Truth
Evolution for Fundamentalists 2
Abstract
Biologists are unanimous in concluding evolution is a fact. The evidence… adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record.Pulitzer prizewinner, Professor Edward O Wilson, a brilliant biologist, brought up a creationist!
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 20 December 2005
The Story So Far
So, let us recapitulate.
- At the outset, Christians proposed the idea of evolution to explain the unexpected fact that God’s creation had the features of not being a free creation at all, but a family of related species.
- The inference from species seeming to be related is that they are related.
- If life is related, there must be an explanation of it. Claiming it is a whim of God is not an explanation.
- The explanation is that living things descend from other living things but with modification.
- Descent with modification is evolurion.
The evidence at the outset was reproduction—that life is passed on—and taxonomy—the classifcation of species into a tree of life. This classification is a vast body of evidence showing that species are related even down to the most fundamental levels. There is just too much of it to be coincidence, or fobbed off as God’s mystery. Taxonomy and cladistics, the distinguishing of the taxa, is a huge study in itself, and one that would not exist if creation had been as creative as an Almighty could have made it. How can an Almighty God be constrained to creating life that is closely related even in obscure details when He could have shown His bounteous creative genius? No answer to this is necessary for Christians who accept evolution. They have no trouble accepting that God made things that evolve. And for those who do not believe, God is superfluous. Life simply evolves with no need of God at all. That is what creationists do not like.
What does the Christian understand by evolution? For any Christians who are still not with us, evolution is the descent of living things with genetic modification causing them to change over the generations, eventually substantially. Do Christians deny that it happens? Do they think living things do not alter and so remain exact copies of their parents and even distant ancestors?
A lot of them seem to think that the theory of evolution is an explanation of the origin of life. It is not. What they do not understand is that creation is also no explanation of the origin of life. Just to say, with creationists and most Christians for that matter, “God done it”, simply passes the buck, for we know no more having said it about how life began than before. We do not know, and can never know by any sort of enquiry how “God done it”. That is why creationism, or Intelligent Design is not scientific. Science does not depend on revelation, and the only way the Christian can know about the origin of life, if “God done it”, is by revelation. But no alleged previous revelation in history has actually told us anything reliable, and science refuses to rely, therefore, on revelation. It depends on painstaking investigation of Nature, the formulation and testing of hypotheses, and the prediction from them of what outcomes we can expect in given circumstances. No amount of biblical study has taught us anything like the knowledge that science has, nor can it, for obvious reasons—the bible is ancient and wrong, Nature is always present and true. Study of it followed by checking the results by prediction shows whether the conclusions are right or not. The review above explains how, by this means, evolution was formulated, originally by practising Christians.
Ocean Floor Black Smoker Vents
At hydrothermal vents, food chains are based, not on photosynthesis, but on chemosynthesis. Microbes process hydrogen sulphide and methane seeping from the stacks into the water yielding chemical energy rather than the light of the sun to build themselves. These microbes are the base of a food chain, the equivalent of plants on the surface, and the life around the thermal vents live on them.Among the strange life around hydrothermal vents are blind Rimicaris exoculata shrimps that have crude light sensing cells on their backs. They suggested detectable light in the depths, yet it could not be sunlight. Perhaps the vents themselves were the source of light. Indeed this light has now been detected. Shrimp originally from the surface had adapted to the darkness of the deep, losing their now useless eyes, but these had then adapted to life near the vents and evolved a different type of “eye” on their backs. It shows that ordinary cells can evolve to be light sensitive, thus providing the basis of the eye. In these creatures, in the low light levels, the sensitive cell was sufficient, simply pointing the direction of food by the vent, but also where the water was dangerously hot. Further evolution into an eye might not have been possible because of the lack of light. On the other hand, is there enough light for some life to use it for photosynthesis? Questions like these need to be answered.
Tube Worms
There are also thickets of metre long tube worms which have no mouths nor guts but simply house bacteria that their plumes feed with oxygen and sulphides. Many of these creatures are independent of life at the surface, but some have a freely swimming larval stage which does depend on the detritus from surface feeders. Though the mid-ocean ridge stretches 70,000 kilometres around the planet, exploration of deep-sea chemosynthetic life has only just begun. If biblicists abandoned their empty scholarship in favour of something worthwhile and potentially useful, they might get more fulfilment and help us discover something. Of course, they will have to realize that God did not write a scientific text called the bible, and study science first!What of the situation now? The discovery of the structure of the molecule of life, DNA, has shown just how life reproduces itself, how a blueprint is passed on, how the blueprint changes by copying errors and therefore how changes can happen and be perpetuated in the blueprint. It all explains exactly why evolution happens. Not only does it explain it but it makes evolution inevitable. Why should God have done all this in this way unless He meant evolution to happen? That is what creationists ignore so that they can keep worshipping their idol, the bible. If Christians have to believe in God, then they have to believe that God made His creation such that it could evolve, and you have to admit, if God is meant to be intelligent enough to merit the title Intelligent Designer, then he must have done it this way to save Himself a lot of individual effort. Intelligent Design can only mean that God designed evolution, and believers in Intelligent Design ought to accept evolution. That they do not proves they are too stupid to understand God.
