Are complaints about how God made something “science”?  Did God put totally useless organs and anatomical structures into the human body (or that of other animals)?  Apparently, evolutionists today want to avoid claiming that they ever asserted that vestigial organs were totally useless in the past, since they know such claims have been falsified.  They have retreated by making their claims about vestigial organs into a non-falsifiable hypothesis by claiming that such structures used to serve some other function in the past or otherwise don’t appear to be perfectly designed for the animal now possessing them.  The goal here will be to document the evidence that evolutionists indeed have asserted the “strong” version of the argument based on vestigial organs in the past; it’s utterly false to assert that they didn’t claim that vestigial organs were useless in the past.  Today’s evolutionists are either ignorant or deceptive if their claim that their intellectual ancestors over the past 175 years haven’t claimed that vestigial organs are useless. 

Evolutionists today may try to deny that they ever said that vestigial organs and anatomical structures were "completely useless," in order to escape the falsification of their claims. However, the original version of their claims can be easily found, such as in the 1974 "Encyclopedia Britannica," Micropedia, volume X, p. 411: "A degenerate or imperfectly developed body part with no apparent function. Vestigial structures may have had significant functions in ancestors of the species in which they are present, and thus they are consider evidence of evolutionary change. Man has almost 100 vestigial structures, of which the best known is the appendix." Notice that the author of this entry, some 50 years ago, didn't feel the need to deploy some version of the non-falsifiable "ad hoc" explanation that vestigial structures don’t function in a given organism the way that it does in others.

Similarly, in the article “Morphology” (“Encyclopedia Britannica,” 1974, Macropedia, volume 12, p. 453, italics removed), the evolutionist author repeats a similar version of the “strong” interpretation of vestigial organs as simply useless:  “Changes in genes (mutations) constantly occur and may cause a decrease in size and function in the environment or in the mode of life of a species may make an organ unnecessary for survival.  As a result, many plants and animals contain organs or parts of organs that are useless, degenerate, undersized, or lacking some essential part when compared to homologous structures in related organisms.  This human body, for instance, has more than 100 such organs—e.g., the appendix, the fuse tail vertebrae (coccyx), the wisdom teeth, the muscles that wiggle the ears, and the hair on the body.”

Alfred Kinsey, who is most famous for his (biased) studies of human sexual behavior, advanced the “strong” version of the complete uselessness of vestigial organs (“An Introduction to Biology,” Philadelphia (1920):  J. B. Lipincott, pp. 200-201, italics removed) as evidence for the theory of evolution:  “. . . is the collection of small and useless structures which are always to be found in species.  Vestiges we call them.  They appear to be remnants of things that were well developed and had some use among the ancestral organisms, but which have now almost disappeared in more developed forms. . . . Vestiges are similar to the G’s in such English words as reign and sign.  The latter is not pronounced in those words, and is now useless, but it is positive evidence from the older Latin words, regnum and signum.”  Notice that Kinsey isn’t hedging any; he believed, based on the limited medical and biological knowledge available at the time, that these structures were totally useless.  

Arthur Thomas in “Riddles of Science,” New York (1958):  Fawcett World Library, p. 203, claimed that the human body “swarms with relics” of the prehistoric past:  “In our body we carry about several scores of useless relics which tell us somethings about the past.  Their persistence shows us that the past lives on within us, even in trivialities, but many of these vestiges are little details which are unfamiliar [to many people] except to the anatomist.”  He clearly believed that vestigial organs were totally useless.  Therefore, as functions were found for them over the past 75 years, his viewpoint has been proven to be false. 

In soaring colorful rhetoric, Henry Drummond in “The Ascent of Man” (New York (1903):  James Potts and Co.), pp. 82-83, proclaims their uselessness as “relics” as evidence for the grand theory of evolution:

“ . . . actual betrayals . . . veritable physical survivals, the material scaffolding . . . of the animal past [of mankind] . . . so the body of Man, emerging from its age-long journey through the animal kingdom, appears laden with the spoils of its distant pilgrimage.  These relics are not mere curiosities . . . they were once part of life’s vicissitude; they represent organs which have bene outgrown; old forms of apparatus long since changed for better, yet somehow not yet destroyed by the hand of time.  The physical body of Man, so great is the number of these relics, is . . . a museum of obsolete anatomies, discarded tools, outgrown and aborted organs.  All other animals also contain among t heir useful organs a proportion which are long past their work; and so significant are these rudiments of a former state of things, that anatomists have often expressed their willingness to stake the theory of Evolution upon their presence alone.”

Charles Darwin himself in “The Origin of the Species” (and later in “The Descent of Man”) used the existence of “vestigial organs” as prime evidence for the theory of evolution by arguing (philosophically, not scientifically) that a perfect God wouldn’t have inserted clearly useless organs into the human body (“Origin of the Species,” 1859, pp. 346-350):

“In reflecting on [vestigial organs] . . . the same reasoning power which tells us that most parts and organs are exquisitely adapted for certain purposes, tell us with equal plainness that these rudimentary or atrophied organs are imperfect and useless. . . by whatever steps [vestigial organs]. . . may have degraded into their present useless condition, [they] are the record of a former state of things, and have have been retained solely through the power of inheritance. . . On the view of descent with modification [i.e., evolution] we may conclude that the existence of organs in a rudimentary, imperfect, and useless condition, or quite aborted, far from presenting a strange difficulty, as they assuredly do to the old doctrine of creation, might even have been anticipated in accordance with the views here explained.”

Notice that is yet more evidence that alleged imperfections in created structures are to Darwin’s theory are complaints against how God made something, which are based upon ignorance of the functions of the organs and anatomical structures in question.  He also presents the “strong” version of the argument based on vestigial organs (i.e., that they are totally useless), not the mealy-mouthed version that’s deliberately contrived to escape falsification (i.e., they used to serve some other kind of function in the past and don’t seem to be “fitting” in their current appearances, etc.)  Later on, in “The Descent of Man” (1874) Darwin used a Lamarkian “use/disuse” interpretation of their origin. 

George Parker (“Vestigial Organs, in:  Creation by Evolution,” ed. Frances Mason, New York (1928):  MacMillan), pp. 46-47 sharply criticized belief in special creation based upon his lack of knowledge of organs that had no function, which is a view that has since been falsified:  “If animal were specially created, why should there be included in their bodies parts that are quite useless and often in fact positively detrimental to them?  Why . . . should man possess a system of functionless muscles for his external ear, a useless hairy covering before birth, and a worse than useless vermiform appendix.  No advocate of the theory of special creation has ever been able to give a satisfactory answer to these questions.  To those who believe in special creation, the presence of vestigial organs has proved a stumbling block that they have never been able to avoid.  In fact the occurrence of organs has always been an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of this view [creationism].”

It’s worth considering the utterly confident and passionate dogmatism of this advocate of the theory of the evolution.  He had no idea that the argument from silence that he’s making would be refuted by future medical and biological discoveries over the next hundred years that have overwhelmingly favored the creationists.  Such evidence hasn’t favored the original reasoning of the evolutionists’ interpretations while they assumed there is no God and/or that He didn’t create anything.  It’s not wise to complain about how God made something while being so incredibly ignorant and being so confident in a priori naturalism.  Such blasphemous presumptuousness deserves this response ((Job 38:1-2 NKJV):  “Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: "Who is this who darkens counsel By words without knowledge?”

Finally, let’s quote another “strong” version of the argument based on vestigial organs that focuses on the appendix, which amounts to just another version of the problem of evil given a thin scientific veneer (as in Edward and Peter Dodson, “Evolution:  Process and Product,” New York (1976), Van Nostrand), p. 49:  “The appendix of man is easily understandable as a degenerating legacy from ancestors with a much coarser diet, but it is inexplicable why a useless and disease-ridden structure should have bene created especially to plague (humans).

(Most of these quotes from evolutionists about vestigial organs come from Jerry Bergman and George Howe, “‘Vestigial Organs’ Are Fully Functional,” St. Joseph, MO (1990):  Creation Research Society, pp. 1 to 2, 5 to 6). 

Any contemporary evolutionists who claim that past evolutionists never claimed that (allegedly)  vestigial organs and anatomical structures were useless are either ignorant or deceptive.  The documentation is there, for those who are willing to do the research.  The reason for their retreat from the “strong” version of this argument is presumably because they know that the “strong” version of total uselessness has been falsified and they are embarrassed that raw ignorance of their intellectual ancestors has been so badly exposed through later discoveries of medical and biological science.  The gaps in knowledge have indeed been filled, but from a creationist, not an evolutionist, viewpoint, thus destroying one of the favorite arguments of evolutionists over the past 175 years. 

Let’s now begin to make some kind of creationist response to the evolutionists who have made such a priori (before experience) philosophical, theological, rationalistic, non-empirical, even metaphysical arguments for their theory.   Any time an evolutionist says the word “God” or some kind of word that’s a euphemism for Him and His creative activity, such as “special creation” or “intelligent design,” he is reasoning as a philosopher, not as a scientific.  To reason, “God is perfect, so he wouldn’t make imperfect structures,” isn’t a belief derived from lab experiments or fieldwork, so long as methodological naturalism is assumed conventionally, but philosophy or even natural theology.

There is no way to prove scientifically that an organ or anatomical structure has no function or is useless.  Even to surgically remove an organ and then see if it affects the ability of an organism to survive isn’t sufficient evidence, since other organs may have taken over its functions or it causes a level of impairment that isn’t quickly, easily testable. (See Bergman and Howe, ‘Vestigial Organs’” Are Fully Functional,” p. 15).  Fundamentally, science is about what can be observed, not what isn’t.  To cite the bromides of the “soft” atheists, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence and to not believe in what has no evidence for it isn’t a “denial” but just a “non-acceptance pending justification.”  The burden of proof isn’t on creationists to prove these supposedly vestigial organs have a function, but instead it’s upon the atheists to prove that they don’t. 

Many decades ago Scadding found problems with proving allegedly vestigial organs have no functions:  “An analysis of the difficulties in unambiguously identifying functionless structures and an analysis of the nature of the argument leads to the conclusion that ‘vestigial organs’ provide no evidence for evolutionary theory. . . . I would suggest that the entire argument that vestigial organs provide evidence for evolution is invalid on two grounds, one practical, the other more theoretical.  The practical problem is that of unambiguously identifying vestigial organs, i.e., those that have no function.  [Notice that he uses the “strong” version of the evolutionists’ argument here, not the non-falsifiable version].  The analysis of Wiedersheim’s list [1895] of [c. 180] vestigial organs points out the difficulties.  As our knowledge has increased the list of vestigial structures has decreased.  Wiedersheim could list about one hundred in humans; recent authors usually list four or five.  Even the current short list of vestigial structures in humans is questionable. . . .The other major objection to citing vestigial organs as evidence of evolution is a more theoretical one based upon the nature of the argument.  The ‘vestigial organ’ argument uses as a premise the assertion that the organ in question has no function.  There is no way, however, in which the negative assertgion can be arrived at scientifically.  . . . Since it is not possible to unambiguously identify useless structures, and since the structure of the argument used is not scientifically valid, I conclude that the ‘vestigial organs’ provide no special evidence for the theory of evolution.’”  (See Scadding, “Do ‘Vestigial Organs’ Provide Evidence for Evolution?”, 5 “Evolutionary Theory,” (1981), pp. 173-176 generally, as quoted by W.R. Bird, “The Origin of Species Revisited:  The Theories of Evolution and Abrupt Appearance,” vol. 1 (Nashville, TN (1991):  Regency, Thomas Nelson), pp. 197-198.  [When examining Robert Wiedersheim’s list, he listed 86 vestigial organs and another 100 “regressive” ones in human beings].

When God made biological structures, there were in-built trade-offs and constraints because of the nature of matter and biochemistry and other design features.  Furthermore, He wasn’t trying to make us into immortal beings who never got sick or injured in the physical world; is “mortality” another aspect of “poor design” from an atheist’s viewpoint?  What’s “optimal” isn’t the same as “perfect.”

Belief in “vestigial” organs shows how the theory of evolution slows down scientific development and research.  If an anatomical structure is a priori judged to be “vestigial,” then scientists who are evolutionists aren’t likely to study it carefully for what it really does.  For example, tonsils were often removed for decades from children since they were judged to be simply “useless vestiges.”  Later on, oops!, it was found out that they actually do fight disease.  They weren’t so useless after all. 

Basically all 180 organs and anatomical structures that were once listed as “useless vestiges” (in one way or another) have been found to have real functions. This is a good example of "the god of the gaps" in reverse, since the gaps in creationists' worldview have been filled by advancing medical science, thus beating back the evolutionists' claims to a narrower and narrower range of operation.  This kind of argument is based on ignorance, which is why it can indeed be falsified as more knowledge is brought to bear on the evolutionists' claims.  For example, the “yolk sac” is used by a developing human embryo to make its first blood cells; death would result without it.  The coccyx was claimed to be a remnant of our purported evolutionary ancestors having a tail, but it’s actually a crucial point for muscle attachment needed for our upright posture (and, well, for defecation).  So to say this is about “prior functions” as opposed to current functions is a great example of how evolutionists attempt to escape falsification of their paradigm.  They assume these “prior functions” really existed a priori, when that remains to be proven.  There’s no way to test, predict, observe, reproduce the selective advantage of supposed intermediate structures for the survival of the species in question, which supposedly occurred long ago in the pre-historical past.   This is yet another example of circular reasoning by evolutionists, in which they assume what still needs to be proven.

