventricular walls, probably allows the human heart to pump a larger volume of blood with each beat. This meets the heightened demands of our physical activity and larger brains.

She doesn’t understand her own theory. Nothing “evolves to” do something. That would imply foresight, purpose, and direction. She should have read Meredith Root-Bernstein’s article in PNAS on August 12, “Evolution is not driven by and toward increasing information and complexity,” where she chides other evolutionists who assume “that evolution is progress, via selection for increasing complexity.” Not true! “Most fundamentally, their underlying assumption that there is such a thing as ‘selection for’ violates valid reasoning in evolutionary biology.” Aimee, this means you need to rely completely on sheer dumb luck! And we don’t care what you imagine “probably” happened (did you calculate any mathematical probabilities?). Science is about demonstration.

Aimee and her 16 accomplices in the paper in Communications Biology mentioned “evolution” 23 times, merely assuming it. Like Pedro, they all appealed to mythical “selective pressure” to believe that the Spirit of Darwin pushed humans to invent hearts suitable for their upright posture and big brains.

We propose that this adaptive evolution occurred to support the requirements of the human ecological niche, including an augmented cardiac output to facilitate sustained bipedal physical activity, a larger brain, and the associated metabolic and thermoregulatory demands.

Proposal denied. Go back to Philosophy of Science 101, after taking a refresher course on logic and reading Root-Bernstein’s rebuke.

Earth’s days once got 2 hours longer — and that may have triggered one of the biggest evolutionary explosions in history, study suggests (21 Aug 2024, Space.com). Always on the lookout for Darwin praise, reporter Tia Ghose, who also works as assistant managing storyteller for Lie Science, imagines longer days “triggering” the Cambrian Explosion. Believe it or not. Preferably, not.

“New research shows the moon’s distance from the Earth played a role in the Cambrian explosion,” reads a caption under some artwork. Research? What research? The only research came from Chinese storytellers performing divination on some rocks. The rocks spoke to them, telling them that Earth tides had changed millions of unobserved Darwin Years ago. And if they changed, the moon must have been farther away. And if it was farther away, there must have been more sunshine. And if there was more sunshine, the oceans must have produced more oxygen. And if there was more oxygen, life had more pressure to evolve. Presto: trilobites!

The extra hours of sunlight, in turn, may have led to oxygenation events that ushered in a period when life’s complexity exploded on Earth, the study researchers say.

Tia can always shift the blame for this logical house of cards. ‘I didn’t claim this; researchers did. I’m just reporting what they said.’ That’s no alibi. A journalist should ask hard questions and maintain critical thinking at all times. The closest thing she came to a critique was to quote the storytellers saying that the results “need to be interpreted with care.” Too late. The gong was sounded after Tia’s headline was read. Her sentence is to do a book report on Darwin’s Doubt and watch Darwin’s Dilemma three times.

An explosion of evolutionary diversification.

Exercise: You can read our analysis of Darwinian claims every day and grin at the credulity of Darwinists, but it’s important that you develop critical thinking skills on your own. Try your hand at analyzing these claims. Keep our Baloney Detector handy. For extra credit, explain your answer to a friend and see if he or she gets it.

• Why herbs evolved to smell and taste so delicious (18 June 2024, New Scientist).
• Dogs might have evolved to read your emotions (18 July 2024, Nature News).
• 520-million-year-old worm fossil solves mystery of how modern insects, spiders and crabs evolved (31 July 2024, Phys.org)
• Mass extinction 66 million years ago triggered rapid evolution of bird genomes, study finds (31 July 2024, Phys.org)