Some might argue an Almighty God is not bothered about effort because it is no effort to Him. If that is so, it should be no effort to prove conclusively to everyone that He wants to save us. Why cannot He effortlessly appear to everyone in the world to explain His plan of salvation? He chose to put His quite important, if it is true, salvific message in a book that could have been written—and certainly was, in fact—by cheesy evangelists keen on a fast buck and an easy life conning gullible innocents. Why does He depend on obvious crooks to spread His vital message? One can believe more easily in an Almighty who behaves in an understandable way, and, being omniscient, He must know it. Having given us brains, as Christians say He has according to His own image, why does God not make use of them. His supposed evangelical missionaries on earth appeal to idiots knowing that they are appealing to those whose brains are so uncritical that they might as well not have any. That is why even God seems like an idiot Himself to match the fundamentalist specification of Him. Maybe the God of idiots is necessarily an idiot Himself. That is what fundamentalist Christianity suggests.
Entropy and Disorder
Creationists like to use their own idiosyncratic interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics to refute evolution. It has to be their own understanding of the second law because evolution is not refuted by any scientific undrstanding of it. Thus, the ever hopeful defender of God, Duane Gish, writes:
Evolution theory contradicts one of the most firmly established laws known to science, the second law of thermodynamics.
The essence of the second law of thermodynamics is that the entropy of the universe is growing, and entropy is a measure of disorder. It therefore says that disorder is growing. The creationists deduce from this that life cannot happen without being created because life is an ordering of Nature. So, they argue, evolution is a progressive growth in order, but the second law of dynamics forbids any such growth because everything should tend towards disorder. They miss the fact that a growth in complexity can certainly occur locally if it is accompanied by a greater growth of disorder elsewhere. The net effect on the universe is a growth in disorder, yet life can have arisen amidst it.
Dr Kent Simmons has an outline of his Winnepeg university biology course in which he has a concise page on the origin of life on earth. It is quite well and simply put because it is an outline, so even creationist Nobel nominees ought to be able to understand it. Of course, no one knows whether life actually started on earth, not even Christians because Genesis does not mention the beginning of life. It simply says that God ordered the earth—on the third day even before the sun had been made—to produce vegetation, seed bearing plants and fruit bearing trees, and it did and it was good. Now, we know from the fossil record that life existed on earth for æons before vegetation ever put in an appearance. Genesis is not telling us about the origins of life, but when, in the myth, the familiar forms of life appeared. So, although no one knows how life began, scientists have put forward hypotheses about how it happened and have shown in laboratory simulations that they are feasible and so could have occurred.
Cosmologists can use their spectroscopes to test the composition of planets a long way from earth, and even the space in between distant suns and galaxies. They show the characteristic spectra of molecules we know about on earth, some of them related to life, in containing the ingredients of life such as carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, particularly. Organic compounds even closer to life, such as amino acids, have been detected in meteorites. It has led some scientists to wonder whether life actually did originate on earth or whether it might have begun elsewhere in the universe and simply arrived on earth in some cometary impact. The notion is called panspermia. At the very least, the availability of these essential building blocks of life in extra-terrestrial objects means they need not have been made on earth, though they most probably were too.
Wherever life originated, there are clues to it in the make up of life itself. Moreover, the fossil record, ignored by creationists generally, shows that life began simply, as single celled organisms without even a nucleus in them. Life appeared remarkably early in the Earth’s history. Fossil prokaryotes similar to ones known today grew 3.5 billion years ago as stromatolites, colonies of bacteria and cyanobacteria which form thickening layers in salt marsh environments near the edge of a salty sea. Such small and jelly-like forms of life do not fossilise individually at all easily—stromatolites betraying themselves by being colonies of these bacteria—but the tendency of life to begin simply in the fossil record, as soon as it became possible at all to be fossilized, then to get more complicated, suggests a progression that can be extended back in time to the period before fossils are found. It implies that the molecular basis of the simple cells must have evolved first. Moreover, the stromatolites depended on photosynthesis which also suggests a period of prior evolution. The first prokaryotes appeared at least 2 billion years before the earliest eukaryotes, the more sophisticated cells that have a nucleus.
Life must have began in water or moist sediments, though it is possible it developed in the deep sea where hot volcanic smokers provide nutrition, light and energy. It is even possible it appeared first underground, in similar circumstances, given energy and nutrition by volcanic activity. Most probably, though, it happened near the surface of the earth in the period, known from the composition of rocks to have been when the atmosphere had no oxygen in it, or little, so that the predominant chemical reaction at the surface was reduction not oxidation as it now is. Oxidation is important in most life now on earth in providing the energy it needs, but oxidation also destroys life by oxidising it (effectively burning it) so that, although life, once formed, can evolve ways of coping with oxidation and even taking advantage of it, it is hindered from forming by the presence of oxygen and other oxidising agents. So, the reducing atmosphere which seems to have existed originally was a help to the formation of life. It makes it more likely to have formed, but it is not necessary because there are always spaces where the environment is reductive, and life must have began in some small region. It could therefore have been anywhere where reduction was the predominant reaction.
The hypothesis of the origin of life is that it was produced by an earlier (prebiotic) phase of chemical evolution in four stages:
• quite small organic molecules, including amino acids and nucleotides, synthesised and accumulated (abiotic synthesis)
• some of these acting as monomers joined together into more complicated polymers— proteins and nucleic acids respectively
• these abiotic molecules, in some circumstances, clustered together to make globules of molecules with a pseudo-skin formed by them acting as micelles, all orienting with their heads or tails together, and so partly isolated from their surroundings (protobionts)
• at some stage the prebiotic molecules or the protobionts begin to replicate and evolution begins.
