Re: Creationist Psychology Revealed

Dr. Menton has got things perfectly backwards. How can it be that this self-appointed evolutionary expert has not even read Darwin's The Origin of Species, in which the idea of differential reproduction serves as a building block to the theory of natural selection? And of course, it was Mendelian genetics which largely transformed Darwin's theory into Neo-Darwinism.

Very few folks have read The Origin of Species, yet naturally we all feel qualified to comment on the subject of evolution. One of the more interesting things that goes completely ignored is a comment that Darwin made in The Origin of Species noting how, left to themselves, species that man has manipulated revert back to their natural forms after a few generations. In other words, Darwin already had evidence that the species tend to maintain their distinctiveness and revert back to it -- not differentiate and do strange things.

In fact, man's manipulation through sexual selection can produce some extreme variation within in a species, but it has never once produced a new species.

Darwin makes his case pretty well, but this isn't the only problem in his work. Consider, for example, when he discusses various visual organs and their capacity for sight. He shows how different creatures in existence in modern times have differing visual ability, ranging from sea creatures that can simply detect light to creatures of differing visual ability all the way to full visual perception. Then Darwin invites the reader to consider that the evolutionary process could be in play here, as clearly we have different stages of visual ability, so it's not all that big a leap to think that those with better sight are the more advanced, and those with lesser visual abilities were evolution's stepping stones.

Only problem is, there's nothing to prove this.

Science depends on noting some pattern, formulating a conclusion, and then testing that conclusion (the hypothesis) with some predictions to see if the predictions hold. Great. Darwin has done an excellent job of noting that various creatures have different abilities in a wide variety of areas, and he drew a fascinating conclusion from it, but the prediction and test side are very underrepresented. The obvious prediction is that, as a natural, on-going phenomenon, evolution should have examples. Lots of them. Yet we don't have any. And the "one" we've found in the fossil record isn't exactly a stellar proof.

Furthermore, genetics actually raises more questions than it solves, as far as evolution goes. Genes are tricky things, and while we can identify them and correlate them to specific problems or characteristics, and while we can modify genetic material and inject genes into places they wouldn't otherwise go, we still have so much to learn about how the genes are responsible for driving the creation and maintenance of bodies from cells.

Consider one case, when genetics engineers attempted to create "beefier" salmon. They worked their technological magic and tried inserting a gene to encourage growth. Eventually, they got some live samples with the gene expressing, and the salmon grew much more muscle tissue than their natural counterparts. Only problem was, the meat was green, not orangey-pink. Care for some green salmon?

In the recent human genome project, as the genes were being mapped, geneticists were realizing that there were far too few genes based on their (then-)current thinking about the relationship between one protein and one gene. As with the "more meat and color change go together", there simply must be a more complex interrelationship among (at least some) human genes than we formerly believed. The data strongly suggests that the one-to-one assumption wrong, and so some geneticists are working to come up with a better model.

Evolutionists needs to do that, too.

I'm told about another case (take this with a grain of salt, because I don't even know where to look to find corroboration for this one) where some researchers attempted to create mice with chromosome pairs that either came from two eggs (both donors female) or from two sperm (both donors male). They succeeded in producing the embryos, but the embryos were not viable. They all died after a short while. After some investigation, the researchers noted that the female-female embryos all failed in one manner, and all the male-male embryos failed a different way. Ultimately what was uncovered was that some of the genes responsible for causing gene expression from the chromosomes that came from the female parent were located in the chromosomes of the male parent and vice versa. In other words, some of the genes from male sexual cells, even on chromosomes that are supposedly the same between the sexes, are different from the genes in female sexual cells. How do the different sexual cells in the different genders know to include the correct-for-the-sex genes on the chromosomes that go into sexual cells? And if a "random mutation" occurred, how would the mutation that appears in one creature be properly trasmitted through another creature of the opposite gender, so that it expressed in a way that didn't result in embryo death?

And what are the odds of all this happening?

Evolutionists like to try to overwhelm their opponents with large numbers. "Millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years of evolution". And yet, really, we have no credible proof of it happening in the millions of years of the fossil record. Statistically speaking, for a random mutation to occur that results in a beneficial alteration to a species is unknown but extremely small, based on the evidence. We know of genetic oddities producing third arms or two heads or some such, but we have no examples of humans suddenly growing feathers on their arms. In other words, the only examples we have of genetic oddities are to express what is already present in strange ways, not to change into something different. Same thing with all those deformed frogs. They're not growing things that are making them into new species; they're simply growing parts that are already a part of their genetic code in eerie ways.

So in the same way I demand that Christians produce Jesus to tell me that their particular interpretation of Jesus is in fact The Way It Is®, I insist that evolutionists give me some actual proof for evolution -- not wishful thinking, not invitations to see relationships, and certainly not calls to ignore the accumulated evidence we already do have on the subject.