Debunking Evolution - problems, errors, and lies of evolution exposed as false and wrong

Debunking Evolution:
problems, errors, and lies exposed,
in plain language for non-scientists

"Evolution" mixes two things together, one real, one imaginary. Variation (microevolution) is the real part. The types of bird beaks, the colors of moths, leg sizes, etc. are variation. Each type and length of beak a finch can have is already in the gene pool for finches. Creationists have always agreed that there is variation within species. What evolutionists do not want you to know is that there are strict limits to variation that are never crossed, something every breeder of animals or plants is aware of. Whenever variation is pushed to extremes by selective breeding (to get the most milk from cows, sugar from beets, bristles on fruit flies, or any other characteristic), the line becomes sterile and dies out. And as one characteristic increases, others diminish. But evolutionists want you to believe that changes continue, merging gradually into new kinds of creatures. This is where the imaginary part of the theory of evolution comes in. It says that new information is added to the gene pool by mutation and natural selection to create frogs from fish, reptiles from frogs, and mammals from reptiles, to name a few.

Do these big changes (macroevolution) really happen? Evolutionists tell us we cannot see evolution taking place because it happens too slowly. A human generation takes about 20 years from birth to parenthood. They say it took tens of thousands of generations to form man from a common ancestor with the ape, from populations of only hundreds or thousands. We do not have these problems with bacteria. A new generation of bacteria grows in as short as 12 minutes or up to 24 hours or more, depending on the type of bacteria and the environment, but typically 20 minutes to a few hours. There are more bacteria in the world than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches of the world (and many grains of sand are covered with bacteria). They exist in just about any environment: heat, cold, dry, wet, high pressure, low pressure, small groups, large colonies, isolated, much food, little food, much oxygen, no oxygen, in toxic chemicals, etc. There is much variation in bacteria. There are many mutations (in fact, evolutionists say that smaller organisms have a faster mutation rate than larger ones¹⁵). But they never turn into anything new. They always remain bacteria. Fruit flies are much more complex than already complex single-cell bacteria. Scientists like to study them because a generation (from egg to adult) takes only 9 days. In the lab, fruit flies are studied under every conceivable condition. There is much variation in fruit flies. There are many mutations. But they never turn into anything new. They always remain fruit flies. Many years of study of countless generations of bacteria and fruit flies all over the world shows that evolution is not happening today.

Here is how the imaginary part is supposed to happen: On rare occasions a mutation in DNA improves a creature's ability to survive, so it is more likely to reproduce (natural selection). That is evolution's only tool for making new creatures. It might even work if it took just one gene to make and control one part. But parts of living creatures are constructed of intricate components with connections that all need to be in place for the thing to work, controlled by many genes that have to act in the proper sequence. Natural selection would not choose parts that did not have all their components existing, in place, connected, and regulated because the parts would not work. Thus all the right mutations (and none of the destructive ones) must happen at the same time by pure chance. That is physically impossible. To illustrate just how impossible it is, imagine this: on the ground are all the materials needed to build a house (nails, boards, shingles, windows, etc.). We tie a hammer to the wagging tail of a dog and let him wander about the work site for as long as you please, even millions of years. The swinging hammer on the dog is as likely to build a house as mutation-natural selection is to make a single new working part in an animal, let alone a new creature.

Only mutations in the reproductive (germ) cells of an animal or plant would be passed on. Mutations in the eye or skin of an animal would not matter. Mutations in DNA happen fairly often, but most are repaired or destroyed by mechanisms in animals and plants. All known mutations in animal and plant germ cells are neutral, harmful, or fatal. But evolutionists are eternally optimistic. They believe that millions of beneficial mutations built every type of creature that ever existed.

This rare admission is from the evolutionist journal Nature: "Darwin anticipated that microevolution would be a process of continuous and gradual change. The term macroevolution, by contrast, refers to the origin of new species and divisions of the taxonomic hierarchy above the species level, and also to the origin of complex adaptations, such as the vertebrate eye. Macroevolution posed a problem to Darwin because his principle of descent with modification predicts gradual transitions between small-scale adaptive changes in populations and these larger-scale phenomena, yet there is little evidence for such transitions in nature. Instead, the natural world is often characterized by gaps, or discontinuities. One type of gap relates to the existence of 'organs of extreme perfection', such as the eye, or morphological innovations, such as wings, both of which are found fully formed in present-day organisms without leaving evidence of how they evolved."-- Reznick, David N., Robert E. Ricklefs. 12 February 2009. Darwin's bridge between microevolution and macroevolution. Nature, Vol. 457, pp. 837-842.

There are two versions of evolution. The first (Neo-Darwinian or Modern Synthesis) proposed that many tiny changes made new creatures. But evolutionists are conceding that "major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity." "The principal 'types' seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate 'grades' or intermediate forms between different types are detectable."¹⁹

They could not find tiny changes between one type of creature and another in the fossil record, so a few evolutionists proposed instead that change occurred by occasional leaps (punctuated equilibrium). Each hypothetical beneficial mutation could only make a slight change. Any more than that would be so disruptive as to cause death. So punctuated equilibrium is not really one leap at a time. It envisions a lot of slight changes over thousands of years, then nothing happens for millions of years. Evolutionists say with a straight face that no fossils have been found from a leap because thousands of years is too fast in the billions of years of "geologic time" to leave any. On the other hand, without fossils there is no evidence that any leaps ever happened, and of course there is no evidence that leaps or gradual changes are happening today in any of the millions of species that still exist.

Evolution is all about constant change, whether gradual or in leaps. Consider a cloud in the sky: it is constantly changing shape due to natural forces. It might look like, say, a rabbit now, and a few minutes later appear to be, say, a horse. In between, the whole mass is shifting about. In a few more minutes it may look like a bird. The problem for evolution is that we never see the shifting between shapes in the fossil record. All fossils are of complete animals and plants, not works in progress "under construction". That is why we can give each distinct plant or animal a name. If evolution's continuous morphing were really going on, every fossil would show change underway throughout the creature, with parts in various stages of completion. For every successful change there should be many more that lead to nothing. The whole process is random trial and error, without direction. So every plant and animal, living or fossil, should be covered inside and out with useless growths and have parts under construction. It is a grotesque image, and just what the theory of evolution really predicts. Even Charles Darwin had a glimpse of the problem in his day. He wrote in his book On the Origin of Species: "The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on Earth must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory." The more fossils that are found, the better sense we have of what lived in the past. Since Darwin's day, the number of fossils that have been collected has grown tremendously, so we now have a pretty accurate picture. The gradual morphing of one type of creature to another that evolution predicts is nowhere to be found. There should have been millions of transitional creatures if evolution was true. In the "tree of life" that evolutionists have dreamed up, gaps in the fossil record are especially huge between single-cell creatures, complex invertebrates (such as snails, jellyfish, trilobites, clams, and sponges), and what evolutionists claim were the first vertebrates, fish. In fact, there are no fossil ancestors at all for complex invertebrates or fish. That alone is fatal to the theory of evolution. The fossil record shows that evolution never happened.

The "Tree of Life" is falling
New discoveries are bringing down the whole notion of a "tree of life", as passages from an article in the mainstream magazine New Scientist show:²⁰ "The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal in importance to natural selection, according to biologist W. Ford Doolittle of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Without it the theory of evolution would never have happened." "For much of the past 150 years, biology has largely concerned itself with filling in the details of the tree. 'For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,' says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach."