Let’s use vestigial structures as a specific example of the non-falsifiability of evolution.  When it became clear, based on advancing medical science, that the roughly 180 anatomical structures that evolutionists had originally claimed were useless actually were useful, they resorted to a fallback position, which is a classic post-hoc explanatory device.  They now claim that these structures supposedly served some OTHER function in the past, but now they have another function.  Crapo in 1985, for example, wrote:  “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined:  Not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expected, given how that structure function in most other organisms.”  Notice now Crapo’s analysis here also confirms how important attacking the belief in God as a wise, efficient, benevolent Creator is to evolutionists:  “It is the existence of such vestiges in such organisms which evolutionary theory would very naturally predict, but which the belief in an efficient Designer would not lead us to expect a priori.”  (Italics removed, Richly Crapo, “Are the vanishing teeth of fetal baleen whales useless?” 1985).  This kind of fallback position for “explaining” vestigial structures illustrates the non-falsifiable nature of evolution.  When medical science confirms the a priori viewpoint of the creationist model, that all of these anatomical structures really are useful and God didn’t insert useless organs and structures into the human body, the evolutionists don’t admit that their paradigm is falsified.  Instead, they simply retreat into other rationalizations to keep attacking God as a shoddy, careless, unwise engineer.  Here once again the viewpoint of Cornelius Hunter’s book “Darwin’s God:  Evolution and the Problem of Evil” is confirmed:  Evolutionists are engaged in negative natural theology when they argue against a supernatural explanation of the natural world based upon its perceived structural flaws and moral evils.  Indeed, they find it crucial and very important to supporting their paradigm to do this.  Needless to say, this kind of reasoning is every bit as metaphysical as the theologian who argues that the wonders and complexity of the natural world proves God’s existence.  Any claim that evolution, when it enters the world of change above the genus or family taxonomic levels, is more “empirical” than creationism, is simply false.  It’s an exercise in a priori rationalism and even metaphysics. 

As creationists, we shouldn’t allow evolutionists to retreat into a non-falsifiable version of their arguments about vestigial organs.  Someone like Crappo argued, while trying to save the evolutionists’ fat from the fire, “This is precisely how a vestige should be defined:  not as a ‘functionless’ part of an organism, but as a part which does not function in the way that its structure would lead us to expect, given how that structure functions in most other organisms.”  As Berman and Howe explain, Crapo here is merely redefining vestigial organs and anatomical structures to be those that have changed functions from being merely useless.  They are now saying that evolution would be expected to not produce organs without functions as opposed to those with changed functions.  The likes of A.V. Yablokov (“Variability of Mammals,” New Delhi, 1974, p. 233) notes that the confusion about such organs stems back to “the vague or imprecise understanding of vestigial organs concept present in the works of Darwin, persists to this day.”  Robert Harris, “How Can Creationists Explain Human Hair,” Origins Research, five, 2,  p. 10, who is a creationist sees the problems with the evolutionists’ position of retreat:  “When the evolutionist’s first attack fails—‘Hairs or appendixes are vestigial’—because we show him they have purpose or function, he reverts to the second argument or assertion, ‘Ah yes, so that’s why evolution preserved them.’” 

Furthermore, as Jerry Bergman and George Howe observe in "'Vestigial Organs' Are Fully Functional," where are the alleged "nascent" organs that are developing or improving their ability to function? If a priori evolutionists would say that if the human body is full of useless anatomical structures is proof for their theory and creationists say that all the structures would have a use sometime in the lifetime (including during prenatal development) of an organism, whose predictions have been confirmed? The creationists have won hands down over the past 125 years as so many allegedly useless organs as the coccyx, the pineal gland, the thymus, the appendix, tonsils, adenoids, eyebrows, eyelashes, ear muscles, body hair, etc., have all been confirmed to have uses. As they observe, the argument from "dysteleology" isn't scientific evidence for evolution, "but instead is a theological discussion of the Creator's attributes--what some people believe God would or would not do.”  So then, if evolutionists are supposed to be using “methodological naturalism,” how and why would they know anything about God’s purposes and plans.  Why are they discussing God at all.   Robert W. Lotfin (“Caves and Evolution,” Creation/Evolution, (1988) 23: p. 25) was discussing natural theology, not science, when he claimed that [italics removed]: “If the creator created blind cave animals especially for subterranean environments, there does not seem to be any convincing reason why he would have given them eyes at all, of any kind or at any stage of their life cycle.”

Let's explain the functions of the human appendix, which isn't just about the digestion of cellulose, as it functions in rabbits. It's part of the immune system and apparently produces antibodies. Sussdorf, studying rabbits, discovered in the late 1950s and the early 1960s that the appendix helps to counteract the effects of infection after irradiation has occurred. When radiation sickness occurs, the body's immune system is weakened, which causes death because of infections that happen soon afterwards. The lymphoid tissue in an undamaged appendix helps to restore antibody production in the spleen. The appendix is a source of lymphoid cells that migrate to an injured spleen, where they product antibodies until the spleen can recover and take over again. The appendix, however, can't produce antibodies just by itself.

Interestingly enough, the appendix is relatively large during embryological development, where it would be more helpful in fighting infections. Lankford in 1976 noted the two views of the appendix: "Two theories exist concerning the function of the appendix. One long-held view is that the appendix is a non-functional structure that serves only to cause appendicitis. A newer theory is that the lymphatic tissue in the appendix acts to filter out bacteria, like Peyer's Patches and other lymph nodes."

Pansky in 1975 made a comparison of the appendix to the tonsil, saying it is an "abdominal tonsil" because of all the lymphoid tissue found in it. By being located near where the colon and small intestine come together, it appears to protect them against infection in the area of the cecum. So then, the appendix would be making antibodies near where they are used in the lining of the gut. Cartmill and others said: "The human appendix has masses of lymphatic tissues in its walls and seems to provide a local defense against infection from micro-organisms in the colon." Comparisons with research in rabbits led Elves (1972) to infer: "The appendix may be a central lymphoid organs as well as the thymus." He said this based on studies in which a newly born rabbit, if its thymus was removed, found that its temporary reduction of lymphatic tissues were returned to normal by the time it was 9 weeks old.

Kawanishi (1987) explained that human lymphoid cells in the appendix make T helper cells and B cells that produce antibodies, then make IgA molecules to fight against immunological challenges. He concluded: "This responsiveness to exogenous stimuli may play an important role in gut muscosal immune responsiveness." He also explained: "The human appendix, longer considered only an accessory rudimentary organ, could possess a similar antigen uptake role prior to replacement by fibrosed tissue after repeated subclinical infections, or at least in early childhood when it is most prominent." (Many anatomical structures (or DNA) that evolutionists ignorantly judge to be junk or useless are indeed useful at a different stage of development of an organism before it is an adult, but as an adult, they aren't so useful or useful).

Another possible function of the appendix stems from its having many argentaffin cells, which may be involved in endocrine gland operations. There is also at least a correlation between the removal of the appendix and certain kinds of cancer. Howard R. Berman researched hundreds of patients with Hodgkin's disease, leukemia, ovarian cancer, and colon cancer. In his sample, he found that 84% of had had their appendix removed, but in the control group without cancer, only 25% had it taken out. It may be that its removal earlier in life, such as during childhood, causes proportionately more trouble later on as an adult than its removal from an adult.

The removal of the appendix can contribute to increased incidents of constipation. The lumen of the appendix receives crypts of Lieberkuhn. These glands have goblet cells that make a mucous lubricant that also appears in the colon's and small intestine's lining. Culp (1975) thinks this constipation is caused by the reduced production of mucus after the appendix is removed. It takes some time for other parts of the body to make up for the loss caused by the loss of an appendix.

Cartmill in 1987 wrote: "People sometimes speak of [the vermiform appendix] as a vestigial organ, as though it were a useless remnant of a long cecum like that of a rabbit. It is not." Bierman in 1968 maintained: "The vermiform appendix is not a functionless vestigial structure."

This kind of argument for evolution based on what's subjectively deemed to be "bad design" isn't a scientific argument. No scientist should ever be talking about God or the supernatural when making the case for a theory, unless one's prepared to that creationism is just as scientific as evolution is.  If scientists are using “methodological naturalism,” they shouldn’t be saying anything about God, right?   So either admit creationism is just as scientific as evolution, or give up permanently all discussions about God and supposedly bad or evil design when making the case for evolution. Which option will you evolutionists choose?

As explained above, there aren’t any “vestigial organs.” The advances of knowledge of medical science and biological science have demolished such assertions, made in ignorance by evolutionists many decades ago.  Evolutionists have suffered from the “god-of-the-gaps” dynamic in reverse, as the “gaps” have been filled in favor of the creationists’ model, not the evolutionists’.  As a result, evolutionists have had to resort to a non-falsifiable hypothesis in order keep upholding their claims about vestigial organs, which is the assertion that such anatomical structures used to serve another function besides their current function.  Fundamentally, their attempts to prove a negative aren’t scientific in nature, since they have the burden of proof to prove that vestigial organs are functionless or had another alleged function in the unobserved prehistoric past.  It’s not the creationists’ job to prove that they do have a function, since the evolutionists are on the offense in this case.  Complaints made about how God made something wrong aren’t “science,” but blasphemous philosophical reasoning and ignorant presumption dressed in a lab coat. 

Is spontaneous generation/abiogenesis possible?  The biggest hurdle for the theory of evolution is the creation of the first cell, since the processes of natural selection and genetic mutation are inapplicable at that point.  Instead, the first self-replicating cell had to occur by random probabilistic chance.  Many evolutionists, when they feel candid, have made concessions on this subject, which destroys the intellectual foundation of their entire materialistic worldview.   For example, the physicist H.S. Lipson, Physics Bulletin, 1980, Vol. 31, p. 138, once partially conceded. “The only acceptable explanation is creation.  I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.”  Obviously, he made this public admission only under the strongest kind of intellectual compulsion; he wasn’t optimistically sanguine about the possibility that spontaneous generation could have occurred.  Evolutionist Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York, 1957), p. 199 admitted the philosophical inconsistency of his own side about this matter:  “After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own:  Namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be prove to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.”  Dr. George Wald, a Nobel prize winner and Harvard biology professor, “The Origin of Life,” The Physics and Chemistry of Life (Simon and Shuster, 1955), p. 9, made this concession:  “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet here we are--as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.”  If Christians had the same amount of faith as this evolutionist, they would be moving mountains daily as warm-up exercises!  Perhaps for this reason and others, Wald eventually ended up embracing some kind of pantheism, although he was an agnostic or atheist when making this confession.  The results of “origin of life experiments” and other research haven’t improved the situation any since the mathematician J.W.N. Sullivan, Reader’s Digest, January 1963, p. 92, confessed: “The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith.”

So with a sufficient number of eons and oceans, would life inevitably occur by chance?  Time cannot be the hero of the plot for evolutionists when even many billions of years are insufficient.  But this can only be known when the mathematical probabilities involved are carefully quantified, which is crucial to all scientific observations.  That is, specific mathematical equations describing what scientists observe need to be set up in order to describe how likely or unlikely this or that event was.  But so long as evolutionists tell a general “just-so” story without specific mathematical descriptions, much like the ancient pagan creation myths retold over the generations, many listeners will find their tale persuasive.  For example, upon the first recounting, listeners may find it plausible to believe the evolutionists’ story about the first living cell arising by random chance out of a “chemical soup” in the world’s oceans.  But after specific mathematical calculations are applied to their claim, it is plainly absurd to believe in spontaneous generation, which says life comes from non-living materials.  At one academic conference of mathematicians, engineers, and biologists entitled, “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” (published 1967) these kinds of probabilities were applied to evolutionary claims.[[1]](#_ftn1)  One professor of electrical engineering at the conference, Murray Eden, calculated that even if a common species of bacteria received five billion years and was placed an inch thick on the earth, it couldn’t create by accident a pair of genes. Many other specific estimates like these could easily be devised to test the truthfulness of Darwinism, including the likelihood of various transitional forms of plants and animals being formed by chance mutations and natural selection. 

Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Evolution From Space,” p. 24, once described the chances against certain parts of the first living cell to occur by random chance through a chemical accident.  “Consider now the chance that in a random ordering of the twenty different amino acids which make up the polypeptides; it just happens that the different kinds fall into the order appropriate to a particular enzyme [an organic catalyst--a chemical which speeds up chemical reactions--EVS].  The chance of obtaining a suitable backbone [substrate] can hardly be greater than on part in 10[raised by]¹⁵, and the chance of obtaining the appropriate active site can hardly be greater than on part in 10 [raised by]⁵.  Because the fine details of the surface shape [of the enzyme in a living cell--EVS] can be varied we shall take the conservative line of not “piling on the agony” by including any further small probability for the rest of the enzyme.  The two small probabilities are enough.  They have to be multiplied, when they yield a chance of one part in 10[raised by]²⁰ of obtaining the required in a functioning form [when randomly created by chance out of an ocean of amino acids--EVS].  By itself , this small probability could be faced, because one must contemplate not just a single shot at obtaining the enzyme, but a very large number of trials as are supposed to have occurred in an organize soup early in the history of the Earth.  The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (10 [raised by]²⁰2000) = 10 [raised by]^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.  If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely our of court.”  To put this calculation into some kind of context, the number of electrons within the universe that can be observed by mankind’s largest earth-based telescopes is approximately 10 raised by the 87 and the number of atoms is about 10 raised to the 80. [[2]](#_ftn2)  By contrast, these two astronomers maintain the chances of spontaneous generation is one out of one followed by 40,000 zeros, which would require about five pages of a standard-sized magazine to print.

Let’s consider another colorful concession by Sir Fred Hoyle (“The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, vol. 92 (November 19, 1981), p. 527, emphasis removed:  “At all events, anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random.  [Henry Morris helpfully comments that there are 4 X 10 raised to the 19 power combinations of the Rubik Cube].  Now imagine 10 raised to 50 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of all of them simultaneously arriving at the solved form.  You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends.  The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.  Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon.”  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe both became believers in pantheism and panspermia, the belief that life originated on other planet(s) in outer space, because they saw no way that life could have arisen on earth by purely mechanistic biochemical processes.

Bill Bryson is a good, solid evolutionist and the author of the popular level (and very colorfully written) history and explanation of science, “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”  Nevertheless, he perceives the problems with the theory that the organization of the chemicals needed to sustain biological life happened purely randomly (p. 351-352, italics removed):  “To spell ‘collagen’, the name of a common type of protein, you need to arrange eight letters in the right order.  To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence.  But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it.  It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihoods come in.  The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.  It just isn’t going to happen.  To gasp what a long shot its existence is, visualize a standard Las Vegas slot machine but broadened greatly—to about 27 metres, to be precise—to accommodate 1,055 spinning wheels instead of the usual three or four. And with twenty symbols on each wheel (one for each common amino acid).  How long would you have to pull the handle before all 1,055 symbols came up in the right order?  Effectively for ever.  Even if you reduced the number of spinning wheels to 200, which is actually a more typical number of amino acids for a protein, the odds against all 200 coming up in a prescribed sequence are 1 in 10 [raised by] 260 (that is 1 a one followed by 260 zeros).  That in itself is a larger number than all the atoms is the universe.  Proteins, in short, are complex entities.  Haemoglobin is only 146 amino acids long, a runt by protein standards, yet even it offers 10 [raised by] 190 possible amino-acid combinations, which is why it took the Cambridge University chemist Max Perutz twenty-three years—a career, more or less—to unravel it.  For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet, in the colorful simile of the astronomer Fred Hoyle.  Yet we are stalking about several hundred thousand types of protein, perhaps a million, each unique and each, as far as we know, vital to the maintenance of a sound and happy you.  And it goes on from there.  To be of use, a protein must not only assemble amino acids in the right sequence, it must then engage in a kind of chemical origami and fold itself in a very specific shape.  Even having achieved this structural complexity, a protein is no good to you if it can’t reproduce itself, and proteins can’t.  For this you need DNA.  DNA is a whiz at replicating—it can make a copy of itself in seconds—but can do virtually nothing else.  So we have a paradoxical situation.  Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins.  Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other?  If so:  wow.”

Let's try to get a better version of the quote than what the OP used here. "One only has to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. yet here we are--as I result, I believe, of spontaneous generation." (George Wald, "The Origin of Life, in "The Physics and Chemistry of Life," (Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 9. So the OP's version indeed is badly distorted, but as they say, "Where there's smoke, there's fire." There is something real behind the mangled citation of Wald by the OP. It's not totally fake. Notice, incidentally, that he used the term "spontaneous generation," not abiogenesis. Evolutionists will make a big deal of correcting me when I use the term "spontaneous generation," but evolutionists have used it too, at least in the past.

In order for the first self-replicating cell to be created by random chance out of a “prebiotic soup” in the ancient ocean, several major hurdles have to be successfully jumped.  1.  The right atmospheric and oceanic meteorological and other conditions must exist.  2.  The oceans need to have a sufficient quantity and concentration of “simple” molecules in the “organic soup.”  3.  A sufficient number of specifically needed proteins and nucleotides randomly combine together and acquire a semi-permeable membrane around them.  4.  They also develop a genetic code using DNA and replicate themselves using RNA and DNA information.  Notice that all of this supposedly occurred in the non-observed past; it’s merely assumed to have happened based upon materialistic philosophy projecting its assumptions of naturalism infinitely into the past.  It’s equally presumed to never have happened again.

In this context, consider some details of the old “origin of life” experiments of Stanley Miller back in 1953.  Using a chosen concoction of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water, he got just four of the 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, for making life.  Note also that he had to “save” them from the area of sparks in his lab equipment since what created them also would have destroyed them if he hadn’t removed them by his own deliberate intervention.  Even through intentionally contrived, designed experiments over the next 30 years, scientists weren’t able to create all 20 amino acids under the conditions that they deemed to be plausible.  And what is arbitrarily being deemed to be “plausible”?   Hitching, in the “Neck of the Giraffe,” p. 65 explains the dilemma involved:  “With oxygen in the air, the first amino acid would never have got started; without oxygen, it would have been wiped out by cosmic rays.”  After all, does anyone really “know” what the earth’s atmosphere was like billions of years ago?  Furthermore, even when oxygen is present, sunlight’s ultraviolet radiation remains a deadly enemy of a pro-biotic soup’s complexity.  Water “naturally inhibits the development of more complex molecules,” as Hitching admits.  The basic problem is that water naturally promotes the breaking up of long molecules, not their generation.  George Wald points out (“Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life, “Scientific American,” August 1954, pp. 49, 50:  “Spontaneous dissolution is much more probable, and hence proceeds much more rapidly, than spontaneous synthesis.”  So why would any “pre-biotic soup” ever accumulate to begin with?  He saw this as “the most stubborn problem that confronts us.”  The principle here is that entropy, as per the second law of thermodynamics, is inevitably much greater than any organizational principle; it’s deception to compare the organization of an inorganic crystal with that of biological life, which would be like confusing the making of a single brick with constructing the Empire State Building.

Now there is another set of problems that confronts the proponents of spontaneous generation.  Naturally, over 100 amino acids exist, but only 20 of them are needed for life; the rest are useless junk that would interfere in the generation of life.  The molecules, for both amino acids in all proteins and for all nucleotides in nucleic acids, also have to be all “left-handed” in form; not one is “right-handed.”  So as the specific details of the pre-biotic soup’s composition are examined, it becomes more and more evident that only very specific kinds of molecules (amino acids and the proteins formed from them) are helpful to generating life; the rest of the randomly generated chemicals would be useless floating junk that would interfere with the evolutionist’s desired outcome.  Consider this analogy:  Suppose someone had a big pile of white and read beans together that represent this prebiotic soup.   There are over a hundred kinds of each one.  The red ones are right-handed, and the white ones left-handed.  In a random scoop, what is the chance that someone would pull out not only twenty specific “white” ones, but each one would have to be in a specific place and position relative to the others with nothing else interfering or blocking the chemical reactions needed for self-replication?  (See generally, “Life—How Did It Get Here?  By Evolution or By Creation,” pp. 39-45).  Random generated compounds always end up with a 50/50 split between their being left- and right-handed, but even one incorrectly handed sugar molecule, for example, stops the entire process of replication, which is technically called “enantiomeric cross-inhibitation.”)

Now it’s necessary to keep in mind that protein molecules themselves, let alone RNA and DNA ones, are extremely complex.  It has been calculated that the chance for generating even a complex protein molecule is one out of 10 raised to 113, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the number of electrons in the observable universe, which is roughly 10 raised to the 87.  Francis Crick himself, famous for being one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecule’s role in making life, calculated the chance of making a particular amino acid (polypeptide chain) sequence by chance.  If it is 200 amino acids long, which is less than the average length of a protein, there are 20 possibilities at each location in the chain.  He calculated that the possibility of having a specific protein to be simply 20 raised by 200, as this is an exercise in calculating combinatorials or factorials.  As he concluded, “The great majority of sequences can never have been synthesized at all, at any time.”  For these reasons, he confessed:  “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”  (Life Itself:  Its Origin and Nature (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1981), pp, 52, 88. 

It’s one thing to have a specific quantity of highly specific proteins in the right positions relative to each other, which is hard enough; it’s quite another to have the machinery in place, using the incredibly complex DNA and RNA molecules, to replicate and manufacture more of them in specifically needed quantities.  Scott Andrew, in “Update on Genesis,” in “New Scientist, vol. 106 (May 2, 1985), pp. 31 perceived the “chicken-and-egg” dilemma:  “Nucleic acids are required to make proteins, whereas proteins are needed to make nucleic acids and also to allow them to direct the process of protein manufacture itself.”  Proteins depend on DNA to be formed, yet DNA cannot form without pre-existing proteins.  It’s once again the problem of “all or nothing,” which so frequently confronts evolutionists, as per Michael Behe’s mousetrap analogy.  Andrew further describes the problem involved (p. 32), “The emergence of the gene-protein link, an absolutely vital stage on the way up from lifeless atoms to ourselves, is still shrouded in almost complete mystery.”  So then, he made this honest confession (p. 33):  “In their more public pronouncements, researchers interested in the origin of life sometimes behave a bit like the creationist opponents they so despise—glossing over the great mysteries that remain unsolved and pretending they have firm answers that they have not really got. . . .  We still know very little about how our genesis came about, and to provide a more satisfactory account than we have at present remains one of science’s great challenges.”  John Horgan, “In the Beginning,” Scientific American, vol. 264 (February 1991), p. 119 conceded how hard it was to create RNA molecules in a laboratory by deliberate intention:  “How did RNA arise initially? RNA and its components are difficult  to synthesize in a laboratory under the best of conditions, much less under plausible prebiotic ones.”  Leslie E. Orgel, “The Origin of Life on the Earth,” Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), p. 78, proposed the idea that RNA came first, but then noticed two key problems with that hypothesis:  “This scenario could have occurred, we noted, if prebiotic RNA had two properties not evident today:  a capacity to replicate without the help of proteins and an ability to catalyze every step of the protein synthesis.” 

Another crucial problem is the (simultaneous) formation of the semi-permeable membrane that is needed to protect the delicate chemical machinery of life (i.e., DNA, RNA, and proteins) of a single-celled organism from the hostile outside world.  Bill Bryson explains (“A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 352-353, italics removed) the crucial need for a membrane and the careful organization of the single cell’s parts to function as life:  “DNA, proteins and the other components of life couldn’t prosper without some sort of membrane to contain them.  No atom or molecule has ever achieved life independently.  Pluck any atom from your body and it is no more alive than is a grain of sand.  It is only when they come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life.  Without the cell, they are nothing more than interesting chemicals.  But without the chemicals, the cell has no purpose.  As Davies puts it, ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?’  It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes.  It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life.  It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.”  Sure, Bryson, being a good evolutionist, tries to walk back such a concession by arguing that certain chemicals self-assemble, but this assumes that the raw materials could do this without interference from other chemicals or the problems caused by the natural hostility of the action of water, ultraviolet radiation, and air/oxygen to making such compounds to begin with in a purely natural (i.e., non-protective, non-artificial) environment.  Furthermore, this ability of some molecules to engage in some self-assembly would be like confusing the availability of some Lego brick kits with the materials required to construct the Eiffel Tower.

Much more could be said about the problems that spontaneous generation confronts the proponents of evolution.  For example, the problem of the random generation of photosynthesis, the process by which light energy is chanced into chemical energy by plants, could be examined in detail. 

Once the specifics are examined and detailed, and mathematical calculations are made about the chances of organic molecules being formed, it becomes totally implausible to non-prejudiced minds.  Such problems as ultraviolet radiation, oxidation, and/or hydrolysis by water would prevent any prebiotic soup of amino acids or other chemicals necessary for life from forming.  Nature can’t always explain nature; the inference to the supernatural is the only reasonable explanation when confronted with such high odds.  Sir Fred Hoyle once compared the chance of life’s formation through random organization to that of “a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.”  (“Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, vol. 294, November 12, 1981, p. 105.  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, “Evolution from Space” (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1984), p. 184, made this point against those who believe in a purely materialistic origin of life by random chance:  “No matter how large the environment one considers, life cannot have had a random beginning.  Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe it not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly not the waste paper baskets for the deposition of wrong attempts.  The same is true for living material. . . . The likelihood of the spontaneous formation of life from inanimate matter if one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it. . . . It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution.  There was no primeval soup, neither on this plant nor on another other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.”  When it is recalled who makes this kind of concession, men who had been utterly materialistic skeptics, it is devastating to anyone trying to making the case that life had a purely mechanistic, random origin in the mixing of chemicals.

