Evolution

In Part 1, I recounted how Darwinists are deeply invested in the rhetorical value of the emotional argument that humans and chimps have a 98% – 99% genetic similarity. Anthropologist John Marks reports that sometimes Darwinists even use this statistic to contend that our lives are “meaningless”! To explore this debate, I recently blogged about a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%” that reported that the 1% human/chimp genetic difference statistic was a “myth,” because “studies are showing that [humans and chimps] are not as similar as many tend to believe.” The Science news article reported that improved genome comparison modeling methods indicate that humans and chimps are “6.4%” genetically distinct from one another. Apparently my Read More ›

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway. Nonetheless, on a rhetorical level, the claim that humans and chimps are 99% the same is a powerful emotional argument aiding those seeking to evangelize for Darwinism. For example, last year a cover story of Time magazine proclaimed: “chimps Read More ›

Last July, David Tyler wrote an insightful post at ARN stating, For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This ‘fact’ of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. ‘Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.’ However, this ‘given’ is about to be discarded. Tyler was quoting a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%,” which reported that “human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%.” The statistic of an alleged 1% difference between human and chimp DNA is Read More ›

This week’s Human Events features a piece by Logan Gage which addresses, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s unsurprising take on evolution: Following liberal science writer Chris Mooney’s successful book “The Republican War on Science,” Clinton repeatedly lumps these issues together using the “war” metaphor. “Mrs. Clinton has used the phrase ‘war on science’ frequently on the campaign trail, and it has reliably drawn applause from Democratic audiences,” according to The New York Times. Her website declares she will “end the Bush Administration’s war on science.” But who is really politicizing science? In February 2008, comedian, economist, and actor Ben Stein will release a feature-length documentary film titled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” It chronicles the many scientists who have been harassed Read More ›

For decades, Darwinists have been telling us that an alleged lack of function for the human appendix demonstrates that our species once walked on 4 legs and ate a vegetarian diet. As a result, many believe the Darwinian urban legend that the appendix is a “vestigial organ” that has no function, and that this demonstrates that humans evolved from quadrupedal mammals. But now CNN is reporting that the “Purpose of appendix believed found” in a story that reads: The appendix “acts as a good safe house for bacteria,” said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac Read More ›

UPDATED: Today’s response is the fourth and final in this series of responses to critics. This reponse addresses Dutch biologist Gert Korthof and is available here. Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution, has hit a nerve with Darwinists by using mainstream scientific research to highlight the distinct limits of Darwinian evolution. Earlier this week he began another series of responses to critics attempting to refute the book’s conclusions. As I wrote in The Edge of Evolution, Darwinism is a multifaceted theory, and to properly evaluate the theory one has to be very careful not to confuse its different aspects. Unfortunately, stories in the news and on the internet regularly confuse the facets of Darwinism, ignore distinctions made in The Read More ›

I’ve already commented on the paper by Eugene Koonin and the Darwinists’ concern that it might show that there is a serious controversy over the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life at all, let alone in a gradual step-by-step process over eons of time.

Koonin challenges the standard Darwinian view of the tree of life. His research shows that it lacks the ability to explain life’s complexity, but he hasn’t been fired from the National Center for Biotechnology or lost his funding from the National Institute’s of Health (yet).

Like Koonin, Michael Behe in his latest book The Edge of Evolution shows what evolution can do and what it can’t. Professor Robert Marks at Baylor uses the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Lab to showcase some of the limits of Darwinian evolution. Both have suffered serious repercussions. But not Koonin (yet).

[Editor’s note: This was the third installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part 1 and Part 2 of this response to Richard Dawkins’ article, “The Information Challenge,” I explained why gene duplication is not an adequate explanation of how Darwinian processes can produce new information. But Dawkins’ article has other problems. He writes that “most of the capacity of the genome of any animal is not used to store useful information.” This is another good example demonstrating how Neo-Darwinism led may scientists to wrongly believe that non-coding DNA was largely junk. Dawkins’ statement is directly refuted by the findings of recent studies, which the Washington Read More ›

[Editor’s note: This was the second installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part I, I demonstrated that specified complexity is the appropriate measure of biological complexity. In this section, I will show why merely citing gene duplication does not help one understand how Darwinian evolution can produce new genetic information. Dawkins’ main point in his “The Information Challenge” article is that “[n]ew genes arise through various kinds of duplication.” So his answer to the creationist question that so upset him is gene duplication. Yet during the actual gene-duplication process, a pre-existing gene is merely copied, and nothing truly new is generated. As Michael Egnor said Read More ›

[Editor’s note: This was the first installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] Last week I posted a link to a YouTube video where Richard Dawkins was asked to explain the origin of genetic information, according to Darwinism. I also posted a link to Dawkins’ rebuttal to the video, where he purports to explain the origin of genetic information according to Darwinian evolution. The question posed to Dawkins was, “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process that can be seen to increase the information in the genome?” Dawkins famously commented that the question was “the kind of question only a creationist would Read More ›