"But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. 'We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality,' says Bapteste. That bombshell has even persuaded some that our fundamental view of biology needs to change." "The problems began in the early 1990s when it became possible to sequence actual bacterial and archaeal genes". "As more and more genes were sequenced, it became clear that the patterns of relatedness could only be explained if bacteria and archaea were routinely swapping genetic material with other species - often across huge taxonomic distances". " 'There's promiscuous exchange of genetic information across diverse groups,' says Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine." "As early as 1993, some were proposing that for bacteria and archaea the tree of life was more like a web. In 1999, Doolittle made the provocative claim that 'the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree'.¹² 'The tree of life is not something that exists in nature, it's a way that humans classify nature,' he says."

"Recent research suggests that the evolution of animals and plants isn't exactly tree-like either." "A team at the University of Texas at Arlington found a peculiar chunk of DNA in the genomes of eight animals - the mouse, rat, bushbaby, little brown bat, tenrec, opossum, anole lizard and African clawed frog - but not in 25 others, including humans, elephants, chickens and fish. This patchy distribution suggests that the sequence must have entered each genome independently by horizontal transfer."²⁶ "HGT [horizontal gene transfer] has been documented in insects, fish and plants, and a few years ago a piece of snake DNA was found in cows." "Biologist Michael Syvanen of the University of California, Davis... compared 2000 genes that are common to humans, frogs, sea squirts, sea urchins, fruit flies and nematodes. In theory, he should have been able to use the gene sequences to construct an evolutionary tree showing the relationships between the six animals. He failed."

"The problem was that different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories." " 'We've just annihilated the tree of life. It's not a tree any more, it's a different topology [design or shape] entirely,' says Syvanen." "It is clear that the Darwinian tree is no longer an adequate description of how evolution in general works." "Rose goes even further. 'The tree of life is politely buried, we all know that,' he says. 'What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.' Biology is vastly more complex than we thought, he says." " 'The tree of life was useful,' says Bapteste. 'It helped us to understand that evolution was real. But now we know more about evolution, it's time to move on.' "²⁰

Evolutionists write: "The meaning, role in biology, and support in evidence of the universal 'Tree of Life' (TOL) are currently in dispute. Some evolutionists believe... that we can with available data and methods reconstruct this tree quite accurately, and that we have in fact done so, at least for the major groups of organisms. Other evolutionists... do not doubt that some... branching tree can in principle represent the history of all life. Still other evolutionists, ourselves included, question even this most fundamental belief, that there is a single true tree." "Darwin claimed that a unique inclusively hierarchical pattern of relationships between all organisms based on their similarities and differences was a fact of nature." Yet "the only data sets from which we might construct a universal hierarchy including prokaryotes, the sequences of genes, often disagree and can seldom be proven to agree. Hierarchical structure can always be imposed on or extracted from such data sets by algorithms designed to do so, but at its base the universal TOL rests on an unproven assumption about pattern that, given what we know about process, is unlikely to be broadly true." There is "the possibility that hierarchy is imposed by us rather than already being there in the data."¹¹ "The finding that, on average, only 0.1% to 1% of each genome fits the metaphor of a tree of life overwhelmingly supports the... argument that a single bifurcating tree is an insufficient model to describe the microbial evolutionary process." "When chemists or physicists find that a given null hypothesis can account for only 1% of their data, they immediately start searching for a better hypothesis. Not so with microbial evolution, it seems, which is rather worrying. Could it be that many biologists have their heart set on finding a tree of life, regardless of what the data actually say?"⁹ "A single, uninterrupted TOL does not exist, although the evolution of large divisions of life for extended time intervals can be adequately described by trees." "Tree topology tends to differ for different genes."¹⁹ The genomes of all life forms are collections of genes with diverse evolutionary histories." "The TOL concept must be substantially revised or abandoned because a single tree topology or even congruent topologies of trees for several highly conserved genes cannot possibly represent the history of all or even the majority of the genes." "The 'strong' TOL hypothesis, namely, the existence of a 'species tree' for the entire history of cellular life, is falsified by the results of comparative genomics." "So the TOL becomes a network, or perhaps most appropriately, the Forest of Life that consists of trees, bushes, thickets..., and of course, numerous dead trunks and branches."¹⁸

This is huge. Professional evolutionists spend most of their time adjusting their "tree of life". They have fun thinking how one type of creature "developed" into another type, how abilities "arose" or "emerged" here and there, but that is just playing at science. These articles show that, while they still cling to their belief in evolution, the truth is becoming inescapable to a few evolutionists who dare to look at the facts: Darwin was wrong; microbes, insects, plants, and animals do not fit a "tree of life" with linear descent. There is no pattern to their similarities and differences because each one is a uniquely designed, complete creature.

The big fudge
There were warnings of problems in the very "tree of life" diagrams evolutionists were fabricating. If you believed these diagrams of new forms arising from old forms, then you believed that parts can be lost from a creature and then exactly re-invented in the same creature millions of years later. And that might happen several times! Not only that, the same part might appear independently in unrelated creatures isolated from each other. For example, wings would have to have evolved completely independently four times: in insects, flying reptiles, birds, and bats.

Instead of heeding the warnings and scrapping the diagrams, they solved the problem by giving it a name: either "convergent" or "parallel" evolution (according to the situation), and it became very common in evolutionist writings. In their sales pitch to the public, evolutionists use the gimmick, "if a million monkeys typed randomly for millions of years, eventually one would type one of Shakespeare's sonnets", and people think "well, maybe...". How about the monkeys typing the same sonnet twice or more? It would be amazing if random mutation-natural selection produced any working part, let alone the same part twice or more from scratch. With convergent/parallel evolution, evolutionists could fudge any situation.

Perhaps the most brazen example of this can be seen in the "parallel evolution" of the two types of mammals, placental (such as humans) and marsupial (such as kangaroos). Evolutionists tell us that each group evolved separately, yet many are remarkably similar, including cats, mice, wolves, moles, flying squirrels, anteaters, and others. This is whole animal duplication, not just an individual part.

A normal person would be embarrassed if their theory of random change made such claims, but you cannot embarrass a fanatic. The only reason for the "convergent/parallel evolution" maneuver is to force the "tree of life" framework onto a world of uniquely designed creatures.

Reliving evolution?
An old evolution myth still hanging around is the notion that things that look like gill-slits, tails, etc. in developing human embryos show the embryo repeating all the stages of evolution. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed his "biogenetic law" (not to be confused with the law of biogenesis that says life only comes from life). His idea was that growing vertebrate embryos went through all the forms of their supposed evolutionary ancestors ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"). He published drawings comparing growing embryos of a number of animals such as the pig, cat, salamander, etc. to growing human embryos. The similarities that he said he found helped persuade people to believe the theory of evolution. Scientists eventually discovered enough about embryology to quietly discard the "biogenetic law", but it was not until a careful photographic study of growing vertebrate embryos was conducted in 1997 that Haeckel's deceit was fully revealed. They found that his drawings were so far from reality that they could not have been done from the actual embryos.²⁸ He must have faked them.

Vanishing vestigials
If evolutionists do not know what something does, they assume it is useless, as we will see with "junk DNA". One of their "proofs" of evolution has been that as creatures evolve, some body parts that were useful long ago become less important in the new and improved creatures. Eventually these parts no longer function and they shrink in size. Evolutionists called them "vestigial organs". In the late 1800s they made long lists of vestigial organs in humans, including the tonsils, pineal gland, thymus, and appendix.⁴ In the years since, advances in our understanding of anatomy and biology have knocked them off the lists one by one. Yet the notion lingers on that "there is something to it". In 2009, researchers at Arizona State and Duke Universities reported that the little appendix is a "safe house" for important gut bacteria. If the intestine becomes infected and is forced to flush everything out (diarrhea), the good bacteria stored in the appendix are there to return the intestine to normal working order.³⁰ "Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a vestigial organ." Furthermore, over 70% of all primate and rodent taxonomic families contain species with an appendix.¹³ The vestigial organ idea helped fool millions of people into believing the theory of evolution. Today, this "proof" is down the toilet.

