News or propaganda?

It seems like nearly every day, there’s another sensational headline written about some major discovery that “proves” evolution.  Fans of evolution hoot and holler and thump their chests, doubling down on their complaints that creationists are just science deniers who don’t even understand evolution.  It’s been my experience, though, that most of these headlines age like milk.

I started my first blog on October 19, 2007.  I was very passionate about what I believed but wasn’t necessarily a great blogger.  I feel I got better over time but, after several years, I took a break from blogging.  A couple of years ago, however, I plunged back into blogging because I am just that passionate about my beliefs.  I still don’t know how good of a writer I am but I feel like some of my old posts were more interesting than others.  I decided to take some of my better posts from my old blog, rewrite them to make them a little more precise, and publish them on my new blog.  I did notice something, though - a lot of the old links I had to news stories were broken.  Hmmm.

I try to use links to secular sources whenever I can.  I do this because I’m usually commenting on claims made by evolutionists and I don’t want to just repeat (or, worse yet, plagiarize) things being said by other creationists.  I want to talk about current issues and give original thoughts - my thoughts - about the matter.  Anyway, in a post I had written 3/27/2015, I cited a National Geographic article titled, Oldest Human Fossil Found, Redrawing Family Tree.  I would link you to the original article but it’s not there anymore.  My first thought was that it’s a little odd that the story wasn’t available any more.  I mean, this was supposedly the oldest human fossil and redrew the family tree of human origins so you’d think that’s kind of a big deal, right?  Why would the article not still be available?

Of course, we’re talking about National Geographic which offers a lot of content online.  I could understand it might not archive every story they’ve ever published online.  After all, the article is over 9 years old as I write this so maybe they have no articles that old available anymore.  But this was a major find, right?  It was claimed to be the oldest human fossil and would “redraw” man’s family tree!  Surely there would be more recent headlines written about it that I could use on my blog.  Alas, there are not.  I did a Google search under the term ‘jaw “Chalachew Seyoum”’ and there’s been remarkably little said about it since 2015.  The find made a splash, only to find itself later piled onto the heap of fake news published by evolutionists.  In my day, we called this “a flash in the pan.”

I did find a paper published in 2023 titled, Ledi-Geraru strikes again: Morphological affinities of the LD 350- 1 mandible with early Homo.  From that paper, we can read the following:

Due to [the fossilized jaw fragment’s] age and location, it has been suggested that the mandible might represent a young specimen of Australopithecus afarensis. However, despite its primitive traits shared with australopithecines, Villmoare et al. (2015a) discarded this interpretation based on the presence of a set of derived features shared with Homo. Furthermore, the LD 350-1 mandible is at least 0.2 Ma younger than the most recent known A. afarensis specimen. Therefore, Villmoare et al. (2015a) assigned the LD 350-1 to the genus Homo…  A subsequent study led by Hawks et al. (2015) contested the Homo assignation and drew attention to the fact that the Ledi-Geraru mandible also presents significant similarities with A. afarensis, A. africanus, and A. sediba. They emphasized that LD 350-1 is an isolated and partial remain, making a genus assignation unwise. This interpretation, however, was rejected by Villmoare et al. (2015b), who maintained their original position. 

So what was found was the jaw fragment of some creature which, even after years of studying it, scientists still can’t even agree if it was an ape (A. afarensis) or a human (Homo).  What was reported is that someone had found the oldest human fossil and that it would redraw the human family tree!  

Now, I get it.  Online sites, magazines, and newspapers are trying to earn clicks.  They use hype to draw views so they can sell ads.  They’re just trying to put a little sizzle on the steak as the saying goes.  But what is happening is they’re reporting fake news.  I’m fairly confident that most of the eager readers of the sensational headlines, never went on to read and “peer-reviewed” scientific papers about what was actually found.  The average person will never read much past the headline because he already believes evolution is true so why bother?  