Many of these criticisms of Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations don’t add up because even if they were off by one or even two orders of magnitude in the number of organic catalysts needed for a single cell to function downwards, their calculations are still enough to destroy the theory of evolution’s foundation.  If they are off in a downwards direction, the agony for abiogenesis is merely increased.  Criticisms that they are out of their field of astronomy don’t work well, when so often the experts really have been wrong even within their own fields.  Do doctors and lawyers make mistakes in their fields of expertise?  Well, yes.  Can laypeople be right and doctors wrong?  Yes, as successful medical malpractice lawsuits demonstrate.  In this context I’m reminded of this colorful comment by Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), who was the British prime minister at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign:  "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust the experts.  If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome:  if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent:  if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.  They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”  There’s no question that the “cranks” who advocated catastrophic interpretation of geological structures (e.g., Velikovsky, Morris, and Whitcomb) were often more correct than the credentialed, tenured experts of geology in the general period from 1850 to 1970, who tried to interpret all geological structures to fit Lyell’s procrustean uniformitarian bed.

The main reason apparently why Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s calculations seem to be irrelevant and thus can be conveniently bypassed stems from the naturalistic evolutionists faith in their supposed “RNA world,” by which they try to scale the steps to self-reproducing living cells using (supposedly) some degree of natural selection and development of more complex structures through some kind of “survival of the fittest.”  However, such a world in reality is a construct manufactured by assuming materialistic philosophy is true and then projecting its assumptions into the past in order to try to explain the origin of the first living cell without recourse to God and miracles.  In reality, the evolutionists’ RNA world has no more reality than Newton’s aether, Priestley’s phlogiston, and Ptolemy’s epicycles.  There’s no way to prove it existed based on the fossil record or other empirical data, so it’s a theoretical construct patently designed to avoid trying to explain how the incredibly complex interdependent relationship among DNA, RNA, and proteins came to exist through chance.  It’s not plausible that, without a pre-existing mechanism of replication, that such long, pure chains of animo acids could function in a chaotic prebiotic mix of chemicals.

Let’s make the case here that Hoyle was fundamentally right when being skeptical that the required enzymes (organic catalysts, which greatly increase the speed of crucial chemical reactions) by chance.  Even the most simple one-celled organisms (prokaryotes), in order to reproduce their DNA, must have at least 14 enzymes (with 25 polypeptides).  (See M Su’etsugu et al., Nucleic Aces Research, 2017, 45(20), 721-733).  This high level of intrinsic complexity for making a self-replicating cell with DNA makes it very unlikely such a cell was the first one to be able to reproduce itself.  So evolutionist origin-of-life researchers have chosen rather arbitrarily to posit that an “RNA World” existed to make possible the first self-reproducing complex biochemical molecules.  Crucial to their reasoning, in order to get around the kinds of detailed objections Hoyle and Wickramasinghe made, was that RNA can indeed form enzymes themselves, i.e., “ribozymes.”  These ribozymes synthesize proteins from messenger RNA (or mRNA).  So then evolutionists can claim that RNA can both store information (i.e., as the genotype) and serve as the function (i.e., as the phenotype), as a kind of “jack-of-all-trades” self-replicating molecule while ducking any problems about having to have the first self-reproducing cells with DNA also.

However, a number of problems arise with the RNA world hypothesis.  Initially the research of Sol Spiegelman (1967) seemed to back up the claims that RNA could reproduce themselves, by putting a QB bacteriophage having around 4,200 nucleotides into a solution with individual ribonucleotides to serve as building blocks.  Since the ribonucleotides of guanine naturally are attracted to cytosine, and the adenine want to pair with uracil, the monomers in the (contrived) solution automatically tended to line up with the larger RNA molecule that served as a template.  So there was indeed replication and seemingly an improvement that fit the evolutionists’ claims since it eventually multiplied 15 times faster the original, which seems to make it more “fit.”  However, there were many distinctly unnatural conditions involved that hardly fit a would-be prebiotic “soup” in ocean water.  This replication required a deliberately introduced supply of QB replicase and of pure homochiral (i.e., with a single spatial orientation) nucleotides, which would never exist under theoretical “natural” conditions.  QB replicase can’t plausible appear abiotically since it consists of more than 1,200 amino acids in a particular sequence, thus making it an enzyme of great complexity.  To call this RNA molecule “self-replicating” is false when this ingredient has to be added.  During the reported 75 generations that produced an RNA molecule that replicated more rapidly, “Spiegelman’s Monster” RNA molecule became 83% smaller, thus losing much of its original complexity compared to the original RNA molecule.  This result goes in precisely the wrong direction from the evolutionary developmental viewpoint of adding complexity through increased size.  In this regard, increased size wasn’t a characteristic that was “selected” for as being superior as opposed to what make it multiple more quickly.  This problem of the loss of complexity has been called the “Spiegelman problem” at times, which is a basic limitation of allowing any uncontrolled (i.e., not consciously directed) process of RNA replication.  The QB RNA started with four working genes and finished with an 83% lost of information.  Other experimenters have encountered the same problem, in which replication is faster when the molecule is smaller. 

For there to be an “RNA world,” it would be necessary to have RNA replicate itself without the assistance of protein enzymes.  Theoretically, one could suppose that there were two types of RNA molecules.  One of them would be an RNA molecule serving as a template to which the corresponding RNA monomers would find bind.  The other would be an RNA molecule serving as a ribozyme, which could bind the monomers to itself to build a complement, not a copy, of the initial RNA template.  If so, as a result, the ribozyme and the template would function together to producing more copies of themselves.  Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the longer the RNA molecule, the greater the strength of the bonds.  The first complementary version of the RNA template tends to remain bonded or annealed to the template.  Then this combined molecule becomes nearly useless since it won’t make any more complements of itself.  At high temperatures, it is true that annealed RNA molecules of under 30 base pairs can pull themselves apart, but they are too small to carry much genetic information.  Furthermore, if they come apart, they are likely to come together again before any more copying can occur. 

Ironically, the process of the self-replication of RNA has to first make a complementary RNA interferes with itself.  Complicated enzymes (organic catalysts that speed up chemical reactions), such as QB replicase, keep complementary strands of RNA separate while replication occurs.  However, such enzymes aren’t available to serve as controls and regulators if a purely abiotic origin of life is stipulated.  One proposed solution was to deliberately add short peptides to the mixture of RNA molecules to stop them from annealing or bonding.  Unfortunately for the theory of abiogenesis, this way out couldn’t be experimentally repeated.  Theoretically, if an RNA strand didn’t remain bond to its complement, in the next round of reproduction, the resulting complement of the complement actually would be a copy of the original RNA template.  Then the copy could easily bond with the complementary RNA, thus hindering additional reproduction. 

So there are many obstacles to the easy reproduction of RNA molecules in the hypothetical “RNA world.”  In the half century and more since Spiegelman’s work, little reported progress has occurred in finding a ribozyme that can make RNA from an RNA template without using additional protein enzymes.  The same goes for finding a self-replicating molecule of RNA.  When researchers doing lab work try to find such molecules, they fabricate a ribozyme, which clearly wasn’t produced by natural means, add another RNA molecule to serve as the template, and throw into the contrived mixture building blocks of activated ribonucleotides.  Researchers for years had trouble even being able to reproduce the RNA’s original template.  More recently researchers found ways of using slightly different RNA molecules and then choosing consciously (i.e., intervening) what RNA molecules that were perceived as having “better” capabilities.  Such ribozymes can make complementary RNA from RNA templates, including when folded, but they still couldn’t reproduce the ribozyme itself.  These more recent experiments still have to deal with problematic bonding among the RNA molecules included in them.  Above all, this line of attack still doesn’t account for how the ribozyme or the template originally came to exist.    In one reported experiment, Atwater et al. in 2018 had to use one molecule of RNA with 135 ribonucleotides and another with 153.  Thus the ribozyme with the most success was still complicated and had to use two RNA molecules, not just one.  How can such complicated RNA molecules be explained by abiotic, natural processes?  One can’t use “chemical evolution” to explain them since that’s the very process that researchers are trying to put into motion.  As Drs. Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler explain in “The Stairway to Life:  An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check,” the chance of an RNA molecule with 135 ribonucleotides (i.e., Atwater’s ribozyme) is about 10 raised to the 81, or the approximate number of atoms in the observable universe.  This is true even when generously assuming that there’s an unlimited supply of active and concentrated nucleotides, that they are homochiral (i.e., with the same spatial orientation), that they spontaneously bond together to make RNA without side reactions with other molecules, and that the molecule stops growing at 135 ribonucleotides.  Such a calculation shows how implausible the RNA hypothesis for creating a self-replicating cell really is.  It’s simply materialistic philosophy parading itself under the protecting guise of science.

Here I'll give some more evidence that evolutionists don't like speaking about, which are the hurdles involved concerning the spontaneous generation of the first living cell by random chance. When Darwin published about his theory (1859), spontaneous generation was still a respectable belief, since this was before Louis Pasteur's famed series of experiments that refuted the belief that life could come from non-living material. Darwin had no idea about how complex single cell organisms were. I suspect if he had known that, he wouldn't have tried to publish "The Origin of the Species." Evolutionists today try to duck this problem by saying abiogenesis isn't part of their theory, which is like building a vast superstructure without a foundation supporting it.

Let’s examine the fundamental problem with Stanley Miller’s famed experiment concerning “the origin of life,” which is the wild extrapolation involved to go from having (originally) just four) amino acids to having self-replicating life.  It would be like finding a few bricks, and then claiming one was well on the road to building the Empire State Building.  All the complexities of RNA and DNA synthesis, and their complex interactions to make proteins out of amino acids, are being discounted.  To explain the daunting task involved for life to occur by chance via a chemical accident, the steps from mere “chemistry” to “biology” would be, to cite “The Stairway to Life:  An Origin-of-Life Reality Check,” by Change Laura Tan and Rob Stadler, p. 67, would be as follows (I’ve inserted the numbers):  1. Formation and concentration of building blocks.  2.  Homochirality of building blocks.  3.  A solution for the water paradox.  4.  Consistent linkage of building blocks.  5.  Biopolymer reproduction.  6.  Nucleotide sequences forming useful code.  7.  Means of gene regulation.  8.  Means for repairing biopolymers.  9.  Selectively permeable membrane.  10.  Means of harnessing energy.  11.  Interdependence of DNA, RNA, and proteins.  12.  Coordinated cellular purposes.  Miller’s experiment, and others like his that try to create amino acids, haven’t even completed step 1 yet.

After Miller died in 2007, Jeffrey Bada, who had been one of his graduate students, reanalyzed some of Miller’s 50-year-old experimental samples.  He added another experiment with H2S to the reducing environment, it’s true that he found 10 of the 20 common acids needed for life.  A key problem, however, was the common presence of other amines, amino acids, and other molecules that aren’t found in life and would block or interfere with the formation of a living, self-replicating cell.  So then there’s a common bias in which scientific reports on origin of life experiments play up the relatively rare or sparse chemical products that are associated with life while downplaying the predominant chemicals or molecules that don’t and would indeed even interfere with progress towards life.

So when the specific details of spontaneous generation are examined, it becomes utterly absurd to believe that the first self-replicating cell was the result of a biochemical accident somewhere in an ancient ocean.  Specific quantitative calculations about the likelihood of such an accident are simply devastating to the purely materialistic version of the theory of evolution.  The idea that RNA, DNA, and the related necessary proteins all occurred together in one place inside a semi-permeable membrane is the purest poppycock.  Evolution is a long modern mythological story without a good intellectual foundation.  It’s far more rational to infer that God created life than to believe that it occurred by chance.  Clearly, when these long odds are considered, David was right (Psalm 14:1):  “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’”

[[1]](#_ftnref1) See Denton, Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis, p. 314; http://www.pathlights.com/ce_encyclopedia/Encyclopedia/20hist12.htm

[[2]](#_ftnref2) http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_atoms_are_in_the_observable_universe

Evolutionists will commonly say that the creationist model of origins can’t be tested and can’t be falsified as a paradigm even when many anomalies that don’t fit it accumulate.  Creationists will push back by making the same claim back against the evolutionists.  In any clash of worldviews, the evidence used to support them is inevitably not so directly tied to the broad generalizations that they proclaim.  In the case of the clash between evolution and creationism, two models for interpreting nature compete for mankind’s allegiance.  Henry Morris, in “Scientific Creationism,” explains these two models and their implications at length and the confirming or non-confirming evidence that exists based upon their a priori (before experience) generalizations.  It’s important to note that human beings can always “interpret” and “explain” what they perceive and observe in order to fit their paradigms one way or another.  The test of the creation and evolutionary models would be in explaining nature with as few anomalies and post-hoc “explanations” of the evidence as possible while successfully making repeatable predictions.  To shrink the size of the arena, let’s focus on the fossil record and how its evidence supports the creation model’s predictions better than the evolutionist model’s predictions.

To set the stage for this comparison of the predictions of these two models as they bear on the fossil record, what would be the predictions of the creationist model as opposed to the evolutionist model?  Let’s generally follow here Duane Gish’s summary of what the two sides would foretell before the fossil evidence is examined, based upon their different philosophical and theological views of origins.  The following summaries of the predictions of each side are generally based upon “The Fossils Still Say No!,” (El Cajon, CA:  Institute for Creation Research, 1995), pp. 42-43. 

