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fitness terrains
Tiktaalik, Field Museum, Chicago, by Eduard Solà (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons.
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Fitness Terrains and Their Challenge to Darwinian Theory

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A new episode of ID the Future on fitness terrains is quite relevant to the fish-to-man question I wrote about earlier today. Evolutionists picture major innovations in the history of life as no big deal. Forget fish-to-man — consider the more modest challenge of fish-to-amphibian, as Dr. Miller notes.

As Center for Science & Culture research coordinator Brian Miller explains in a conversation with Sarah Chaffee, minor changes (microevolution) lie with the reach of unguided Darwinian processes. But major inventions are a different story.

Remember, in the Darwinian understanding, every modification, building up successively over generations, must be advantageous to survival and reproduction or, at worst, neutral. From human innovation, he gives the example of trying to transform a car into a helicopter. Imagining such a thing necessarily entails catastrophic losses of function along the way, something that evolution could never tolerate.

Brian Miller is a fine and lucid science explainer. Listen to the episode here, or download the podcast here.

David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Science and Culture Today
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. He is the author of seven books including Plato’s Revenge: The New Science of the Immaterial Genome and The Lord Will Gather Me In: My Journey to Jewish Orthodoxy. A former senior editor at National Review, he has contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He received an A.B. magna cum laude from Brown University in 1987. Born in Santa Monica, CA, he lives on Mercer Island, WA.
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