I’ve written before (here) about a sort of “conspiracy” going on in the scientific community.  Evolutionists are happy for the lay public to believe half-truths and misleading headlines.  Have you ever heard that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar?  Did you know that this amazing similarity only occurs in 82% of the genome?  I’ll bet you didn’t.  I’ll bet you also didn’t know that chimp DNA is about 10% longer than human DNA.  If you have two, written sentences with one being 90 characters long and the other being 99 characters long, how can they ever be 98% similar?  It’s a joke.  

When people hear that human and chimp DNA are 98% similar, they assume it means 98% of the entire genomes.  The evolutionists who should know better, won’t bother explaining exactly what’s being compared because it undermines their theory.  Like I said, evolutionists are happy for the confusion.  Likewise, they’re happy for the sensational headlines even though they know how misleading they are.

Of course, there have been many of these pop-science stories written since 2015 - all of them being  just as sensational but also just as forgettable.  I see them all the time and I have to endure the chest thumping and name calling displayed by militant evolutionists every time.  Deep down, though, I know I will have the last laugh in just a few years when the remarkable find they report today will be all but forgotten.

The Law of Large Numbers meets an infinite amount of monkeys

Evolutionists are rather cavalier in their attitude toward abiogenesis. The supposed first ancestor of everything was not observed. Neither can it be repeated or tested. It's outside of the scope of scientific inquiry yet evolutionists, because of the religious-like tenets of methodological naturalism, dismiss any possibility of divine intervention in the origin of life. It's not a scientific conclusion; it's a faith based one.  Outside the revelation of the Creator, we could not possibly know about the true origin of life. How it did happen can never be known scientifically because it was a unique event in history and we weren't there to see it. However, scientists are also in the dark about how it even could have happened. In spite of years of trying, scientists have not been able to create life from non-living chemicals. They've not even devised a plausible scenario. The best they have are fanciful, “just so” stories that are no more scientific than Dr. Seuss.

 

Seeing that scientists have not been able to create life via their own intelligence, it's rather far-fetched to believe that life could randomly begin without the aid of any intelligent design whatsoever. Many creationists have ridiculed the idea of abiogenesis using a purely statistical perspective. That is, given the length of even the simplest protein, the odds of that many amino acids lining up in just the right order to create life seems impossible. Talk Origins summed up the creationists' argument this way (source):

 

So the calculation goes that the probability of forming a given 300 amino acid long protein (say an enzyme like carboxypeptidase) randomly is (1/20)300 or 1 chance in 2.04 x 10390, which is astoundingly, mind-beggaringly improbable. This is then cranked up by adding on the probabilities of generating 400 or so similar enzymes until a figure is reached that is so huge that merely contemplating it causes your brain to dribble out your ears. This gives the impression that the formation of even the smallest organism seems totally impossible.

That's not a bad summary of the creationists' position and I think the improbable odds is a serious objection to abiogenesis. Now, don't get me wrong. By citing them, I'm not saying TO is not a bunch of closet creationists nor do they cringe when hearing the probability argument. It's just that evolutionists aren't daunted by the mind-numbingly small chance of abiogenesis. In a textbook example of circular reasoning, they know that abiogenesis has happened because we're here!

When considering abiogenesis, evolutionists usually dismiss the matter with the tired argument, “that's not part of the theory.” That's rather odd because they always seem to include something about the “primordial soup” or the Miller-Urey experiments in biology text books. So even though they like to claim it's not part of their theory, they spend a lot of their own time talking about it.  Never mind that right now.  In this post, I'd like to explore another tactic sometimes employed by evolutionists in their effort to climb “mount improbable.” Even though the odds of amino acids combining to form even one, simple protein are astonishingly small, evolutionists place their hope in a near infinite number of trials. After all, even the most improbable combination – even a seemingly impossible combination – will be accomplished if all possible combinations are tried. In a universe as large as ours, there are chemical processes occurring everywhere. If you have billions of years of trial and error, even something as unlikely as abiogenesis becomes almost a certainty.

