Evolution is Obsolete
By Ken Ham
Printed in PHS #34, 2000.
We recognize design everywhere - evidence of the outworking of intelligence. We see man-made objects all around us - cars, computers, and so on. Never would anyone suggest that these were just the products of time and chance. It would never enter our minds that a mass of raw materials could organize itself to form all the intricate parts needed to produce a car or computer!
The late Isaac Asimov (an ardent anti-creationist) declared, "In man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe."1 It is much more complex than the most complicated computer.
Yet, many people today, including numerous leading scientists, believe that all plants and creatures (including the intelligent engineers who design computers) are products of an evolutionary process - not a Creator God.
Is this position scientifically defensible?
Dr. Richard Dawkins, of Oxford University, is one of the world's leading evolutionist spokespersons. In his book, The Blind Watchmaker - in which he claims to refute the notion of a Creator God - Dawkins acknowledges, "We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance."2 With what does he replace "chance," if he rejects a Creator God?
Dawkins insists that natural selection and mutations together provide the mechanism for the evolutionary process. He believes these processes are "nonrandom" and "directed." This is simply saying that evolution is itself the designer!
To argue that natural selection and mutations are the basic mechanisms of the evolutionary process, one must show that these processes produce the information responsible for the design that is evident in living things.
Natural Selection Adds No New Genetic Information
Now anyone who understands basic biology recognizes, as Darwin did, that natural selection is a logical process that one can observe. However, natural selection only operates on the information that is already contained in the genes. It does not produce new information.3, 4
It is true that one can observe great variation in a "kind," and see the results of natural selection. For instance, wolves, coyotes, and dingoes have developed as a result of natural selection operating on the information found in the genes of the dog (canine) "kind." But the point is that no new information was produced - these varieties of dogs have resulted from a rearrangement, sorting out, and separation of the information in the original dog kind. One "kind" has never been observed to change into a totally different "kind" with information that previously did not exist!5 Without intelligent input to increase information, natural selection will not work as a mechanism for evolution.
It is important to understand that in areas of practical, applied biology, such as selective breeding, hybridization, etc., the same holds true. There is no selection process - even by deliberate, intelligent means - that can actually produce a new "kind" of organism. Again, without a way to increase information, selection processes fail as a mechanism for evolution. Evolutionists would agree with this, but they believe that mutations somehow provide the new information for natural selection to act upon.
Mutations are Caused by Loss of Genetic Information
Mutation, of course, like natural selection, is a real phenomenon, and plays an important role in the adaptation of organisms to specific environments. But do mutations provide a mechanism for evolution? For that matter, has any scientifically-valid mechanism for evolution been identified - any natural mechanism to generate the information behind the obvious design in living things?
No! Israeli biophysicist Dr. Lee Spetner, in his classic book Not by Chance, points out that all mutations studied on the molecular level (even those such as antibiotic resistance, which are favorable to survival) cause a loss of information, the opposite of what evolution needs to be credible.
Genuine science consistently reveals that with no way to increase information, evolution as a factual process is bankrupt - a theoretical model with no real mechanism.
Evolution Theory Adds No Information to Science
Evolutionary concepts have contributed nothing to the practical applications of biology and the physical sciences. (In the realm of the social sciences, however, the influences of evolutionism are devastatingly real. Consider its foundational role in racism and ethnic oppression, the devaluation of human life, and the demise of moral absolutes.)
Why, then, do many scientists still insist that evolution is the "central concept of biology"? Dr. Michael Behe, Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, observes that ". . . they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the physical world. Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior."7
Perhaps the following is illustrative: a bulletin announcing the upcoming national convention of the National Science Teachers Association lists over 1,300 workshops, yet, few address evolution.
This is not reason to complain . . . however, recall that prominent evolutionists have been declaring for many years the importance of evolution to understanding biology. Then consider that of over 1,300 workshops, only twelve deal with evolution - less than one-tenth of one percent!
"Odd," perhaps, or perhaps indicative of the bankruptcy of a scientifically futile and socially detrimental philosophy, committed to rejecting the Creator God! "In the beginning matter" makes no sense of the unmistakable design all around us. "In the beginning God" is the only logical and scientifically defensible basis for interpreting the real world.
Footnotes
- Asimov, Isaac. 1970. "In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can't Even Break Even," Smithsonian (June), p. 10. [Cited in page 82 of The Illustrated ORIGINS Answer Book, 1995. Eden Communications, Gilbert, Arizona.]
- Dawkins, Richard. 1987. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton & Co., New York. p. 43.
- Lester, Lane P., and Bohlin, Raymond G. 1989. The Natural Limits to Biological Change. Probe Books, Dallas, Texas. pp. 175-6.
- E. Noble, G. Noble, G. Schad and A. MacInnes, Parasitology: The Biology of Animal Parasites. Lea & Febiger, Philadelphia. 1989. Chapter 6, Evolution of Parasitism?, p. 516 states, "Natural selection can act only on those biologic properties that already exist; it cannot create properties in order to meet adaptational needs."
- For instance, despite many unproved claims to the contrary by evolutionists, no one has observed or documented a reptile changing into a bird. The classic example paraded by some evolutionists as an "in-between" creature, Archaeopteryx, has now been rejected by many evolutionists. (See Gary Parker, Creation: Facts of Life, Master Books, Green Forest, Ark., 1994)
- Spetner, Lee, Dr. 1997. Not By Chance. The Judaica Press, Inc., Brooklyn, New York. pp. 138-143.
- Behe, Michael J. 1996. Darwin's Black Box. The Free Press, New York. p. 243.
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