As I mentioned in part 1, you'll occasionally hear there is "overwhelming evidence" for evolution. What's ironic is that likewise:
Evidence against evolution is overwhelming.
If you doubt that, you've lived too long in your evolutionary-bubble. You've focused on the apparent strong links in the chain, while missing the glaring breaks. For those of us who follow these challenges, we can't help but be amused at the 'emperor who has no clothes'
Some examples
The concept of Genetic Entropy (coined by Dr Sanford, see below) is simple: Our genomes are getting worse over time due to a build up of copy-mistakes.
Consider these quotes from “Human genome decay and the origin of life” – Journal of Creation, Vol 28(1), 2014. pp 91:
- “our genomes are decaying towards extinction from copy errors alone”
- “When decay in copy fidelity is projected backwards in time it reaches perfection around 4,000 BC”
- “projected forwards, extinction from copy errors alone occurs in thousands, not millions, of years”
- Evolutionary geneticist Alexey Kondrashov asked, “Why aren’t we dead 100 times over?” because of this build up of errors.
This topic was introduced by Dr Sanford in his book: Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome – Dr J.C Sanford.
Since that book came out, there is a growing amount of evidence to support this notion of Genetic Entropy. Enough that I'm not going to try and post it here...with updates.
If you love science, and love creation, this topic should keep you excited to be a Creationist. Go research it.
If I were an evolutionist, I would be embarrassed at the fossil record. That is NO understatement. Among the many challenges is one of the most well-known: The Cambrian Explosion, where in a 'geological instance' almost all body-plans burst onto the scene.
This problem is well documented and well known, so I won't give details here other than list it as one of the 'overwhelming' arguments against evolution.
What's more is that the Cambrian Explosion is just one of many 'explosions' in the fossil record; which makes them not just a one-off serious problem... but a theme!
This, plus numerous other problems make The Fossil record an embarrassment to evolutionists.
According to neo-Darwinism, the incredible diversity of life came about by a trial-and-error through accidental tinkering of the genome (via mutations). Supposedly this mechanism took ocean worms and eventually 'tinkered around' to develop fins, legs, wings, hearts, lungs, etc.
One thing modern genetic research in the area of TODO: Define it here developmental biology has revealed shouts "I don't think so". The incredible complexity and networked-style nature of the area of the genome involved in a life forms' early development is extremely resistant to tinkering.
This leaves evolutionists pondering: if life's diversity came about by trial-and-error tinkering, why do we see a genome that looks amazing designed with tight inter-coupling, inter-dependence, and networking that is highly resistant to 'tinkering'?
Go read this article: The four dimensional human genome defies naturalistic explanations
The article describes this picture above. It comes with the following description:
Figure 1: A comparison of the control of transcription in E. Coli (left) with the Linux call graph (right). The bacterial cell is able to control many protein-coding genes (green lines at bottom) with relatively few controls (yellow and purple lines). Linux, while obviously a result of intelligent design, falls far short in that it requires many more high-level instructions to control relatively few outputs. From Yan et al. 2010
As a software developer, I get what is being conveyed here loud and clear. The articles explains four levels of complexity (or abstraction to use a software engineering term). I honestly cannot do the article justice, Dr. Carter says it best himself. You really need to read this article. One profound quote:
Our computer programs are essentially one-dimensional. The human genome operates in four dimensions. This is one of the greatest testimonies to the creative brilliance of God available.
If I were to try and sum up this article as concise as I could, I would point out two things we can learn from this:
- An incredible amount of foresight had to go into making something so inter-connected, taking great advantage of "code re-use" (as any good software engineer would do).
- Such tightly connected graphs of re-use cannot appear via some hap-hazard trial and error approach like Darwinism.
This one items is fatal to neo-Darwinism. If you disagree, then you do not fully understand this problem. Either that or you are living in denial.