There's an old analogy used to demonstrate this principle: if there were an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters, eventually they would type all of Shakespeare's plays. Now, I'm not a math wizard but even I can understand that books are merely combinations of words and words are merely combinations of letters. If someone could attempt every possible combination of letters, then of course he will chance upon the same combination of letters found in a Shakespeare play. If I may be so bold, I might even correct the analogy: in an infinite number of attempts, the correct combination would immediately be reached, not eventually.

However, there's something that's always nagged me about the monkey analogy (besides evolutionists' seeming obsession with monkeys – RKBentley snickers). First, the universe isn’t infinite.  It isn’t infinitely large nor is it infinitely old.  It may be very big but, at the end of the day, there still could have been only a finite number of trials.  To use an analogy where there are an infinite number of trials, is a subtly deceptive way of making their unlikely position seem more plausible.

But besides that, like I said, I'm not a math genius but I do have a degree in business and have worked in financial services for over 30 years so I'm not a stranger to math. There's a widely understood principle in the business world known as the law of large numbers. The law is used in many different ways but basically the law predicts that the larger a sample is, the more typical it will be. Let me explain how it works.  If I tossed a coin 10 times, I should theoretically get 5 heads and 5 tails. However, 10 trials is not a large sample so my results are not easily predicted. I could get 7 heads and 3 tails. 10 is just too small to be representative. If I next tossed the coin 100 times, I still might not get exactly 50 heads, but it will likely be closer to 50/50 than 70/30. If I tossed the coin 1,000,000,000 times, I can almost guarantee that approximately 50% of the tosses will be heads. As a matter of fact, if I got 70% heads after 1 billion tosses, I would suspect that the coin is not truly random.

The difference between the law of large numbers and the theoretical monkeys is that the law of large numbers has been tested many times over. Casinos, insurance companies, lotteries, and many other businesses rely on this principle in their business models. For example, an insurance company with 5,000,000 customers can predict with uncanny accuracy how many 45 year old, insured men will die this year. If slot machines are truly random, I could theoretically win 100 jackpots with 100 pulls. The odds of doing that may be remote but they exist in theory. Yet by using the law of large numbers, casinos know almost to the penny how much they will pay out in winnings for every 1,000,000 pulls of a slot machine.

The law of large numbers puts a kink in the infinite monkey analogy. I'm not sure how many words typically make up a play but let's say it's 200,000. We'll further assume an average word length of 5 letters. Therefore, a typical Shakespeare play is 1,000,000 characters long (we'll also assume that includes spaces). There are 26 letters in the alphabet plus a space so each peck of the typewriter could yield 27 possible outcomes. 1 million pecks is a reasonably large enough sample that the law of large numbers should apply so we know that 1/27th of the letters will be “A,” 1/27th will be “B,” 1/27th will be “C,” etc. In other words, after 1 million pecks, you will have about the same number of “X” as “A.” In English, the letter A occurs far more frequently than the letter X so I don't care how the letters are arranged, you can never have a Shakespeare play when there are as many X's as A's!  

 

Don't forget too that there are punctuation marks on the keyboard so you will actually have as many $, @, and % as you have A, B, or C.  The more outcomes that are possible, the more unlikely it becomes to get the desired outcome.

Even in an infinite number of trials, the letters typed out by each monkey should be distributed evenly if each trial is truly random. Any 1,000,000 long string of characters will look approximately the same as any other 1,000,000 long string. There will roughly be equal numbers of A's, Q's, X's, spaces, and punctuation marks. An infinite number of monkeys will yield an infinite number of manuscripts that will all resemble each other and will all be gibberish.

 

Time is not a magic formula that suddenly makes the improbable likely. Amino acids combining over and over could be likened to letters being spit out by the monkeys. In a large number of trials, they will randomly combine in similar sequences over and over. There's no certainty or even likelihood that they will ever combine in that fortunate sequence that creates life. Some things are truly impossible.

