The worst example ever of “evolution in action”

Photo is AI and not part of the study

I hear evolutionists say all the time that “we see evolution happening.” When they say that, they don’t mean we see all life having descended from a supposed common ancestor. They don't mean we see one kind of animal becoming another kind of animal (i.e. reptiles becoming birds). They mean to say we see natural selection occurring all the time. But since they call both “evolution,” they blur the distinction between the two. Here’s an example from Sciencedaily:

Countering the widespread view of evolution as a process played out over the course of eons, evolutionary biologists have shown that natural selection can turn on a dime -- within months -- as a population's needs change. In a study of island lizards exposed to a new predator, the scientists found that natural selection dramatically changed direction over a very short time, within a single generation, favoring first longer and then shorter hind legs.

Notice how they change from saying evolution to natural selection in the same sentence! Tsk, Tsk.  Because of the careless way these terms are often used, people sometimes become confused about their meanings. What's worse is that textbooks will oftentimes present examples of natural selection as evidence for evolution. 

Regardless, let me start by saying this has got to be the worst example of evolution that I've seen. If it weren't in Sciencedaily, I would have thought it was a joke. For being zealous evolutionists, they don’t seem to understand their own theory very well. You see, individuals don’t evolve – populations evolve. It’s supposed to be “descent with modification.”  It’s supposed to be a change in the frequency of alleles from one generation to the next.  Yet here they are talking about changes “within a single generation.”  It’s a stretch to even call it natural selection.  

Here’s the gist of the Sciencedaily’s article. On a group of 12 islands, there were indigenous lizards that had no predators. On 6 of the islands, scientists introduced a larger, predatory lizard that would eat the smaller ones. To escape being eaten, the smaller lizards would climb into trees and bushes. After 6 months, scientists compared the smaller lizards on the 6 islands with the predators to the smaller lizards on the 6 predator free islands; lo and behold the lizards on the islands with the predators had shorter legs than those on the islands without predators. It seems those with shorter legs were better able to climb and escape being eaten. Now, I ask you: is this evolution?

Suppose I have a population of mice – some white, some gray. Being the heartless soul that I am (just ask any of my critics) I want to see if this population can evolve so I do an experiment and kill every gray mouse. Wow, it’s true! Evolution does happen! I now have a population of white mice in only one generation!  Who in their right mind would consider this evidence of anything?

Now back to the lizards: on the islands with the predators, the lizards that climbed well (short-legged ones) survived and those that climbed poorly (long-legged ones) were eaten. After 6 months, there are more short-legged lizards left. Duh! I hope these scientists aren’t getting a government grant for this stuff because I’d hate to see my tax dollars supporting such a sophomoric experiment. If they had said that the lizards had sprouted wings and flew off the island, then they might have my attention. But this is ridiculous.

But wait…. there’s more! The short-legged lizards are more likely to produce short-legged offspring. So, the future population will more likely be shorter-legged than the previous population (this would better fit the definition of descent with modification). The researchers said however, “Evolutionary biology is by its nature an historical science, but the combination of microevolutionary experimentation and macroevolutionary historical analysis can provide a rich understanding about the genesis of biological diversity” [emphasis added]. 

In case you miss the irony let me point it out. The researchers believe this process leads to “biological diversity.” Did it not occur to them that the daughter population (containing only short-legged lizards) is less diverse than the parent population (containing long-legged and short-legged lizards)?

Let me leave you with one last quote; in response to the complaint that evolution has never been observed, Talkorigins.org says the following:

Biologists define evolution as a change in the gene pool of a population over time. One example is insects developing a resistance to pesticides over the period of a few years. Even most Creationists recognize that evolution at this level is a fact. What they don't appreciate is that this rate of evolution is all that is required to produce the diversity of all living things from a common ancestor.  [emphasis added]

So, it is this kind of change (long and short legged lizards) that evolutionists claim is all that is required for common descent to occur. Somehow, removing traits from a population can add traits to a population?  That doesn’t make any sense.  It’s like saying I could turn a molehill into a mountain by removing dirt - I just have to do it long enough!

I’ve already pointed out (here) that natural selection is when animals LOSE traits (like the lizard population losing the trait of long legs in this example). Evolution requires animals to ACQUIRE traits (such as dinosaurs acquiring feathers to become birds). If you want to prove to me that evolution happens, I want to see animals acquiring traits. Stop showing me natural selection and calling it evolution. It's certainly not "evolution in action!"

Lies evolutionists tell: Abiogenesis is different from spontaneous generation

People who militantly defend evolution (AKA evolutionists) like to look down their noses at 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.  One lie I’ve heard many, many times is that abiogenesis is not the same as spontaneous generation.  