This one is similar to the previous, but here I want to focus on one incredible aspect of our genome: Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes. Consider one quote from this article:
One of the intriguing things about DNA sequences is that a single sequence can “encode” more than one piece of information depending on what is “reading” it and in which direction
As a software developer, I am amazed at how obvious this shouts "Design!". I've seen source code that was obviously cobbled together in a patch-work fashion, were the end-product was not fully thought-through, and pieces were continually patched on just enough to get the thing to work. If neo-Darwinism was the approach used to develop source code, the final source code would appear even worse than these. We developers call this mess: "Spaghetti code"
But now imagine compiled source code that actually has multiple implementations depending upon where you started reading it, and which direction you read it in. Code that would implement one feature when read in one direction, and another feature when read in the opposite direction. That would result in some highly concise code! Something developers strive for. But in all my years as a developer, I've never seen it accomplished.
Here's one big reason why coders don't strive for this type of code: It's very challenging to pull off. Any small change to the code run in one direction would have an adverse affect on the implementation in the opposite direction. That's certainly not code you could just put together quickly.
BUT GET THIS: Our genome (which is code) has such complexity!
That is why as a software developer I cannot help but LAUGH OUT-LOUD at those who think this complexity could come about by some terrible trial-and-error, no-goal-oriented "process" of mutations and selection. I'm sorry to say this so bluntly, but if you think it can, you are an utter fool. And let me add one more observation: You must not value science.
One seriously significant challenge to evolution is how to account for the significant increase of information in the genome when going from a single-celled organism to higher life forms like humans. We're talking about roughly a Consider that double an amount is only a one-fold increase! So yeah, 1000-fold is quite a bit! 1000-fold increase in DNA base-pairs. There's a LOT of information that needs to be added to create things like immune systems, circulatory systems, lungs, livers, legs...you get the idea.
Their "answer"
When pushed on the topic, many evolutionists reply with their standard hand-waving - "No problem: gene duplication followed by modification".
Ok, Is that your final answer? Or better yet, Is that your scientific answer?
Let's review "science"
Following the scientific method involves taking a prediction (a hypothesis) and testing it, generally in the form of making observations and gathering a significant enough amount of data to support the hypotheses. Take water cycles as an example. Once it was thought that rain and snow was not a sufficient enough explanation to answer were all the water came from to supply rivers:
It turns out after making scientific observations (running tests and gathering data), rain and snow were MORE than enough to supply the water. In fact they had to find out where some of it went.
Today we can provide you with a great amount of data regarding water cycles: amounts of evaporation, amounts of ground absorption, amounts of vapor released from plants, etc.
So what kind of upward-evolution, feature-adding, new-functional-coded-element, information-adding data have we gathered regarding this "gene-duplication with modification" mechanism? Do we have good numbers on things like:
- Frequency of new enzymes developing from this mechanism for a given species (or ANY species)?
- Average numbers of generations between each new information-adding events?
- Number of information-added events with this method compared to some other information-added method?
- Comparison of the amount of information-adding events over the information-subtracting events (because they DO happen), showing that a net-increase DOES occur.
- etc, etc, etc...You know, "scientific DATA"
SO...What kind of data have we collected?? Again, evolutionists need a seriously significant method. Just like all that water flowing down a river, it's got to come from somewhere. Do you think their numbers look good?
Here's where this topic get extremely sad for the evolutionist: As much as I've followed this topic (because I have tried to pay attention), it's not just a matter of their data not looking good, it's more like THEY HAVE PRACTICALLY NO DATA. I've seen a tiny handful of 'supposed' examples, which turn out to be nothing more than speculation. Seriously, practically NO data to support this hypothesis! You need enough gathered data to provide answers in a statistical fashion. THAT'S what science is about. I'm still waiting to see ONE GOOD SIGNIFICANT UNDENIABLE EXAMPLE! And no, nylonase isn't it.
...which gets me back to my question: Is that what you would call a "scientific" answer?? Sounds more like a pipe-dream, a fairy-tail, wishful thinking. Evolutionists: I hate to inform you, but "science" is not on your side. It makes me wonder if you actually value science.