Violating the law
The theory of Evolution violates two laws of science. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (law of increasing entropy) says that things which start out concentrated together spread out over time. If you heat one room in a house, then open the door to that room, eventually the temperature in the whole house evens out (reaches equilibrium). Knowing how far this evening-out has progressed at any point in time tells you the entropy. Entropy can measure the loss of a system's ability to do work. Entropy is also a measure of disorder, and that is where evolution theory hits an impenetrable wall. Natural processes proceed in only one direction, toward equilibrium and disorder. Things fall apart over time, they do not get more organized. We can overcome this by making a machine and adding energy, but the Second Law prevents such a machine from assembling spontaneously from raw materials. The Law of Biogenesis was established by Louis Pasteur three years after Darwin's book was published, and simply says that life only comes from life. Living cells divide to make new cells, and fertilized eggs and seeds develop into animals and plants, but chemicals never fall together and life appears. Evolutionists often call certain chemicals "the building blocks of life", giving people the false impression that you just stack the building blocks together and you get life. No one has ever done that, including the famous 1953 Miller/Urey experiment where all they got were clumps of amino acids. Many people mistakenly think scientists have made life from chemicals in the lab, but they have not (though many have tried very hard). If one were to succeed, you would know about it. He would get every science award there is, be all over the news, and have movies, books, buildings, statues, and schools dedicated to him, so desperate are evolutionists on this matter. For something to be a law of science, it can never be found to have been violated, even once, over thousands of trials. No exceptions. A theory that violates two laws of science is in big trouble.

When confronted with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, evolutionists usually use two tricks to try to escape. The first is to state that "it only applies to closed systems, and biological creatures are open systems, so it doesn't affect evolution" (they actually intend to say isolated, not closed, but we know what they mean). The fact is that the Second Law applies to all systems, open or closed, and to all actions and chemical reactions, from molecules to galaxies. The words "except for..." are not in this universal law. A thermodynamics system is simply any part of the universe we want to study. If we are doing an experiment in a bottle, the inside of the bottle is our system and the bottle itself is the "walls" of the system. There are only 3 kinds of systems: if no energy or matter can pass through the walls, it is an isolated system; if energy can pass through but matter cannot, it is a closed system; if both energy and matter can pass through the walls, it is an open system. Now, it is true that the laws of thermodynamics and entropy are defined in terms of isolated systems, because that is the simplest way to express them. However, experts who write textbooks on the subject are quick to say that isolated systems do not occur in nature. For practical applications, a procedure called the Legendre Transform mathematically converts entropy to a variable called Gibbs free energy that is useful for working with real-world systems. Most natural systems are open, but it is convenient to model them as closed. For example, even though a bacterium is an open system, modeling it as a closed system makes it easier to understand chemical reactions in it.^2,7 You are an open system. You eat food (which comes from outside yourself) and your body survives and grows. Evolutionists believe that all we need is an open system with sufficient energy flowing into it for evolution to succeed. If that were so, you could just stand right behind a jet engine as the aircraft prepares for takeoff, absorb that blast of energy, and evolve to a higher life form. In reality, of course, you would be incinerated because absorbing energy without a mechanism to convert it to a useful form and employ it is destructive or useless. The mechanism must be very specific. Sticking food in your ear will not work; it must go into your mouth and through the digestive system. And the mechanism must be in place and functioning first, before energy is added, or the energy is wasted. The "closed system" ploy is just an attempt to avoid dealing with the Second Law because the Law prohibits any functioning biological mechanism from falling together by pure chance, without assistance or plan, using only the properties of matter.

The second trick they use is to say that "when you freeze water, the disordered molecules become beautifully ordered ice crystals or snowflakes. If water can bypass the Second Law and organize its molecules by a natural process, why not the chemicals of life?" At room temperature, water molecules are bouncing off each other and you have water. When you take away heat and they freeze, water molecules stick to each other with weak molecular bonds, forming ice crystals and snowflakes because of the shape of the H₂O molecule. The same thing happens if you put a bunch of weak magnets in a jar and shake it. The magnets bounce around. When you stop, the magnets stick together. They are at a lower energy level. There is order, yet no complexity - just a simple repetitive structure that does not do anything. The Second Law is not bypassed or violated. But guess what. Amino acid molecules that form proteins, and nucleotide molecules that form DNA and RNA resist combining at any temperature. To combine, they need the help of mechanisms in a living cell or a biochemist in an organic chemistry laboratory.¹⁶ It means that nothing happens in the primeval soup, the pond of chemicals where evolutionists believe life began. DNA and RNA dissolve in water³³, so there could not even be water in the primeval soup. DNA is made of only right-handed versions of nucleotides, while proteins are made of only left-handed versions of amino acids. Yet any random chemical reaction that produced nucleotides or amino acids would make an equal mix of left and right-handed versions of each. Even if the thousands of nucleotides or amino acids needed to form individual DNA or protein molecules were able to combine from this mix, they would be a jumble of left and right-handed versions that could not function at all. Ilya Prigogene coauthored a paper in 1972 that says in an open "system there exists a possibility for formation of ordered, low-entropy structures at sufficiently low temperatures. This ordering principle is responsible for the appearance of ordered structures such as crystals... Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures."²⁷ Prigogene won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for research on dissipative structures, such as tornados, for contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and for bridging the gap between biology and other sciences. Evolutionists wrongly claim he won for showing how thermodynamics could explain the formation of organized systems, from fluctuations in chaos, that lead to the origin of life. They thought he was their hero. Over thirty years later, nothing has come of it. There is no escape from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It prohibits the spontaneous origin of life and the progression from microbes to man.

Mindboggling complexity - proteins
Even a single cell is not simple. In Darwin's day researchers looked at cells under the microscope and saw little balloons filled with goo they called protoplasm, so they thought cells were simple forms of life. 150 years later we know that there are many types of cells, and each cell is a little city at work. The smallest known genome (Mycoplasma genitalium) has 482 genes.¹⁷ The minimum possible for an organism to survive is probably 200 to 300 genes. Most bacteria have 1000 to 4000 genes. A popular textbook on the cell¹ is 1600 pages long and weighs 7 pounds. Everything about the cell is stunningly complex. Plants and animals contain a great variety of cells. The human body has about 210 different types of cells.

Cells are made of proteins, and everything that goes on in a creature involves proteins interacting with each other. Proteins are generally 50 to 2000 amino acids long; a typical one has about 300 amino acids.¹ Ribosomes are molecular machines that build proteins in all cells, using messenger RNA as the template. Here is an overview of how a bacterial ribosome "translates" RNA into protein. Every protein in bacteria is made this way.

From: Schmeing, T. Martin, V. Ramakrishnan. 29 October 2009. What recent ribosome structures have revealed about the mechanism of translation. Nature, Vol. 461, pp. 1234-1242.

A protein is not just a long ribbon of amino acids strung together from the DNA pattern. It folds itself into a 3D structure.

The temperature and chemical concentrations must be right for it to fold correctly, and many proteins get help from special proteins called "molecular chaperones". Chaperones can keep proteins separated from each other while they are folding, prevent mistakes in folding, and even unfold mistakes to give the protein a second chance to get it right. After helping one protein fold, a chaperone will go help another one fold.

