Imaginary Evolution in Real Time

Evolutionists claim to be watching
evolution in action. Their claims,
instead, demonstrate inaction.

 

Why is it necessary to teach Darwinians about their own theory? Charles Darwin’s book was about the origin of species, not variations within species. He wanted to explain bacteria to brains, goo to you, and fish to Gish by a slow, gradual process of natural selection (the Stuff Happens Law). Do any of the following claims of “evolution in real time” qualify as support for such a grand scheme?

Recommended: Before continuing, read “Natural Selection: Where Is It?” from 2 Sept 2019.

Nebraska-led study of mountaineering mice sheds light on evolutionary adaptation (7 Nov 2024, University of Nebraska). *Sigh*. Why do they call this an “evolutionary” adaptation and not just an adaptation? They started with deer mice; they ended with deer mice of the same species. Both young-earth creationists and intelligent design advocates accept change within the family level, claiming it is designed into created kinds so that they can continue thriving when the environment changes. That is not Darwinism.

Bautista said the findings show how adaptation to local conditions can allow a widely distributed species like the deer mouse to thrive in diverse environments.

“It highlights how evolved changes specific to populations help shape their flexibility,” Bautista said. “Ultimately, it is these changes that influence their ability to survive within different habitats.”

Why does he call these “evolved” changes? They could be designed changes. Bautista and team took deer mice up in the mountains and measured their ability to cope with the lowered oxygen levels and cold. The ones who normally lived at higher elevations did better:

Data showed that the highland and lowland deer mouse cousins do not share a general ability to acclimate to hypoxia (low oxygen conditions). As the simulated elevations rose above 4,000 meters, the homefield advantage of the highland mice quickly became apparent. As oxygen levels dropped, the highland mice were better able to regulate body temperature than their lowland counterparts owing to more efficient breathing and circulatory oxygen-transport.

“The results show us that the highlanders and lowlanders do not share a generalized ability to acclimatize to changing environmental conditions,” Bautista said. “Rather, the mice living at higher elevations share evolved ways to acclimatize to low oxygen conditions that are distinct from those of the lowland prairie mice.”

Any genetic data to support this? The press release says that “the highland mice have a genetic advantage that helps suppress thickening of the right ventricle of the heart,” but the paper in PNAS does not ascribe this to Darwinian natural selection of chance mutations. It says of the highland mice “local selection and/or genetic drift play important roles in shaping transcriptomic variation in high-altitude mice.” Well, which is it? This either-or causation gives them an out: maybe it was natural selection, or maybe it was genetic drift.

In addition to the combination of plastic and evolved changes that enhance circulatory O₂ transport in highlanders relative to lowlanders, lowland mice suffer characteristic symptoms of hypoxic pulmonary hypertension (right-ventricle hypertrophy) that are expected to reduce aerobic performance by impairing pulmonary function, whereas highland mice appear to have evolved a means of suppressing these maladaptive side-effects of hypoxia acclimation.

Dr Bautista, please. How do you know they “evolved” this means? All the mice in your study are deer mice. They began as deer mice, and they ended as deer mice. There was no origin of species. Scientists cannot hedge their bets by saying these changes evolved, when it could be due to genetic drift, or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., standing variation), or to designed regulation for adaptability.

If you take a group of human beings from different habitats up in the mountains, some will do better than others. Some will develop altitude sickness and others will feel fine; I have witnessed this on backpacking trips. But all the people would be the same species, Homo sapiens. They did not evolve the ability to avoid altitude sickness. What on earth does this paper and press release have to do with Darwinism?

At levels of hypoxia corresponding to the upper elevational range limits of P. maniculatus (and beyond), the superior thermogenic capacity of highland natives relative to lowland conspecifics indicates that the ability of the species to inhabit such a broad range of elevations is attributable to a combination of genetically based local adaptation and evolved changes in the plastic response to hypoxia in highland natives…. Our results reveal the importance of local adaptation, including evolved, population-specific changes in plasticity and the suppression of maladaptive plasticity, in determining the niche breadth of species that are distributed across environmentally heterogeneous landscapes.

Using the e-word “evolved” gives credit to Charley he doesn’t deserve. Creationists expect phenotypic plasticity that was built into created kinds so that they could spread into a variety of habitats and fill the earth without going extinct at every new environmental challenge. This required foresight by the Engineer of life. It was not due to natural selection of chance mutations. It’s noteworthy that the authors only mentioned “selection” one time, in that bet-hedging phrase referring to “local selection and/or genetic drift” being involved, and never mentioned mutations. They did, however, mention differences in regulation of existing genes that could have accounted for the adaptation. That’s design, not Darwinism.

Evolution in Real Time (7 Oct 2024, Institute of Science and Technology Austria). My, oh my. “Snails on a tiny rocky islet evolved before scientists’ eyes.” Darwin wins again!

OK, calm down. What happened? “The marine snails were reintroduced after a toxic algal bloom wiped them out from the skerry. While the researchers intentionally brought in a distinct population of the same snail species, these evolved to strikingly resemble the population lost over 30 years prior.”

Once again, this is a story of plasticity within one species, not the origin of a new species. The re-introduced snails found the way back to the traits the other population had before. Nothing new evolved. The scientists, eager to worship the Bearded Buddha, breathlessly exclaimed that their experiment gave them “the opportunity to predict and see evolution unfolding before our eyes.” It’s not Darwinian evolution if it is the same species! Remember Charley’s title, “on the origin of species by natural selection”? All the snails belong to one species, Littorina saxatalis. Where’s the evolution?