Organic molecules are so called and distinguished from inorganic ones because they were once thought to have been made only by life. Yet the molecules on the prebiotic earth were inorganic ones. Is this a supernatural barrier? It was known in 1828 that it was not, because F Wöhler had made urea, an organic chemical, from inorganic chemicals. But could organic compounds just appear? To test it, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey used an electrical discharge in a reducing atmosphere of hydrogen, water, ammonia and methane to create organic molecules. Since the discharge mimicked lightning and the chemicals mimicked the early atmosphere, the experiment showed that organic molecules, suitable as the basic molecules of life, could be formed from inorganic precursors. The early atmosphere was probably not as favourable to the generation of organic molecules as in Miller and Urey’s experiment. Carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and nitrogen were all also present, diluting the more active gases. Even so, repetition of the experiment using similar apparatus but varying the composition of the gas mixture produced similar results. All 20 amino acids, adenosine triphosphate (ATP), some sugars, lipids and purine and pyrimidine bases of RNA and DNA have been made in experiments like this, Dr Simmons explains. Now, remembering that this is a tiny laboratory experiment running for a few weeks, and the early atmosphere had millions of years of experimentation on a much more massive scale, it seems hard to doubt that these organic molecules were present in the seas, lakes, pools, puddles and sediments of the early earth. In 1969, a carbonaceous meteorite fell in Murchison Australia containing about 100 ppm of amino acids, an astonishing amount, but they were also just those you get in prebiotic experiments! It is thererfore impossible to doubt that a primeval soup actually brewed.
The main molecules of life are proteins. Is this a supernatural barrier? No! Once these amino acids were present in sufficient concentration, in some pool somewhere, they can combine together by a simple condensation reaction in which a molecule of water is eliminated. Reactions like these can be assisted by catalysts such as heavy metal ions. The outcome is a polypeptide that is effectively a simple protein. Sidney Fox, of the University of Miami, undertook to mimick the conditions of such a reaction. He allowed solutions of amino acids to drip on to hot sand, rock or clay. The heat of the hot matrix evaporated the water concentrating the solution of amino acids until polymerization occurred forming abiotic proteinoids. For prebiotic reactions the temperature need not be too high. These are delicate molecules. They can appear at 40 C. Clay may have been an important substrate for abiotic synthesis of polymers since surface charges bind the monomers bringing them into closer proximity for the reaction to occur, and the clay contained the heavy metal ions that could catalyse the reaction.
The fact that lipid-bilayer membranes define boundaries of all contemporary living cells suggests that protocellular vesicles were likely to have had similar, self-assembled boundaries. Is this a supernatural barrier? It seems not. Among the polymers made would have been surface active substances that orient preferentially in contact with water. Such organic compounds are amphiphilic, having polar and nonpolar groups on the same molecule. Amphiphilic compounds such as short-chain fatty acids spontaneously self-assemble into more complex stable structures such as bimolecular layers, which in turn form closed membranous vesicles that can trap hydrophilic solutes with catalytic activity. The origin of life could have been an oil/water interface in the warm, subsurface environment of the Earth. Such an environment was sheltered from any small amounts of oxidants in the general atmosphere, and from solar radiation that might have been dispruptive of primitive molecular life. The first forms of cellular life with self-assembled membranes were likely to have involved amphiphilic compounds. So, a subsurface oil/water environment could have been ideal for the assembly of the first simple membranes, with no enzyme catalysis needed.
The partially charged ends of polymeric chains would incline into the water which is also partially charged, while nonpolar uncharged parts of the chain would try to avoid the dipolar water. Molecules with this property form micelles in water, small spheres, tubes or plates with the polar ends outwards. This cuts off any molecules within the micelle from the rest of the environment. Once a stable, simple, continuous closed membrane was formed, an essential component of the first cells was present—a semi-permeable membrane that protected the soup within it, yet allowed the passage of some matter and energy in and out. Here is a proto cell—a protobiont—an aggregate of abiotic molecules with an internal environment different from its surroundings. Laboratory simulations show that such vesicles readily encapsulate macromolecules, including nucleic acids and polymerases. A protobiont can have some of the properties of life without yet being able to reproduce certainly. Evolutionary biologists see them as being antecedents of living cells. Such an open system would be able to evolve. The goal of future work is to make artificial cells as models of the origin of life.
The basis of life seems to be realizable in no particularly remarkable way, but there is still no genetic information—the molecules are not able to accurately reproduce themselves. Is this a supernatural barrier? Not according to Julius Rebek who, in 1991, synthesised a simple organic molecule which could indeed replicate itself. In life, DNA is the self-replicating molcule that controls the reproduction of the living cell, and DNA makes use of a simpler form of itself called RNA. Cells read DNA making RNA which makes proteins. But even RNA is a sophisticated molecule and so the possibility that it was preceded by simpler molecules that could, even so, replicate had to be considered. Rebek showed simpler replicating systems could have preceded nucleic acids.
Before DNA, amino acids must have aligned along RNA molecules thus coming into the right sequence for copying of the appropriate protein. They were the first genes. Such a process has been carried out in test tubes, up to 40 bases pairing with Zinc present as a catalyst. Moreover, RNA has been found to be autocatalytic—it catalyses itself in reactions. Lastly, RNA folds differently depending on sequence (unlike DNA), providing a mechanism for natural selection to select shapes according to their stability and catalytic properties. The trapping of the reactions within a micelle concentrating favourable reactions would have led to cell formation. Later, DNA was selected instead of RNA because it was more stable, although more complicated.
None of this is extraordinary, in that all of it can be demonstrated in the laboratory. Indeed, modern workers have gone further. It might be a miracle to bring a dead man back to life, even though all of the ingredients of life are present, at least immediately after death, but scietists have resurrected lesser forms of life with no miracle involved. Researchers can create a primeval soup from the break down products of once living creatures, then test how individual biological molecules can self-assemble under different conditions. Or autocatalytic cycles that constitute the core of many biomolecular systems can be studied.