"A chaperone protein (bottom, yellow) called SecB guides the folding of another protein (transparent)
in this artist's illustration." --Science News, December 1, 2007, Vol. 172, p. 342

Making and folding proteins goes on continuously throughout the body. Misfolding can lead to more than proteins that don't work. In humans, bunches of them (aggregates) can lead to diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, or sickle cell. "Proteins are so precisely built that the change of even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the whole molecule so severely that all function is lost."¹All proteins stick (bind) to other molecules. But each can bind to only a few of the thousands it encounters. "An average protein in a human cell may interact with somewhere between 5 and 15 different partners."¹ Their shapes fit each other like a hand in a glove. "Proteins can form enormously sophisticated chemical devices." "The most impressive tasks are carried out by large protein assemblies formed from many protein molecules." "Each of the central processes in a cell... is catalyzed by a highly coordinated, linked set of 10 or more proteins."¹ The parts of a cell where proteins are made (ribosomes) are themselves made of many different proteins. "The complexity of living organisms is staggering."¹ In the face of this breathtaking complexity, evolutionists have tried to find the basic things necessary for a cell to function. So far they have found 17 general categories¹:

Each category requires many proteins. All have to be in place and working together or the cell is wrecked.

So evolutionists have to believe that for each protein, pure chance laid out long strings of amino acids that fold themselves into the exact shapes needed to interact with other specialized proteins and, where needed, get help from chaperone proteins which themselves appeared by chance. The necessary proteins cannot be invented one at a time. Either they are all there, ready to work together, or nothing happens and they disintegrate. Yet even if it could design proteins, mutation-natural selection would only work on one at a time sporadically over many years. Considering just the complexity of proteins, the notion of creating them with mutation-natural selection is as silly as asking someone to build a television set with a spoon and a toothbrush. If Darwin had known what we have learned about proteins, he probably would have abandoned the theory of evolution.

Darwin himself wrote in chapter 6 of On the Origin of Species that "natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being... If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."¹⁸

Repairing mutations
Do evolutionists admit defeat? Never! They temporarily set aside natural selection, saying all mutations in DNA needed to build a complicated new part quietly accumulate in the population, perhaps in duplicate genes, because by themselves each of the necessary mutations is neutral, neither beneficial nor harmful. Then, millions of years later, all are in place. The new part starts working, natural selection chooses it, and the improved creature is off to the races. This scenario exists only in the mind of the evolutionist. As pointed out earlier, we do not find new parts under construction in living creatures or fossils, so it obviously does not happen. Furthermore, everyone agrees that harmful mutations appear many, many times more often than mutations needed for new construction ever could. Over those millions of years, slightly harmful mutations that are hidden, or not destructive enough for natural selection to remove, would also quietly accumulate. This would produce creatures loaded up with highly polluted genes. Survival of the barely functional? We do not find this either because cells have mechanisms that maintain the original design of a creature within its variation boundaries, and minimize the accumulation of mutations. These include:

Harmful mutations happen constantly. Without repair mechanisms, life would be very short indeed and might not even get started because mutations often lead to disease, deformity, or death. So even the earliest, "simple" creatures in the evolutionist's primeval soup or tree of life would have needed a sophisticated repair system. But the mechanisms not only remove harmful mutations from DNA, they would also remove mutations that evolutionists believe build new parts. The evolutionist is stuck with imagining the evolution of mechanisms that prevent evolution, all the way back to the very origin of life.

Systems and networks
A new science, Systems Biology, began around the year 2000. At the Institute for Systems Biology website, they write: "As scientists have developed the tools and technologies which allow them to delve deeper into the foundations of biological activity, genes and proteins, they have learned that these components almost never work alone. They interact with each other and with other molecules in highly structured but incredibly complex ways, similar to the complex interactions among the countless computers on the Internet. Systems biology seeks to understand these complex interactions, as these are the keys to understanding life."

A small section of a biological system in an organism, displayed as a 3D network

"To make sense of the genome, systems biologists think in terms of networks. If two kinds of proteins or other biological molecules interact, they are connected on the network." "These network diagrams... show how individual pathways crisscross to form a tangled web. Each protein in a pathway can interact with molecules in other pathways, sometimes dozens of them." Additionally, "systems biologists produce complex maps of how genes and proteins interact, and these maps help scientists analyze results from drug screening." "Cells 'talk' to each other by passing chemical signals back and forth. They also sense their physical surroundings through proteins on their surfaces called integrins. All these cues serve to orient the cells in the body and inform them about how to behave so that they cooperate with the rest of the cells in the tissue." "The cells are not complete by themselves. They need signals from outside," says Mina J. Bissell of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "The unit of function literally is the tissue."-- Patrick Barry. April 5, 2008. You, in a dish: cultured human cells could put lab animals out of work for chemical and drug testing. Science News, Vol. 173, No. 14, pp. 218-220.

"The interesting point coming out of all these studies is how complex these systems are; the different feedback loops and how they cross-regulate each other and adapt to perturbations are only just becoming apparent. The simple pathway models are a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening", says Mike Tyers, a systems biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.-- Blow, Nathan. 16 July 2009. Untangling the protein web. Nature, Vol. 460, pp. 415-418.

This is a map of how the genes in a cell of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae interact with one another. Each color shows what a group of genes does. Genes in these functional networks interact with other genes throughout the cell; a cell of yeast.

Costanzo, Michael, et al. 22 January 2010. The Genetic Landscape of a Cell.
Science, Vol. 327, No. 5964, pp. 425-431.

Mutation-natural selection could no more build the vast, intricate networks in living creatures than a beaver could build the Hoover dam.

Only a small portion of a creature's DNA is protein-coding genes (around 1.5% in humans). In the 1970s, evolutionists began calling the rest of it "junk DNA", saying this collection of useless evolutionary debris showed there was no intelligent design involved. Decades later, researchers are finding that the "junk" does vital work. Some of this DNA plays a role in turning genes on and off at the right moments in a developing embryo²². Other bits separate coding and regulating sections, like punctuation marks in writing, so that DNA is not a long run-on sentence²³. Other bits called Alu elements, found only in primates, can be spliced in or out during RNA processing to make different versions of the same gene.²⁴ The "junk" label discouraged research into this part of the genome for many years; who would want to waste their time studying it?

Scientists have found that the number of genes a creature has is not a good measure of how complex it is. For example, the human genome is 23 times larger than the fruit fly genome (3.2 billion base pairs versus 137 million), yet humans have only about 2 times the number of protein coding genes (almost 25,000 versus 13,000 according to Human Genome Project Information). Yeast has about 6,000 genes.

The main reason for biological complexity must be in the rest of the genome, the non-coding part, which determines how those genes are used.

Today there is an explosion of knowledge going on in the study of gene regulatory networks (GRNs). But it is not led, assisted, or even inspired by the theory of evolution. In fact, evolution theory has always predicted that researchers would find simple devices that mutation-natural selection, their little one-at-a-time change mechanism, could conceivably work on. Yet each discovery has opened up higher levels of complexity in even the tiniest organisms.

Researchers are starting to learn how multi-level control and feedback gene regulatory networks operate in creatures. Some evolutionists are excited that many genes can be controlled by a few genes; they hope to use them to show how big changes can occur. But these networks really just make their task more impossible, because there is no way that mutation-natural selection could build them. And "we have little empirical knowledge on the evolutionary history of such networks."-- Dean, Antony M., Joseph W. Thornton. September 2007. Mechanistic approaches to the study of evolution: the functional synthesis. Nature Reviews Genetics, Vol. 8, pp. 675-688.

-- Erwin, Douglas H., Eric H. Davidson. February 2009. The evolution of hierarchical gene regulatory networks. Nature Reviews Genetics, Vol. 10, pp. 141-148.

