Just read an excellent point by DaveScot over at Uncommon Descent, and it basically goes like this:
If evolutionists were forced to adhere to truth in advertising, they’d have to rename random mutation and natural selection to random degradation and natural deselection. (my wording, not DaveScot’s…)
I’ve been saying this for years. The concept of natural selection is a sound one, but insofar as it preserves the basic properties of a pool of similar organisms and deselects any mutated organisms that stray off the ranch. In other words, we may have hundreds of varieties of dog, but they’re all still dogs. And whether natural selection or artificial breeding produces all the different genetic versions of dogs, the dog-ness is always preserved. As for random mutations, despite the protests of evolutionists for years, there are virtually no obvious beneficial mutations recorded by scientists. We’ve seen a tiny handful of dubious changes in microorganisms that seem to increase fitness in an extremely specific environment — witness the rise of “superbugs” that resist antibiotics — but in every case there’s actually a good argument the change resulted in an overall decline in fitness level despite the presence of a particular helpful characteristic.
The story of life is simply not one of benevolent change leading to more and more complexity through the encouragement of selection, but rather one of dangerous change kept in check through the deselection of degraded organisms with diminished fitness levels. The onward and upward mantra of evolution just doesn’t square with the facts on the ground.
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4 Comments
Wow, this is a tired objection, long since put to rest by real scientists. DaveScot shows once again that he has no grasp of evolutionary theory.
Ric, I chose to leave your comment here rather than delete it even if it offers no value to the conversation. If you’re interested in a real scientist’s take on genetic degradation, I suggest you read The Mystery of the Genome by Dr. John Sanford. An eye-opening book, to be sure.
I enjoyed reading your blog topic. Very interesting. I always wonder in relation to evolutionists, if we were to just give them the benefit of the doubt that we evolved from monkeys (which really would explain why they think the way they do). Don’t they ever take things further and ask themselves “Where did monkeys come from”? I can’t see how people can be so content with running themselves head first into walls.
“Wow, this is a tired objection, long since put to rest by real scientists.”
Oh, Like Bill Nye or the Ones on your precious Discovery channel? Why don’t you give us an example of your idea of “Real Scientists” rather than just taking the easy way out by posting sad attempts at degrading ones intelligence on the topic of “Evolutionary Theory”? You were accurate though, it is just a theory, not a fact, that’s for sure.
Actually, scientific theories are generally well-established by evidence in a number of areas, and provide a framework to explain various phenomena. I say this because when we use the “theory, not fact” argument, evolutionists just laugh. I know what you mean in layman’s terms — I just prefer to stay on the side of scientific terminology as much as possible so evolutionists understand what the real debate is.
My contention is that evolution is not well-supported by evidence and doesn’t provide a useful framework (hence the perennial surprise of scientists as they discover more and more design-like features of life and inexplicable placements [or lack thereof] of fossils). Therefore, it’s at best an hypothesis. I’m sure you would agree with that.
BTW, Michael, please don’t be offended, but if you could refrain from making fun of people on my blog, even if we may not agree with them, that would be much appreciated. Thanks.