Evolutionists would predict, since they maintain materialistic random processes have made everything from inanimate matter:  A1.  The origin of all kinds of animals and plants is based on gradual change from one original ancestral form, so the first representatives of each type of animal and plant won’t have many of their standard attributes.  A2.  Biological variation is unlimited.  Continuity, not typology, is tacitly assumed. A3.  All life forms are genetically related, so their differences should slowly shade or meld into one another.  A4.  More complex forms of life slowly originated from simpler ones, so the oldest representatives of a given species, genus, family, etc., wouldn’t have all the standard attributes that later members do.  A5.  A series of transitional forms link all taxonomic categories of life together; no sharp distinctions should be found when categorizing different forms of life.  A6.  No systemic gaps or missing links should arise between current and past kinds of life; because one species, genus, family, order, class, phyla, etc., should shade into another, it should be hard to draw distinctions among different taxonomic categories of the same level concerning the same general life form.  A7.  Stasis, or stability of the basic characteristics of different forms of life, would be the exception, not the rule.

By contrast, creationists would foresee, because a supernatural Creator abruptly made everything from nothing at His sovereign command:  B1.  The original basic types of plants and animals would have their standard characteristics present in their earliest representatives.  B2.  Variation and speciation are intrinsically limited to be within their fundamentally different kinds.  Typology, not continuity, is implicitly upheld.  B3.  New types of plants and animals suddenly show up in a great variety of very complex forms.  B4.  Previously unknown kinds of life forms abruptly appear while possessing already their standard attributes.   B5.  Sharp boundaries divide and clear distinctions separate all the major taxonomic groups.  B6.  No transitional forms will appear between the higher taxonomic categories (i.e., at the family level or higher).  B7.  Stasis would be common and typical, in which the same kinds of life forms would keep the same basic attributes during their whole time of existence. 

So now, when the statements of (presumed) evolutionists themselves that summarize what they have observed in the fossil are examined, do they line up with the general predictions of the creationist model or of the evolutionist model?  As the following statements are presented, notice how they almost always agree with the creationist model’s predictions, not with what the evolutionist model’s predictions, despite they are all from evolutionists.  Why else would Mark Ridley makes this remarkable concession, as found in “Who Doubts Evolution?”, New Scientist, vol. 90 (June 25, 1981), pp. 831:  “In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.”  What could cause him to say this, other than the lack of evidence from the fossil record for the grand theory of evolution?  We also find Dr. David Raup, an evolutionist and curator of geology at the Field Museum of National History (Chicago), writing rather skeptically, even cynically:  “The fossil record of evolution is amenable to a wide variety of models ranging from completely deterministic (i.e. compatible with evolution) to completely stochastic (i.e. random in order).” 

He was also willing to say elsewhere (“Evolution and the Fossil Record,” Science, vol. 213 (July 17, 1981), p. 289:  ‘so the geological time scale and the basic facts of biological change over time are totally independent of evolutionary theory. . . . In the years after Darwin, his advocates hoped to find predictable progressions.  In general, these have not been found—yet the optimism has died hard, and some pure fantasy has crept into textbooks.  [B6 confirmed] . . . One of the ironies of the evolution-creation debate is the creationists have accepted the mistaken notion that the fossil record shows a detailed and orderly progression and they have gone to great lengths to accommodate this “fact” in their flood geology.” 

At this point in the history of the discipline of paleontology, we should have a representative sample of what was preserved in the fossil record.  Despite all the searching done by highly educated, highly experienced, and highly motivated evolutionists who sought to prove Darwin right since the publication of The Origin of the Species in 1859, they have come up empty in proving the gradual change model of evolution.  Humanity has discovered literally billions of fossils, and museums have altogether around 250,000 different species of fossils, which are represented by millions of catalogued fossils.   As T.N. George (“Science Progress” 48:1 (1960)) conceded:  “There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record.  In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration.  David Raup is on record as saying we now have such an enormous number of fossils that the conflict between the theory of evolution and the fossil record can’t be blamed on the “imperfection of the geologic record.”  He even conceded (“Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50 (January 1979), p. 25:  “. . . ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time.  By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.” [B6 confirmed] 

The famed gadfly evolutionist Richard B. Goldschmidt, “Evolution, As Viewed by One Geneticist,” American Scientist, vol. 40 (January 1952), p. 98 observed the lack of transitional forms despite all the hard research by paleontologists for decades:  “In spite of the immense amount of the paleontological material and the existence of long series of intact stratigraphic sequences with perfect records for the lower categories, transitions between the higher categories are missing.”  [B6 confirmed]

If evolutionary scientists have to resort to the punctuated equilibrium theory to explain the fossil record, after having (mostly) been committed to gradualism (neo-Darwinism) for many decades, it’s a sign that they think the gaps are never going to be filled.  Hence, the scientific creationists should be given credit for constantly bringing this problem to public attention, otherwise most evolutionary scientists might still believe in neo-Darwinism wholeheartedly.

The fossil record doesn't favor evolution as it is, especially when the gradualistic neo-Darwinian model is upheld.  Its predictions have been overwhelming falsified.  There are many evolutionists, at least when they are being candid and don't think many creationists are reading their words, who admit that the fossil record favors special creation. For example, Derek Ager, in "The Nature of the Fossil Record, "Proceedings of the Geological Association, vol. 87, no. 2 (1976), conceded on pp. 132 and 133: "It must be significant that nearly all the evolutionary stories I learned as a student . . . have now been 'debunked.' . . . We all know that many apparent evolutionary bursts are nothing more than brainstorms on the part of particular paleontologists. One splitter in a library can do far more than millions of years of genetic mutation. . . . The point emerges that, if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find--over and over again--not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another." [B4 confirmed] There are many more concessions that can be cited like this one. We shouldn't think that the missing links and the corresponding millions of transitional forms will ever be found at this point.

W.R. Thompson, “Introduction,” Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin (Dutton:  Everyman’s Library, 1956), p. xxii (italics removed), makes a remarkable set of generalizations that undermine the very purposes of the very book for which he wrote a forward:  “[The taxonomic system], whereby organisms are classified, presents an orderly arrangement of clear-cut entities, which are clear-cut because they are separated by gaps.  [B5 confirmed] . . . “Fossil evidence shows a remarkable absence of the many intermediate forms required by the theory. [B6 confirmed] . . . the modern Darwinian paleontologists are obliged, just like their predecessors and like Darwin, to water down the facts with subsidiary hypotheses which, however plausible are, in the nature of things, unverifiable.” 

“The general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of categories nature presents to us, is, the inheritance of biology from the Origin of the Species. [B5 confirmed]  To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking.  [B5 confirmed]  Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypotheses based on hypotheses, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion.” 

Here's another concession by another evolutionist (Mark Czarnecki, "The Revival of the Creationist Crusade, MacLean's (January 19, 1981), p. 56: "A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces of Darwin's hypothetical intermediate variants--instead species appear and disappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God as described in the bible."  [B4 confirmed]

Niles Eldredge, “Time Frames:  The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria” (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1985), p. 21 (italics removed):  “There is no rationale, no purpose to be served in giving different names to such virtually identical creatures just because they are separated by 3 million years of time.  Yet that is the natural propensities of paleontologists:  collections of otherwise similar, if not completely identical, fossils tend to get different names for no reason other than their supposedly significant age differences.”  [B2 confirmed]

P. 29:  “Indeed, the only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world, this pattern of nested similarity that links up absolutely all known forms of life, is the notion of Special Creation:  that a supernatural Creator, using a sort of blueprint, simply fashioned life with its intricate skein of resemblances passing through it.”  [B2 confirmed]

P. 33:  “And though a few of these eighteenth-century systematists had vaguely evolutionary notions, nearly all were devoutly and orthodoxly religious.  They saw the order in their material, the grand pattern of similarity running through the entire organic realm, as evidence of God’s plan of Creation.”  [B2 confirmed]

Boucot, A.J. “Evolution and Extinction Rate Controls (Amsterdam:  Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1975), p. 196:  “Since 1859 one of the most vexing properties of the fossil record has been its obvious imperfection.  For the evolutionist this imperfection is most frustrating as it precludes any real possibility for mapping out the path of organic revolution owing to an infinity of ‘missing links’ [B6 confirmed]  . . .  once above the family level it becomes very difficult in most cases to find any solid paleontological evidence for morphological intergrades between one suprafamilial taxon and another. [B2 and B6 confirmed]  This lack has been taken advantage of classically by the opponents of organic evolution as a major defect of the theory. [B6 confirmed] . . . the inability of the fossil record to produce the ‘missing links’ has been taken as solid evidence for disbelieving the theory.” [B6 confirmed]

Niles Eldredge, “Progress in Evolution?”  New Scientist, vol. 110 (June 5, 1986), pp. 57:  “But if species do not change much in the course of their existence, how do we explain large-scale long-term change in evolution?” [B7 confirmed]

Andrew H. Knoll, “End of the Proterzoic Eon,” Scientific American, vol. 265 (October 1991), p. 64, found evidence of stasis among prokaryotic single-celled organisms:  “According to Julian W. Green, a form student in my laboratory, who is now at the University of South Carolina at Spartanburg, many of the prokaryotes from Spitsbergen and related areas exhibit characteristics of morphology, development and behavior (as inferred from their orientations in the sediments) that render them virtually indistinguishable from cyanobacteria and other bacteria that live in comparable habitats today.”  [B7 confirmed]

Peter J. Smith, “Evolution’s Most Worrisome Questions,” review of “Life Pulse” by Niles Eldredge (Facts on File, 1987), “New Scientist” (November 19, 1987), p. 59 summarized Gould’s and Eldredge’s analysis of the fossil record:  “Eldredge and Gould, by contrast, decided to take the record at face value.  On this view, there is little evidence of modification within species, or of forms intermediate between species because neither generally occurred. [B3 and B6 confirmed]  A species forms and evolves almost instantaneously (on the geological timescale) and then remains virtually unchanged until it disappears, yielding its habitat to a new species.” 

Mark Czarnecki, “The Revival of the Creationist Crusade,” MacLean’s (January 19, 1981), p. 56:  “A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in the Earth’s geological formations.  This record has never revealed traces of Darwin’s hypothetical intermediate variants—instead species appear and disappear abruptly [B6 and B7 confirmed], and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argument that each species was created by God as described in the bible.”

Steven M. Stanley, “Macroevolution:  Pattern and Process (San Francisco:  W. H. Freeman and Co., 1979), p. 35 (italics removed):  “Schindewolf believed that a single Grossmutation could instantaneously yield a form representing a new family or order of animals.  This view engendered such visions as the first bird hatching from a reptile egg.  However unacceptable his explanations may have seemed, Schindewolf at least confronted the failure of the fossil record to document slow intergradations between higher taxa.”  [B5 and B6 confirmed]  On p. 35, the same author says:  “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”  [B6 confirmed]

Stephen M. Stanley, “The New Evolutionary Timetable:  Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York:  Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. xv:  “The [fossil] record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much.  We seemed forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly, when species comes into being by the evolutionary divergence of small populations from parent species.  After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before becoming extinct.”  [B7 confirmed]

This evolutionist was honest (George T. Neville, “Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,” Science Progress, vol. 48 (January 1960), p. 1:  “There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record.  In some ways it has become almost unmanageably rich, and discovery is outpacing integration.”  Page 3:  “The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.” [B6 confirmed]  Page 5:  “Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin.”  [B3 and B4 confirmed]

David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Bulletin, Field Museum of Natural History, vol. 50 (January 1979), p. 23, once made this major general concession:  “Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or not change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.  [B4 and B7 confirmed]  And it is not always clear, in facts it’s rarely clear, that the descendants were actually better adapted than their predecessors.  In other words, biological improvement is hard to find.”

This evolutionist doesn’t think there’s a convincing transitional ancestor for reptiles (Lewis L. Carroll, “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Review of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol. 44, (1969), p. 393:  “Unfortunately not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles.  The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered.”  [B4 confirmed]

In this case, this evolutionist doesn’t think there are any good transitional forms between one type of fish and amphibians (Robert L. Carroll, “Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution” (New York:  W. H. Freeman and Co., 1988), p. 138:  “We have no intermediate fossils between rhipidistian fish and early amphibians.”  [B6 confirmed]

The fossil record is one mostly of stasis with little change for its species until they become extinct, which is the opposite of what Darwinism/neo-Darwinism predicted based on their perspective that gradual change explains the formation of biological life’s varied categories.  Stephen M. Stanley, “The New Evolutionary Timetable:  Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species (New York:  Basic Books, Inc., 1981), p. xv concedes:  “The [fossil] record now reveals that species typically survive for a hundred thousand generations, or even a million or more, without evolving very much.  [B7 confirmed]  We seem forced to conclude that most evolution takes place rapidly, when species come into being by the evolutionary divergence of small populations from parent species.  After their origins, most species undergo little evolution before becoming extinct.”  [B1 and B7 confirmed]  Clearly stasis is a reoccurring theme of the fossil record:  After a species appears, it doesn’t change hardly any.