Cells have backups for their master genes. "Between 5 and 10 percent of the genes in all living species are master genes that produce proteins called transcription factors that turn all other genes on or off." "If one of these genes is lost, other... master genes with similar sequences, called paralogs, often can replace it by turning on the same set of genes."
-- Cells Are Like Robust Computational Systems, Scientists Report. ScienceDaily, June 17, 2009.
-- Gitter, Anthony, Zehava Siegfried, Michael Klutstein, Oriol Fornes, Baldo Oliva, Itamar Simon, Ziv Bar-Joseph. 16 June 2009. Backup in gene regulatory networks explains differences between binding and knockout results. Molecular Systems Biology 5, Article number 276, 7 pages.

DNA has special handling devices. About 200 base pairs of DNA wrap around a spool of histone protein. Histone H1 clamps it together.

Each DNA-histone unit is a nucleosome. These are folded into tangled loops that are called chromatin. When certain molecules attach to tails on the histones, they affect how tightly packed the chromatin will be. If it is loose, the DNA is more accessible and active; if it is tightly packed, the DNA is inactive.

In humans, the same DNA segments are spliced in 4 or 5 different ways to make many more proteins and regulatory elements than there are genes.-- Kapranov, Philipp, Aarron T. Willingham, Thomas R. Gingeras. June 2007. Genome-wide transcription and the implications for genomic organization. Nature Reviews Genetics, Vol. 8, pp. 413-423.

The Bottom Line
Evolutionists assume evolution is true, then write endlessly about when and where it happened, rates and lineages, etc. But if macroevolution is physically impossible in the real world, and it is, then all the rest is fantasy. There are only two possibilities. Either every part of every living thing arose by random chance, or an intelligence designed them. It is now clear that the theory of evolution's only mechanism for building new parts and creatures, mutation-natural selection, is totally, utterly, pathetically inadequate. In spite of overwhelming evidence that the theory of evolution is dead wrong, many are not ready to throw in the towel. They desperately hope that some natural process will be found that causes things to fall together into organized complexity. These are people of great faith. And they are so afraid of connecting God with science that, like the Japanese Army of World War II, they would rather die than surrender. Unfortunately, the staunchest defenders sit in places of esteem and authority as professors, scientists, and editors, and have the full faith of the news media. The public is naturally in awe of their prestige. But once the facts are understood it becomes obvious that the theory of evolution is long overdue for the trash can, and to perpetuate it is fraud. Perhaps it made sense for what was known when On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, but not today.

Many scientists are with us
The only tactic left to evolutionists is to ridicule their critics as simpletons who don't understand how their pet theory really works. Here is a link to a roster of hundreds of professionals whose advanced academic degrees certify that they thoroughly understand evolution theory. They also have the courage to defy the high priests of academia by voluntarily adding their names to a skeptics list against Darwinism.

Some revealing quotes
Philip S. Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote in the August 29, 2005 edition of The Scientist: "I recently asked more than seventy eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No. I also examined the outstanding discoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss." -- Philip S. Skell. August 29, 2005. Why Do We Invoke Darwin? The Scientist, Vol. 19, No. 16, p. 10.

Ernst Chain (1906-1979) and two others were awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Chain identified the structure of penicillin, and isolated the active substance. He is considered to be one of the founders of the field of antibiotics. Concerning Darwin's theory of evolution, Chain found it to be "a very feeble attempt" to explain the origin of species based on assumptions so flimsy that "it can hardly be called a theory."^A He saw the reliance on chance mutations as a "hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts."^B He wrote: "These classic evolutionary theories are a gross oversimplification of an immensely complex and intricate mass of facts, and it amazes me that they were swallowed so uncritically and readily, and for such a long time, by so many scientists without a murmur of protest."^B Chain concluded that he "would rather believe in fairies than in such wild speculation" as Darwinism.^A He was born in Berlin, Germany, and obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry and physiology there. He worked as a research scientist at Cambridge (also studying for a Ph.D. there), at Oxford University until 1948, and then as a professor and researcher at several other universities. In 1938, Chain came across Alexander Fleming's 1929 paper on penicillin, and showed it to his colleague Howard Florey. In their research, Chain isolated and purified penicillin.--Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. April 2008. Ernst Chain: Antibiotics Pioneer. Acts&Facts, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 10-12.
A. Clark, R.W. 1985. The Life of Ernst Chain: Penicillin and Beyond. New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 147.
B. Chain, E. 1970. Social Responsibility and the Scientist in Modern Western Society (Robert Waley Cohen memorial lecture). London: The Council of Christians and Jews, p. 25.

Richard C. Strohman, professor emeritus of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley, and an evolutionist, wrote in the March 1997 edition of Nature Biotechnology: "There is a striking lack of correspondence between genetic and evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinian theory predicts a steady, slow continuous, accumulation of mutations (microevolution) that produces a progressive change in morphology leading to new species, genera, and so on (macroevolution). But macroevolution now appears to be full of discontinuities (punctuated evolution), so we have a mismatch of some importance. That is, the fossil record shows mostly stasis, or lack of change, in a species for many millions of years; there is no evidence there for gradual change even though, in theory, there must be a gradual accumulation of mutations at the micro level." "We currently have no adequate explanation for stasis or for punctuated equilibrium in evolution, or for higher order regulation in cells." "We seem to lack any scientific basis with which to explain, for example, evolution." "Not necessarily so. It does suggest, however, that our evolutionary theory is incomplete." "The theory is in trouble because it insists on locating the driving force solely in random mutations." "It is becoming clear that sequence information in DNA, by itself, contains insufficient information for determining how gene products (proteins) interact to produce a mechanism of any kind. The reason is that the multicomponent complexes constructed from many proteins are themselves machines with rules of their own; rules not written in DNA." "The rules... of brain formation are not reducible to genetic maps and to the rules of genetic theory. Each higher level of organization has its own rules, and there is no continuous gradual transition from one level or hierarchy to the other." "We have been lulled into reasoning that if the gene theory works at one level--from DNA to protein--it must work at all higher levels as well. We have thus extended the theory of the gene to the realm of gene management. But gene management is an entirely different process, involving interactive cellular processes that display a complexity that may only be described as transcalculational, a mathematical term for mind boggling." "Understanding of complex function may in fact be impossible without recourse to influences outside of the genome." --Richard C. Strohman. March 1997. The coming Kuhnian revolution in biology. Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 15, pp. 194-200.

Sean B. Carroll, of the Medical Institute and Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison, wrote in a 2001 edition of Nature: "A long-standing issue in evolutionary biology is whether the processes observable in extant populations and species (microevolution) are sufficient to account for the larger-scale changes evident over longer periods of life's history (macroevolution). Outsiders to this rich literature may be surprised that there is no consensus on this issue."-- Sean B. Carroll. 8 February 2001. Nature, Vol. 409, p. 669.

A symposium on evolution was held at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany in November 2001, organized by PhD students. The meeting report says that "the symposium ended with a panel discussion about questions of microevolution (evolution within the species) and macroevolution (evolution after speciation). The issue at stake was whether extrapolation from the selection theory operating on organisms is sufficient to explain all patterns of macroevolution. In other words, do we need an independent body of theory to explain the changes occurring above, as opposed to at, the species level? There was no general agreement among the panel members. It seems that the jury is still out on this important question."-- Gáspár Jékely. 2002. Meeting report - Evolution in a nutshell. European Molecular Biology Organization reports, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 307-311.