A bad word analogy of evolution

 

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I found the “graph” below online a while back. Maybe it's not a graph; perhaps I should call it an illustration. I don't know. Normally, I'd link you to the original site but I can't find it now. Yes, there's a URL on the image but that gives me a "missing page" error.  I even did a Google search on the image but no luck. If anyone knows where the image came from, please leave a link in the comments. Thank you in advance.

Anyway, the author was trying to make the point that little changes can accumulate over time to create big changes. This is one of the lies that evolutionists tell when they say that the only difference between microevolution and macroevolution is time and scale. To make his point, the author showed how you could change the word AARDVARK to BASEBALL by changing only one letter at a time.

Now, as someone who often uses analogies, I can appreciate how difficult it is to create a really good analogy. I normally wouldn't nitpick an analogy if I can at least see the overarching point its author is trying to make. However, in this case, there are such fundamental flaws in the analogy that I believe it better illustrates some of the difficulties of evolution rather than how evolution could progress.

Before I get into the difficulties in the analogy (and, by extension, with evolution), let me offer a thumbnail of what the author is trying to demonstrate. Evolution supposedly happens via mutation and natural selection. A mutation will occur in the DNA of an organism; on rare occasions, the mutation will offer a benefit to the host; because of this advantage, the host may live longer (natural selection) and leave more offspring which will inherit the beneficial mutation; eventually, the descendants with the beneficial mutation will replace the entire population. In the analogy, the changes in the letters represent mutations in the DNA. The accumulation of these changes can turn the ancestral species into a different species in the same way changing one letter at a time can turn AARDVARK into BASEBALL.

Did I misrepresent anything? Isn't that how evolutionists believe populations evolve? OK, then on to the problems!!

EVERY GENERATION MUST BE SUCCESSFUL

The first problem is rather glaring. The steps in between AARDVARK and BASEBALL in this graph are just groups of letters that don't even make words. Going from actual words to meaningless letters represents a loss of information. If natural selection selects the most fit, why would it select AASDVARK over AARDVARK? It doesn't make any sense.

For evolution to happen, any mutation must make the host more fit than the population before it. For an arm to become a wing, for example, every slight modification of the limb had to be more beneficial than the generation before it. It's hard to imagine a scenario where a limb that is not quite an arm but not yet a wing would be selected over a fully functional arm.

Evolution is impossible if the transitional forms between the starting and ending species are any less fit than the generation before it. They'd be like the meaningless words between AARDVARK and BASEBALL.

EVOLUTION IS NOT A DIRECTED PROCESS

In the case of this graph, the author knew he was heading toward BASEBALL and selected only those letters that worked toward that goal. Natural selection doesn't know that it's supposed to do that. In the imaginary leg-to-wing series, natural selection would tend to select the mutation that creates a more fit leg over a mutation that makes the limb “more like a wing.” Further, it would not select the other features necessary for flight (like hollow bones, complex feathers, or perching legs) unless those features offer some survival benefit to the earth-bound creature. In short, natural selection will have the tendency only to make a terrestrial creature a more fit terrestrial creature. It will not select mutations that could eventually make an earth-bound creature a flying creature.

Consider mimicry in nature, for a moment, where one species will look like another. An example I've used before was one of Batesian mimicry, where a fly resembles a bee. Predators that eat flies, might avoid eating a bee out of fear of getting stung so looking like a bee offers a survival benefit to a fly. Using the stepwise method suggested by the graph, the problem becomes, how did such a striking similarity evolve gradually? Surely blind chance would not select a “more like a bee” mutation. It would only select for a “more fit fly.” Every single mutation that doesn't make the fly more fit will be selected against – even if the mutation might slightly resemble a bee.

TOO MUCH ROOM FOR ERROR

The final flaw I see in the analogy is the enormous room for error. As has already be discussed, for the analogy to be realistic, all the steps in between the starting and ending words should also be words. Here's an example with a 4-letter word, PLAY – FLAY – FLAG – FLOG – FROG. In this case, every step in between is a real word. However, in each place there are 26 possible replacements which means you are far more likely to get a meaningless word than a real word.