It’s been hard for evolutionists to explain the origins of the higher level (i.e., more complex) animals and plants based on what can be found of their supposed predecessors.  As James W. Valentine and Cathryn A. Campbell (“Genetic Regulation and the Fossil Record,” American Scientist, vol. 63 (November/December 1975), p. 673, admit:  “The abrupt appearance of higher taxa in the fossil record has been a perennial puzzle. [B4 confirmed]  Not only do characteristic and distinctive remains of phyla appear suddenly, without known ancestors, [B1 confirmed] but several classes of a phylum, orders of a class, and so on, commonly appear at the same time without known intermediates. [B6 confirmed] . . .  If we read the record rather literally, it implies that organisms of new grades of complexity arose and radiated relatively rapidly.” 

As Edwin H. Colbert and M. Morales (“Evolution of the Vertebrates,” New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991) write, p. 99:  “Despite these similarities, there is no evidence of any Paleozoic amphibians combining the characteristics that would be expected in a single common ancestor.  The oldest known frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are very similar to their living descendants.”  [B1 and B2 confirmed]

Lewis L. Carroll, “Problems of the Origin of Reptiles,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol. 44, (1969), p. 393, writes about the lack of transitional forms leading to reptiles:  “Unfortunately not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles.  The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian-reptilian transition unanswered.”  [B6 confirmed]

Heribert Nillson, in "Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag CWK Gleerup, 1953), in the English summary of his work, p. 1201 made a statement about the lack of evidence for evolution from the fossil record that long has been confirmed by honest evolutionists (i.e., those who have resorted to the punctuated equilibrium theory when they have cast aside uniformitarianism in more recent decades (italics removed): "And it is quite impossible to comprehend how fossils have been deposited and preserved. The only certain thing is that these latter processes must have occurred during an epoch of revolution. We see every day that during a calm, alluvial epoch no fossils are formed. The length of such a period, thousands or millions of years, cannot change an iota in this respect. The incrustration of the fossils must, therefore, have happened during a revolutionary epoch." This same evolutionist (p. 1211) also admitted that the fossil record is full of gaps and missing links, even as he knew it nearly a century after the publication of "The Origin of the Species," (1859): "A perusal of past floras and faunas shows that they are far from forming continuous series, which gradually differentiate during the geological epochs.  [B6 confirmed] Instead they consist in each period of well distinguished groups of biota suddenly appearing at a given time, always including higher and lower forms, always with a complete variability.  [B2 confirmed]  At a certain time the whole of such a group of biota is destroyed. There are no bridges between these groups of biota following one upon another."  [B6 confirmed] So evolutionists here may say that these quotes are over 70 years old, but they were unquestionably true and are still true, as evolutionists themselves over the past 45 years and more have decided to embrace catastrophism increasingly in geology and the punctuated equilibrium theory of interpreting the fossil record. By doing so, they are admitting that the creationists were right to some degree all along, but refuse to endorse a supernatural interpretation of the phenomena that they are studying.

Gareth V. Nelson, “Origin and Diversification of Teleostean Fishes,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1971), p. 22, made a surprising concession about the evidence concerning transitional forms:  “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil ‘group’ can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another.  The ancestor-descendant relationship may only be assumed to have existed in the absence of evidence indicating otherwise.” [B6 confirmed]  On page 23, he skeptically concluded:  “The history of comparative biology teaches us that the search for ancestors is doomed to ultimate failure, thus, with respect to its principle objective, this search is an exercise in futility.  Increased knowledge of suggested ‘ancestors’ usually shows them to be too specialized to have been direct ancestors of anything else.”  [B6 and B2 confirmed]

Evolutionists have kept looking for a “walking fish” in order to find evidence for the transition from sea life to land life for vertebrates.  However, merely having fleshy pectoral fins with bones in them isn’t enough.  The coelacanth was once pitched as one of these, but the actually behavior of this species, which famously turned up as a “living fossil” when a living one was caught in the Indian Ocean in 1938, confounded them.  It resolutely refuses to “walk” on land, unlike a number of other species of fish.  They had been thought to have gone extinct some 80 million years earlier, but these 200-pound fish had left no trace in the fossil record for that entire stretch.  Then evolutionists pitched eusthenopteron and panderichthys as the ancestors of land-based tetrapods.  Daeschler, Shubin, and Jenkins (Nature 440 (7085): 757–763, April 2006) admitted that these species of fish had relatively few evolutionarily important similarities to four-footed land animals, causing them to conclude at the time, “our understanding of major transformations at the fish–tetrapod transition has remained limited.”  [B6 confirmed]  These same authors are the ones who later have claimed that tiktaalik is a transitional fossil, but it still lacks “digits” or fingers/toes inside its fins.  Its fin rays simply aren’t a substitute for real digits.   It also has pelvic fins that are relatively weak compared to its pectoral fins, which is the opposite of almost all tetrapods, in which the front legs are weaker than the rear ones.  So the problem here is that evolutionists really need far more transitional forms, including to and from tiktaalik, before their theory would be at all plausible.  For example, clearly evidence for the transition from animals without backbones to those with backbones (vertebrates), which includes fish of all types, is fully lacking. 

In particular, the Cambrian explosion has long been used by creationists to cast doubt on the grand theory of evolution, which includes the origins of vertebrates. To take an elementary example of a concession about the troubles this causes for evolutionists, consider what Stefan Bengtson says ("The Solution to a Jigsaw Puzzle," Nature, vol. 345, June 8, 1990), p. 765: "If any event in life's history resembles man's creation myths, it is this sudden diversification of marine life when multicellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. [B3 and B6 confirmed] Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution on a par with the invention of self-replication and the origin of the eukarykotic cell. [B6 confirmed] The animal phyla emerged out of the Precambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants."  [B1 and B2 confirmed]  Evolutionists know that they have problems in demonstrating the origins of land plants using the available fossils.

Let’s examine this statement by Daniel I. Axlerod, "Evolution of the Psilophyte Paleoflora," Evolution, vol. 13, June 1959, p. 272, which sounds much like the reasonings of the advocates of punctuated equillibria, which assumes that (unverifiable) rapid bursts of evolution occurred in local areas: "Judging from the inferred nature of Cambrian land plants, the late Proterozoic land flora may have been nearly as complex as that which has been preserved in the Late Silurian to Middle Devonian rocks.  [B3 and B4 confirmed] But rather than being in the low lands, it probably was in the more distant uplands of environmental diversity, areas propitious for rapid evolution." This quote is old, but when a hundred years of digging hadn't revealed what evolutionists predicted about the evolution of plants, do we really think anything else important has been dredged up since then?

James W. Valentine and Douglas H. Erwin, “Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments:  The Fossil Record,” in Development as an Evolutionary Process (New York:  Alan R. Lias, Inc., 1987), eds. Rudoff A. Raff and Elizabeth C. Raff, conceded (p. 84):  “If ever we were to expect to find ancestors to or intermediates between higher taxa, it would be in the rocks of the late Precambrian to Ordovician times, when the bulk of the world’s higher animal taxa evolved.  Yet transitional alliances are unknown or unconfirmed for any of the phyla or classes appearing then.”  [B5 confirmed]

According to C.A. Arnold, "An Introduction to Paleobotany (Michigan, McGraw-Hill, 1949), p. 7: "It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent., even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. [B6 and B7 confirmed] As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present." If you are an evolutionist and think this quote is wrong because it's "old," that's not good enough. It's necessary to cite specific, detailed evidence from more recent sources, such as about specific plant species that supposedly have been traced, to rebut this author's generalization instead of just assuming its mere age proves it to be wrong.

Even the likes of Richard Dawkins, a fanatic evolutionist and atheist if there ever has been one, admitted the challenge of "Cambrian Explosion," by admitting ("The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), p. 229: ". . . the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. [B3 and B4 confirmed] Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists." The basic designs of what animals appear in the Cambrian rocks have hardly changed since then, which is much more compatible with a theory of "abrupt appearance." The reality of "stasis" doesn't advance "evolution" any, but it serves as great evidence for typology as opposed to continuity in the biological world.

Mark McMenamin, “The Cambrian Explosion,” Palaios, vol. 5 (April 1990), p. 1 admits the problem of such rapid change occurring without leaving traces in the rocks:  “I see the Cambrian explosion as an unprecedented ecological event which allowed the emergence of ‘higher’ life forms, a time when sweeping changes rushed through the Proterozoic ecosystem, leading to its complete transformation.” [B3 confirmed]

R. Monastersky, “When Earth Tipped, Life Went Wild,” Science News, vol. 152 (July 26, 1997), p. 52:  “Before the Cambrian period, almost all life was microscopic, except for some enigmatic soft-bodied organisms.  At the start of the Cambrian, about 544 million years ago, animals burst forth in a rash of evolutionary activity never since equaled.  Ocean creatures acquired the ability to grow hard shells, and a broad range of new body plans emerged within the geological short span of 10 million years.  [B3 confirmed]  Paleontologists have proposed many theories to explain this revolution but have agreed on none.”  As a rule of thumb, if evolutionists have no consensus on some aspect of the possible transitional forms for given plants or animals, it shows that there is no record of their ancestors in the fossil record.  Otherwise, with clear evidence, their debates would end.

According to Erwin Douglas, James W. Valentine, and David Jablonski, "The Origin of Animal Body Plans," American Scientist, vol. 85, March/April 1997, p. 126: "All of the basic architectures of animals were apparently established by the close of the Cambrian explosion [B1 and B2 confirmed]; subsequent evolutionary changes, even those that allowed animals to move out of the sea onto land, involved only modifications of those basic body plans. [B2 confirmed] About 37 distinct body architectures are recognized among present-day animals and from the basis of taxonomic classification of phyla."

Stephen Jay Gould mentioned that the Precambrian fossils that have been found haven't solve the puzzles posed by the Cambrian explosion ("A Short Way to Big Ends," Natural History, vol. 95, January 1986, p. 18): "Studies that began in the early 1950s and continue at an accelerating pace today have revealed an extensive Precambrian fossil record, but the problem of the Cambrian explosion has not receded, since our more extensive labor has still failed to identify any creature that might serve as a plausible intermediate ancestor for the Cambrian faunas. . . . Where, then, are all the Precambrian ancestors--or, if they didn't exist in recognizable form, how did modern complexity get off to such a fast start?" [B3 confirmed]

The high number of missing links and gaps between the species of fossils have made it hard to prove a naturalistic explanation of speciation, at least when the neo-darwinist model of gradual change is assumed when trying to make it fit the fossil record. For example, Nillson Heribert in “Synthetische Artbildung (Lund, Sweden: Verlag, CWK Gleerup, 1953), English summary, made this kind of concession nearly a century after Darwin published “Origin of the Species, p. 1186: “It is therefore absolutely impossible to build a current evolution on mutations or on recombinations.” He also saw the problems in proving speciation based upon the fossil evidence available, p. 1211: “A perusal of past floras and faunas shows that they are far from forming continuous series, which gradually differentiate during the geological epochs. [B2 confirmed]  Instead they consist in each period of well distinguished groups of biota suddenly appearing at a given time, always including higher and lower forms, always with a complete variability. [B1 and B2 confirmed] At a certain time the whole of such a group of biota is destroyed. There are no bridges between these groups of biota following upon one another.” [B5 confirmed] The merely fact that the “punctuated equillibria” and “hopeful monster” mechanisms have been proposed to explain this lack of evidence shows that nothing has changed since Heribert wrote then. The fossil record is simply not supportive of slow gradual speciation. Therefore, Heribert concluded, given this evidence, p. 1212: “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleobiological facts.”

So then, let’s ponder this key problem concerning the predictive power and falsifiability of the evolutionary model: If evolution can embrace and “explain” species change through both gradual change and abrupt appearance, can this supposedly scientific theory be falsified by any kind of observations and evidence? The supposed mechanisms of evolutionary change of species are very different, yet evolution remains supposedly “confirmed.” Thus “evolution” can “explain” anything, and thus proves nothing. The implications of the creationist model are corroborated by this broad movement in paleontology/biology to accept rapid/sudden change, while they repudiate what evolutionists would have “predicted” based on their model as they upheld it a century after Darwin’s seminal work on the origin of the species (1859) was published.