"Biology has been re-integrated twice already, first by Darwin in 1859 and then during the 'Modern Synthesis' of the 1920s and 1930s. In both cases, the success of these syntheses rested in part on ignorance. Charles Darwin could reasonably integrate biology in the 19^th Century on a relatively elegant evolutionary foundation partly because a great deal was not yet known about cellular and biochemical machinery." "Like Darwin's synthesis, the form of the Modern Synthesis was shaped in part by ignorance of important features of life that were at the time unknown to science. Specifically, the molecular biology of the cell remained largely unknown." "The view of life that most biologists had from 1935 to 1965 was highly simplified. Some of the assumptions at the foundation of the Modern Synthesis started to crumble in the 1970s. Common mid-20^th Century assumptions about how cells, organisms, and species work have thus been undermined." "This might seem like reason for despair about the future of biology, but there are two mitigations to consider. First, this complexity was always there. Darwin and many later biologists realized that their simple models were erected like piers over swampy ground. They just didn't know how deep the muck was. Second, we now have powerful genomic tools for addressing complex phenomena throughout biology." "Some may feel that the view of life supplied by nascent 21^st Century biology is painfully complicated, if not perverse. For our part, we think that the historical complexity and versatility that we now know to characterize life are inspiring and challenging."

"The fundamental landscape of biology is undergoing a major upheaval, much as it did in the first decades of the 20^th Century. This upheaval will take time to fully reveal its implications."-- Michael R. Rose, Todd H. Oakley. 24 November 2007. The new biology: beyond the Modern Synthesis. Biology Direct, 2:30, 17 pages (published online). Michael Rose is an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine.

"Origin of Life" research
The theory of evolution says life started from raw chemicals. Evolutionists long ago handed the problem off to specialists, trusting that they would come up with something. The specialists have spent many frustrating decades trying to figure out how DNA assembled itself. They have two approaches to the problem, and those on one side think the other side is wrong. Here is the essence of both views, synthesized from two research papers:

The mainstream prebiotic evolutionary scenario is the “RNA world”.^S “Textbooks often assert that life began with specialized complex molecules, such as RNA, that are capable of making their own copies. This scenario has serious difficulties, but an alternative has remained elusive.”^S “We do not know how the transition to digitally encoded information has happened in the originally inanimate world; that is, we do not know where the RNA world might have come from.”^V

“The crucial origin of life question then becomes how natural selection was initiated by some molecular assortments, irrespective of their exact chemistry.”^S “Life on our planet could have begun as a random chemistry melting pot, a ‘garbage-bag world’ with myriads of different chemical configurations.”^S “A complex chain of evolutionary events, yet to be deciphered, could then have led to the common ancestors of today’s free-living cells, and to the appearance of DNA, RNA and protein enzymes.”^S

Here are excerpts from candid reports by two scientists who have spent many years in "origin of life" research. These men support evolution, but insist that experimental evidence back up every claim.

This is "what has been called the NASA definition of life: Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution." "Richard Dawkins elaborated on this image of the earliest living entity in his book The Selfish Gene: 'At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator. It may not have been the biggest or the most complex molecule around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself.' When Dawkins wrote these words 30 years ago, DNA was the most likely candidate for this role." "Unfortunately... DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of a number of proteins". So "which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the recipe for protein construction. Yet that information cannot be retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins. Which large molecule, then, appeared first in getting life started--proteins (the chicken) or DNA (the egg).?"

"A possible solution appeared when attention shifted to a new champion--RNA." According to this view, "life began with the appearance of the first RNA molecule. In a... 1986 article, Nobel Laureate Walter Gilbert of Harvard University wrote in the journal Nature: 'One can contemplate an RNA world, containing only RNA molecules that serve to catalyze the synthesis of themselves. The first step of evolution proceeds then by RNA molecules performing the catalytic activities necessary to assemble themselves from a nucleotide soup.' In this vision, the first self-replicating RNA that emerged from non-living matter carried out the functions now executed by RNA, DNA and proteins." "Perhaps two-thirds of scientists publishing in the origin-of-life field... still support the idea that life began with the spontaneous formation of RNA or a related self-copying molecule."

"How did that first self-replicating RNA arise?" Most people know of an "experiment published in 1953 by Stanley Miller. He applied a spark discharge to a mixture of simple gases that were then thought to represent the atmosphere of the early Earth. Two amino acids of the set of 20 used to construct proteins were formed in significant quantities, with others from that set present in small amounts." "Some writers have presumed that all of life's building blocks could be formed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites and other extraterrestrial bodies. This is not the case."

"A careful examination of the results of the analysis of several meteorites led the scientists who conducted the work to a different conclusion: inanimate nature has a bias toward the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus show no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life." "RNA's building blocks, nucleotides, are complex substances as organic molecules go." "Amino acids, such as those produced or found in these experiments, are far less complex than nucleotides". "No nucleotides of any kind have been reported as products of spark discharge experiments or in studies of meteorites."

"To rescue the RNA-first concept from this otherwise lethal defect, its advocates have created a discipline called prebiotic synthesis. They have attempted to show that RNA and its components can be prepared in their laboratories in a sequence of carefully controlled reactions." Finding "a specific organic chemical in any quantity... would justify its classification as 'prebiotic,' a substance that supposedly had been proved to be present on the early Earth. Once awarded this distinction, the chemical could then be used in pure form, in any quantity, in another prebiotic reaction. The products of such a reaction would also be considered 'prebiotic' and employed in the next step in the sequence." "Unfortunately, neither chemists nor laboratories were present on the early Earth to produce RNA." "The analogy that comes to mind is that of a golfer, who having played a golf ball through an 18-hole course, then assumed that the ball could also play itself around the course in his absence. He had demonstrated the possibility of the event; it was only necessary to presume that some combination of natural forces (earthquakes, winds, tornadoes and floods, for example) could produce the same result, given enough time."

"Many chemists, confronted with these difficulties, have fled the RNA-first hypothesis as if it were a building on fire. One group, however, still captured by the vision of the self-copying molecule, has opted for an exit that leads to similar hazards. In these revised theories, a simpler replicator arose first and governed life in a 'pre-RNA world.' Variations have been proposed in which the bases, the sugar or the entire backbone of RNA have been replaced by simpler substances, more accessible to prebiotic syntheses. Presumably, this first replicator would also have the catalytic capabilities of RNA. Because no trace of this hypothetical primal replicator and catalyst has been recognized so far in modern biology, RNA must have completely taken over all of its functions at some point following its emergence."

"Further, the spontaneous appearance of any such replicator without the assistance of a chemist faces implausibilities that dwarf those involved in the preparation of a mere nucleotide soup. Let us presume that a soup enriched in the building blocks of all of these proposed replicators has somehow been assembled, under conditions that favor their connection into chains. They would be accompanied by hordes of defective building blocks, the inclusion of which would ruin the ability of the chain to act as a replicator." "There is no reason to presume that an indifferent nature would not combine units at random".

"Probability calculations could be made, but I prefer a variation on a much-used analogy. Picture a gorilla (very long arms are needed) at an immense keyboard connected to a word processor. The keyboard contains not only the symbols used in English and European languages but also a huge excess drawn from every other known language and all of the symbol sets stored in a typical computer. The chances for the spontaneous assembly of a replicator in the pool I described above can be compared to those of the gorilla composing, in English, a coherent recipe for the preparation of chili con carne. With similar considerations in mind, Gerald F. Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute and Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute concluded that the spontaneous appearance of RNA chains on the lifeless Earth 'would have been a near miracle.' I would extend this conclusion to all of the proposed RNA substitutes that I mentioned above." "Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve has called for 'a rejection of improbabilities so incommensurably high that they can only be called miracles, phenomena that fall outside the scope of scientific inquiry.' DNA, RNA, proteins and other elaborate large molecules must then be set aside as participants in the origin of life."

What is left? Theories that "employ a thermodynamic rather than a genetic definition of life, under a scheme put forth by Carl Sagan in the Encyclopedia Britannica: A localized region which increases in order (decreases in entropy) through cycles driven by an energy flow would be considered alive." "I estimate that about a third of the chemists involved in the study of the origin of life subscribe to theories based on this idea."