In the real word, mutations are far more likely to be neutral or harmful than they are to be beneficial. Yet it is the occasional, beneficial mutation, one that maybe happens only once in a while, that is the hope of all evolutionists. Beneficial, trait-adding mutations are astonishingly scare. I would say they don't happen at all but, just for the sake of argument, let's say they happen infrequently. How often can we agree that they might happen? Is it once every hundred mutations? Surely, it's not that often. I could say it's more like 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100,000. Actually, in a moment you'll see why higher numbers are worse for evolution but I'm going to be very, very generous and say it's 1 in 1,000. Now, let's look at some math.

If 1 in every 1,000 mutations is a beneficial, trait-adding mutation for the host, then for the host to inherit 2 beneficial mutations means there will have been 1,000,000 neutral or harmful mutations (1,000 x 1,000). To inherit only 3 means there will have been 1,000,000,000 neutral or harmful mutations in the genome (1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000). Can you see where this is going? The genome is deteriorating 1,000 times faster than it is improving. To inherit even a handful of successful mutations comes at the great expense of billions and billions of unsuccessful mutations. How many successful mutations would it take to turn a molecule into a man? How long could such a wasteful process continue before the entire genome becomes too corrupted to sustain life? Remember, this is assuming 1 beneficial mutation in every 1,000. If it were 1 in 10,000, then 2 successful mutations comes with the burden of 100,000,000 other mutations!

In 1995, A.S. Kondrashov published a paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology where he discussed contamination of the genome by very slightly deleterious mutations. Over time, the ratio of harmful mutations to good mutations should become unbearable and he says, “This paradox cannot be resolved by invoking beneficial mutations or environmental fluctuations.” In the title, he asks, “Why have we not died 100 times over?” It's a numbers game and evolution is losing!!

In conclusion, I understand this is supposed to be a simple analogy and not a scientific outline of the theory of evolution. However, the graph is a gross oversimplification. No, I take that back. It's worse than an oversimplification, it's outright deceit. It presents evolution as a simple, stepwise process where tiny, gradual changes over “millions and millions of years” would easily accomplish what rational people can see is impossible. They look only at the beginning and end, while ignoring all those pesky details in between. It reminds me of the rhyme children sometimes say: 1, 2, skip a few, 99, 100!!

Is evolution a hoax perpetuated by a conspiracy among scientists?

Some years back, I read an article written by a professing “theistic evolutionist” named Tyler Franke. I would link to some of his posts now but they seem to have been taken down. Fortunately, though, I had responded to some of his arguments online and I have some quotes Franke at that time. Virtually all of the points Franke made were typical strawmen used to attack young-earth creationists. He did make one point, though, that I'd like to leverage now and discuss something I've seen happening in the scientific community regarding creation and evolution.

In an article titled, The Top 10 Signs That You Don't Understand Evolution At All, Franke said, someone doesn't understand evolution if “You think our modern understanding of it rests on a long series of hoaxes perpetuated by scientists.” From that article, Franke explained, Affirmed by the likes of everyone’s favorite nut-job conspiracy theorist meets cartoonist, Jack Chick, this idea is alive and well in evangelical culture. And why shouldn’t it be? Repeatedly assured by young-earth creationist groups that there is “absolutely no evidence for evolution,” what else would explain the theory’s unshakable dominance in the scientific community, courts and public schools besides a vast atheist conspiracy? And so, young-earthers on the Internet commonly parrot blatant falsehoods like “Archaeopteryx was a hoax”... and “Java Man and Peking Man were frauds”.