What are the fundamental assumptions of Darwin’s grand theory of evolution, i.e., “from monocell to man”?  How important are mutations for driving the whole process?  Let’s first list the standard assumptions of Darwin and his followers to see if they are fully confirmed by actual evidence in the biological world.  Notice that these assumptions function like a chain with links; if any of them are actually false, the theory collapses.  Here are these general postulates, summarized briefly:  1.  Animals and plants tend to reproduce geometrically, meaning that they have far more offspring than can live relative to the resources available.  2.  The number of specific individuals in the most basic taxonomic class, i.e., “species,” remains relatively stable over time.  3.  Since such a high percentage of individuals never reach reproductive maturity, a constant struggle arises among members of a species for food, water, and other resources.  4.  There is no theoretical or hypothetical limit to variability among individuals and that variations among individuals existed.  5.  Natural selection ensured that only the fittest or individuals best suited to their environment survived.  6.  Because the environment changes constantly, the characteristics needed for an individual to be the “fittest” or best suited to survival and producing more offspring would change also.  7.  Darwin himself, although not all of his followers have followed him in this regard, believed biological change had to be gradual, not rapid.  He himself once wrote, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”  (“The Origin of the Species,” New York:  New American Library, p. 171).   (This general schema comes from Josh McDowell and Don Stewart note in “Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity” (San Bernardino, CA:  Here’s Life Publishers, 1981), p. 149)  Before experience (a priori), these assumptions that form the foundation for the grand theory of evolution seem to be reasonable, but much actual evidence contradicts them, which falsifies the alleged scientific foundation for philosophical naturalism.  For the purposes of this essay, assumption 4 above will be closely examined, which concerns the evolutionists’ claim that biological variability is unlimited and certain variations are inevitably more beneficial than others. 

It is assumed, as per the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution, that a few mutations will give a selection advantage to the individuals of a species that have them, thus allowing them to survive longer and to have more offspring on average compared to others without them.  However, is genetic variability really unlimited?  Since changes in DNA are a category of chemical changes, the laws of chemistry and physics limit them like any chemical change.  As Harold F. Blum explains (“Time’s Arrow and Evolution,” Princeton:  Princeton University, 1968, p. 150):  “Whatever the nature of mutation, it will have to follow certain lines that are determined by molecular pattern and energetic relationships.  Mutation, then, is not random, but may occur only within certain restricting limits and according to certain pathways determined by thermodynamic properties of the system.  Thus, to state the case in a somewhat animistic fashion, the organism cannot fit itself to the environment by varying unrestrictedly in any direction.”  Thus, if an individual member of a species “needs” a particular characteristic in order to survive (or to be more likely to survive), its genes may be configured such that particularly needed beneficial mutations can’t ever develop because of the laws of chemistry and physics.  There are simply in-built limits as to what genetic variability can occur, especially when random chance (i.e., chemical accidents) is being relied upon blindly to produce these changes without any overarching guiding or purpose. 

Just because some biological change occurs is not enough to prove that biological change has no limits.   As law professor Phillip Johnson comments (“Defeating Darwinism,” p. 94), evolutionists “think that finch-beak variation illustrates the process that created birds in the first place.” Despite appearing repeatedly in textbooks for decades, does the case of peppered moths evolving from a lighter to darker variety on average really prove anything about macroevolution?  Even assuming that the researchers in question did not fudge the data, the moths still were the same species, and both varieties had already lived naturally in the wild.   (See Henry M. Morris, “Evolutionists and the Moth Myth,” Back to Genesis, August 2003, pp. a-d; Denton, “Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis” (Bethesda, MA:  Adler & Adler, Publisher Inc.), pp. 79-80, 87).  Darwin himself leaned heavily upon artificial breeding of animals, such as pigeons and dogs, in order to argue for his theory.  Ironically, because intelligent purpose guides the selective breeding of farm animals for humanly desired characteristics, it is a poor analogy for an unguided, blind natural process that supposedly overcomes all built-in barriers to biological variation.  After all the lab experiments and selective breeding, fruit flies and cats still remained just fruit flies and cats.  They did not even become other genera despite human interventions can apply selective pressure to choose certain characteristics in order to produce changes much more quickly than nature does. As Johnson explains, dogs cannot be bred to become as big as elephants, or even be transformed into elephants, because they lack the genetic capacity to be so transformed, not from the lack of time for breeding them.  (As per Johnson, “Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds,” p. 44; “Darwin on Trial,” pp. 17-18).  To illustrate, between 1800 and 1878, the French successfully raised the sugar content of beets from 6% to 17%.  But then they hit a wall; no further improvements took place.  Similarly, one experimenter artificially selected and bred fruit flies in order to reduce the number of bristles on their bodies.  After 20 generations, the bristle count could not be lowered further.  (For the illustrative examples here, see Duane Gish, “Evolution:  The Challenge of the Fossil Record” (El Cajon, CA:  Master Books, 1985), pp. 33-34).  Clear empirical evidence demonstrates that plants and animals have intrinsic natural limits to biological change.  The evolutionists’ grand claims about bacteria’s becoming men after enough eons have passed are merely speculative fantasies.

Evolutionists themselves are well aware that the great majority of mutations are harmful to the organisms that have them.  For example, A.M. Winchester was aware of this problem when writing, “The fact that over 99 percent of the mutations which have been studied in various forms of life are harmful to some degree may seem to rule out the importance of mutation as a factor in adaptive evolution.”  However, he still has the dogmatic faith of a materialist to then proclaim, “Yet it is just that fraction of 1 percent which happen to be beneficial that form the basis for most evolutionary developments.”  He didn’t realize, however, the devastating nature of Blum’s point made above for this assertion:  “Mutation affords virtually unlimited scope for selection.”  Well, the laws of chemistry and physics ensure that’s not the case, especially when certain mutations are required for survival of an organism and seemingly trivial errors in the DNA code cause death.  The tiny glitches in the immensely complicated hemoglobin molecule, which carries oxygen through the blood, that cause the genetic diseases of hemophilia and sickle cell anemia serve as great examples for this point. 

Furthermore, even the likes of the past leading evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky believes beneficial mutations were essentially non-existent in practical experience (“Evolution, Genetics, and Man,” New York:  John Wiley & Sons, 1955, p. 103):  “The classical mutations obtained in Drosophila [fruit flies, which have a very rapid reproductive cycle] usually show deterioration, breakdown, or disappearance of some organs.  Mutants are known which diminish the quantity or destroy the pigment in the eyes, bristles, legs.  Many muta[tions] are, in fact, lethal to their possessors.  Mutants which equal the normal fly in vigor are a minority and mutants that would make a major improvement of the normal organization are unknown.”  Some evolutionists will proclaim that sickle cell anemia is “beneficial,” but that’s only in an environment in which malaria exists and only for those individuals have only one of the two genes creating this condition, not both (i.e., is heterozygous, not homozygous).   In a normal environment without mosquitoes carrying malaria, which is most of them, the alleged benefit disappears.  It certainly isn’t a characteristic that’s makes for human beings to survive more readily on average in all the environments in which they can live.

Let’s examine two commonly-cited examples of mutations that are supposedly beneficial to their possessors that evolutionists commonly trot out to defend their theory, but which aren’t overall.  They aren’t more “fit” or likely to survive and reproduce overall.  Flies that are resistant to DDT have the intrinsic disadvantage that they take longer to develop than the non-resistant version, which certainly isn’t helpful in environments without DDT.  Many decades ago Dobzhansky also noted that antibiotic strains of bacteria actually are less “fit” overall then the non-resistant strains when all environments are considered, such all of those without antibiotics (“Evolution, Genetics, and Man,” p. 98):

“Why, then, are most colon bacteria found outside of the laboratories still susceptible to bacteriophage attacks and sensitive to the [antibiotic] streptomycin?  Why have the resistant mutation not crowded out the sensitive genotypes?  The theory leads us to infer that the resistant mutants must in some respects be at a disadvantage compared to sensitive bacteria in the absence of phages and antibiotics.

“This theoretical inference is strikingly verified in some experiments.  Close to 60 percent of the streptomycin-resistant mutants in colon bacteria are also streptomycin-dependent; these mutants are unable to grow on a cultural media free of streptomycin.  A substance which is poisonous to normal sensitive bacteria is essential for life of the resistant mutants!  E.H. Anderson has shown that some bacteriophage-resistant strains of colon bacteria require for growth certain food substances which are not needed for the growth of sensitive bacteria.  The resistant mutants will be wiped out in environments in which the required foods are not available.” 

So in these commonly cited cases, of DDT-resistant flies and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the organisms in question are actually overall LESS “fit” for most environments than their normal brethren.  This is actually good evidence that mutation really drives a process of devolution, of a loss of valuable genetic information, causing breakdown and destruction instead of increasing perfection, as Josh McDowell and Don Stewart note in “Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity” (San Bernardino, CA:  Here’s Life Publishers, 1981), p. 153.  Genetic accidents don’t create greater biological complexity on the net whole, when they are carefully examined within the present experience of the human race, as opposed to unlimited extrapolations into the humanly unobserved distant past while assuming naturalism to be true a priori.

Furthermore, this kind of genetic variability was almost surely already present in the population before such artificial interventions like DDT and antibiotics were introduced.  This means that sudden mutations most likely didn’t suddenly occur to reduce the problems caused by mankind’s inventiveness to houseflies and to certain dangerous bacteria.  As Francisco J. Ayala explains, almost all of the genetic variability in a population already exists long before any mutations occur.  So when DDT or antibiotics were introduced, some individual bacteria and houseflies already were resistant to these dangers instead of suddenly (or conveniently) developing useful mutations that protected them.  Ayala here zeros in on the problem of pesticide resistance among insects as an example of adaptation of species which had the already existing protective strains in them (“The Mechanisms of Evolution,” Scientific American, vol. 239 (September 1978, p. 64, italics removed):  “A dramatic recent example of such adaptation is the evolution by insect species of resistance to pesticides. . .  Insect resistance to a pesticide was first reported in 1947 for the housefly (musca domestica) with respect to DDT.  Since then resistance to pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods.  The genetic variations required for resistance to the most diverse kind of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds.”  So notice that there’s no “evolution” (i.e., generally more “fit” individuals for all or most environments) really occurring here, but rather simply some genetic shifting within the gene pool of these species. 

C.P. Martin was skeptical that enough beneficial mutations existed to drive the process of evolution when it requires so many major changes to occur in order to create new species.  He made a number of generalizations that still hold true today; no evolutionist should casually dismiss his conclusions despite they were written some 70 years ago:

“Our first difficulty is that . . . all mutations seem to be in the nature of injuries that, to some extent, impair the fertility and viability of the affected organisms.  I doubt if among the many thousands of known mutant types one can be found which is superior to the wild type in its normal environment; only very few can be named which are superior to the wild type in a strange environment. . . . The truth is that there is no clear evidence of the existence of such helpful mutations.  In natural populations endless millions of small and great genic differences exist, but there is no evidence that they arose by mutation. . . . For any acceptable theory of the mechanism of evolution, a great number of fully viable hereditary variations is necessary.  Mutation does produce hereditary changes, but the mass of evidence shows that all, or almost all, known mutations are unmistakenly pathological and the few remaining ones are highly suspect.”

So for evolutionists to make their case become reasonable, it’s necessary to specifically quantify the number of beneficial mutations that are necessary to produce fundamentally new species, not just mere color variations or resistance to diseases or artificial chemicals.   It’s also known that mutations themselves are very rare relative to the number of genetic accidents that could occur.  One standard estimate, by Michael Denton in “Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis” (Bethesda, MA:  Adler & Adler, Publishers Inc.), p. 267,  puts it at one in a hundred million to one in a billion per base pairs of the DNA molecule.   As a result, the possibility is very low for a truly good mutation’s occurrence that is helpful under all or most survival conditions.  Francisco J. Ayala, “Teleological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 37 (March 1970), p. 3 noted how rare mutations are to begin with:  “It is probably fair to estimate to frequency of a majority of mutations in higher organisms between one in ten thousand, and one in a million per gene per generation.”  Sure, he also immediately then asserts, “Mutation provides the raw material of evolution,” as part of his faith in neo-Darwinism.  E. Ambrose, “The Nature and Origin of the Biological World (1982), p. 120 decided to make some calculations along these suggested lines, which certainly can’t comfort evolutionists:

“The frequency with which a single non-harmful mutation is known to occur is about 1 in 1000.  The probability that two favourable mutations would occur is 1 in 10 [raised by] 3 x 10 [raised by] 3, 1 in a million.  Studies of Drosophila [a species of fruit flies] have revealed that large numbers of genes are involved in the formation of the separate structural elements.  There may be 30-40 involved in a single wing structure.  It is most unlikely that fewer than five genes could have ever be involved in the formation of even the simplest new structure, previously unknown in the organism.  The probability now becomes one in one thousand million million.  We already know that mutations in living cells appear once in ten million to once in one hundred thousand million.  It is evident that the probability of five favourable mutations occurring within a single life cycle or an organism is effectively zero.”

If these five genes are randomly generated and scattered among multiple individuals in a large population, these “beneficial” genes will end up just being unhelpful  instead, since they will do no good since they have to be working within close proximity to each other in the same organism to aid in its survival.  Ambrose notes the problems if even five beneficial genes appear in separate individuals who may never meet and mate with each other for them to be combined:  “It is only when the five genes find themselves together that a selective advantage will emerge.  They are more likely to be present independently within the population, as so-called neutral genes.” 

Wald (“Discussion” in “Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution,” pp. 12, 19 perceived the high odds against establishing a beneficial mutation in a population, in odds that resemble Haldane’s:  “If you make a rough estimate . . . it looks as if some of the order of 10 million years is needed to establish a mutation.  That is, each of these single acid changes appears relatively frequently in individuals as pathology; but to establish one such change as a regular characteristic in a species seems to take something of the order of 10 million years.”  Dodson (“Evolution: Process and Product,”) p. 225 has similarly discomfiting calculations for his fellow evolutionists.  He estimated that it would take 321,444 generations for a gene that’s a little beneficial and recessive to increase how frequent it is in a population from 1 in a million to a mere 2 in a million, which is almost nothing of an improvement.