It requires: "1) A boundary... to separate life from non-life." "2) An energy source". "3) A coupling mechanism must link the release of energy to the organization process that produces and sustains life. The release of energy does not necessarily produce a useful result. Chemical energy is released when gasoline is burned within the cylinders of my automobile, but the vehicle will not move unless that energy is used to turn the wheels. A mechanical connection, or coupling, is required." "4) A chemical network must be formed, to permit adaptation and evolution" "on a path that leads to increased organization." "5) The network must grow and reproduce." "We can imagine, on the early Earth, a situation where many startups of this type occur, involving many alternative driver reactions and external energy sources. Finally, a particularly hardy one would take root and sustain itself." "A system of reproduction must eventually develop." "Once independent units were established, they could evolve in different ways and compete with one another for raw materials; we would have made the transition from life that emerges from nonliving matter through the action of an available energy source to life that adapts to its environment by Darwinian evolution." "Many further steps in evolution would be needed to 'invent' the elaborate mechanisms for replication and specific protein synthesis that we observe in life today." They "would not reveal the specific events that led to the familiar DNA-RNA-protein-based organisms of today."

"Systems of the type I have described usually have been classified under the heading 'metabolism first', which implies that they do not contain a mechanism for heredity. In other words, they contain no obvious molecule or structure that allows the information stored in them (their heredity) to be duplicated and passed on to their descendants." "Over the years, many theoretical papers have advanced particular metabolism first schemes, but relatively little experimental work has been presented in support of them." "They have not yet demonstrated the operation of a complete cycle or its ability to sustain itself and undergo further evolution. A 'smoking gun' experiment displaying those three features is needed to establish the validity of the small molecule approach."
Shapiro, Robert. June 2007. A Simpler Origin for Life. Scientific American, Vol. 296, pp. 24-31.
Robert Shapiro, Ph.D. Harvard, is professor emeritus of chemistry and senior research scientist at New York University. He is author or co-author of over 125 publications, primarily in the area of DNA chemistry. In 2004 he was awarded the Trotter Prize in Information, Complexity and Inference. Shapiro has been involved in the search for origin of life mechanisms, and has written four books on the subject for the general public.

"The feasibility of any particular proposed prebiotic cycle must depend on arguments about chemical plausibility, rather than on a decision about logical possibility." The metabolic cycles that have been identified by biochemists are of two kinds: simple cycles and autocatalytic cycles. The citric acid cycle" is an example of a simple cycle. "The reverse citric acid cycle" is an example of an autocatalytic cycle. "Each molecule of citric acid introduced into the cycle results... in the generation of two molecules of citric acid." "That is why the cycle is described as autocatalytic." "The proposal that the reverse citric acid cycle operated... on the primitive Earth has been a prominent feature of some scenarios for the origin of life."

"A different kind of autocatalytic cycle, which has no analog in biochemistry, has been hypothesized by Stuart Kauffman to self-organize spontaneously whenever amino acids condense together to form peptides." "Could prebiotic molecules and catalysts plausibly have the attributes... to make the self-organization of the cycles possible?"

"The identification of a cycle of plausible prebiotic reactions is a necessary but not a sufficient step toward the formulation of a plausible self-organizing prebiotic cycle. The next, and more difficult step, is justifying the exclusion of side reactions that would disrupt the cycle." "It is not completely impossible that sufficiently specific mineral catalysts exist for each of the reactions of the reverse citric acid cycle, but the chance of a full set of such catalysts occurring at a single locality on the primitive Earth in the absence of catalysts for disruptive side reactions seems remote in the extreme."

"It has sometimes been implied or claimed that [autocatalytic] cycles are not only stable, but also are capable of evolving to form nonenzymatic networks of great complexity. Genetic materials are then seen as late additions to already fairly complex evolved life forms. According to this view, a genetic material merely adds stability to systems that already have a substantial 'information content'. "

"One way of achieving something useful might be to use one of the constituents of the core cycle as the starting point of a second independent autocatalytic cycle." "Another suggestion that might be explored is the possibility of a side reaction generating a catalyst for one of the reactions of the core cycle." "However, neither of these possibilities, nor any others with which I am familiar explains how a complex, interconnected family of cycles capable of evolution could arise or why it should be stable." "What is essential, therefore, is a reasonably detailed description, hopefully supported by experimental evidence, of how an evolvable family of cycles might operate." "Without such a description, acceptance of the possibility of complex nonenzymatic cyclic organizations that are capable of evolution can only be based on faith, a notoriously dangerous route to scientific progress."

"Kauffman takes it for granted that if it is possible to write down on paper a closed peptide cycle and a set of catalyzed ligations leading from monomeric amino acids to the peptides of the cycle, then that cycle would self-organize spontaneously and come to dominate the chemistry of a reaction system. This... is unlikely because peptide molecules do not have the properties that Kauffman assigns to them." "I have also explored a number of alternative systems with different numbers of amino acids or with inputs of random families of short peptides, and I find that they all encounter similar or more severe difficulties."

"Kauffman assumes that, in sufficiently concentrated solution, the naturally occurring amino acids or some subset of them would condense spontaneously to form a mixture of long peptides in substantial yield. In practice, this would not happen." "The catalytic properties of enzymes are remarkable. They not only accelerate reaction rates by many orders of magnitude, but they also discriminate between potential substrates that differ very slightly in structure. Would one expect similar discrimination in the catalytic potential of peptides of length ten or less? The answer is clearly 'no', and it is this conclusion that ultimately undermines the peptide cycle theory."

"Protein catalysis is dependent on the stable three-dimensional structures of enzymes and enzyme-substrate complexes. Highly specific catalytic activity could only be expected from short peptides if they, too, adopted stable structures." "In fact, short peptides rarely form stable structures, and when they do, the structures are only marginally stable. The synthesis of a decapeptide that would catalyze the ligation in the correct order of two particular pentapeptides out of a mixture of ten pentapeptides that are required to form the five cycle components, while failing to bring about any of the other possible ligations, would present an extremely difficult challenge to peptide chemistry. It seems certain that the additional requirement that this peptide should also catalyze specifically many of the reactions leading from amino acids to the pentamer precursors of the decamers of the cycle could never be met. Of course, the decamers need not be formed only from pairs of pentamers, but the difficulties are no less severe for more complex synthetic networks. There are a number of possible ways in which this difficulty might be circumvented, but none seems relevant to the origin of life." "It is unlikely, therefore, that Kauffman's theory describes any system relevant to the origin of life."

"It is essential to subject metabolist proposals to the same kind of detailed examination and criticism that has rightly been applied to genetic theories." "Because little experimental work has been attempted, appraisal must be based on chemical plausibility." "The lack of a supporting background in chemistry is even more evident in proposals that metabolic cycles can evolve to 'life-like' complexity. The most serious challenge to proponents of metabolic cycle theories--the problems presented by the lack of specificity of most nonenzymatic catalysts--has, in general, not been appreciated. If it has, it has been ignored."

"Theories of the origin of life based on metabolic cycles cannot be justified by the inadequacy of competing theories: they must stand on their own." "Experimental proof that such cycles are stable against the challenge of side reactions is even more important." "The prebiotic syntheses that have been investigated experimentally almost always lead to the formation of complex mixtures. Proposed polymer replication schemes are unlikely to succeed except with reasonably pure input monomers. No solution of the origin-of-life problem will be possible until the gap between the two kinds of chemistry is closed." "Solutions offered by supporters of geneticist or metabolist scenarios that are dependent on 'if pigs could fly' hypothetical chemistry are unlikely to help."
Orgel, Leslie E. January 2008. The Implausibility of Metabolic Cycles on the Prebiotic Earth. Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology, Vol. 6, No. 1, e18, pp. 5-13.
Leslie E. Orgel, Ph.D. Oxford, was a biochemist who studied life on primitive Earth. He conducted research at Cambridge, the University of Chicago, the California Institute of Technology, and later joined the Chemical Evolution Laboratory of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California. He died at age 80 in October 2007. The above article was published posthumously.