Once upon a time, people believed in a thing called spontaneous generation.  It’s the idea that life could spring up from non-living matter.  They believed, for example, that maggots would spontaneously form in rotting meat.  Over time, however, with much experimentation and observation, it was discovered that every suspected example of spontaneous generation could be attributed to observable causes.  In the case of maggots, they determined the cause was flies laying eggs on the meat.  

Eventually, the spontaneous generation of “complex” animals was disproved.  However, the belief endured that it could still happen in “simple” creatures like single-celled organisms.  If you put a jar of clean water in the sun, for example, after a while, the water would begin to cloud.  If you examined the water under the primitive microscopes available at that time, they could see the water was teeming with bacteria.  They believed these cells were merely gelatinous blobs formed spontaneously by a fortunate arrangement of chemicals already present in the water. 

Louis Pasteur  was a chemist, biologist, and contemporary of Charles Darwin.  He didn’t believe life could arise purely by chance so he devised an experiment to test what was happening.  He discovered that in sterilized, sealed flasks, bacteria would not grow.  If the flasks were left open, bacteria would begin to grow.  So he proved the bacteria was entering the flask from outside and not forming spontaneously in the water.  This was the discovery that led to the process we now call pasteurization and was the final blow to spontaneous generation.  It was replaced by the law of biogenesis - life only comes from life.

This poses a problem for evolutionists.  If life only comes from life, where did the supposed first living cell come from?  They have to believe - somehow and somewhere - that it rose from non-living matter.  In other words, they still believe in spontaneous generation!  I’ve often teased them by saying they’re asking people to believe in a theory that was discarded about the same time as blood-letting!!  [joke copyrighted by RKBentley © if you want use it, send me a quarter] Of course, they claim to not believe in spontaneous generation; instead, they call it abiogenesis.  So what is the difference?  That’s a good question.  I asked Chat GPT to define ‘spontaneous generation.’  Here’s what it said:

Spontaneous generation is an old scientific idea that living organisms could arise from nonliving matter without any parent organisms.  

It went on to talk about the meat/maggots example, the Pasteur experiments, and the Law of Biogenesis.  It concluded its response with these words:

In short

• Spontaneous generation  = life comes from nonliving matter

• Modern science = life comes from preexisting life

OK, that seems straight forward.  It’s pretty much the same thing I’d already understood.   Then I asked it to define ‘abiogenesis’ and here’s what it said:

Abiogenesis is the scientific concept that life arose naturally from non-living matter on early Earth - without any pre-existing life.

Do you see what I see?  These definitions are essentially the same thing - life arose from non-life, except spontaneous generation says it doesn’t happen and abiogenesis says it does!  

Because Chat GPT’s responses seemed contradictory, I asked a less direct question.  I asked, “What do you call the process by which life rises from non-living matter?”  Here’s the response:

The process you’re referring to is called Abiogenesis.

What it means

Abiogenesis is the scientific idea that life arose from nonliving chemical substances - likely on earth Earth billions of years ago.

Key distinction

It’s important not to confuse this with spontaneous generation:

• Abiogenesis -> A gradual, natural process over long periods involving chemistry (accepted area of scientific research)

• Spontaneous generation -> life appearing suddenly and regularly from nonliving matter (now disproven)

Ah, I get it.  Abiogenesis has the magic ingredient: time!!  I mean, life can’t just spring up like maggots from rotting meat, that’s crazy.  But if you wait billions of years, a rock can become alive.  Yeah, that makes perfect sense.  Plus, abiogenesis involves chemistry, you see, and that’s scientific - so there you go.  //RKBentley rolls his eyes//

To be fair, Chat GPT did conclude with this final distinction:

Simple way to think about it

• Abiogenesis = how the first life ever began

• Biogenesis = how life continues today (life comes from life)

Yet even this doesn’t hold any water.  First, if abiogenesis was a singular event, then it is disqualified from scientific investigation.  It would be like trying to scientifically observe the reign of Julias Caesar - it’s something that happened in the past and we weren’t there to see it.  If it never happens again, how could we ever observe how it happened?  And even if we somehow create life in a lab, there’s no way to say that is how it happened in the past!