An interesting idea, scarcely a proper hypothesis as yet, is that quantum mechanical effects can contribute to self assembly or autocatalysis. Grover’s algorithm works on the quantum mechanical principle of the superposition of states to allow one state to be selected from N in the square root of the time it ought to take by classical sorting and selecting. Such a phenomenon working at the molecular level would be a great advantage, for example in the replicating of DNA by polymerase from molecules in the environment. Thus there are four nucleotide bases and the enzyme has to select the correct one each time it replicates a part of the DNA. If some quantum effect could make use of Grover’s algorythm, it would effectively make the problem twice as easy—equivalent to classically picking just one from two, instead of four.
Or take a simple example that most people will be familiar with—crystallization. A crystal grows from a saturated solution, yet the chaotic liquid state is obviously much more disordered than the solid orderly state of the crystal. According to creationists, crystals cannot spontaneously crystallize from a solution, they need an Intelligent Crystallizer to make them. What they deliberately ignore is that the crystal forms while giving out heat, and the heat makes the chaotic liquid even more chaotic by making the molecules in the liquid move about faster, thus expanding its volume, both being increases of entropy. Needless to say, that answer is insufficient. They then want to know why the crystal crystallizes, and why complexity grows. Essentially they say the rules that cause life or the crystals to grow are made by God. Well, a lot of non-creationist Christians might agree, but they will point out that it is not Genesis. Making the rules whereby Nature operates is not the same as perpetually operating Nature as if it had no rules.
A basic rule scientists have worked out is that the free energy of a system changing spontaneously must be lower at the end than it was at the start. Nothing can spontaneously go to a state of higher free energy. It is like water flowing downhill, not up. Free energy is the energy available to do work, the energy corrected for the energy wasted by inefficiency and disorder, corrected for entropy. The measure of free energy is enthalpy. So, enthalpy must be negative—the final state of the system must be lower in free energy than the initial state, due to the forces that bring about order. The first law of thermodynamics says energy must be preserved, so where has the enthalpy gone if the final state has less of it? It transmits to the surroundings where it appears as energy (usually heat) and as disorder (entropy).
The equation representing this is H = E - TS, where H is the change in enthalpy, E is the change in energy, and S is the change in entropy. T is the absolute temperature, disorder being temperature dependent. It says that the system lost free energy (enthalpy) of H which entered the surroundings as a certain amount of energy E and a certain amount of entropy S.
The negative sign before the entropy term shows entropy opposes energy and enthalpy. An increase in entropy reduces enthalpy—less energy is free to do work because more is wasted. The opposite is also true. An increase in energy is equivalent to a decrease in entropy. This shows that the law that entropy tends to increase is not necessarily true when energy is supplied. Energy can make the entropy decrease—locally! What happens universally is that it increases in the surroundings. The second law remains true overall.
What this means is that so long as energy is supplied from somewhere like the sun, or the heat stacks in the oceans, complexity can grow as decreasing entropy of the local system or organism. When heat is being continuously supplied the system is not in equilibrium, and it is not tending towards a minimum enthalpy level. The energy supply allows local high enthalpy, that is low entropy, ordered states to be made. Molecular sysytems can grow that are unstable in equilibrium sysytems. These are non-equilibrium systems, and have fascinating properties as Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine showed in his famous book Order out of Chaos written with Isobelle Stengers (1977). This is the science that creationists ignore because it is too hard for them, but it is the basis of creation—continuous creation by evolution. If Christians want to believe in God, they had better believe that God is intelligent enough to design a system of life that evolves.
Species and Hybridization
The Christians who established the basis of evolution in the nineteenth century had no doubt about what species meant. God had created his creatures in separate creations, and so all of the descendents of any individual creation were related to all of the creatures descended from the same original creature—and could not be related to any other! Yet taxonomists found detailed similarities and apparent relationships across the whole of creation. Species seemed far from being as absolute as creation required them to be.
A gardener will know that a sport of a plant can look quite unlike the plant it came from, yet it had to have the same original creation as their mutual ancestor. It is the same species. Even chromosomes can change between parents and children, yet they carry the blueprint of life. Are these offspring of the same species as the parent, and of the original creature of that species made by God? The Christian God was Jewish and the Jews had a hatred of mixing, so the Judæo-Christian God can hardly have been ready to let His creatures mix themselves after they had been made by Him, yet that is what some of them do!
Species are not as distinct as Christians expected. Among plants hybridization is common, and hybrid vegetables and flowers are marketed often. The supposed species are not really separate species at all, even though they do not look the same. In terms of evolution, it is understandable. They are the same species but are beginning to separate into different ones, so look different, but still are able to breed together. Individual creation cannot explain it unless God meant to fool us by making the same species in different forms. In fact, though hybridization has more to it than this, for some of the crosses are fertile but some are not, suggesting that the plants are differentiating, and that implies that they are evolving. It goes further, for there are examples where a species exists that forms fertile hybrids with the set of plants that form fertile hybrids together, and also with the set of plants that hybridize but only to form infertile forms. This fluidity or continuity can be explained by evolution but makes no sense if species were made separately. If God made species that were not distinct, and so could hybridize, then He built evolution into His scheme of things. Either way, creationists are wrong.
Some animals that do not interbreed in Nature, even where their ranges overlap, can be made to interbreed by keeping them in close proximity in captivity. Horses can interbreed with donkeys and zebras. Why is this possible if God made them separately? Creation cannot answer it, but evolution can. Speciation is happening but is not yet complete, according to evolution. Related species evolved from a common ancestor have not yet fully separated, so that they can still breed together, though the offspring often cannot. Creation has no explanation, just excuses.