After the "tree of life"
In a paper about bacteria, two evolutionary biologists write, "we cannot rely exclusively on traditional genealogical relationships." "A single taxonomy will be likely to provide an overly coarse picture". It should be replaced by "more taxonomies based on real biological processes". "Discarding all but one of these process-based taxonomies would be comparable to reducing a person's identity to a single aspect of his or her life, even though he or she might have an effective role in many organizations: professional, artistic, sports, family and so on. To avoid overlooking any of the natural groups, it seems legitimate to propose - rather than a single taxonomy of microbial species - many taxonomies". "We suggest giving up the unique hierarchy as the reference classification system and instead encourage the production of a comprehensive interactive database in which an individual could possibly belong to overlapping taxonomical groups." "Any organism can then be characterized by many names because it can belong to more than one group at once."
Bapteste, Eric, Yan Boucher. 2008. Lateral gene transfer challenges principles of microbial systematics. Trends in Microbiology, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 200-207.

Epigenetics (meaning "above" genetics, as in controlling elements)
Evolutionists are starting to turn to epigenetics to explain macroevolutionary changes. However, most of them do not know much about molecular biology, and they are scrambling to catch up. "During the twentieth century, evolutionary and molecular biology diverged". "Few scientists were trained in both fields, and many biology departments were split up." "Most evolutionary biologists emphasize... variation". "Inferences about the historical mechanisms that generate variation are usually drawn from patterns of association". "The weakness is that statistical associations are not reliable indicators of causality." "Claims that are based solely on associations remain standard in the field." "Evolutionary biologists will need to be trained in molecular biology".-- Dean, Antony M., Joseph W. Thornton. September 2007. Mechanistic approaches to the study of evolution: the functional synthesis. Nature Reviews Genetics, Vol. 8, pp. 675-688.

Here is some of what real molecular biologists have learned, beginning with a March 2008 report in Science News magazine: "Many people regard ribonucleic acid, as RNA is formally known, as 'just a middleman between DNA and protein,' says Claes Wahlestedt, a neuroscientist and genome researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla. Shuttling genetic information from DNA to a cell's protein factories has long been recognized as RNA's day job, summarized" as "DNA makes RNA makes protein." "Some researchers estimate that as much as 98 percent of the human genome is copied into RNA, says Sofie Salama of the University of California, Santa Cruz." "Initial observations of the genome showed islands of protein-coding genes separated by vast oceans of DNA--sometimes called junk DNA--where nothing happened. That would mean that only about 2 percent of the human genome is transcribed into RNA. But recent efforts to map all of the RNA transcripts show that virtually every base pair of DNA in the human genome is copied into at least one RNA molecule."

"More than 20 classes of noncoding RNA have been discovered in the past decade. Many of these RNAs are much smaller than their protein-coding cousins, the messenger RNAs. Some noncoding RNAs contain a mere 20 nucleotides, the chemical units corresponding to letters in the genetic alphabet. Scientists used to throw away such short bits of RNA, thinking the tiny pieces were nothing more than breakdown products of larger molecules--basically garbage, Wahlestedt says."

"Researchers now know that noncoding RNAs get involved in virtually everything that happens in or to a cell, says Georges St. Laurent III, a computational and molecular biologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C." "They monitor temperature, chemical conditions, electrical currents, and other signals from the environment and then tell the cell how to respond."

"One class of noncoding RNAs, known as microRNAs, modulates production of proteins. MicroRNAs get their name from their minuscule size--most are only about 22 nucleotides long. These short pieces of RNA find and bind to complementary sequences in messenger RNAs. Usually that binding causes the ribosome, the protein-building machinery in a cell, to grind to a halt. The ribosome remains paused until other signals allow it to resume making protein or until the RNA message is destroyed." " 'It's not only important that you make a particular protein, but when and where you make it,' Salama says."-- Tina Hesman Saey. March 1, 2008. Micromanagers: New classes of RNAs emerge as key players in the brain. Science News, Vol. 173, No. 9, pp. 136-137.

Non-coding RNAs have risen from "junk" to "drivers of complexity".³¹ "Sequencing the genomes of 85 species has revealed that in any given organism, increasing biological complexity is correlated with an increasing number of non-protein-coding DNA sequences and not, as previously assumed, with an increasing number of protein-coding genes."³¹ "The sheer number of non-coding RNAs is estimated in the 100s of thousands."¹⁴ "It is clear that tens of thousands may operate within a cell".³¹

"Interference and activation can be caused by the same transcript".³ "A large part of the transcriptional activity in the human genome is derived from repeat sequences".³¹ "Repeat elements... occupy 40-45% of a typical mammalian genome".³ "Alu repetitive elements constitute 10% of the human genome".²⁶ "Repeat elements, such as the Alu family in humans and B2 in mice have provided regulatory signals for RNA PolII transcription."⁶ "Some of the Alu elements... may have functions in stress response, chromatin organization or signaling events in the early embryo. Alu transcripts are... activated by heat shock and DNA damaging agents".³¹

There are levels of non-coding RNA regulation that have yet to be discovered.³¹ Studying the old "junk" transcripts can lead to understanding hidden layers of cell regulation and how deregulation can lead to the understanding of human disease.³¹ "The scientific community is getting more aware of the importance of the formerly abandoned 'junk' DNA. What we have learned so far is likely just the tip of the iceberg."³¹

It is clear that biological complexity depends less on gene number and more on how those genes are used. Researchers are realizing that regulation is on multiple levels²⁵; there are intricate feedback loops.⁵ Stretches of DNA can be inactivated by attaching methyl groups. Tiny embryos need to grow according to a body plan organized in steps that have to happen at the right time in the right sequence. Their cells use timers and spatial signals to guide their growth. For example, a signal chemical is made at one end of an embryo and spreads out. Cells act according to how much signal chemical reaches them. Signal chemicals spreading from opposite ends of an embryo can interact to coordinate construction.²¹

In small genomes, such as yeast, the parts of DNA that regulate a gene are next to the gene. In more complex genomes, such as human and mouse, they can be far apart. Cells have ways, still unknown, of moving sections of chromosomes next to each other to get the right parts together to control gene expression.¹⁰ This happens constantly.

To respond to a rapidly changing environment, a creature's genes have to be turned on and off in a highly coordinated way. The genetic network must be stable under a broad range of conditions, but flexible enough to recognize and respond to important signals when things around it change. This operating at the brink of order and chaos is well known to systems scientists. They call such systems critical. This property has now been recognized in plants, animals, and microbes. It allows them to quickly detect and respond to external stimuli, small or large.³

Zombie science
"Although the classical ideal is that scientific theories are evaluated by a careful teasing-out of their internal logic and external implications, and checking whether these deductions and predictions are in-line-with old and new observations; the fact that so many vague, dumb or incoherent scientific theories are apparently believed by so many scientists for so many years is suggestive that this ideal does not necessarily reflect real world practice. In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas for so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status."

To say "that the theory is phoney, and always was phoney, and this is why it so singularly fails to predict reality is regarded as simplistic, crass, merely a sign of lack of sophistication. And anyway, there are... the reputations of numerous scientists who are now successful and powerful on the back of the phoney theory, and who by now control the peer review process (including allocation of grants, publications and jobs) so there is a powerful disincentive against upsetting the apple cart."

"Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down." "Zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda. Zombie science is deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally. It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion. Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science."
Charlton, Bruce G. 2008. Zombie science: A sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest. Medical Hypotheses, Vol. 71, pp. 327-329.

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