But there’s an even deeper problem with this idea, namely, who’s to say that it doesn’t happen any more?  They’re saying only the first life formed by abiogenesis, because if it happened again, that would be spontaneous generation.  It’s kind of like the exotic theories atheists invoke to explain the origin of everything from nothing.  How can anyone say that some “miraculous” thing happened naturally in the past but it doesn’t happen any more?  If life arose from chemicals once, why necessarily doesn’t it keep happening?  If the universe poofed out of nothing, why can’t matter/energy poof into existence now?  It sounds like a clever way to say, “An incredible thing happened, it wasn’t a miracle, we don’t have to prove anything, and it’s still scientific.” 

In conclusion I’ll say, my opinion hasn’t changed.  Abiogenesis is Spontaneous Generation 2.0.  It’s a god-of-the-gaps argument being used by unbelievers to plug a big hole in their worldview.  We’ve known for more than a century that life doesn’t rise naturally from chemicals but they still cling with faith-like determination to the idea that it must have happened. 

The imprecise theory of evolution

I came across an article on Live Science titled, Reptiles evolved earlier than we thought, newly discovered claw-mark fossils suggest.  Here’s a quote from the article:

Based on the fossil record, amniotes were thought to have evolved around 320 million years ago. However, this new discovery of clawed amniote footprints in Australia from 350 million years ago throws these estimations hugely off…  “I'm stunned,” study co-author Per Ahlberg, a professor of paleontology at Uppsala University, said in a statement.  “A single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when modern tetrapods evolved.”

You can read the whole article for itself but here's the gist of it. Evolutionists believe they know when reptiles evolved. However, two amateur palaeontologists found a fossilized track left by a lizard supposedly walking around 30 million years earlier than they had believed.

I read articles like this all the time.  Some new fossil is found that changes everything evolutionists thought they already knew about their theory.  It’s rather hilarious because it points out the flimsy foundation on which they’ve built their models.  How can anything in science be so imprecise and still be considered a "well tested" theory? There are so many things I could say about this article that I’m not sure where to start.  Here are just a few thoughts.

DAWKINS’ “WRONG DATE ORDER” TEST

Richard Dawkins, a rabid atheist and evolutionary apologist, once spoke a terrible lie saying, “Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.”  Dawkins tells this lie to make it sound like evolution is a very robust theory that is tested every time a new fossil is found.  Evolutionists make this claim all the time.  Biologist, J. B. S. Haldane famously quipped that if we ever found “fossil rabbits in the Precambrian,” that would disprove evolution.  

Yet in spite of all their hubris, these quotes and every quote like them are all bluff.  Radically out of order dates assigned to fossils will never disprove their theory.  Rather, they merely “correct” their theory.  Just google the term “evolved earlier than thought” or “fossil rewrites evolution” and see how many hits you find.  Go ahead, I dare you!  They say a fossil in the “wrong date order” will disprove evolution but we find examples by the dozen and nothing changes.  Well, Mr. Dawkins, here’s a fossil in the wrong date order.  Are you going to denounce your theory?  I didn’t think so.  

They’re all liars!

NYE ON EDUCATION

There’s an oft repeated claim that, if kids are taught creation, they won’t be able to understand science.  Bill Nye has made this very point. In his own words, he claimed the following (source):

[T]here are more people in the world — another billion people all trying to use the world’s resources. And the threat and consequences of climate change are more serious than ever, so we need as many people engaged in how we’re going to deal with that as possible. And we have an increasingly technologically sophisticated society. We are able to feed these 7.2 billion people because of our extraordinary agricultural technology. If we have a society that’s increasingly dependent on these technologies, with a smaller and smaller fraction of that society who actually understands how any of it works, that is a formula for disaster.... My biggest concern about creationist kids is that they’re compelled to suppress their common sense, to suppress their critical thinking skills at a time in human history when we need them more than ever.... There are just things about evolution that we should all be aware of, the way we’re aware of where electricity comes from.

Life improving technologies - made by real scientists - are made every day without a single thought being given to evolution.  Nye thinks we need to understand evolution just like we understand electricity.  Really, Nye? You want us to think we can understand evolution the way we understand electricity? Finds like this highlight exactly how unsure “scientists” really are about evolution.  Remember the quote from the Live Science article, “[This] single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when modern tetrapods evolved.”  If we had this same lack of precision in how we understand electricity, we'd still be reading by candlelight.  Yet they still insist that kids are taught evolution as though it somehow will help them understand “science.”  

I’ve seen videos where kids can't answer basic questions about science or politics or geography or history. If evolutionists were truly worried about preparing kids for the future, they would be alarmed that young people don’t know how many dimes make a dollar!  But no, they think we need to devote more energy and resources to teaching them evolution! I truly believe they are more interested in indoctrinating kids rather than educating them.