L. saxatilis is a common species of marine snails found throughout the North Atlantic shores, where different populations evolved traits adapted to their environments. These traits include size, shell shape, shell color, and behavior. The differences among these traits are particularly striking between the so-called Crab- and Wave-ecotype. These snails have evolved repeatedly in different locations, either in environments exposed to crab predation or on wave-exposed rocks away from crabs. Wave snails are typically small, and have a thin shell with specific colors and patterns, a large and rounded aperture, and bold behavior. Crab snails, on the other hand, are strikingly larger, have thicker shells without patterns, and a smaller and more elongated aperture. Crab snails also behave more warily in their predator-dominated environment.

This is as lame as comparing Inuits in Alaska and Masai in Africa and claiming they “evolved” differences. A closer look at ISTA’s claim shows that it had nothing to do with natural selection of chance mutations.

However, the snails did not evolve these traits entirely from scratch. Co-corresponding author Anja Marie Westram, a former postdoc at ISTA and currently a researcher at Nord University, explains, “Some of the genetic diversity was already available in the starting Crab population but at low prevalence. This is because the species had experienced similar conditions in the recent past. The snails’ access to a large gene pool drove this rapid evolution.”

But the authors admit that “A fast selection of traits already present at a low frequency in the transplanted Crab snail population and gene flow from neighboring Wave snails that could have simply rafted over 160 meters to reach the skerry.” Creationists are yawning. Please, guys, stop calling this “evolution in real time.”

Evolution in action: How ethnic Tibetan women thrive in thin oxygen at high altitudes (23 Oct 2024, Case Western Reserve University). The smiling Darwinian professor Cynthia Beall is not ashamed of her racism.

“This is a case of ongoing natural selection,” said Beall, also the university’s Sarah Idell Pyle Professor of Anthropology. “Tibetan women have evolved in a way that balances the body’s oxygen needs without overworking the heart.”

So are the Tibetan women more evolved than lowlanders? Are they the fittest in the struggle for existence? Presumably so, because Dr Beall commits the old tautology of linking fitness with reproduction (see “Fitness for Dummies,” 19 June 2014).

They collected data on the women’s reproductive histories, physiological measurements, DNA samples and social factors. They wanted to understand how oxygen delivery traits in the face of high-altitude hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in the air and the blood) influence the number of live births—a key measure of evolutionary fitness.

Beall and her fellow Darwinians have no way of knowing that the women did not self-select by moving down the mountain if they could not handle the low oxygen. She simply assumes that “natural selection” gave the 400 Tibetan women they measured resistance to hypoxia. Have Tibetans no brains? Don’t they have common sense? Beall turns them into irrational products of mindless processes.

A number of statements in their paper in PNAS show, however, that Beall and her colleagues don’t know anything for sure: e.g.,

• Testing the hypothesis of natural selection acting on adaptive human phenotypes requires integrating many data sources, including reproductive histories, sociocultural factors, physiology, and genotypes.
• Therefore, we hypothesized that these traits would improve reproductive success. This study did not support that hypothesis, perhaps because of the older age range, different measurement protocols, or sensitivity to other environmental factors.
• Generally, these results matched expectations. However, respiratory and pulmonary traits did not predict the number of livebirths.
• Balancing the need for careful measures of physiology with the need for sufficient sample sizes for GWAS will continue to challenge field studies.

Verdict: For the inability to control all the variables, for failing to consider non-Darwinian hypotheses, for the failure to link fitness to chance mutations, for appealing to the Stuff Happens Law (natural selection) instead of rigorous scientific explanation, and for engaging in the racism-tainted habit of attributing fitness to reproductive success, this paper and press release needs to be tossed into the waste bin of bad science masquerading as scholarship.

OK, your turn: Critique this press release from the University of Massachusetts Amherst: “How Playing Songs to Darwin’s Finches Helped UMass Amherst Biologists Confirm Link Between Environment and the Emergence of New Species” (10 Oct 2024). What about this study, if anything, supports Darwin’s contention that new species arise by natural selection of chance mutations, producing fitter individuals? CEH is not always going to be around to lean on. We need our readers to develop their own critical thinking skills.

To teachers and home school parents critical of Darwinism: what is the best way to combat this relentless onslaught of articles claiming that evolution is observable science? The surprising answer is: “teach more evolution”! Why? Young minds need training in advance to see through the empty claims of Darwinians. Avoiding the subject can actually be counter-productive, because students will be exposed to evolutionary indoctrination eventually, especially if they go on to higher education, and can be emotionally overcome by thoughts that they were shielded from hearing about important ideas that all the experts believe. That emotional reaction can sometimes turn a student into an even more dogmatic member of the Darwin Party.

Like it or not, Darwinism is the dominant religion of western science. It cannot be ignored; it must be challenged. We showed you here how to expose the fallacies and ask important questions that the totalitarian censors ignore and don’t want you to ask. Shining sunlight on fogma* makes it dissipate. The pageant of evolution, without the fogma machines, gets exposed as a fantasy grounded on empty ideas. By all means, therefore, do not ignore Darwinism. Expose it for what it is: an empty religion masquerading as science. It is flawed and assailable at all levels. Get good at it. Teach the young to get good at it. Ignoring Darwinian evolutionary theory will not make it go away. Good science, good philosophy and critical thinking are the weapons that will make the Darwin bigots run for cover.

Good read about natural selection: “The Fate of Evolution without Natural Selection” by Neil Thomas, Evolution News, 30 Oct 2024.

*Fogma: dogma so thick you can’t see through it unless you’re outside it. Once surrounded by fogma, it begins to represent all of reality—a shifting, shapeless mass of evolutionary change.