Sunday, April 01, 2007

Evolutionary Musings

Paradigms shift all of the time. Hundreds of years ago, it was the common consensus that the solar system revolved around the earth. The science textbooks changed and a new paradigm entered the scene. The beliefs of science are in constant flux. If the world lasts, a thousand years from now, our progeny will scorn our shallow understanding of the world. Compared to eternity future, we are but still at the beginning, playing with the dust and pebbles of the universe while thinking we are doing something grand.

Evolution is a paradigm that is in grievous trouble.

Fred Hoyle of the British Academy of Science and mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe decided to calculate the probability of life coming into existence anywhere in the universe. Their results? Utterly impossible. They gave it all the time in the universe, but time plus chance produces nothing!

Francis Crick, Noble Prize winner for his discovery of DNA, also attempted to calculate the probability that life sprang into existence spontaneously. His results? Utter impossible. Instead of jumping into the arms of God, Crick decided to propagate the theory of genetic panspermia. In sum, his theory propounded that life on earth was seeded by benevolent and mighty aliens. Their work made life possible through the path of evolution. The problem? Crick merely delayed the impossible, casting it back on a continuous regression of aliens.

Stephen J. Gould, one of the greatest defenders of evolution, was also troubled by issues that he saw within evolution. As a result, he came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium. He postulated that there were sudden leaps in evolution that left no transitional forms. If only he had made one massive leap, he would have ended up where theists are today.

Are these the actions of men that believe that the evolutionary paradigm is secure?

While the defenders of evolution are resorting to new and stunning conjecture to cover the nakedness of evolution, intelligent design has been seeking to topple the entire infrastructure.

The simple design of a mousetrap is irreducibly complex, no one part of the mousetrap makes sense without all of the other pieces. The evolution of a species or a single organ is also irreducibly complex. Take for example the eye. The eye is composed of mechanisms that are entirely reliant upon one another for the eye to function at all. If evolution is true, each part of the eye evolved over time and accrued in aggregate form. Unfortunately, the individual parts of the eye do not promote the survivability of the animal. They may actually impede its survivability. Over millions of years, the evolutionist would have us believe that the portions of the eye accrued until we had a complete and functional organ.

Another stake in the heart of evolution is the absence of transitional forms. Darwin predicted that this would be the downfall of his theory. Nothing has been found. Frauds have been created such as Piltdown man, Java man and a host of other oddities found to be made out of bits of extinct pigs, apes, etc., but nothing definitive has been offered to support the claims of evolution. If nothing else, our excavations should lead us to conclude that life was more complex and varied in the past than it is at present. This concurs with the concept of entropy.

The third law of thermodynamics is at odds with evolution. Time and chance lead to a loss of genetic information, the accretion of deleterious and deadly mutations. Per the evolutionary model, the very environment that may have produced the earliest protein chain is the same environment that would wipe it out in the next second. Life and entropy teach us that life is fragile.

The fossil record has yielded no evidence for evolution. Fossil beds contain a mixture of species and life forms from supposedly different evolutionary eras all at the same level of excavation. The geological column, which is purported to have taken millions of years to form, is riddled with issues. Dozens of museums have fish and other creatures that are tipped on end in the column. These fossils, know as polystratigraphic fossils, pass through millions of years of evolutionary deposition and sedimentation. How could a fish stand on end over millions of years while it was covered by sedminent? Evolutionists recognize these as “mysteries”.

I’m not attempting to be exhaustive with this list of problems, but the list goes on forever!

If evolution is true, there is no meaning or purpose to the world. We are merely spinning out our days on a not-so-extraordinary speck in the universe. Everything is chemically driven and determined. My love for my spouse has nothing noble within it. I’m merely driven by my biological urges to secure a mate that will perpetuate the species. Emotions over the death of my father are merely a chemically induced warning to avoid those things that limit my survivability. The only drive is sexual, the only moral is survival and there is no answer for anything.

"Nature is red in tooth and claw" is the summation of the evolutionary virtue. By bloodshed the fittest survive, but to what end? Morals are irrelevant. To push an old lady into oncoming traffic or to help her across the street are of equal value; both are meaningless. One might even argue that pushing the old lady into the street opens an ecological niche for a contributing member of the species. As one geneticist one argued with me, adultery and fornication are evolutionary values. They create genetic diversity.

Several scientists have recognized the problem in not having a center upon which to build society, ethics and morals. They have embraced the creation of what they call a “Noble Lie”; the creation of a belief system akin to Christianity. Let us create something to believe in that will allow us to continue our meaningless, mediocre existence. In the end, is it not still a lie?

In a world that is merely a cosmic accident, does even science have any meaning? Is it not merely a search without purpose and a quest without answers? Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.