Let me start with a quick clarification. Evolution is indeed the prevailing opinion within the scientific community – presumably because they feel it's supported by the evidence (but maybe more so because it's the only theory that fits the “natural-explanations-only” paradigm which I'll address in a moment). However, “the theory's unshakable dominance” in the courts and public schools is not because the evidence for it is so overwhelming. It is because any criticism of the theory in a public school is challenged in court as a violation of the so-called “separation of church and state.” To my knowledge, no court has ever tried the evidence for evolution and judged it to be true. Rather, any competing theory – indeed, any criticism of the theory – is simply declared a religious belief and, so, is banned from public schools.

OK, back to the point. I absolutely believe that, if more people understood evolution, fewer people would believe it. The acceptance of evolution by the lay public has been made more successful by intentional deception committed by the scientific community. I wouldn't call it a hoax, per se, because the scientists may actually believe this one interpretation of the evidence. Is it a conspiracy? I'm reluctant to use that word because it is so often associated with people like Jesse Ventura. There is definitely something going on in the scientific community. For the lay public, academia allows untruths and half-truths about evolution to continue to be believed by the masses. I'm not even talking about Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man, which Francke mention in his article. I'm talking about modern examples of objectively false information currently believed by the public to be evidence for evolution.

I could talk about the persistent spin that evolution has been declared true by the supreme court but I've already discussed that. Let's see... oh, here's one: Have you ever heard that human and chimp DNA is 98% similar? This is often cited as “proof” that humans and chimps are related. But have you ever heard the people who cite this statistic also explain that chimp DNA is 10% longer than human DNA? I'll bet you haven't.

In the book, Anthropology: The Human Challenge, we find the following quote: Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences among genomes. Genetic evolution involves much more than simply replacing one base with another. Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the human’s.... [T]he tips of each chimpanzee chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans.

The seemingly amazing 98% similarity is achieved only by comparing sections of the DNA and not the entire genome! Of course, the lay public thinks our DNA (the entire genome) is nearly identical to a chimp's. A letter by letter comparison of the entire genome shows human and chimp DNA is only 70-80% similar.

I'll give only one more example of a commonly believed lie. Have you ever heard that 99% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct? If life evolved from a single cell to everything that exists today, it would sort of make sense there would have been countless species in between. I heard an evolutionist once say in a debate that we see this in the fossil record. What a liar! Did you know there are more identified species living today than there are extinct species found in the fossil record? I'll bet you didn't. The statistic is merely an estimate that makes certain assumptions about how long ago the first life form appeared and how long it takes new species to appear. There are about 1.7 million species that have been named. There are maybe 10,000,000 that are believed to exist but haven't been classified or even discovered. Compare that to only 250,000-500,000 extinct species known only from fossils. There is NO fossil evidence for “billions of species” having lived in the past.

There are many, many other other examples of these types of “factoids” that are either blatant lies or grossly misunderstood. For some more examples, click the “Lies evolutionists tell” tag on this page. Yet lay people believe them and repeat them to support their belief in evolution. What's worse though – far worse, in fact – is the coordinated effort within the scientific community to squelch any research that might challenge evolution.

Since evolution is not real, it really has no impact on any part of science. Evolutionary biologists talk a lot about evolution and hash out their theory in peer reviewed papers but none of their work has anything to do with science. All other scientists are able to do their work just fine without ever thinking about evolution. If everything we think we know about evolution turned out to be wrong, no one else would change a single thing about the research they're doing right now. It makes me a little curious about why they so zealously defend a theory that contributes so little to science.

The first reason is because they have a commitment to naturalism. Scientific American admits to a natural bias. In an article containing 15 half-truths and strawmen aimed at confusing the public, they said this:

A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism—it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.

You'll have to ignore the irony for a moment – like, how can I observe or test this tenet of science? My point in quoting this is to show how mainstream science has disqualified, a priori, a miraculous creation as a possible explanation of the universe. Not because they've carefully studied the evidence for creation and are more persuaded by the arguments for evolution. No, it's because of their tenet - an opinion, belief, or principle that is held as absolute truth – that says they will only ever consider a natural explanation for anything.

Ben Stein made a movie several years ago called, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, where he detailed some of the systematic discrimination in the scientific community against creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design. This has always been the case and I've observed it for decades.