In some cases, two creatures look so much alike they are classed as a single species, and only attempts to make them breed together show that they are not. The ability to produce fertile hybrids is the central criterion of creatures being in the same species. Conversely, some creatures have looked so different they have been classified as not only as different species, but as different genera until they produced fertile hybrids. Cases such as this include the domestic cow and the bison, which husbandry found could interbreed comfortably.
Another problem for creationists is that the characteristics of a widespread species can show a gradation over the extent of the range. The ultimate of this is that the creature at one end of the range will refuse to mate with the one at the opposite end when they are introduced. Willingness to breed together is another criterion of species. The creatures might produce viable offspring when artificially inseminated, but the adult creatures no longer find each other attractive even though they are linked by a continuum of breeding adults. The example given in evolutionary textbooks is the example of the herring gull which exists as two species which never hybridize in the UK, but have a continuum of breeding relationships around the whole of the northern hemisphere. The species has spread round the arctic changing as it spread, until it arrived back at its starting point as a different species, and would no longer breed with the herring gulls which remained local. That is a mystery to creation, but precisely what evolution predicts.
For reasons like this, the idea of a sub-species had to be introduced—a group of creatures of a species beginning to differentiate into a new species, but which had not yet done, though it showed distinctive characteristics. Separate creation obviously has no place for a sub-species, but creationists cannot deny they exist in Nature. Otters were once thought to have existed in a glut of different species, differentiated because they had interbred in one locality. In fact, most have been shown to be sub-species because the animals will breed when introduced artificially, something they cannot do in the wild. Evolution predicts that had they been left to themselves for a few more million years, the otters would indeed have differentiated and been separate species.
More evidence of speciation going on is that animals take on characteristcs suitable for their environment. It does not make them separate species but shows that they can begin to change. Animals in sandy deserts are sandy or light coloured, whereas animals of the same species in forests are often darker or mottled. Some desert rodents found in sandy deserts to have light brown fur, had dark brown fur in a desert made of dark coloured volcanic lava. The colour was an adaptation that made the creature less obvious to predators or prey in the environment they lived in, and so the advantageous colour was selected. In evolution theory, it is possibly the beginning of the differentiation into two species. If large colonies of the two animals lived in their stable environments for long enough, the time might come when the light coloured rat would not interbreed with the dark rat, and vice-versa. If sufficient numbers of them always interbred at the fringes where they were in contact, the differentiation might not happen, which is why isolation is an important cause of speciation in the evolutionary hypothesis.
Variation and Adaptation
Species that get confined in a strange or changing environment either die out (become extinct) or adapt to the environment causing often rapid changes in the their characteristics. Creation has no concept of adaptation to the environment because God made all His creatures complete “in the beginning”. All that can happen is that the creatures will die out. Fish living in subterraneoan caves were perhaps washed into them from flooding rivers where they had previously existed as perfectly ordinary river fish. The fish either died or survived, but if any survived, they had no use for their eyes in caves that had no light at all. Cavern fish have been found in places, and sure enough they are blind. God could have made blind fish for caverns at the creation, but why would He have given them blind eyes, for the fish found in underground caves have eyes all right, but they do not work? God need not have made the fish with eyes at all but they have them. Evolution explains why they do. They have evolved from ordinary river fish washed into the cave. Not only that, but in some places an intermediate type of fish still exists.
Consider the limbs of some of the main types of animal, frogs, birds, cows, humans and whales. They look different at a glance but a closer look shows they are remarkably similar, considering that they have amazingly different functions, according to the lifestyle of the animal that has them. In fact, an anatomist can find close parallels in their basic construction that beggar belief in separate creation. God could have, and would have been expected to, make each animal specifically for its place in the world, and the flipper of a whale ought not to have had any relatiosnhip in stucture to the leg of a ruminant or the wing of a bird. Why should an almighty have been restricted in the designs he had for the limbs of different animals? They were not the only designs He had because there are animals in His creation that do have other types of limbs, but all of these diverse animals—all the vertebrates—had the same structure of limbs. That they all evolved from a common parent is the simple evolutionary answer. Creationists can only explain it away.
What is even more inexplicable and remarkable, if you are a creationist, is that when homologues—corresponding parts of the animals in this common design—are compared, some have parts of their anatomy that correspond with those of other creatures but are not used. Often they are present but are vestigial, meaning that they have atrophied to a vestige of what they must have been originally, according to evolution, but, according to creationism, they are a another mystery. Why would God have designed an animal with some useless part? The eye of the blind cave fish is one such example. God making creatures individually from scratch could be the perfect designer, as one strand—Intelligent Design—of the creationist scam maintains. Vestigial organs and limbs show that the Intelligent Designer was not that intelligent or He would have dispensed with useless parts in His original designs all together. Vestigial parts are perfectly understandable when it comes to evolution. The animal no longer needed what it once had in a new environment. There is no evolutionary pressure to preserve a useless limb or organ and so they atrophy over the millennia. The fish had no use for an eye it had, and the eye ceased to function as a preliminary to disappearing all together eventually. Why, though, did God give the fish a useless eye?
The whale has a rear flipper that has atrophied through being purposeless until it can no longer be seen, and is known only from dissections. Dissection shows it is built on the same structural plan as all of the other vertebrate limbs, but has faded from use and view. Curiously such an atrophied part can sometimes appear again as a “throwback” that we now know is caused by some genetic or anatomical fault in the creature. Is that God’s punishment for sinning whales, a hidden limb that it does not need but that sometimes appears to make the whale into a freak? Only evolution has a sensible explanation. The wings of flightless birds like the ostrich are another example. They are wings in every respect but the bird cannot fly with them. The bird might still have a use for them, as balance when it is running, say, but they are wings not used as wings, and a running balance could have been purpose built by any truly intelligent designer.