EVOLUTION IS NOT IMPORTANT ANYWAY

In 1977, construction on the Citigroup Center in New York was completed.  Because of a building restriction, the 59-story building was built on 4 stilts, positioned in the middle of each side of the building, rather than at the 4 corners.  In the following year, a young, architectural student was asking the building’s structural engineer, William LeMessurier, a question about wind shear for the building when LeMessurier realized a terrible error had been made in the planning.  The stresses put on the building due to wind were much higher than the design had anticipated and the building would almost certainly collapse eventually.

In real sciences, like engineering, being wrong could have terrible consequences.  Fortunately, evolutionary biology isn’t really a science.  So what happened when these tracks were discovered?  I’ll tell you: a bunch of biologists probably started running around, redrawing their cherished, nested hierarchy. In the meantime, the rest of science continued its work improving people's lives. The average person didn’t even notice. Evolution is just that unimportant.

Jerry Bergman, Ph.D., tackled the myth that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. He noted that a survey of college textbooks showed that most rarely discuss evolution. The anatomy and physiology text books examined didn't mention evolution at all. Of the colleges surveyed in Ohio and Michigan, biology majors were required to only take one class in evolution.

From a Bergman article, we read this:

National Academy of Science Member and renown carbene chemist, Professor emeritus Dr. Philip Skell of Pennsylvania State University (see Lewis, 1992), did a survey of his colleagues that were “engaged in non-historical biology research, related to their ongoing research projects.” He found that the “Darwinist researchers” he interviewed, in answer to the question, “Would you have done the work any differently if you believed Darwin's theory was wrong?” that “for the large number” of persons he questioned, “differing only in the amount of hemming and hawing” was “in my work it would have made no difference.”

Evolution is the trivial pursuit branch of science.  If you were to google, “how evolution helps research,” you'll find plenty of articles by people trying to convince you that understanding evolution is critical to scientific research. Here's another exercise to try: see if you can find any invention, scientific advancement, or life improving technology whose discovery hinged upon evolution being true.  Maybe you can find one, but it is dwarfed by the explosion of improvements in medicine, computers, and technology that had nothing to do with understanding evolution.  If you ask me, I think it's a shame that we waste resources studying the theory.

Evolutionists are lying about nothing

Genesis 1:1, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

Genesis 1:1 is perhaps the most terse statement ever made on the issue of origins.  Here we see that “in the beginning” (time), God created heaven (space) and the earth (matter).  Time, matter, and space all came into existence suddenly and simultaneously at the command of God.  The full extent of this act is reiterated in other passages.  Psalm 146:6 proclaims that God, “made heaven, and earth, the sea and all that therein is.”  In other words, everything that exists was created by God.  John 1:3 explicitly says, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”  Are you picking up what I’m putting down?  God made literally everything.  We might rearrange things into new ways, like building a castle out of sand, but God made the things.  

But what was there before anything?  What existed before God made all the things?  Creationists sometimes use the fancy, Latin term, Creatio ex nihilo.  When translated, this simply means, “Creation out of nothing.”  God has always existed, of course, but before He made anything, there was nothing.  

The term “nothing” is self explanatory - “no thing.”  Not only was there no matter, there was no space and no time.  There was nothing!  It’s a concept that is hard to grasp, I admit.  How can there be no space?  It sort of makes my head hurt just thinking about it.  Aristotle is alleged to have said, “nothing is what rocks dream about.”  That’s about as succinct a definition as I’ve ever heard.  However, even this very clever definition doesn’t quite work because it starts by saying, “nothing is….”  Philosophers have struggled defining nothing because when you attempt to describe nothing, you start making it sound like it’s something.  

Now, I would never claim to be in the same league as Aristotle, Plato, or even Vizzini, so I’m not going to claim to have THE definition of what nothing is (er,... isn’t?).  I’m just going to say that we all sort of have an idea of what nothing means.  Right?  Maybe not.

In the debate on origins, evolutionists consistently lie about what they mean when they say the universe came from nothing.  Let me give you an example used by the late Stephen Hawking:

Because gravity shapes space and time, it allows space time to be locally stable but globally unstable. On the scale of the entire universe, the positive energy of the matter can be balanced by the negative gravitational energy, and so there is no restriction on the creation of whole universes. Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.  

Do you see what I mean?  He said, “Because there is a law like gravity…”  Am I wrong but isn’t gravity something?  How can the universe create itself from nothing if there is already something like gravity?!  

But Hawking isn’t alone when he redefines nothing to include something.  It is the normal practice of virtually every evolutionist.  When they say “nothing,” they always mean “something.”  Always!  It’s yet another example of evolutionists redefining words in the same way they redefine “evolution,” “science,” “theory,” or even “faith.” (I’ve written about this before, here).  It’s equivocation at its worst.