From one Answers in Genesis article, we find the following quote:

In the summer of 1985 Humphreys wrote to the journal Science pointing out that openly creationist articles are suppressed by most journals. He asked if Science had “a hidden policy of suppressing creationist letters.” Christine Gilbert, the letters editor, replied and admitted, “It is true that we are not likely to publish creationist letters.”

In 2004, Smithsonian editor, Richard Sternberg dared to allow a paper favoring intelligent design to be published. In his account of the “controversy” he said, Because Dr. Meyer’s article presented scientific evidence for intelligent design in biology, I faced retaliation, defamation, harassment, and a hostile work environment at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History that was designed to force me out as a Research Associate there. These actions were taken by federal government employees acting in concert with an outside advocacy group, the National Center for Science Education. Efforts were also made to get me fired from my job as a staff scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Very early in my blogging career, I wrote about the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution firing a researcher solely because he was a creationist. In a Boston.com article about the case, Woods Hole, studies how aquatic animals respond to chemical contaminants by examining '. . . mechanisms from a comparative/evolutionary perspective.' Did you catch that? “from an evolutionary perspective.” Anyway, Hahn, the senior scientist as Woods Hole is quoted as saying, This position is incompatible with the work as proposed to NIH and with my own vision of how it should be carried out and interpreted. In other words, Woods Hole only ever considers the evidence from an evolutionary perspective and is not interested in hiring someone who interprets the evidence any other way.

More recently, Bob Enyart, a radio talk-show host and creationist, offered Jack Horner, a paleontologist, a $20,000 grant if Horner would just give permission to test a t-rex fossil for carbon-14. After much hemming and hawing, Horner refused saying, Your group is a group of creationists and... and... and... the spin they could get off of it, doing it, is not gonna help us.

Does anyone remember the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza had a job interview, but at the end of the interview he wasn’t sure if he’d been offered the job or not? The hiring manager was going to be out for a week so George had the idea that he would just show up at the office while the manager was gone and say he’d been hired. Whenever the manager returned, it would be hard to deny his employment because he would already be “ensconced.” It finally dawned on me that evolutionists have been using this same tactic for years. Think about it: scientists present questionable evidence for evolution, they convince the public that evolution is true, we later discover the same evidence doesn't really support the theory, scientists quietly dismiss the evidence, and the public continues believing in evolution. Evolution is “ensconced.” It's brilliant. It's the Constanza Tactic!

I've heard a thousand times that science goes wherever the evidence leads but that's just another lie. Devout evolutionists refuse to consider any evidence that goes against their precious theory. They organize groups like NCSE to make sure nothing critical of evolution is ever spoken in public schools. If a teacher so much as says, “we should critically examine evolution,” he is branded a creationists and slapped with a lawsuit. Any scientist who is even suspected of being sympathetic to creationism is at risk of losing his job. Is it a conspiracy? Well, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then maybe it is a duck.

Lies evolutionists tell: Human and chimp DNA are 98% similar

People who militantly defend evolution (AKA evolutionists) like to look down their noses on the “lay” public and smugly drone on about how science is the key to knowledge, how evolution is the most rigorously tested theory in science, and how they only go where the evidence leads. If that were true, why do they feel the need to tell lies to support their theory? I'm not talking about a mere difference of opinion – like how I believe the earth is around 6,000 years old and they think it's 4 billion years old. I'm talking about continuously repeating things that are objectively false. The sad thing is, many members of the public have heard these lies repeated so often, they assume they are true.

I've written series in the past where I list 5 or 10 of some of the most egregious examples but I'm not going to write a series now. Instead, I'm going to visit this topic from time to time and make each, entire post about a single lie. If you want to read all the posts published under this topic, click “lies evolutionists tell” in the label cloud in the left column.

Have said that, on to the next lie!