Homologues can be traced in creatures that have evolved in such a way that the parts would have been unrecognisible for what they are if it were not for the comparisons that can be made with other animals having the same anatomical structure. The tiny bones in the ear of higher vertebrates are homologues of bony structures that make up part of the jaws of fish. Separate creation has no logical answer for this fact, widespread though it is. It has to be harder for an almighty designer to devise how an existing structure can be re-used in quite a different way than it is to design and make a purpose built new part. Why does Almighty God have to keep using the same plan when He had every option imaginable open to Him? Evolution from a common ancestor explains it quite naturally, and needs no gash excuses, or meaningless generalities to explain it as creationism does.
One off creation simply cannot explain all this. It has to remain a mystery of God or be explained away as God being able to do just as He wishes, even if it does not seem necessary. Evolutionary theory necessitates what is observed, not God being whimsical. Creation explains nothing. Evolution explains so much of what is observed in Nature that it is a triumph of human endeavour. Sensible Christians can see evolution as a plain deduction from Nature and accept that it must have been part of God’s plan, but loony fundamentalists love their holy book more than God and reason, so act like religious morons.
Taxonomy reveals a tree of life in which species that have close similarities are grouped together as genera, and the genera are grouped together on the basis of features common to them all, and so on. Each node in the branching tree stands for a greater difference from the tips of the branches which are the species themselves. It is just what evolution would generate, but is inexplicable if God made His creatures individually. If God had to make the living world in this way, then He was constrained to do so, and is not almighty at all. But why should He have been constrained to make life according to a plan that would have arisen by a perfectly natural process—evolution? An almighty God, by definition is not constrained, so the branching tree of life is inexplicable. If God is responsible for it, it must be because God meant his prototypical life form to evolve!
Sometimes homologous organs in distant species on the tree of life seem quite different, but a study of the growth of the organ in embryos shows that at some stage of development of the creature the two were actually equivalent. Such studies also have drawn out homologies in adults that were far from obvious, such as that the swim bladder of fish is homologous with the lungs of land animals. Evolution has an explanation. The fish that took to land adapted by storing air in its swim bladder. It was effectively a rudimentary lung and evolved into a lung. Creation cannot explain why the two organs should be homologous, and nor can it explain homologies at all except as God’s caprice.
Now the taxonomies of the nineteenth century were based upon physiology, the appearance and structure of the creatures, but similar taxonomies can be made from other properties of life in the natural world, such as the clotting factors of blood, proteins, enzymes and now, of course, the analysis of the creature’s DNA molecule. The different taxonomies produced do not match precisely, but they are generally the same, and the best of all will prove to be the DNA. The genomes of more and more organisms, animals and plants are being determined completely, and they permit a close comparison of the creatures at the level of life’s blueprint. Though many Christians cannot bring themselves to accept that humans and apes are closest relatives, the DNA shows we are. Apes have the same DNA chains as human beings to about one part in a hundred. It confirms what taxonomy by physiology had already told us—humans are simply the naked ape. This is such a mystery to creationists that they cannot accept it at all, despite the unarguable evidence. The detractors of Charles Darwin for the last 150 years have been proved utterly wrong on this. They are the ones that should be drawn as apes, not Darwin, but that, of course, would be to insult apes.
If physiological processes at the most basic level are essentially the same, creationism has the usual problem, why was God restricted to this one basic chemistry? Evolution demands it, but creation by an almighty being of separate species must find it a disturbing fact. Creationists attempt an answer by admitting that God was indeed constrained here—by the need to have it possible for one life form to live by eating another. The chemistry had to be the same for one animal or plant to be the food of another one. That is true enough, though it is only true in the world Christians say God has made, the one we live in, but God could have made it otherwise. Indeed, one wonders why a perfectly good God wanted one form of life to eat another, another mystery of God, proving that there is no point in expecting belief in God to answer mysteries. It only provides them, Unless, of course, you are sufficiently simple. God could effortless ensure that all life was based on the same chemistry by allowing it to evolve from His prototype.
Fossils
A study by CAT scan of the brain of the London specimen of Archaeopteryx (Nature 430) has shown it had a primitive type of the brains of modern birds. As a transition form, as expected it was intermediate in size between the brain of a same-sized reptile and the brain of a same-sized bird. Segments of the brain concerned with movement and visual centres were enhanced, as in birds, and the inner ear canals of Archaeopteryx were more bird-like than reptile-like, suggesting more agility and better coordination. Flight evolved independently in pterosaurs, and a similar CAT study of pterosaurs revealed enhancements like those seen in Archaeopteryx suggesting the neural requirements for flight. Brain size to body size is almost identical.
So, Archaeopteryx resembled modern birds in the dominance of their sense of vision, in the possession of expanded auditory and spatial sensory perception in the ear and in having an enlarged forebrain to integrate the input from its enhanced senses to allow it to fly. Archaeopteryx had the neurological and structural adaptations needed for flight. Although some of the predatory theropods in the same clade as Archaeopteryx had brains similar to those of birds, Archaeopteryx is even further towards the modern bird in brain development. Now evolutionary paleontologists want to know the details of the transition from therapods to archaeopteryx and to birds. Did all of the avian neural components evolve together or was it piecemeal?
The best archaeopteryx specimen yet seen, one that has been kept in a private collection, has now been examined. Like the other nine archaeopteryx fossils, it came from a limestone quarry at Solnhofen in Bavaria, Germany. It will go to the Wyoming Dinosaur Center on long term loan.