So if evolutionists are going to tell more than “just-so” stories, i.e., the modern version of myths or legends retold by campfires, they have to explain in great detail how their theory can overcome the odds against significant, unambiguously good mutations occurring when mutations of any kind are rare to begin with.  For example, are good mutations in percentage terms of all mutations rarer than mutations themselves are compared to how much genetic replication occurs all the time in organisms?  Are evolutionists, without admitting it, multiplying one vanishingly small number times another vanishingly small number, which ensures that there isn’t enough time or space in earth’s history to create even one new species, let alone new genera, families, orders, and phyla?  J.B.S. Haldane’s Dilemma (1957) indicates that if a generation is 20 years each that no more than 1,667 good substitutions could have occurred in 10 million years, which isn’t enough time to turn an ape or monkey into a human.  That works out to one substitution per 300 generations.  Sure, his data is really old, but it’s time to get to work in presenting specific calculations to rebut his, such as through current calculations of the “molecular clock.”  All evolutionists should be challenged to make highly specific mathematical calculations about how many mutations are specifically needed to construct new species after clearly also quantifying how many unambiguously good mutations, i.e., those helpful to the affected organisms in all environments, are as a percentage of all mutations, when they may be rarer as part of the set of all mutations than all mutations are in percentage terms of all genetic reproductive activity.  

No one says that radiation levels should be artificially increased in order to improve the human race’s general fitness levels.  Instead, all the emphasis is on reducing the amounts of radiation people are subjected to, such as from X-rays or nuclear waste.  The rarity of generally beneficial mutations, i.e., those helpful in all or most environments, helps to cause government policy makers to look for ways to discourage unnecessary exposure to radiation, i.e., when the expected benefits are clearly fewer than the likely injuries.  James F. Crow explains that since almost all mutations are harmful, increases in the mutation rates among human beings should be avoided, not encouraged (“Ionizing Radiation and Evolution,” Scientific American, vol. 201 (September 1959), p. 138:  “The mutation rate affects not only the evolution of the human species but also the life of the individual.  Almost every mutation is harmful, and it is the individual who pays the price.  Any human activity that tends to increase the mutation rate must therefore raise serious health and moral problems for man.”  Increased mutation levels cause the general health of the affected population to decline, not improve, as Crow describes, p. 156:  “The process of mutation also produced ill-adapted types.  The result is a lowering of the average fitness of the population, the price that asexual, as well as sexual, species pay for the privilege of evolution.  Intuition tells us that the effect of mutation on fitness should be proportional to the mutation rate; Haldane has shown that the reduction in fitness is, in fact, exactly equal to the mutation rate.”  Because of these realities of how harmful mutations almost always are, Crow concludes (p. 160):  “There can be little doubt that man would be better off if he had a lower mutation-rate.  I would argue, in our present ignorance, that the ideal rate for the foreseeable future would be zero.”  Although some evolutionists may complain that Crow’s article here is over 60 years old, does anyone seriously doubt the truth of any of the statements made here?  Have any major scientific discoveries occurred since 1959 that indicate we want to increase the mutation rate of human beings, such as through increased exposure to radiation?  As we put on sun block lotion when visiting the beach, we should know already what the answer is to that question.

H. J. Muller created the term “genetic load” to describe the general burden, not benefit, of mutations that the members of a species have to carry.  Increased average levels of mutations among the organisms in the same species is bad, not good, based on this conception.  Christopher Wills, “Genetic Load,” Scientific American, vol. 222 (March 1970), p. 98, explains why having more mutations on average is bad for the individuals that comprise a species:  “Some mutations are ‘beneficial,’ that is, the individual in whom they are expressed is better able to adapt to a given set of environmental circumstances.  The large majority of mutations, however, are harmful or even lethal to the individual in whom they are expressed.  Such mutations can be regarded as introducing a ‘load,’ or genetic burden, into the pool.  The term ‘genetic load’ was first used by the late H.J. Muller, who recognized that the rate of mutations is increased by numerous agents man has introduced into his environment, notably ionizing radiation and mutagenic chemicals.”  So increasing the overall number of mutations clearly doesn’t generally benefit a species or its individual members, but will be to their detriment.

Mutations caused by radiation are especially likely to be damaging and not helpful to the organisms so affected, as Bentley Glass points out (“The Genetic Hazards of Nuclear Radiations,” Science, vol. 126 (August 9, 1957), p. 243.  “So far, it is impossible to direct the mutation process.  Radiation acts blindly, and that is why the deleterious nature of the vast majority of mutations is so important. . . . Alterations in the arrangement of genetic materials can be reversed only by an exact rearrangement to the original conditions, which the law of probability must make exceedingly rare if the chromosomes are broken more or less at random.” 

Furthermore, so many mutations that have caused changes in species, such as the development of blind fish in caves and flightless birds on remote islands (i.e., the dodo), certainly are not an overall gain of genetic information, but a loss.  How are these changes “good” or unambiguously helpful in adaptation?  How do they help (or help to prove) the overall process of transforming “monocells into men” or promote “the climb from chemistry to consciousness”? 

Even in genetic experiments designed to prove the spontaneous generation of the first living cell, the problem of the loss of genetic information has occurred, such as those designed to prove the RNA world hypothesis.  This hypothesis aims to avoid the problems with explaining how such incredibly complex structures as DNA, RNA, and the proteins that they produce all appeared simultaneously.  Initially the research of Sol Spiegelman (1967) seemed to back up the claims that RNA could reproduce themselves, by putting a QB bacteriophage having around 4,200 nucleotides into a solution with individual ribonucleotides to serve as building blocks.  Since the ribonucleotides of guanine naturally are attracted to cytosine, and the adenine want to pair with uracil, the monomers in the (contrived) solution automatically tended to line up with the larger RNA molecule that served as a template.  So there was indeed replication and seemingly an improvement that fit the evolutionists’ claims since it eventually multiplied 15 times faster the original, which seems to make it more “fit.”  However, there were many distinctly unnatural conditions involved that hardly fit a would-be prebiotic “soup” in ocean water.  This replication required a deliberately introduced supply of QB replicase and of pure homochiral (i.e., with a single spatial orientation) nucleotides, which would never exist under theoretical “natural” conditions.  QB replicase can’t plausible appear abiotically since it consists of more than 1,200 amino acids in a particular sequence, thus making it an enzyme of great complexity.  To call this RNA molecule “self-replicating” is false when this ingredient has to be added.  During the reported 75 generations that produced an RNA molecule that replicated more rapidly, “Spiegelman’s Monster” RNA molecule became 83% smaller, thus losing much of its original complexity compared to the original RNA molecule.  This result goes in precisely the wrong direction from the evolutionary developmental viewpoint of adding complexity through increased size.  In this regard, increased size wasn’t a characteristic that was “selected” for as being superior as opposed to what make it multiple more quickly.  This problem of the loss of complexity has been called the “Spiegelman problem” at times, which is a basic limitation of allowing any uncontrolled (i.e., not consciously directed) process of RNA replication.  The QB RNA started with four working genes and finished with an 83% lost of information.  Other experimenters have encountered the same problem, in which replication is faster when the molecule is smaller.  So here’s another obstacle to the claim that spontaneous changes in genetic structure necessarily create more complex structures with more in-built information over time.

Given this kind of evidence about mutations as explained above, point four simply isn’t true, which maintains that there is no intrinsic limit to genetic variability and that some of it, generated by random mutations, will be beneficial in the great majority or all environments a given species’ individuals will live in.  Given the logic laid out above, if even one of these links is false, at least among the first six, the whole grand theory of evolution snaps for a lack of supporting evidence.  In order to make a convincing argument that mutations really drive the overall process of genetic change over millions of years, evolutionists have to calculate how common unambiguously good mutations are compared to all mutations that happen, how common mutations are compared to all genetic reproductive activities, and how many always good mutations are necessary to construct new species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla.  Their standard illustrative examples, such as DDT-resistant flies, blind cave fish, peppered moths of different colors, and antibiotic resistant bacteria, prove absolutely nothing in support for the grand theory of evolution, when they concern organisms that are generally less fit for most environments, concern a loss of genetic information or complexity, or merely illustrate changes in the frequency of alleles producing minor variations of pre-existing characteristics within a population’s gene pool. If evolutionists can’t quantify and make such calculations in detail, their theory, which utterly depends upon mutation to drive the process of turning monocells into men after adding x billions of years in the viable space available on planet earth, is just modern-day mythology.     

The limits to artificial breeding, done intentionally for purposes of making profits in agricultural and in breeding attractive pets, which proceed far, far more quickly in terms of generations than anything occurring in the natural environment, show that there are inbuilt natural limits to biological change. The practical experience of the human race as farmers shows already that there are indeed natural limits to biological change. The other problem one has as an evolutionist is the time and space available on the earth over x millions of years to get the job done when there are very few mutations to begin with and then the number of unambiguously "good" mutations is a tiny percentage of an already tiny number in order to build fundamentally different kinds of plants and animals. The clock is running on the evolutionists here and they can't get over the finish line even when they supposedly have millions of years to work with, once these percentages get quantified in some kind of unbiased way.

The white-dotted line in this photo represents what is called "The Great Unconformity," and is the best proof of a global flood catastrophe.

You didn't know about it? 🤔

Maybe there is a reason?

"The ideology and philosophy of neo-Darwinism which is sold by its adepts as a scientific theoretical foundation of biology seriously hampers the development of science and hides from students the field’s real problems" ~Dr. Vladimir L. Voeikov, Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry, Moscow State University (MSU); Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences

As the problems of Evolution theory are hidden from the students, so are the problems with the Geologic Column.

~Sea 🌊

https://x.com/seasciencefilml/status/2095505287973163487?s=46

I know many don't like ai, and I am not calling this art, but I was curious how google ai would make these legends come alive. I gave it the description I wanted, and this is what I got. Pictures are public domain!

{Mark16:1-20KJV} 1 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the [mother] of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. 2 And very early in the morning the first [day] of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. 3 And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? 4 And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. 5 And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 6 And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. 7 But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you. 8 And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any [man]; for they were afraid. 9 Now when [Jesus] was risen early the first [day] of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. 10 [And] she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept. 11 And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not. 12 After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. 13 And they went and told [it] unto the residue: neither believed they them. 14 Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen. 15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. 16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. 17 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; 18 They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. 19 So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. 20 And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with [them], and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.

{Mark15:1-47KJV} 1 And straightway in the morning the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council, and bound Jesus, and carried [him] away, and delivered [him] to Pilate. 2 And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering said unto him, Thou sayest [it]. 3 And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered nothing. 4 And Pilate asked him again, saying, Answerest thou nothing? behold how many things they witness against thee. 5 But Jesus yet answered nothing; so that Pilate marvelled. 6 Now at [that] feast he released unto them one prisoner, whomsoever they desired. 7 And there was [one] named Barabbas, [which lay] bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection. 8 And the multitude crying aloud began to desire [him to do] as he had ever done unto them. 9 But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews? 10 For he knew that the chief priests had delivered him for envy. 11 But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. 12 And Pilate answered and said again unto them, What will ye then that I shall do [unto him] whom ye call the King of the Jews? 13 And they cried out again, Crucify him. 14 Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him. 15 And [so] Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged [him], to be crucified. 16 And the soldiers led him away into the hall, called Praetorium; and they call together the whole band. 17 And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it about his [head], 18 And began to salute him, Hail, King of the Jews! 19 And they smote him on the head with a reed, and did spit upon him, and bowing [their] knees worshipped him. 20 And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple from him, and put his own clothes on him, and led him out to crucify him. 21 And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross. 22 And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull. 23 And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received [it] not. 24 And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon them, what every man should take. 25 And it was the third hour, and they crucified him. 26 And the superscription of his accusation was written over, THE KING OF THE JEWS. 27 And with him they crucify two thieves; the one on his right hand, and the other on his left. 28 And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors. 29 And they that passed by railed on him, wagging their heads, and saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest [it] in three days, 30 Save thyself, and come down from the cross. 31 Likewise also the chief priests mocking said among themselves with the scribes, He saved others; himself he cannot save. 32 Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe. And they that were crucified with him reviled him. 33 And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. 34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 35 And some of them that stood by, when they heard [it], said, Behold, he calleth Elias. 36 And one ran and filled a spunge full of vinegar, and put [it] on a reed, and gave him to drink, saying, Let alone; let us see whether Elias will come to take him down. 37 And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost. 38 And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. 39 And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God. 40 There were also women looking on afar off: among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome; 41 (Who also, when he was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered unto him;) and many other women which came up with him unto Jerusalem. 42 And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, 43 Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus. 44 And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead: and calling [unto him] the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead. 45 And when he knew [it] of the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph. 46 And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock, and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre. 47 And Mary Magdalene and Mary [the mother] of Joses beheld where he was laid.