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#2 Human and chimp DNA are 98% similar

When lay people are told human and chimp DNA are 98% similar, they assume it means the entire genomes are 98% similar. Evolutionists, of course, are happy to perpetuate that misunderstanding. For example, here's a quote from Scientific American:

In 1871 Charles Darwin surmised that humans were evolutionarily closer to the African apes than to any other species alive. The recent sequencing of the gorilla, chimpanzee and bonobo genomes confirms that supposition and provides a clearer view of how we are connected: chimps and bonobos in particular take pride of place as our nearest living relatives, sharing approximately 99 percent of our DNA.

I've always said that creationists don't ignore the evidence. Take fossils, for example. Both creationists and evolutionists have different ideas about how and when most fossils formed but the fossils themselves are real. When we say the fossils aren't evidence for evolution, we're not “ignoring” the fossils – we're disagreeing with certain conclusions about the fossils made by secular scientists.

What, then, am I supposed to do with this oft-repeated claim that human and chimp DNA is 98% similar? Actually, I've heard estimates ranging from 95-99%, which should have been a clue that the exact similarity really isn't precisely measured. Yet it's always cited in a way to give the impression that the similarity is “proof” of our relatedness to chimps. Since DNA is something we can study in the present, I'd always assumed the similarity was there. I wasn't going to “ignore” the evidence like creationists are often accused of doing. I simply disagreed that it was evidence that we are related to chimps.

I can see that humans and chimps have certain, physical similarities and, if DNA works like a blueprint for building an organism, then creatures that are the most similar will necessarily have the most similar DNA. Creation would predict that our DNA is most like a chimp's, less like a bear's, and least like a bird's. That's exactly what we find. So the high similarity between human and chimp DNA was never a problem for creation. I've come to realize, though, that my confidence in the reports by secular scientists about the DNA similarities was misplaced. It seems their bias toward evolution causes them to engage in some “monkey business” when comparing our genomes (pardon the pun).

The first thing you have to consider is that chimp DNA is 8-10% longer than human DNA. Here is a quote from Anthropology: The Human Challenge, p.40:

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences among genomes. Genetic evolution involves much more than simply replacing one base with another. Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimp’s genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the human’s.... [T]he tips of each chimpanzee chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans.

I'm not a math whiz or anything but even I know that if one sentence contained 90 letters and another sentence contained only 99 letters, there is no way the two sentences are 98% similar! Just knowing that chimp DNA is longer than human DNA already proves the “98% similar” claim is false.

If the difference in the lengths of human/chimp DNA is so large, how did they arrive at such a high similarity? Here's an article from Nature.com that gives you an idea. Consider this quote from the article:

“BLASTZ was used to align non-repetitive chimpanzee regions against repeat-masked human sequence. BLAT was subsequently used to align the more repetitive regions. The combined alignments were chained and only best reciprocal alignments were retained for further analysis.”

It sounds a little technical but, in simpler terms, the highly touted similarity in human/chimp DNA is essentially achieved by comparing only the most similar parts of the DNA and ignoring everything else! Carefully read the following from the same article:

“The current [human] genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps.” So human DNA is 2.85 gigabases (Gb) long. The article goes on to say the, “Best reciprocal nucleotide-level alignments of the chimpanzee and human genomes cover ~2.4 gigabases (Gb) of high-quality sequence, including 89 Mb from chromosome X and 7.5 Mb from chromosome Y.”

Again, it sounds complicated so let me make this as simple as possible. The human genome is 2.85 billion nucleotides long (2.85Gb) but only 2.4Gb was examined. You can do the math: 2.4/2.85 = 84.21%. They chose only 2.4Gb to compare because it was already the most similar to chimp DNA! So the alleged 98% similarity only occurs in 82% of the genome! Remember too that chimp DNA is already longer than a human's so the actual similarity of the entire genome is going to be even less than 82%. When a letter by letter comparison is made, estimates of the similarities range between 70-80%.

So whenever you hear the 98% DNA similarity being cited as evidence that we're related to chimps, you'll know it's a lie.