How Transitional Do You Have To Be?
It is a classic transition fossil, just the sort of “missing link” the creationists are always demanding, but it is even more like a dinosaur than had been thought. Its foot has the extendible second toe of raptors, like the talon of the velociraptor, but the first toe was not fully reversed as in modern birds. A skull bone also looks more dinosaurian than birdlike. Anti-evolutionists were always adamant that the archaeopteryx was a bird because it had feathers, despite its non-bird-like features. The evidence now is even stronger that it is not a bird, but a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds. These features were not clear in other specimens because of the rock matrix, cracks or because part of the fossil was missing.Another Transition Fossil!
The age of the fossil is not certain but it could be older than the archaeopteryx, and so vitally important in the study of the evolution of birds. Believers in creationism are cutting themselves off from these wonderful discoveries being made about the development of species. Why not accept with the Anglicans that this is the way that God did it, and Genesis is the briefest shorthand suitable for the stage people were in at the time it was written. These fundamentalists will allow no subtlety to God. For them God is an idiot.
Feathery legged dinosaur
Hybridization in Animals?
A check on the honeysuckle imports in different places found the same thing. The two native species had hybridized into a species that now fed on honeysuckle. Because the regions were geographically distinct, it looked as though the hybridization had happened separately in each case. The maggots also had different proportions of genes from each species, showing they had been interbreeding for many generations. A new species of insect seems to have arisen several times in less than 250 years, from cross-species mating. New animal species were thought to have arisen almost always by gradually splitting from an existing lineage. Here, somehow two animals that would not normally interbreed had done so and produced a third type that did not interbreed with either. The adults mate on their host plant, so flies on different hosts seem unable to crossbreed, and nor can the daughter species breed with the parents. Nevertheless it happened, but having done so, the preferenvce for a particular host must lead rapidly to a new species. The honeysuckle maggot may not yet have completed the process. It all suggests that hybridization might have been an important mode of animal evolution, even if it is now unusual.
The most direct evidence of evolution are fossils, the marks the bodies of some dead animals have left in some rocks. Fossilized animals are not often animals that we know in our modern world. They are animals that no longer exist because they have died out long ago. The same is true of plants. God must have made a lot more creatures than now exist but many were killed off in the past. “Exactly!”, say evolutionists. “They were unsuitable for their environments in some way and were not selected.”
“Exactly!”, say the creationists. “They were killed in Noah’s flood.” It could be an explanation, if you have the credulity to think a flood 17,000 feet above present sea level over the whole of the world was possible at all, so hold it in mind as a hypothesis, albeit incredible. Meanwhile let us look at the creatures that are found dead in the stone. Even though they are dead, there are few of them that do not fit the same tree of life that has been built by the taxonomists for living animals. Their limbs and bodies have the same structure. Even though creatures like the dinosaurs and pterosaurs no longer exist, they did not differ in basic form from modern vertebrates. The creation God destroyed did not differ in plan from those that survived, though they were different animals and plants. He showed no more creativity in the extinct life forms than in the surviving ones, so far as structure is concerned.
Creationists used to like the fossil record because it is incomplete, fossilization being a difficult process, and fossils hard to find except in certain places. So, many species that lived never were fossilized, or if they were, the fossils have not been found. Only ever able to think in terms of miracles, they suppose that every species ever living had its fossil and we ought to have found it. Then, if Darwin says that evolution is gradual, we should have full sets of fossils of these gradual changes. Of course, if that is so, many fossils should be those of the modern world, since Noah saved the innocent animals. As someone pleaded on a forum, “Will creationists please go find fossils of rabbits in the Precambrian. Please!” If they found them, they would have an argument. They never have! There are none!
The animals that evolution says lived as intermediaries between the species in the rocks, they call transitional forms. Instead of complaining of the missing rabbits, foxes, badgers, chipmumks, and so on, creationists complain that the transitional forms are absent, proving that God made the species, and they remained as they were made. It is true that in evolutionary theory there must have been organisms that were intermediate between the original form and the form it eventually became. Creationists say, transitional forms do not exist and their absence disproves evolution. But first what do they understand as a transitional form? Jim Grove, a Baptist minister, who gave seminars on “Why Evolution is Stupid”, told the New Scientist:
If evolution is true, there should be intermediate forms—birds with fins and fish with feathers.
This buffoon who imagines he can explain why evolution is stupid simply proves that he is. Since when did the hypothesis of evolution suggest that birds evolved from fish or fish from birds? This halfwit, who tells his congregation about God, must think birds and fish are closely related in the evolutionary scheme. Either that or he thinks any combination of features he can dream up should be allowed by evolution. What he does not realize is that is precisely what the free creation of a supreme Creator should yield in the fossil record but does not. Fossilization yields, where it yields anything at all, transitions that fit the evolutionary tree. Nor does the doltish minister of God say anything about the absence of all the normal animals that ought to be in the earliest rocks and are not, in the creationist scheme of things. The hardly more reasonable Dr Gish says:
While transitions at the subspecies level are observable and some at the species level may be inferred, the absence of transitional forms between higher categories (the created kinds of the creation model) is regular and systematic.Duane T Gish
Gish has no trouble writing this even though the Archaeopteryx has been a well known transitional form between dinosaurs and birds since it was discovered in the nineteenth century. The Archaeopteryx looks like a coelurosaur with a long tail and teeth, but had well developed flight feathers on its forelimbs. Indeed, Sylvia Baker, another creationist, had tried to make the same point:
Nothing in the fossil record suggests a convincing link between animals of different types,
but with the caveat, “apart from Archaeopteryx, a primitive bird”. So she had accepted that something in the fossil record did suggest a link between animals of different types! If some creationists accept one such link, then they accept such links are possible. Nothing in the fossil evidence prevents transitional forms in principle because they accept there is at least one such form, of which we have several separate fossils, all excellent ones. Creationists move the goalposts to get round the evidence by declaring the Archaeopteryx is not a transitional form but an extinct species of bird, and there are no transitional forms to and from it! Gish says:
Archaeopteryx was a true bird—it had wings, it was completely feathered, it flew. It was not a halfway bird, it was a bird.