King Crocoduck is a militant evolutionist that I’ve written about before.  Some years back, he made a video series on YouTube explaining how he believed creationists were arrogant.  Nevermind the irony in his premise, in his first video, he attempted to address the problem of the universe coming from nothing.  Here’s how he described it:

It is useful to define what “nothing” is.  While the philosophical definition might be easy to come up with, we’re dealing with the physical world.  So our definition of nothing has to be concordant with physical reality.  If you have a system to remove all the matter and all the energy, you’ve essentially removed everything that physically exists….  What you’re left with is a vacuum, which is as close to the philosophical definition of nothing as you can get.

King Crocoduck is cheating.  He isn’t starting with nothing; he’s starting with a vacuum.  Time still exists in a vacuum.  Space, physical laws, and even energy still exist in a vacuum.  The only thing really missing from a vacuum is matter so there’s a whole lot of things in KC’s definition of nothing!  But he doesn’t stop there.  He rattles on for about 3 minutes describing the supposed events surrounding the alleged Big Bang, and how energy became hydrogen atoms, which became stars, blah, blah, blah.  Then he concludes his fanciful story with this very telling admission:

“So, in summary, all matter comes from energy and energy – in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics – is eternal.”

Think about what KC has said.  According to him, “nothing” includes space, time, physical laws, and all the energy in the universe!!  It isn’t at all what you, I, or any sane person would consider nothing.  It reminds me of the comedian, Steve Martin's, investment strategy: “OK, you start with $1,000,000....”

In one sense, it’s encouraging that they do this.  It tells me that - deep down - they really know that you can’t start with nothing and get everything.  As a matter of fact, you can’t start with nothing and get anything - not even a single electron.  So, instead, the “scientific” atheists invent exotic theories to explain to the lay public how everything can come from nothing, knowing all along that they don’t really mean “nothing.”  

But I expect unbelievers to lie.  To me, what is more sad, is that people who claim to be Christians, will still believe in evolution.  These compromisers willingly believe the lies spoken by people who proudly admit they exclude God from their theories.  It doesn’t make any sense.

In a previous series on my blog, I addressed 10 points made in a video by a Christian YouTuber called, Inspiring Philosophy.  It was attempting to use Scriptures to claim there were biblical problems for young earth creationists.  One criticism was over the use of the Hebrew word, bara (בָּרָא, Strong's word 1254).  Read this transcript excerpted from the video:

Number 2 is not so much a passage but the use of a Hebrew word, bara. Many young earth creationists believe this word refers to God creating out of nothing and it is used frequently throughout Genesis 1. But looking at how the word is used outside of Genesis 1, implies bara doesn't necessarily mean creation out of nothing. It might not even refer to material creation at all. John Walton has done a full semantic analysis on the word and he points out the word never necessarily means creation out of nothing and there are several times it cannot mean that at all.

Inspiring Philosophy wants to give the impression that God didn't speak everything into existence but, rather, that He shaped and formed an already existing earth. This begs the question: where did the formless, shapeless earth come from? Unless IP is invoking an infinite regress, then at some point in the past, there had to be a creation out of nothing.  The video seems to leave open the possibility that Elohim is not the Creator of the universe. IP only portrays God as continuously shaping already existing matter but never seems to definitively attribute the creation of matter to God.  This is one of the reasons I think theistic evolution borders on heresy!

For whatever reason, evolutionists think it’s more “scientific” to believe nothing created everything than to believe God created everything.  I say it’s foolishness.  To make me believe their theory, they would first have to show me how nothing could create anything.  Next they would have to convince me that nothing creating everything is more reasonable than believing God made everything.  Good luck with that.

Natural laws are properties of the universe. We use them to describe how the universe behaves.  But, if natural laws are properties of the universe, we can't really use them to explain the origin of the universe. Logically speaking, it’s impossible for something to create itself; rather, everything that begins to exist is caused by something outside of itself. To invoke natural laws as some natural explanation for the universe, is like saying nature created nature, which is absurd. So the cause of the universe must be something outside of the universe, something “supernatural” by definition.

Unbelievers are in denial about the religious nature of their beliefs about origins. They are trying to posit a creator with similar attributes that we normally associate with God - like King Crocoduck saying energy is eternal. In other words, they want us to believe there is a supernatural, eternal, uncaused cause for the universe – but it's still not God!  They call this cause, “nothing” but they really mean something.  Evolutionists are lying about nothing!!