Except for its teeth and a long tail, features that no bird has, but dinosaurs have. We now know that many dinosaurs, especially small ones, had downy feathers for insulation, so doubtless creationists will have decided the Archaeopteryx is now a dinosaur, “not a halfway dinosaur but a true dinosaur”. Except that it has wings with flight feathers, not just down! Creationists like Gish also like to assume that because a species somewhere evolved into a different species, it must necessarily die out itself. Thus, Gish in a different context writes:
If Australopithecus, Homo habilis and Homo erectus were contemporaries, how could one have been the evolutionary ancestor of the other?
This false thinking allows them to say the Archaeopteryx could not have been a transitional species because birds are found contemporary with it, or even before it. Note that suddenly, creationists are using the geological times scale. Even so their complaint does not hold water. There is a curious primitive looking bird, the hoatzin, that survives to this day. Nothing in evolution says that the Archaeopteryx had to die out when some of its kind evolved into modern birds, or the earlier forms of man for that matter. Successful species do not just die out. They are successful and so are survivors. In the case of man’s ancestors, they might indeed have survived until modern humans came on to the scene, and then they died out butchered like the Titans by their children. R J Cuffey writes of “numerous sequences of transitional fossils”:
These sequences quite overwhelmingly support an evolutionary, rather than a fiat-creationist view…
Speciation and sexual selection has been studied in drosophila, and in the cichlid fish of Central Africa. Shortly after Darwin, a view was put forward that evolution might not happen to a species that remains well adapted to a stable environment, but it was overlooked in the general disputes over Darwinism. Latterly, it has been revived as punctuated evolution (S J Gould and N Eldredge (1977). The studies of fruit flies have shown just this sort of behaviour in the laboratory. Evolution is largely driven by changing environments, not stable ones. It means transitional species will be rare because they evolve when the environment is changing, and that is usually quite rapid, and often local. Transitional forms have to be looked for in specific but unknown places.
Essentially evolution happens most easily when some individuals of a species get isolated, and when they do, several well known evolutionary factors propel their evolution to suit the new conditions they are in, and the ecological niches available. In the case of plants, even that is not needed, for polyploidy (changes in chromosome sets) stops plants from hybridising, so a daughter plant cannot then hybridize with the parent, but only with her own seed. Speciation is instantaneous in effect, though the changed type might not be so well adapted as the parent, so selection of the fittest still applies. Once speciation is accepted as possible, the only barrier to greater differences arising is time, and one of the troubles with creationists seems to be that they cannot get their heads around the incredible times that are available for evolution. It is why they often prefer to think the earth is young—only 6000 years old, according to biblical dates.
Date 14-04-2014
Time 21:47:57
Click for Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic
Subscribe New AW! Reader
Yes to history. No to mystery.
If you agree, Link To Us!
Support Us!
Buy a Book
Support independent publishers and writers snubbed by big retailers. Ask your public library to order these books.
Available through all good bookshops
Get them cheaper
Direct Order Form
Get them cheaper
© All rights reserved
Who Lies Sleeping?
Who Lies Sleeping?The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man
ISBN 0-9521913-0-X £7.99
The Mystery of Barabbas
The Mystery of Barabbas.Exploring the Origins of a Pagan Religion
ISBN 0-9521913-1-8 £9.99
The Hidden Jesus
The Hidden Jesus.The Secret Testament Revealed
ISBN 0-9521913-2-6 £12.99
These pages are for use!
This work by Dr M D Magee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.askwhy.co.uk/.
This material may be freely used except to make a profit by it! Articles on this website are published and © Mike Magee and AskWhy! Publications except where otherwise attributed. Copyright can be transferred only in writing: Library of Congress: Copyright Basics.
Conditions
Permission to copy for personal use is granted. Teachers and small group facilitators may also make copies for their students and group members, providing that attribution is properly given. When quoting, suggested attribution format:
Author, AskWhy! Publications Website, “Page Title”, Updated: day, month, year, www .askwhy .co .uk / subdomains / page .php
Adding the date accessed also will help future searches when the website no longer exists and has to be accessed from archives… for example…
Dr M D Magee, AskWhy! Publications Website, “Sun Gods as Atoning Saviours” Updated: Monday, May 07, 2001, www.askwhy .co .uk / christianity / 0310sungod .php (accessed 5 August, 2007)
Electronic websites please link to us at http://www.askwhy.co.uk or to major contents pages, if preferred, but we might remove or rename individual pages. Pages may be redisplayed on the web as long as the original source is clear. For commercial permissions apply to AskWhy! Publications.
Website Summary
- Truth (120 pages)
- Adelphiasophism (60)
- Christian History (140)
- God’s Truth (20)
- Questioning Belief (35)
- Jewish History (90)
- Christian Heresy (25)
- Analogies & Conjectures (40)
- Science (15)
- Feedback (100)
- Frome (50)
- Last Year in Marienbad (5)
- DHTML Art (20)
- AW! Google Gadgets (10 gadgets)
- Downloads, mainly Ebooks
- SVG art generator